At Last, Couric Is Expected to Say She's Leaving CBS - Brian Stelter

Brian Stelter offers up the lamest excuse for anonymous sources, ever:

At Last, Couric Is Expected to Say She’s Leaving CBS - Brian Stelter

The meticulously arranged exit plan was described by four people with knowledge of it, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because it was not supposed to be revealed before the formal announcement.

The editors at the NY Times really are slipping on the anonymous sources justifications. This is a new low.

Megan Garber, The New York Times’ R&D Lab has built a tool that explores the life stories take in the social space For the past several months, the R&D Lab has been working, quietly, on a time-based representation of how the Times’ news content is being shared in Twitter’s social space. Its name: Project Cascade. Superficially, it’s a data visualization, but it’s actually a tool that could, ever so slightly, change the way we think about online engagement. It’s the product of a collaboration among Mark Hansen, the UCLA stats professor who spent a spring 2010 sabbatical working at the Times as what Zimbalist calls the paper’s “futurist-in-residence” — that casual title alone offers evidence of the scope of the R&D Lab’s ambition — along with Jer Thorp (data artist in residence) and Jake Porway (data scientist). And it has, despite its pragmatic uses, a firmly artistic attitude: Hansen, along with the artist Ben Rubin, designed the “Moveable Type” screen installation in the Times’ lobby, and Thorp, whose work we’ve written about previously, has converted data from the Times’ API into visualizations that are both revealing and stunning. I’ve seen the Project Cascade demo several times at Betaworks’ events. Fascinating insights into the near-randomness of stories ‘taking off’ on Twitter based on a chance retweet, and ideas finding the right mind in which to grow; a stratling revelation about social contagion in general, and the role that Twitter has grown into within the realm of open social discourse.
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Megan Garber, The New York Times’ R&D Lab has built a tool that explores the life stories take in the social space

For the past several months, the R&D Lab has been working, quietly, on a time-based representation of how the Times’ news content is being shared in Twitter’s social space. Its name: Project Cascade. Superficially, it’s a data visualization, but it’s actually a tool that could, ever so slightly, change the way we think about online engagement.

It’s the product of a collaboration among Mark Hansen, the UCLA stats professor who spent a spring 2010 sabbatical working at the Times as what Zimbalist calls the paper’s “futurist-in-residence” — that casual title alone offers evidence of the scope of the R&D Lab’s ambition — along with Jer Thorp (data artist in residence) and Jake Porway (data scientist). And it has, despite its pragmatic uses, a firmly artistic attitude: Hansen, along with the artist Ben Rubin, designed the “Moveable Type” screen installation in the Times’ lobby, and Thorp, whose work we’ve written about previously, has converted data from the Times’ API into visualizations that are both revealing and stunning.

I’ve seen the Project Cascade demo several times at Betaworks’ events. Fascinating insights into the near-randomness of stories ‘taking off’ on Twitter based on a chance retweet, and ideas finding the right mind in which to grow; a stratling revelation about social contagion in general, and the role that Twitter has grown into within the realm of open social discourse.

For emphasis

jaketbrooks:

The American Journalism Review reveals how Arianna Huffington was able to lure Peter Goodman from the Times. It also reveals Goodman’s own self-loathing for taking the offer that was “too amazing to turn down.” So what did it? Freedom (and I’m sure the money wasn’t bad either). 

Adding original content was a goal from the outset, Huffington says. So when the site became profitable last year, she took a dinner meeting with Peter Goodman — who says he was satisfied at the Times writing in-depth news features — as a chance to give him what he saw as an offer he couldn’t refuse.

Total freedom, as Goodman describes it. A chance to dig deep into the economic issues facing Americans left powerless by economic recession.

After he decided to join up, Goodman says “it was almost hard to get out of bed for a week. I thought, my God, this woman has described something that is too amazing to turn down, and yet I’m at this job where I’m doing serious, high-impact work at the greatest brand in American journalism.”

Goodman speaks highly of the Times (and of its executive editor, Bill Keller, who is not, as can be seen in a recent New York Times Magazine column, a big fan of Goodman’s new employer). But there were limitations. For instance, when a front-page story on predatory for-profit colleges generated hundreds of e-mails, Goodman wanted to do another story on the topic — but the paper had no place for it.

“My editors said, and I’m not criticizing them, ‘Well, we already hit the subject,’” Goodman says. “Arianna’s whole thing is, “This is the Web, let’s hit it again and again. If we’ve got another one, let’s hit it again.’”

So now Goodman has assigned a reporter to that beat full-time and has deployed his staff of about a dozen, some established journalists, some eager new recruits, to cover economics and business issues across the country, all with the idea of pursuing a story as long as it takes to tell it thoroughly.

Well played, Huffington. Well played.

How would you like your Times bashing to be served today?

jaketbrooks:

New York Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger and Times CEO and paywall doyenne Janet Robinson sat down for a Q&A with graduate journalism students at Columbia. According to the published reports, it didn’t go so well.

1) The New York Times is lead by a bunch of out-of-touch elitists: Arthur Sulzberger: ‘It’s harder’ for poor people to access the New York Times

2) The New York Times is lead by a bunch of out-of-touch pencil pushers: NYT’s Arthur Sulzberger and Janet Robinson Insist the Paywall is Not a Paywall

3) The New York Times is lead by a bunch of out-of-touch rich people who possibly overspend on technology: Sulzberger: $40 Million Estimate For Paywall Cost Is ‘Vastly Wrong’

4) The New York Times is lead by a bunch of irritable curmudgeons: Arthur Sulzberger’s New York Times Paywall Defense.

Classists! Capitalist pigs! Rich ignoramuses! Patronizing snobs! Tough crowd.

Comments Have Cooties

The NY Times — especially Bill Leller — just can’t stop throwing rocks at Ariana Huffington and her Post. Jeff Jarvis spends some time analyzing this — a good read — but I can abstract the argument using just one phrase buried in his piece:

Jeff Jarvis, Who’s afraid of Arianna Huffington?

Comments have cooties.

All the tired arguments being kicked about by the Church of Journalism about their reason to exist, why we need them, and why we should pay them to do what is most comfortable for them really don’t address the deep motivations of people online.

We have invented the web to happen to ourselves, and to the extent that the NY Times staff and owners wise up to that, they can benefit from it. We are not here to be informed, or be part of the public that they want to address.

The central problem at work here is not paywalls, but simply that conventional, old school journalism doesn’t want to share the podium with us. They don’t even want us nattering in the comments, really. The leaders of The NY Times — arguably in favor of liberalism — are really not willing to accept the basic premises of the social revolution, and will definitely not reshape what they do to support it.

Comments have cooties because we, the people, have cooties. We have unwashed ideas, dirty minds, and bits of social rhetoric caught between our teeth.

Huffpo is not going to up end the media world, necessarily, but it has accepted more of what is hotting up the social mess online than the NY Times does, and so Huffpo is gaining community while the NY Times is losing readers. There is more of us in Huffpo than in the NY Times, and with the exception of our money, that seems to be the way Bill Keller and company like it.

New York Times Recommendations page.
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New York Times Recommendations page.

Erich Schonfeld on News.me

Erich Schonfeld does a once over on News.me, the new Betaworks/NY Times collaboration on social news. He is likes what he sees:

News.me is a social news reading app that presents the news that the people you follow on Twitter are reading, and filters it based on how many times those stories are shared and clicked on overall. It pulls in data from not only Twitter but alsobit.ly, the betaworks company that shortens billions of shared links every month.

News.me is still a work in progress, and new features are being added every few days. but its basic skeleton is in place. It is more along the lines of Flipboard but with a few new twists. You sign in with your Twitter account, and you can see a stream of news stories and videos being viewed by the people you follow in their Twitter streams. Instead of just seeing the links, the underlying text and images are displayed inline. Not only can you see your own Twitter news stream, but you can also see the Twitter news streams of any other News.me users who you also follow on Twitter. These people should already be familiar to you, but instead of seeing what they are Tweeting out, you get to see the news that is being recommended to them by the people they follow.

That’s the fundamental hook of News.me. You get to see my upstream articles: those being recommended to me by those that I follow. You can already see what I recommend — just follow me on Twitter — but this shows what’s upstream of that.

As I have said many times, the most interesting aspect of curation is not what you recommend, but where you are positioned in the sprawling, worldwide, social network. Where you position yourself determines what you get to see, the raw material from which recommendations come.

I think News.me is headed in an interesting direction, but I agree with Erich’s recommendations for improvements:

  1. Merge the streams: It’s cool to be able to click on 20 different avatars of people you know from Twitter and see the social news stream through their eyes, but if you are anything like me, the people you follow pretty much all tend to be interested in the same things. The result is that Everyone’s News.me stream is very similar with the same tech news stories popping up in each one. There is an option to mute a story once you’ve read it so that it does not appear again even in other people’s streams. But a better solution is to show a unified stream with a little avatar icon for everyone who is implicitly recommending that story.
  2. Show more signals: In addition to showing everyone in whose stream a particular story appears, News.me could also highlight when someone you follow explicitly recommends something by retweeting it or sharing it themselves. Anything that allows readers to tell at a glance which stories are more important than others would be a step forward.
  3. Filter by topic: Right now there is only one “Big News” button based on bit.ly data, but that button could be broken up into categories like politics, international, tech, sports, and finance. Show me the best news stories in each category.

[disclosure: I am a consultant to Betaworks, and have a financial interest in Bit.ly, which is working with the NY Times on News.me. I am also a ‘featured reader’ on News.me: see my avatar on Schonfeld’s News.me.]

News.me

The hush-hush News.me development project at Betaworks — based on technology acquired from the NY Times — has been leaked to the press, by Mashable’s Jolie O’Dell.  Few details have been revealed, but John Borthwick, CEO of Betaworks said “We’re building something wonderful and amazing in the social news space.”

No real details, just vague allusions to personalized and customized news. Seems like the news led Betaworks to launch the News.me stealth website on Thursday.

Update: I have been informed that it appears that Jenna Wortham at the NY Times (Betaworks and The Times Plan a Social News Service) was the first to break this story (thanks @mathewi).

[disclosure: I am an advisor to Betaworks, and have a financial interest in Bit.ly, one of the incubators product companies.]