Entries Tagged 'journalism' ↓

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 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!

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.

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).”

One of the fellows quoted Henry Luce.  Could this quote from long ago apply to journalism today?

“Journalism is the art of collecting varying kinds of information (commonly called “news”) which a few people possess and of transmitting it to a much larger number of people who are supposed to desire to share it.”  Henry Luce

This fellow, Gabriel Sama, had an interesting thought…that the best publications could become adjectives:

Wired-like

Salonesque

National-Geographical

(with one other fellow suggesting HuffingtonPostal as describing a sort of attention grabbing presentation)

Sama said that newsrooms could define themselves, help create that adjective, by asking these four questions:

• What we do
• Who we serve
• How we do it
• When we do it

Interesting thoughts from one of the Knight Fellows finishing off an intense year.

Paul Radu, one of the Knight Fellows and a noted international investigative reporter, has announced the new website that he has set up to share information and ideas between investigative reporters.

You can check out his Investigative Dashboard here. This is an early version of the concept and will grow as more and more people contribute resources and ideas.

I hope you find this as interesting as many of the other Knight Fellows did.

One of the themes that has come up time and again during my year here at Stanford has been the topic of social capital. It was a phrase I had only the vague awareness of when I arrived but now have been involved in discussions on it in a number of classes. In one class the instructor challenged us to think about what it meant to social media. With that thought in mind, I wrote down what I had learned and discussed, as much to help me crystalize my notes and understanding as to finish a classroom assignment.

How does this relate to journalism? In many respects it is at the heart of journalism for it speaks to the conversations and connections that we are part of, the trust and sense of community that we can champion.

Here are the rather long thoughts posed in a series of questions.

What is Social Capital?
Social capital is a phrase one can often hear today being used by a range of disciplines and for a number of purposes. The very flexibility of the term is both an obstacle and an opportunity. An obstacle to understanding since it lacks the precision that scientists often like to attach to an idea but an opportunity in that it offers a flexible concept to consider in our constantly changing world, particularly in this new age of rapidly evolving social media and virtual communities.

Beyond the very definition of the words, there are other questions. Where can it be found, how does it work, who has it, and of course, does it matter? I believe it matters very much to anyone who is trying to get something done, for social capital is a concept that should be discussed and debated as we move into a world of increasingly complex problems requiring multi-disciplinary and cross border collaboration.

I also believe that just by having a discussion about the very existence of social capital and the definition of it, (Is it glue that holds things together, or is it, as one academic paper proposed, “A multi-dimensional construct usually applied to describe communities and the relations among people who live there”?) we will enrich our community and support the qualities needed for democracy to succeed.

What I have found is that even here at Stanford there are many definitions because there are many people in many disciplines using it with each of their different purposes and agendas creating their own specific meaning for each of the words.

We can begin with the word “capital,” which is familiar to any business school or economics student. “Capital” invokes a very specific idea, often that of cold hard cash. In the broadest and simplest definition, financial capital is an economic asset, a resource, like a factory’s equipment, that can be used in pursuit of goals. By extension of that concept, there are other forms of capital that can also be used to pursue specific achievements such as human capital, the brains and the hands available to do work and natural capital, the water, trees and minerals ready to be used.

And then there is social capital. The debate begins regarding what it is and how it manifests itself, moving on to how it is created and even how it is “spent” for unlike cutting down a tree, which disappears or is converted into cash once the wood is taken to the mill to be made into furniture, with social capital, some think that when you aggressively “use” it, you might actually see it grow. My favorite definition so far and one worth taking a moment on is this one from the writer Paul Bullen:

“Social capital is the raw material of Civil society. It is created from the myriad of everyday interactions between people. It is not located within the individual person or within the social structure, but in the space between people. It is not the property of the organization, the market or the state, though all can engage in its production.
Social capital is a “bottom-up” phenomenon. It originates with people forming social connections and networks based on principles of trust, mutual reciprocity and norms of action.” Paul Bullen

I grant you that the above is long and fairly dense but worth “unpacking” as so many of the professors here at Stanford like to say. Bullen uses social capital as a term not unlike a physical asset, something that sounds more substantial than a soft sounding phrase like “social fabric”. He argues it is something that is constantly created not by people but by their conversations and exchanges with others. Social capital thus is not something a person can own and carry with them to another town, but instead is one way to represent the relationships of that person. The point is that unlike other assets where value can be transferred, social capital is not “owned” by any group but all types of formal and informal social activities play an important role in helping to create it.

Social capital, as Bullen defines it, is not something that can be mandated by a leader. Instead, it depends on the creation of trust between people, the sense that you can believe another person and that they will do what they said they will do. Such trust between people, when widespread, creates a sense of reciprocity, the simple idea that you do something good for others, perhaps not even people you know, with the idea of that good will be shared and repeated and might even return to you in some undefined way and future day.

Who created and defined the term Social Capital?
The sociologist Pierre Bourdieu is often given credit for starting the debate about what is “social capital”. He looked at a wide range of capital, economic, cultural and social capital with an eye to how they interact. Some of this work, in the shortest definition, looked how the rich get richer by their access to social capital.
Taking a look at very different communities, sociologist James Coleman explored how those who are not rich but with high social capital can have a better outcome, a look at social capital that sees how relationships are resources.

Harvard professor Robert Putnam is probably the best-known writer on this topic. He looked at what he considers to be a crisis in civic engagement through an examination of the complex mix of networks, norms and trust that have been changing in America. His work raised questions about the role of media (particularly TV as an influence on people staying home) and other forces that he believes has resulted in people being more isolated from each other than in past decades of America’s democracy. He also raised an interesting paradox that strong interpersonal ties, for example, those with your closest family, can weaken the larger family of society. He was interested in what he sees as weak ties that are created by memberships or association with secondary groups. He thought that something as simple as a bowling team, (the source of the title of his best known book “Bowling Alone”) creates one level of community, one that can fuel other conversations and shared actions.

There are critics that say that America was not becoming less social but changing the type of interactions we are having with each other. The explosion of social media since the book came out points to a new way for people to connect with and care about each other. The term “virtual communities”, coined by Stanford instructor Howard Rheingold speaks to how these online conversations have created very real communities for those involved.

Discussions about social capital in this new digital environment bring up interesting questions about how communities will work in the future. Students in Stanford Instructor Howard Rheingold have explored this topic and with his help identified six important concepts that on line or in person define social capital:

• Participation in networks (a capacity to create new relationships/networks)
• Reciprocity (people care for each other)
• Trust (you can take risks and assume that the others mean you no harm)
• Social norms (you can expect others to behave a certain acceptable way)
• The commons (shared resources owned or supported by all)
• Pro-activity (willing engagement and activity)

When talking through each of these, the students (I was one) realized that it described the Stanford University campus in the best possible way, a real world place where you where encouraged to participate in many different networks, from the classroom to the larger campus, that good works would not just be for your own benefit but would help the larger academic community, that you could generally trust others to do as they say, that the social norms on campus meant you could sleep in the library and walk the streets in relative safety, that overall, people were respectfully using common resources like the library and not to belabor the value of the Stanford environment, that this was a community comprised of proactive future oriented people. That said, the physical interactions of Stanford are increasingly being replaced by virtual ones, the community has moved out of the red tiled buildings and now often takes place on the MacBook Pro computers that many students use.
In either case, in person or online, this discussion by the students in Rheingold’s class confirmed the incredible social capital generating capacity of the Stanford campus and how a community rich in social capital confers on its participants many different benefits.

What is the value of social capital?
Those benefits or the value of social capital in the case of Stanford students are readily apparent to even casual visitors to the campus. The sense of possibilities and progress here is why so many people come from around the world to visit Silicon Valley and Stanford, to see in person what makes this place so special.

Certainly there are physical and intellectual resources concentrated in this area but one could argue that other regions could duplicate the buildings and even the number of master students and still not achieve the disproportional impact this small region has the world. The high level of social connectedness, at least in a business sense, the movement of people from one company to another and the many mix and mingle opportunities from conferences to chance meetings at Buck’s (a Silicon Valley breakfast place frequented by some in the venture capital community), creates many small networks that work together to bring people, ideas and money together.

There is particular interest from business leaders who come to Silicon Valley trying to see if they can understand social capital as a way to drive strategy in social media consumer interactions but also come away recognizing that creation of social capital inside their organization can have long term implications for improving productivity, collaboration, recognizing and engaging all of their stakeholders, and building valuable expertise networks.

The success of Silicon Valley is one reason why a growing number of people in academic and policy circles believe that understanding social capital can explain why development/growth and collective action take place in some places and not in others.

Some of the greatest interest in this topic is being expressed by those involved in the creation of and sustaining of democracies. The very essence of a democracy is based on people trusting others that they have never met in person to act on their behalf. This civic order, that an efficient government comes out the community with a density of social interactions and associations, is something that Robert Putnam has identified:

“The historical record strongly suggests that the successful communities became rich because they were civic, not the other way round. The social capital embodied in norms and networks of civic engagement seems to be a precondition for economic development as well as for effective government. Civics matters.” Robert Putnam

What happens if there is a lack of or decline in Social Capital?
One way to establish the existence and value of an object or concept is to remove it from the environment and see what changes. In areas where there are low levels of trust, where people are not willing to help others and civic cooperation is almost non-existent, one could point to this as a decline in social capital. This type of environment is recognizable by just walking down the street. There can be a lack of community services, damage to public property and a sense that even the most basic rules not being respected or enforced. A community where social capital is low can also be seen as having little public discourse on issues of importance. Instead, people have social interactions with a limited family circle, isolated and not spending time in public spaces.

This is a challenge that the US government is facing in certain regions. In setting up local governments and services in emerging states, the officials in charge of reconstruction apparently find themselves focusing on building social capital as much as building bridges and schools. When representatives of the US government surveyed some communities, one indicator of how long it will take to rebuild the economy and civic structure was the finding that people felt that it was necessary to be cautious when dealing with other, that they could not trust their neighbors.

What does this all have to do with social media and the social data revolution?
Patterns of participation and connection have changed in a fundamental way. Your ability to give and get attention, become a participant and make contributions have moved from the town hall and the corner post office to anywhere you carry a mobile phone or have a connected computer.

The physical boundaries of those you can create social capital with have been changed, as your voice carries farther but beyond changing definitions of personal geography, there has been a change in the way people perceive and interact with society’s many hierarchies. As most social media use open systems, there is less traditional direct control of the conversation or barriers in preventing people of different social, economic, religious, and political backgrounds from having conversations. These conversations and exposure to people who are different may be making people more tolerant but it raises the question of if it is improving trust between people. However, as we are seeing on a daily basis, all of these social media opportunities create more opportunities for people to make calls for action and in turn create opportunities to share a common concern and take action even if those involved never meet in person.

How can you build Social Capital?
There are those who believe horizontally organized clubs and associations are strong mechanisms for generating social capital. These organizations help create shared norms and values which in turn can support micro trust between individuals and macro trust between organizations. Sociologist Eva Cox has been an advocate of this technique of building meaningful interactions between individuals saying:

“Learning some of the rough and tumble of group processes… has the advantages of connecting us with others. We gossip, relate and create the warmth that comes from trusting.” Eva Cox

With this vision in mind, some police departments hold community meetings in neighborhoods with the idea of hearing the concerns of the community but also starting conversations between neighbors. This seed can then become a block party that can lead to other conversations on the street corner, leading to shared concerns and over time, greater trust and the sense of watching out for each other, a development that many feel is the best tool available to most neighborhoods in fighting many crimes.

There are others who believe that social capital can be created or at least encouraged through educational efforts, not so much classes in how to create a civil society, as through the process of bringing people together to learn and share.

How can you measure Social Capital?
If social capital is created through hundreds of hourly interactions, thousands of neighborhood conversations each day and millions of relationships and interactions of associations and organizations every week, the challenge of measuring social capital is considerable. Surveys and first hand observations can document some of conversations, relationships, and memberships to see how engaged people are with each other and their institutions. Putnam has been particularly effective in marshalling numbers that point to declining civic engagement.

The emergence of sophisticated social data media tools can now help to measure new interactions and help us see what up to now might have been hidden patterns. Finding those links, however, is only part of the challenge. A full examination of these connections could require a careful review of how many, how far they reach, how long they have existed and how strong they are.

One value of this data is that a careful examination of it can point to those who serve as brokers or bridges in bringing together different communities or individuals. These influencers will be much sought after by those who want to sway the connections this person or association and thus much of the future research into measuring social capital may be done with an eye to how the connections and areas of trust can be used for commercial purposes.

One other value of this social media data is that it can also point to those who are isolated and identify why they are not part of an on line community, be it a lack of time, resources, or even broadband connectivity. The larger rapidly expanding world of social data does not just speak to twitter accounts or Facebook activity but valuable insights can be made gathering information about a community’s crime rate (particularly corruption), voter registration, church attendance, PTA membership, number of registered cars, and any other number of data points about people’s movements and purchasing patterns. As much of this “off line” data is rapidly moving on line and being made accessible, we can expect ways to see a much more complete picture of the interactions in a community.

This increasing amount of data will enrich the conversation about who has social capital and how it is used. As sociologist Eva Cox once explained, being able to measure this concept has a value in helping a community make decisions:

“Social capital is…appropriate because it can be measured and quantified so we can distribute its benefits and avoid its losses.” Eva Cox

Can Social Capital be misused?
In the most extreme example, there are many that believe that Hitler used a variation of some of the themes of social capital to build the Nazi regime. The Mafia depends on some versions of social capital to function. It has distorted set of social norms, a level of internal trust and other qualities one typically associates with any other association or small community. It could even be that some aspects of social capital are the causes of wars. One group of researchers have found that disorganized families of primates in the jungle are not a threat to neighboring primate families but once a family has a group of males that are related, a sort of “association” that shares communication and trust along with time to spend in activities beyond essential survival, these male primates can become a threat to others.

The glass ceiling is an example of males creating an association, the old boys network, which can be seen to be using their social capital in pursuit of a unified goal, one of inhibiting the progress of others not like them.

What long-term benefits can Social Capital have?
When one reads the works of those who advocate social capital, the benefits seem almost endless. There are those who say it can have direct and positive health benefits for those who have more social capital vs. those who do not. People with high social capital can find jobs more quickly. Neighborhoods with strong social capital have lower crime and better schools. Communities that are seen as having widely distributed social capital often are attributed as having more efficient and responsive government and even more altruism and philanthropy, which in turn is an ingredient in supporting some of the associations and activities that can create more social capital.

While I cannot imagine that social capital is a cure all for all that is wrong with society, a conversation about the definitions of social capital, the value of the concept and the ways that it can be created and distributed is worth engaging in. Our communities face problems that are increasingly complex and interconnected with the challenges faced by others. To solve these problems will involve proactive participation by as many of the stakeholders as possible, the capacity to create new relationships, committed efforts to grow trust along with the sense that people care for each other and respect for shared resources.

Those communities, virtual or in person, that commit to encouraging those qualities will find that they are building social capital one conversation at a time as the individuals involved begin to know each other better, care about each other more, and act with an eye to the future.

Earlier this year I took a look at some of the opportunities in what is called hyperlocal coverage.

There are quite a few sites that occupy this “space” (as they like to say here in Silicon Valley) running the spectrum from sites created for and run by the public to those that are staffed by professional full time journalists…and a growing number that merge those two concepts in various ways.

Here are a few that those interested in hyperlocal content might want to glance at:

Here is one of the efforts by the New York Times:
http://www.nytimes.com/marketing/thelocal/

And the Boston.com team are doing this:
http://www.boston.com/yourtown/

And this is what the Chicago Tribune is up to:
http://www.triblocal.com/

With this related effort:
http://www.chicagonow.com/

Here is one from the Gannett:
http://injersey.com/

AOL is getting quite a bit of press for their expansion of the Patch concept. This is one example:
http://summit.patch.com/

The following represent a variety of hyperlocal concepts that are often cited as examples of local efforts.

http://missionlocal.org/
http://www.wickedlocal.com/
http://www.annarbor.com/
http://www.edhat.com/index.cfm
http://www.coronadelmartoday.com/
http://www.TheAlternativePress.com/
http://kansascitykansan.com/
http://www.myballard.com/
http://www.pulaskicountydaily.com/
http://www.universalhub.com/
http://www.sacramentopress.com/
http://www.chitowndailynews.org/
http://www.frontporchforum.com/
http://insidemedford.com/
http://yourarlington.com/
http://westseattleblog.com/
http://www.nashville247.tv/
http://newhavenindependent.org/
http://www.westportnow.com/
http://www.villagesoup.com/
http://www.nextdoormedia.com/
http://www.ibrattleboro.com/
http://phillyfuture.org/
http://denver.yourhub.com/Denver/
http://windsorite.ca/
http://ossingtonvillage.com/
http://www.blogto.com/
http://www.bctv.org/
http://davidsonnews.net/

There are a wide range of hyperlocal sites with specific focuses, here are a few:
http://midtownlunch.com/
http://www.loadedgunboston.com/
http://www.mgoblue.com/index-main.html

If you know of hyperlocal websites we should be looking at, please let us know.