Innovative media needs better technology

Excellent insights into programmers working for or as journalists, the value of content management systems in attracting writers who want to publish for the digital age, and agile media startups who are able to innovate quickly because they are free of the shackles of print journalism.

Apr 6, 2014 - NY Times - Vox Takes Melding of Journalism and Technology to a New Level

Ask Ezra Klein what prompted him to leave a high-profile position at The Washington Post to start a new website, and the answer is a little wonkish.

It was, in essence, about content management systems, Mr. Klein said.

“We were badly held back not just by the technology, but by the culture of journalism,”

he said of daily newspapers, as he offered a preview of his new site, Vox.com, which was introduced Sunday night.

While The Post is an excellent publication, he said, he felt that the conventions of newspaper print journalism in general, with its commitment to incremental daily coverage, were reflected in publishing systems, which need first and foremost to meet the needs of printing a daily paper.

That end of that last sentence is baffling in 2014.

My February 2014 thought

Producing a printed newspaper wastes money and slows innovation. If an old newspaper company feels the need to produce a printed product to "serve" the public, then that company should spin-off a small group of writers, editors, designers, and other tech people, and give the group its own company name and budget, and allow them to operate like a startup, creating new products for producing and sharing journalism. If successful, then eventually, the old wing of the company transitions completely to the new. If it fails, well, at least they tried.

Back to the Apr 6, 2014 NY Times story:

So in January, when he and his colleagues announced they would join Vox Media with the aim of creating a site bigger and broader than Wonkblog, it seemed to be another watershed in the news business: a moment when young talent began demanding superior technology as the key to producing superior journalism.

With printing to paper either a non-existent thought or a significant afterthought.

Technology has become crucial to every newsroom, of course, but not all technology has been designed equally. News organizations born in the print era have generally knit together disparate systems over the years to produce websites that integrate graphics, social media and reader comments with various degrees of smoothness.

Many all-digital organizations have built their content management systems from the ground up with the Internet in mind. That strategy, many say, produces a more organic melding of journalism and technology.

A little about Vox Media's CMS:

In this high-tech universe, Vox Media’s content management system — which even has its own name, Chorus, and is used to publish all the company’s websites — has earned recognition. It is credited with having a toolset that allows journalists to edit and illustrate their copy in dramatic fashion, promote their work on social media, and interact with readers — all seamlessly and intuitively.

Reporters and multimedia journalists say the enhanced technology of Chorus enables them to do things like make photos appear as a cursor slides down a page; add links automatically to copy; and identify problem commentators through word identification.

“Most journalists hate their content management systems,”

said Melissa Bell, who was director of platforms at The Post before she left with Mr. Klein to join Vox.

Chorus does not fix everything, of course, said Jim Bankoff, Vox Media’s ambitious chief executive, but it is sexy enough to be a recruiting tool. “For this generation of talent, which grew up digitally, having the proper tools to ply their craft is essential,” he said in a recent interview. “Being able to offer them the best possible platform to achieve their goals is a great advantage.”

Like Mr. Klein, the founders of all those sites confirmed that Chorus was crucial to their decision to team with Vox. Josh Topolsky, editor in chief of The Verge, came over in 2011 after growing frustrated with the limits of the computer system at Engadget, an AOL technology publication.

“From a storytelling perspective it couldn’t be accomplished in any other place that I have seen.” - [Josh Topolsky]

The company’s attitude toward content management has its roots in the basement of Trei Brundrett, now Vox’s chief product officer. It was there that he and some partners developed SB Nation, a sports blogging website that became wildly popular when it was introduced nine years ago.

Mr. Brundrett and his crew cast themselves as equal parts journalists and software developers.

Because SB Nation needed a platform where sports fans could communicate with one another, the team created word-recognition software that would help police comments. Because it covered live sports events, it created an organizational tool, called story stream, that allowed editors to click and drag relevant material — from previous stories, Twitter posts or commentary by the writers — all into one continuous flow.

Developers at Vox Media call themselves journalists and work continually with writers and reporters to build the tools they require.

Mr. Klein, hoping to avoid incrementalism — “the biggest source of waste is everything the journalist has written before today,” he said — instead wants his journalists responsible for constantly updating pages that are the ultimate resource on a topic.

“It would be like a wiki page written by one person with a little attitude,”

Ms. Bell explained.

To help accomplish this, the developers have been building a tool they call the card stack. The cards, trimmed in brilliant canary yellow, contain definitions of essential terms that a reader can turn to if they require more context.

For example, a story updating the battle over the Affordable Care Act might include cards explaining the term “insurance exchange.”

Ms. Bell said Vox.com would start with roughly 20 reporters with expertise around specific topics, a limited travel budget, and, of course, very inchoate¹ technology.

TechCrunch - May 2012 - A Closer Look At Chorus, The Next-Generation Publishing Platform That Runs Vox Media

A bit more about Vox in general:

[Vox's] largest demographic is educated households headed by individuals under 35 years old with incomes over $100,000.

Perhaps more important for its long-term survival, Vox’s formats attract attention directly, so the site does not have to turn to gimmicky features like quizzes, teasing headlines or lists to generate traffic through Facebook or Twitter.

For a while now, I've been interested in new media startups led by Greenwald, Silver, and Klein. All three approach journalism differently. I looked forward to Silver's data-backed and more logically-focused stories. And I've been looking forward to Klein's explanatory, wiki-like journalism.

Data, logic, wiki, writing, storytelling, those have been features that I've longed for in journalism. We'll see if these new ventures satisfy.

A media team could be comprised of:

• computer programmers
• designers
• database admins
• data analysts
• writers
• editors
• photographers
• videographers
• illustrators

I always wonder about local versions of new media projects. Could ideas from national media projects be applied to local media? Definitely.

Vox - Apr 6, 2014 - Welcome to Vox - a work in progress

Today marks phase two of Vox’s launch: the beginning of our effort to build the vast repository of information that will make it possible for us to explain the news in real time.

At the core of this phase are the Vox Cards. They’re inspired by the highlighters and index cards that some of us used in school to remember important information. You’ll find them attached to articles, where they add crucial context; behind highlighted words, where they allow us to offer deeper explanations of key concepts; and in their stacks, where they combine into detailed — and continuously updated — guides to ongoing news stories.

We’re launching this fast for one simple reason: there is no better way to figure out the best way to do explanatory journalism on the web than to do explanatory journalism on the web.

The site we have today isn't perfect, and it isn't anywhere near complete — not editorially, and not technologically. Poking around this evening, or this week, or this month, you may notice a few things seem missing. We don't have commenting features on most articles. We don't have a menu bar. We're woefully lacking in snazzy data visualizations. We have some card stacks on key topics in the news, but there are many, many more left to build.

At the same time, we didn't want to delay the parts of the site we had ready. We're launching today because three more weeks or three more months or 30 more months will not produce a perfect website. We’ll always be a work in progress.

Vox's idea of "cards" reminds me of my January 2014 post that excerpted from a Medium.com story titled Two sides to every story - A vision for a new way to publish journalism.

My idea is that each story should be published on a HTML5 “card” that has two sides. On the front side of that card would be the story itself, with no bells and whistles. It would just be headline, byline, text, and perhaps a large image. That stripped-back experience would encourage uninterrupted reading, which I think is an undervalued quality.

However, as a reader, I love extra context when I get to the end of a story. If I’ve been moved by a piece of journalism, I’ll often look up the Wikipedia entry for the story’s subject or the chief protagonist. I’ll go to YouTube to see footage of the event in question. I’ll look for other work by the same author, and perhaps even buy one of her books. I might even listen to a podcast interview with the author to find out what she was thinking while she wrote the story. And sometimes, moved by the protagonist’s plight, I’ll donate money to the cause. All this stuff could live on the back side of the story card.

This back side of the card would be the platform part of the product, and it would lend itself to money-making in several ways.

A publisher might also choose to open the back side of the card to third-party developers who might build relevant widgets or apps.

https://twitter.com/voxdotcom

https://www.facebook.com/Vox

¹ in·cho·ate - adjective - "just begun and so not fully formed or developed." - syn: rudimentary, undeveloped, immature, embryonic, fledgling.

#media - #startup - #cms - #wiki - #cards - #blog_jr