Tag Archives: media

This is the News

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aka ‘Doing Fewer Things Better, The Problem with Infographics, and The Tyranny of Breaking News’

I’ve been meaning to write something about news for a long, long time. I’m not sure I’ll be saying much that hasn’t been said elsewhere, but hopefully it will act as a useful synthesis of the current debate, with a smidgen of my own thoughts on top.

Firstly, it’s widely said that the news industry is in trouble, or at the very least, going through massive disruption at the moment. And the finger of blame, more often than not, is pointed in the direction of the Web. No-one seems sure what to make of it, or indeed how best to use the Web for news. At times, it seems that in reality, things aren’t much different. Write your articles, and post them on the Internet. just like this blog. Which is where the first ‘battle’ seems to be – between traditional, professional journalists, and those who just write because they want to. Now, it must be said, that I’m absolutely not arguing that plain text writing, as it were, is in any way wrong, dying, or should be outlawed. Indeed, I’ll go on in this post to consider how we can best use the Web to experience news, advocating the importance of the Linked Data approach, just as I have for drama and sport in previous entries, but the fact will remain that this post will be first and foremost a textual essay. And that’s a good thing. But at the same time, it’s not the only thing, and moreover, given the potential of the new Web medium, we should at least be exploring and trying new things out, embracing the complexity and experimenting, rather than just being content with what we know and seems safe and simple. I’m not claiming I have the answers, but the willingness to explore, for me, is the key.

In a very similar vein to the content producers of television and radio, as I’ve explained in the past, journalism, in the main, treats the Web purely as a distribution mechanism, matching McLuhan’s hypothesis of old media confronted with the new. Frustratingly for me, and perhaps others, new platforms, rather than new media, are often lauded as the game changers. For instance, the iPad, and the current vogue for ‘apps’. I’m not disputing that these new forms offer simplicity and opportunities to experiment with presentation and user interaction, but more often than not, they tend to be blind to the massive opportunity for real, genuine, exciting change that the Web offers us. The whole debate around economic models for news on the Web is important, probably, but for me, again, it’s just background noise. It’s like we’ve discovered electricity, and instead of experimenting and investigating its properties, uses and opportunities, we’re sitting around debating how to bill people for their use of it.

More relevant, though, is the seemingly wasted opportunity of simply packaging up existing forms of news content into ‘apps’. As others, including Martin Belam, have pointed out, (here and here) this really is no different from the mid-nineties craze for CD-ROMs. Yes, it’s new, it’s simple, but beyond the immediate experience, does it really change things? Is it really something new? No. At the end of the day, it’s still just textual reports, or video clips, or images – and that’s a real shame. Again, ‘apps’ themselves aren’t inherently a bad thing. Something that packages up content and provides a coherent journey and experience around the Web is useful and should be encouraged – but it shouldn’t be just a surface level thing. The beauty of the Web is in the connections, in the way that it is free-form, the way that it has the potential to be an extension of our minds, freely linking between concepts with no artificial boundaries. If you’re reading something in the Times, you’ll be thinking about the subject of the article not just in the context of that report, or indeed in the boundaries of the Times, but as a general thing, linked in your mind to all sorts of related concepts.

A bit of history and hypothesis, then. News emerged as an industry dependent, really, on the format of the paper, on the medium of text and some images. On rolling TV and radio, of course, news reporting, as exemplified by Charlie Brooker, has not only expanded to fit the medium, but has almost become set in its patterns and ways. More worryingly, though, is the feeling that news currently inspires, across both paper, TV and radio media – dissatisfaction, bewilderment and despair. In the desperation to sell papers, to keep eyes and ears on channels, news outlets are forced to fill time, to fill space with whatever stories they can find (and/or make up!). And the emphasis is always on the breaking story, the immediate, the new, the now. I would argue that again, this isn’t inherently bad – people want to know things as soon as possible, often before others, so that they can then be the first to share it. But this constant barrage of ‘news’ is overwhelming and tends to lower the overall quality of journalism. Ironically, people like Nicholas Carr have been critiquing the Web for ruining attention and making people ‘surface skimmers’, but I’d argue that this is more the result of the pace and quantity of news through traditional means.

Indeed, the Web has the potential to be the exact opposite of this surface world. On the Web, there are no deadlines. There is no material constraint of having to fill the paper with whatever you can. And most importantly, there are no physical barriers to connecting ideas. If everything, potentially, is for the long term (and almost permanent), then there is simply no excuse to be focusing solely on the current, the present. I would argue that it’s completely the wrong model for the Web. Quite frankly, I find it incredible that there is no easy, official way for me to see news stories from any day except for today on the main news websites. Instead, I’m forced into Google searching for content. I’m looking for information about the news, why shouldn’t I be able to find it on the BBC, or on Sky, or any other news outlet. Why are old stories hidden away? There’s no need – and in fact, it’s completely illogical. More often than not, today’s current news is simply building on top of events that have previously happened. Events that will be referenced in the text of the ‘new’ article. And yet, unless a journalist has kindly provided a manually entered link back to a previous story, I’m forced to make the link back implicitly, in my mind. Yes, this made sense in the days of broadcasting, or of papers, where everything was ‘one-shot’ – you couldn’t get the past back, so you had to summarise in your ‘new’ content. But that’s simply not the case now. Perhaps the BBC news outlet shouldn’t try to cover every single story. Instead, perhaps it should pick and choose stories, and cover them in depth, with decent analysis that seeks to help people understand, not just to keep them up to date. Perhaps this is what is meant by doing fewer things, but doing them better. And perhaps it’s important to phrase it like that – not just as ‘doing fewer things better’ – the comma is of prime importance, else it seems we’re advocating doing fewer good things, and lots more bad things.

All this provides an interesting position for news outlets. They’re still trying to work out how best to position themselves on the Web. Yes, there’s the economic question. But paywall or no paywall, it’s really not a question of distribution. It’s a question of form. And whilst images, text and video are not dead, and are still useful, they are not going to solve any problems. My personal opinion here, of course, but if Sky’s position is to be first for the story, to be the arbiter of breaking news, that’s fine. That’s a useful service. But, I contend, it’s one based in the old world of news. It’ll still survive, but there’s an opportunity for others to provide something different, something that can truly revolutionise the news industry, whilst also sating the desire for understanding, the desire that is being so sorely underprovided in the current climate. People are crying out for understanding, for context. And the Web can offer this, not just in terms of lengthy ‘analysis’ articles and the domain of the personal blogger, but by using the building blocks of the Web itself – URIs and links.

Before I go into some examples of what this could turn out to be, I want to take a little time to talk about data visualisation and ‘infographics’. Again, it’s something which is currently in vogue, and very much the subject of debate. I think that infographics can be useful. They can reveal interesting patterns, and of course, look good. They can be, as the regular creators of infographics often acknowledge, misleading and dangerous – a form of propaganda. But again, this whole debate on the merits of infographics often (but, to be fair, not always) misses the point. Data gets collated, the infographic drawn. The graphic is provided as an image, and if you’re lucky, the data in a spreadsheet alongside it. Yes, sometimes it’s in a flash file where you can click on things. But most of the time it’s an image, which can be easily distributed by the Internet. To truly be using the Web, to be creating something new, however, we would need to be creating these graphics from the raw materials of the Web. It’s not going to be easy, at the moment, as the tools are only starting to emerge, and often the beauty of these visualisations are severely compromised. But more effort has to be put into it.

So, finally, a case study. As I write this, today is the hundredth day of the current Coalition government in the UK. There seems to have been plenty of reporting around this in the news. The significance of the hundred days, of course, is a reference back to the tenure of Franklin D Roosevelt in the USA, who used the first hundred days of his presidency to revolutionise American society by introducing economic reform and the New Deal. Not that you’d know from the current reporting. It looks to be just a random milestone chosen because of the niceness of the number.

More importantly, though, we need to consider why the first hundred days of a government is worth reporting on now. It’s precisely the kind of news content that the Web would be perfect at delivering – it’s a retrospective, a review, a summary of events. And what can I find if I turn to the BBC News website? Either a hundred second video (which plays without me asking it to – grr!) with clips of significant moments, or a long textual analysis. The video, especially, is frustrating. It’s offering me a whistlestop tour through time. And yet it’s not allowing me the opportunity to explore, to find out more, to discover. It’s just video. The text article doesn’t even have any real point by point summary of the hundred days. I want to know what the significant events were, why they were significant, and how they were reported at the time. But this isn’t provided. I can read, or I can watch. But I can’t explore. I must consume.

We can also use a related example to illustrate the frustration around infographics. This is a really nice infographic summarising and comparing the first hundred days of presidencies from FDR to Obama. We have nice colourful lines, an easy to use key to ‘types’ of event, and each event is summarised and dated. But it’s just an image. There’s dots, there’s lines, there’s text. Potentially, there could be sound and video. But it’s a flat file. There’s nothing I can click on. I have to consume. All the significance, all the message – it’s all implicit. It can’t be explored, it can’t be journeyed through. And this is where the Web can, and must be used to help.

I’m very much aware that I’ve been quite harsh in this post, and perhaps not providing examples of the solutions. I’m also aware that it’s a difficult time at the moment. In the overwhelming chase for the ‘new’, and with financial constraints, it’s often not regarded as possible to consider anything which doesn’t provide a simple, quick and easy solution. Perfectly understandable. But also perfectly misguided and wrong. Yes, in the current society, we need to make money to survive, and yes, experimentation often means failure and drains on resources. Yes, we should give the public what they want, and if they want more, faster, fresher, we can provide it. But that’s not the be all and end all, and simply can’t be. If we don’t explore, if we don’t try new things, then we’ll never progress. I believe that the lack of comprehension, of attention, of willingness to understand each other, ultimately stems from our preoccupation both with the ‘now’, and with the obsession with single narratives. The Web can allow us to break free from this. It can allow us to create and explore overviews, multi-faceted analyses of situations, which can be consumed in better ways than ploughing through a huge book or long documentary. It’s not the Web which is ruining our attention and/or critical faculties. It’s the lack of consideration, of experimentation, of effort to comprehend and acknowledge the complexities of the world – ones that can only truly be reflected by networks of concepts and ideas, not only in our minds, but on the Web. And it’s up to us to try.

Addendum: Other articles I didn’t get a chance to talk about in this post, but are well worth reading, and I may come back to, include Stijn Debrouwer’s ‘The Basic Unit of Information‘, Megan Garber’s ‘Following up on the need for follow up’, Philip Trippenbach’s ‘News: Rewired‘ and Silver Oliver’s blog.

The Fourth Medium

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Stories as TV Programmes, by tristanf

It’s been a while since I last posted. Things are going well, and I’m glad that all this has come on leaps and bounds since this time last year. Hopefully, by this time next year, there will be something practical to show for all of it – stay tuned, and keep an eye here if you’re interested in the Ontomedia work.

I’ve been busy refining the ideas that I’ve discussed here, experimenting and talking to others about it. In the course of doing so, however, I’ve felt that there’s one major part of what I’m trying to put forward which doesn’t always get through. It’s something I touched upon in the last post, but I thought it might be good to expand and explore again here.

In the case of drama, the writer is the starting point for everything. Their ideas and the ways in which they are communicated through their writing are central to their craft. The story comes first, and then it is translated and adapted to suit a number of different media. There are, of course, three main types of media that I’m referring to – text, speech and (moving) pictures. This then roughly translates to the medium of print, radio and television respectively. The audience for the writer’s work is implicitly aware that they are experiencing the story through the filter that the medium overlays on the narrative. In the mind of the audience, then, they must decode the filter in order to get to the real ‘prize’ – the narrative, the context, the ideas being communicated.

This isn’t to say that the filtering effect of the medium (be it text, speech or pictures) is necessarily a negative influence. Careers and whole industries have been built on the ability of people who understand the natural tricks of the medium, and are able to utilize them to create an effective and compelling representation of the story. Equally, tricks of the trade can be noted and enjoyed by audiences who find comfort and satisfaction in familiar practices.

Of course, when constructing a narrative, the creator is likely to be aware of the conventions, limitations and advantages of the medium they have chosen to communicate through. This may indeed shape the narrative itself, but it remains true that you should be able to strip away the medium’s influence, in order to access the ‘pure’ story at the heart of the work. This can then be re-contextualised through a different medium – some of its beauty in the former medium may be lost, but a new perspective may reveal new highlights in the new medium.

OK, so far, so (fairly) obvious, if a little abstract. The point that i’m trying to make is that when you use a medium to construct a representation of a narrative, the medium plays an active role in the communication of that narrative to the audience. Or at least, it should do, if the medium in question is used to its full potential.

So, with that in mind, let’s examine the media that we’ve discussed. We’re all aware that print, radio and television (alongside film) have their own techniques, advantages, quirks. Writers, producers, technicians, artists, all use these quirks to make representations of a narrative in a way which is best suited to their chosen medium. That is to say, you have the book of Swallows and Amazons, the TV adaption, the radio version, even the film. Note also the language being used – adaption, “…brought vividly to life…” – each acknowledging the fact of the different media being used to tell the story.

However, then we come to the Web – and what do we find? It would appear that, from current use, we cannot call the Web a fourth medium. Instead, it is merely a distribution channel for the other three, akin to a TV set, a radio, or a bookshop or printing press. Not that this is a bad thing in and of itself – applying the technology of the Internet – of a network – in this way is pretty obviously a good thing, despite the legal ramifications – communication has never been so cheap and widely distributed. But earlier I said that representations of a creation through a medium involve some form of adaption, not just delivery.

The book, the TV, the radio, the film – these are all isolated, one-shot representations of a creation. They are produced, packaged, sold, distributed, consumed – in isolation. In order to remix, re-adapt, and so on, we either have to go directly back to the source, to the creator, and ask them to rework their creation, or we have to cut and paste, knowing that in doing so we are left with the pieces of the story still in situ of the media from which we took them – they cannot truly be extracted.

However, the Web is different – it has the potential to be the fourth medium, a networked, connected medium, thereby very different from the other three. Rather than sound effects, paragraph breaks or camera tricks, the Web has its own natural tricks and advantages – the network, the connections. These, of course, are the same connections that we all make when consuming narrative from the other three media – but rather than being isolated within us, the Web allows us to expose these connections, explore them, analyse and create new links, enabling us to enjoy narratives and stories in a way which is both natural to the Web, and, more importantly, natural to our minds.

Just as we take a story and adapt it for a book, for TV etc, so we should adapt stories for the Web. We should forget about scenes and chapters, and concentrate instead on the story itself – the events that take place. In this way, we can begin to construct entirely new adaptions and representations of stories. Only then can we say that we are using the Internet to its full potential, and only then will we have added a fourth medium to our repertoire of cultural and creative expression.

The Web as a Creative Tool

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Radio Daze, by Ian Hayhurst – creative commons license from Flickr

This year, the World Wide Web celebrates its’ 20 anniversary. I’ve been thinking about what use we’ve made of this technology during this time, and the way in which I like to think about how we could help fulfill the potential of the Semantic Web. As ever, thanks go to several people and bloggers out there whose ideas have inspired me, and the conversations I’ve had with them in general. Again, this may be stating the obvious to some people, but I feel it’s important to try and draw the threads of the patterns I’m seeing together in the hope that it will help others make the leap to looking at the potential of the WWW in a completely new way.

Up until recently, the Web has mainly been used as an enabling technology. By this, I mean that it has allowed us to do things faster, easier, cheaper, wider and for longer than ever before. However, these things that we’ve been doing with the Internet are, in the main, very much things that we were doing before the Web hit the mainstream. If anything, we’ve concentrated mainly on transposing these traditional methods of communication and interaction onto a new platform – and a platform is exactly what we’ve been using the Web for. Essentially doing the same as we’ve been doing before, but “now with added web!” as it were. On the way, we’ve (possibly accidentally) created concepts that didn’t exist before – for instance the whole notion of websites, but overall it’s been a case of doing the traditional things, using the web – and the benefits listed above have come as a kind of side-effect.

The industry in which I attempt to make a living – television and radio – is doing the same thing. The on-demand products from all the major UK broadcasters offer the benefits I’ve mentioned, but when it comes down to it, they are still just replicating traditional platforms – it’s all about using your device as a substitute for your radio or your TV. Yes, we get the extra benefits of stuff being available for longer, and potential personalisation, but we still haven’t fully escaped the mindset of using the Web purely as a platform – as if it was just a new type of box for watching or listening. It can be, but it can also be so much more.

The other way in which we have tended to use the Web has been as a commercial tool. I mean this in two ways. Firstly, again, it’s a case of imitating existing processes on the Internet – hence the success of retailers, such as Amazon and Play. However, I think that the main use has been the way in which the Web has been seen as vital to a commercial strategy – not just in terms of selling goods directly through the Internet, but in a promotional sense as well. If you want to be successful now, you need a promotional presence on the Web. Again, however, what role is the Web playing in this, apart from the side effects? Very little. We’re still promoting and distributing things, it just happens to be a new platform for doing so.

I think it’s especially interesting to note the dichotomy between the way in which we’ve transposed old methods of ‘doing’ onto the Web, whilst creating new ‘things’ which are ‘of’ the Web. But the crux of the matter is that we’ve never really (in a mainstream sense) tried to properly transfer the traditional ‘things’ which make up our world onto the Web, and then set about creating new ways of interacting with these things via the Web.

So that’s what we’ve done up until now. But what of the future?

In the mid-1990s, when CD-ROMs and the Web were beginning to puncture mainstream consciousness, the buzz-word was ‘interactive’. Yet I think this has always been a mis-nomer. The way we’ve used the web so far in terms of the creative arts still conforms to a flat structure. People create things, whether they be songs, pictures, television/radio programmes, even blog posts, post them on the Web, and that’s it. The thing that has been created is effectively fixed, static. Other people can create their own works as a result of these things, but again, it’s almost as if they perform the act of creation ‘offline’, and then only when it comes to ‘publishing’ does the thing go ‘online’.

The Web, as I understand it, is essentially very simple. As I’ve mentioned in other posts, it’s just dots and lines. The dots are the things we identify, and the lines are the links we make between them. So far, we’ve concentrated on using the dots to represent ‘pages’, and the ‘lines’ have been (mostly) simple navigational links, with little meaning invested within them. These dots and lines, though, could be used as a model for almost anything – they are, after all, the essence of communication, the construction of a narrative. What we should be doing, is using the Web in the same way we would write a book, or make a TV/radio programme.

By this, I mean that just as you pull together ideas, resources, things in the construction of a work, we would use the Web to do the same thing – except we’d be able to retain the links back to where the individual parts of the work came from, with less need for someone to do the hard work of analysis for us. For instance, knowing that a line in a TV show is a reference to a famous film from the 50s, knowing that an author is alluding to a Norse legend, knowing that a piece of music is sampling others, even knowing that a work of art was painted using oils or watercolours, or uses symbols which have distinct meanings – all this would be explicit and available to anyone, via the links – encouraging learning, truly ‘reading between the lines’, as it were. Indeed, then we could claim to use the word ‘interactive’ properly – because a work that is published by someone would no longer be a flat, finished structure – audiences would be able to explore it from all angles, trace links to other things, and, importantly, then create their own works by linking things together in a brand new way.

Of course, one of the main objections to the trend of making things available online is that we lose the context of things, the author loses the power. I think that I disagree here – that’s not a failing of the Web itself, it’s a failing of our limited use of it. If we were to use the Web in the way I’ve talked about, then authorship would be another valid link to make – and one that should always be traversable – credit would actually be easier to give, and would also hopefully, importantly begin to encourage a true breaking down of the walls between ‘producers’ and ‘consumers’ – we would, and should be, enabling the audience to create entirely new things, using our things – that’s still a valid thing to do, as long as the credit is given, and the links between what one person has originally made, and someone else has remixed, are made.

As I mentioned towards the beginning of this post, it’s almost as if so far, we’ve done things the wrong way round – we’ve been so busy creating the new platforms and enablers that we’ve failed to see the true potential of them – and that can only really be achieved once we start migrating not the processes and devices (e.g. the process of shopping, the ability to watch TV etc.) but the things we create for those processes, onto the Web. Dots can be more than webpages, lines can be more than navigational links. Create the things (from which we may create exciting new things we haven’t even thought of yet…), then refine the processes that help us find, share and experience them.