My personal highlight of the  Scoopcamp 2010 conference in Hamburg on September 29 was definitely Aron Pilhofer ‘s keynote. (last year it was the keynote of Everyblock founder Adrian Holovaty). Pilhofer leads a team of ten programmers and interactive news specialists which is responsible for the excellent interactiven visualizations at nytimes.com. As he showed us in one genius example: datajournalism can also be done accoustically.

I filmed Pilhofer’s speech with my Flip camera and edited it down to a 20 minute “highlights version”. Aron showed many screenshots, some of which weren’t easy to see even live at the venue due to too much ambient light. I have replaced most of them in this video by original screenshots taken from the web. You can find the links to the websites below the video. Please do click around on them – they are interactive.

Aron Pilhofer talks about what makes great data journalism great, why some visualisations seem wonderfully intuitive and others don’t. And he talks about why often less is more when visualising data for journalism.

Aron Pilhofer Keynote beim Scoopcamp 2010 from Ulrike Langer on Vimeo.

These are the links to the websites I have replaced:

The Top Secret Network of Government and its Contractors (Washington Post)

Tracking the Oil Spill in the Gulf (New York Times)

Election 2004 (New York Times)

President Map – Election Results 2008 (New York Times)

Presidential Big Board – Election Results 2008 (New York Times)

House Race Ratings 2010 (New York Times)

Fractions of a Second: An Olympic Musical (New York Times)

Is It Better to Buy or Rent? (New York Times)

The Web Is Dead. Long Live the Internet (Wired)
Is the web really dead? (Boing Boing)

There is a German version of this blogpost behind this link.

It finally happened – the famous Mission Chickens Elvira, Chiquita, Frida and Dolores who got their names through crowdsourced suggestions on their blog Mission Chicken are now official name bearers. Thank you to Tanja, Donna, JP and Frank for a great party and a beautiful (and funny!) namegiving ceremony.

Want to know what this is all about? Read my blog entry about Tanja Aitamurto on crowdfunding and crowdsourcing (in German) or scroll down and watch the embedded video interview (in English).

Click on this link to Flickr for more pictures from the party and ceremony and here’s the ceremonial video:

Cynthia Typaldos from Mountain View, California (renowned as world headquarters of Google), is the woman behind  Kachingle. That’s the name of one of several social micropayment systems, whose medaillons and buttons are popping up on more and more blogs and other websites. (another such system is flattr). Kachingle now has a network of almost 160 websites with an astonishing share of approximately 30  percent sites from Germany. This blog, too, sports a Kachingle medaillon. You can click it and thus turn it on or – if you’re not a member yet -  become a member. Yon can then distribute a monthly amount of $5 to your favorite websites (which need to be Kachingle members). That’s really simple, isn’t it? I interviewed Cynthia via Skype (I’m based in Cologne, Germany). We talked about:

• why Kachingle favors giving contributors only a few choices (the paradox of choices)
• if social micropayments (crowdfunding) can become part of new business model for the newspaper industry
• why publicly supporting your favorite webcontent is part of your persona
• if social micropayments can become a new social movement
• and more.

This is the original English interview. Click here to read the German translation.

What does the word Kachingle mean?

Cynthia Typaldos: I made it up. It’s a combination of the word “kaching” which is the sound of the old cash registers and “jingle”, the sound of coins. I don’t know how it sounds in German, but in English it sounds very cute.

What made you start Kachingle?

I actually got the core of the idea in 2003. My best friend Laura in Argentine became ill with brain cancer. Her English wasn’t good, so she asked me to research her disease on line. I gathered information from all over the web and put together a report for her. And when I was done I wanted to go back to those places where I found the information and reward them, take a hundred dollars and just give it to these various places. But I didn’t have any way to track where I had been. It didn’t matter to me whether it was a non-profit organisation or a blog or a discussion board. I just wanted to make sure that site was going to be there for the next person looking. In 2004 and 2005 I started working seriously on this, putting together the whole concept and meeting with various people. And then I put it aside, because I realized it was too early. I came back to it in 2007. (Cynthia tells more about the history of  Kachingle in this video).

What was missing back then?

A lot has changed since. The main thing is social networks. The whole power of social networks and people wanting to share who they are and what they’re doing. Kachingle is not designed to be a destination site. We’re working on a Twitter application which will be coming out soon where you can tweet what you support and a Facebook interface, because that’s where people want to tell their friends what they’re doing and which sites they care about. That’s where they develop a persona about the content and services they use on line.

Does that imply that people will be able to donate to Twitter or Facebook profiles?

It’s possible. We’re looking at that. But we’re very user-centric. Any time we make a decision about a feature we look at it from the user’s point of view, not the producer’s point view. They want to develop a reputation and a persona aroung the things they support. That implies that what I support has to have a name. It can’t just be little pieces scattered all over the web. But we’re giving users the choice. You can share what you support or stay completely anonymous.

How can contributors be sure their money goes to the right places?

We’re being totally transparent to the user. We show the money flow. Because we’re a third party in the middle we need to prove where every penny of everyone’s money went. That’s what I call “crowd-sourced auditing”. The contributors can track their money and the sites can track the money that they’re bringing in and those things had better add up. So there’s no way Kachingle cannot distribute the money fairly. And that, we felt, was really important. We’re building trust, but you don’t have to trust us, you can see for yourself.

A high proportion of German blogs are early adopters of Kachingle, although blogs don’t have the same relevance in Germany as they have in the United States or in France. Do you have an explanation for that?

Actually, I was going to ask you this question.

I don’t know the answer. I know many of the German bloggers who have joined Kachingle. They say they love the idea of a voluntary support system and want to promote the idea – just like I do. But that doesn’t explain why German much more than French bloggers take to Kachingle.

We speculate about this, too. Our core team is team is six people. Two of them are Americans, three are German, one is French. I’m beginning to think that’s not a coincidence. There’s something about Kachingle that resonates with Germans and makes them want to be early adopters. There seems to be the idea of giving back and making sure we don’t run into a tragedy of digital commons that we have in the real world. The tragedy of the commons,  that if everybody just takes and nobody gives back, then a lot of good things will disappear.

The German newspaper industry is arguing the “culture of free” was a birth mistake of the internet. There are big regrets among newspaper publishers that they didn’t put up paywalls straight away and now it might be too late.

The newspapers are whining and crying, although I’m happy that we have vorwaerts.de among our sites. It’s our biggest site and I really applaud them for taking the leadership in the newspaper industry. And besides the German bloggers we now have at least 3 or 4 travel sites and we just got a Swiss train-watching site. The bloggers are always going to be the early adopters, but these other sites are really important, too, because they can take the idea to the mass consumer who doesn’t necessarily read blogs.

In order for Kachingle to really take off, wouldn’t you need the attention of influential American media blogs?

Outside the narrow space of media blogs the ordinary consumer has to buy into it. We’re focussing very hard on increasing producers, because we think that’s what will attract users. Users really want to be able to see a set of sites they can kachingle. Right now, certainly the early adopters putting Kachingle on their sites are talking about it and encouraging friends and family and colleagues to also join. But it’s very typical for web services to start in a niche. Facebook started as a college network. We’re discovering our first niche is probably going to be the German market. We’re taking this very seriously. As of now the Kachingle medaillon is available in German and we will be rolling out some more features specifically for the German market.

Why doesn’t Kachingle enable sponsoring indivual posts (like flattr does), but only whole websites?

The scope of the medaillon, the area which it defines, is simply based on where you put it. A large site or a site with several authors can have many unique medaillons. Vorwaerts.de is going to have many medaillons or a blog like Carta could conceivably give each author their own medaillon. Again: It’s designed from the user’s point of view. If a site has one voice then it makes sense to have one medaillon across the whole site. If there are many voices and the user sees them as distinct, then you can choose to have different unique medaillons.

So kachingling does work for individual posts, if the site enables that option?

Technically, you could actually put a different medaillon on every post, but that’s not what we think is user-centric, because the user can’t build much of a reputation. Another thing is: I looked for a system that the typcial web user could get into and that implies that people really don’t have to do anything complicated. That’s why we make singing up as easy as possible and why you can only put up five dollars initially. That‘s the „paradox of choice“ phenomenon. If you give people choices they start wondering how much they should be giving and might be overwhelmed.

Many blog readers don’t click through to the websites but read the blogs feeds instead. Will there be a Kachingle for feeds?

Absolutely. We’ve already been asked to do this by bloggers. With new features we’re letting the market guide us what should come next. The first thing we heard loud and clear is improvements for the German market. That relates to language and to Paypal.

How are you going to address the Paypal issue?

We’re talking to them. We believe Paypal is an absolutely great platform for the future of micropayments. But it’s not fully there yet. It doesn’t seem right that we have to pay both incoming and outgoing transactions fees. These add up to 11 percent which is too much, and Paypal agrees. Soon we will be able to lower that rate. We’re also helping Paypal figure out the German market and the fact that Germans really like the direct deposit mechanism. Germany is the second largest Paypal market and therefore it’s incredibly important to them and their owner Ebay. They are eager to work closely with us, because they see us as innovators in what we call “social cents for digital stuff”. Paypal thinks the market is going to be really big.

Can crowdfunding be a small part of a solution to dying newspapers?

We hope we’re going to be a big part and we hope they won’t be dead by then. Some of these sites are very large and that of course is very attractive to us, because it only needs a few percent of their users to become Kachinglers in order make serious money, both for us and for the newspaper. The other great thing though is – it’s not just the money. Our system is social. Users are building a reputation, they are thinking about the way they define themselves. Is the fact that I read “Vorwärts” part of my persona? Is it important for who I am? Then I am going to turn the medaillon on. The other reason – and that’s the probably the reason why it’s taking off in the blogosphere – if you see a colleague kachingling your blog, you might think, maybe I should go and kachingle their blog, too.

So kachingling needs to become a new social norm?

We’re encouraging all sites to reach out to their passionate users and get those people to sign up. Many sites know who their passionate users are because they are the ones who make all the comments. When you see other people like you doing this that’s how you create a new social norm. The real difficulty for any system like this is creating a new social behaviour. At the core people know this is the right thing to do, but they need to see others doing it to follow their example. That’s why we have all these social signals on our site.

The German media consultant Robin Meyer-Lucht, publisher of Carta, coined the term “promoting a culture of responsible payment” when he wrote about new financing models for media and about Kachingle in „Spiegel Online“.

I love that term. I read the article through Google Translate, but I didn’t get the nuances. I absolutely agree. It will take time and a number of key sites and maybe even celebrities to stand up and say, this is the way to go. But we’re in it for the long run. The early adopters are the ones that can make that case. It’s almost a new world attitude, like a new movement. It’s part of a democratic society to show which causes you support.

This is an interview with Jeff Jarvis who teaches entrepreneurial journalism at City University of New York. His main points:

• Journalists must learn and understand the business side of journalism, even if they don’t want become entrepreneurs.
• Traditional media companies should reckon with the force of destroyers – new media entrepreneurs who sit in their student dorm or start-up garage and think of new ways of serving the public and can destroy old media business models single-handedly.
• The future belongs belongs to networks and hyperlocal platforms and it belongs to media companies who understand that they must cooperate with innovators rather than deny their existence.

I had the opportunity to speak with Jeff at the Munich conference Digital Life Design (DLD 10), organized by the German publisher Burda.

Jeff Jarvis über Unternehmer-Journalismus from Ulrike Langer on Vimeo.

Additional links:
Jeff Jarvis wrote about the CUNY class experience: The entrepreneurial journalism class report .

My interview with Jeff at the web conference next09 in Hamburg: Journalists should be curious about new tools

(switch to the German version)

Everyblock has facilitated access to hyperlocal information since January 2008. The database journalism project, founded by the journalist and web programmer Adrian Holovaty, was financed initially by by a 1.1 million dollar grant from the Knight Foundation. In August 2009 Holovaty sold the plattform to MSNBC. And this doesn’t sit well with the Knight Foundation, as NiemanJournalismLab points out:

The sale raised questions about nonprofit funding of for-profit ventures. After all, Knight had essentially seeded EveryBlock’s development, while Holovaty profited from its sale.

But what is the problem? The grant was intended as initial support for two years. Within this time frame Holovaty could develop and run the platform with a small team of six people. And this is what the public got in return: a free service in meanwhile 15 major U.S. cities. The code for  searches and the content management system Django ist open source. Now MSNBC took over the platform for an undisclosed sum and has guaranteed its independent existence and development.

This doesn’t seem to me like cheating on the grant conditions. MSNBC to Everyblock is the successor of the Knight Foundation. The alternative of a sale to a for-profit company would probably have been to close down Everyblock – and in that case the grant would have been wasted on a short-lived experiment. At this point, Everyblock is far from being profitable, the platform is only just starting to look into for-profit business models. For the past two years it has been concentrating on usability and expansion to new geographic regions. The new ownership will enable Everyblock not to rush their change to a for-profit model.

There is no mention that the Knight Foundation is going to demand the grant (or part of it) back. But it does want take this case as a turning point to possibly change their future rules of engagement. Their reasoning: Using grants that have been paid back enables fostering new promising journalism start-ups.

But these kind of finance models exist already: They’re called venture capital investors. They differ from foundations in that they only invest in projects which look promising to be profitable within the VC company’s exit strategy.

The Knight Foundation would be sending a wrong message to grant-aspiring journalism start-ups: Their projects would have to tailored so a later investor can stem the cost of his acquisition plus paying back the grant or part of it. This would probably lead to more ideas which calculate being on a fast track to profitability. And it would lead to less project ideas which rethink journalism in the digital age from the scratch. Projects which first and foremost aim for an innovative journalism for the benefit of society. The Knight Foundation should strive to foster projects in the latter category.

(switch to the German version) Most journalists would probably agree with the following statement: it’s a professionally written story which turns raw data into a journalistic gem.  Adrian Holovaty thinks out of the box: At the Hamburg Scoopcamp, the 28-year-old Chicago journalist and web programmer held a fantastic keynote and at one point during his speech he revealed only half-feigned horror on his face as he described what he feels  when he sees what journalists do: “They have this beautiful clean data and then they turn it into a – BLOB! And then he explained: data like “iPod stolen, value $ 25, 9/17/2009, break-in into private residence,  123 ABC Street, Chicago” becomes a one-inch column in a newspaper. This kind of report doesn’t give readers any chance to make anything more out of it than what’s in there at face value.

Holovaty’s project Everyblock views journalism from the data perspective: Many stories develop out of data. If you make them searchable by as many criteria as possible and if you localise them in every possible detail then you create  value for users that is much bigger than the sum of its parts.

Lets’s stick with the stolen iPod in the police report. Everyblock enables search by any kind of criteria you can possibly think of: In which parts of town were the most iPods stolen? In which streets? Was it by home burglaries? Car break-ins? Muggings? Armed robberies? Pick-pocketing? If I move my usual jogging route by one block, do I have a bigger chance of keeping my iPod? Should I prefer jogging at 5 pm instead of 8 am because less joggers are mugged at 5 pm?  Etc., etc. Such links between data from databases and geotagging are the base for deeper journalistic analysis and new story ideas.

Database  journalism projects like Everyblock.com don’t intend to replace traditional journalism, but add to it. Holovaty works with only six staffers and a computer program that he coded himself. But with this minimal manpower he managed what full-staffed newsrooms wouldn’t be able to do: Everyblock breaks down big stories and minute reports from various sources including government reports to their data core: block by block, street by street, in an astounding number of 15 US cities (4 of them still in beta mode). Adrian received a $ 1.1 million grant from the Knight Foundation for his innovative project. It is all open source. But now Everyblock (which was bought by MSNBC.com for an undisclosed sum last month) must develop as a for-profit business.

Does Adrian Holovaty view the future of journalism in databases? Does Everyblock cooperate with newspapers? What are areas in which database journalism works especially well? And what is the business model of Everblock? Click into the interview (9:25 min.)  for Adrian’s answers to these questions. And please excuse some amateurish cuts. I’m only just starting out as a video journalist.

My interview with Adrian is the second in my new blog series Interviewing Innovators.  In these interviews I will be talking to pioneers of social-web journalism.  The first interview was my talk  in Vancouver with Michael Tippett, co-founder of the crowd-sourced journalism platform NowPublic which has meanwhile been sold to Examiner.com. (The video is in English, but the written blog post is in German.)

At the web conference  next09 in Hamburg I interviewed Jeff Jarvis about the new opportunities for media in the digital age and the link economy in the US and in Germany. (switch to the German version)

Your current book has the title „What would Google do“? – meant to be read as a piece of advice for classic media to think and act like Google. Shouldn’t the advice for media companies rather be: What can’t Google do? What can the media do better than Google?

That’s interesting. The answer is yes and no. Yes, to the extent that there are other opportunities, but no to the extent that Google is a platform that we can build on it without having to build a platform ourselves. Google presents opportunity to build new companies, find customers and be found by those customers and use technology. That’s the web 2.0 secret. We can start new companies, new ventures with very little investment. And now to your second point: you’re absolutely right: We should be looking at the opportunities where Google is just not good or has left a void.

The book industry gets mad about Google book search, but the book industry should have set it up themselves. They should have been there with their own book search, discoverable and linkable online. The media industry gets mad about Google having so much revenue in advertising. Well, Google just offered the advertisers a more efficient means of advertising. Media could have done that too. So where is Google not yet King? I think there are a few areas. One is live.

But then again not an established media company but a small start-up called Twitter filled the void…

Exactly, a fast service named Twitter came along. Twitter is not perfect, but it shows the tremendous opportunity in live connections and learning from what people are saying live. And that has just begun. So that’s a huge frontier. Another one is local. And Google is starting there too to serve very local advertisers online. They do that for mapping and for mobile. Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt says they will make more money from mobile than from the web. The other opportunity is people. Google organizes all our information, but who is going to help organize us? That’s what Google and Facebook are fighting over, but neither has won yet. There’s also the notion of the deep web, of data that sits in databases all over and making sense of that. So there are new frontiers yet to conquer and we should be looking ahead not back.

Many publishers and newspaper journalists don’t see the virtuous circle in the link economy, as you describe it, but rather claim that it’s a vicious circle: Google is skimming off profits from their content. Do you understand their fears?

Yes, but they don’t understand the link economy. The shift from the content economy towards the link economy is exactly what’s causing this war. It used to be all about content that you own and you tried to sell it many times as you could. That’s what gets torn apart by the internet. All you need now is one copy. It’s the links to that one copy that add value to it. The link economy puts on three imperatives. The first is that you have to open up all your stuff, because you want more links…

…media companies would probably find that imperative easier to understand, if they could better monetize the links they get.

Well, that’s the second imperative. Who get’s the links must find ways to monetize them. And the third imperative is: the link economy demands specialization, not commodity content. So you must stand out and be unique and do something uniquely well. Then you can own that category. Techcrunch is a brilliant blog that owns the web 2.0 category. And they monetize beautifully. But the idea that we can monetize as we did in the past is what’s wrong here.

What’s wrong about it?

Even online we’re still using old ad models based on selling scarcity advertizing. Only so many banners, only so many impressions, only so many eyeballs. Google doesn’t sell any of that. Google sells perfomance. They say, if you succeed, we’ll succeed. The fourth imperative is: Do what you do best and link to the rest. The link economy also creates efficiency. We tend to look at just the revenue line of businesses and try to replicate that to maintain the same size business we had in the past. Well, sorry, you’re in a competitive marketplace now. Far more competitive. So media companies should view Google as a platform to do what they do best. Specialize, don’t try to sell everything to all people. That makes your business much smaller, cheaper and closer to profitability.

You have started a project at CUNY Graduate School of Journalism to determine which new business models for newspapers might work in the age of Google. What do you think, so far, which ones will work?

I think we have learned a few things. A news organization of the future is going to organize news and be smaller and its role is more of a curator and aggregator, and educator. The role of professional journalists is going to change. We held a session on what happens in a city when a paper dies. The outcome was: they could regroup with 35 journalists instead of 300 by going digital only. But those 35 people now work with a network of 3000. We will see a network structure coming forward.

Will this new newsroom efficiency make newspapers more attractive for advertisers?

I think we’re going to see a local level. A new whole new group of advertisers who were never served by newspapers, because newspapers were too big and too ineficient. We’ve got to figure out how to serve them. Serving them will be probably be helping them do well on Google, helping them build customer relationships and more whole new ways. I think ad sales will become more collaborative. One sales office is not going to scale against this huge web populalation. We willl see citizen sales.

What about paid content models? Why are you so skeptical about them?

I’m not against paid content just like I’m not against paper, although I get accused of both. The Wall Street Journal as an online subscription model is an exeption, but that’s a business expense. I think you can make more money by taking advantage of the internet. That’s what the New York Times learned when they took down their paywall. Their traffic, google juice and ad revenue went up. More people discovered them. In his book „Here Comes Everybody“ Clay Shirky argues – and I agree with him – that when the web was created we all got presses. The value of being the only person to own a press shrank to zero. Worse then that, it became a cost burden. So we can’t keep on trying to transplant old business models to a new business world thinking „people have paid before, so they should pay now“. There is no business model built on the word should. The reality is, these days there is no one with the only press out there. Someone is always going to undercut you. And if you’re trying to make your money by trying to control a scarce asset, well, it’s not scarce anymore. Even exclusive news inevitably becomes information and information is a commodity. Once it’s known, there’s no controlling information. Someone people say, but people buy songs on iTunes. Yes, because Billy Joel sings, but if I sang his song you wouldn’t pay for that.

What about Spot.Us in San Francisco? A paid content model in which journalists start to investigate a story when it has financed through donations.

David Cohn is magnificent. Spot.Us is a way for the public to help support journalism. But it will not take over the role of the newspaper.

On which scale will such a model work best? Local, hyperlocal, regional?

On this individidual level hyperlocal and local. But we have the tradition in the US of National Public Radio supported not through taxdollars but through contributions from both foundations and individuals. That doesn’t exist as much in Europe. In the case of contributions other than through tax-funding I’ll decide where my money should go to. I think that’s a very powerful model, especially, because we already have that contribution reflex. If you did an audit of all the journalistic resources in a market and all the output then analyzed what portion of the  huge amount of money goes into investigative journalism today the portion would be tiny. I don’t say that as an insult, I just say that it becomes conceivable to me that public support though indivuals and foundations can probably suppport investigative journalism on a similar level than what it is today. Indeed, I think it could grow, because there are also ways to do it more efficiently.

You’re telling the media, don’t force users to come to your website, offer digital home delivery to users’ networks. Do you have a specific example of how this can work?

We see it a lot today in RSS, in embedable Videos and in Twitter. The latest example is the Guardian with all its content available  though its Application Programming Interface (API). National Public Radio has had an API for a while, and to some extent also the New York Times and the BBC. But the question quickly becomes: What’s the business model? The Guardian puts 3 requirements on using its content via API: 1. You have to use their brand. 2. You have to join their ad network, but you can make money there too. 3. You have to refresh the content every 24 hours, because of British libel law. If the Guardian corrected something and the uncorrected version stayed out there in the world with the Guardian helping to put it there then they get into trouble. The point is: They wanted to be out there in the fabric of the web and they used the power of an API to do that. I think it’s a brave beginning.

Do you know a German example of weaving into the fabric of the web? Maybe Burda’s German Glam?

What Glam does is create a network model where they help others succeed with their businesses. Another example is Kai Diekmann at Bild.

You like him, because you talked him into using a Flip camera…

Exactly, I love this story. Kai Diekmann saw the Flip and saw the possibilities. He did not say, “Oh I’ll give this to my staff so my staff can make more video”, but he saw that the could empower the public to make content for Bild. He still has to find the good stuff and not show all the cat videos, but he now has access to content. It’s a way of distributing the effort. The reflex most for most editors in the US would have been: “Oh great, a new way for my staff to make more content.” The staff’s reflex then would have been to complain.

Should newspapers collaborate with bloggers, maybe create a network of blogs?

Yes. I’ve been trying to push that idea in Germany many times, but I get nowhere. The opportunity in Germany is to nurture that new market of blogging. The problem with blogs in Germany is: there aren’t enough to create a network. The response to that should be: how do we encourage people to create them because it’s going to be good for them and good for us. And indeed, when you have a business relation with these people it gives you a quality relationship. You can say, “your blog is crap, I’m not selling ads for this one, your blog is better, we shall sell ads for you.” That’s a sane and sensible way to act in this digital world. Burda gets  collaboration through Glam and its Scienceblog investments and of course also through Sevenload in videos. The Bild model, where citizen reports send pictures and video is more the old model „give us content“. The new model is users saying: help me on the outside do my own thing. That’s a network. I think, there’s a huge opportunity there. Media companies should do it. Somebody’s going to do it, and it might not even be a media company.

Is collaborative journalism for everyone? I can’t imagine papers like the Wall Street Journal benefiting much from collaborative journalism unless they want to cut down on their vast team of specialized reporters and editors?

It’s not for everyone and not for every story. But it does work in the financial sector. The Guardian recently put together a chart of all the major financial purchases. They didn’t have the time or the means to sit down and go through all the files. They asked their readers, and the readers collaboratively filled the feature for them. The Wikipedia “one percent rule” comes to bear here. Only one percent of all users contribute to Wikipedia.  We need to see new possibilities and envision new kinds of stories we never could have made before without working collaboratively. My classic example that of a radio station in New York that asked people to go out and find out the price of milk, beer and lettuce in stores so that in the end they could compare which neighborhoods were getting gouged in prices. In 24 hours 800 people did that. No one reporter could have done that. That yielded a new kind of reporting. Some kinds of investigative stories about scandals are always going to be reported as they always have been. But there are new kinds of watchdog stories which are powerful by working collaboratively.

You are a 54 year old media veteran embracing all kinds of new media technology. What do you tell younger journalists who are reluctant to try all these new tools and approaches like blogging, live video-blogging, twittering, using iPhone apps for news distribution and so on?

If I can do it, they can do it. It ‘s easier than it looks. That’s the point: it’s easy. I argue that every journalist in every newsroom organisation should be trained in all the tools. They will then understand why the world is using them. And the reason is: because it’s easy. These tools will become less myterious to them. That’s the best service we can do to journalists. I teach these tools to my fellow journalism faculty members at CUNY and it’s empowering because they then understand why and how the world is changing. A curious journalist should know that. There is absolutely no skill needed to pick up a flip camera and hit the red button and make video.

Should every journalist be a jack-of-all-trades with all these tools?

No. But they should have at their ready all the tools they need to tell their stories in the best way so that if they happen to witness a truly funny or interesting moment like Jarvis fell off the stage they can record and live-blog it. That’s not a whole video story but it might be a ten second moving talking picture. It’s a question of being prepared to be able to use the tools. Its the same as when computers came into writing. 1974, when I was a young writer, that changed the way I wrote.

Maybe they are more curious in the US. In Germany lots of journalists are sceptical of new technology. They think new technogy will devalue the skills they already have.

That’s an old controled way of thinking and I can’t imagine how anyone can think not learning things is going to make you more powerful. On its face that is ridiculous. Journalists have to learn new things and by definition have be curious about them. Part of the problem though is that we in the new media world became our own priesthood and tried to make things look complicated. We’ve got to open up our own orthodoxy and open up our tools and be generous about sharing.

If you enjoyed this post you might be interested in this one (in English): Global Media Forum: 10 Strategies for Social Media Journalism

photos: nextconference, elmine, next09 Flickr photostream

A special event at the Global Media Forum hosted by Germany’s global broadcaster Deutsche Welle is the  symposium “Re-Inventing Journalism? Journalistic Training in the Social Media Age”. I will be discussing the topic of social media journalism on a panel with Kevin Anderson (Blog Editor of Guardian), Marcus Bösch of the DW and other experts.

Social Media and Journalism from dw akademie on Vimeo.

I have submitted a paper called “10 Journalistic Strategies for Competing in the Web 2.0″ which I’m posting for discussion on my blog. I would most grateful for feedback. This is an experiment in which I am starting occasional crossposts in English. In my new blog design (coming soon!) I will find a more elegant way to publish the English posts in a separate blog section, but for now, this will have to do. (switch to the German version)

10 Strategies for a Journalism 2.0

1. Enable discussion

Journalism 1.0 prints a finished story or puts a finished story on the web. The readers may then – sometimes, but not always – comment on the story. The author or an editor is not actively present except to delete inappropriate comments. Journalism 2.0 is different. A story isn‘t ”finished“ once it‘s been published. Authors need to join the discussion. Comments by users need to become an equally recognized part of the story-development process. Comments need to be freed from their traditional ghettos and be placed prominently. Blogs, which have always been more open in allowing discussion, can be a role-model in this process.

The Canadian newspaper Toronto Globe & Mail is developing steadily into this direction. Communities Redakteur Matthew Ingram describes the strategy in his blog:

Over the next few weeks and months, we will be adding new community features as well, including forums and groups, which will allow you to have a focused discussion around a specific issue, rather than having to do that through comments on a particular news story. In some cases, we may close comments on a story but open a forum where readers can discuss a contentious issue in a more closely moderated environment.

I am also working hard to convince our writers of the benefits of responding to comments, and interacting with readers. I can assure you that we don’t see comments as simply a “ghetto that will drive page views.” I will say that one of the easiest ways to convince writers that your comments are worth responding to is to say something intelligent (it doesn’t necessarily have to be in agreement).

2.    Imperative of the link economy: Make yourself part of the discussion

Media platforms need to open up and be found where their readers, viewers and users are instead of locking in their content behind closed walls or pay walls. In the link economy, as outlined by Jeff Jarvis (director of the Graduate School of Journalism’s new-media program at the City University of New York and author of “What Would Google Do?”), journalism sites are the more valuable the more they are interconnected with the rest of the online world. Content that can‘t be searched and can‘t be found because it is hidden behind a pay-wall is less valuable in the link economy because it can only be discussed within small closed circles. The New York Times has recognized this principle and re-opened its subscription-based web platform (“Times Select”) in 2007. Since then webtraffic has increased by more than 40 percent, and the additional revenue from advertising has by far increased the loss of subscription revenue.

The importantance of links from users to free content can’t be overestimated. According to the research company Hitwise, in the UK, ten percent of all links from Twitter point to traditional news websites. In absolute figures this is still only 0.3 percent of the total traffic to news websites, since Twitter – in spite of its tremendous growth rate – is still relatively small in Europe. But in the UK Facebook is already responsible for 3.3 percent of all traffic to journalistic sites – this is twice as much as from Google.

3.    APIs: Journalism needs to be where the users are

The Guardian, the New York Times, National Public Radio , and the BBC enable other sites to embed their content (widgets) and enables the news organizations to be everywhere the user wants them to be. The NYT announced in February 2009 that it has released a new Application Programming Interface (API) offering every article the paper has written since 1981 – an amazing amount of 2.8 million articles. The API includes 28 searchable fields and updated content every hour. User can put an NYT widget on their blogs or a Guardian widget on their Facebook profiles and thus turn their web profiles into news sites with high-quality content.

ReadWriteWeb analyzes:

This is a big deal. A strong press organ with open data is to the rest of the web what basic newspaper delivery was to otherwise remote communities in another period of history. It’s a transformation moment towards interconnectedness and away from isolation. A quality API could throw the doors wide open to a future where “newspapers” are important again.

What does that mean? It means that sites around the web will be able to add dynamic links to New York Times articles, or excerpts from those articles, to pages on their own sites. The ability to enrich other content with high quality Times supplementary content is a powerful prospect.

4. Use multimedia forms of storytelling and enable users’ creativity

The  Guardian has visualized all the data in the MP expense scandal (who claimed what? who paid it back? who didn’t?)  in a spreadsheet. The most amazing thing about this is not the brilliant presentation, but rather the openness and colloborative character of the project which is manifested by this question the Guardian asks on its homepage:

• Can you do something with this data? Please post us your visualisations and mash-ups below or mail us at datastore@guardian.co.uk

5. Do what you do best and link to the rest

For many years journalists have been taught not to link to competitors sites, but to keep the traffic on the media company’s own domain. They have to be retaught.  According to Jeff Jarvis the “cultur of linking” is creating “a new architecture of news”:

This leads to a new Golden Rule of Links in journalism — link unto others’ good stuff as you would have them link unto your good stuff. This emerges from blogging etiquette but is exactly contrary to the old, competitive ways of news organizations: wasting now-precious resources matching competitors’ stories so you could say you’d done it yourself. That must change.

News sites should concentrate on their core value and recognize this quality in other sites too. Another Jarvis’ rules applies: ”Do what you do best and link to the rest.” User, who are confronted with valuable links on a news site, will love to come back for more good links.

Again, blogs with culture of freely linking to valuable outside content and their recognition of other good blogs and sites in their blogrools can be viewed as a role model. But some first examples of more traditional media now recognizingg this principle are showing up on the web.

• ProPublica, an independent, non-profit newsroom that produces investigative journalism in the public interest (publishing since June 2008), links to outside sites in its section “Breaking on the Web”. ProPublica is led by Paul Steiger, the former managing editor of The Wall Street Journal, Stephen Engelberg, a former managing editor of The Oregonian, Portland, Oregon and former investigative editor of The New York Times as managing editor.
• The Washington Post also freely links outside in its sections “Required Reading” and ”Staff Picks”.

6. Think Multimedia

Journalism training in the year 2009 needs to train print journalists to think in links, linear story tellers to think multilinear, radio journalists to take pictures and photographers to make use of a video camera. A few German journalism schools like the Axel Springer Akademie are setting exemples. But the vast majority of mid-career journalists in their forties or fifties will have to take it mainly into their own hands to learn and be proficient with social media and new technology. Otherwise many of them will find themselves without a job, because the skills they once learned are out of demand.

Attractive content on web pages that really stands out is often designed in multimedia packages. Again the New York Times has gone a long way to experiment with being much more than a printed paper.

Here are three examples of US-papers experimenting with multimedia content in visually and conceptionally bold ways:

• The  New York Times photo blog Lens
• One in 8 Million (multimedia NYT portrait series)
  
• The Boston Globe photo blog

7. Make use of crowdsourcing

Media companies should not not train professional journalists to be proficient with multilinear and multimedia web reporting and using web 2.0 tools, but they should also teach new media enthusiasts to be more journalistic, i.e. use fact checking and quote correctly. Both groups shouldn’t view each other as competitors, but should work together (”crowdsourcing”).

Collaborative journalism has  huge potential. According to eMarketer, more than 82 million people in the U.S. created content online in 2008, a number expected to grow to nearly 115 million by 2013. 71 million people created content on social networks last year, while 21 million posted blogs, 15 million uploaded videos.  They are alle creators of media content in the broadest meaning. Until 2013 eMarketer predicts a rise to 115 million media creators.

Examples for the intelligent use of crowdsourcing:

• Help Me Investigate (in private beta) is a platform for crowdsourcing investigative journalism in the West Midlands (UK). It allows anyone to submit a question they want to investigate – “How much does my hospital make from parking charges?” “What happened to the money that was allocated to my local area?” “Why was that supermarket allowed to be built opposite another supermarket? It is funded by Screen West Midlands and 4ip (digital innovation project funding by Channel 4)Find more information on the  Online Journalism Blog
• Chicago Now (early beta) ) is an effort to create a new kind of local site by aggregating and curating local bloggers, staff material and other content. It includes social features, and mobile options. The  promotion-Video describes it as “HuffingtonPost meets Facebook for Chicago”. It is run be the Chicago Tribune.
• Buzzriders.com is a collaborative project by well-known German blogger Robert Basic. He calls  it „a mixture of Twitter, blogs, Craigslist and social networks“ in which the user have as much editorial power as professional journalists. Right now he is on an introduction and fund-raising tour through Germany, visiting local communiteis who might be interested. More information in an  interview mit Yeebase. (in German)
  
• MyHeimat.de a German collaborative citizen journalism project, predominantly up and running in small towns. Problem: it is often more public relations driven than driven by checked and balanced journalism. Partnering publishing companies include Augsburger Allgemeine, Hannoversche Allgemeine, Neue Presse, Oberhessische Presse and others. 

8. Think hyperlokal

Crowdsourcing offers opportunities to scale down journalism to very small, targeted and dedicated hyperlocal groups. It is an opportunity to reconnect professional journalists, the neighborhood and local advertisers who have never advertised in ”big media” before, because the scale was too large for them. Now it isn’t anymore.

Examples:

• Are you being gouged? The New Yorker public radio station WNYC asked its listeners in  October 2007 in one of several  interactive ”crowdsourcing experiments” to find out the price of a quart of milk, a six-pack of beer and a lettuce in their nieghborhood store.  Within 24 hours more 800 people had submitted data for a interactive price map – this would have a massive research project, if it had been undertaken by journalists, but it was no big deal at all by enlisting the crowd.
• Everyblock – a project financed by the Knight Foundation
• Placeblogger – a local blog aggregation site.
• newsroom in an internet café -  In the Czech Republic hyperlocal citizen journalism is now produced in coffeeshops (a project funded by investment firm PPF Group) Cities. Find more  details in the  New York Times.

9. Embrace the idea of citizen funding

Who pays for a story, gets to decide which story will be researched and published.  Spot.Us is a project based on the idea to crowdsource not only journalism, but also its funding. an initiative started by 27-year-old US journalist David Cohn in San Francisco. At Spot.Us anyone can suggest a story. If it gets enough funding professional journalists will pursue it. After publication traditional media may reprint the story in which case the donors are reimbursed. Cohn’s project has some funding from the Knight foundation. During the first six months 23 stories have been published. The biggest donation has been collected for a fact-check on a local political campaign. Cohn journalistic training includes collaboration with Jay Rosen, media professor at New York University and founder of  NewAssignment.Net , a collaborative project for professional and citizen journalists. English language video interview with Cohn on the DW academy blog lab.

10. Embrace new technology

examples:

•    Shared bookmarks and Wikis facilititate collaborative research

•    Mobile reporting: streaming video to a website directly from a mobile phone for live reports

•     Inexpensive equipment like the Flip camera for video interviews. (The German tabloid Bild has made good use of them by selling a branded version to their citizen journalists. It has a special function for uploading videos directly to Bild.)

•   Google Wave (available later this year) may have the potential to revolutionalize both real-time and collaborative reporting. Jeff Jarvis speculates how Google can influence journalism in this blog post.