The Evolving Newsroom

A few things that have caught my attention in recent weeks, in no particular order.

1. I see curation as a big part of journalism online, so I bookmarked this piece from Mike Masnick on Techdirt (and the Google Newsroom piece referred to here).

Jay Rosen points us to an article out of France that takes a stab at presenting what a modern internet-era newsroom should look like. The point that I find most interesting, that helped clarify a few different ideas for me, is that it splits “journalism” into three distinct categories, all of which have a role in the newsroom:

1. Reporters — who go out and do first person reporting — creating original stories, not just reposting rewritten wire copy.
2. Columnists — who “start conversations and give stories another perspective.”
3. Curators — who “‘cover’ the news by sorting, verifying and editing live everything good existing on the web and in the media. They make link journalism, they make the news more accessible.”

Now, this is interesting in a few respects. First, many “reporters” today don’t really do what is described as reporting above. That is, they often do try to take wire copy or stories that were written elsewhere, and go through the wasted process of “re-reporting” them just to pretend it’s a new and unique story for that publication. In many ways, this is a waste of resources. What would be better is if they actually encouraged #3 above — let a “curator” handle that sort of news.

Unfortunately, for the most part, newspapers seem to look down on “curating” as if it’s some sort of lesser form of journalism, and this is a sticking point that they’re going to need to get past if they want to understand how people engage with the news today.

2. A website which has begun telling news stories in Manga comics is going to offer translations, including into English, according to this report from Anime News Network.

The creators of Manga no Shimbun, the first website to report daily news through manga, told the Shinagawa Keizai Shimbun paper that they aim to distribute their news manga in English, French, and Korean in about half a year. The website launched last Thursday with stories in politics, business, international issues, society, arts, and sports. Unlike traditional Japanese newspapers and news websites, two artists and a staff of about 40 to 50 assistants draw a few pages of manga for each story.

I love the idea of using comics, games and other formats to get news to children, teenagers and gamers. It’s increasingly difficult to get people to come to your website to read your content and your advertisers’ messages, so you should be working hard to get your content out to where people naturally spend time online (and on mobile).

3. Wired does a nice overview of Google and its algorithm.

Want to know how Google is about to change your life? Stop by the Ouagadougou conference room on a Thursday morning. It is here, at the Mountain View, California, headquarters of the world’s most powerful Internet company, that a room filled with three dozen engineers, product managers, and executives figure out how to make their search engine even smarter. This year, Google will introduce 550 or so improvements to its fabled algorithm, and each will be determined at a gathering just like this one. The decisions made at the weekly Search Quality Launch Meeting will wind up affecting the results you get when you use Google’s search engine to look for anything — “Samsung SF-755p printer,” “Ed Hardy MySpace layouts,” or maybe even “capital Burkina Faso,” which just happens to share its name with this conference room.

The rest is here.

4. Jonathan Stray on NiemanLab checks out the origins of a big news story and how many news outlets did any original reporting on it. No conclusions to be drawn from one story, but it’s an interesting exercise.

I chose a single big story and read every single version listed on Google News to see who was doing the work. Out of the 121 distinct versions of last week’s story about tracing Google’s recent attackers to two schools in China, 13 (11 percent) included at least some original reporting. And just seven organizations (six percent) really got the full story independently.

— Only seven stories (six percent) were primarily based on original reporting. These were produced by The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, Tech News World, Bloomberg, Xinhua (China), and the Global Times (China).

— Of the 13 stories with original reporting, eight were produced by outlets that primarily publish on paper,  four were produced by wire services, and one was produced by a primarily online outlet. For this story, the news really does come from newspapers.

— 14 reports (12 percent) were produced by Chinese outlets, had a China dateline, or mentioned the assistance of staff in China. For a story about China, that seems awfully low to me. Perhaps this has to do with cutbacks of foreign correspondents?

— Nine reports (7 percent) mentioned no source at all. Five more were partially unsourced. Given the ease of hyperlinks, this frightens me.

The rest is here (along with a spreadsheet of Stray’s research).

This could turn out to be interesting.

In a post on the Guardian’s Organ Grinder blog the editor of Wikileaks Julian Assange talks about how Iceland could become a journalism haven.

I’m excited about what is happening in Iceland, which has started to see the world in a new way after its mini-revolution a year ago. Over the past two months I have been part of a team in Iceland advising parliamentarians on a cross-party proposal to turn it into an international “journalism haven” – a jurisdiction designed to attract organisations into publishing online from Iceland, by adopting the strongest press and source protection laws from around the world.

Because of the economic meltdown in the banking sector, which, per capita, was the largest of any western country, Icelanders believe that fundamental change is needed in order to prevent such events from taking place again. Those changes include not just better regulation of banks, but better media oversight of dirty deals between banks and politicians.

…

The “Icelandic Modern Media Initiative”, a proposal that binds the government to draft legislation to develop an attractive package of free speech and openness laws, including source protection, internal media communications protection, protection from libel tourism, immunity for intermediaries such as ISPs, and a tight statute of limitations on litigation. It is to be filed by tomorrow and has cross-party support, including from the governing coalition. Although the political environment in Iceland is still highly charged over the 6 March referendum about the Icesave dispute, it is expected to be voted through.

Wikileaks meanwhile has cut back its operations while it fundraises, saying it’s short $70,000 for the year’s basic operations and needs another $400,000 if it wants to pay staff. Here’s what visitors to the front page see.