A digital journalist: Innovation ideas and entrepreneurial digital media concepts

One of the Knight Fellows from last year details his plans to bring social media/journalism to the coverage of the on-going war in Afghanistan.

When I’ve described Silicon Valley has having some qualities in common with a big casino, one thing that is different is that everyone is constantly calculating the risk level of any effort, they are not just dropping coins into a slot machine hoping to win.

There are a dozen ways to measure the risk but here is a quick list of six.

What is the technical feasibility, the business viability, the usability, and the desirability of the product or service?

There is always the question of, does it (product/service) address a major pain point? Pain points are often discussed in the business school, a short hand way of looking at how a product might solve someone’s problems. Interestingly, there is a debate on the need to address pain points. I listened to one entrepreneur who argued, with some success in a class filled with skeptical students, that some of the most interesting digital products don’t address pain points but are so intriguing and engaging that they become wanted without ever being needed.

I like to attribute any ideas like the above list of six but my notes don’t offer that information. If anyone can help me track down the source, know that I appreciate

When I was touring an aircraft carrier, in one of the many hallways I saw a posting of the Ten Commandments of Damage Control. It reminded me of some of the issues some journalism organizations face.

1. Keep Your Ship Watertight.

2. Do not violate material conditions.

3. Have confidence in your ship’s ability to withstand severe damage.

4. Know your way around – even in the dark!

5. Know how to use and maintain damage control equipment.

6. Report damage to the nearest damage control station.

7. Keep personal articles properly secured at all times.

8. Practice personal damage control, protect yourself so you can protect your ship!

9. Take every possible step to save the ship as long as a bit of hope remains.

10. Keep cool; don’t give up the ship!

What makes someone an entrepreneur?

Here are some of the words and phrases (in no particular order) that I’ve heard entrepreneurs use to describe themselves or that those who are studying them (and there is a lot of that at Stanford) use to capture the complex entity that is a entrepreneur.

Restless
Curious
Mind on speed
Team builder
Cheap
Focused
Visionary
Resourceful
Resilient
Tenacious (see this blog for a quick item on that)
Flexible

This last one is particularly important. I was told several times that “Final businesses are rarely like the first business plan.”

When I reflect on some of the people I met at Stanford, one of the things that was clear is that many of these people had personal ambitions far beyond collecting a paycheck. These big missions kept them constantly engaged with people around the world as they enlarged their networks to achieve their lofty goals. I met more people from more nations in ten months at Stanford than any other similar time period in my life…people who often also had their own life missions that they shared with me.

Some even went public with their ambitions.

Take for example the posted by Tom Kosnik, one of the Stanford professors in the MS&E program.

Mission:
Promote world peace by helping global leaders, entrepreneurs, and altruists across generations to:
build trustworthy networks
transcend culture, time and distance
create true value
save the planet
share the wealth

I had the pleasure of taking a couple of classes from Tom and can say he lived up to his mission. He seemed to edit his thoughts and filter his very busy schedule with this mission statement always in mind.

What is your mission?

There was a recent story about people watching TV and surfing the web at the same time.

Here is one quote from the story:

“more women (77 percent) claim to multitask than men (73 percent). The average multitasker spends over 2.5 hours per week using the Web and TV at the same time, and the total time spent multitasking has surged by 19 percent over the past year, according to Nielsen.”

It reminded me of the research that Cliff Nass is doing at Stanford. He has been doing studies about high and low multitaskers which he says raises “implications for the future of the news media as well as media more generally.” You might have seen him talking about this topic in the Frontline documentary “Digital Nation“.

He has spoken on this topic to the Knight Fellows at Stanford and at conferences around the world.

Here are some of the themes that are important for news organizations to consider.

He has pointed out that classical psychology says multi-tasking is impossible but it is growing at an ever-faster rate.

Teenagers are leaders in multitasking.

Definition of media multitasking: Exposure to and use of unrelated media content. The key word is “unrelated”. Applies within technology as well as across technology.

He did not study non-media multitasking.

He says that there is physical multitasking (women may be better vs. men doing this) but with media multitasking there appears to be no difference between men and women.

Media multitasking In 2003, 25% of the time young people spent using one medium, they were concurrently using a second medium.

In 2009 80% plus!

The number of young people are using some form of media for fun while at the same time doing their homework has seen the same growth…2009 80% plus!

Why is multitasking growing? Nass thinks it has been growing for 100 plus years. As new media product or service appears…the first thing that happens is that it steals time from other activities. Movies took time from reading, radio took time from movies, and so on.

Media steals from non-media activities with the media time budget growing year after year.

He has created the term of horizontal use of time…with media it is easy to be in three places at once…so if we have media activities in parallel…and if we have more and more new media products being introduced, people have no choice, they have to multitask.

Media multitasking is becoming ubiquitous but humans have difficulty attending to multiple stimuli and cognitive bottlenecks allow one decision-making process at a time.

At the moment multitasking impedes performance:
Runner at the bottom of news screens
Facebooking while studying
Constant distraction while working…all hurt performance.

Nass believes one of the important conclusions to come out of his work so far is that no information product or service will be a primary focus of users and that multitasking is the dominant model of new media use.

With less attention being paid to any one media interaction, how do you design media…when research is so thin on multitasking?

Nass has said that one thing to consider is high multitaskers prefer new information to old. It may be that high multitaskers are explorers…they like breadth vs. depth. As you can imagine, Nass says that advertising people are very interested in this but I believe it is one of those topics hidden right in the open that newsrooms need to be aware of.

If you’d like more information on his work, you can check out this website.

Kavita Menon shared this list of resources with some of the Knight Fellows from last year.

http://www.journaliststoolbox.org/archive/2010/06/mobile-journalism.html

If you know of others, welcome them here.

A few interesting links related to the semantic web from the Nieman Reports team.

Click here for the links…and know that they welcome more links.

I’d like to recommend to you some of the articles in the most recent edition of the Nieman Reports from Harvard.

There are a few interesting articles by people I had the good fortune to meet over the last year while at Stanford.

You can find the entire report here but I would like to draw your particular attention to a few stories filed by friends and colleagues.

Professor Clifford Nass explores the issue of multi-tasking here.

Knight Fellow Krissy Clark looks at geo-location in reporting here.

Mike Liebhold, a researcher from the Institute For the Future and a speaker at Stanford at a number of events looks at augmented reality here.

And past Knight Fellow Burt Herman looks at how journalists and computer scientists can work together here.

In full disclosure, I did a speculation on what the semantic Web could mean if some of the visions of standardized linked data become true for this same magazine.

It was a pleasure to work with editor Melissa Ludtke and her team and I can recommend it to other journalists who might have the opportunity.

I was reminded of the UPI the other day and found one of their old broadcast style books from 1959 that I’ve kept since it was passed along to me as a young radio journalist.

Some brief thoughts from the UPI, back when their slogan was “United Press International: A UPI Man Is At The Scene,” that I think apply to the digital world we are now in.

“Each writer is expected to add his personality, background and enthusiasm to the report.”

“Time is precious to a broadcaster. Learn to measure it in terms of the written word.”

“Check and recheck all facts, figures and names. In radio or television, nine out of ten corrections reach an entirely different audience. The time to make one is BEFORE the copy hits the wire.”

“Let the ear tune in the source before you hit it with the charge, statement or prediction.”

“Some people speak more informally than they write, a newscast is more informal than Page One of a newspaper. It must not, however, be so informal it fails to win listener respect.”

“Tune in on every phase of human existence. Otherwise, how can you report on and interpret them? “Dig” Satchmo as well as missiles and summit conference. Read, read and read some more.”

“Your first sentence should be a snappy attention-getter, similar to the banner line in a newspaper.”

Of course some things have changed:

“In items involving pertinent profanity (where stations may wish to use or know about the actual wording) set it up in bracket form.

Examples:

Mr Truman called the music critic a name ordinarily avoided in polite society (an S.O.B.).

Godfrey said – “It hurts (like hell).”