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.

When the Egyptian government shut down the internet during the protests in Tahrir Square, it was seen as a form of repression.

Should access to technology now be seen in the same way as access to, say, clean water? And does this mean that the companies behind those technologies have a particular moral obligation to their users?

The authors of Cameras Everywhere, a report published earlier this month by Witness, a non-governmental organisation focused on using video to expose human rights abuse, argue that they do. (Full disclosure: Sameer Padania is the report’s co-author and a friend.) They looked at the role of mobile telephones and social media, as well as technology providers including Google, Twitter and Dailymotion, in documenting human rights abuses.

Thanks, Rav!

[Update on 24 Feb, 2011: in a far more elegant and effective way than I outline below, the Media Standards Trust has released a tool that exposes Churnalism, journalism recycled, or indeed copy-pasted wholesale, from press releases...  More from the Guardian.]

A few minutes down the road from me, The Guardian has this weekend been hosting a hack SxSW event – which helped precipitate (in the chemistry sense) an idea for me that has been swirling for a long time, but which has been particularly swirly since long discussions at Newsfoo in December.  I’m sure others are already thinking about or working on similar ideas – although my impression at Newsfoo was that perhaps not.  Either way, I offer it up here, warts and all, in case it’s got some merit, and might be of some help.

A caveat: I’m not a coder or a technologist, so please forgive any tech barbarisms [update: e.g. "Metadata? Are you crazy? We can do this with basic tagging..." or "This is classic sledgehammer/nut, hammer/nail territory..." or "Uh-oh - here comes the rabbit-hole...".]  I work in sectors (journalism, media, development, human rights), however, that are profoundly affected by the work that many technologists are doing, and that are facing challenges in how to make manifest the provenance, authenticity, accuracy, diversity and representativeness of the information they provide.

Five things in particular have prompted me to thrash this post out now, starting at half-six on a Sunday morning, with regular interruptions from the kids…:

- discussions at Newsfoo  about how to make manifest a layer of trust and transparency in news content – distinct from a reader’s habituated trust in a certain journalist or publication
- re-reading my friend Ethan Zuckerman’s thinking on media attention, xenophilia, homophily and other obstacles to diversity of news coverage – and wondering if the problem is less that the international media’s resources and attention are unevenly apportioned, and more that local media, closer to the story, are less able to compete, to project themselves or their analysis internationally
- by extension, a bit of media development dogfooding – what’s good enough to suggest to journalists and media outlets in the developing world should be good enough for any media anywhere
- watching immense surges of communication about the #egypt #jan25  #sidibouzid #wikileaks and other unfolding crises through the Twitterverse and beyond (including the Guardian’s Ian Prior incident described here)
- Mozilla’s Privacy Icons project – an attempt to represent at a glance how a web user’s data will be held and used by a service or website (more here and here)

There are some admirable efforts to crack the nut of information overload, especially with the huge increase in individual media production (tweets, facebook updates, and so on).  Projects like SwiftRiver take a technological approach to crunching information, including news sources, and rendering it (ideally) both more contextualised, and more filterable, and therefore more useful and less overwhelming.  Google News has started asking news orgs to tag their stories to distinguish between original and syndicated content.  Some, like Neography, are basically hieroglyphics for the news.  It’s a start, but still a fairly modest one.

None of this offers readers enough fine-grained control, nor does it present a new, different prism through which to understand news events, and it’s not designed in a way that communicates the intention of journalism.  Google for one is trying to get there, but its solutions are still reliant to some degree on search (and search itself is an increasingly personalised rather than shared experience). This doesn’t yet truly level the playing field for, say, local media in the developing world, or journalists writing in their native language rather than in a global language.  [A propos of which, there is still no Global Voices Online equivalent that, instead of tracking and curating blogs about or from every country in the world, systematically tracks and surfaces stories from local and national media around the world.]  High-quality curation in more established international media as well as on many blogs, is helping diversify access to a wider range of original sources somewhat, but again it is constrained by individual capacity, networks, inclination.

I believe we need something extra, a reasonably independent searchable layer, that helps extract and highlight some of the things that we both value and seek to avoid in reading journalism – both ends of which may help spark deeper changes in the practice or perspective of journalism as it continues to evolve.

So, rather than having users rely on a combination of searches, aggregators, curators, recommendations, affinities, semantic crunchers and luck to find what they need, what if a broad swath(e) of news organisations, and other organisations involved in the business of journalism, developed a simple (perhaps even visual) system that, before they read an article:
- addresses both the problems of information overload and consumer choice
- surfaces some of the markers that might distinguish high-quality journalism
- provides readers with clear provenance of information
- and in doing so meets head-on the issues of transparency and trust that we discussed at Newsfoo?

How about allowing readers information not just about the author, topic and location of a story, but also about how it was put together, how it was sourced, how many corrections it has?  (Might something that looks a little like the Mozilla privacy icons work?)  Or giving news seekers an advanced search, both on newspapers’ own sites, and on third-party sites and search engines, that allowed them to search, sort, filter using this information?  I’ve started a list below of the kinds of information I have at various times been interested in seeing made more transparent, and filtering by – not necessarily all at once, in every story, but certainly at one time or another.  It’s by no means exhaustive…  please do have at it.

- sourcing - greater transparency in and enumeration of sourcing would be a significant leap forward in helping understand the scope and weight of a story – both in terms of people interviewed for the article, and primary sources consulted.  How many sources were used for the piece, and who were they or what role do they occupy (if it’s safe to indicate this).  If the story is about poverty among women pensioners, are they directly affected, are they a policy-maker with direct influence, what’s their gender, age, and so on.  At Newsfoo I suggested an indicator of a source’s proximity to the centre of the story (mitigated by a FireEagle for sources, if you like…)  Depending on how granular (or anal) a publication wanted to be, they could even include a count of sources consulted and not quoted, or direct, primary, original source interviews, vs re-quoted sources, desk/telephone research vs face-to-face, were the interviews conducted in local languages, or through an interpreter…
- are there pieces of primary source material available, and attached to the story, or using documentcloud or similar?  Or even just a list of source material (including other media reports, blog posts and so on) that went into a piece?  This might increase the authority of such primary sources, help give a sense of the scope and grounding for a given story, and at the same time provide more accountability for journalists in terms of the range and diversity of sources they rely on.
- number of corrections, highlighted corrections, and perhaps a right-of-reply opportunity tethered to the article in addition to services like ReportAnError (which perhaps could lead to the article changelog, like The Guardian’s Article History links)
- what kind of article is it?  a short update to an existing set of information, an original investigation, an adapted wire piece, an evergreen piece, an interview, and so on?
- where is the journalist based?  Is s/he in the country, in the city, at the scene, on the same continent, etc?  One can imagine eventually being able to correlate Ethan’s analyses of media attention per publication to the miles travelled by each publication’s correspondents.
- a single identifier code for a story, or a news event?  Something like a Dewey decimal system for events?  (OK, maybe not that one…)

How might this help?

A couple of ideas of what might evolve in the long term…
- redefining trust in the news through a commitment to transparency (where safe to do so) in how and from whom participating news organisations acquire, handle and package information
- grow and strengthen the reputation of journalists and publications that consistently find and use sources at the heart of stories, strong research sources, have a reputation for accuracy, and so on – it might be a badge of honour for niche topic or methodology publications (e.g. long-form, web-only) to differentiate their content from others.  What if readers began to decline articles about Africa from a particular publication that quoted only male sources?
- begin to surface, alongside international media stories about new events, local and local-language media that use such a system.  As well as pushing local journalists into occasional international circuits, it might push them against a wider variety of readers with different expectations and experiences, which could help strengthen their reporting in the long run
- if a correspondent’s proximity to the story were to become more important as a differentiator for news outlets, it might create an opportunity for local journalists working as “fixers” for foreign journalists, for example, to count more and merit an actual byline
- readers of business, sports, etc journalists would begin to differentiate between stories (and publications) predicated on rumour and those on documented sources…  Provenance, by being made a little more transparent, might become an important differentiator.
- beginning to create a clearer economy for being on-the-record; with the amount of secret docs being released through leak sites, and with Matt Thompson’s Speakularity looming into view, some way of classifying, tethering and sorting this information not purely reliant on search, semantic or other tagging becomes important, and voluntarily releasing or sharing information becomes an important symbolic act
- a couple of people at Newsfoo talked about innovations in reading contexts (I mentioned this in a previous post), but the parameters seemed to be more about the form of the articles – length, particularly – than about other facets

That’s about all I can put together on my kiddie-ruled Sunday – what do you think?  An idea that has some kernel of merit, or a complete and utter waste of a Sunday?  (Apologies for any errors in this – not much bandwidth, ironically, to proofread… – I’ll take another sweep through to amend tomorrow.  Piece swept on Sunday night, and slightly re-jigged.  Note that I’ve not used the word “objective”…)

Perhaps Daulerio’s darkest moment came last spring, when he posted a video of an obviously drunk college girl having sex in a bathroom stall at a sports bar in Bloomington, Indiana. At the time, he was thinking of it as part of a series on fans having sex in bathrooms. (In the fall of 2009, he’d posted a clip of a couple getting it on in a stall at the new Cowboys Stadium.) On May 11, a few days after the video went up, Daulerio received an e-mail from a woman imploring him to take it down. “I know the people in it and it is extreemly [sic] hurtful. please, this is completely unfair,” she wrote. In separate responses, both Daulerio and Darbyshire, the Gawker lawyer, refused to comply. “Best advice I can give you right now: do not make a big deal out of this because, as you can tell, the footage is blurry and you are not identified by name,” Daulerio wrote, assuming the e-mailer was the girl herself.

For the rest of the afternoon, Daulerio and the woman traded five e-mails. Finally, before handing the matter off to Darbyshire, Daulerio wrote, “It’s not getting taken down. I’ve said that. And it’s not a very serious matter. It is a dumb mistake you (or whomever) made while drunk in college. Happens to the best of us.”

The next day, though, he and Darbyshire decided that removing the video was “the best course of action,” Darbyshire says. But by then it had migrated to other sites. And a couple of days after that, Daulerio received a panicked call from the girl’s father. “He had this basic breakdown on the phone,” Daulerio recalled. “The guy is like, ‘You gotta understand, I’ve just been dealing with watching my daughter get fucked in a pile of piss for the past two days.’ ”

Daulerio now says he wishes he hadn’t run the video. “It wasn’t funny,” he says. “It was possibly rape. I was trying to kind of put it in that same category [as the Dallas video]. I didn’t really look at the thing close enough to realize there’s maybe something a little more sinister going on here and a little more disturbing.”

As Daulerio himself notes, where it’s not possible to establish that an act witnessed involves consent, and indeed, may involve a sexual violation, a potential crime, there’s a special onus on the publisher not to propagate the video for titillation or humour, especially when videos can circulate so freely and easily.  But where are the written, editorial guidelines to help editors like Daulerio to make better decisions about what they should or shouldn’t publish when it comes user-contributed video raising these kinds of ethical questions, whatever kind of publisher they are?  There aren’t many in public, and those that there are don’t take much account of the ethical or human rights implications (because that’s what we’re talking about here).  When I worked on the Hub, we developed a very detailed set of internal editorial guidelines for dealing with raw video related specifically to human rights (here’s a very condensed public version – if I am permitted to share the full guidelines, I will do so in an update) – and we tested a lot of the content we received or saw against these guidelines.  Trying to make these kinds of editorial decisions is not easy, and we tried our best to explain many decisions in public, to help others facing similar decisions.  On occasion we found the guidelines either too specific, or too vague – sometimes our decisions contradicted the guidelines, because we were exercising judgement rather than applying hard-and-fast rules – but the key thing was that, because we were dealing with a new medium, with new kinds of content emerging all the time that challenged categories and boundaries, we needed some kind of framework to help situate us.

Part of the trouble is that we’re yet to see a genuinely balanced or informative widespread public debate about what constitutes ethical sharing, and ethical publishing of this kind of content.  The debate such as it is tends to resolve primarily into fears about loss of privacy, security, consent and/or dignity (including many in the human rights community), fears about intermediary liability (holding the platforms that receive and host UGC without reviewing it responsible for the content of the videos – not a popular position, but a perennial worry in terms of regulation), and proclamations that this is the new reality, and we’d all best toughen up (as Daulerio initially counsels the emailer in the above quote).   These debates need to move beyond hand-wringing, scare-mongering, and snark-flinging, in order to become a more productive and nuanced contribution to our evolving understanding of privacy, safety and security, and, ultimately, what we mean by transparency.  Seeing nuanced and genuine discussions about editorial decisions like these more widely in journalistic settings may help enrich those debates.  Let me know below if you’ve seen or published any.

As part of my continuing work with WITNESS, I’ve been working on a policy advocacy initiative called Cameras Everywhere (read my old friend and colleague Sam Gregory’s post introducing the work).  The work we’re doing looks in part at the emerging ethics of the online/mobile video environment – more on this soon.  We’ll make sure AJ gets the updates…

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.

Shaky, grainy, traumatic footage filmed on mobile phones wielded by brave citizens – from Burma to Tibet to Iran – has fast become both part of and fuel for contemporary narratives of uprising, struggle and repression – and it increasingly represents one of the key acts of resistance that individual citizens in repressive societies can make.  While this now makes it seem almost commonplace in the rituals of human rights media, it wasn’t always thus.

I’ve been tracking, analysing and curating human rights video online for the human rights organisation WITNESS since the middle of 2006, initially via a blog aiming to unearth examples of activists using new technologies to document, expose and bring an end to human rights violations.  A large number of stories were about mobile phone video – from police cells in Egypt to the execution of Saddam Hussein – and strikingly the most compelling, unvarnished and actionable footage often came from the cameras of the human rights abusers themselves.

Most of these cases showed networked technologies could reinforce repression – specifically taking mobile footage of humiliation, beatings, abuse, torture, happening in secret places, to show it directly to those you want to intimidate, and to circulate it more widely via Bluetooth “pour encourager les autres”.  But in a certain number of instances case the videos found their way into the hands of outraged activists who spread and publicised the abuses online, to often global attention, with the long-term effect of focusing attention, activism, and advocacy to the governments tolerating or sponsoring these abuses, or at the very least, to undermine officially sanctioned or imposed narratives of law, order, justice.

Some videos, however, don’t make the same dent.  My chosen video is one of the very first mobile phone human rights videos I ever saw, one that circulated for months in Chechnya until it reached the eyes of a New York Times reporter, and thence the wider world.  In Argun, Chechnya, in March 2006, the woman in this video, Malika Soltayeva, was abducted by local security forces (kadyrovsty), after her husband alleged that she had had an affair with a Russian militiaman stationed in the town.  Soltayeva was pregnant at the time, and after a series of humiliating abuses, all captured on mobile video by her kadyrovsty attackers – having her head and eyebrows shaved off, her head daubed with a crucifix in green paint, her now bare scalp painted green, and being beaten, kicked, taunted – lost the baby a few days later.  Bravely, Malika launched a legal case to bring her attackers to justice, supported by international submissions from the likes of the Helsinki Commission.

This segment of the video (there’s more detail at the NYT site) follows the moments after the kadyrovsty had released her, and shows them forcing her to dance in the street in her degraded and abused state.  The camera is both distant and uncomfortably persistent – but importantly, unlike most of the clips in the early stories we were covering, it is filming in public space, for public humiliation.  It’s a scene that seems somehow emblematic of ancient hierarchies and punishments – the public shaming by men of a woman for alleged adultery, but also a religious marker, with the “thumb-thick” crucifix on her forehead painted in the green of Islam.  The video did not receive as wide a circulation outside traditional human rights circles as others above have, and fell perhaps a little into the shadows until the murder earlier this year of human rights defender Natalia Estemirova – who was, among many things, instrumental in bringing this story to light, as the NYT’s C J Chivers acknowledged.  Is the reason that the video didn’t receive more sustained international focus that it’s just one among a huge number of human rights violations – assassinations, censorship, disappearances, mass graves – in Chechnya?  Or is it more that the humiliating abuse seems to come almost from a pre human rights era, like tarring and feathering, or a scarlet letter?  Another video, purporting to be of public witch-burnings in Kenya, surfaced on Wikileaks many months ago, and similarly gained only limited attention, despite the graphic content.  Do events that are already public somehow circulate less readily?

At WITNESS we’re working to understand the mechanisms and dynamics by which this kind of video emerges and circulates, as human rights values clash with other values, and as privacy is contiuously renegotiated.  We are also working to help shape ethical norms that are relevant to the newer modes of networked audio-visual communication to ensure that when video of this kind does emerge, it both inspires the advocacy and action that is necessary to end the abuses shown, and is shown in a context that places a primacy on the dignity and security of the persons depicted.  How this plays out under an anthropological lens is something that we’re deeply interested in, and we welcome your thoughts…

On the Hub, we’ve encountered a wide variety of visual media for human rights, including much powerful photojournalism – from Magnum In Motion, VII Photo, and Human Rights Watch, among others.  So when I watched this Monocle piece about the Prix Pictet on my way home from work, it reminded me that (to my delight, having worked with them closely in the past) Panos Pictures have joined the Hub.  It’s the perfect excuse to start a regular series highlighting photojournalism on the Hub – so, welcome to In Focus…

Panos recently started creating multimedia narratives, and now Anna Stevens of Panos Pictures has contributed this piece, on the desperate situation faced by tens of thousands of asylum seekers whose applications for asylum are rejected in the UK:

This powerful narrative is part of a campaign led by major human rights organisations that are calling on the UK Government to:

–> End the threat and use of destitution as a tool of Government policy against refused asylum seekers
–> Continue financial support and accommodation to refused asylum seekers as provided during the asylum process and grant permission to work until such a time as they have left the UK or have been granted leave to remain
–> Continue to provide full access to health care and education throughout the same period

To learn more read this briefing (Word document) and to take action, visit the Still Here, Still Human campaign website.  If you’re in London, you still have till April 4th to see the photographer Abbie Trayler-Smith’s exhibition at the HOST Gallery near Old St (also home both to Panos and to the exceptionalFoto8 Magazine).

Panos Pictures has always championed underreported stories, high quality photojournalism, and editorial innovation, and we’re delighted to have them as part of the Hub community.

If you want to take a closer look at Panos’ photojournalism, here are some human rights-related examples that really stood out for me recently:

- Espen Rasmussen’s photographs of the Janjaweed in Darfur in April 2004
- George Georgiou’s series of photographs of the Serbia/Kosovo conflict
- the extraordinary story of Nic Dunlop’s quest to track down Comrade Duch, Chief Executioner for the Khmer Rouge (who recently went on trial in Cambodia)