1. Redefining quality:

We are seeing a huge increase in the quantity of content, but old markers of quality need to be redefined in this new era. Journalists are having to deploy traditional skills in new configurations and at different speeds, as well as sharing parts of their role to their networks on Twitter and elsewhere. Curation, facilitation and amplification are becoming core skills, alongside new forensic techniques for evaluating the accuracy and reliability of information. This could mesh powerfully with long-standing approaches within media development, such as foregrounding the perspectives and demands of those on the front lines of poverty and marginalisation, or increasing the diversity of sources. It’s incumbent on the media development community to engage with these new modes of doing journalism, and to help to shape the new markers of quality and value.

2. A new ethics of information and communication

When billions can communicate in real-time through text, audio and images, and images formerly seen only within a country’s borders or by a select few are now available instantly around the world, media literacy and information ethics become ever more important. Ethical practices in journalism are part of the picture, but it’s bigger than that – it’s more fundamentally about how we communicate, how we film, photograph, document our and others’ lives, and how we share this information, for example on social media networks. [Update: A journalist wonders, for example, about the ethics of using material posted to social networks, and whether there might be a signal of intention missing between "public' and "private".] Services like Facebook are trying to make it as easy and “frictionless” to share content as possible, but might “friction” – for example, considering whether I really should post that picture – be a good thing? And as more and more citizens acquire the ability to stream live video, for example, how will technology providers, regulators, NGOs, media, and citizens respond? How will “local cultural sensitivities” change and adapt in a truly globalised communication environment? Several of our interviewees suggested that looking at these issues through the lens of human rights provides a robust new basis for a new information ethics. Alongside these ethics, we will need to rethink how and when we might extend, for example, some of the statutory protections afforded to journalists to others engaging in similar work, but not affiliated with publications, and not working in traditional media forms. How might this benefit governance, for example? [Update: Here's a case from December 2011 where a blogger invoked, but was judged not to have followed professional practices necessary to, statutory legal protections journalists might have access to.]

3. Privacy, identity and technology are inextricable

Our privacy, our identities and our technology are increasingly linked and bound up with each other. Participating in new networked technology – using a mobile phone, having a Facebook profile, using a free email service – and taking advantage of its social aspects means trading aspects of your privacy, and linking formerly separate parts of your identity. Doing this unwittingly, whether you are an activist, official or journalist, presents new types of risks. It is clear that neither policy-makers nor civil society organisations understand these technologies well enough, if at all, or how they work – and therefore their understanding of the vulnerabilities and risks inherent in them is cloudy at best. We all need to understand these technologies, the people that build them, and the impacts they have better – whether by learning the basics of computer code, or about how mobile phones work, or how data is collected on web users – rather than seeing them as somehow “magical” or dismissing them as insubstantial. [Here's one excellent analysis, from October 2011, of how journalists could do better, by OSI Fellow Christopher Soghoian.]

3. All our eggs in one privately-owned basket

Technology, and video increasingly, is a critical part of civil society’s infrastructure. We need to invest continually in making sure civil society has the capacity to use it effectively, as it can magnify the impact of resources, mitigate isolation, act as a protection and so on. But as I have noted, it’s also a risk generator… Much civil society content is stored on private commercial web services, some of whom have less than stellar records on protecting freedom of expression. This content is also vulnerable when commercial web services are shut down – in these circumstances these services rarely consider donating their content to a public domain site like Archive.org [non-profits also fail to do this, but they host far less of other people's content]. Content is also vulnerable to takedown on the grounds of copyright – parodies, an honourable tradition in internet video, for example, are especially vulnerable to poltically-motivated copyright takedown. But copyright policy debates are dominated by the film, music and publishing industries and by polarised rhetoric, and policy-makers rarely have access to a balanced set of research and resources to help guide digital-era policy. We’re in the early days of addressing this public/private conundrum – and media development practitioners and donors might have helpful lessons to share from their experiences of more inclusive definitions of the public interest, bridging public and private media.

4. Agility

Programming cycles in civil society are too long and inflexible, and unsuited to the nature of more fluid and iterative project development (some might say, to the nature of reality.) Whether this is a result of donor requests for deeper and more robust evidence of impact, or some other root-cause, it is leading in some cases to risk aversion, and to a fear and masking of failure. Venture capitalists and technologists thrive on acknowledging and understanding failure – civil society and donors need to own up to, understand and use failures much more clearly, especially in the iterative ICT domain, which rarely responds well to rigid long-term logframes… Similarly, legislative cycles are too long and unwieldy to be able to cope adequately with new developments in technology and new uses for technologies. It means that policy coherence is fractured across and between different domains of government and intergovernmental policy, and that legal and regulatory mechanisms are increasingly out of step with the reality of practice. And legal communities and judiciaries around the world (here in the UK too) need to understand these developments better too, not least in helping to develop evidentiary standards for social media.

5. Civil Society

I’ve already said a lot about civil society, but here’s something specific that came out of a lot of the interviews: civil society needs to collaborate more and to compete less when it comes to the internet and the media. Civil society’s collective knowledge, understanding, networks and influence are enormous – CSOs are among the most trusted organisations and institutions in the world. But lack of coordination, lack of collectiveness, and lack of forward-planning are hampering this potential influence. We need to infuse spaces (and the companies that own them) such as YouTube, Twitter and Facebook with the human rights ethics and values we espouse, but at the same time, we need to learn from other sectors in becoming more fluid, more porous and more collaborative – and if we are to exercise more credible influence, we need to understand the technologies and spaces we are talking about better, in the same way we understand trade negotiations, or HIV/AIDS, or the environment – or indeed, governance.

6. Donors

Finally, a word about donors. Donors – whether governments, foundations, individual philanthropists or crowd-funding sites – need to be more mindful and less risk averse in how they approach and evaluate funding for human rights and ICTs. They need to help rethink the programmatic model for a more complex, instant age, bring together groups of grantees more systematically, and function more clearly as brokers of ideas and as field-builders and -strengtheners. They also need to use their long and evolving understanding of M&E to help build less burdensome, more shared systems for documenting and measuring the effects of what they fund. Interviewees also called on donors to fund the development of a more systematic evidence base in this field. Finally, they need to use their long experience to help peers and grantees to avoid repeating mistakes of the past, particularly in instrumentalising, or “harnessing” the internet. [Here's a presentation I gave a few months later with recommendations from the final report on what donors can do specifically.]

Knowledge management, fact-checking in news organisations

Three Newsfoo discussions in particular prompted this post (alongside Baratunde‘s reminder to us all that The Onion has fact-checkers):
- Jonathan Stray asked first how news organisations could implement better knowledge management as they gather and process information – in a sense, a “context layer” for the web. As one person put it in another discussion, “the process of journalism is very lossy”, in that a lot of labour-intensive, useful information gathered in the process of doing journalism never gets used, or stored and made available to others to search or build on.
- Dan Schultz and Sasha Costanza-Chock talked about how to provide a “truth and credibility layer” for news consumers when they interact with journalism: how do you know if a statement reported online is true or not?
- a range of participants came together for a session specifically on fact-checking, looking in part of how Politifact works, and other initiatives (like this) enabling quite granular analysis of political and business discourse and reporting.

Also, a week before Newsfoo, Craig Newmark had posted on how he’s extremely dissatisfied with the state of fact-checking [UPDATE: and a new post from Craig Newmark at Nieman Lab continues to argue that fact-checking and -challenging is a critical part of how news organisations earn, retain and grow trust]. And a week ago, Ethan Zuckerman wrote helpfully about Morningside Analytics’ work on the US online fact-checking ecosystem, and Lucas Graves’ work on the landscape of fact-checking in the US. There’s a lot of discussion about the state of fact-checking generally at the moment, so I won’t retread the discussions had in these sessions at Newsfoo (not least since there was a fair amount of FrieNDA.)

So read on for a list of resources mentioned in these Newsfoo sessions, along with some others I’ve added to round things out a bit – I hope it’s of use. Most of these are US/UK only – who’s doing this in other parts of the world, in other languages? Thoughts? Additions? Let me know through the comments box!

–> making information gathered during the news/research process more useful
- SoundNote helps journalists, researchers and others link their text notes to raw audio. It’s a little like a LiveScribe pen, but as an iPad app. This all reminds me of Matt Thompson’s Speakularity - what happens when all audio and video content is automatically transcribed and collaboratively corrected and annotated?
- Palantir and their video explainers - Jonathan called Palantir’s knowledge management technology “state of the art”, and wondered whether this (or something like it) could be adapted for use by journalists, in addition to the existing government/intelligence and finance products, if it’s as secure as Palantir claim. Would this allay Christopher Soghoian’s fears about journalists and information security? In a similar vein, I’d also ask whether this could be used for human rights organisations, especially resource- and technology-poor ones worldwide.
- Jonathan also recommended reading Tim Berners-Lee on the Semantic Web - rather than an automated, algorithmic system that analyses the world for us, he conceives it as a better way for us of annotating the world.
- DocumentCloud came up at the previous Newsfoo as a key tool for journalists to share and annotate source material they have used in their journalism. Lots of people are talking about how to establish reputation for individuals online – commenters, journalists, and so on – but what about the source material itself? Do we need a score a bit like PageRank or some kind of citation analysis embedded in a piece of journalism to help readers to see how influential a piece of source material has been?
- And from the Mozilla Festival a few weeks before Newsfoo, a handbook for data-driven journalism is underway (version 0.1 here)
- a suggestion was also discussed to combine elements of knowledge management with fact-checking, by creating a simple checklist for journalists submitting articles to fill out as part of the workflow: have you put your source documents on DocumentCloud? Have you provided links to your online sources? Is this based on a press release? And so on… News organisations could choose to make any or all of this public for users to help them decide what to read.

–> fact-checking statements made by politicians and the media
- TruthSquad is a community-powered fact-checking system, aimed at fact-checking statements from all parties in the 2012 US Elections. It builds on previous experiments by NewsTrust: “Our first pilot took place the week of August 2nd, 2010, with the help of our partners at the Poynter Institute and our advisors at FactCheck.org [...]. Check our findings from this pilot on the NewsTrust blog — and the article from Read Write Web on NYTimes.com. At the end of 2010, we conducted a second pilot with MediaBugs.org and RegretTheError.com, focusing on statements from reporters or commentators (not politicians). In September 2011, we started a third pilot, to test our new fact-checking form and experiment with new types of claims.”
- NewsTransparency is a similarly community-driven site that focuses on individual journalists rather than facts. Both Poynter and a commenter (rather more forcefully) on the Knight Center at UT blog have expressed concerns about how easy it might be to misuse this kind of reputational system.
- Politifact aims to provide citizens with a rapid idea of whether a statement made by a politician is true, partly true or false. Here’s more about the service and how it works, and here’s their team. It’s part of the St Petersburg Times in Florida – which exercised Gawker this week, after the site announced its Lie of the Year, stoking a lot of controversy among liberal commentators in the US.
- Truth Goggles is a browser plugin being developed by Dan Schultz at MIT Media Lab, and uses sites like NewsTrust and Politifact to tell a reader whether statements made in an article are true or not – this is a deliberate limitation, he says, as he’s focusing on the user side, rather than the data source side. Dan talked about the need for a “truth and credibility layer” when reading or watching news online – here’s Dan’s introduction to the project, and here’s The Register’s take. Dan’s also working on a project called ATTNSPAN.
- Hypothes.is is a new non-profit initiative looking to bring sentence-level collaborative annotation of information and writing on the web – it’s based on an emerging open standard for annotations.  They’re looking for Fellows who can help them develop a robust reputation-modelling system (application deadline is Wednesday, 4th January 2012).
- The Washington Post and the UK’s Channel 4 News both have fact-checking blogs, and Ben Goldacre has written a science fact-checking column in The Guardian for years now. I’m sure there are plenty of examples of this kind of watchdogging (as Ethan’s post on Lucas Graves mentions).
- DisputeFinder (part of Intel’s wonderfully named Confrontational Computing team, which researched how people argue on the web) – a now-defunct Firefox extension that helped readers identify disputed claims online (via Dan Schultz).
- SpinSpotter, also defunct, was cited as an example of how not to do this…
- and no list would be complete without Snopes - an old stalwart of online myth-busting, with some journalistic moments. Very useful for cross-checking email scams, hoaxes (and for telling your mother that the email she just forwarded to 300 people is in fact a hoax.)
UPDATE (22 Dec) – Here’s a tool proposed by NewsMotion.org for rating contributions to journalism on the web: ReticulatorUPDATE (9 Jan 2012) – Global campaigning community Avaaz is soon to launch a news service, and is advertising for a fact-checker.

–> tracking, mapping and visualising hidden things
- Muckety maps and let you explore “relationships of the rich and powerful”. Here’s more about the team behind it, and here are some of their sources. If you want to use it, you need to license it.
- Little Sis is broadly similar (more about them, their team and their list of source data) but takes an open-source, partly wiki approach, has a few training videos for would-be contributors, and provides an API. They provide highlights from their data via their blog.
- Poligraft allows you to plug in the text or URL of a news article, blog post or press release, and it will show you “an enhanced view of the interconnections between the people, organisations and relationships mentioned in the piece.” It’s got a bookmarklet you can use too. This reminds me a little of the Media Standards Trust’s Churnalism tool, which allows you to put in the URL or text of a news article, and tells you (in theory) what percentage of it is recycled from press releases.
- Truthy is a meme tracker for Twitter – it’s based at Indiana University, and “helps you understand how memes spread online. We collect tweets from Twitter and analyze them. With our statistics, images, movies, and interactive data, you can explore these dynamic networks.” (The Guardian used a similar idea in a journalistic context, but built it a different way.) Here’s more about Truthy.
- I tweeted a link to Sentinel Visualizer Software, which is being used by human rights organisation Videre to analyse patterns of incidents and abuses – I’d be interested to see journalistic instances of this or similar tools.
- and it’s easy to forget that someone owns the way we search for information – CommonCrawl, by contrast, is a truly open crawl of the web – here’s where they are headed next.

Today/tomorrow in London it’s the UK Foreign Office’s London Conference on Cyberspace (programme) – which seems heavy on cybersecurity, anti-hacking, and cybercrime, but opened this morning with a long panel on internet freedom featuring, among others, one of my wife’s Article19 colleagues, Barbora Bukovska. I’ll be there on Wednesday, with a particular interest in the session on Safe and Reliable Access.

In Mexico City on Wednesday and Thursday, the Data Protection and Privacy Commissioners are meeting to discuss Privacy: the Global Age (programme PDF). I’m intrigued to see where this goes after following its previous iterations in Madrid and Jerusalem. Visual privacy still seems a little off the agenda, in particular – and with the rise in consumer-driven face-recognition, this seems like a massive missed opportunity. And interested to see also how Stephen Deadman of Vodafone approaches moderating his panel on Mobile Privacy in the light of widespread criticism of Vodafone earlier this year during the Egyptian revolution. Sadly I won’t be in Mexico City alongside another of my wife’s Article 19 colleagues, Dave Banisar (see his global RTI law map) sampling the chapulines… The Public Voice held a related civil society meeting yesterday, and the OECD is holding one on privacy frameworks today.

And then, on Friday, Saturday and Sunday, it’s London’s turn again for the Mozilla Festival. This promises a totally different tone and approach to the previous two – focused more on the possibilities of openness, collaboration, innovation – and should be fascinating. (No time to go to this either, however…) Lots of very interesting people there (more here), and here’s what they’re talking about.

[ADDED] Also NewsXchange is happening in Portugal right now. Always worth following along to get a sense of what is happening across news industries around the world.

(I’ll post up relevant summaries, video etc if and when these appear.)

You can watch the video live here, or follow the tireless Katherine Maher’s liveblog here. And we’ll try to take questions via Twitter for about 20 minutes after the panel ends at the hashtag #rightscon.

(After the panel, I’ll add any videos or resources we bring up or show into this page.)

Visual content and human rights - Content has changed our world, how do we manage its impact on society, governance, and privacy?

Panelists:
Sam Gregory, Program Director, WITNESS
Thor Halvorssen, Founder, Oslo Freedom Forum
Victoria Grand, Director, Global Communications and Policy, YouTube
Hans Eriksson, CEO, Bambuser

I’ll be drawing in part on Cameras Everywhere, but what topics and issues would you like me to raise with these panelists? Let me know either via a comment below, or tweet me.

Most of us think of Newton as a mathematician, a physicist, an astronomer, striking out into new territories of shared, incremental, testable knowledge, whereas Newton spent the greater part of his time on studying and writing about the Bible (.doc), alchemy, and the occult – elite, hidden, controversial (as a Christian, he is widely held to have been an Arian).  He studied, for example, alchemical motifs like the Greene Lyon, and helped to sponsor an expedition in search of dragons in the Swiss Alps.  Gravitation was, in a way, a side-project – something he came up with in his 20% time.

Some of the discussions (in many, many settings – not specifically at Newsfoo) about how to pay for journalism feel to me at times more akin to a theological, doctrinal conversation about waning belief-systems than one intent on discovering the intrinsic natural forces that surround and govern our work.  That’s undoubtedly more due to my own limitations than the problems of the conversation, but I think it’s worth asking those wiser than I am:

What’s our Greene Lyon? And what’s the 20% time project that becomes gravity?

This rather lengthy post was my first maladroit assay, yesterday.

At Newsfoo, a session on long-form journalism prompted me to think later that maybe we should have been talking instead about immersive journalism.

There was in the session an anxiety (my reading) that long-form journalism as an important way of capturing and understanding the world, is in danger – because it’s expensive, labour-intensive to produce, takes a long time to read, and takes up a lot of space in print and, in a different way, online.  The discussion ranged over the changing nature of news content and changing settings and habits of news consumption – and the impact this has on how we apportion our attention.  Within the ecosystem of online news, information and comment, I got the feeling that the lapidary status update (and in other settings the SMS) was being regarded as the increasingly sharp-elbowed atom/pixel of news and information, hustling other, more stately forms to the back of the queue.  If attention is “shortening” – whether deterministically because of the volume, variety and velocity of the stream (I think of our period as that of Strom und Drang - the stress of the stream), or because the market wills it, or because because because because… – either way, this was Kryptonite to those seeking to do or foster long-form journalism.  (It may be helpful, as a tech-free counterweight, to cite Julian Barratt, of The Mighty Boosh: “Having kids means relaxing is a different thing for me now. Today, finishing an article in a newspaper is like going to a rave.”  He and I both have young twin boys.)

Finding a way in which to deliver existing long-form journalism to readers seemed to rest primarily on time-shifted reading services like Instapaper, Read It Later, Evernote, or favouriting long articles to read later.  I myself do this a lot, but am struggling not to overburden my Instapaper (I don’t have a commute at the moment), in the same way that my delicious bookmarks became almost an unusable index of my own deferred attention online, rather than a library or annotation of key resources.  But, as I say, I’m interested by the immersion, not so much by the length per se.  Is there a news journalism that exists and unfolds according to its own time (like *cough* Wagner), and that publics would tolerate, consume, and even sustain?  Starting out with the contrast drawn between the atomised stream and long-form work, both for journalism and for those that reading/watching/listening to it, I’m wondering whether this is still a helpful distinction, whether it reflects and relates to the way many of us experience information landscapes now, and if not, whether/how the form of news more broadly itself might need to change.

The time-shift solution had as its corollary the discussion of “contexts”, in this case meaning (for a handful of meanings of “context” were circulating over the weekend, and particularly in the session on “context”) the settings in which the journalism is to be read: how the content for a morning commute on a phone might differ from that for a work lunch-break on a laptop, or for an iPad in bed.  How might the form, the presentation, the content itself change and adapt to these settings?  Would my device, or a service on it learn, for example, that on my morning commute, I click on, but never finish any article over the length of 500 words, and therefore stop presenting me with these?  Would it learn that during lunchtime at work, I only have 20 minutes to read, usually about Tottenham Hotspur, and therefore it should autopackage a set about Spurs consumable within that timeslot.   And so on.  And would this mean that content would need to be re-written, re-edited not just for different delivery mechanisms or devices, but also for different contexts – and with instructions to the device to create the optimal type of immersiveness appropriate to the context (mute email, SMS, tweets, etc)?

It sounds nice – like a Masa to one’s Erast Petrovich Fandorin. So much more than a butler – an aide-de-camp, a retainer, an info-bouncer, an enabler of efficiency, and therefore of deeper concentration, purer flow, and higher reflection.  Opening one’s third eye to the news chakras.

But I’m not so interested in talking at the moment about the technology first and foremost, the adaptations it forces from us or enables us to make.  It’s clearly significant in the ascent of man to be able to imagine, pinpoint and serve a community of those who spend 19-27 minutes reading Malcolm Gladwell pieces at stool in the early morning – but it doesn’t tell us why they read Gladwell at that time particularly, or what effect it has.  But I’m wondering whether, in amongst the discussions about the delivery mechanisms, the time-slots, the format, presentation and targeting of content, I missed the discussions on the broader question of function and purpose.  I was rather jetlagged, so it is very possible.

The media, and journalism in particular, and news journalism perhaps most of all, has had plenty of time in technology-rich societies to metabolise the scale and scope of the changes being talked about (the clue was in “seismic” – not everything, or everyone, is left standing after an earthquake).  At its worst, the discourse of innovation has overpowered responses to these changes.  The further multi-skilling of reporters, the thinning of the butter onto further platforms and outlets, the doctrine that “everyone can be a reporter”, the mandatory incorporation of performative interactivity, has left much news, for me, in its current persistent formats and formulae, emptied out of itself, an ever more imperfect representation of and mirror to the world in all its multiplicities it purports to report on and inform us about.

I’m describing of course the thin slice of the audiovisual and text-based news media with which I interact – it’s largely in English, from the UK or US, filigreed periodically with local media from elsewhere and in other languages.  Mostly online or in print, a little radio, a little TV.  Some is re-mediated through blogs or other online media.  It’s also coloured by my professional work over the past decade in several locations around the world with local journalists, researchers and activists.

A word uttered a lot at Newsfoo – and more widely in other venues dissecting news, journalism, documentary and the new information landscape – is authenticity.  Again, like context, it’s a word that suffers a lot of slippage, and covers a multitude of ideologies.  In reading a draft of this post, Matt Bernius challenged me to ask how, in relation to the news media, the presumption of authenticity (and therefore authority?) was established in the first place.  He suggested that mass printing technology in the early 19th century both created publics, and manufactured a type of authenticity within those publics – meaning these publics consented to how each particular publication represented the world, trusting its description of events, and reinforcing its version of the truth.  I’m OK with that as one working idea – there are others I’ll return to at another time.

Now there’s a (partly manufactured) binarised tension between new forms of media, personal, direct, real-time, visual, chaotic, conversational, incremental, and the institutional media.  The former are assumed, because of their supposed directness, permeability, accessibility, informality, to be somehow inherently more authentic, and the latter maligned for an ever more frail fiction that they can present “all the news that’s fit to print”, in what, in the past, would have been seen as authoritative, regular, chargeable doses.

It’s not that news media are incapable of coping with the shifting sands of authenticity.  Many within these same established publications and outlets understand this far better than I do, and are making sometimes extraordinarily good content that combines the best of having an established institution and audience with clear-eyed, far-sighted curation (the information filtering, summarising, synthesising and stitching that makes for one possible emerging shape to authority now) of a wide range and diversity of sources.  Alexis Madrigal, to whose work I was introduced while at Newsfoo, is a good example – exploratory, iterative, curious.  And long-form journalism still provides immersive experiences – if not always Wagnerian, then Mogwai.

Given the increasingly manifest, explicit complexities of the world around us, part of the crisis of journalism, I think, lies in this increasing parallax between the world as increasing numbers of individuals and communities perceive it, through a vastly expanded and diversified information landscape, and the declining ability of institutional media systematically to ingest, cohere and represent the world around us in a way we can still consent to as truthful.   Has the utility (for the public) of an imagined, consented truth that news media can present, and from which they derived in part a proxy power to hold power to account, finally run out of road?  Perhaps a key emerging role for news media and journalists might lie in more systematically tracking and unpacking the nature and web of connections, instances and influences that flow to and through and from events – a section within the newsroom that does nothing, for example, but continually search and log events into a timeline and a map, just in case.  Might this look less like finished articles, and more like a set of evolving propositions or questions?  Might these news media become deliberately separable into layers or clusters distinguished by location, resources, politics, or other marker, at the same time as becoming more specialised, or more permeable?

Matt Bernius: Alternative conjecture… Perhaps the promise that there even is a single situated position for the reader/consumer to experience the news from. In institutions roles were clearly demarcated by position… in assemblages roles are temporarily assumed by actions. People have been largely trained by western media, to trust only a single outlet. Thus they were conditioned to the idea that there is a unified story…   a lot of the conversations at news foo still resolved into binaries – there is a right or wrong story. While digital is binary, electronic, the release of a bazillion binaries has created a (somewhat) nuanced information space. We thus want a return to single narratives and are beginning to largely reject that when we get it.

[Added on 15 Feb: David Shields' Reality Hunger addresses a similar problem in the contemporary English-language novel - he argues that most novels still follow a nineteenth-century cognitive/narrative model, and as such do not reflect life as we live it any more.]

Perhaps that’s behind to some extent why we (yes, me too) currently find such attraction in stats, data visualisation and data-driven journalism – it takes impossibly huge sets of data (objective! science! truth!), and provides us with means to conduct broader, macroscopic analysis.  It also provides us with the ability to draw conclusions, and pretty pictures.  Google’s Ngram Viewer, and before it, newspaper-focused tools like Berkman’s MediaCloud, are early glimpses of what we might be able to extract from the body of journalism over time.

It’s also clearly evident in the Wikileaks brouhaha.  Julian Assange’s alternately fascinating and curious op-ed in The Australian on the day of his arrest in December proclaimed the birth – through the release of vast quantities of only lightly redacted source materials on which journalists for one rely for their content – of a new form of journalism, “scientific journalism.”  It’s a clumsy coinage, for sure, but the principle of prising apart layers that were previously interleaved, and providing direct access to the source material in its entirety for anyone to scrutinise, annotate and interpret, is a sound one, and seems to me potentially a more relevant candidate to the Gutenberg analogy than the bovine dictum that “anyone’s a reporter/publisher”.   Coupled with Matt Thompson’s Speakularity, this has the potential to transform definitively what we mean by the record, let alone a newspaper of record – even whether there’s such a thing as off-the-record.  (One might want to contrast this with the “Specularity” that we exist in a lot of the time right now…)

Matt Bernius: Do you see this as the hope of “immediation” that given enough technology (and not direct human intervention) we can go from eye-witness-reporting to I-witness-everything? By immediation, I mean removing (or appearing to remove) all the layers of human/computer mediation that occur from event-of-origin to event-of-viewing.

It’s partly why, I now realise, I repeatedly recommended at Newsfoo the book Pandaemonium, painstakingly compiled by Humphrey Jennings during the 1940s, and completed after his death by his daughter and an academic.  Pandaemonium consists of a chronological assembly of passages (“images”) that in multiple ways to the “coming of the machine”, from 1660 (Milton’s Paradise Lost, whence the book’s name comes) to 1886, lightly grouped and glossed.  It’s a brilliant, brilliant work, obsessive, meticulous, termitic (in a word I borrow from Manny Farber, whose essay White Elephant Art vs Termite Art I also indiscriminately recommended).  I am left wondering where this bricolage is happening now – Tumblr?

Maybe this post relates more to the session led by Tim O’Reilly about the need for philosophers in the newsroom (I’d also advocate strongly for including anthropologists like Matt Bernius and Meg Pickard).  Tim, after the session, said he was not referring to “the ossified distribution of codes, but the practice of everyday life in this arena – how to be a better human being.”   Or, it occurs to me, How to live well in a time of hyperexpressivism – Strom und Drang – the stress of the stream.

And that means that this must also be about grasping more, quicker: a greater diversity of perspective, tone, texture, proximity within the greatly increased amount and diminished time available.  It’s hard to get far in these discussions without getting into talking about tools as an expression of these values, so here’s my one example (for promising prisms like SwiftRiver, see their blog).  Bruno Latour, whom Matt Bernius mentions way back at the top of this post, is a key contemporary theorist of democracy.  His research at Sciences Po in Paris has turned out a tool for mapping controversies, MACOSPOL.  Here’s Latour’s 7-minute tour d’horizon of the problem and the proposed solution.

Note what he says, quite deliberately, about newspapers (if you’re still reading, wow, congratulations). He elaborated on this, apparently, in a presentation at Uni Siegen in Germany over the summer, talking about navigating datascapes and the future of newspapers, but I have yet to find a summary or transcript of this session online.

The post-newspaper, the renewed news media needs as one of its primary functions to provide ways of navigating large datasets, to help readers understand them as they unfold – and I think this is a sort of investigative, long-form, or better still, immersive journalism that permits a different kind of interaction, ongoing, periodic interaction, and even some participation.   Involve readers and others, as The Guardian did so smartly in the MPs expenses investigation, harnessing (in a neat Newsfoo formulation) private, non-social interest for a social effect – but participation isn’t necessarily the crux of all of it – sometimes you want to be immersed, taken somewhere.  The maps of MACOSPOL, for example, provide one part of the view, one means of understanding one dimension of a story, but importantly, of identifying further dimensions – and this is a critical function that news media and their journalists can provide too, provided they have the right frameworks within which to do so.

Finding and pulling together information, facts and events, unearthing connections between superficially unconnected things, people or industries, finding things representative of human experience in the mass and the abstract – journalists do this day-in-day-out.  But being prepared to rethink systematically what is meant by long-form – by authenticity, by context, by long, and by form – and using those existing core strengths, might bring a significant dividend in terms of new kinds of knowledge (or at least new understanding), and impetus to more holistic scrutiny, debate, and even (whisper it softly) change.  If, through intelligent, purposeful marshalling of tools and formats like these and of those yet to be imagined, in whatever medium, I can be immersed, can lose myself for an hour, two, more, in new and unfolding dimensions, that’s fine by me.  But things as they are…

[There's an excellent post by Matt McAlister of the Guardian about atomisation in the news - it's shorter than this one, and better written.  Go there.]

A friend had been to such things before.  I asked her how I should comport myself at a Foo Camp.  She told me:

* don’t be a tool, contribute, and be peripatetic
* come with your mouth open, your ideas half-formed
* you will often feel like the dumbest person in the room.  that’s because you probably will be. [OK, I added that very last bit.  No, really.]

Following this, and wiki advice, seemed to act as a reasonable amulet (n00bery during my virgin round of Werewolf apart).

I won’t pretend it wasn’t daunting to begin with – as a hand-selected group, it was a formidable cluster of skills, achievements, futures – but it felt quickly more natural to explain my presence there by referring to what I do/know than by saying, as I did initially, ”Because of a grotesque clerical error*.”  Everyone I interacted with (including those of us with jetlag-induced narcolepsy) was open, generous and discursive, and I hope the contributions I made helped.

This discursiveness was considerably enhanced as an experience by the general adoption of the Foo Camp ethos of “being present” as far as possible, by setting aside laptops, mobile devices and such (although a number of Newsfoo-ers wielded iPads – clearly a different, magical device-class), and of using common sense and courtesy as to what could be shared through social networks and blogging (see the second Steve Buttry post below for more on this).  This meant that almost the only interruptions were phone calls, but by this stage I was enjoying the freedom, so I let my phone battery run down.  Not that I took extensive field notes, or drew elaborate sketchnotes in every session, but I was definitely having uninterrupted, whole conversations, which felt nutritious, enjoyable, and freeing.  I should issue, however, a blanket apology to fellow attendees for inadvertently saying “rhizomic” twice over the course of the weekend.  Jetlag.

Newsfoo is an unconference, and as such each person’s experience is likely to be quite different.  Here’s the Rasho-blogging of Alex Howard, Steve Buttry, Matt Bernius (once, twice, three times an anthropologist), Wade Roush, Alex Hillman, and Dave Cohn (let me know if I missed anyone).  [16 Dec 2010, 5.53pm, adding the glory that is Meg Pickard, and the Storification of Mo Krochmal.  6.58pm: Andrew Walkingshaw's provocation to the US press, and more from Alex Howard.  Looks like it's accelerating.]  Something from me very soon [Update, Jan 21, 2011: here's a short one about Green Lions, Isaac Newton and the news business, and another shambolically stalking one such Green Lion, and getting rather badly mauled].

* For the record, I am not Samira Ahmed.  Also, if you don’t understand the title of this post, I apologise.

How, in your experience, have web technologies been employed to make the world a better place?

Improving access to information (for those that can access it), enabling people to share new perspectives (though there’s some way to go on diversity), and slowly and still a little randomly offering ways to challenge and hold power and authority to account.  Video specifically is very powerful – it offers both very direct and human ways to interact, and to see directly and feel more viscerally and authentically what is happening in many more places than we could before.  As more and more historical and archive visual material gets preserved, digitised and shared, it’s fascinating to watch what changes when people have access to their visual histories, especially in places where this hasn’t previously been possible.

And where for you are the real problem areas that remain that you think the internet and its associated technologies can help to tackle?

There are so many things we need to think about, and rethink – here are a couple of things that preoccupy me:

One of the big shifts I was working on at WITNESS was looking at how the human rights field is increasingly affected by new and emerging non-traditional players – technology/social media companies like Google, Yahoo, Facebook and Twitter, and hardware companies like Nokia.  Although these new players offer new arenas and publics for human rights work, their products weren’t designed with human rights challenges in mind, and therefore can expose many more people, and human rights activists in particular, to new, networked vulnerabilities.  These companies need to update and adapt their technology and policies to be more protective of human rights workers, and of wider populations – for instance, in the area of privacy and anonymity, or in thinking collectively about the legal/copyright status of human rights content online.

Beyond this, the perennial issue is overcoming barriers to access – whether we are talking about poor infrastructure or connectivity, a culture of censorship, literacy barriers, poverty or other kinds of exclusion.  Mobile’s important, but it’s only one part of a solution.  It’s good to see the UK’s Digital Champion, Martha Lane Fox, and Beth Noveck speaking at Activate – these aren’t just developing world challenges, they’re present in our societies too.  And we need to be a bit more realistic about what participation means, and understand better how online participation meshes with offline participation.

Opportunities opened up by the internet, and through networks generally, to strengthen public understanding, debate and participation in human rights and social justice are pretty central to the work I do and hope to do with NGOs, media, foundations, and so on.  I’ve started gently since returning from New York to live in London last month – co-writing a series of posts about human rights video online as a collaboration between YouTube and WITNESS, doing some work for a US-based foundation, and interviewing psychoanalyst Adam Phillips about his new book On Balance, which touches on some of these topics, for BOMB Magazine.

Who do you admire in this space? Who’s inspiring you? Who’s pushing the boundaries and how?

Just so many people!  Here’s who comes to mind today…  Stamen for information design and visualisation; Berg London’s work and blog is professionally essential; danah boyd, Mizuko Ito, Molly Land and many other researchers; edge.org is always thought-provoking; there’s an incredibly good blog by the World Bank on communication and media in development; and I love Pete Brook’s Prison Photography Blog, where he talks about visual culture and activism; anthropologists/ethnographers Jan Chipchase and Dawn Nafus.  Got to stop there – too many people to mention – we’d be here all week.

And what can we expect from your presentation at Activate 10?

I’m going to talk a little about the recent history of human rights video online, the work I and colleagues did at WITNESS, and where I think things are going next – and I am really hoping that we have time for genuine conversation, as not just the list of speakers, but also the attendees I already know are pretty stellar and diverse.