Internet Strategy For News Organizations 1: Introduction To New Media

Internet Strategy  
for News Organiza3ons 
Session 1: Introduc3on to New Media 
1 June 2010 
Instructor: Jonathan Stray 
Course outline 
1.  How to do good journalism with online media. 
2.  How to support your news organiza3on doing it. 
Or at least, what we think we know right now about these topics. 
The field is very young, very experimental, and will be changing 
quickly for the foreseeable future. 
Course outline 
June 1: Introduc3on to new media – what is this stuff? 
June 4: Digital storytelling – how does the medium shape the message?  
June 8: The people formerly known as the audience – we’re no longer broadcas7ng. 
June 11: SoQware for communi3es – making something people want to use 
June 15: The economics of new media – how do I pay for this? 
June 18: Reinven3ng the product – what could journalism be, if not stories? 
Blog: hUp://jmsc.hku.hk/blogs/internetstrategy/ 
We have had print, radio, television. 
What makes the internet different? 
Fundamental Internet Differences 
1. It’s many‐to‐many. 
Communica3on PaUerns 
Broadcast 
Communica3on PaUerns 
Telephone, email 
Human Social Networks 
Human Social Networks 
Communica3on Technology 
Prin3ng press, TV, radio: one‐to‐many 
Telephone, email: one‐to‐one or few‐to‐few 
Public global networks: many‐to‐many 
–  audience talks back 
–  talking to each other might be just as important to 
the audience as talking to you 
–  concept of “authority” changes 
2. No distribu3on monopoly – limi3ng factor is 
aUen3on. 
How did you get on the newsrack? 
24 hours of video uploaded to 
YouTube every minute 
(link) 
There’s a lot out there 
Human data generated in 
2010 = 
1,000,000,000 terabytes 
Library of congress digital 
archive =  
160 terabytes 
(only 20 TB for all books!) 
All New York Times ar3cles 
ever = 
0.06 terabytes 
(13 million stories, assuming 5k per story) 
A news outlet generates a 
7ny amount. 
How many good blog posts? 
126 million blogs currently  
(BlogPulse) 
Assuming 1 post per month = 4 million per day 
Assuming 1/1000 are good to read =  
4000 good blog posts per day. 
(link) 
aUen3on. 
–  you’re compe3ng for aUen3on with everyone 
online, amateur or professional 
–  a few large organiza3ons s3ll get most of the 
traffic  
–  entry is cheap, but building an audience is hard 
3. The medium is soQware + people.   
What can you publish in a newspaper? 
Text, photos, graphics… any color image.  
Predetermined, finite number of pages. 
What can you publish on radio & TV? 
Radio: Any (lo‐fi) audio.  
Television: Audio and video, cap3ons. 
Typically fixed program length. Live content possible.  
What can you publish online? 
•  Text 
•  Photos and graphics 
•  Images 
•  Audio 
•  Video 
Arbitrary content length. Live broadcasts.  
What else? 
What else can you publish online? 
•  Documents. 100,000 pages? No problem. 
•  Data. Databases and datasets of all kinds. 
•  Interac3ve stories. 
But is “publish” the right word? 
What about aggrega3on and cura3on? What about people 
genng informa3on from one another? Is crea3ng a forum 
“publishing”? Does Wikipedia “publish”?  
3. The medium is soQware + people. 
–  interac3ve stories, data visualiza3on, etc… 
–  much more than “mul3media,” this class of thing 
is called “social soQware” 
–  what do you want your audience to do? 
–  “community” 
4. It’s personal. 
“Mass media” no longer means  
“same thing for everyone” 
Can “broadcast” something different for each user 
Remember what I’ve seen, what I like, who my friends are... 
–  this is part of how communi3es and sub‐
communi3es are built 
–  the site doesn’t belong to you, it belongs to them 
–  think of a phone 
–  a really good product becomes and extension of 
yourself 
aUen3on. 
3. The medium is soQware + people.  
How do people get news now? 
(in highly wired places) 
(link) 
(in highly wired places) 
(link) 
Disaggrega3on: the “unit of consump3on” is no 
longer a paper or a (TV/radio) program 
Disaggrega3on 
(aka compe33on?) 
Aggrega3on 
People who don’t like aggrega3on 
WSJ Editor Robert Thompson:  
"There is no doubt that certain websites are best described as parasites or 
tech tapeworms in the intes3nes of the internet.” 
Rupert Murdoch: 
“We are going to stop people like Google or MicrosoQ or whoever from taking 
stories for nothing.” 
Associated Press chairman Dean Singleton: 
“We can no longer stand by and watch others walk off with our work under 
misguided legal theories.” 
Ways to think about aggrega3on 
•  Legal status of linking. 
•  Legal status of rewri3ng – does anyone “own” facts? 
•  Done my machine (“aggrega3on”) or by hand (“cura3on”) or by a 
community (“collabora3ve filtering”) 
•  Is it morally right to rewrite someone’s story? To link to it? 
•  What service does aggrega3on provide to the reader? 
•  How does its value change when there is more informa3on? 
Filtering 
 “In a world where publishing is expensive, the act of publishing 
is also a statement of quality ‐‐ the filter comes before the 
publica3on. In a world where publishing is cheap, punng 
something out there says nothing about its quality. It's what 
happens aQer it gets published that maUers.” 
“It’s not informa3on overload, it’s filter failure.” 
   ‐‐ Clay Shirkey 
Haven’t editors always aggregated? 
What is choosing wire stories?  How about rewri3ng stories from other 
publica3ons? 
You can save yourself the trouble (and cost) online. Just link. 
“Cover what you do best and link to the rest.” 
‐‐ Jeff Jarvis 
Hand‐selec3ng links has become known as “cura3on.” 
(We’ll return the economic issues in session 5) 
“Social media” 
It’s the word we’re stuck with for non‐broadcast media. 
“What all my friends/colleagues/contacts are reading” is 
probably interes3ng to me. And it’s a form of filtering. 
“The news comes to me.” 
‐‐ Gina Chen  
“Social media” 
•  Facebook 
•  TwiUer 
•  Blogs 
but also 
•  The web itself! 
A useful metaphor for thinking about social media: it’s a 
“conversa3on.”  
(link) 
What is Facebook? 
(from a journalist’s point of view) 
•  Each person selects the 
people and organiza3ons they 
want to hear from (via the 
Facebook “news feed” 
•  Three buUons on each item: 
comment, like, share 
•  Or: “add to story”, “signal 
approval”, “syndicate” 
Is Facebook a medium? 
Is Facebook a broadcast medium? 
What else is it good for? 
Hey, there’s a back‐channel! 
•  Monitor the news 
•  Find sources 
•  Get feedback on what you publish 
•  Make contacts 
•  Talk to your audience / community! 
...and generally par3cipate in whatever 
discussions are relevant to your journalism 
What is TwiUer? 
Main structural differences from Facebook: 
•  all conversa3ons are public* 
•  “Friends” on Facebook is bi‐direc3onal. “Following” on TwiUer 
is not. (I can “follow” you without asking.) 
*there exist private TwiUer streams, but these have not proven very popular or relevant 
Use a TwiUer app to organize the stream 
Social network or news medium? 
Research by Kwak et al. 
Graph of “retweets” on a 
par3cular topic. 
Looks almost like “broadcast.” But 
stories depend on retweets for 
reach. 
Social network or news medium? 
Research by Kwak et al. 
RSS 
Stands for “really simple syndica3on.” A way a site can publish a 
feed of its ar3cles.  
Designed for blogs, and all blogs have an RSS feed. But now used 
by just about everyone (including news sources.) 
RSS Reader 
The Blogosphere is made of links 
...and comments 
Different social media networks... 
•  Public vs. private (or limited) 
•  Real‐3me vs. not real 3me 
•  Message length 
•  Who owns the conversa3on? 
•  How is iden3ty handled? 
–  is anonymity possible? 
–  do you have to log in? 
–  how can I see your history/reputa3on? 
–  is anything personalized? 
Each of these parameters has effects on the type of conversa3on 
that occurs. 
For next 3me… 
•  Readings! Course blog: 
jmsc.hku.hk/blogs/internetstrategy 
•  Non‐tradi3onal story forms: 
interac3venarra3ves.org 
visualcomplexity.com 

Internet Strategy For News Organizations 1: Introduction To New Media

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