If you’re like me, you probably don’t remember – and that’s not surprising.  Unless something extraordinary happened at breakfast, or it was a particularly special day for you, we don’t generally devote valuable memory space to store all the minutiae of our lives.   But what if you learned today that there was an outbreak of food poisoning that Tuesday, and it’s critical that you remember what you ate?  Could you dig deep into your memory banks to recall those details?

It’s not easy.  But that’s not a flaw in memory; that’s a feature of it.  We couldn’t possibly remember everything that happens to us, so we have to sift events for meaning as they happen to us.  As Joshua Foer, author of Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything, notes:

What makes things memorable is that they’re meaningful, they’re significant, that they are potentially colorful to you in some kind of way…

True enough.  But what seems trivial today could become meaningful tomorrow, and vice versa.  How can we know we’re noticing the right things? Are we condemned to remember key details of the world only through the prism of the present?

And so it is with journalism, which nearly by definition tries to chronicle what’s important at that moment.   Which is an important mission – but doesn’t make it easy to reuse what we’re reporting and writing now at some later date.  (Just try reading stories from six months ago and see how hard it can be to follow it.)

This all made sense when today’s newspaper became tomorrow’s fish wrapper, and where archives were dusty bound volumes of old papers in the library stacks; but that’s no longer the case.  We can and do pull up all kinds of old stories and data all the time now.

The trick is, how can we find ways to store potentially useful information – say, what we had for breakfast last Tuesday – in ways that make it easy to access months later and so that we aren’t overwhelmed by all that information?

Storage isn’t the key concern any more – any more than it is with human memory.  (We’ve long since outsourced much of our memory to computers, Flickr, Facebook and old-fashioned notebooks.)  The problem is systems and taxonomies to be able to find and make sense of all that information.  No filing system is future-safe.

Politifact fact-checks some political statements but not others; Muckety catalogs some relationships but not others.  Clearly we can’t anticipate all questions and store all information.

But there are some things we can do.  We can be more consistent about how we collect and store information.  If we’re going to log what we eat for breakfast – just to torture that analogy to death – let’s do it regularly and diligently.  There’s no point recording it on random days.

In newsroom terms, that means making sure there’s some consistent set of types of information we want from every story – or at least for certain categories of stories.  Is it relationship information of the people and entities in the story?  Is it geolocation data?  Notes and documents?  Better and more consistent metadata?

We may not make the right choice about what to keep.  But the alternative – not making a choice – is to give up a chance to build for the future as well as the present.

Back then, it didn’t matter all that much – words (or wordes) were simply written representations of a sound that people knew from oral communication.  How you spelled it – as long as people knew what you meant – was immaterial.  But all that would change soon enough, and that seemingly small evolution would help reshape the way we think.

At least according to The Information, a fascinating and dense book by James Gleick about the evolution of well, information.  It’s not the easiest book to read – I’m about a third through it – but there’s a lot in there.  (There’s a whole chapter on the syntax of African talking drums.)  The development and value of consistent spelling is one of the many nuggets you can find in it, and one I’m stretching (and torturing some metaphors for) to cover some ideas on data journalism.

So bear with me.

Gleick traces the development of language, and more importantly, how the innovations of writing and consistent spelling would transform the very process of thinking.  Perhaps some of this seems obvious now – at least the part about the invention of writing – but the book explains the changes well.  Certainly writing changed the fundamental nature of communication.

Before writing, communication is evanescent and local; sounds carry a few yards and fade to oblivion.

…

But the new channel does more than extend the previous channel.  It enables reuse and “re-collection” – new modes. It permits whole new architectures of information. Among them are history, law, business, mathematics and logic.

As Gleick notes:

Logic might be imagined to exist independent of writing – syllogisms can be spoken as well as written – but it did not.  Speech is too fleeting to allow for analysis.  Logic descended from the written word, in Greece as well as India and China, where it developed independently.

Not that everyone welcomed this development.  Plato, that old curmudgeon, was right that this would upend traditional ways of communicating.  Where he was wrong was in the value of the new ways compared to the old ways.  (Sound familiar?)

For this invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory.  Their trust in writing, produced by external characters which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of their own memory within them.  You have invented an elixir not of memory, but of reminding; and you offer your pupils the appearance of wisdom, but not true wisdom.

Still, none of the advantages of writing back then depended on good – or consistent spelling.  Indeed, “correct” ‘spelling wasn’t considered important for a long time, as long as readers understood what was being conveyed.

That began to change in the 1600s, and the publication of a dictionary by Robert Cawdrey (or Cowdrey, or Cawdry) entitled A Table Alphabeticall marked a new phase in the evolution of language – because it was compiled alphabetically.  That may seem like a logical way to do it now, but if you don’t spell consistently, how can you organize a book alphabetically?  (Previous dictionaries were organized by theme and topics, not spelling.)

Gleick notes how odd it is, in many ways, to use spelling to order words – how it strips meaning from words and reduces it to a series of symbols.

…the system is unnatural.  It forces readers to detach information from meaning; to treat words strictly as character strings; to focus abstractly on the configuration of the word.

…

Topical lists were thought provoking, imperfect and creative. Alphabetical lists were mechanical, effective and automatic.  Considered alphabetically, words are no more than tokens, each placed in a slot.  In effect they as well be numbers.

But what words lost in creativity they gained in consistency and standardization – and all sorts of advantages, from dictionaries to being able to sort and find words in chunks of text such as phone books.

So are we at a similar junction today?  Can we also begin to standardize some forms of text information – certain types of stories, or at least parts of stories – even at the cost of some creativity, in order to unlock potentially much more creativity when we have much more consistent building blocks of information?

What is standardization worth, and how can we allow for both creativity and consistency?  And what new types of ideas can we unlock if we do that?

They’re good ones: 1. Your business isn’t what you think it is; 2. Brands decay; 3. Early to market doesn’t mean you win; 4. Disruption doesn’t happen just once.

They’re also profoundly depressing,  although Steve does go out of his way to note that facing those facts can make it easier to find a path forward.  It’s certainly true that not facing those facts – as any number of newsrooms have tried in vain to do – doesn’t get you anywhere.

Still, it’s a huge leap between recognizing what the problem is and actually being able to do something about it.   It’s one thing for, say, train companies to understand that they’re really in the transportation business rather than in the locomotive business; it’s another to get the skill sets needed to compete and win in that other business.  Similarly, horse carriage companies may well want to move into fabricating auto bodies, but that calls for different tools, skills and factories.

As Steve notes, newspapers thought they were in the news and information business, but as it turns out, they were really in the commercial advertising printing and delivery business.  And even if there was a viable future in the ad printing industry, that’s frankly not the one that most journalists want to be in.

Part of it is simply being trapped by who we are – in the same way that skilled carriage makers can’t suddenly decide to be auto mechanics, it’s not like most journalists can just become information platform architects, say.  By and large, news people want to be in the news business, for all sorts of personal and public interest reasons.  And that’s a good thing, in many ways.  But it doesn’t make finding a business model any easier.

But what we can do – even while holding on to that goal of providing news and information – is to at least really unpick what it is we do and provide.  Our traditional “product” has been the story and the “bundle” (of news, in a newspaper).  There’s certainly some continuing value in them – story telling is a great way of conveying information, and editing and aggregating – another way of thinking about “bundling” – should be important in a world where people are drowning in information.

But we shouldn’t be wedded to those forms simply because they’ve served us well over the decades.   What other forms might work better in a digital age – what are the characteristics of digital media that we need to retool around to take advantage of?  Speed, reach, persistence, interactivity, visuals, sound, data, automation, technology… and more.  We’ve barely scratched the surface of these advantages, at least in part because we’re wedded to the form of the story.  (It’s like carriage makers wanting to learn how to do metal work, but insisting that steel has to worked like wood.  Or whatever. I failed shop when I was in school.)

That’s not to say any of these will be a savior or lead to a new business model.  But if we want to stay in the information business (and stay in business) we need to be willing to completely upturn what we do and how we do it, and fundamentally rebuild the factory floor – the newsroom – that we’re used to.

Hopefully then we’ll we be able to have a happy ending – a Kodak moment in the best sense of the word.

It’s a good, quick read and a nice introduction to the whole field of “gamification” – a hot area that lots of people are diving into.

I won’t attempt to summarize it but there are a couple of interesting points the book raises that are worth highlighting.

The first is that, beyond the notion of building more engaging interfaces that will draw readers/users into our content, is that games – at least some games – can offer real insights into content that stories just aren’t as well suited to provide.

In particular, they note that simulations, by virtue of their ability to let users “live” through a situation – and replay it many times, each time slightly differently – allow for much more understanding of how systems work, be it government budget processes or the incentives driving Somali pirates.

That latter example is in fact the subject of a game, Cutthroat Capitalism, that Wired published in 2009, as a companion to a story about piracy; the story addressed the issue from the point of view of the shippers who are getting their vessels and crews hijacked, while the game puts players in the position of a pirate trying to make money.

Journalists… think of their work in terms of people, events, locations, moments, motivations.  They craft ledes and choose images to draw readers or viewers into a specific individual’s plight, and then they move from the particular to the general.

But as we have shown, games are better at depicting the general than they are at the particular.  Cutthroat Capitalism addresses the economics of Somali piracy, not the tale of a particular pirate of freight captain.

Try the game out – it’s not exactly Doom or World of Warcraft, but there’s a certain addictiveness to it; and more importantly, it really does help you understand why pirates act the way they do.  It shows the system works, as opposed to a story about a specific example.

And that’s the broader point: It isn’t just that the game increases the stickiness of the story – it’s that it explains things in a way that the story never could.   It isn’t simply an adjunct to the story; it’s a different way of communicating information and insight.

…journalism can and will embrace new modes of thinking about news in addition to new modes of production.  Rather than just tack-on a games desk or hire an occasional developer on contract, we contend that newsgames will offer valuable contributions only when they are embraced as a viable method of practicing journalism – albeit a different kind of journalism than newspapers, television and Web pages offer.

Not that most newsrooms can afford the kind of time this one obviously took to build; but that’s part of another insight that the book provides.  Which is that newsrooms could invest in larger-scale simulations – about the locality or area of interest that they cover – that allow them to quickly build modules that embrace new information so that they can keep the game current.

A election simulation, for example, could take a real-time feed from polls or primary results so that it’s kept as up-to-date as possible.  A budget simulation could take in data from actual budget negotiations.

True, picking the right topic, and having a updatable/scalable platform aren’t easy things to do.  Or cheap.  But there is – in theory at least – some real money there.  The book notes that casual games were a $2.25 billion business in 2007, with 20% annual growth rates.  That looks pretty good to a business whose business model is collapsing around it.

Or maybe there’s even a good simulation around that – and we could see if embracing games makes economic sense….

The show – at the Museum of the City of New York – is entitled The Greatest Grid: The Masterplan of Manhattan 1811-2011 (on until April 15).  It’s fascinating, especially for New Yorkers who take the city’s layout for granted.

First, a digression for non-New Yorkers (and my sympathies too): One of the strengths of the city is regularity of its layout, at least in Manhattan.  You never need to walk more than a block to figure out where you are, and the rectangular nature of the city’s block  allows for a much more interaction at the street level.   It’s true that there are few curving boulevards or imposing monuments that mark other great cities – and truth be told, it can be a tad boring – but the grid really spurs life where it really counts, on the streets.

But it didn’t have to be so.  As the exhibit makes clear, the city was a patchwork of oddly shaped lots owned by a host of rich – and powerful – people in the late 1700s.  But farsighted planners realized that setting up a more regular structure would help spur development, by standardizing the size and shape of land parcels and allowing for more standard construction of buildings.  To do that, they had to overcome entrenched opposition from landowners whose property would get sliced into pieces as well as physically reshape much of the landscape, flattening huge parts of Manhanttan.   It took a huge effort overall, but the result is the New York of today.

So what does this have to do with journalism?

Only tangentially.  But it really speaks to the power of setting standards and restricting choice – in order to allow much more creativity to flow within those parameters.   Leaving New York to a patchwork of odd-shaped lots and meandering streets would doubtless have fostered much creative architecture; but setting the grid allowed for both creative work as well as fast development.

And so too it should be with journalism.  We’re in love with unstructured text and wide-open standards for the narrative form – as we should be, since that can lead to great storytelling – just as we can, and should be, in love with great architecture.  But there’s real power, too, in giving ourselves standards to conform to.  If we build the building blocks of data-driven journalism in our day-to-day work, we open up new possibilities for creating new and better ways of uncovering and communicating information.

As Rem Koolhaas, the reknown Dutch architect noted in a 1978 tribute to New York:

The Grid defines a new balance between control and de-control in which the city can be at the same time ordered and fluid, a metropolis of rigid chaos.

Not a bad thing to aim for too: Order and fluidity.

(Hey, I’m Singaporean.  We like edicts.)

The book, by Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman, is a dazzling – and dizzying – tour of human mind that’s won great reviews (in the FT, NYT and Guardian, to name a few).  It’s a lucid, insightful exploration of how our quick, instinctive mind (which he calls System 1) works with – or against – our slower, more rational brain (System 2). It ain’t always pretty, but it is the way we think.

Kahneman focuses a lot of the irrational elements of our brain, and there’s much to see: From the way we cling to narratives to explain events despite evidence to the contrary, to how forcing us to frown can make us more skeptical, to the way exposure to a handful of age-related words can make us walk slower.

It’s fascinating stuff, and one that any student of human behavior should dive into.  But for us journalists, whose day job is largely about trying to explain the events and motivations behind them, this research shouldn’t be optional.  It’s important to help us learn how our sources get things wrong, where our own thinking goes astray, and how the words we write affect the audiences we reach.

It makes a good case for data journalism, too, although not in so many words.  But I’ll take any argument in favor of better math and statistics.

There’s far too much in the book to summarize it effectively here – just go and read it, already – but what it lays out are the host of ways instinctive System 1 works to undermine rational System 2 in everyday life -  and even in what should be carefully-considered decisions.

If you take the last two digits of your social security number (or whatever random number comes to mind) and then bid on a bottle of wine, you’ll likely offer more if those digits are high than if they’re low.  Experiments on grad students show that those who were asked to work on a puzzle featuring words associated with old age shuffled more slowly to their next class.  People asked to focus on one task often miss even a gorilla walking through the room.  (Try it, then try the second video too).

In other words, our minds are susceptible to all sorts of outside influences, small and large, accidental and planned.  And that should raise some level of concern about what people “know” when they tell us things – even experts.  Experienced radiologists who evaluate chest X-rays as “normal” or “abnormal” contradict themselves 20% of the time when they see the same picture on separate occasions.  True, you can’t simply distrust all your sources, but that’s why it’s important to corroborate what they say with others – or preferably with documents and statistics.

Another problem System 1 presents is a predilection for a narrative explanation – even in the face of data to the contrary.  Or, as Kahneman puts it,

…people are prone to apply causal thinking inappropriately, to situations that require statistical reasoning.

The simplest example is the famous “Linda fallacy,” which I described in an earlier post.  But there are lots of other examples that lay bare our inability to handle numbers well in the face of a good story.

Sports fans – and sports writers – still cling to the idea of a basketball player having a “hot hand” when he sinks a number of baskets in a row, despite tons of research showing there’s no such thing; it’s just randomness.   Business publications devote covers and miles of column-inches to CEOs despite evidence that they only have a marginal – albeit a non-trivial margin – impact on a company’s fortunes.  Not to mention mutual fund managers:

Mutual funds are run by highly experienced and hardworking professionals who buy and sell stocks to achieve the best possible results for their clients.  Nevertheless, the evidence from more than fifty years of research is conclusive: for a large majority of fund managers, the selection of stocks is more like rolling dice than playing poker.  Typically at least two out of every three mutual funds underperform the overall market in any given year.

More important, the year-to-year correlation between the outcomes of mutual funds is very small, barely higher than zero.  The successful funds in any given year are mostly lucky; they have a good roll of the dice.

But calling it luck gets in the way of a good narrative: About the fund manager’s carefully-constructed strategy, his rags to riches story, the way he timed this market, etc.

Which isn’t to say that great stories don’t matter – they do, hugely.  But that it’s important to remember that causality and narrative don’t always go hand-in-hand, and that journalists wanting to uncover the reasons for some event should dig much harder into the documents, data and statistics.

Consider the example that Kahneman about research into the characteristics of successful schools that showed that, on average, they’re small institutions.  That makes intuitive sense: Smaller schools should be able to offer more attention to students, etc.  As a result of that study, $1.7 billion was poured into efforts to make schools smaller.  But a closer look at the research would have shown that the worst schools were also the smallest.  Oops.

Small samples are hugely prone to huge swings in variability – fantastic and terrible results.   That’s one reason why anecdote-based reporting – by definition looking at small samples – can come back with bogus trends or wildly inaccurate explanations for events.   You need to anecdotes to tell good stories, of course; but you need the data to know which anecdotes reflect reality.

The exaggerated faith in small samples is only one example of a more general illusion – we pay more attention to the content of messages than to information about their reliability, and as a result end up with a view of the world that is simpler and more coherent that the data justify.

…System 1 is not prone to doubt.  It suppresses ambiguity and spontaneously constructs stories that are as coherent as possible.

And even within coherent, accurate stories, how they’re presented to us matters hugely.  And, by extension, how we present them to readers also matters hugely.

The book cites an example where physicians were asked to evaluate a procedure that had some short-term risk but could lead to important longer-term gains.   Some were told that the procedure had a one-month survival rate of 90%, and others learned that there was a 10% mortality rate in the first month.  Both mean the same thing, of course, but the 84% of the experts in the first group opted for the procedure; only 50% in the second group.

And those are experts in the field.  What about our readers, who we’re (hopefully) trying to responsibly explain important policy and personal issues to?  How do we frame the information we give them so that they get as fair and unbiased a report as possible so they can act on it effectively?

If we present numbers as percentages – eg, there’s a 1% mortality rate – readers take a more clinical view; if we present it in human terms – one in every 100 will die, on average – they fixate, unsurprisingly, on an image of one person dying.  And that affects they way they’ll act on the information.

That’s not to say that there’s any “right” way to present that information.  But it’s important to know that it sometimes isn’t simply a stylistic decision.

In some ways, much in Kahneman’s book – and there’s lots in there – just reinforces some old journalistic advice: Check it out with a second source; where’s the document; did you look at the data; write it clearly.  But it’s nice to know there’s good science behind it as well.

Meanwhile, go read the book.  They’ll be a test.  Singaporeans love tests.

Hmmm.

The “umbrella man” has been a staple of conspiracy theorists for decades now (not to mention the Grassy Knoll, multiple shooters, fabricated X-rays and more), and now the New York Times weighs in with an “Op Doc,” a short video opinion piece by filmmaker Errol Morris to debunk it.   In it, he notes that a person came forward in 1978, saying that he had carried that umbrella on that fateful day in 1963 as a protest against Kennedy’s father.  “This is just wacky enough that it has to be true,” says Errol in the video.

OK, so maybe I wouldn’t want to base a huge investigative story on deciding that something was so improbable it had to be true – and it certainly isn’t going to satisfy those who believe otherwise.

But it is true that probability is at the heart of what much of journalism is.  We look for the unusual (Man Bites Dog!) or seek to uncover hidden causes (Cancer Cases Surge After New Drug is Introduced!) – and that’s based fundamentally on how likely or unlikely those occurrences are.

If men bit dogs routinely, it wouldn’t be a story.  If cancer cases have been on an uptrend anyway, then it’s hard to tie that to the new drug.  If lots of people regularly carried open umbrellas on sunny days, it wouldn’t seem suspicious.

And so journalists really ought to know a lot more about probability and how it works.  But by and large we don’t.

That’s not surprising – most people don’t.  It’s not an intuitive branch of mathematics, even for dyed-in-the-wool gamblers, who have money at stake.  But not knowing how to calculate odds can put journalists’ reputations – or at least story accuracy – at stake.

Consider a fund manager with a 15-year track record of beating the market.  How likely is it that he did that by chance?  With that kind of record, he must be some kind of investing genius, right?  And it’s true – the chances that any specific person would beat the market 15 years in a row purely by luck are infinitesimal.  But in a population of tens of thousands of fund managers, it’s actually quite probable that someone could beat the market for that period of time – even if they’re all picking stocks by throwing darts.

Imagine you’re tossing a huge number of coins a huge number of times.  It’s unlikely that any specific coin will come up heads 15 times in a row – but given thousands of coins, there’s an excellent chance that at least one will.   So maybe that fund manager isn’t so smart – he’s just lucky.  Or he could be an investing Einstein.  The point is that his track record actually gives you very little information about that.

How many similar events does it take to make a trend?  What constitutes a suspicious coincidence?  It really comes down to understanding the numbers, and how probability works.

If you’re walking along a chilly New York street, and a man goes past wearing shorts and a tee shirt, it may seem odd, but it could just be one of those things.  New York is a big city, and people wear all sorts of things – trust me.  So it may be a low-probability event, but one that falls within a normal distribution of events in a town like NY. But what if, at that moment, a prominent politician is assassinated across the street?  All of a sudden, the oddity of the inappropriately-dressed man – which earlier just seemed odd – now seems deeply suspicious.  (Conspiracy theorists will doubtless call him “Shorts Man” for decades.)

But the point is that a political assassination is an even lower-probability event – and so anything connected to it, such as a man with an umbrella, dressed in shorts, or any other unusual activity, is by definition also a very low-probability event.  So the question to ask isn’t, “what’s the chance that a man carrying an open umbrella on a sunny day is at the precise spot where the president is assassinated?” but more “what’s the chance that a man will be carrying an open umbrella on a sunny day in Dallas?”

(I realize this isn’t quite the best example – in the JFK case, the man says he was deliberately there as a protest, so it’s not really a random event.  But you get the point.  I hope.)

Part of the problem in understanding probability is that it runs directly in the face of a basic human desire to find a narrative – and meaning – in events, even when there is none.   It’s what drives us to see basketball players having a “hot hand” when they sink multiple baskets in a row, despite all scientific evidence to show that no such thing  exist.

Consider the famous “conjunction fallacy” demonstrated in this experiment by social scientists Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman.

Linda is 31 years old, single, outspoken, and very bright. She majored in philosophy. As a student, she was deeply concerned with issues of discrimination and social justice, and also participated in anti-nuclear demonstrations.

Which is more probable?

1. Linda is a bank teller.
2. Linda is a bank teller and is active in the feminist movement.

You may have answered 2.  But of course, all feminist bank tellers are also bank tellers – so the class of people in category 1 is, by definition, bigger than the class of people in category 2.  And that makes it more probable – obviously – that Linda is a bank teller rather than any specific kind of bank teller.   But answer 2 fits into a narrative more neatly, and so we tend to choose it.

Kahneman’s latest book, Thinking, Fast and Slow, is full of gems like this about the kinds of mental biases and errors we make.  I’m only halfway through, and will write more about it in a bit, but so far it’s been a fascinating read.   So too is A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper, by mathematician John Allen Paulos.  Check them out.

Meanwhile, check the math in any story you do.  More importantly, check the mathematical and probability assumptions behind any story you do.   Chances are it’ll help you get it right.

So it was interesting to read a long, detailed post on the design of Angry Birds and why it’s as successful as it is – and that holds lessons not just for the design of news games, but for all the interfaces we create to try to pull readers/users into more-immersive experiences of our content.  I won’t try to summarize it – you should read it yourself – but it made a great point about simplicity and complexity.

The idea behind simplicity isn’t that the interface should only have a few moving parts, but that it’s designed to be easy for first-time users to quickly understand how they’re supposed to interact with the app.

Simplification means once users have a relatively brief period of experience with the software, their mental model of how the interface behaves is well formed and fully embedded. This is known technically as schema formation. In truly great user interfaces, this critical bit of skill acquisition takes place during a specific use cycle known as the First User Experience or FUE.

That’s not necessarily true of many of the apps out there, whether news-related or not.  True, everyone needs to invest some learning time into using any new interface, but there’s a limit to what any reader will do without an obvious payoff.  It’s also true that Angry Birds – or Viking Defence – has the advantage of drawing on established laws of physics and our memory of cartoon behavior.  No one needs to explain what the likely consequences of releasing a slingshot with a bird in it are.

News apps and news games have a much higher hurdle; there are fewer well-established metaphors for exploring information – walking through a library, say, or exploring a map – and that makes learning how to navigate complex databases more of a chore.  Nonetheless, it’s a reminder that we should tap as many real-word analogs as possible to make it easier for first-time users to get accustomed to us.

At the same time, it’s important – as all good game design demonstrates – that gameplay gets increasingly complex as players/users get more proficient.

What makes a user interface engaging is adding more detail to the user’s mental model at just the right time. Angry Birds’ simple interaction model is easy to learn because it allows the user to quickly develop a mental model of the game’s interaction methodology, core strategy and scoring processes. It is engaging, in fact addictive, due to the carefully scripted expansion of the user’s mental model of the strategy component and incremental increases in problem/solution methodology. These little birds are packed with clever behaviors that expand the user’s mental model at just the point when game-level complexity is increased.

That helps keep users more engaged as they get familiar with the basics.  Obviously, it’s important also to have a mechanism that lets people  stay at whatever level they’re comfortable with, so they don’t get frustrated.

All of this may seem like commonsense to designers of games – but it’s still pretty alien thinking for journalists.  And as more and more of our interaction with readers comes through real interactivity on digital platforms, it’s increasingly critical that we learn to master these concepts.

It conjures up all sorts of images of science-fiction spy thrillers, where blueprints of buildings and photos of every street corner always seem to be available to secretive government agencies with a couple of keystrokes.  In this case, the actual technology doesn’t seem all that new – we’ve seen lots of panoramic camera shots before – but the application of it is a smart one.  When you first arrive at a crime scene, do you know what to focus on?  I’m sure seasoned detectives have very good instincts, but it never hurts to be able to go back and look over all the evidence again.

And so now that it’s so much easier – and cheaper – to store tons of information, why not do it regularly?  That’s not entirely analogous to the ideas behind structured journalism – but it’s close.   Reporters – like detectives at a crime scene – sift tons of information in their head and then come to (hopefully smart) conclusions.  But there’s a lot left in their notebooks and heads that effectively gets thrown away.  Finding ways to access and tap all that information later on should unlock a lot of value.

Some methods to access that information will require some painful cultural change on the part of journalists, and involve upturning the way they’re used to working.  But other methods are more purely technological.   The revolutionary Lytro camera, which captures so much more data in any single image that viewers can focus on any point in it, is one example – it’s a way of bringing back much more from the field than just what the photographer was focusing on at the time.

I doubt reporters will ever be going around taking 360-degree photographs of where they’ve been, but the general idea is the same.  How can we make sure that all that effort expended in reporting any particular story isn’t thrown away after the 400-word piece on it has been filed?  How can we keep all that information gathered in searchable, useable formats to power future stories and news products?  (Or solve crimes…)

What a difference the collapse of a business model makes.

While sustainability isn’t at the top of everyone’s minds, it’s a lot higher on the agenda than it used to be – and thank goodness.  But there’s a lot of catching up to do – not just on the basics of the business, but as a recent profile of the San Jose Mercury News shows, also going beyond and rethinking the rules of the game.   It won’t be easy, and we’re far behind where we should be.  But increasingly there’s help – or at least a desire to help.

The Renaissance Journalism Center, in a recent survey of online journalism enterprises, found – not unsurprisingly – that most were long on journalism skills and short on business experience.  And that – also not surprisingly – money wasn’t easy to come by.

…an increasing number say they are at or approaching a crucial crossroad because the grants that funded their creation are scarce to come by on the second or third try.

Still, the journalists they surveyed are optimistic – although perhaps in the face of evidence to the contrary: The business track record of journalist-led companies isn’t exactly stellar, after all.

Nevertheless, the respondents said that journalists can make good business people. More than 86% said journalists can adapt and apply the discipline of business to an online venture.

But even if true, they’ll need training.   It’s certainly the theme of two recent reports – one from the World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers (WAN-Ifra) and the other by the Center for International Media Assistance (CIMA).

Both make broadly the same point: It isn’t enough just to be a great journalist – you have to know how to pay the bills.  But both also underscore how much harder it is to figure that out now.  In the WAN-Ifra report, Anne Nelson estimates that upwards of $600 million might be spent a year on supporting media initiatives.  But:

International aid and assistance resources have concentrated overwhelmingly on the areas of journalism skills, with an emphasis on the hot topics of the day – currently, new technologies, social media, and convergence. There is only a casual nod toward business skills and market forces that are fundamental to sustainability.

And as Michelle Foster notes in the CIMA report, lots of news managers in the developing world started out because of strong convictions and journalistic passion – not necessarily business sense.  Yet it’s business problems that are likely to undermine them.

A significant risk to being able to solve those problems is the lack of management and business skills among media owners, which can make them reactive to the economic challenges and technology-driven changes in the media environment. Without business acumen, it is almost impossible for media operators to shape, adapt, or create new practices.

That last point is especially important: It used to be relatively straightforward – not easy, necessarily, but at least straightforward – to think through the circulation and advertising challenges that any media organization faced.  There were rules of thumbs and metrics that the industry was familiar with, and a limited palette of options.

These days, the field is much more uncertain – and even the basic business rules that managers have relied on don’t always work in the face of disruptive technologies and new markets.   That’s where it gets tough – journalist-managers need to first master the basics of business, and then understand how they sometimes don’t apply.

That’s very apparent in an excellent Michael Shapiro piece on the San Jose Mercury News, once a powerhouse of Silicon Valley, now a shell of its former self.  It’s a story about how the Merc did invest in new technologies and did experiment with ways to seize the future.  It first developed Viewtron, a videotext service, and then Mercury Center, a site that could carry far more than just the paper’s content and potentially appeal to niche audiences – not far from what today’s sites do.  And all that in the early 1990s.  (So much for the image of newspaper managers being curmudgeonly dinosaurs, to mix metaphors.)

Mercury Center, (New York Times reporter William) Glaberson noted, had carried an online chat with San Jose’s mayor, offered its telephone-only subscribers recordings of Martin Luther King Jr.’s speeches, posted press releases (much to the newsroom’s consternation), and had also made available archives of all stories that had appeared in the newspaper since 1985. The archives, which came with an additional fee, had proven to be particularly popular.  (Senior Merc editor Bob) Ingle had thought their greatest appeal would be to schoolchildren working on reports. But the traffic was heaviest during the day, suggesting that the biggest users were business people eager for information about their industries and competitors.

But despite the relative success of the project, revenues were small – certainly small to a massive Silicon Valley newspaper.  And so as the company moved forward, it focused back on its core business – which meant less and less investment in new projects like this one.   The story doesn’t end well, of course.  But far more important than that is the question of why.  As Michael asks:

Why did the Merc fail to seize the future? Was this the result of greed, stupidity, timidity, and blindness, as so many who worked there would suggest? Or was it the inevitable consequence of disruptive technology, a phenomenon whose most vulnerable targets are often the best-run companies?

In The Innovator’s Dilemma, Clayton Christensen wrote of two technological forces, the more gentle of which “sustained” well-run companies.

But “disruptive technology” possessed an altogether different power, one that could unmoor the best-run companies.

…

Instead, it created new products that initially held little appeal to that existing market, either because the market was already happy with what it had, or because it was not ready for that innovation. In the 1980s, those newspaper companies that had experimented with electronic publishing discovered that their audiences still regarded the printed paper as the most efficient way to read and advertise.

Which meant that Merc managers, following good business metrics, should have – and did – focus on their core customers.  And in the process, gave up the future.  But should they have ignored good business sense and followed a different vision – one that in all probability won’t have shown a return for a decade?  (And to some extent still doesn’t?)  How do you justify that to your backers, bankers – or staff, who see money going out the door that isn’t being invested in day-to-day story operations?

Michael comes to his conclusion:  That the Merc could have turned the tide.

Disruptive technology is only half the story of what happened to newspapers. There is also the response. The disruption opened the path to change, and not just for small companies unburdened by legacies of success. The change could also come for those older newspaper companies willing to accept that what was happening was not so much an existential crisis in journalism as it was a catastrophic assault on the most prosaic aspect of the newspaper business: the classifieds. Tough to do in any circumstances. Even tougher at a time when things feel as if they are going better than ever.

These times, of course, are very different times.  Things certainly don’t feel that they’re going better than ever.  So in many ways it’s easier to experiment and try new things now – even things that fly in the face of business orthodoxy.   But it underscores the real challenge ahead for this generation of journalist-entrepreneurs: They have to learn the rules of business, and then learn how to break them.