loose wire blog

Journalists Citing Wikipedia: Rarely an Option

Reuters has just published its handbook online. A smart move (declaration of interest: I’ve done some training work for Reuters. I’ve got my old dog-eared copy on a shelf nearby.)

I posted (approvingly, but without comment) a retweet from Nieman pointing out that Reuters generally forbids quoting from Wikipedia:

Online information sources which rely on collaborative, voluntary and often anonymous contributions need to be handled with care. Wikipedia, the online "people's encyclopedia", can be a good starting point for research, but it should not be used as an attributable source. Do not quote from it or copy from it. The information it contains has not been validated and can change from second to second as contributors add or remove material. Move on to official websites or other sources that are worthy of attribution. Do not link to Wikipedia or similar collaborative encyclopedia sites as a source of background information on any topic. More suitable sites can almost always be found, and indeed are often flagged at the bottom of Wikipedia entries. It is only acceptable to link to an entry on Wikipedia or similar sites when the entry or website itself is the subject of a news story.

This is good policy, but the point could be made more clear. Wikipedia does not encourage the writing of entries that don’t cite existing sources:

Wikipedia does not publish original thought: all material in Wikipedia must be attributable to a reliable, published source.

In other words, if it’s in Wikipedia it should have been somewhere else first, and anyone using the information should go to that original source to check before citing it.

This is true of any journalistic endeavour,  and so it’s no great issue. (“Who told you that?” “What’s your source for that?” “Where did you hear that?”: all questions a journalists asks of someone who tells them something that’s not their own direct experience.)

People should not be offended by Reuters’ polic; indeed, they should be following it already—as writer, as reader, as consumer of Wikipedia.

Confirming is easy enough to do, by the way: just click on the small number that should be next to the information you’re planning to use:

That will take you to the footnote, highlighted in blue:

Then click on the link, if any, in that footnote which should take you back to the source:

If it doesn’t—either because the link no longer works, or the source is an offline one--then you need to do a bit more digging before you’re ready.

Of course, if no footnote exists, then you should be skeptical, or look elsewhere to confirm the information.

The Gap in Michael Jackson’s Online Death

This is a piece for my weekly Loose Wire Service column. I’m posting it here because it’s timely. That’s why there are no internal links in it.

Michael Jackson is dead. You’ve probably heard that already. But where did you hear it?

Chances are you read about it on twitter. Or more or less anywhere except for the traditional media channels, unless you’re late riser and live in Asia.

Jackson’s death, more than any other news event since 9/11, has captivated the world. Everyone knows who he is/was, and everyone is affected, to some degree, by his death.

But his passing is as likely to be remembered for the manner of its telling as for anything else. Jackson’s death was an online death—at the heart of the West Coast, at the heart of the Internet.

At 1921 GMT, one of his aides made a 911 call, saying Jackson was unconscious and not breathing. Paramedics arrived a few minutes later; by 2000 GMT he is in the Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center.

2010 GMT: Ten minutes after that an online entertainment site called x17online.com posted photos and a brief story that Jackson had been hospitalized.

Twenty minutes later, at 2030 GMT, TMZ.com, a bigger entertainment website, posted a bulletin: “Michael Jackson—Cardiac Arrest”.

Barely an hour has passed since the medics were called. Twenty minutes later E-Online reports Jackson’s hospitalization.

But still no word from the big media.

Wikipedia—the community-edited encyclopedia—cites the E Online article at 2112 GMT.

Finally, seven minutes after that, the French news agency Agence France Presse quotes TMZ.com and E! Online as saying that Jackson had been rushed to hospital.

A minute later TMZ.com was saying that Jackson was dead; the same time as Thomson Reuters, another news agency quoted the Los Angeles Times website as saying Jackson had been rushed to hospital.

TMZ.com had jumped the gun, but only in medical terms: Jackson was pronounced dead at 2126 GMT.

It’s not easy for traditional media to cover any type of story these days, what with so many amateurs, semi-amateurs, so-called pro-ams (professional amateurs), in the game.

But all that tells me is that the game probably needs to be changed.

Traditional media are used to confirming things before they run them.

But what happens in a world where information travels so quickly, through so many different channels?

It no longer makes sense to say nothing until you can say something.

In this case a news service with extensive contacts was able to trump traditional media for the biggest entertainment story since John Lennon’s murder in 1980.

And not just by a few minutes. By an hour.

The second act is even more revealing.

With mainstream news only still saying Jackson had been hospitalized—while Jackson’s body was being flown by helicopter to the Los Angeles County Coroner’s office—the TMZ story was now finding its way onto twitter.

At 2131 the first link to the story appeared on twitter. A minute earlier, the two million odd followers of CNN’s breaking news twitter feed received word that Jackson had gone to hospital.

Now the word is really out. But word of what? Is Jackson dead? Hospitalized? What gives?

From about 2140 Internet users start to hammer Google News for information.

So much so, Google’s engineers think it’s some kind of hacker attack and throw up roadblocks (those messages asking you to enter letters in a text box to prove you’re not a computer.)

From now on, for the next few hours, the average speed for downloading news sites doubles, from about four seconds to nine.

So many people try to update the Wikipedia page on Michael Jackson that the editors decide, at 2145 GMT, to freeze it until the situation is clearer.

History is being written, with or without the mainstream media.

At 2150 Facebook users start to alter their updates more frequently.

At exactly the same time Twitter users are clicking on the TMZ.com link at the rate of 42 per second—its peak.

Plays of Michael Jackson songs on the online music sharing site Last.fm surge; from about 1,000 to 35,000.

Michael Jackson is being mourned online even before he’s been publicly declared dead.

At 2219 GMT the top trend on twitter—the phrase most often and widely used in users’ updates—is RIP Michael Jackson.

Five minutes later Reuters news agency quotes the Los Angeles Times website as saying Jackson is dead. A minute later MSNBC.com confirm his death.

Five minutes later, CNN.com joins in. Two minutes later, so does Wikipedia.

Now he is, officially, dead—an hour after being pronounced dead, and more than an hour after an entertainment website, and millions of people online believed him so.

By 2234 20% of all messages on twitter—and there are many—are about Michael Jackson.

An hour later the LA Coroner confirms Jackson’s death, and, eight minutes later, so does Reuters.

It’s a strange new world where information travels this quickly. And it’s not necessarily a bad thing that traditional media tries to confirm stories the old fashioned way.

But the problem is the gap it leaves.

A gap between these new upstart news services, which may or may not be right, but which are able, through the power of the Net, to pass word out to the world, entirely bypassing tradtional media.

Twitter, in that sense, is the last piece of the puzzle.

Google News buckled under the pressure, firstly from all the attention and then latterly because the results from its own little automatic bots which go out and index news pages didn’t show up on Google News until 2246—an hour and a half after TMZ.com’s story saying Jackson was dead.

(This according to the search optimization website SEOmoz, which put together a great chronology on the story, much of which I’ve used here. http://bit.ly/3blDAC)

But maybe Google doesn’t matter anymore, when you’ve got “real time search” like twitter.

Twitter lets you see everything in real time, and, when something big like this happens, everyone wants the information in real-time.

Traditional media now has to figure out a way of giving it to them—without, preferably, ditching their values of getting the facts right first.

Nonsense Linking, Or the Rise of the Cheap Bot

I’m a big fan of The Guardian, but their auto-linking software needs some tweaking. It’s a classic example of trying to provide that extra value to data on the cheap.

My argument for a while has been that the only lasting way for traditional media to make itself competitive again is not to create more, but to create better.

In one key sense this is about injecting extra value into words: metatagging them, in short, so that other content belonging to the media—or others—adds context.

But this is not easy. Lots of people are trying it, and some are doing interesting stuff with it. But building a library of words that creates automatic links to categories within the one site, as The Guardian is doing, is not it.

Take the example above. It’s in an article written by a woman who has given up sex for a year (neat and easily sellable book idea, or what?). But in the example above, where she’s talking about her lack of love life as a young journalist (tell me about it) she mentions her dating experiences.

The Guardian’s autolinker parses the story at some point and inserts a link for the word ‘dating’ to the paper’s ‘Lifestyle and Dating’ section.

Another example appears lower in the story, where relationships are mentioned, leading inexorably to a link to the section on Relationships:

Now there’s nothing wrong with this story appearing in either of those sections (and it does), but to autolink these words to the section is meaningless. It’s out of context. It lacks context. It’s not contextual. It' doesn’t add value.

Indeed, it cheapens all the good linking that is going on in The Guardian, because it reduces the reader’s trust in the value of all those links.

If you as the reader start to see links all over the place to places that don’t add value to what you’re reading, pretty soon you’re going to stop seeing those links.

So, Guardian, drop the autolinking bot and spend time thinking up a better way of adding value to your content. Metadata is too valuable, too important, to leave to cheap bots.

My year without sex, by Hephzibah Anderson | Life and style | The Guardian

Twitteran: We Should Do What We Do Best

Paul Lamb over at MediaShift asks:

Is there still a need for vetting and fact checking of stories. Absolutely. But isn't that something a machine, building off our collective intelligence, could be trained to do far better than any one human or editorial staff? Of course this ignores the fact that machines aren't good at storytelling or understanding the nuances of human emotions and interactions - that which makes for good reporting and journalism. But maybe that's something the machine could be taught as well? Maybe even doing it better than the tired old formulas used in most mainstream reporting?

The twitteran thing has been ably covered elsewhere, but I couldn’t resist posting a comment, which I narcissistically reproduce here:

Paul, I think you're right in your comment that journalists need to think beyond storytelling and reporting, but that is part of a bigger crying need for us in the news industry to think harder about how we report, write and convey the news, and, indeed, what constitutes news.

In the case of Tehran, it's a complex picture. Reporting political upheaval is difficult at the best of times, and Iran is not the first time that crowd-sourced news has done a better job of capturing an overall picture--of what is visible.

But reporting is also about uncovering the hidden information--the behind-the-scenes struggle, and I've not seen anything either on twitter or, frankly, in mainstream media, that's captured that more difficult part of the story.

Smart media practitioners will learn from this lesson, not only that they can out-source to the crowd some of the 'public' events, but that their value lies in better reporting the 'private' events, those that go on behind closed doors.

We need to move with the times, and see as a positive development the emergence of tools that create a more comprehensive picture of mass events like this. After all, we're supposed to be in the business of bringing light to the dark corners, and this could so easily have been--and may yet be--one of the darkest of recent times.

MediaShift Idea Lab . Twittering Away the Jobs of Journalists | PBS

The Economist’s Secret: Its Limits

Interesting piece by Rafat Ali on paidContent.org quoting Michael Hirschorn of The Atlantic as to why The Economist is doing OK, while Newsweek and TIME are in free-fall:

“By repositioning themselves as repositories of commentary and long-form reporting—much like this magazine, it’s worth noting, which has never delivered impressive profit margins—the American newsweeklies are going away from precisely the thing that has propelled The Economist’s rise: its status as a humble digest, with a consistent authorial voice, that covers absolutely everything that you need to be informed about…The Economist has reached its current level of influence and importance because it is, in every sense of the word, a true global digest for an age when the amount of undigested, undigestible information online continues to metastasize. And that’s a very good place to be in 2009.”

Apart from the obvious reasons--the global thing (rather than Newsweek etc, who catered only for Americans Abroad)—I think the key thing here is that The Economist is digestible.

This means it’s finite. It’s a promise of a definitive digest in return for a commitment of time. It’s an odd equation: Give us some money and then we’ll give you back your time. (I’ve whittered on about attention being the scare commodity these days elsewhere.)

The other thing they point to in their critique is the web. The Economist folks aren’t link whores—linking in. They’re not link journalists—linking out.  (This doesn’t mean The Economist shouldn’t be online; it’s just that it shouldn’t try to be just another part of the big wide-web.)

There’s a lesson in here for all mainstream media. Well, several, actually:

• Don’t focus on eyeballs. Concentrate on attention. Your readers won’t thank you for wasting their time with more stuff to read. They want the digest.
• Don’t try to be trendy. The Economist looks little different than it did in the 1970s. That, actually, is the selling point.
• Online has lots of different opportunities. I don’t think they’ve made full use of them yet, but at least they haven’t thrown out the baby with the bathwater. That may prove the smartest thing they’ve done so far. As Hirschorn says in the TV clip, when you can get a subscription to a magazine for virtually nothing, what kind of commitment does that demonstrate (on either side?)

Hirschorn: The Economist Benefited From Being Semi Competent About the Web | paidContent

The Myth of Customization?

I noticed that the BBC website, one of the most trafficked news websites on the planet, is abandoning customization due to an apparent lack of interest. Instead of being able to choose between a UK version and an international version, all visitors will get the same homepage.

Steve Herrmann explains it thus:

So why bother with the change? Because the option allowing you to choose "site versions" (which relatively few of you actually chose to use) has started to lead to some potentially frustrating experiences for you, as well as some significant technical complications for us.

He says that one of the reasons for this is because of conflicting rights and legal issues to do with audio and video, which “has led to a growing number of potentially confusing results.”

But another reason is that it makes it easier to feed ads to overseas users:

The change also means that the advertising which you can see on our pages if you are outside the UK can be integrated around our pages without the need to change page formats for the UK version of the site.

Makes good economic sense. But to me the most telling thing about this is that users just weren’t using the customization enough. And not just the choosing the UK or international version, but the whole module thing that the BBC set up some time ago, allowing users to create a sort of iGoogle, or NetVibes homepage. Herrmann says that international users won’t be able to do this anymore but adds

[i]t was used by a relatively small number of you, but if you were one of them - I'm sorry, and please bear with us while we work on developing the site. We'll be looking at how to make the site customisable in other ways as part of that work.

This is all quite revealing. I’d suggest a couple of quite possible conclusions:

• Perhaps BBC website users don’t care so much about customization because they care more about what the BBC editors choose to be the news. In other words, part of the value in the content is the choice of that content, its placement, what is left in and taken out etc.
• Users just don’t have time to customize stuff. My long-running point is that the scarcity in news is now attention. If you insist on users taking up some of that attention time with customization—whether or not it may save them time in the long run—it does not seem to be an investment users are willing to make. (Unless, perhaps, they pay for it?)
• Customization is hard. It’s not easy to make it palatable and appealing to users.

BBC - The Editors: Changes to international pages

Technorati Tags: bbc,journalism,customization,media,new media,attention

The Context of Content, in the Back of a Fast-moving Cab

 

I was reading The Wall Street Journal in a cab on a BlackBerry just now and I realised what’s wrong with print media. It still hasn’t got that not everything is going to be read in a newspaper.

See this story about Gordon Brown. It might look good as the main story on the front page, but it looks and reads all wrong pretty much anywhere else:

U.K. Prime Minister Gordon Brown, beset by scandals and sniping from within his own party, on Wednesday faced a battle for political survival just two years after ascending to the country's top post.

Mr. Brown's fortunes, already slumping in recent months amid Britain's deep recession, have spiraled downward in recent days, hit by a series of political nightmares. Several top officials in the government of Mr. Brown's ruling Labour Party have been caught up in the embarrassing revelations about dubious expenses claimed by U.K. politicians of all stripes.

And it goes on it that vein for another dozen paragraphs. They’e all good paragraphs—I know, I’ve written or edited hundreds like them over 20 years--earnestly written and no doubt earnestly edited by a bevy of subs. But they’re not contextual to me, in the sense that they’re not how I want to get my information bumping along in a cab driven by a guy arguing with his wife on the phone at 10 pm on a Thursday evening.

Why not? Well, the truth is that this style of writing—thoughtful, ponderous, with lots of subordinate clauses--is stuck in the dark ages of journalism. Valiant efforts at freshness—beset, sniping, political survival, ascending, top post, fortunes, slumping, amid, spiraled, downward, hit, political nightmares, caught up, embarrassing revelations, dubious, all stripes—sound turgid and forced, merely highlighting how far journalistic writing has departed from the way that we speak.

Not that we ever really spoke like this, but in the old days it didn’t matter. Because then news was scarce, and us journalists were like monks/nuns or doctors, permitted our own way of communicating. And the pomposity of a newspaper somehow made pompous language more fitting.

But nowadays this sort of writing just looks, frankly, archaic. And because it’s so far from the way we speak, it is unsuited for the way that we likely read it—on BlackBerrys, on the net, on scrolling tickers, on Tweetdeck.

The language of journalism, in short, needs to catch up with the fact that we consume it now in dozens of different ways. A self-respecting radio or TV editor would re-write copy so it sounds realistic when spoken. Why is the same not being done for newspaper content?

Contextualized content—in every sense--is the future of media, I have no doubt. But some of that has to do with making the actual content something that is suited to the device upon which it’s being absorbed. A smart editor should be rewriting this stuff so that it sits well on the devices it is being pushed to.

The value of content lies, in part, in its sensitivity, for want of a better word, to the environment in which it is devoured (OK, consumed, but I try to avoid that word.)

If you don’t believe me try reading a good blog post on a portable device, and then compare it to something like the above.

U.K.'s Brown Faces Battle for Political Survival - WSJ.com

Into the Light

Part of my job is explaining the world of new/social media to old media veterans. It’s not easy, either because they’re very resistant to change, or because they tend to see the changes  being wrought on their industry as somehow different to the much bigger changes taking place.

It’s not a bunch of separate revolutions—it’s one revolution. For want of a better description, it’s not unlike the transition from the Dark Ages to the High Middle Ages. That’s perhaps overstating it, but compare, if you will, this small vignette.

I was chatting with a friend on Skype just now; he had returned to Canada to be with his ailing dad. I enquired more, and he told me his father had been at the Battle of Ortona, and still suffered from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.

I know something of PTSD, but I was ignorant of Ortona, so I looked it up while we chatted. There’s a great Wikipedia page on it, so I quickly got a sense of what his father had been through, back in 1943.

Then my friend sent me links—to a book written about it, which I could thumb through on Amazon and search for his name.

I was able to quickly learn a bit about the battle, about my friend’s father, and about his wounds, both external and internal. Then my friend sent me another link, this time to a YouTube page that showcased a movie about the battle.

Within a few clicks I was much, much more knowledgeable about what this man had gone through, made more personal by my friend’s messages that dropped through Skype:

All of the officers he trained with were killed. He was the only one left.

He has one pal left who is still alive from those days.

It’s easy to dismiss this all as just bite-sized knowledge, without depth or perspective. But nevertheless what we have at our finger tips is so much more than was possible a few years ago—so much so that it’s no exaggeration to say that the Internet offers wisdom over darkness to those who came before it.

And for the media? Well, it’s not really about news anymore. It’s about wisdom. Information grabbed when needed to assemble an insight. The dividing line now is not between those who have access to information—everyone, more or less, has access—but between those who have the skill and interest to be able to know what they’re looking for and to find it. And then, of course, digest it.

That has huge implications for media because it transforms the market for information. It doesn’t remove it—it transforms it. We haven’t figured out how.

But we have already reached, without really making a big fuss about it, a great point of leveling, where we all can claw our way out of ignorance, topic by topic, surprisingly quickly. Whether we want to is something else entirely.

Image from SDCinematografica.it

Technorati Tags: socialmedia,newspapers,journalism,information

Telling the Story in the Third Dimension

Technorati Tags: journalism,media,newspapers,infoviz,visualization,google earth,kml

The bitter end of the Tamil Tigers has been fought away from the news crews, but not the satellites.

But did we make the most of this technology to tell the story of human suffering and the end of a 35-year guerrilla movement?

A month ago the U.S. government released satellite images apparently showing how tens of thousands of Sri Lankan civilians had been squeezed into the last tract land held by the LTTE, a story covered somewhat cursorily by the media. This three paragraph piece from The Guardian, for example:

A week ago (May 12) Human Rights Watch issued its own report based on images it had commissioned from commercial satellites. The photos, the organisation said, “contradict Sri Lankan government claims that its armed forces are no longer using heavy weapons in the densely populated conflict area.”

The full report was available as a preliminary analysis, downloadable in PDF.

The report was carried by the BBC and others.

But I could find no one who had dug into the report to find a way to bring this remote tragedy closer to home.

For example, it could be as simple as double checking the images and coordinates given against Google Earth (easy enough; just enter the lat/long digits into Google Earth and see where they take you. HRW could have done a better job of providing the full coordinates here, to the full six decimal places--9.317999, for example—rather than the meager two they gave: 9.32.)

But a much better way of presenting the data lurks in a link on page four. Click on the link, and, if you’ve got Google Earth installed, the KML file (a KML file is a XML-based way of expressing geographic information that can be read by programs like Google Earth) will load a layer that tells the grim story in a different way.

The first is the most recent picture from Google Earth, dated 2005. As you can see, very little human habitation (click on each image to enlarge).

The one below is from May 6. A dense city has appeared in the meantime, with its own streets:

Four days later, most of it is gone:

Toggling between these images in Google Earth is a sobering experience. Of course, such imagery does not explain what exactly happened to these people, but it asks tougher questions than any talking head can. And yet CNN chose to focus on that, and on familiar footage of the war.

My point is this: we’re now in a world of three dimensions. We journalists can see things our predecessors couldn’t.

If I was an editor I would have mined that HRW report until I’d found a way to use their imagery to tell the story. Buried in that single, 50 KB KML file is a wealth of detail:

Which could have been used as time lapse, or juxtaposed over a map like the one the BBC used for its report:

The bottom line: We as journalists need to understand this kind of thing better so we know what is possible, what is doable, and, if nothing else, to be able to know that when we see a link to a KML file, we may be on the way to a treasure trove of information to help us tell the story.

Newspapers' Challenge, Part II

I’ve written before about how traditional media appears to be debasing itself in a desperate bid for eyeballs. That example was the IHT. This time it’s the WSJ (I declare an interest: I’m a former staffer and still undertake projects for them.)

Yesterday’s online Journal has a piece by one Mark Penn, opining about blogs:

In America today, there are almost as many people making their living as bloggers as there are lawyers. Already more Americans are making their primary income from posting their opinions than Americans working as computer programmers or firefighters.

An excellent deconstruction of his argument can be found at Read/Write Web.

I’m not here to contest the figures, though it looks like they do need contesting.

I’m here to question why someone who is the CEO of a PR firm is writing a piece in the WSJ that’s not properly flagged as such.

There’s no telling from the byline that he’s not a Wall Street Journal employee:

There’s no telling from the URL: indeed, it’s called article (rather than comment, blog, column, or somesuch in it: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124026415808636575.html

There’s no telling from the tagline at the bottom. In fact there’s no tagline at the bottom.

There’s a blurb at the side, buried beneath a list of his recent columns and above a “People who viewed this also viewed..” list:

Indeed, there’s absolutely nothing on the page to flag that this is a column written by someone who is not a reporter or editor and that his opinions do not represent anybody’s but his own’s or his company’s or his company’s clients.

If I had the time I’d take a closer look at who those clients are and how they may benefit from his pieces. But I shouldn’t have to do that. I buy the WSJ so I don’t have to. Or shouldn’t have to.

The WSJ should clearly flag, at each and every opportunity, that this is someone who is not being edited by them—I hope, at least—and that the opinions being expressed have absolutely nothing to do with the journalistic reputation of the paper.

But the bottom line is the same as that for the other piece I wrote: that traditional newspapers are doing themselves, and their remaining readers, a great disservice by mistaking externally sourced commentary as content, and mistaking quantity for quality.

The sad thing is that someone will think this column—with its 27 comments and ripostes in places like Read/Write Web and Huffington Post—is a success, elevating WSJ.com to the level of a cool social media site. No, guys, it doesn’t. It just means you’re becoming no different from all the commentary that’s out there, dubiously motivated and free of the basic principles of our profession.

America's Newest Profession: Blogging; Mark Penn, WSJ.com - WSJ.com