Comments on: “Newsless”?

By: A Prescription for Journalism « Journalism

A Prescription for Journalism « Journalism — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 20:23:50 +0000

[...] A Prescription for Journalism Posted in Ethics, Future of Journalism, Journalism by James Rowe on September 10, 2009 The goal Matt Thompson takes for his fellowship at the Reynolds Journalism Institute at the University of Missouri is enormous. He began with Newsless.org. He explains in his own words in his inaugural post. [...]

By: The Shocking Truth About Journalism, Activism, and the Healthcare Reform Debate « The Levisa Lazer

Sat, 05 Sep 2009 13:44:14 +0000

[...] Yes. Basically my whole goal in creating a site like this is to bring some context to the issue of healthcare [...]

By: Old Forest, New Trees » Blog Archive » Online news should be replayable

Mon, 27 Jul 2009 07:00:45 +0000

[...] It’s a problem that can be solved. [...]

By: Michael Josefowicz

Michael Josefowicz — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 20:23:20 +0000

Terry,
We agree. The art of journalism is similar to the art of writing history. How to nest an event within a series of events to make a plausible narrative. I thought the cloud was interesing as one more piece that is falling into place.

By: Terry_Steichen

Terry_Steichen — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 15:24:29 +0000

@Michael-
Document clouds are certainly interesting, and if they do what we hope they will, it will make reporters' jobs easier. Unfortunately, however, they don't really help us to solve the context challenge.

I think that most participants in this blog generally agree that news consumers want not just to be informed about events happening in the world around them, but also to better understand what that event means – in other words, they want context.

In the pursuit of developing ways to add context to news, it's easy to get pursuit of that goal confused with the related but different task of locating background material. DocumentCloud and other repositories seek to offer a richer set of more easily retrieved background material.

However, no matter how easy it might be to retrieve it, the background for the individual article still has to be written and that takes more effort on the part of journalists.

But even if the background is added, readers aren't going to want to wade through essentially the same background on every article covering a related event. What they want is background that they can access if and when they want it.

That means the background information must be independent from the news articles itself. It also means you need to organize the background information by categories that are meaningful, and you have to determine which categories are meaningful to each article.

And all of this brings you right back to square one.

By: Michael Josefowicz

Michael Josefowicz — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 14:10:44 +0000

I wanted to share a link I found this am. I think it is another step closer to using the Cloud in the way that Matt has been arguing for since I got here"

The New York Times and ProPublica are looking into doing something similar through DocumentCloud, which would be a place for reporters to store documents they gather during reporting for other newsrooms to use.

The link:http://www.collegemediainnovation.org/blog/2009/0...

FYI, I've been asked to do a bimonthly post as the "Print Correspondent" for http://www.pbs.org/ideala My first column is supposed to go live late in the day today. The FYI is that I put in links to newsless.org and proposed a scheme to raise some money for Everyblock. Keep an eye on your RSS.

By: Michael Josefowicz

Michael Josefowicz — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 20:24:04 +0000

make sense. My interest is to get closer to distribute and print. My other interest is to help figure out how good journalism can benefit from web tech so that more money can be focused on creating and supporting great journalists.

By: Terry Steichen

Terry Steichen — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 20:00:21 +0000

@Michael –
By "tagging" I presume you mean the identification of new concepts and teaching/tuning the associated classifiers? If so, the answer is yes.

Over time, you'll probably also want to retire some classifiers, because interest in the concept/topic has waned. And you'll want to occasionally redefine a concept (expanding or narrowing its scope) and the associated classifier.

Please keep in mind that doing these things isn't possible with all classifiers, and much of the detailed information about the technology is quite proprietary. Publicly, the vendors will say "no problem." The reality, however, gets a lot more complicated. (At the same time, the technology is improving all the time, and I've been out of the loop for a couple of years, so there may be additional capabilities out there by now.)

Full disclosure: I am an independent inventor and have a couple of pending patents bearing directly or indirectly on this issue.

By: Michael Josefowicz

Michael Josefowicz — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 19:29:32 +0000

Terry,
Am I correct that the process of tagging can be ongoing as long as previous tags were not eliminated?

By: Michael Josefowicz

Michael Josefowicz — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 19:26:40 +0000

Fascinating. Given that there is virtually no cost to blog real estate, and I don't think we are sidetracking any other discussion, perhaps Matt, our host, could weigh in to see if it's ok to hang around and keep it right here. i would prefer it because there are lots of really smart lurkers. Terry would this be ok with you if Matt agrees? If not, send me an email "offline"

Matt?