You ignore the work on structured stories at your own risk

If you are a journalist (or PR writer), you should read David Caswell's latest about his research into structured stories and follow the links, especially to the structured stories database.

Here's a definition from one of Caswell's earlier atricles: 

Structured Stories is a form of structured journalism, an approach in which reporting is entered directly into a database and then extracted as needed to create digital news products. Early examples of structured journalism, such as PolitiFact and Homicide Watch D.C., are limited to fixed news items in narrowly defined subject areas. Structured Stories, however, attempts to encode any journalistic news — from any subject area — into structured events and narratives.

Articles are not obsolete in a structured journalism approach but instead are organized within much larger journalistic structures that provide context, coherence and flexibility. These narrative structures are then used to make news stories intelligible to computers and, therefore, available for a variety of digital applications.

This is a not-so-nascent-anymore corner of journalism thought that says, essentially, that the beautifully crafted narrative you just wrote is nothing but data. That fire story you wrote? The address is data, so is the amount of damage, the cause, the type of house, etc. And it's data insurers and others might be willing to pay for.

Adrian Holovaty famously proposed this disaggregation of journalistic stories in 2006. Matt Waite extended it seven years later.

 

Caswell has now been testing the idea on an operational scale in New York, Los Angeles and Missouri (Where he's a Reynolds Fellow).

 

You risk not paying attention to this at your own peril. 

Let me put it this way, how many of you scoffed not that long ago at the concept of computers "writing" journalism stories? How's that worked out?  (A search on "Automated Insights" will fill you in a bit more, such as the AP's wide use of the software, if you haven't been paying attention. Here's some more on AP.)

Now, if you go to Caswell's Structured Stories site and look at some of the work, to those steeped in "storytelling," the examples don't look like much. Bullet points, cards, etc. Certainly not an eye-pleasing "story" (and, let's be honest, we misuse that term a lot anyhow; much of what we do is factual exposition, not story).

But what you are seeing is Holovaty's vision beginning to be turned into reality. And here's why it's important:

• When you break stories into data, you can repackage that data in many ways and resell it, meaning more streams of income in an era when that's guaranteed to get executives' attention (after all, what other business do you know that leaves more than half of its raw material on the shop floor?).
• This inevitably means changes in workflows, training and, perhaps, the romantic notion of the storytelling journalist. From another of Caswell's articles: Working with structured information enables the journalist to become like an air traffic controller for news: coordinating, routing, verifying and organizing news as well as identifying gaps in knowledge and filling them by assigning journalistic resources to conduct original reporting. This level of coordination is an impossible, even meaningless, task in a media environment based on text articles, but in a structured media environment it becomes easy and valuable.
• Caswell says he's shown in real operational situations that structured journalism can be done. 
• Finally, if you scoff that "people will never read this stuff," I want you to think about two things. First, much of this is not designed to be read by people; it is designed to be read and repurposed by machines. Second, go to the top of any one of those story databases on the Structured Stories site and click on the "told as" drop down menu. Go down to "natural language."  I have not found a natural language version yet, though I haven't gone through all the items,. But take a close look, and what does it say? "Natural language generation by Automated Insights." Uh huh.

Oh, and there's one other. In an era where consumers more and more are accustomed to blending their information and media inputs as they wish, this is the ultimate way for them to do that with journalism.

 

In many ways, this is another aspect of the "semantic web," essentially, the idea of turning much, if not all, of the web into data. Projects such as Open Calais have been grniding along for several years, trying to figure out how to turn all this unstructured information (in our business = story) into structured data.

So whether the prospect makes you recoil or not, it's time to start paying attention. Your future in journalism (and PR) probably depends on it.

Impressive work by Charleston Post and Courier

The Post and Courier in Charleston has started running an investigation into domestic violence against women in South Carolina.

It's nice work , and you should read it.

My only reservation is technical -- the paper has tended to "snowfall" this a bit, and I'm not sure it is the best technique for a public policy story like this. The legislative part of it tends to get lost toward the bottom, and it also kind of gets in the way of a more general thread of telling women's stories, which works better integrally as a long-form narrative.

That the Legislature so far has resisted most changes  is important enough that I think it would be better split out and floated on the side so it stays in people's view. But that's only a minor quibble.

Shirley, get me rewrite

Ah, what was old is new again.

That's my first reaction after reading Jeff Jarvis' typically provocative post suggesting it is time (again) to rethink the basic form of the story after the New York Times' Brian Stetler posted a long Tumblr account of his time tweeting in Joplin, Mo., after much of the city was leveled by one of the deadliest tornadoes ever. Stetler ruminated: "Looking back, I think my best reporting was on Twitter."

And it remained my reaction after reading Matt Ingram's rejoinder, "No, Twitter Is Not a Replacement for Journalism."

For those of us old enough to remember rewrite desks, and especially those of us who worked in the wire service, the reaction is sort of, "Uh, yeah?"

If you listen closely to what Jarvis is saying, I think it's simply that for the first draft of news, especially breaking news, the default position no longer has to be what I have referred to at Newsplex and in "Principles of Convergent Journalism" as a "river of text"--the standard inverted pyramid, get it all together in a nice 500-word package, story.

So what's new? The standard operating procedure for a wire service reporter wasn't to wait around to assemble 400 words. It was to pick up the phone and dictate a lede and maybe a second paragraph. That went out on the wire. Then you dictated another few sentences. Etc. Or sometimes just facts. Someone on the desk fixed your breathless prose and sent it out, then assembled the pieces, maybe threw in some background, etc. And then you did it all over again through the day (or night), sometimes moving information out in pieces, sometimes topping the existing story, sometimes writing it through.

One of the jokes of a wire-service reporter is that my name is on some of the best copy I've never written.

OK, we were still producing "rivers" then, but only because there was a delay in publishing.

Fast forward. Now we tweet. The chunks are smaller, but they still are chunks. The potential array of media bursting forth is also wider. The assembly is done with things like Storify that can pull together all sorts of threads into a sort of coherent narrative.

And for the initial wave, that may well be all we need. Take a look at Recovery Alabama, a map-powered site designed to crowdsource the needs after tornadoes raked that state. In many ways, that was a story in and of itself, more comprehensive and powerful, no river of text needed.

In fact, too much of what we call "story" in the news biz isn't story at all. It's a factoid exposition that tries to impose structure on often unstructured events.


But Ingram is right, too. Ultimately, we are wired for "stories." After we've confirmed bin Laden is dead, and the initial Twitter rush has slacked and the hormones dial back, we start looking for meaning, and meaning in our psychology often means some kind of story - and in news that means journalism. Now, whether it's a river of text story or some new experiential form, we're all waiting around to find out. But that will be journalism, too, because journalism is not so much about the initial news but about making sense of it all in whatever way that works.

Which is why we also spend inordinate time about whether "ordinary" people thrust by time and place into performing newsgathering acts are doing journalism. They're doing newsgathering, folks. It's a subset of journalism, but not really the main show.

Don't get me wrong. Someone's got to cover disasters and city council meetings -- assuming you don't consider that redundant. Where it transcends newsgathering is when the journalist in the room goes beyond reporting mere facts to start giving us insight and understanding. (Yes, the nonjournalist specialist can do that, too. Let's just say the journalist is more prone to do it, or try to, across a wider range of subjects. You want to get into cit-j further? You're buying the beer.)

Even Stetler updated his post to say this:

I’ve thought about this comment a little bit more. I believe it’s true that “my best reporting was on Twitter,” but only up until a certain point on Monday, probably around 11 p.m. local time. After that point, with a more stable Internet connection, I was able to file complete stories for NYTimes.com, not just chunks of copy.

I've said for some time, including to some news organizations I consult with, that I'll believe they have gotten it when I wake up on July Fourth and (barring the world blowing up) see at the top of my local news organization's website a big, honkin' interactive map that lets me click on the various marked parades, fairs, celebrations and find out details on each one. Because, after all, isn't that the story for most of your users/readers for the first 10 hours or so of the day? (It would be even cooler if they blew out the front page of the paper, too. Not interactive, but still ...)

Then later in the day, as the narrative starts to unfold, I want that journalism - the poignant or funny photo, maybe the video, the telling moment that can be fashioned only by a good journalist telling a good story.

We need to think about new story forms as Jarvis suggests. We need to always remember the journalism as Ingram notes. What we can't do is stay stuck in the past. So what's the problem?

Now, Shirley, get me rewrite.

Newsgames - slowly maturing

One of the original "news games" was by the Hampton Roads, Va., paper, a simple little find-the-shoplifter affair that showed you the inside of a store, and you had to guess which people were part of the shoplifting team - roll your mouse over a person and it gave you the answer.

Sadly, it no longer seems to be online. But I made a screen video and show it in lots of my classes because it shows how relatively simple (OK, you need some Flash skills, but these days the simple rollover technique can be accomplished relatively simply) things can promote interactivity. Add quizzes and time lines to that list - things not used as much as they might be.

J-lab has been championing news games for some time. They can be excellent ways for helping an audience understand complex, dynamic issues. But they can also be as simple as the shoplifter game mentioned above.

Still, I think they remain too scarce. But I also think they are going to get more impetus as we become more mobile, a platform that, from purely personal observation, seems to lend itself more to the casual game. Gaming also is being baked into many mobile applications (think things like the badges that are part of Foursquare).

At the Georgia Institute of Technology, researchers have been looking into the intersection of news and games. Ian Bogost elaborates in this recent post on Culture Lab.

He's also lead author of a new book, Newsgames: Journalism at Play, which I hope to get to read soon.

Those folks, including one commenter on Bogost's blog post, who argue that news games are not really journalism have a point, if you look at journalism in a somewhat restricted way of continually trying to uncover new facts about institutions, poeple and the way things work. But facts don't always provide knowledge; however, examining those from various perspectives and combinations, which is what games allow, does produce knowledge.

And in an age when we are looking for user engagement, I think they are a very important piece of the puzzle.

Gallo: Integrate, don't segregate, multimedia

Steve Outing at Poynter's E-media tidbits points to an interesting column by Argentinian professor Julian Gallo, "Today's Journalism is Obsolete." (Note 2009- the original blog is gone, but Robin Good has the full article, so I now have the link pointing to it.)

As does Outing, I recommend it to every journalist who cares about the concept of story and how we do our jobs and present information.

Gallo isn't getting into one of those interminable debates about anonymous sources or transparency vs. objectivity. He's dealing with something much more concrete and controllable -- the way we tell stories. In short, he's calling for a radical change in the way we think about stories to stop being so text-centric. By extension, one would also have to philosophically expect the argument that broadcasters should also stop being so image-centric. So we might expand Gallo's point a bit to say that journalists need to stop being so media-centric.

This is not radically new; we have been teaching and preaching this at Newsplex for several years, based on the initial vision (2009-link now dead) of Newsplex founder Kerry Northrup that the story is the core of everything and from that should flow the decisions about which media to use to tell that story and how to incorporate those elements.

Gallo's contribution is in noting that:

• In practice we remain too much of a text-centric profession.
• Authors should have more influence on the multimedia content in their stories, as such content can be a more powerful storytelling form.
• The tools exist to integrate such content much more tightly into the body of the story than to put it on the "rails," effectively making it a stepchild.

As he writes:
The text is the spinal column, the body as well as the substance of the story, and around it evolves a series of appendixes of other contents – considered of relative or very low importance - made up of photos, audio, videos and links. Except for the links, the author has little or no influence on the multimedia contents that accompany his text. ...
The author deals with the important stuff (he writes) and other people enlarge or enrich his text by adding design and content. This working process conceives the author as a one-talent person: he can only write. In this scenario, somebody is specifically in charge of the layout, another person takes the pictures, a third one chooses the photos, somebody else handles the videos and audio that will be eventually edited by another person and, finally, a “technician” posts everything online. In such a structure, a journalist is believed to have less abilities than a 16-year-old boy to make his weblog.

Further, he says, that expecting readers to click about, leaving the story's spine to pursue a multimedia link here and there and then somehow return to the thread of the story "is nearly equivalent to suppose that eating some lettuce and then drinking two spoons of oil will give us a salad. Some things must be mixed up in order to work."

Gallo argues that if the author does not have some control over where and how the multimedia contents are incorporated into in his or her story, content that may be vital to the storytelling can be excluded. He goes on to produce, using Blogger and other Internet sites, a column that integrates a Flikr slideshow, audio from Castpost and video from You Tube. He also incorporates a Google Earth presentation.

His stance is a bit provocative from the U.S.-centric view, where some of the struggle over "convergence" has been whether a single journalist can effectively handle the multiple tasks. Opponents fear owners, given their history, will do journalism "on the cheap," heaping more and more on individuals and to heck with the quality. I, Northrup and others argue that effective multimedia journalism is not cheap, that a journalist can't do it all, but that the journalist must be skilled in understanding the possibilities and limits so as to work within a team.

Gallo, however, suggests a more expansive view:
To renew the journalistic production, we need authors that can decide where to place a photograph, and who even have the possibility of producing the photograph themselves. Aren't we all photographers by now? We need journalists to include audio and video in their stories. Aren't we all experts when filming a video?

To which, based on my former life in television before moving to newspapers and the wire service, I would answer no. "Prosumer equipment" (scroll down to definition) may give the illusion that we all can do it, but we can't. So there Gallo and I diverge.

He also does not address the sticky issue of where content resides and ownership. Yes, I know that's a bad word in some quarters, but let's not think of ownership here as that by some big corporation, but by those who produce the content themselves. Gallo suggests it is time to use the plethora of emerging free services to integrate such content into stories. He and I use Blogger, for instance. But it is a hosted service, and in a moment, all our work could be wiped away by a decision to shut down, or not invest in more storage and technology, etc. So while we control our work, in some ways we do not "own" it simply by the reality of where it resides.

These are very real management and production concerns. Easy enough, you say, just bring the technology in-house. Yes, but in many cases there are patent, licensing and economic issues to consider. (And, one wonders, were journalism organizations to pursue Gallow's suggestion and use the free tools from the Internet, would those sites suddenly be able to handle or afford the potential spike in traffic?)

But these are things to be worked out, not deal breakers. I agree entirely with the overall thrust of his argument that we must do more to move away from media centricitybecause we are coming to the point where everything will, indeed, be rushing down and intermingled in the same "pipe." Prepare for 2009, when TV goes digital and your local TV station becomes one big mother Wi-Fi antenna, not to mention the scads of digital bandwidth opening on the old analog channels.

As we struggle with this concept of convergence, one of the lingering questions has been the journalistic equivalent of the 8-year-old in the back seat: "Are we there yet?"

I would propose -- and I think Gallo might agree -- that question will be answered only when we no longer have to ask it because we just do the integrated job of storytelling.