What most ails the marketplace of ideas?

Tim Wu knows: Too Much Information.

In a well-argued and smart essay, Tim – a law professor at Columbia University – makes the case that intelligent, truthful, nuanced information is being drowned out by a deluge of noise: Not just the cacophony of the crowd, but increasingly weaponized disinformation, propaganda and troll attacks that exploit new news distribution systems to overwhelm citizens.  And that existing free speech protections, designed to constrain governments from silencing dissenting voices, are grossly unsuited to countering these new threats.

The most important change in the expressive environment can be boiled down to one idea: it is no longer speech itself that is scarce, but the attention of listeners.

It’s not a completely new argument, but he brilliantly synthesizes multiple threads (and threats) facing the industry – fake news, filter bubbles, the rise of platforms, troll armies, lower barriers to publishing – into a stark (and eloquent) framing of the information landscape, and lays out thoughtful ways to think about possible remedies, getting beyond the black-and-white arguments about whether the free market or the government should tackle the problem.

To be sure, the world of journalism, news and news organizations face all sorts of other challenges, not least disintegrating business models that have led to smaller and smaller newsrooms.  But the issue Tim identifies isn’t one of a lack of quality content; it’s about how it gets to people and how well they can process it.

(As a digression – that’s not to say there aren’t problems with good journalism being practiced and how much quality content is being produced.  Including, as I’ve discussed before, how some audiences are being ill-served

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The Guardian came up with an interesting way to rethink the article the other day: “Smarticles.”

OK, so I don’t love the name, but the idea is a good one – a machine-assisted evolution of the late, lamented Circa’s model of personalized news that incorporates ideas from the also late and lamented Google Living Stories idea, and some notions of structured journalism.  It’ll be interesting to watch.

The Guardian explains it this way:

Here’s how Smarticles work: On a reader’s first visit to a story page, the blocks contain the most basic details and background, as text, embedded video, photos or social media posts.

As the reader returns to the page, the Smarticle will attempt to algorithmically determine which elements of the story are most useful to the reader based on a number of signals, such as the time passed since last visit, the frequency of visits, and the importance of each story development.

In other words, the story figures out what you already know, doesn’t bore you with those facts, and only presents you with the new stuff.  In many ways, it’s a simple and obvious enhancement – and at the same time also a huge, fundamental change in thinking about what we do and how we do it. 

Of all the functions that journalism performs – explaining, investigating, watchdogging, etc – simply bearing witness to breaking news events would seem to be low on the totem pole in an age of crowdsourcing, easy self-publishing, and platforms that encourage ordinary people to post what they see.

And it’s certainly true that news organizations can’t be everywhere where news breaks – and even more so now that many newsrooms are that much smaller – and that many are increasingly dependent on user-generated content from on-the-ground witnesses.  (Shameless plug: At Reuters, it’s tools like News Tracer that helps us find those events and those witnesses.)

But just because everyone can do it doesn’t mean news organizations can’t add value to the process, and two recent examples show how.  Let’s call them – or at least I will – structured witnessing.

Exhibit A in this genre is this great Cincinnati Enquirer project covering a week in the lives of heroin addicts.

It’s really nice work – and while it isn’t intended to be particularly explanatory or investigative, it offers a nuanced view into a deeply troubled world.  It doesn’t attempt to sum up the issue, assign fault, or ponder solutions.  But at the same time, by setting a team on it, focused on a defined time period, and designing it beautifully, it allowed readers to get a better understanding of the scale and human cost of the problem

Shameless self-promotion time: We (Reuters) just launched The Trump Effect, a section of reuters.com dedicated to tracking the real-world impact of the President’s policies and pronouncements.

It’s our way of trying to get past the daily noise and politics surrounding the new administration – important though some of that is – and focus instead on what’s actually happening on the ground.

It features a great interactive graphic that explains immigration issues (with more to come). There’s a timeline that tracks various policies and their impacts, and a rich trove of polling data for users to dig into. And stories, of course. (Hats off to a huge crew of smart people who built this, including Christine Chan, Matt Weber, Leela de Kretser, Maryanne Murray, Chris Kahn and many more.)

All in all, a really nice package, even if I say so myself.  And just as important – a nice piece of quasi-structured journalism, even.

When we’re in as noisy and busy (and polarized) a news environment as we are in the U.S. these days, it can be really important – but hard – to find ways to step back and offer up a broader sense of the landscape, untethered to that day’s tweetstorm or crisis.

(Which is not to say that the daily coverage isn’t important or hasn’t been great – in many cases it’s been outstanding.  But it can be hard to keep track of all that’s going on, or understand how it relates

Not all new ways of telling stories need to be digital, interactive or involve technology.

Take a look at how the PCIJ Storytelling Project turned the story of Kian Delos Santos, a 17-year-old killed in the Philippines’ brutal war on drugs, into a book designed in the form of a children’s book, complete with evocative illustrations. It’s posted as an album on Facebook.

As Sheila Coronel (full disclosure – my partner) notes in a post on Medium:

Children’s books rarely deal with current events or with topics as dark as the killing of minors in the war on drugs. This project presented an opportunity to tell (or retell) Kian’s story in a new way, to audiences that may have been overwhelmed by—or inured to—the news. It is also an effort to reach out to younger readers.

This story and the accompanying artwork attempt to bring Kian to life as a 17-year-old, with hopes and dreams like so many others.

There’s been a constant drumbeat of coverage of the thousands of killings in the drug war – including, I’d add, some excellent work by Reuters, here, here and here – but that also means it can be hard for readers to maintain focus or interest in such a long-running saga.

Shifting the way the story is told – changing readers’ frame of reference – can sometimes spark a new interest in a running story.  What it takes is imagination – far more than any great technology, datasets or programming skills.

Just a quick post to point out this nice piece in Columbia Journalism Review by Bill Adair about the birth of PolitiFact, my oft-mentioned poster child (along with Homicide Watch and Connected China) for structured journalism.

Bill walks us through all the ups and downs of creating the site 10 years (!) ago, including a bunch of dead ends in trying to find a sustainable business model, and how it’s finally found its footing.

Among the key points he makes:

• You needed to approach political reporting from a completely different perspective (just as Laura and Chris Amico needed to approach crime reporting from a completely different perspective).
• You needed to rethink what a story looked like, and was organized and built.

We brought in Matt Waite, a reporter who had done lots of data journalism, to build the website. He incorporated the ideas of Adrian Holovaty, a visionary web developer who believed that journalism should be structured like a database so readers could interact with it.

• You needed to build a platform that would support that new story structure.

We realized it wasn’t practical to put PolitiFact on the newspaper’s web publishing system, so Waite built ours from scratch.

(Which is a pretty critical point – technology enables journalists to do many more things these days, but technology also constrains what we can do,

What’s “news?”

I riffed on this way back in 2012, and about how newsrooms might need to rethink how they define what’s newsworthy – i.e., worthy of coverage – in a digital age that allows readers to approach information in completely new ways.

That question came back to mind after reading a very good speech by Amanda Hess, the NYT David Carr Fellow, about reporting on sexual assault. Her talk, entitled “The stories we tell, and the stories we don’t,” is a smart and provocative look at how journalists pick the subjects they cover, the characters they focus on, and how the issues are framed.

She uses as a poster child for getting all those things wrong Rolling Stone’s hugely discredited “A Rape On Campus” story.   (If you want the abridged version, just read the Wikipedia entry.)

As she notes, the story is skewed by all sorts of assumptions about what sort of sexual assault is newsworthy – those involving white women, on college campuses, and that are more violent, and so on – based, in all likelihood, on what journalists think is interesting and of public interest.

When we gravitate toward the most “shocking” stories, we necessarily distort reality. And as we do that, we send messages about what’s important. One of the messages we send is that the violence of rape isn’t violent enough. It’s only really newsworthy if the victim gets punched in the face, too.

There’s a broader theme that she’s pursuing, about the role of journalists in the choice of narrative about topics like this, and how we can distort public perceptions.  (For example, she notes that all the coverage of campus rape has led to the mistaken notion

Just wanted to flag an Upshot story that ran in the New York Times the other day, looking into the algorithm that the Chicago Police Department uses to predict who is most likely to be involved in a shooting (whether as the shooter or as the victim.)

As I’ve mentioned before – and Nick Diakopoulos has campaigned about – we ought to be doing more to cover the alogorithms that rule increasing parts of our lives, so it’s great when there’s a piece that does exactly that.

The story, by Jeff Asher and Rob Arthur, takes as a starting point the limited public information about the algorithm – known as the Strategic Subject List – that’s available, then tries to figure out how it works.

But using the publicly available data that (the CPD) have released, we reverse-engineered the impact of each characteristic on the final risk scores with a linear regression model. Because the department didn’t release all the information that the algorithm uses, our estimates of the significance of each characteristic are only approximate. But using what was available to us, we could predict risk score very accurately, suggesting that we are capturing much of the important information that goes into the algorithm.

It’s a nice piece of work that helps shed light on what’s almost certainly an important policy and policing tool in Chicago.  It isn’t clear if the algorithm works well or not – gun violence remains a problem – but just being able to show what factors are taken into account is already an important public service.

In particular, victims of assault and battery or shootings were much more likely to be involved in future shootings. Arrests for domestic violence, weapons or drugs were much less predictive. Gang affiliation, which applied to 16.3 percent of people on the list, had barely any impact on the risk score.

The algorithm has been updated several times, and (Illinois Institute of Technology lead researcher on the project Miles) Wernick noted that the variables of gang affiliation and narcotics arrests were dropped from the most recent version.

There’s nothing wrong in theory, of course, with using an algorithm such as this one to help prioritize the use of limited resources – or even to take human bias out of decision-making, so we shouldn’t be approaching these stories with a bias that algorithmic decision-making is a bad thing.

But while we can talk to humans

There was a fascinating analysis in Politico recently about how and why the media missed the support for Donald Trump in America’s heartlands. Written by Jack Shafer and Tucker Doherty, it’s a smart look at where journalists have increasingly congregated in the digital age, and – no surprise – it’s not in red states.

And if you’re not where the story is, you’ll miss the story.  And so we all did.

But that’s only half the story.  It’s not just that we – the media – missed the story; we also missed the audience.  And that’s probably as important an issue as how well the country is covered: Do we need better coverage about a group, or better coverage for that group?

In other words, it’s great if major news organizations spend the time and resources to cover the fears, dreams and drivers of rural and rust-belt voters, and so better inform their readers in New York, London or wherever.  But that’s not the same as covering those communities for people in those communities, who doubtless have a whole bunch of issues they care about that people in far-off cities don’t.

To be sure, it’s not the job of the New York Times, or Washington Post, or Guardian, to reach rural readers in Wyoming, and it’s unfair to expect them to do so. 

A quick post: I’m off to Seattle in two weeks for the Society of American Business Editors and Writers annual conference, and to talk on a panel about automation and the newsroom.

Also on the panel – titled “Robots Will Change Your Newsroom. Are You Ready?” – will be Robbie Allen of Automated Insights and Lisa Gibbs of the AP.  Should be lots of fun, and interesting.  The main point I want to make is that we ought to be looking at the kinds of stories that machines can do well, rather than trying to make machines do what humans do well.  

(Plus, I’ve never been to Seattle, and it looks like a fun town.)

It’s on at 3:45 pm on Friday, April 28.  Come by if you’re in town.  (And, there’s a reception sponsored by Reuters that evening.  Free drinks!)