ucb investigative journalism symposium: collaborative media

Date

Collaborative MediaAn approach to open journalism in a networked world

Monday, 18 April 2011

Agenda

✤ Open and connected as a business strategy

✤ Collaboration in journalism...examples

✤ A direction of travel


In this talk I’m going to look at journalism in the context of an open and connected strategy.

For me it’s very difficult to separate journalism from both technology and business. When these things are all aligned toward a common purpose then great things happen. When one of these functions operates in a context that is separate to, or, worse, opposed to the others then things tend to go wrong.

I’ll go through several examples, diving into some depth on our coverage of the protests in Egypt and the role of live blogs.

My intent here is to show a direction of travel and to demonstrate that despite the precarious financial issues facing us all in the media that there is a way forward through an open and connected approach to the whole business.

Processes• Skills• Plans• Channels

Packaged Goods Users

Chuck things a

t users and

hope they

catch them


Let’s start by comparing the old and new publishing models.

First, we can paint a picture of the methods and processes that have driven the media business for the last several decades. This isn’t unique to print but rather a reflection of the times, an approach that formed during the industrial revolution and, in its simplest forms, is a legacy that we’re all trying to shed.

The model is a production-consumption model. We use staff skills and operating plans and distribution channels to package things up. We then find ways to get things in peoples’ hands. They either pay us directly or the thing is subsidised with advertising.

We chuck things at them and expect an equal and opposite reflection of value back to us.

Enablers• Purpose• Principles• Platforms

Users

Innovation Partners

StoriesData

Prod

ucts

Users, Part

ners, Innova

tion are

ingredients

of the sy

stem


The new media platforms look at things very differently.

They view themselves more like enablers of ecosystem dynamics. They consider uses, partners and constant change as ingredients of the overall operation. The outside world is a contributing force into what they do and how they do it.

The business then is made up of enabling forces. They develop and refine the principles, technology platforms, and larger purpose for existence. These enabling forces are where the business unites with the outside forces of users, partners and innovation to create new things.

Depending on the platform the outputs can range from data to stories to products to new businesses.

Closed Open


These models can be viewed in a few different ways. For example, you can look at the world across two axes: open and closed...

Closed Open

Connected

Standalone


...vs connected and standalone.

In other words, you can paint a picture of the media landscape by mapping how different companies and products approach openness and their role in the wider network.

There are degrees of openness, and there are degrees of connectedness.

Though the lines can be blurry, there are some simple business models that sit within each of these areas.

The production-consumption model sits in the lower left...closed and standalone. The ecosystem model sits in the upper right...open and connected.

Distribution Utility

Retail Participation

Closed Open

Connected

Standalone

Business Models


For example, the closed and standalone model is the same as the traditional retail model.

The open and standalone model is the participation model, or, perhaps more accurately, the exclusivity model.

The closed and connected model is about distribution.

And the open and connected model is about utility services.



Closed Open

Connected

Standalone

Business Models

clear paths to profitability by reducing cost, increasing sales


The retail model will demonstrate clear paths to profitability by pulling on the traditional business levers of cost reduction and sales acceleration.



Closed Open

Connected

Standalone

Business Models

optimising user and advertiser relationships creates value


The participation model works by optimising relationships and creating value either for the end-user customers or for advertisers who want a voice in the relationship.



Closed Open

Connected

Standalone

Business Models

strategic partnerships uncover new opportunities


The distribution model thrives through partnership.



Closed Open

Connected

Standalone

Business Models

growing by making others successful has many rewards


And the utility model is one where growth occurs as a result of making others successful. You measure your own success by how well your customers do.

Distribution(licensing)

Utility(taxes)

Retail(buy to own)

Participation(pay for access)

Closed Open

Connected

Standalone

Business Models

(market creation)


There are well understood revenue models for each of these approaches:

Retail is a buy-to-own model.Participation is about paying for access.Distribution is about licensing.And utility businesses employ a tax system to generate revenue.

Of course, you don’t win friends by calling your revenue model a ‘tax’. And, in truth, it is more than that. It’s about creating markets, and when you create markets you can set the terms of engagement. Most of the leaders in the open and connected space earn revenue through some sort of sharing agreement that may look and feel a lot like a ‘tax’.

Closed Open

Connected

Standalone


The best example of a closed and standalone business is Murdoch’s The Daily. It is mostly isolated from the wider Internet. They make it each day and expect you to pay them the value of that production. It’s a production-consumption relationship.

Member services like mumsnet and match.com, for example, demonstrate the open and standalone model. They are open to participation, but they don’t necessarily weave themselves into other connected platforms and technologies on the Internet.

Reuters is a great example of the closed and connected distribution model. They control what content gets distributed through their platform, but they push their content deep into the furthest corners of the Internet in a very connected way.

Lastly, it’s hard to imagine a more open and connected utility than Google’s open source mobile OS, Android or perhaps WordPress. Of course, Twitter, Facebook and Wikipedia are also very open and connected.

Now, I’m not arguing that one model is better than another. Each model has its benefits. Some are better at facilitating growth while others are better at sustaining revenue.

News International Twitter, Inc.Monday, 18 April 2011

But once you can see these different approaches and how they relate to each other it becomes clearer why the new generation media mogul is pushing toward the open and connected space.

It’s the brave new world, the wild west. There’s plenty of room to break new ground in the open and connected market with a good idea and strong execution. While the incumbants are getting stronger and more powerful, they are still very young and unable to control the market.

Rupert Murdoch may in fact do well with the closed and standalone, traditional, production-consumption model. If he uses his own portfolio to support the growth of new nodes in the Murdoch network then he could make a lot of money. He controls a lot of media and could make that work.

But that’s not going to be the case for most people in the media business.

If I were to start over today with a new proposition or to modernize an old proposition, I would point it toward the open and connected model.

Open journalism


With that backdrop on the overall approach to the business of journalism let’s look at some examples of the way we’re looking at journalism in an open and connected world. I’ll start with the Guardian’s coverage of the Egypt protests and then look at a few other quick case studies.

Principles of open journalism

✤ Linked

✤ Collaborative

✤ Participative

✤ Transparent

✤ Networked

✤ Multi-disciplinary


First, Alan Rusbridger has defined a few key principles that define where journalism is heading at the Guardian.

The most successful projects will be linked, collaborative, participative, transparent, networked and multi-disciplinary.

These principles are an acknowledgement that our work is part of a global dialog and needs to have more of a give-and-take relationship than a production-consumption relationship.


The protests in North Africa in January became a great opportunity to put all this into practice. We didn’t have people in the area to cover the story in full, and with the near simultaneous action happening in Tunisia, Egypt, Bahrain and Syria we knew we needed a different way to work.

We also recognized that the speed at which the story was moving from one location to the next would make it impossible to cover the story well even if we did have a few people on the ground.

So, we started with what we knew and built up using these principles. The focus of all our coverage became the Live Blog.


One of the first things we did was get some help with translation. We pulled an Arabic-speaking editor off her normal work to help us translate a few things we were doing and then got a translation partner to do it as a service with us.

The translation work turned out to be critical to our success.

And it becomes one of the arguments for open. When you see the traffic logs showing huge numbers of visitors from Egypt and India and the US in addition to the expected UK traffic you quickly realize how important it is to be accessible everywhere.

Our ability to be a central force in the reporting and the conversation of this global event was dependent on being open and connected. We couldn’t have had the same impact if we were closed and standalone.


We then invited more discussion into our community platform, Comment is Free. We were able to obtain immense depth from Egyptian voices, primary sources who knew more about the issues than we did, people who were there, people educated in the issues, people who were explicitly not British


The Guardian’s Brian Whitaker curated several lists of sources on twitter.


He watched what they were tweeting and identified some of the important voices in the blogosphere.


And he built lists that he could then track which we then integrated into our coverage on the site as well.


We linked directly out to those sources from the Guardian and presented them in context in our live blogs.


And the audience on the Guardian not only joined the conversation but they also became a channel of distribution.


Their comments were presented in context on the live blog stream when they were relevant, and the sharing activity off our site went through the roof. They became part of the story as lightweight contributors and distributors, helping to both push and pull the story around our coverage. We had tens of thousands of comments, tweets and likes on Facebook.

The Live Blog becomes a sort of living portal.

We can use it for original reporting, pointing off to deeper analysis, aggregate and curate conversation and links. It’s the antidote to the common experience on the web which is a jump in, jump out experience. People spend more time on the Live Blogs, they come back to them. It’s multi-paced, multi-format. We can use the Live Blog to request information and send people out to get answers for us quickly.

It’s because Live Blogs are open and live and human that people feel very compelled contribute and participate in the coverage even if only to spread the word of its existence.I did some analysis on our Live Blogs not long ago, and when you look at the metrics you start to wonder if we’ve finally found the native format for reporting news on the Internet.


Now, if you then compare the Guardian’s coverage with what the Times of London did it becomes clearer why the open strategy may be the only way to cover living stories.

If you have a much smaller UK-only audience then your relationship with the story is more of a filter, delivering the story rather than collaborating on its growth.


The sharing and commenting on their coverage added nothing and in some ways actually gives the appearance that nobody cares about the conversation here.


It wasn’t just the closed nature of their model that limited the activity around their coverage, but they didn’t have a model for embracing other voices. The coverage by necessity had to be very British.

I’m pointing this out as a contrast to what we can do with an open model, not because their model doesn’t work. Their model serves a certain audience very well, and many of those readers are willing to pay for that method.

But that model is not going to work for us at the Guardian where we want to be a platform for a global dialog, a conversation with many views from many sources and many experts.

It’s a question of purpose. If you’re about giving power to people’s voices then I think you have no choice but to find a solution to being open.

We haven’t yet solved it, but we know which way to point our ship.

This video clip I’m going to show you reinforced that commitment for us. It’s our Egypt correspondent who was in Tahrir Square talking to Alan Rusbridger about what role the media played there.

Jack Shenker - Guardian Egypt correspondent - covered the Tahrir Square revolution


“The Guardian alongside Al Jazeera was the one news source that everybody on the streets in Tahrir - not just in Cairo but in surrounding cities and major centers of revolutionary activity - it was the one news source that people were talking about.

The Guardian’s live blog in particular which the paper translated into Arabic was a revelation.

At a time of fast-moving events when people were desperate for updated information and particularly information they trusted and could be verified - there was a lot of misinformation being spread - that became the one place on the web that people could go to and could get a regional context and a regional view of everything that was going on minute-by-minute.

The fact it was translated into arabic opened it up to a much wider group of people and a far wider audience.”

More examples



Everyone seems to be aware of the MPs Expenses effort. But quickly for those who aren’t, we published the PDFs that were released using a simple annotation tool built by a rock star developer named Simon Willison.

Each expense record had a page in the app which users could then tag and escalate to us for investigation.


Over 25,000 people participated in the investigation. It was a classic crowdsourcing experiment.

We loved what this was demonstrating, but we found some things that could be improved. The following year when the documents were released we made an effort to make it more relevant to people so we could get closer to 100% coverage of the database.


We broke up the data into more specific tasks that would appeal to different types of citizen investigators. For example, you might only want to look at your local MP and go through his or her expenses.

This open approach was incredibly compelling and demonstrated what role a trusted journalism organization can play in the new world.

People are naturally motivated to get involved. It’s just a matter of tapping into that side in everyone that enjoys researching something they care about. It’s about setting the stage and being a good enabler, empowering people to satisfy their own needs and their natural curiosities.


When the UK Treasury released the spending database of all transactions over £25,000, we put a few things we had learned into practice.

We invited a few close friends of the Guardian to our offices and joined up the developers and journalists to interrogate the data to find interesting stories. It was not an easy task given the complexity and the state of the data.

The team used some open source tools and came up with a very straightforward sortable spreadsheet interface for the Guardian web site. You could search, sort and then download a CSV file of your results to manipulate the data using Excel, if you wanted.

We also posted an email address ‘[email protected]’ where people could send us questions.


I was on that email list and saw the questions coming in. It was amazing to see people really working through the data. People were very motivated to see how their government was spending their money.

One great example was this question from someone who found the ‘Flag Flying’ spending category. “Apparently, the DCMS spent £100,000 on it.”

We then took that question and asked the DCMS to respond.

The cost of flying the British (and other) flags: £95,506, as reader Sam Keir points out.

A spokesperson for the Department for Culture, Media and Sport said it was responsible for providing and managing the flag-flying services for ceremonial state occasions, including state visits, trooping of the colour and special flag days, for example Commonwealth Day, UN Day and Europe Day.


While we didn’t necessarily get a satisfactory response to the question we did get an immediate answer which might not have happened had the question come from an unknown source.

We then posted the question and the answer on the Live Blog that day.


We’ve had a lot of great response to the Data Store project, led by news editor Simon Rogers. We post raw spreadsheets openly and publicly on Google Docs for people to download and use as they please.

A lot of designers and developers out there are experimenting with visual storytelling, and the Data Store has become a robust resource for them. We’ve released close to 1,000 spreadsheets now as part of the news process of the paper and web site.

We decided to open up a Flickr group for people to share their data visualizations, and there are now about 1,000 members of the group who publish their work and share it with their peers in the market. There are some beautiful and occasionally shocking uses of the data posted there.


We’ve opened up our archive going back over 10 years now and including nearly 2 million articles and made it reusable as part of the Open Platform initiative.

The Open Platform is the suite of services that enable people to build applications with the Guardian. It includes this API of our content, a plug-in architecture for the Guardian web site, the Data Store and a Politics API.

It’s a way of making our internal technologies more accessible and transparent.

The guiding principle behind the whole initiative is to “weave the Guardian into the fabric of the Internet.”


Of course, the tools have become incredibly useful both for the way we partner with people and for our own development efforts.

We have been able to build some fantastic mobile products incredibly quickly, because our partners and our own developers don’t have to muck around with databases or proprietary code just to get to the content they want in a format that they can use.

Our first iPhone app was built in a matter of weeks by a third party which we then took over and now evolve in-house. Our Guardian Eyewitness iPad app was similarly turned from prototype to product in a very short time with mostly front-end technical talent.


But the power of releasing your content in reusable formats like this starts to become even more apparent with things like the Guardian WordPress plugin.

Without knowing any code, you can add this plugin to your blog and start publishing Guardian articles directly on your web site. It gives you a news feed in your admin panel, sort of like a Reuters dashboard or something. When you see an article you want to publish on your blog, you click the ‘Publish’ button.


An edit window then comes up where you can add your own commentary or photos or whatever.


Here are some examples of blogs that have been actively using it. They tend to use Guardian coverage to supplement their own work. It has been particularly popular with some of the football blogs and some of the green sites.


Now part of the agreement for republishing Guardian articles is that as a partner you must not alter the content. We embed an ad directly within the body of the article which then appears on the blog...or wherever any article obtained via the Open Platform goes on the Internet.

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GreenDiversityFoodFashionCulture

• 4k developer partners• 220 premium publisher partners• 71% revenue growth YOY• 2m monthly unique users• 30m monthly ad impressions


The results are getting really interesting now. Our various network plays are quickly expanding the Guardian’s wider sphere of influence.

With 4,000 developer partners and over 200 premium ad network partners we’re now adding over 2 million monthly Unique Visitors and 30 million ad impressions to our overall footprint across the Internet.

This is the open and connected model incarnate...increasing the transparency of our journalism, enabling native Internet distribution methods, and powering the whole thing with a relevant commercial model.

As Mike Smith said,“If content is king, then this is service is a hundred of the king’s best horses, and thousands of his best messengers, sending the Guardian far and wide.”


Twitter has become a sort of extension of our brains, but we’re also creating very simple ways for people to share their thoughts and to socialize with the news. For example, during the TV debates for last year’s UK general election, we posted a ‘Reaction Tracker’ so that people could vote positively or negatively to things the politicians were saying them…as they were saying them on TV.

The lines you see in the chart below formed in realtime as the debate unfolded and were visible to everyone who visited the Guardian home page during the 90 minute debate.


Alastair Dant’s World Cup Twitter Replay animations are fascinating in the way they help you relive a match through the eyes of twitter…bubbles of words World Cup watchers were tweeting grow and shrink in response to each match, as if you are watching the match with everyone again rather than being the recipient of a leanback-style highlights package.

There are lots of different sponsorship options that are easy to imagine in this context.

Band info via Last.fm

Buy tracks via Amazon

Videos via YouTube


Hack Days have become a great source of innovation for us.

Media reporter Jemima Kiss organized a Hack Day focused on the SXSW event. She invited London developers to come to our offices and to join our own technology team to work on ideas together and compete for a free flight, accomodation and ticket to SXSW. The hack day was then sponsored by Google.

There were some very clever editing tools and music mashups. This example here is a mashup that we integrated directly onto the Guardian web site using the Open Platform’s plugin architecture that internally we call ‘microapps’. Ever band had a band page that brought in information from last.fm, videos from YouTube and track purchasing via Amazon.

Again, the many commercial models for this kind of thing should be pretty obvious including affiliate links and sponsorship.


There are two more example that, in my mind, demonstrate where all this is going when you take it to the extreme, pushing all the way to that upper right corner of ‘Open and Connected’.

At a hack day this past December, a small team was experimenting with a new Java-based programming framework called Lift. They decided to create a live shared reading app which they called The Social Guardian.


After logging on with Twitter, you see a navigational column and 3 columns of content. The content includes the most recent articles published by the Guardian, the current Editor’s Picks from the guardian.co.uk home page, and a final column for the shared experience.

This shared reading column shows what other people are reading right now. It updates as they move from article to article, and you can’t help but want to dive in and read the same article at the same time as someone else, particularly when it’s someone you know.

The app gives you the feeling that you are getting the benefit of what other people are discovering before you and then that you are leaving refinements as exhaust behind you for the next person. It’s as if you are collaboratively shaping the entire Guardian corpus.

UserTag

URL


Now, one of the clever things these guys did was that they built a dead simple database that then creates a lot of power.

The database is simply user, URL and tag. This means that for each user we know not only the article they have read but also the tags of the articles that they have read. So, for example, the database knows instantly that you are reading ‘World News’ and ‘Media’ articles.

This then makes it very easy to write very simple recommendation algorithms, live recommendations.

And, again, when you operate in this very open way the relevant commercial model becomes obvious very quickly.

UserTag

URL

Ad


If you created a self-serve database for advertisers to publish ads to, you could build a very powerful live ad targeting platform. Though this clearly doesn’t have anything resembling the scale of Facebook, the structure of it feels very similar.


Lastly, this is an experiment in the Social-Local-Mobile context. It’s sort of like Foursquare for news.

The app is called ‘no0tice’...the ‘o’ is a zero. It checks the location of your phone and lets you report news. The web site then has additional features for socializing...reputational rewards for posting and adding evidence, ways to post events and ways to post things your are selling.

The platform is built entirely on open source software. The content is all Creative Commons licensed. There are open APIs for partners who want to pull content out and post content into the database. The software is posted publicly with an open source license, so you could easily publish your own bird watching versions or celeb-spotting versions, for example.

The ad model hasn’t been completed, but the plan is to allow people to buy featured placement based on a radius and duration. And then the partner model would allow others to sell the ads and share a percentage with us.

Again, I can’t imagine how something like this could exist in a closed and standalone world. If it does work it will work because it’s open and connected.

Closed Open

Connected

Standalone


So, all this is meant to demonstrate how we are pushing toward that ‘Open and Connected’ position. We have a long way to go to move our core business that way, but we’ve pushed out several boats to help lead the transition.

That’s not to say that we won’t also pursue things that make sense in the other areas. We will.

In fact, we have an iPad app coming out soon that will sit very squarely and intentionally in the closed and standalone position.

We are not religious about our position, and until the market becomes a bit more stable and the path to financial sustainability is more obvious we have to place some bets around the market. Others will find ways to make the production-consumption model work for them, and we would be stupid to ignore those success stories.

What worries me about the whole paywall discussion is not the paywall model in itself. That model obviously works in certain contexts.

But it’s too simple. It’s one answer to a complicated problem. It works when you have a single thing you want to give and expect an equal and opposite payment for that thing.

But the Internet makes it possible to copy things infinitely. it makes it possible to change things and build on them and respond to them. it makes it possible to accelerate their journey to other places.

Putting an artificial software solution between all those things and your reader may solve one problem, but it creates another bigger problem in the long run.

It isolates you from aspects of a medium that was designed at its core and from its inception to be open and connected.

As a journalist, I think you have to ask yourself if there was in fact a strong business model for being open and connected would you not prefer that journalism was open and connected?

If the answer is ‘yes’, then you need to be on the side of making it so.

It’s not good enough to give up because it’s hard.

Open and connected


The answer to “making it so” is in the eye of the beholder. But it’s worth looking at the exemplars amongst the new media platforms.

• Connect• Open• Information• Global

Common mission themes amongst the new media platforms

Organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful

Connect people to their passions, their communities, and the world’s knowledge.

Revolutionize how the world engages with ideas and information.

Give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected

Instantly connect people everywhere to what’s most meaningful to them


Their mission statements are very telling. I mean that in the aggregate sense. Their mission statements are essentially indistinguishable.

We all know Google’s mission statement, but does anyone outside of Silicon Valley know the difference? Could you guess which one is Twitter’s by reading them?

lt is very interesting to see these themes stacked up against eachother, though.

They all are essentially trying to openly connect people and information globally.


They see their businesses as ecosystem enablers.

Again, users, partners and innovation are ingredients of the operation itself.

They develop and refine the principles, technology platforms, and larger purpose for existence. These enabling forces are where the business unites with the outside forces of users, partners and innovation to create new things.

The commercial models form by identifying where someone can add value into the equation and understanding if there are either exclusive arrangements in the system that people will pay for or if there are ways to share the value of something between parties in the system.

Photo by Joi Ito

“These changes show the emergence of a new information environment, one in which individuals are free to take a more active role than was possible in the industrial information economy of the twentieth century.”

- Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks


There is a much larger philosophical issue at play here around openness. We aren’t far away from debating as a society whether or not the Internet is a human right. Is it social infrastructure as integral to civilization as roads and plumbing? If so, it should be open and even protected legally from forces that could control it.

Personally, I am on the side of open in that debate. But you don’t have to take sides to understand its impact.

What you do have to decide if you work in the media business today is whether you are going to be a participant in the solution or a bystander waiting for others to work it out. At the Guardian we’re not going to wait for someone else to decide what shape the Internet takes for future generations.

Let me read a passage from Yochai Benkler’s 2006 book The Wealth of Networks. This is the type of philosophy that has focused our thinking on being open and connected:

“A series of changes in the technologies, economic organization, and social practices of production in this environment has created new opportunities for how we make and exchange information, knowledge, and culture.These changes have increased the role of nonmarket and nonproprietary production, both by individuals alone and by cooperative efforts in a wide range of loosely or tightly woven collaborations.These newly emerging practices have seen remarkable success in areas as diverse as software development and investigative reporting, avant-garde video and multiplayer online games.Together, they hint at the emergence of a new information environment, one in which individuals are free to take a more active role than was possible in the industrial information economy of the twentieth century.This new freedom holds great practical promise: as a dimension of individual freedom; as a platform for better democratic participation; as a medium to foster a more critical and self-reflective culture; and, in an increasingly information dependent global economy, as a mechanism to achieve improvements in human development everywhere.”

ucb investigative journalism symposium: collaborative media

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