Story Review

If WolframAlpha sounds familiar but you’re not quite sure what it was, it is one of those new search engines touted to replace Google. Whether it will or not is the subject of another post entirely, for now let’s just focus on the main difference between the two algorithms (and please excuse the generalisations).

When you ask Google a question, it gives you the answers of potentially millions of people each of whom has some relevant information on the topic but not all of the relevant information. When you ask WolframAlpha a question, it gives you the potential answer of just one person who is immensely well informed and has the capacity to process all the relevant information. Google gives you the wisdom of the crowds and its answers represent the collective knowledge of a large group of people. WolframAlpha, which uses pre-categorised libraries of human knowledge, tells you how each individual person would be likely to answer your question, given the same information WolframAlpha has.

So now I’ve set up the stage for the main attraction. This is WolframAlpha’s definition of journalism:

I take this to be the likely answer to the question of what journalism is if you asked people who do not regularly think about it. In my experience, that is also often the answer from people who do regularly think about what journalism is. Even if they do not say it directly and even if they would not admit it when confronted, most people equate journalism with newspapers. Not TV, not radio, not news agencies.

So far, so not out of the ordinary. Using a narrow term for a much broader concept is something we do all the time. My problem in this case is that it spills over. For a year now I have been listening about a supposed crisis in journalism. There is no crisis in journalism. Journalism is doing very well from what I’m seeing. The business of making and selling newspapers is in crisis for reasons that have nothing to do with journalism. I’m not saying people should not be concerned about that crisis too, but the longer we continue to equate journalism with newspapers, the longer it will continue to be a hurdle for all other sorts of journalistic endeavour. Universities should focus on teaching journalism separately from teaching newspaper-making. Companies should focus on making journalism rather than making newspapers. It will be better for both journalists and newspapers.

I got an email from a reader today telling me she knew we had certain coverage but was unable to find a specific article. I looked it up and it turned out we hadn’t covered that story. So I gave it to a reporter and he wrote it up. I then wrote back to the reader and told her the article was now available. This was her response:

thank you very much! What a great service from you.

I tend to rant a lot, so I thought I shouldn’t miss this opportunity to brag a little. But also, that whole episode made me once again think about how much closer journalism is to servicing customers (readers) than to creating a product (content). And although writing stories on demand, as it were, may not be the best/the only/the most viable possible future for journalism, I am growing ever more convinced that custom(isable) niche solutions will be an important part of it.

I was talking about movies with my wife and a friend the other day and the subject of good films getting dumbed down after test screening came up. We were, of course, indignant. It is a topic that I have noticed appears relatively often in conversations about Hollywood and is a practice that is generally frowned upon. But why?
Test screening is a way for film-makers to get customer feedback and tailor the product so as to suit most consumers’ needs. I have been campaigning for news organisations to involve their audiences in the process of making news, of writing stories; why shouldn’t film studios do the same?
I guess we all have an audience in mind when creating our stories and we just cannot believe that our audience may want anything different than we want.
Say you are a big financial daily and you run a survey of your audience and people tell you that they want a page-three girl. Will you have one if that helps your bottom line? Most All big financial dailies will be outraged at the idea that their readers may request such a thing. And that is, to be sure, an extreme example.
But the question remains: when do people stop being valued customers giving us crucial feedback and cross the line over to morons who want stupid things? If the morons vastly outnumber our preferred type of reader (just check the comments on your company’s YouTube page), shouldn’t we, as service providers, cater for their needs?
I have no answer to this. My instinctive reaction is to say that we shouldn’t, but does that not suggest that a degree of arrogance must always remain part of journalism?

I recently had a conversation over dinner with @vanya_damyanova, @joannageary and @markmedia about what journalism is. I have blogged about this at length, but at this particular occasion we were more interested in something short: the conversation was a follow-up on an earlier tweet by Mark seeking definitions in up to 140 characters. (The previous evening I, Mark, @eulken and Jane Singer had had the same discussion and came away none the smarter from it.)

As we made our way through generous helpings of fish and chips served on the floor of Jo’s living room, Mark moaned about people’s tendency to answer the question by telling him what journalism is not, rather than what it is. However, our attempts to answer with a straight description of what journalism is produced definitions that were either too narrow or too broad.

We sort of agreed that journalism is what journalists do, which left us with the task to define who is a journalist. Vanya suggested that journalists are people who know things and share them with others. But that could also be a description of other occupations, such as teaching, or even architecture or medicine (basically anything that required special knowledge, provided the holder of that knowledge didn’t mind sharing it).

Then it dawned on us — and I am fairly certain we all agreed, despite the blurring effect alcohol has on memories — that journalists are people who know stuff they have no particular reason to know. Unlike other occupations, where knowledge is a prerequisite to doing the job, journalism seems to be unique for “professionalising” curiosity for curiosity’s sake.

What does everybody else think?

Mark Comerford

Mark Comerford established Europe’s first online newspaper in 1994 when he launched the website of Sweden’s biggest daily newspaper Aftonbladet.

He initially moved to Sweden in the early 1980s to work as a welder and a shipbuilder before moving to work in the digital world.

Since then he has spread his journalism knowledge across the globe teaching people from Africa to Britain how to get the best out of the Internet and digital technologies. He is a keen advocate of the notion that journalists should not be confined by what technology can currently offer, but rather make technology work for them. (Source: The Journalism Leaders Programme.)

In a Google Talk chat session Mark answered some questions about the future of newspapers and journalists.

D Damyanov: Do you believe newspapers will become obsolete and be entirely replaced by news websites?

M Comerford: No.

DD: Why not?

MC: Lol. OK. I think we will see a number of things happening to newspapers over the next few years, and maybe even quicker. A number of them will die as paper products. A number of them will migrate totally to the web. (And the fact that every household in the country [DD: the UK] will be guaranteed access to broadband Internet will accelerate and consolidate that change.) Some of them will become bi-weekly. Then there will be a two-tier series of papers. The free ones like Metro (which will probably be one of the few to continue making money) and top-level ones that come out on Saturday and will be analytical, deep, long and expensive. These will attract top-level advertisers and will be used as both an info service for the upper-class/educated etc and as a symbol in the same way watches are: “Look at me! I am discreetly telling you I belong to the wealthy and educated and influential, but not flashy.”

DD: So you mean paper will stay because it is tangible and can be easily used as a status symbol, unlike a digital publication?

MC: Yes. And that transition will be staggered, different speeds for the transition in different economic regions depending on a huge number of factors.

DD: Such as?

MC: Take China and South Africa. Both are new markets, both have seen an increase in newspaper launches, both have rising literacy levels. There will be an increase there but the cycle — new, grow, stagnate, die — will be much faster as there will be parallel growth in digital at the same time.

DD: Where do journalists fit into this picture? What is the future of the journalist ten or twenty years from now?

MC: There is a great future for journalists as story tellers/curators. There will be a load of new initiatives in regional and local digital-based products and they will need journalists.

DD: Yet right now it seems as though the industry does not need (or cannot afford) to have as many journalists?

MC: It is the monolith media that has structural and cyclical problems, not journalism per se. Though there is a problem in the perception traditional journalists have about what they do and what they are that needs to be addressed.

DD: If you were to explain it to them in one sentence what would it be?

MC: You’re fucked.

Can I use three sentences?

DD: Please do.

MC: Journalists are story builders. Those who build their stories best and understand that a story is a social object will survive.

DD: Will there be a third sentence?

MC: A social object implies that the story is a collaborative effort.

You can follow Mark’s updates on Twitter or find him in your favourite social network (he is markmedia in all of them). His blog is a great read.