Aaah – another site about The Future of Journalism.

A dull one.  Without the  invective and ideology about free vs. paid, pajama-clad bloggers vs. stick-in-the-mud mainstream media curmudgeons, and Utopian visions of crowdsourced news vs. dark fears about falling standards you can find elsewhere.  It has words like taxonomy and persistent content in it; discusses business models and revenue streams in dull, accountant-like language; and tries to dissect the sparkling prose journalists turn out into tiny bytes of data.

But there is a purpose here, and it’s based around the idea that we as journalists haven’t really thought about how people are changing and accessing information, or about how we need to fundamentally rethink the way we carry out journalism and the kinds of – for want of a better word – products we turn out for them.

There’s much hand-wringing over the loss of the traditional business model of news, it’s true.  Perhaps too much.  And this site will contribute its share.  But hopefully it’ll also explore some of the less-explored questions about where the profession goes in a digital age.   And lay out some of the thinking behind one concrete idea that might help move the business forward: Something I’m calling Structured Journalism.

So, welcome – and I hope you find this interesting.

I’ve just finished reading Leonard Mlodinow’s Subliminal: How Your Unconscious Mind Rules Your Behavior, an interesting overview of all the ways the human brain isn’t rational.  Keen followers of Daniel Kahneman’s work won’t find much they don’t already know, but Mlodinow is a breezy writer, and the book is easy to follow.  (I’ve written about Kahneman here).)

More importantly, he highlights a couple of points that have more direct relevance to journalism, and they’re worth pointing out.

The first is the importance of presentation – not just the need to write compelling stories packaged with great photos, videos and graphics; at a much more basic level, we need to focus on how easy or hard our stories/packages/data visualizations/etc are to physically read.  (My design and layout friends will love this.)

He describes an experiment where subjects were given a recipe in both an easy-to-read and a harder-to-read font, and asked to rate the difficulty of preparing the dish and how likely it was that they would try making it at home.  Those who read it in the difficult font rated it as requiring more effort and skill than the others, and were less likely to try making the dish at home.   Nor is this effect confined to cooking; experimenters have found the same result when they tried it with a one-page description of an exercise routine.

Which is to say that easier-to-read fonts don’t just make stories easier to read; they actually make the information in them easier to understand and assimilate.

Psychologists call this the “fluency effect.”  If the form of information is difficult to assimilate, that affects our judgments about the substance of that information.

That sounds scary in some way – surely “rose” written in Helvetica seems as sweet as in Comic Sans?  But apparently not – all of which speaks to the importance of design, layout and user experience, which is often relegated to the nice-to-have category by a lot of journalists, when in fact it may well be in the critical-if-you-want-your-story-understood category. (So listen to your designers and graphics people!)

Similarly, it matters how things are described as well – which recalls the point Kahnemann makes about the importance of good storytelling.  Subjects who tasted food described in more flowery terms rated it tastier than

Nieman Journalism Lab ran a nice profile of Connected China a couple of days ago; it was written by Chris Amico, who helped found Homicide Watch, about which I’ve written a fair amount here as well.  Chris frames the app nicely (thanks, Chris!):

It’s a context-first effort to catalog, organize, and visualize everything Reuters knows about power in the People’s Republic. What emerges is something radically different from news as we know it: The app focuses almost entirely on telling you how power is structured today, and how players are connected.

But more than that, he introduces a new – to me, anyway (proving I didn’t study economics at school) – way of thinking about how to categorize news and information: In terms of stock and flow.  These are economic concepts that, to grossly simplify, describe a quantity at a given time, and the rate it changes, respectively. Which doesn’t sound very news-related, but Chris helpfully points to a 2010 post by Robin Sloan at Snarkmarket that torques the ideas very nicely into an information context:

Flow is the feed. It’s the posts and the tweets. It’s the stream of daily and sub-daily updates that remind people that you exist.

Stock is the durable stuff. It’s the content you produce that’s as interesting in two months (or two years) as it is today. It’s what people discover via search. It’s what spreads slowly but surely, building fans over time.

Which is another way of saying – there’s stuff that’s intended to be newsy, and there’s stuff that’s intended to last a while.  Sometimes they’re the same thing, but often they’re not.  A book generally doesn’t have the latest information in it, and a daily story doesn’t have a huge amount of context in it.  There’s value to both, of course – we need to stay current and informed, but we also need to

My last post – on how well (or not) stories communicated information – got a little more response than usual (thanks, Mom!). Including this insightful – and provocative – tweet from Jonathan Stray:

For me, journalism is not about telling stories.  Stories are a means to an end.  But, a beautiful and effective means.

That makes sense:  After all, if journalism is here to serve the public interest, then what it does – stories, visualizations, games, curation, tweets – is really just a means to that end.  Right?

That depends.  It depends on what you think the end is.  And for a lot of journalists, the goal is writing a great story rather than dwelling on whether or how it advances the cause of a well-informed citizenry and facilitates the practice of democracy.  That’s not necessarily a bad or shortsighted view – most doctors are more concerned about the patient in front of them than about the state of public health in general, and there are virtues in that approach.  (Weaknesses, too.)

In any case, it does point to an interesting divide in how we think about journalism and why we’re here. (Or on what basis we claim privileges for our profession.)

In many ways, Jonathan stands out in this debate – not just because he’s articulate and smart, but also because he comes to journalism in a non-traditional manner.  A computer scientist by training and experience, he enrolled in the journalism program at Hong Kong University – where I met him back in 2010 – to learn, he told me, the ways of “the tribe of journalism.”

Since then he’s moved on, first to the AP, and now building out the Overview project, a Knight Challenge winner, while continuing to write at Nieman Labs. (His personal blog is here.)

In his writing, Jonathan brings a different – and fresh – perspective to what we do: Among other things,

So you’ve amassed terabytes of data, reams of documents and hours of expert testimony, all backing up your conclusions.  What’s the best way to convince people you’re right?

Tell them a story.

Ideally, a compelling, colorful tale weaving in memorable anecdotes and striking details.  Printed in a clear, legible font.  Oh, and it helps – no kidding – if it rhymes.

At least according to Nobel-prizewinning economist Daniel Kahneman, author of the outstanding Thinking, Fast and Slow, who’s made a career out of understanding  - experimentally – how our brains take in information and make decisions.  It isn’t always pretty, but it does help explain why storytelling is a centuries-old means of passing on information.  He gives a great speech here that explains – with color, anecdotes and stories, of course – why that is.  It runs more than an hour, but it’s well worth watching.

So what has this got to do with The Future of Journalism, and/or the notions of structured journalism?

And haven’t I written at least a couple of times why we have to get past the story as the basic unit of journalism?  It’s true, I have.  And I think we do.  But if we’re going to rethink journalism for a digital age, and serve our audiences/readers better, we need to know how they prefer to get information, what our (and their) limitations are, and how best to achieve that goal.

But let me go back first to Kahneman, and his talk at the National Academy of Science’s conference on “The Science of Science Communication.”  (And to digress: Read his book.. It’s full of great stuff.) To grossly oversimplify:  Our brains are capable of deep, analytic, rational thought, but they’re – to put it bluntly – lazy.  We prefer conclusions that are easily digested, don’t contradict our previous experience or understanding of the world, and form a coherent narrative.

So we like things that rhyme, because it lowers the cognitive load on our brains – people assign a higher faith in the line “woes unite foes” than they do to the identical, non-rhyming “woes unite enemies.”  We trust statements in clear fonts that we do in

There was a uplifting – for geeks, anyway – story in the New York Times a week or so ago, about a small team of data crunchers in City Hall helping solve some of New York’s (many) problems.

For the modest sum of $1 million, and at a moment when decreasing budgets have required increased efficiency, the in-house geek squad has over the last three years leveraged the power of computers to double the city’s hit rate in finding stores selling bootleg cigarettes; sped the removal of trees destroyed by Hurricane Sandy; and helped steer overburdened housing inspectors — working with more than 20,000 options — directly to lawbreaking buildings where catastrophic fires were likeliest to occur.

Pretty impressive stuff.

They also figured out, just by digging through and matching some public records, where the city’s most likely illegal grease-dumpers, were, and sic’ed inspectors on them.  (For the best explanation of why that matters – and one of the best examples of The Wall Street Journal’s famed funny “Ahed” stories on the front page – check out this piece by Barry Newman.  You gotta love a story that starts: “Why wait until the next story about coagulated fat in sewers comes along when you can read this one now?”)

Makes you love the power in joining up data sets and crunching numbers, doesn’t it?  But also in the same issue of the paper was a more cautionary tale – one about fears about how to regulate the inevitable questions of privacy as more and more of our lives are digitized, and more of and more it is available to governments and corporations.

Those are legitimate worries, and probably one of the big challenges ahead of us as societies is how the tension between “good” uses of data and privacy worries can be resolved.   There are lots of arguments on both sides, and no simple answers.   There’s interesting research going on about how people actually value privacy, rather than what they say they value.  And there are clear cultural differences as well:  Tax payments are public in Scandinavia, but secret in the US.  Court records are open in America but names are redacted in many European countries.

Still, regardless of anyone’s position, privacy clearly matters.  I certainly don’t want people prying into my life.  But then again, a lot of what journalism is – and by that I mean the good, public service type of journalism, not the tabloid press – is about violating people’s privacy, albeit

As the father of a 12-year-old who would be glued to an iPad all day if he was allowed to, and a 17-year-old who would rather I buy her physical books than an e-reader, I have a personal interest in how the “touch-screen generation,” as the Atlantic dubs them, views the world through the various media now available to them, and how it shapes their minds.

There’s an excellent piece in the latest issue of the magazine about toddlers that are growing up with touchscreens; it’s a valuable read both for parents as well as anyone interested in how young minds might be shaped – for better or worse – by all the devices around them.  It’s a smart, nuanced piece that’s backed by much solid research.

And there’s much in it that – I think – applies to the non-toddler set as well.  In particular, it cites a fascinating experiment about how kids perceive information.

In one series of studies, conducted by Georgene Troseth, a developmental psychologist at Vanderbilt University, children watched on a live video monitor as a person in the next room hid a stuffed dog. Others watched the exact same scene unfold directly, through a window between the rooms. The children were then unleashed into the room to find the toy. Almost all the kids who viewed the hiding through the window found the toy, but the ones who watched on the monitor had a much harder time.

That sort of plays to all our (older folks’) prejudices about how screen viewing encourages a passivity about the world, doesn’t it?  But Troseth redid the experiment a couple of years later,  making the video demonstration much more interactive.  When the kids watched the monitor, a researcher talked to them through the video link, asking them question and inviting them to sing along with her.

She gave them the distinct impression that she—this person on the screen—could interact with them, and that what she had to say was relevant to the world they lived in. Then the researcher told the children she was going to hide the toy and, after she did so, came back on the screen to instruct them where to find it. That exchange was enough to nearly erase the video deficit. The majority of the toddlers who participated in the live video demonstration found the toy.

OK, so there’s a limit to how much you can extrapolate findings about toddlers to the rest of the world (although if you’ve been in some of the newsrooms I’ve been in, you might find lots of similarities between squabbling two-year-olds and some journalists at major news organizations), but it does point

Xi Jinping recently became China’s new president.

Connected China*, our gorgeous site/app (hey, I’m entitled a little pride here) that tracks and analyzes power in the Middle Kingdom,  reflects that fact as well, despite having been launched before he formally took on this additional position. (Not that this was a surprise – but it wasn’t official until recently.) But what it means is that we updated the database (and hence the site) when the news was announced. That’s not remarkable – right?

That may seem like a strange question.  After all, shouldn’t data-driven apps offer the most up-to-date information to users?  Certainly many do, especially those that take in regular feeds of government and publicly released data.  But many data-driven projects – and especially heavily editorially curated projects such as Connected China – often don’t; they’re generally built to stand as a snapshot of a moment in time, not to be a constantly updated resource.  There are exceptions – Politifact and Homicide Watch among them – but they are exceptions.  Most big projects analyzing reams of data and providing stories and analysis aren’t designed to be updated.  But shouldn’t they be?

That’s not to say that such projects don’t serve a real public service – they absolutely do. The Washington Post’s analysis of a decade of homicides in the capital is great work.  But while it provided a great picture of what had happened before 2011, it wasn’t set up to let readers figure out how things might have changed in the last year or so – arguably equally relevant and important information to current residents of DC.

To be sure, it’s not easy to build sites that continue to be updated, unless it’s through a quasi-automated feed of official data.  Deep analysis requires time and effort to clean data, hunt down outliers, check and double-check findings, and so on – tasks that can’t easily be automated or done by humans on deadline or as part of daily workflow. And in a world of finite resources,

Sounds like the title of a cheesy TV series; but this is a riff off the Tow Center at Columbia University’s excellent report on Post-Industrial Journalism.

In it, the authors talk about the need for both steady, incremental, regular coverage of issues – “scarecrow”‘ journalism that discourages wrongdoing via the potential threat of exposure – as well for more episodic, deeper, investigative reporting that uncovers actual wrongdoing – “watchdog” journalism.  We need both kinds, of course, and certainly doing well on one front can help improve coverage on the other front; but often the two require very different resources and skills.

Scarecrow work, most obviously, calls for more systems and process – and that really brings home how data-driven journalism organizations have, in some ways, a fairly different mission from traditional news outfits, as I noted in an earlier post.

In some ways, that was less of an issue when we had large legacy/mainstream news organization that could encompass both types of missions under one roof – say a Connected China project twinned with a large China bureau and an enterprise team at Reuters.  Or Politifact and the Tampa Bay Times.  But as newsrooms fragment – or new startups like Homicide Watch spring up – how we we make sure we marry the advantages of both deep data-driven beat coverage and broader, accountability journalism, rather than have them drift apart?

For example, the Washington Post published a great series tracking every homicide in the district from 2001 to 2011, showing how fewer than a third resulted in a conviction – a wonderful example of bringing perspective and context to an important public issue.  On the other hand, the data was essentially dated by the time it was published; and it hasn’t been updated since, which doesn’t help a person who wants to find out what’s happening in their neighborhood right now. For that, they have to turn to Homicide Watch, which has made it its mission to track, on a daily basis, every murder in the capital and how each case is progressing through the system.  That’s not to say that Homicide Watch couldn’t in theory

So NICAR, as usual, was a blast – with a record 600-plus attendees, which either speaks volumes about how much people now realize that data journalism matters, or that word has spread about the wild parties.  Not that I’d know anything about that.

Unfortunately, I missed my own panel on business models;  the airline gods were firmly against me the entire trip.  But we launched Connected China (Chrome, Safari or iPad, please) there, and on time; and I did make it there on time to talk about data-driven beat reporting with Chris Amico,  who co-founded Homicide Watch and Matt Waite, one of the creators of Politifact.  I’ve written about both sites many times as great examples of structured journalism before, but I’ve never really had a chance to talk through, in public, some of the broader issues that setting up such data-driven – and highly-focuses – sites involve.

There’s certainly plenty to talk about – how to design, build, and modify a CMS to power such a site; the cultural resistance within newsrooms to new requirements for reporting; and so on – but it seems to me that one of the core issues that doesn’t get raised often enough is the question of a site’s mission.

Politifact tracks and fact-checks political statements; it doesn’t do polling, and it doesn’t cover election horse races.  Homicide Watch just cares about murders in DC; it ignores other crimes.  Connected China has a broader mandate – but then again, it’s focused mainly on understanding power in China, not in any other country.

To be sure, all news organizations have missions and audiences they focus on; but these sites go far beyond that – they pick out a specific activity or area, build a data structure and workflow around it, and then just pound away at it.  Homicide Watch doesn’t make a judgment about whether a particular murder is newsworthy or not; it covers it.  Likewise, it doesn’t suddenly decide to investigate a spate of poisonings, even if they seem really interesting.  It’s not even that the site would deviate from its mission; at some level, it can’t even fit a different type of crime/fact into its CMS or design.

Is that a good thing or a bad thing?

I’d argue: Yes.

So this is a belated post – but hey! I was drinking – Connected China is up and running.

First, a shout out: It’s the culmination of many, many months of hard and excellent work by Irene Jay Liu and her team of dedicated reporters, researchers and project managers, working closely with the legendary Ben Fry and the talented folks at Fathom Information Design.  A huge thanks and kudos to all of them for just outstanding work.  And fair warning: This will be a shameless plug.

So what is Connected China?  Well, check it out.  (Best with Chrome or Safari, or on an iPad).  Or read the blog.  Watch the videos – here, here, here, here and here.  Go ahead; I’ll wait.

It’s a little hard to sum up simply; at one level, it’s a microsite that focuses on looking at power in China, explaining how it flows, the key players and institutions, and their relationships, featuring stories and rich multimedia (including fantastic archival footage.)  But it’s much more than that: It’s also a series of innovative data visualizations that pull from a rich, underlying database of people, institutions and relationships to illustrate the connections, careers and positions of key officials in China.  And more than that: It’s a great example of how the combination of data. visualizations, stories and multimedia can be much more than the sum of their parts.  And it shows how designing visualizations – and a site – around regular updates of data, not unlike HomicideWatch or Politifact, can yield real value to users.

That’s a central tenet of structured journalism, which is another reason I’m really pleased to have conceived the project at Reuters – and had someone as dedicated as Irene to push the idea further and make it come to life. We pushed the button on it late Thursday – and the reaction on the twitterverse, at least, has been great, as well as among fellow attendees at the NICAR conference in Louisville.  (Which explains the drinking.)

It’s an amazing database: Tens of thousands of entities, 30,000 relationships, and a million and a half words (not to mention the array of news stories, photos and videos also featured in the app.)  The team structured tons of information – connections, the importance of job roles, etc – with an editorial sensibility.  In other words, they applied news judgment – but rather than use it just in stories, they used it to structure data.  Or, as Irene notes on the blog:

By quantifying and categorizing these complex relationships, we break from the constraints of long-form text and allow new ways of communicating and interpreting this acquired knowledge.

And there are a lot of different ways Connected China communicates all that information.  We hope you’ll like it, and find it useful.  And that you’ll tell others about it.