Detroit has braved huge economic and social difficulties in the past decade. With the collapse of its industry and a dramatic decline in population, newspapers have struggled to keep up with the rapidly changing city. Its two major papers, Detroit Free Press and The Detroit News have had to layoff employees and increase the price of their papers. All is not lost, however- a news venture is looking to reinvigorate the Detroit journalism scene, and transform the city while doing it.
The new project, Detroit 143, plans to investigate into what the audience "really needs" to know to inspire civic engagement. Bill Mitchell explains that the project was prompted by Kirk Cheyfitz, his former colleague at the Detroit Free Press, who tracked him down after a Time Magazine cover story blaming many of Detroit's current problems on Coleman Young, the city's first black mayor in the 1970s.
"I didn't share Cheyfitz's feelings about that story, but he did convince me that somebody - maybe us- should dig deeper into how Detroit ended up in such a mess and what role journalism might play in its turnaround."
Ali, an entrepreneur with a background in journalism, recently supported his prediction during the Online News Association Conference in Washington, D.C. by firstly looking to the "tactile nature of touchscreens." He believes that in today's overwhelming omnipresence of media and information, touchscreens will allow the public to process the news in "a lot more personal, a lot more immersive [manner], just by the sheer fact that we are touching it."
Last week in Paris, Social Media Club France hosted an event titled "Audience Engagement and Monetisation: Social Gaming, a model to follow?" where the crème-de-la-crème of France's fast-emerging social gaming sector partook in a fascinating panel discussion. Presenters included notables such as KRDS, one of only two agencies in France to be included in Facebook's Preferred Developers Consultant Program, and IFeelGoods, which is the first platform that lets retailers provide Facebook Credits as marketing incentives.
Moderated by Benoit Raphael, co-founder and former editor-in-chief of Le Post.fr, the discussions covered the elements of success for social games and Facebook apps, as well as the enormous potential for virtual credits to revolutionize the way money is exchanged online. Highlights of the panel discussion can be found here, what this post is about is how this lesson in game dynamics can be applied to news sites.
One of the catch phrases heard frequently these days amongst the digerati is "adding a social gaming layer" to, well, everything. For a brilliantly clear explanation of what that means, have a look at this TED talk delivered by Seth Priebatsch. Below we'll delve into what that could mean for news sites.
Social Games: a logical extension of user generated content initiatives
For any community manager, the following statement should make complete sense: positive reinforcement is key to encouraging participation. If step one is allowing your audience to participate more, step two should be rewarding them for doing so (and steps three and four: enticing them to continue the interaction regularly and then share the experience with their friends).
This thinking is nothing revolutionary, in fact it can be traced back to social loyalty schemes that existed far before the internet did (think about your super market club card), and there are a plethora of companies that have already adapted the model to work online (Foursquare, Groupon, and recently Facebook itself just to name a few). It's adding game dynamics to these social loyalty schemes that is innovative, and this is where news publishers could stand to profit immensely.
The question isn't whether or not people are gaming on the web: more than 50% of Facebook users go online to play social games and Zynga has over 200 million individual players each month. For news publishers this poses very exciting possibilities, and the obvious question arises, as Harvard's Nieman Lab put it, "...could adding a little gameplay - and some circular icons - turn casual readers into engaged ones?"
Badges, badges, badges...and MORE badges!
It has already been more than 6 months since the Huffington Post launched its HuffPo Badges initiative, which, as Ariana Huffington explained, focuses on three key member activities, "connecting with others, engaging with our content, and moderating comments." The idea was to take the HuffPo community "to the next level" by offering recognition to top users in these areas, and perhaps even more importantly from a social gaming standard, they had plans to "add more badges and more features that will make being a part of the HuffPost community even more dynamic and rewarding."
As far as we can tell, no new badges have yet been added to the HuffPo experience, which is a big no no according to Thibault Viort of WEKA Entertainment. He explained at the Social Media Club event that at WEKA, the aim is not just to make a social game, but "to make a living game, one that grows and changes everyday". Although the very concept of badges and member ranking involves a dynamic progression, if new objectives aren't regularly introduced, the game play risks becoming stale, and as we know, the novelty factor doesn't last forever.
A new news-related social gaming experiment has just emerged on Philly.com, website of the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Daily News, which looks to offer a more Farmville-esque experience to users. The company behind the badges system found on Philly.com is called Badgeville, and the name is indeed a play on the stupefyingly popular Zynga game. On Philly.com, users earn points for activities they already do, such as visiting the site, reading articles, sharing content, and leaving comments.
A visitor gains different sized trophies according to the number of points they've accumulated, and various badges for completing specific tasks, such as the "Wanderer Badge" awarded to members after their 5th visit to the site. Through the tallying of points and badges, a site's most active users can be identified and a new dimension of analytics is possible.
Engagement Analytics
There is a massive bonus to adding game dynamics to news websites in particular, and that is engagement analytics. By tracking specific actions you want to encourage with a simple point system, you can keep a close eye on the health of your community. Furthermore, with a dynamic system that allows you to introduce new badges at a moment's notice, you can actually target specific activities that you might want to encourage more.
For instance, say you notice there has been a lull in the sharing of articles over the last week, you can take this knowledge and actually act on it by creating a new badge that is unlocked after sharing 5 articles in the next week. What's more, you can link this badge to a real world incentive by allowing sponsors in on the fun. This could be branded, for example, the Pepsi Broadcaster's Badge, and earn users a free six pack of the Pepsi product of their choice.
By coupling game dynamics with an ambitious advertising department, news publishers have a real opportunity to both increase engagement AND boost ad revenue. This can be taken a step further however, by adding a social gaming layer with real incentives to a UGC initiative, such as CNN's iReport or BBC's Have Your Say. In doing so, news outlets can also benefit from richer editorial content, thus addressing virtually every publisher's ultimate goals of providing better content, improving reader engagement and loyalty, and bringing home the bacon.
This is a guest post from Garrett Goodman, a new media consultant currently working with Citizenside, a French start-up that specialises in increasing audience engagement with its UGC hub solution, the Reporter Kit. This solution uses a proprietory system that integrates badges, grades and points to add a social gaming layer to news gathering.
The image of the lone wolf journalist, sniffing out local crime and corruption, may be a thing of the past - that's according to the results of a new enquiry launched by the International Journalists' network, which has summarised the latest changes in the field of investigative journalism.
Hunting in packs
Collaborative efforts have proved both efficient and effective: Editor of the International Journalists' network, Jessica Weiss cites the International Consortium of Investigative Journalist's recent 13-month investigation into the illegal global tobacco trade as one such success. The investigative series, "Tobacco Underground", unearthed stories surrounding a multibillion-dollar business of trafficking, which has contributed to crime, corruption, terrorism and illness internationally. Its team was composed of some 22 reporters in 14 countries, spread across a dozen different time zones, and reported on anything from "counterfeiters in China and renegade factories in Russia to Indian reservations in New York and warlords in Pakistan and North Africa".
The pragmatics of "Tobacco Underground" were by no means unusual. In the digital age many of today's investigative journalists are working in regional and cross-border networks, enabled by technology and tools that are revolutionising reporting. The European Fund for Investigative Journalism actively encourages this- providing research grants from a fund of €20,000 for stories that have the potential to make an impact; its main stipulation being that projects should include "cross-border research, networking between colleagues, established and innovative investigative methods" and be "original, innovative and intensive".
As mentioned earlier, the Internet facilitates this: On a basic level journalists have the means to communicate with each other effectively and inexpensively, benefiting from the use of a secure, online workplaces to communicate, share documents, photos and videos, and edit each other's work. But the web offers other advantages too: The information super highway is being tamed by social networking sites, such as the journalist's virtual grapevine, Twitter. Fans or otherwise, few journalists would refuse to acknowledge the speed with which the tool relays news stories globally, often providing important leads. Latest reports regarding the development of Wikileaks - "the online clearinghouse for leaked documents", permitting access to sensitive documents, is another exciting development for journalists and could provide a powerful tool for investigation.
The importance of watchdog journalism
According to ICIJ director and Tobacco Underground lead editor David Kaplan,
good investigative journalists delve "deeply into complex subjects, and
look at whether people in a given society who have power are exercising
that power in an accountable way". Put like that, one can hardly ignore
its necessity as a direct means to regulate society. Yet newspapers
seeking to cut costs have cut jobs, and with investigative journalism
proving to be time-consuming as well as costly, floundering local
papers no longer have the means to support it.
As
a result citizen start-ups have been cropping up around the globe,
particularly in the U.S. The most well-known publications to date, MinnPost and Voice of San Diego,
exist on a total budget of a little more than $1 million a year (with
almost all of the budget going directly on reporting). The start-ups
have done away with expensive print, delivery and ad sales costs as
well as sports reports, breaking crime news and so on, in order to
deliver serious reporting. A number of the new non-profit units, such as Pro Publica, also focus exclusively on investigative reports also. The UK's newly set up "Investigations Fund" is also looking to support "risky, challenging reporting" for which it has recognised that there is a "crying demand".
The
growing trend for Citizen start-ups is mirrored by non-profit
investigative centres worldwide: The current number stands at 50, with
more than half of those having been established since 2000. Though the
first three non-profits dedicated to investigative journalism were
American: the Fund for Investigative Journalism (1969), Investigative Reporters and Editors (1975), and the Center for Investigative Reporting (1977), it is an idea that is now taking off internationally: In August of this year, the Latin American Conference on Investigative Journalism lauded two exposés of public corruption in Brazil and the management of illicit accounts within the Catholic Church in Costa Rica - an important development for two countries where a tradition of investigative journalism does not exist.
Challenges
One
of the biggest threats facing investigative journalism is simply that
of not having enough trained professionals within the field to
safeguard its survival. In countries where media freedom is seriously
restricted, reporting of this kind can be dangerous - and even life
threatening. Caijing,
a Chinese magazine, has manoeuvred around this by training their
investigators in the reportage of finance and financial investigations
- which is permitted, as opposed to direct criticism of the country's
Communist government. Similarly, Arab Reporters in Syria
have sponsored consumer reporting on food safety in order to train
people in the method. According to Kaplan "The important thing is that
you establish a methodology - you get a generation of reporters trained
in how to do this kind of reporting and the rest will come".
But
even in countries with independent media, investigative stories have
other hurdles to overcome. Kaplan commented that during "Tobacco
Underground", language, cultural and technological barriers were often
difficult to work with, as well as the fact that reporters were working
across different time zones. Furthermore, reporters in different
regions had different levels of training, varied reporting styles and
standards.
A future rooted in its past
All
in all however, technological advancements have so far had a positive effect
on news reporting states Kaplan, which he refers to as the "great
equaliser" at a time when so many other resources are being cut.
Technology
aside, Kaplan maintains that "investigative journalism as a craft
remains rooted in the same principles it was founded upon", calling
upon its journalists to "think about stories systematically, think
about multiple sourcing, look up public records, interview and follow
trails - trails to people, trails of money, trails of accountability",
drawing parallels between investigative reporters and "good cops and
honest prosecutors" who ultimately, are "driven by the hope to leave
the world a little better than how they found it."
With
the emergence of non-profit start ups it is clear that these "good cops" do exist. But are there enough of them to fill in the gaps in reporting
left by the recent financial crisis? By Poynter Media Business Analyst
Rick Edmond's estimations, it
would take roughly 1,600 MinnPosts or Voice of San Diegos to replace
the spending on journalism newspapers have cut. Either non-profit grows
or the newspaper industry faces facts: investigative
reporting is - and should continue to be - the very backbone of quality journalism.
The Independent reported that it is asking its readers to work with the Debategraph community to help develop a "comprehensive map" of climate change issues that will confront world leaders at negotiations for a new international climate change treaty. Formal negotiations on Kyoto's successor start in less than three weeks.
Debategraph describes its goal as "to make the best arguments on all sides of any public debate freely available to all and continuously open to challenge and improvement by all," using argument visualisation and web-based collaborative editing. A diagram or map is created with the key questions about an issue, and then users can click on these to enter sub-maps, and click on different buttons to delve deeper and deeper into each topic.
Conventional wisdom can be misleading for online editors tackling newspaper website design. Traditional website design of UK papers, with lots of white space, neat boxes and strong page formation may not be the most profitable.
Most conventional news sites are designed with consideration that users don’t like to scroll. Thus most content is crammed intop the top 480 pixels of the screen. 24Sata in Croatia has even come up with a ‘no-scroll’ homepage design, which fits everything on one screen – and has proved successful so far.
By contrast, Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet’s opted for a website design with extremely long and narrow pages, that are “loaded with garish boxes and stories with enormous headlines stacked on top of each other,” reported the Press Gazette.
The site’s strategy is to make every page a front page, by including the front page at the bottom of every story page. Although seemingly unpleasant for users, this design becomes increasingly important as users directly come to stories through search engines and RSS feeds.
“Every single design rule that you have ever been taught has been broken here, but they are making more money than you will ever dream of,” said Mark Comerford, a new media lecturer at the University of Stockholm, speaking to regional newspaper online editors in the UK.
And yet Aftonbladet.se is Sweden’s second-largest site after MSN, with 3.5 million unique users. Its parent company, Schibsted, is arguably one of the world’s most successful newspapers groups in its transition to digital publishing.
The main point here isn’t that online editors should delve into Aftonbladet-style design, or that a no-scroll homepage is more user-friendly. But they should rid themselves of preconceptions, said Comerford:
“If there are other sites that violate everything that you would consider the rules of good design, and yet they work, then what can you learn from that?”
CNN.com, which forayed into citizen journalism last year, is to expand its experiment by creating iReport.com, a citizen journalism feature within its actual news portal.
According to MediaWeek, the site (still under construction) is to be similar to a video-sharing platform and will be video-centric, where “wannabe Anderson Coopers can upload videos, photos and audio files.”
It’s still unclear as to how the site will be moderated, if at all.
During previous attempts by CNN to delve into citizen media, such as its campaign debates organized with YouTube, “they not only came away with egg on their face, but gave significant black-eyes to New Media in the process in the eyes of the public,” according to Mark Hopkins in Mashable.com.
Leading French daily Ouest-France is to delve into online videojournalism for the upcoming municipal elections, with three mobile studios that will provide coverage from about 50 different cities.
Must-read. The American Journalism Review takes a look at the reinvention of the newsroom and editorial process through the eyes of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s (AJC), Politico, and others.
As Earth Day approaches, several US newspapers and publications have launched environmentally-friendly websites and features. As Green increasingly becomes an issue for investors and companies, newspapers seem to be tapping into the market.
The following is an overview of the US State of the News Media Report’s findings concerning digital journalism. The report defines six key online journalistic qualities that newspapers should be exploiting, and evaluates how well they are currently doing so.
As the 2008 US presidential election nears and online politics soar, newspapers are making sure they’re ready to get their online share of the pie. The New York Times (NYT) and The New York Sun both announced they were launching political websites.
The Elaph website reported that the Al-Arabiya newspaper is preparing to launch in the Saudi capital, Riyadh, in the months to come. Al-Arabiya’s coverage remains mysterious until now.
The following is an overview of the US State of the News Media Report’s findings concerning digital journalism. The report defines six key online journalistic qualities that newspapers should be exploiting, and evaluates how well they are currently doing so.
![Digg](http://digg.com/submit?phase=2&&url=http://www.editorsweblog.org/newsrooms_and_journalism/2011/06/detroit_projects_seeks_to_link_journalis.php&bodytext=<form mt:asset-id="10417" class="mt-enclosure mt-enclosure-image" style="display: inline;" contenteditable="false"><a href="http://www.editorsweblog.org/detroit-bellevue-avenue.jpg"><img alt="detroit-bellevue-avenue.jpg" src="http://www.editorsweblog.org/assets_c/2011/06/detroit-bellevue-avenue-thumb-200x132-10417.jpg" class="mt-image-left" style="margin: 0pt 20px 20px 0pt; float: left;" height="132" width="200" /></a></form><div>Detroit has braved huge economic and social difficulties in the past decade. With the collapse of its industry and a dramatic decline in population, newspapers have struggled to keep up with the rapidly changing city. <a href="http://www.mlive.com/news/detroit/index.ssf/2009/10/more_layoffs_coming_at_detroit.html">Its two major papers</a>, <i>Detroit Free Press</i> and <i>The Detroit News</i> have had to layoff employees and increase the price of their papers. All is not lost, however- a news venture is looking to reinvigorate the Detroit journalism scene, and transform the city while doing it. </div><div><br /></div><div>The new project, <b>Detroit 143</b>, plans to investigate into what the audience "really needs" to know to inspire civic engagement. <b><a href="http://nieman.harvard.edu/reports/article/102634/Focusing-a-New-Kind-of-Journalism-on-a-Citys-Needs.aspx">Bill Mitchell </a></b><a href="http://nieman.harvard.edu/reports/article/102634/Focusing-a-New-Kind-of-Journalism-on-a-Citys-Needs.aspx">explains</a> that the project was prompted by <b>Kirk Cheyfitz</b>, his former colleague at the Detroit Free Press, who tracked him down after a <i>Time Magazine </i><a href="http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1925796-1,00.html">cover story</a> blaming many of Detroit's current problems on <b>Coleman Young</b>, the city's first black mayor in the 1970s. </div><div><br /></div><div>"I didn't share Cheyfitz's feelings about that story, but he did convince me that somebody - maybe us- should dig deeper into how Detroit ended up in such a mess and what role journalism might play in its turnaround."</div> &title=Detroit project seeks to link journalism and civic engagement){kind=link}
![Digg](http://digg.com/submit?phase=2&&url=http://www.editorsweblog.org/web_20/2009/03/independent_offers_readers_an_original_w.php&bodytext=<form contenteditable="false" mt:asset-id="2221" class="mt-enclosure mt-enclosure-image" style="display: inline;"><a href="http://www.editorsweblog.org/assets_c/2009/03/independent%20debategraph-2221.html" onclick="window.open('http://www.editorsweblog.org/assets_c/2009/03/independent debategraph-2221.html','popup','width=634,height=637,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0'); return false"><img src="http://www.editorsweblog.org/assets_c/2009/03/independent%20debategraph-thumb-175x175-2221.png" alt="independent debategraph.png" class="mt-image-left" style="margin: 0pt 20px 20px 0pt; float: left;" height="175" width="175" /></a></form>The <i>Independent</i> reported that it is asking its readers to work with the <a href="http://debategraph.org/"><b>Debategraph</b></a> community to help develop a "comprehensive map" of climate change issues that will confront world leaders at negotiations for a new international climate change treaty. Formal negotiations on Kyoto's successor start in less than three weeks. <br /><br />Debategraph describes its goal as "to make the best arguments on all sides of any public debate freely available to all and continuously open to challenge and improvement by all," using argument visualisation and web-based collaborative editing. A diagram or map is created with the key questions about an issue, and then users can click on these to enter sub-maps, and click on different buttons to delve deeper and deeper into each topic.<br /><br /> &title=<i><b>Independent</b></i> offers readers an original way to debate key issues){kind=link}
![Digg](http://digg.com/submit?phase=2&&url=http://www.editorsweblog.org/multimedia/2008/02/web_design_aftonbladets_every_page_a_fro.php&bodytext=<span class="mt-enclosure mt-enclosure-image"><img alt="Thumbnail image for 24sata-hp.jpg" src="http://www.editorsweblog.org/24sata-hp-thumb-300x171.jpg" class="mt-image-left" style="margin: 0pt 20px 20px 0pt; float: left;" height="171" width="300" /></span>Conventional wisdom can be misleading for online editors tackling newspaper website design. Traditional website design of UK papers, with lots of white space, neat boxes and strong page formation may not be the most profitable.<br /><br />Most conventional news sites are designed with consideration that users don’t like to scroll. Thus most content is crammed intop the top 480 pixels of the screen. <i>24Sata</i> in Croatia has even come up with a ‘no-scroll’ homepage design, which fits everything on one screen – and has proved successful so far.<br /><br />By contrast, Swedish newspaper <i>Aftonbladet</i>’s opted for a website design with extremely long and narrow pages, that are “loaded with garish boxes and stories with enormous headlines stacked on top of each other,” reported the <i>Press Gazette</i>.<br /><br />The site’s strategy is to make every page a front page, by including the front page at the bottom of every story page. Although seemingly unpleasant for users, this design becomes increasingly important as users directly come to stories through search engines and RSS feeds.<br /><br /><span class="mt-enclosure mt-enclosure-image"><a href="http://www.editorsweblog.org/Aftonbladet-hp.jpg"><img alt="Aftonbladet-hp.jpg" src="http://www.editorsweblog.org/Aftonbladet-hp-thumb-300x155.jpg" class="mt-image-right" style="margin: 0pt 0pt 20px 20px; float: right;" height="155" width="300" /></a></span>“Every single design rule that you have ever been taught has been broken here, but they are making more money than you will ever dream of,” said <b>Mark Comerford</b>, a new media lecturer at the University of Stockholm, speaking to regional newspaper online editors in the UK.<br /><br />And yet Aftonbladet.se is Sweden’s second-largest site after MSN, with 3.5 million unique users. Its parent company, Schibsted, is arguably one of the world’s most successful newspapers groups in its transition to digital publishing.<br /><br />The main point here isn’t that online editors should delve into Aftonbladet-style design, or that a no-scroll homepage is more user-friendly. But they should rid themselves of preconceptions, said Comerford:<br /><br />“If there are other sites that violate everything that you would consider the rules of good design, and yet they work, then what can you learn from that?”<br /><br />Source: <a href="http://www.pressgazette.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=1&storycode=40271">Press Gazette</a><br /><br /> <div><br /></div>&title=<FONT color=#FF3300>Web design: <b><i>Aftonbladet</i></b>’s every page a front page or <b><i>24Sata</i></b>’s no-scroll?</FONT>){kind=link}
![Digg](http://digg.com/submit?phase=2&&url=http://www.editorsweblog.org/analysis/2007/03/us_state_of_the_news_media_07_1.php&bodytext=<img width="130" height="124" border="0" align="left" src="http://www.editorsweblog.org/analysis/images-1.jpeg" />The following is an overview of the US <em>State of the News Media Report</em>’s findings concerning digital journalism. The report defines six key online journalistic qualities that newspapers should be exploiting, and evaluates how well they are currently doing so.&title=US: State of the News Media 07 - digital journalism){kind=link}