Djw2013 Day 1 Keynote Address

I am very sorry that I couldn't be here with you today in Singapore. I was looking forward to it very much. But since I am addressing a room full of journalists, I'm probably sure you are aware of what is happening in Washington DC with the federal budget which'd prevented me from being able to attend. However, the conference organizer graciously allowed me to be able to come to speak to you... this way. And I think someone said the show must go on so Let's get on with the show. The core of my talk is really about the question: Are we in a Golden Age of Journalism? I believe we are. There's been an explosion of creativity across journalism. That gets me very excited. Data visualization Open news hacking Social Curation User generated content It's a fantastic time to be a part of journalism. But before we go on too far on idealism, we need to balance the potential of digital age with the critical values that distinguish journalism from public relation. Borrowing a phrase from David Ensor, Director of Voice of America, where I am recording this video, He said, "We aggressively need, as reporter, to utilize new tools but stay close, keep close, to the old journalistic values." New Tools, Old Values And I highly agree with him. For the old values of journalism are the best guides on how to apply the technological advantages we have today. A subtext to the talk is that digital tools can build and help you access new market but it's going to be high value content and journalistic values embedded in that content that will build your audience and in the long term, sustainability, relevance, and viability. So, technology helps you access market but it is journalistic values and content that build the audiences. So I want to cover some of the profound changes that technology has brought on how we gather and publish the news and specifically, I will talk briefly about sources, speed and accuracy. Then I am going to go on to discuss the implications of these tools in digital tools in speed, sources and and accuracy on the newsroom of future. So... Speed. On May 1st, 2011, a simple tweet from a man in Pakistan woken by helicopters illustrate the potential of the Internet to become a valuable journalistic source. Despite highly compartmentalized knowledge, nape-of-the-earth-flying with radar absorbing helicopters, one of the most important military operations of the US’s War Against Terror was revealed by a guy who couldn't sleep. The “Osama Raid tweet” was a stark display that with the right tools and knowledge social platforms could be a powerful source or sources for news organizations. In the digital age you have the potential as a journalist to leverage every cell phone every camera, in a cell phone every tweet every facebook post as a source. Now while the Osama Raid tweet was found by reporters more through luck than anything, there is a growing usage of social media forensics in journalism. Social mining tools like Mass Relevance, Radian6, Social Flow, as well as some of the more academic tools allow journalists to quickly sort through social content the millions, billions of tweets and facebook post, and other social media, to find the nuggets of of journalistic information. Used as a blunt object, newsrooms are using social data analysis to try identify news trends early. In this mode, newsrooms are not always applying their core journalistic values of sourcing the context, but just thinking about being the first to report on a news event. More sophisticated users use social data analysis to ask more interesting questions: “Why did this event occur?” "Who is associated with it?" "How is the public influenced by it?" “Who is a reliable and authoritative source on what is happening?” How information moves between people and across the network are essential elements of understanding the news today. For example in the recent attack on the Westgate Mall in Kenya, there was a running PR battle between Al-Shabab and the Kenyan government as a real battle was taking place. Which I think was probably actually stunning in itself. For a journalist that back-and-forth on Twitter was newsworthy. By using social forensics, reporters have a better opportunity to broaden the story to understand the context of the attack with all of its religious, ethnic, and political implications. For instance, How did the Arabic population of Mombasa in Kenya view Al-Shabaab, a Somali based terror organization? What are the various reactions by the people of Kenya on the attack? And how do these reactions align with key tribal and political organizations? And finally, which I think is probably one of the most interesting one, What is the discussion and thoughts of the Somali diaspora in places like the US, Canada and England, with the Somali population? While this information is not a traditional “source” it is the distillation of the comments, feelings and engagement of millions of “sources”... Social media data in essence of ‘meta-source’, is a source of sources, that can truly help inform a story. There is an immensely important role for journalistic values however in understanding and using social data. It can be a dangerous proposition to not apply basic journalism skepticism. A great quote from Jennifer Carrnig, Director of Communication at the New York ACLU, said, “When everyone has a video camera with them at all times, the potential is limitless. But there is clearly a downside to that, because when everybody is submitting stuff, it is hard to know in real time what is valid; there is the potential for mistruths to be out there.” I highly agree. In terms of sources, there is a second powerful new source - and perhaps one still in its infancy that we need to take advantage of and that is data, and data itself. Journalism is rooted in storytelling; and the tradition is a reporter talking to as many people as possible to be able to shape a story and understand it. It almost goes without saying that when I say “sources”, 99% of you in the audience think “people”. However, we have to start broadening our minds. Computer-aided reporting and journalism and data visualizations by people from organizations like NPR, Ushihidi, InfoAmazonia, NYTimes and infographics like Visualizing Palestine are beautiful examples of how data does not only enhances storytelling, but IS the story. Data is a valid, valued highly relevant journalism source because powerful data analysis tools now have become accessible and affordable for non-technical users. For as a Journalist, You don’t need a PhD in statistics or have to have the title of “Data Scientist” to be able to mine journalistic insights from data sets. This is information that was not possible to glean from any one person or even groups of people in the past. And data journalism and dataset as a source is a new way to try to undestand again the big picture and understand the context of what is happening inside that big picture. If your future newsroom is going to start recruiting “data sources”, a good place to start to understand is the Data Journalism Handbook and getting your reporters to understand the basics of things like Google Fusion Tables or Tableau. So the second key issue that's been affected by digital media is Speed The increased speed in which news organizations gather and publish content is one of the most notable changes and challenges for digital organizations today. An over-focus on speed without a respect for accuracy leads to problems, often times quite public problems, for careless news organizations. Our ability to identify information and publish it quickly has sometimes outstripped our collective journalism judgement. My analogy is that we just gave my 7 year old the keys to a Ferrari. However, there is a reason that speed to publish is a part of journalism. this speed is because of an abundance of riches. The sheer amount of observers with social media accounts, cameras and audio devices pointed at every news event happening in the world gives reporters and editors an ability to access and then rocket content around the world. And this 24/7 ‘unblinking eye’ has brought us the iconic real-time images of news events that we would never have seen before. So, sometimes speed IS the point. I have sat transfixed in front of my computer watching the Tahrir Square protests as they unfold in real-time in front of me. And I was on the square. We saw Neda Agha-Soltan die before our eyes during the 2009 protests and we watched as people were plucked out of the frozen Hudson River from US airway flight 1549 crash. And we were seeing these things as it was happening as it was recorded on cellphone and posted on the Internet. Speed in which journalists and the audience, and the audience itself facilitated raw content has been a powerful witness to important events. Events that only a few years before would have been hidden from us. In this case, immediacy and realism - the being THERE - was the point of true journalism. The editorial judgement was to point the camera and not interpret the events at the time. But there are downsides to the speed without journalistic and editorial judgement. In the US, the Boston Bombing, it was Pete Williams of NBC news who brought a strong journalistic perspective to rapidly evolving events. And for the Arab Spring, for Twitter audience, it was my friend, Andy Carvin of NPR. Both of these journalists, whether doing original reporting or curating original sources or exclusive information stopped to ask the all-important question: “Do we have another source?” “Can we corroborate that?” As Pete Williams described his approach to reporting “the essence of journalism is the process of selection.” Today, speed to the market is important to the credibility of newsrooms, but also to the financial bottom line as speed brings eyeballs. Our future newsrooms have to balance speed with my next topic, and that is accuracy. Accuracy is not the antithetical to speed. Editorial judgement connected to digital workflows can work efficiently to produce sensical and accurate content in near real-time. Like sources and speed, accuracy can be aided by technology, but today we have to reassess our understanding of accuracy in a digital world. At the core of accuracy is context; what is reliable? What is verifiable? What is in the public interest? Which public? What is the proportionality of one story to another? When we think about accuracy in journalism today, one of things we have to think about is the public is no longer a passive, or remote receiver of news. They are a participant. The best news organizations not only understand that, they enroll the public, in working with them, to make reporting possible, that was not possible before. Crowdsourcing - it's a new way in which we could reach out to public directly, to aid reporters as they pursue stories. This is exemplified in my opinion by the work of the Guardian in UK as they could produce incredibly detailed, insightful and frankly just interesting information about British MP expenses scandal in 2009. Faced with mountains and mountains, and literary thousand of pages of MP expense reports, they turned to the audience to help them process these pages into data which then can be utilized into reporting. But beyond that, they trusted their audience to actually participate in a deeper way in fact, asked the audience to point out interesting things they found when they were reading these reports and putting them into data. Basically tapping the audience on their shoulder and say “hey, would you please tell us about the juicy bit” The success of working with the audience has led to Guardian Witness a new crowdsource platform for their journalism. On this platform, the Guardian reporter can go to the public and ask them for all range, all matter of help They could upload a picture, make a comment, take a survey, give their opinion, give a piece of video. The role of crowdsourcing in improving the accuracy is starting to grow. In the US, ProPublica’s “Free the Files” project, asking the US citizen to help transcribe US political spending. again from thousands of pages of paper report, and online content. In turn allow ProPublica to release a new tool that we should all take a look at. Which is called Transcribable an open source project that allows journalists to build crowdsourcing projects. There's another tool or new company actually out there called OpenWatch where news organizations can task or find already uploaded content, or network of citizen journalists around the world. It was used in great effect in both Egypt and in Turkish-Istanbul protest. There are other services like Storyful which you subscribe to and you can get information that is crowdsourced and verified by Storyful and that really extend the editorial process in the newsroom. There is another technology and this is more of an emergent technology that I think we need to think about accuracy, and that is Algorithms. Yes, a very geeky topic. There are a number of people out there thinking about how algorithms and computer agents can help us more quickly determine the accuracy of information. One thing I will point to, is The Washington Post's recently launched TruthTeller project. An algorithm based project that compares transcripts of video and audio with a database of facts to see if politicians or other people are telling the truth. So speed, sources, and accuracy are truly transformed in a way that digital media has brought to journalism. And it really changed the newsroom. So what does that future Newsroom Look Like? What does that newsroom look like? Who's in it? What are the necessary skills? How is it to be managed? Well one place to start is with Jeff Bezos founder of Amazon and the recent owner, purchaser of the Washington Post. On his first visit to the Washington Post newsroom, he reportedly told the assembled staff: “Put readers, not advertisers, first. Don’t write to impress each other. And above all, “Don’t be boring.” If I was designing my dream newsroom today, and I did not want to be boring, here is who I would have in it. First, are Reporters who can code & shoot. Reporters need to understand both how to tell a story, but they also need to understand the basics of technology and digital media. They need to understand HTML, javascript, basics of data visualizations, social media platforms and advanced customer management-sorry- advanced content management system. The goal is to have a journalist who can write and record, but also understand what tool or platform is the most effective at the moment to tell that story. In addition to just reporters who can code and shoot, I would ask newsroom to have a Computer-Assisted Data Reporter. Every newsroom needs to have staff who can more deeply understand and focus on how data is a source and a storytelling format in itself. Now, the next key player are Social Media Editor(s). But rather than just repost news on Facebook, the Social Media Editor understands how news content can be gleaned from and enhanced by the audience. They have the skills to quickly find valuable information, the ability to understand what is a new source from social media content, or surprising insight. Then they have the all-important job of turning that insight into great news content. A social media editor is not a service to a newsroom, they are a full-fledged reporter, and a key component of any newsroom team. My next role is a Front-end News Application Designer/Developer. The future-leaning newsroom has to be able to move quickly to deploy and customize a variety of storytelling and data visualization applications to help improve the news. The geeks and coders, which I am happily one of, can’t sit in the basement any longer, and that's where generally we are being put. We need to sit beside the reporters. From NPR’s Lost and Found photo story to the New York Times Snowfall to La Tercera’s remembrance of Chile’s coup application application designers are working in newsrooms sitting alongside reporters to tell interactive and immersive stories to draw readers in, build unique storytelling formats and create new experience unlike any traditional means. So my last key player is a Digital Media Metric Analyst. Data-driven insights into the audiences and how they consume, react to, use and even share content can help editors and reporters shape when, where and how they present content. Data-driven insights into audience can also help editors understand where they are not being successful. News organizations are making a big mistake if all they see in analytics is “hey, we are up/down this week.” Today, I have discussed how new digital tools of journalism can help us work faster, smarter and allow us to tell stories in new ways. However, I caution us that if we don’t approach these new tools with a respect for the core values of news we will undermine journalism. While a headline or flashy presentation might divert the eye, it is the values embedded in your content that will build long-term audiences, and in that the viability of your business. We are in a ‘Golden Age’ but only if we collectively realize that everybody in that room are the Founding Fathers and Mothers of this New Age. As Founders, what you think and do today will be the basis for how journalism continues to grow and evolve. The advantage of technology is only one half of the equation. What we do with these tools to ensure that our news is an essential part of building and improving our communities is the more important part of that equation. The next two days are a wonderful time to dive into the depths of the new digital workflow, the role of data, crowdsourcing and social media. I hope you spend this valuable time learning, connecting with each other and talking about how to build the future journalism. Its a wonderful time to be a part of journalism I am very sorry that I am not there, but I hope you have a wonderful next 2 days. Thank you very much.