#GEN2012: Will we still have digital development editors in 10 years?

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Newspaper publishers need to “keep looking outwards” and make changes – even the titles that are the most digitally advanced – the Guardian’s digital development editor told editors at the World News Summit in Paris today.

Asked at the conference whether jobs like hers – helping newsrooms find and implement new processes and tools – would still be needed once newspapers had migrated further towards digital, Joanna Geary replied:

I’d like to hope that in the future it’s something that every journalist would play a role in and would start to understand and have an interest and curiosity in how they connect with readers in meaningful ways.

I still think there is a need to be honest and open with ourselves that this is not a communication revolution that is going to slow down any time soon. If that means we have to have a role that is constantly looking outwards at how our readers are changing, I think there is always going to be a need for this.

She later added:

The Guardian has a very unique culture, specifically about embracing new ideas and understanding new platforms and seek opportunities from new tools. When you see journalists work closely with developers, what’s great is watching both sides learn what’s possible.

For anyone who’s working on internal change it’s so easy to become internal looking and focused on internal structures and politics. My own bit of advice would be to keep looking outwards.

Guardian network editor Clare Margetson said there were still some journalists who needed a hand getting to grips with digital.

When I was on the newsdesk 10 years ago it seemed like a very different place. One of our best reporters would sit smoking a pipe and would not touch a computer. He would call in his story. It seems a world away.

There are still some who need help and some for whom Facebook is still quite a scary thing to use, but it’s quite collaborative and you find the younger reporters on a bank of desks will help out the older ones.

Online news startups need help converting readers into supporters

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A report by the Washington DC-based J-Lab has found that even though online news startups have access to a wide range of social media tools, they struggle with how to measure their impact. Respondents to the survey, which was funded by the Robert R. McCormick Foundation, said Facebook and Twitter were important for alerting readers to new stories but they did not know how to monitor meaningful engagement.

Nearly 80 per cent of the 278 “digital-first” startups who responded to the survey said they did not have the means to measure whether their social media engagement strategies were converting readers into donors, advertisers, contributors or volunteers.

Jan Schaffer, director of J-Lab’s Institute for Interactive Journalism said:

These small sites can measure interaction with their content, but they don’t have good tools to measure meaningful engagement. This affects both the future of their operations and the impact they can have in their communities.

New analytics tools give news startups some useful data, but survey respondents said their top metric for measuring engagement was still website uniques and page views. One respondent said:

We feel these numbers only give us part of the information we need. We’re interested not just in breadth of engagement but more in depth of engagement.

The report identified a “broadcast” mentality as a weakness in measuring audience engagement. It recommends a number of best practices for news startups when measuring engagement and urged training in the use of currently available analytics tools like ThinkUp, Google Analytics and Hootsuite.

#GEN2012: Startup projects showcased in new contest

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The Global Editors Network launched a new contest at the News World Summit in Paris today, which has seen a number of new startups already outline their service or product to delegates, who will then vote on what they have seen.

The Startups for News competition saw more than 50 startups enter, with 13 selected who will present to the conference over today and tomorrow.

Speaking to the conference, GEN’s deputy director Antoine Laurent said there was “a need for more contact and more communication between media groups, editors-in-chief and smaller companies, startups offering editorial services”.

The 13 selected startups are mostly French outlets, but there are also four others from other parts of the world.

The winner will be declared on Friday.

Magazine app developer praises Windows 8, abandons Android

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Digital media developer Daniel Sharp has praised the next version of the Windows operating system for its ease of use when programming.

Writing for the Kernel, the Stonewash co-founder states the advantages of developing digital media products for Microsoft’s as-yet-unreleased operating system over Google’s Android OS:

I’ve just come from another testing meeting. Seven of us around a table looking at an Android app that’s in the mid-stages of development. We’ve found unique issues on each device, every device on the table was running a different version of Android, with different resolutions, capabilities and specifications. Getting this right is going to be time consuming…

Meanwhile, for the past seven weeks we’ve also been working on a super-secret project building magazine apps for the Windows 8 launch. In those seven weeks, we’ve managed to create a solid first version, that works across all resolutions, laptops, desktops and tablets, whether they use a touch screen, pen or mouse. Development was easy.

He continues:

The fact that you can develop native applications for Windows using HTML and JavaScript is huge: in our case, it meant that every single engineer in our company already knew how to develop for Windows.

If you’re looking at a smartphone application then Windows 8 isn’t for you; it’s not for smartphones. But if you’re looking at a tablet application, take a good hard look at Android and the figures. I took one look at them and I’m not convinced.

And that’s why I have paused all our Android development in favour of Windows 8.

Earlier this week the Financial Times revealed that it is working on an app for Windows 8, ahead of the autumn tablet release.

Stonewash develop frameworks for news and magazine publishers to create bespoke tablet applications. Their clients include lifestyle magazine Lusso, Investment & Pensions Europe and the Henley Standard newspaper.

Read the full article in the Kernel here

#GEN2012: Netizine ‘turns magazines into social networks’

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A new HTML5-based service that aims to “connect” magazine readers – allowing them to share, recommend and comment on what they’re reading with like-minded people – has been showcased at the News World Summit in Paris.

Netizine is in invited beta mode at the moment and aims to “turn magazines into social networks”, building communities around content and bring interactivity to magazine pages.

Readers interested in the same subject can chat about articles on the page itself and join groups around specific topics. Editorial teams would also be able to connect with readers in real time.

Magazines can be personalised and bookmarked to read offline – and Facebook and Twitter are integrated directly into each page.

There’s a video explaining more about the service on the Netizine website.

#GEN2012: Interactive graphics case studies from the Guardian

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The Guardian’s Alastair Dant took the the stage at the News World Summit in Paris today to share the news outlet’s approach to using interactivity to present data and stories to their audience.

Dant, who leads the interactive team at the Guardian, said types of interactives include those which plot “paths through space and time”, and those which work to relay “the roar of the crowd”.

Here are some of the interactives he showcased to delegates:

  • Afghanistan war logs

The Guardian produced two major interactives around the war logs. Dant spoke about one which shows all IED attacks on civilians, coalition and Afghan troops from 2004 to 2009 recorded in the war logs. The interactive allows users to “drag the date along the bar, to see where and who they hit over these five years”.

The team also produced a graphic showing a selection of 300 “significant incidents” from the logs, linking through to each full log entry.

  • World Cup 2010 Twitter replay

Dant said the team had a “very fuzzy brief” from the editorial team who wanted to “capture the excitement” around the games. As a result the team produced a “Twitter replay” which consisted of recording all conversations on Twittier and analysing them “to find out how word popularity changes over time”.

As a result the interative offers 90 minutes of football in 90 seconds, based on Twitter reactions.

  • Rupert Murdoch: How Twitter tracked the MPs’ questions – and the pie

And the team re-employed this technique of “relaying the roar of the crowd” when Rupert and James Murdoch appeared before the culture select committee last year

#GEN2012: Swiss news start-up on why it ‘forced’ editors to join Twitter

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The blogs editor of a new Swiss weekly newspaper and website that required all of its senior staff to join Twitter says the move has helped them better understand the challenges of multi-platform publishing and engage with readers.

Tageswoche launched in October – and had 3,000 people buying a subscription “before they even knew what it was about”, David Bauer told the News World Summit in Paris today.

Reflecting on the lessons learnt from the launch, Bauer said getting journalists to be truly platform-neutral was something of a challenge at first:

It’s difficult to get into journalists’ minds that they’re working on a story without knowing where it’s going to be published. Up until recently it wasn’t common in Switzerland for journalists to be on Twitter. We forced all our editors to join Twitter – it teaches you about pace, about interaction, about information flows, about making mistakes and being open about them.

The one thing that surprised me and astonished me the most was the great quality of user content. We required everyone to sign up to post a comment, keeping out the trolls. We actively and prominently featured good reader comments, thus setting a bar. Our editors actively engage in discussions about their own articles, be it on Facebook, Twitter or our website.

He spoke about the importance of apps and being seen on mobile:

We had to learn the hard way. We didn’t have a native app – we just had a website that was optimised for mobile devices. But what happened was people went to the App Store, didn’t find us and concluded that it didn’t exist.

Story selection – and what works best online – was also an interesting discovery:

A lot of people told us that we need to have more news on our website but when we look at what articles people read and share the most it’s when we go beyond news, comment on news, add background information and explain the news. We curate a lot, send people away, and have them come back to have the news explained by us.

#GEN2012: ‘Trolls’ can become an asset in data journalism projects

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The creator of a data-driven fact-checking tool for the French presidential election says data journalists should welcome having their own work fact-checked by readers – and says “trolls” who question your methodology can become an asset.

Sylvain Lapoix, a senior journalist at online news site OWNI, has just finished working on Véritomètre – a fact-checking tool analysing the statistical claims made by the presidential election candidates during the campaign – and which took a year to build.

He said the project was inspired by US political journalism and had not been done properly in France before.

In France, there is a tradition in political journalism which is mainly a Voltaire way of doing things – a very literary way. Politics is about speech, attitude, how you behave. Getting numbers and all the facts back into the subject was a (challenge) we had to go through.

Speaking at the News World Summit in Paris today, Lapoix said:

One thing we learnt is that when you’re a data journalist or a web journalist, you should never ever ever – I insist – ever assume that your readers won’t look that close into your own (work) because eventually they always do.

A guy actually did all the maths from the quotes we fact-checked. At some point we considered him a troll – but he was taking it very seriously so we decided to answer to him.

Lapoix said he eventually “became an asset” to them. He added:

Your readers are your biggest database of experts you could ever have. They realise they matter to journalists. At some times the readers were defending us against other readers who were doubting us.

#GEN2012: ‘The most interesting people to be heard are those who do not have a blog’

The founding editor of a successful French participatory news website has urged journalists to do more to find and train people to tell their stories – and says “bloggers are not especially the most interesting people to be heard”.

Social media consultant Benoît Raphael set up LePost.fr in 2007 – a sister site for Le Monde newspaper which became part of the Huffington Post network earlier this year. He has since gone on to oversee the launch of a new citizen news site for Le Nouvel Observateur called Le Plus.

He said the thinking behind both sites was “the conviction that a lot of voices can’t be heard because people do not have time”.

We thought it was the mission of the journalist to find these voices.

Raphael remembered when Le Post launched:

Back then people were already saying that citizen participation was crap – but we proved that it was not just about giving a mic to people and saying express yourself.

Le Post had a team of 10 journalists curating stories and attracted 3.2 million unique visitors a month by 2010.

Speaking at the News World Summit in Paris today, Raphael said:

It was not about having a team of bloggers – bloggers are not especially the most interesting people to be heard. They are just people with time to write, but the most interesting people might be hidden – they don’t have a blog. Most of the time they don’t have the time, the energy or the vocabulary to express themselves.

At Le Plus, a small team of six journalists and a community manager help members of the public write stories. Raphael said the site attracted 1.4 million visitors a month, with more than 10 per cent of traffic coming from Facebook and Twitter.

Raphael said:

Go to your participants, train them, meet them in person when you can, invite them into the world of news by organising events and meetings.

It’s about working as journalists with your contributors and that’s the key of success.

He also urged news groups not to try mimicking the role of social networks:

Please don’t try to be Facebook or Twitter. I’ve heard media saying we are going to be the Facebook of news. The problem is that media are not social networks – they are media. Instead of trying to be social networks, you are better using social networks as a collaborative tool.

Update: Sharon Moshavi, vice president of new initiatives at the International Center for Journalists in Washington DC, agreed with in a later session at the News World Summit.

She said:

It’s interesting – we worked with bloggers (on a project in Malaysia) and they were the worst people to work with. They were not interested in journalism. They wanted to get their opinion out and scream as loud as possible.

Discussing visual journalism at #GEN2012 – ‘Everybody has to think visually’

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Visual journalism “is not about being pretty”, it is about explaining a story more effectively – this was the advice of visual editor at LaInformacion.com Chiqui Esteban, speaking at the News World Summit in Paris today.

In his presentation to the conference Esteban explained why he felt entire newsrooms need to think visually whether staff are writers, developers or designers, with the overall focus on telling the story in the most effective way.

He outlined how visual journalism can be used to explain, show trends, give geographical information, personal information and help media outlets “be different”.

Here are two of the examples he ran through showing this sort of visual journalism in action:

How Presidents’ Pay Compares with [Professors’ salaries]

Rock-Paper-Scissors: You vs. the Computer

The key is “being different”, he said, citing this as the reason for LaInformacion’s survival.

Everybody has to think visually. We have to propose things in morning meetings but the rest of newsroom has to tell [us what they would like also] … Sometimes the best visual ideas come from people who don’t work on visuals.

He also shared some interesting thoughts on newsroom integration when it comes to working on visual storytelling.

In LaInformacion all the newsroom is 30 people, we are obligated to collaborate if we want to have something.

But he said “everybody wants to do graphics” and writers have seen “that it works”.

They’ve learnt something that they don’t have to write a story, they just have to think and between all of us we will decide how is the best way to show it – if it’s text with video, interactive multimedia or a graphic.

We have been journalists with them, we care about information and not with things looking pretty, they trust us, We earn their trust and we trust them with their stories and everyone respects each other.