Associated Press opens news bureau in North Korea | World news | guardian.co.uk.

…As if the news business wasn’t already Kafkaesque. Well, AP is an appropriate choice for this. 

Having done some critical coverage of several boneheaded AP strategies in digital media over the last few years, I think they see eye to eye with NK regarding the dangers of criticism, and how to respond to it.

I’m not kidding: See the response from Paul Colford, AP’s director of media relations, to a 2010 KDMC story I wrote about the controversial AP News Registry program

Brisbane asked NYT readers: “I’m looking for reader input on whether and when New York Times news reporters should challenge ‘facts’ that are asserted by newsmakers they write about.”

This led to consternation from many Times readers, who believed this kind of revelation is part of the basic job of any news organization. GigaOm’s Mathew Ingram offered a good roundup of the flap, and at The Guardian Clay Shirky wrote an eloquent deeper exploration of the mindset disconnect between the Times and its readers.

Many people are debating the ethical implications of this issue. However, I’m wondering about the practicalities and possible opportunities.

If the NYT (or any news organization) does decide to point out when sources offer inaccurate “facts,” HOW might they accomplish that? Might there be good options, especially online, that could serve this purpose in addition to inserting relevant text into stories?…

I’m wondering about tools that might visually or otherwise flag to a web reader when a factual assertion has caveats — such as it’s probably not true, or could be stretching the point, or is a conflation, or lack corroboration or sourcing, etc.

It just seems to me that especially in digital media we might be able to do with some of the nuances of gradations of truth in ways that go beyond mere words on a page.

Your thoughts? Please comment below or e-mail me. Offer examples of potential strategies or tools, if you know of any. I plan to use this information in a post to the Knight Digital Media Center site, so expect to be quoted.

Thanks!

Yesterday I listened to an excellent Radio Open Source podcast episode. Christopher Lydon interviewed Mark Blyth, a political economist at Brown University, about what he’s been learning about the Occupy movement by talking to protestors in Boston — and putting it into a global economic, social, and historic context that I found sobering.

So give it a listen:

Mark Blyth (6): Going to school on “Occupy Wall St.”

One point Blyth made that particularly struck me — and that I especially wish every journalist would take to heart — is this: The labor movement didn’t come out of nowhere. It didn’t spring into being fully formed with collective bargaining and arbitration procedures. It coalesced gradually, in fits and starts, from a society struggling with the “volatility constraint” that comes with rampant inequality.

Birth is messy. Infants aren’t born talking in complete sentences. So don’t look at the Occupy movement expecting this:

botticelli-birth-venus

Boticelli's "Birth of Venus"

After listening to all the context Blyth offered, I suspect we’re watching the earliest phases of a different kind of labor movement: the labor pangs that precedes the birth of something that might eventually walk and talk. Something that probably won’t go by the name “Occupy.”

I only hope the world can collectively raise this baby right.

Adirondacks (Tivoli 440/540): Mobile Reporting
As more and more users turn to mobile devices for news and information, journalists should be including the platform in their news gathering and delivery. But how? This session will take a big-picture look at trends in the mobile industry, the differences between mobile and the web, the significance of having a mobile presence and the best tools to use in the mobile space.

Here are some things I’ll be mentioning…

My Twitter ID: @agahran (be sure to spell it right — most people get it wrong)

Know your mobile media channels — if you understand this, you can do a better job of mobile publishing/engagement and reporting from the field

Will Sullivan, master of all things mojo: @journerdism

Will’s excellent mobile journalism tools guide

I’ll expand this post after the session with links to whatever mobile stuff we end up discussing.

I’m reading it because I’m fascinated and concerned why people (sometimes in large numbers) tend to cling to beliefs/positions fiercely long after they’ve been factually debunked/disproven, whether by science or by journalistic, legal, or other systematic investigation. (WMD, anyone?)

This kind of anti-fact, anti-science backlash tends to really confuse and frustrate journalists and scientists.

It sucks when you work really hard to do the fairest, most systematic investigation of a topic that deeply affects many people’s lives — but the very people who are suffering most from the topic of your research refuse to believe what you have to say, or accuse you of being part of some conspiracy to hoodwink them. And meanwhile, your less skilled or less ethical colleagues are producing their own research and reports designed to foster fear, uncertainty, and doubt.

That generates considerable friction, controversy, and conflict. And worse, it delays the discovery and implementation of real solutions.

Why does this happen — and what can journalists and scientists do about it?…

Panic Virus isn’t a great book (I found most of it tiresomely redundant, like a heavily padded feature article), but the 2nd half of ch. 16 on cognitive biases is relevant here.

There (starting at about location 3100 in the Kindle edition), Mnookin explains psychological phenomena such as pattern recognition, the clustering illusion, cognitive dissonance, and availability cascades. They’re just part of how our brains work, and the practices of science and journalism often act as counterbalances to these innate tendencies. That’s why science and journalism are fundamentally uncomfortable and controversial professions.

But these quirks of how brains work are why just presenting facts and information often has the opposite social effect that journalists hope for.

I think if our goal as journalists is to help people understand how things really are, how they got that way, what might happen next, and what people might do to steer the future or protect their interests, we need to think hard about how to accommodate — not deny — these psychological tendencies.

These phenomena evolved into our brains’ hardwiring for good reasons — but like many evolved tendencies, they present drawbacks when the environment that people exist within shifts quickly and radically.

I’m not sure what might be the best way to adapt journalism/media in ways that accommodate these neurological tendencies constructively (rather than simply dismiss or denigrate them). But I’m pretty sure that the standard journalistic approach of posing as a detached, uninvolved observer who makes no decisions or judgments only feeds the kind of passionate anti-fact backlash these neurological tendencies produce.

I realize it’s hugely controversial to suggest that it might be a good thing for society if journalists were to present themselves as less detached and more human. Usually when I have that conversation in a community of journalists, it generates a lot of passionate backlash.

But maybe such a fierce reaction, in itself, might be an indicator of these very phenomena at work in journalists’ own brains.

UPDATES:

June 18: On a related theme of collective cognitive dissonance, watch this short, brilliant video rant by NY hip-hop radio show host Jay Smooth: How Lebron James Broke the Golden Rule of Sports.

June 16: In B2B Memes, John Bethune wrote an excellent followup to my post. Here’s an excerpt:

I wonder: when you’re dealing with anosognosics—people who can’t recognize their own cognitive failings—is there any way to get them to accept reality without wrapping it in deception? Can you give such readers what they need without, perhaps impossibly, also giving them what they want? Does your goal of truth telling somehow imperceptibly slip into propaganda?

Faced with such questions, I tend to throw up my hands in despair and fall back on a selfish impulse: “This is my search for truth here. You can take it or leave it.”

That’s fine for me, but not for journalism. Truth-telling is transactional. As Gahran suggests, if journalists can’t find ways to get people to listen, they will have failed. The trick will be to do so without bending the truth in the process.

Also, about the anti-vaccination movement: My friend Mary Mactavish pointed me toward this week’s USA Today story noting that the US is in the midst of the worst measles outbreak in 15 years. Salient point: “Granting exceptions to vaccine requirements has helped foster outbreaks, research shows.”

It was Memorial Day, I decided to go for a long bike ride to see the beach at Alameda. I needed the exercise, and the weather was perfect. I was enjoying myself greatly — but as I was biking back along Crown Beach in Alameda, I saw police, firefighters, and onlookers gathered. I asked what was happening, and they told me that a man was stranded offshore. A firefighter pointed out into the water, and I could see a head bobbing above the waves, about 150 feet out.

“It’s shallow out there, he’s standing,” said the firefighter. And indeed, the man didn’t seem to be struggling. But he wasn’t waving or shouting for help, either.

More onlookers gathered, and I snapped some pictures. I couldn’t get a good photo of the man in the water, but I photographed the gathering crowd, and tweeted it both on @agahran and @oaklandlocal, a local news/community site where I’m a senior editor.

alameda rescue1

Rescue workers, locals, watch drowning man, Crown Beach, Alameda, CA

I heard locals talking, and asked them if they knew the man. “He was depressed, off his meds, lost his job,” said one neighbor. “He just walked out into the water with all his clothes on. He’s trying to kill himself.”

In that moment, I froze. I couldn’t be a journalist just then. It felt too personal.

Crowd gathers as man drowns, Crown Beach, Alameda, CA

alameda crowd 2

alameda drowning

You can't see him, but the drowning man was about here offshore, Crown Beach, Alameda.

About a year ago, a good friend from Boulder, who’d grown distant, took his own life. Max was a few years younger than me, a doting father, an artist, sociable and often grinning.

But a few years ago, his life fell apart, I’m not sure why. It happened when my own life was in major transition, and I was feeling the stress of that change. While I never considered suicide, I could relate to feeling overwhelmed and rootless.

I’ve been haunted by Max’s death — and really spooked by suicide ever since.

Back on the beach, a kiteboarder zipped out to the drowning man and circled him several times, coming back to report to emergency personnel on the beach. It seemed like it was taking a long time to mount a rescue so close to shore

So yesterday I rationalized: “This isn’t Oakland. I’m off duty. I don’t need to cover this. I don’t want to cover this. I’ve tweeted my pictures, that’s enough for now.”

So I left. I biked across to Bay Farm Island, where I saw an orange emergency helicopter fly in across the water, hover over the man’s location, then leave. And I continued my bike ride, and went home, trying to shake the spooked feeling.

Last night I got a call from the Bay Area ABC station, KGO7, asking for permission to use my photos in their story about the incident. I said yes, as long as their web story linked to Oakland Local. Here is the KGO story. (Getting them to add that link took some further prodding, but they did it — legacy news orgs often overlook/downplay local news startups, and I get tired of that.)

Reading and watching KGO’s story, I realized how I’d messed up yesterday. They got the story right: Why were so many emergency personnel there on the beach, just watching a man drown 150 feet away?

I was grappling with my own complex connection to suicide. When I considered what I’d cover, if I did cover it, I could only envision a typical story focused on the guy who was killing himself. I didn’t want to do that — I’d have felt like that would be gratuitously pimping out his misery. It was yet another reason to turn away.

But KGO got the story right, the story my own pictures told: Where was the rescue?

As it turned out, Alameda police and firefighters are not currently certified to mount a land-based water rescue. They had to cut back on that training due to budget problems. To attempt such a rescue without certification apparently meant the city could get sued. So they just stood there and watched.

Which is horrible. And I should have asked about that.

According to KGO:

The Alameda Fire Department says budget constraints are preventing it from recertifying its firefighters in land-based water rescues. Without it, the city would be open to liability.

“Well, if I was off duty I would know what I would do, but I think you’re asking me my on-duty response and I would have to stay within our policies and procedures because that’s what’s required by our department to do,” Alameda Fire Div. Chief Ricci Zombeck said when asked by ABC7 if he would enter the water to save a drowning child.

Alameda firefighters could not even go into the water to get the body, so they waited until a woman in her 20s volunteered to bring the body back to the beach.

On duty, off duty.

I’d told myself this incident was out of my journalistic jurisdiction, and I was not on the clock for Oakland Local right then. All a rationalization because I was having an emotional response that made me feel helpless, depressed, out of place.

Meanwhile, those Alameda cops and firefighters were on duty — but said that status was precisely why they couldn’t act.

We all failed that day, And Ray Zack, 53, of Alameda, drowned while we stood by.

Meanwhile, in Colorado, my good friends Randy and Kit Cassingham told of a rescue that did happen. Everyone was on duty. But knowing Randy and Kit, if they were off duty, it wouldn’t have mattered. They would have rescued the teenager who fell off a cliff during a post-graduation party in a remote rural mountain area.

I’m not sure what to do with this. But I know now, really know, that a journalist can’t ever truly be off-duty. Certainly not for life-or-death events. I could not have save this Alameda stranger, any more than I could have saved my friend Max. But I should have asked more questions, and not given in to how I was feeling. I don’t blame the Alameda emergency responders for their inaction, but that situation had a dreadful wrongness about it.

I’m trying to figure out what to do with this. Suggestions are welcome, please comment below.

UPDATE: This sad event gave me an idea for the upcoming Code for Oakland event I’m helping to organize. What if emergency response agencies/dispatch could coordinate with qualified local volunteers in all kinds of emergencies? Like, say, people with Red Cross lifeguard certification? Stay tuned…

NOTE: This list represents only the pieces I authored. My colleagues Adam Glenn and Michele McLellan wrote several other posts. You can find everything on the News for Digital Journalists blog.

Most important post: March 14: Pew research points to mobile opportunities for local news, info. There’s a lot to learn from in this Pew report. I spotted these strategic implications:

• Attract more young people to your news brand. Tomorrow’s audience has to come from somewhere. The research indicates that news orgs could promote long-term growth of their local news market via mobile offerings.
• Native apps not really such a great revenue strategy. In fact, Pews numbers paint a pretty dismal picture for trying to generate much revenue from getting people to pay for content. Now, if news apps became more service-oriented, that could change the picture…
• Embrace the spectrum of mobile technology, not just smartphones. OK, Pew, didn’t look at this directly, but when you look at their numbers you can see that feature phones are a big part of the picture. And the news business mostly thrives based on audience size. Ignoring feature phones means leaving money on the table and alienating potential allies.

Other posts…

Feb. 22: Disaster news prep: Google Person Finder. I wrote this after the Christchurch, NZ earthquake but before the big Japan earthquake/tsunami. Goal here is to tell news orgs how they can leverage this tool by embedding it in their own pages. Also, if your region gets hits by a disaster, I tell how to ask Google to spin off a new instance of Person Finder. You can spin off your own instance, but it’s better to see if Google will do it first to avoid confusion.

Feb 28: Engaging tomorrow’s news audience today: Report. Research from the Newspaper Association of America takes a closer look at sub-groups within the youth demographic for news audiences. I’d like to see more research like this. More importantly, I’d like to see some evidence that news organizations are actually using this research in their strategies.

March 8: Knight Community Info Toolkit: Help make your community stronger with better info. Summary of a new planning tool for community activists. This is the kind of effort I’d love to see news organizations get involved in, but it’s interesting that the toolkit is not really intended for news organizations.

March 9: Knight names new VP of Journalism and Media Innovation: Michael Maness. Pretty significant shift of leadership at the Knight Foundation. It’ll be interesting to see what direction Maness wants to take Knight’s programs. Especially now that the Knight News Challenge is in its fifth and possibly final year. (It was originally intended as a five-year contest program.)

March 11: Texas Tribune, Bay Citizen win Knight grant to build open-source news platform. I’m curious about this project — especially whether it will build upon existing open-source platforms (hopefully WordPress rather than Drupal, if so), and what kind of mobile functionality, if any, it will include.

March 17: New York Times launches paywall — and why most news orgs shouldn’t. Most people who watch the media business are pretty down on this strategy. Frankly, I’m also pessimistic — although I suspect the Times may be able to pull it off, for a while, without really hurting its audience size or search visibility. But there are so many loopholes, and so few real benefits to paying subscribers, that I’ve got to wonder why they’re even bothering with this. It seems almost like a philosophical exercise. They should be putting these resources into offering services that they can sell, if you ask me. As for the vast majority of news orgs: Don’t try this at home. The Times is a very special case.

March 22: Why “data journalism” is good for the news business. My UK colleague Paul Bradshaw wrote an excellent analysis of the many ways that data-focused content (such as interactive databases) and services (such as APIs of metadata from a news org’s content) can help build a news business.

Many of these sessions involve me explaining important trends and context likely to affect how people use phones as media tools. Here are 10 key points I think are worth noting…

1. Mobile is huge

According to ComScore, as of December 2010, 234 million Americans over age 13 used mobile phones — about 96% of all American teens and adults. ComScore also says that 68% of US mobile users use text messaging; 36% browse the web from their phones, 34% download apps, and 25% use mobile social media.

Also, recent Nielsen research says that as of May 2010, US mobile users spent more time sending or reading e-mail on their phones than any other internet-enabled mobile activity (comprising 38.5% of mobile internet time spent). Social media was a distant second (10.7%)

These represent huge potential mobile audiences.

2. Mobile internet access is taking over

A year ago, Clyde Bentley noted Gartner’s prediction that by 2013, most US internet access will happen via mobile devices, not on computers. Based on this, he set forth a pretty good mobile roadmap to 2013 for news organizations.

Bottom line: Whether you like it or not, in the very near future your entire digital strategy will be mostly mobile by default. If your design your digital offerings to be inclusive of the full range of mobile devices in use, you’re more likely to success.

3. Don’t overestimate the smartphone/tablet market

If you only read the tech news, you might think that everyone already has a smartphone — or they will by next Tuesday. However, according to ComScore, as of December 2010 close to three-fourths (73%) of all phones currently in use in the US are “feature” phones, which do not run native apps, usually lack touchscreens, have simpler browsers, and usually can only access slower wireless data networks.

Still, most feature phones are web-enabled and can do e-mail or social media. My own research shows that, at least in Oakland, CA, the majority of feature phone owners do these mobile activities daily or most days. (And with the recent Qualcomm/Opera Mini deal, expect feature phone web browsing to increase sharply later in 2011.)

Smartphones and tablets are important and they are becoming more popular. So far, they’re also fairly pricey — $100-$200 to buy (subsidized), plus a carrier plan that typically runs $100/month per more under a two-year contract. (Tablets are far pricier up front.) That’s more than many people can or would pay for a phone. Also, cost-conscious users tend to prefer no-contract month-to-month phone plans, for flexibility.

Although technology is evolving, the affordable low end of the mobile market will almost certainly be the largest part. Focusing your mobile strategy primarily on the high end (with, say, iPhone/iPad/Android apps) turns a blind eye to most of your potential mobile audience.

4. Measuring mobile traffic is tricky

This is true especially for counting feature phone traffic. I’ve experimented with several mobile metrics tools over the past year, and all of them make it difficult to figure out how much of your traffic is coming from smartphones vs. feature phones. In particular, Google Analytics seems to count most feature phone traffic as regular web hits, which can drastically mislead your mobile strategy.

PercentMobile seems to do the best job of counting mobile traffic, although it’s not great. They’ve created their own category of “experience phones,” which doesn’t really make sense to me and seems to comprise the largest part of mobile traffic measured with their tools. Plus, because PercentMobile (or any mobile-only tracking tool) is separate from your other analytics, integrating that data for analysis can be difficult — making it harder to measure and understand your mobile audience.

5. Learn from mobile marketers

Marketers are doing most of the pioneering work with putting mobile media to good use, especially for engagement (an area where the news biz sorely needs improvement). A lot of people in the news business are averse to learning from marketers or about marketing. That needs to stop. I strongly recommend these books:

• Mobile Marketing for Dummies
• Mobile Marketing: Finding Your Customers No Matter Where They Are

And Kim Dushinski’s blog, Mobile Marketing Profits.

6. Social media is inherently mobile

People who use social media generally access it from their phones as well as their computers. I mean, the whole reason why Twitter has that 140-character limit is to play nice with basic SMS text messaging.

Therefore, consider social media one of the key channels to promote your content, engage your community/market, get feedback, and find great story leads or marketing intelligence.

We’ve had tremendous success at Oakland Local with engaging people via Twitter and Facebook. In fact, last weekend our Facebook page crossed the 5000-fan mark!

Again, social media is a field where news/media pros can learn from marketers. Two great books:

• Marketing in the Groundswell
• The New Rules of Marketing and PR: How to Use Social Media, Blogs, News Releases, Online Video, and Viral Marketing to Reach Buyers

7. US carriers have the mobile market here locked down

This is especially true for smartphones, and this is likely to continue. Furthermore, the FCC’s new net neutrality rules exempt wireless carriers from most requirements — leaving the door open for carriers to charge users extra to access content that you might be publishing online for free. (They can’t charge the content or service providers extra to deliver their content at acceptable speeds, but they can ding customers for access, or throttle delivery speed.) As the net increasingly goes mobile, this can drastically change the economics of all kinds of mobile publishing.

8. Wireless networks are getting faster, but still expect traffic jams

Right now, wireless network congestion is getting worse, even as carriers are rolling out higher-speed networks (LTE, HSPA+, and other “4G” technologies). This is because carriers are selling data-hungry devices faster than they can serve them, especially in many metro markets. If your mobile strategy hinges on assumptions about the data speeds consumers will see most of the time (especially key for video), then best reality-check carrier claims of “speeds of up to..” with crowdsourced carrier signal maps.

9. Responsive design for the mobile web

A good idea for planning your mobile web site is to incorporate principles of responsive design right from the beginning. This will allow the delivery and presentation of your content to automatically adjust to the features and limitations of certain categories of devices.

Book: Mobile Web Design for Dummies

10. Let people talk back via mobile

Mobile devices are for communication, not just media consumption. Build into your mobile strategy ways that people can easy contribute content (photos, video are naturals) or participate (polls, etc.) in your content offerings. And don’t forget about audio options — most of these devices are still phones, after all!

How to Handle Employee Activism: Google Tiptoes Around Cairos Hero – WSJ.com.

Today at the Knight Digital Media Center, I wrote about new advocacy/awareness tool from Sunshine Week: a model proclamation that news orgs and other activists/advocates can customize, publish, and challenge specific government officials and agencies to adopt. It gets into specifics, at least to some extent.

See: Sunshine Week shows how to call for open government

It’s a good start, but here’s what else I’d love to see from Sunshine Week…

I’d really love it if they called for no more pdf-format publishing of government documents with arcane meaningless titles and no useful metadata. (City of Oakland, are you listening? Nah, I didn’t think so….)

…OK, personally I’m skeptical of the value of proclamations, even ones that call for specific actions. What I’d really love to see from Sunshine Week is an online interactive database where people and groups could file public incident reports about specific examples of government opacity or obstructionism, so we can track this issue better.