However, the kind of sharing Quora is promoting doesn’t jive with me. And neither does it sit well with author Jeff Jarvis, who despite years of advocacy about the benefits of living in public isn’t a fan of this view feature.

I'm Mr. Public but I don't like Quora sharing who reads what. Shouldn't it operate as a library? No crime in lurking. allthingsd.com/20120801/quora…—
Jeff Jarvis (@jeffjarvis) August 01, 2012

While it is understandable for social services to use passive sharing — after all, it quantifies the act of content creation and/or content sharing –but I do feel that anonymous reading has its value.

Quora exec Marc Bodnick tells AllThingsD’s Liz Gannes:

“People on Quora are writing to be read. What we’re telling you is that Quora is a distribution mechanism that works.”

Like many others on the Internet, I too get lured into clicking headlines that are intriguing only to find myself on a list or a news item that only infuriates me. So to see my name associated with that page is disingenuous. Also, if I spent two seconds on a page, does it really count as a “view?”

Liz, who has written about the death of online lurking, wrote in a post last month:

“Passive becomes active. Lean back becomes lean forward. Stalking becomes, well, showing you’re interested in someone.”

In other words, the so-called Quora view that is generated is a false endorsement. What if I have landed on the the post accidentally or have been lured there?  I see this is a curse of Facebook, which has propagated the positive bias syndrome on the web thanks to its Like button. It is not surprising — Quora was started by ex-Facebookers, who like the social-giant itself don’t seem to put real human context around the data signals. (It is not the only bad behavior they have carried over from Facebook.)

How to get rid of Views: Click on your profile icon (top right hand corner) and hit settings in the drop down menu. Find Views (just above Deactivate option) in the right hand column. Click and chose no. Views are turned off.

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We’ve seen a ton of digital ink spilled over the implications of media startup Journatic faking bylines for some of its content, including my post about the underlying economics that have forced newspapers like the Chicago Tribune to outsource their hyper-local content. While some critics choose to see outsourced journalism of the kind Journatic produces as unethical “pink slime,” the controversy over the startup’s practices actually says a lot about how difficult it is to find new ways of producing that kind of content — in part because the traditional media industry and its supporters want to force everything into old models and familiar formats.

Just to recap, Journatic is a Chicago-based startup founded by former journalist Brian Timpone as a way of helping news providers cover local and community news more efficiently. The company has worked with a number of mainstream outlets such as the Tribune and the Chicago Sun-Times, as well as the GateHouse newspaper chain, providing the kind of commodity news that community papers specialize in: notices of events, local residents winning awards, real-estate transactions and so forth. Journatic pays staffers and freelancers — some of whom work in the Philippines — to produce this content from publicly available data.

The company was engulfed in a firestorm of criticism last week, after a Journatic employee (who has since resigned)told the public-radio program This American Life that it routinely used fake bylines for some of the content it provided to the Tribune and others. Timpone said in an interview with me that these manufactured bylines were only used for data-based stories that came from a sister company called Blockshopper, which aggregates data about real-estate sales in various communities, not traditional journalistic stories that were provided to newspapers — but he admitted that using the fake bylines was “absolutely a mistake.”

Why does the new have to look like the old?

As media industry blogger John Bethune pointed out in a blog post about the Journatic incident, the source of the mistake was a desire to make the content that came from Blockshopper look and feel like the stories that both newspaper owners and readers would be familiar with — in other words, a traditional newspaper story with the name of the author at the top. As Bethune put it:

The real issue was not that the company used fake bylines on its stories, but that it used bylines at all. Journatic screwed up because the company wanted to have it both ways: to embrace new-media principles while trying to disguise them. Instead of looking forward, it looked backward.

Timpone effectively admitted the same thing in his interview with me — that part of the mistake Journatic made was in thinking that the content it was producing needed bylines in the first place (much of what it provides to the Tribune for that newspaper’s TribLocal sites now simply says “Neighborhood News Service). Some critics of the practice have assumed that the fake bylines were intended to disguise the fact that contributors were from the Philippines, but Timpone said the practice was mostly designed to make the content look like a traditional story because that’s what the company thought newspapers would want.

But much of the content that comes from both Blockshopper and Journatic doesn’t really fit that model at all. Instead of being a story that a single individual produces (along with some editing), they are an amalgamation of data and contributions from multiple sources, some of whom scrape databases or make phone calls and others who edit or fact-check or perform other functions to produce the “story.”

Critics of the Journatic model, including Mandy Jenkins of Digital First Media and Anna Tarkov at the Poynter Institute, seem to want newspapers to continue to produce hyper-local community journalism in the traditional way, with reporters based in the community writing traditional stories. But given the kinds of financial pressures on the newspaper industry, that may simply not be viable for outlets like the Tribune or GateHouse. That’s not to say they shouldn’t devote resources to those communities, but it does mean that looking at alternative models for some kinds of content makes sense as well.

Not “pink slime,” just a potential new model

I think what’s important with a new model like the one Timpone is trying to implement is not to find ways of dismissing it as the “pink slime” of the journalism industry, but to see whether anything in it is ultimately worth keeping or is providing a worthwhile service for readers. Does Journatic or Blockshopper content inform readers about things that they might be interested in, and does it do so accurately? It seems to (no one has raised concerns about inaccuracy so far, just bylines). Do readers really care who wrote the post about the high-school student winning an award or the sale of a local property? I don’t know.

In a recent presentation about the future of media, Richard Gingras — former CEO of Salon and now director of news products for Google — notes that many of the models that newspapers and other media entities continue to rely on, including the traditional story format, are throwbacks to the days of print. Why do we need to use them online, where content is more fluid? Why not experiment with new forms? As Gingras puts it:

These were models that barely changed in 100 years — what, they added color? So people didn’t have a reason to evolve. [But] you now have people on the outside looking at the problem with a clean slate.

In many ways, this is related to the discussion that media theorist Jeff Jarvis and others have been having for some time now about how the news “story” needs to be blown up or dismantled, or at the very least re-thought. Since the way that news occurs and the ways in which information reaches us has been completely disrupted by the web and the democratization of distribution, the argument is that we need to have different models and formats for handling that information intelligently — whether it’s with tools like Storify or new ways of aggregating and filtering data in order to make it meaningful.

Could Journatic be one of those ways, at least for certain kinds of hyper-local content and information? It’s possible, or at the very least worth considering. And demonizing that approach as “pink slime” or something that is antithetical to journalism doesn’t really help.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr user Zert Sonstige

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Many media outlets — and not just traditional players like newspapers or magazines, but even some newer and more digital-savvy ones — still think of the article or the story as the bedrock foundation of news and journalism. But with so many different sources of content, and so many different ways of distributing it and displaying it, is that really still the case? Author and journalism professor Jeff Jarvis has been writing about this question for some time, and makes the argument that the article should sometimes be separated into its component parts in order to be more useful, advice that new-media startups like Circa seem to be taking to heart.

In a recent post, Jarvis writes about how it makes more sense to think of the various elements of a typical news article as “assets” of various kinds — so the nugget of news that triggered the story might be a single asset, and then the background about that event would be another, related photos or video would be a third, and so on. Do all of these things have to appear in every article? Not really. That’s just the way that things were done when you only got one chance to print something every day. So why does that form still dominate? And should it?

The future of news: Small pieces, loosely joined

During a recent Twitter discussion about Facebook’s IPO, journalism professor Jay Rosen sparked a debate about those questions when he said a Reuters story was so dense with financial terminology that it was almost impossible for a non-financial reader to understand (Anthony De Rosa at Reuters collected some of the conversation in a Storify module, which is embedded below). What the story needed, Jarvis said, was some background — but when those kinds of elements are included in stories they rarely serve readers well:

If you know nothing about an ongoing story, it gives you too little history. If you know a story well, it merely wastes the paper’s space and your time. It is a compromise demanded by the one-size-fits-all constraints of news’ means of production and distribution.

What would be ideal, Jarvis said, is if there was a way to connect that piece to a source of background material that is constantly updated — and of course there is: it’s called linking to Wikipedia, an extension of Jarvis’s “do what you do best and link to the rest” mantra. But not everyone does that; some outlets such as the New York Times prefer to link to their own database of “topic pages” instead, perhaps in part because those backgrounders are engineered to do well in search, and in general seem to prefer to link internally if at all.

If the disaggregation of the traditional story format was taken to its logical conclusion, Jarvis argues that we could end up with “news organizations that specialize not just in beats and topics but in kinds of assets,” with one being just the news nugget (like a wire service), another the explainer (like The Economist), another the data related to the story, etc. Then links between those component parts would help the reader follow as much of the story as they wish, and in whatever order they want. Sean Blanda of the consulting firm Technically Media has also written about how the article needs to evolve, and how the “atomic unit of journalism is the fact.”

A news ecosystem is already evolving

You can see the kind of news ecosystem Jarvis envisions developing already in a way, with Twitter and blogs or aggregators becoming the place where the news breaks, followed by more information on blogs or newspaper sites — along with photos and mashups and related ephemera on sites like BuzzFeed or Reddit (which has also taken on much of the Q&A function, and some of the fact-checking one as well). This is an illustration of what Jarvis and others have called “news as a process,” and also an example of author and Harvard researcher David Weinberger’s description of the web as “small pieces, loosely joined.”

Some of these connections are already created with plain old hyperlinks, of course, although not everyone uses them (or even likes them, if you listen to critics like Nick Carr). Is there a way to make those kinds of connections easier? Blogging pioneer and programmer Dave Winer thinks there is — in a recent post, he described a way to connect different types of documents such as comments together, a kind of peer-to-peer protocol for a document-based web.

It’s an interesting idea: instead of just a story with some scattered links in it, you could have a bundle of assets that could be packaged or linked to in any number of different ways using APIs to sources of different types of content. Judging by a blog post it published on the topic, this is also the kind of area that Circa — the media startup from Cheezburger founder Ben Huh and David Cohn of Spot.us — is focused on. As the nature of information changes thanks to the web and social media, shouldn’t the way we are delivering it change as well?

Producing news articles and putting them behind a paywall is a great idea if what people want is content. But what if they just want information? If that’s the case it will be much harder to ask folks to pay and even doubly hard to meet their desires with an outdated form (the article).

As De Rosa commented during the debate about the Reuters story, accomplishing that kind of thing in practice would require altering the entire way that traditional media content is created — and also the way that reporters and journalists think about what they are supposed to be doing. But if they are competing with more and more sources of information, many of which don’t even look like traditional journalism, they should probably start thinking more creatively soon.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr users The Official CTBTO Photostream and Yan Arief Purwanto

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We’ve spent so long consuming the news in fairly predictable formats — the short story, the long feature, the four-part series designed to win awards, the TV documentary, and so on — that the new forms of journalism we’re seeing can be confusing. Perhaps not surprisingly, there is also some controversy over whether one form is replacing or usurping another form. Frederic Filloux revisits this debate in a Monday Note post, in which he takes issue with Jeff Jarvis’s stance on real-time journalism. But all of these new forms have the potential to broaden the field of journalism and media immensely, and that’s a good thing.

Filloux’s blog post, entitled “Jazz Is Not a Byproduct of Rap Music,” is a response to something Jarvis wrote several weeks ago, in which the author and New York University City University of New York’s Graduate School of Journalism professor argued that the news article — the central unit of storytelling that we have become familiar with in newspapers and other forms of media — should no longer be the default for every news event. In many cases, Jarvis said, the article or story should be seen as a “value-added luxury or byproduct” of the process of news-gathering, rather than the central goal in every situation.

In place of the traditional story, Jarvis said we should be looking to the kind of real-time reporting and curating that some journalists have been doing with Twitter and other forms of social media including Tumblr — as New York Times reporter Brian Stelter did during the aftermath of a tornado in Joplin, Mo. recently, and as Andy Carvin of NPR has been doing during the Arab Spring. Said Jarvis:

Articles are wonderful. But they are no longer necessary for every event. They were a necessary form for newspapers and news shows but not the free flow, the never-starting, never-ending stream of digital. Sometimes, a quick update is sufficient; other times a collection of videos can do the trick.

In his post, Filloux takes issue with Jarvis’s view and argues that the story format is still necessary — in fact, he says that a comprehensive article following a news event like the uprisings in Egypt is even more necessary than it used to be, because someone needs to “understand and to correct excesses and mistakes resulting from an ever expanding flurry of instant coverage” via Twitter and other social media.

I made a similar argument in my response to Jarvis’s original thesis — my point being that we need more curation and context and analysis, not less, because of the ever-increasing tide of information we are being subjected to from all sides (not to mention the difficulty of verifying sources like the recent gay blogger in Damascus, which turned out to be a fiction). In a response, Jarvis said I misrepresented his views, something he also accuses Filloux of doing in a blog post responding to the Monday Note.

I think Jarvis and Filloux and I are all saying the same thing, although it might not look that way at first. Jarvis’s point, as I take it, is that there are too many stories written that add very little value — long chunks of background just to fill out the length of a piece, contributing nothing in the way of analysis, and so on. Stories are also written that duplicate, in some cases dozens or hundreds of times, the exact same information that is available elsewhere. This is undoubtedly true.

I think Jarvis is suggesting that in many cases, these articles are a waste of both the reporter’s time and the reader’s time, and that with the newspaper and media industry undergoing the kind of upheaval it is, we can ill afford to be wasting precious resources on such things. Better to link to other sources that have already reported the facts (“do what you do best and link to the rest,” Jarvis likes to say) and then add value through analysis, or move on to something else.

The point is that there are many new ways to accomplish journalistic goals to cover news and gather and share information: Twitter, blogs, data, visualization, multimedia…. then the article can concentrate on adding true value: context, explanation, education, commentary, further reporting [and] fact-checking.

Jarvis is right that there are so many more tools available to us now than we had in the past, and many of them — including Twitter and other social media — give us the ability to report in real-time in ways we never could before. And in addition to just reporting, services like Storify and Storyful can be used by reporters (as Andy Carvin has for a number of stories) to pull together reports about a topic, and add analysis to them in something approaching real time. After that, a traditional-looking news story might need to be produced — in part to serve those who may not be online or on Twitter all the time — or it might not.

Is that what the journalism of the future looks like? I think it’s a pretty good first step. None of these tools or approaches replace one another, any more than the web has replaced television — ideally, they feed into and inform each other, and smart journalists (professional or amateur) use them to make our knowledge of an event more complete and more understandable. And that’s a win-win situation for both journalism and society as a whole.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr users Arvind Grover and Yan Arief Purwanto

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There’s no shortage of bad news out there for traditional media outlets. Continued circulation declines and advertising revenue shortfalls are producing a widening financial chasm that even paywall revenue for leading brands like The New York Times  can’t hope to bridge. Do we need another litany of the ways in which media is changing and how traditional publishers are doomed? Regardless, media consultant and author Jeff Jarvis has come up with a breakdown of what he calls “hard economic lessons for news,” and it makes for somewhat gloomy reading. That said, however, there are some glimmers of hope amid the despair.

“Doing Good” Doesn’t Pay

Jarvis sets out to disabuse existing media players of some of the myths and rationalizations they have for why people should pay them for their content. For example, he says:

“Should” is not a business model. You can say that people “should” pay for your product but they will only if they find value in it.

and later adds:

Virtue is not a business model. Just because you do good does not mean you deserve to be paid for it.

At the risk of putting words in Jarvis’s mouth, this sounds very much like some of the reasons The New York Times and other newspapers (such as Rupert Murdoch’s Times of London) have given for implementing pay walls around their content. Their argument is that they provide a valuable public service, and therefore people should pay for it — not because they want to, but because it’s the right thing to do.

As Jarvis notes, neither of these arguments — which both rely, to a degree, on making people feel guilty — is going to create a valid business model for news. Even if New York Times Executive Editor Bill Keller would like people to feel bad about reading aggregated snippets of its stories at The Huffington Post, that doesn’t mean that they are going to do so.

So what about nonprofit or other models? These aren’t going to work for most outlets, says Jarvis:

• Begging is not a business model. It’s lazy to think that foundations and contributions can solve news’ problems. There isn’t enough money there.
• There is no free lunch. Government money comes with strings.
• No one cares what you spent. Arguing that news costs a lot is irrelevant to the market.

That’s not all. Jarvis goes on to detail all the “reality checks” newspapers and other publishers need to grapple with as they search for ways to survive. By the end of the list, any self-respecting newspaper publisher or editor could be forgiven for wanting to simply turn out the lights and shut down the presses.

Think — and Act — Local

So where are the rays of hope? Local ad sales is one, says Jarvis: Newspapers could become the broker between advertisers on a community level who aren’t taking advantage of the web, and services such as Groupon (although Jarvis doesn’t specifically mention them), Google Place pages and Facebook deals. This is one reason why I, and others, have wondered why it took so long for newspapers to try to compete with Groupon by appealing to advertisers who want to reach readers in new ways. Jarvis also mentions there is “growth to be found in networks,” although it’s not clear how that would help finance the news. (To be fair, Jarvis says his post is a work in progress.)

Jarvis could be criticized for adding to the litany of despair in the media industry, but his list is the culmination of several years’ worth of work trying to come up with new business models for the news industry — both as a consultant and advisor to newspapers such as Canada’s Postmedia and as a professor at the City University of New York’s Graduate School of Journalism. Jarvis helped coordinate a New Business Models for News summit in Aspen, Colo. in 2009, and followed that up with presentations on some of the models that were featured at the summit, including one embedded below.

Jeff Jarvis on New Business Models for News 2009 from CUNY Grad School of Journalism on Vimeo.

In a nutshell, Jarvis proposes that new business models can emerge when existing players reduce their costs through outsourcing (and crowdsourcing), focus on the value they can add instead of just reporting what has already been reported — which he calls “do what you do best and link to the rest” — and use social media and related services such as Twitter and Facebook to create a distributed news network. (For more of his thoughts, check out this Slideshare presentation from 2008.) Many of his ideas are already being put to the test by the Journal-Register Co., which CEO John Paton has turned into a “digital first” news organization, as I described in a recent post.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user George Kelly

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At a conference in British Columbia this morning, author and media blogger Jeff Jarvis told a room full of corporate and government privacy advocates something many of them probably didn’t want to hear: that society needs more protection for what he calls “publicness,” and less focus on locking down our personal information or prosecuting companies that use that data. “Privacy has plenty of advocates already,” Jarvis said. “It is potentially over-protected, but in any case it is well protected. But publicness also needs its advocates.” Despite stumbles by both Facebook and Google when it comes to privacy, said Jarvis, the benefits of sharing information about ourselves through social media are plentiful and obvious — including the ability to organize popular revolutions like the one that just occurred in Egypt.

In his presentation to the Reboot conference in Victoria — whose tagline this year is “Security and privacy: Is there an app for that?” — Jarvis gave a preview of some of the arguments he makes in his new book, Public Parts, which the CUNY journalism professor said he is still working on. Jarvis, who has written at length on his blog about his battle with prostate cancer, talked about how sharing what might be seen as incredibly personal information can have value. Writing about his cancer, he said, connected him with friends who had had similar issues that he had never known about, and “I got more help and support than any doctor’s pamphlet could ever have given me.”

In the brief video interview embedded below, recorded after his talk, Jarvis spoke about what he sees as the benefits of publicness not just on an individual level but for society in general, and the challenge of balancing that with the ability for governments — including those in Egypt and elsewhere — and others to use our information against us.

Jarvis made a point of saying in his talk that privacy “is not binary, not on or off — it’s a continuum,” and that different societies and individuals come down at different points along that continuum. Scandinavians publish the salaries of all their citizens publicly, he said, something other people might recoil at. And in the United States, photos of people who are accused of crimes are published without any concern for their privacy, unlike some other countries. “I am not a proponent of 100-percent openness,” Jarvis said. “For example, I would like to point out that I am wearing clothing. [But] there are benefits to being public, and we need to acknowledge those at the same time as we talk about what could go wrong — we can’t always focus on what might go wrong.”

Among the benefits of being public, according to Jarvis, are that relationships and connections are formed, which is the fundamental purpose and a large part of the value created by Facebook and other social networks. “It also enables collaboration, and builds trust,” Jarvis said. And in places like Egypt, such tools have created what the author called “an incredible wave of publicness — and that deserves protection. Yes, privacy deserves protection, but by God so do the tools of publicness.”

Jarvis’s presentation came as a stark contrast to the one before him, which was from British Columbia’s Privacy Commissioner Elizabeth Denham, who said that Google chairman and Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg “don’t think privacy is relevant any more,” (something Jarvis challenged in his talk as untrue) and argued that with so much potential danger around “excessive sharing of personal information,” regulators need enhanced authority and broader powers of oversight.

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Post and thumbnail courtesy of Flickr user Josh Hallett

I know what you’re thinking. They already have video books — they’re called “movies.” Well, according to the Wall Street Journal, these video books will be different. Available today in Amazon’s VOD store, Jeff Jarvis’s What Would Google Do? is the first video book out from the publisher. It’s not Jarvis reading text; rather, it’s 23 minutes of Jarvis sitting in front of a white background providing key concepts from the book.

The book publishing industry, like just about every industry right now, is going through a rough patch, with layoffs and cost-cutting. HarperCollins is hoping video books might open up a new revenue stream for the company by tapping into audiences that don’t have the time for a full book. Jarvis’ video book sells for $9.99 and is only viewable on the PC (mobile versions are in the works), with Jarvis getting 25 percent of net revenue. If it works out, HarperCollins says it could make up to six more this year adapting mostly non-fiction books.

I hope the full version is more exciting than the minute-and-a-half free preview up at Amazon. Unless there are more visual elements like charts and graphs, the video format (and cost associated with producing it) seem to be wasted, as you could get the same information just by listening. As good as the content might be, just watching an author talk in front of a white screen might put me to sleep.

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