#377 Get rid of your ego and be an empathetic journalist

Reporters know well the frustration of going out to report a story, with a clear idea in mind of what’s going on, only to find their interviews don’t support their concept.

The same happens in newsrooms, when leaders determine in advance what their audiences will want.

A different, and perhaps better, approach, is a form of empathetic journalism that puts the audience, or the interviewee, first.

“It’s about really listening and trying to see audiences for who they are, not who we think they are, and letting them direct the coverage a little bit more than we ever have before,” says P. Kim Bui, director of audience innovation for The Arizona Republic. “We used to do pedestal journalism — we know best, let us tell you what the news is. Empathetic journalism takes the other tack: I don’t know about this, please tell me more, we want to hear from you, I want to learn from you, as a reporter, as I do this. It takes the ego out of journalists a little bit.”

Empathetic journalism also involves a deeper level of listening and trying to hear an interviewee’s story not just on the surface, but to try and better understand that person in a particular moment of their life.

“If you’re writing a story about a drug addict who killed two people, try to understand the motivation behind that person, what drove them there, to see them as human, as a character, as a person, and trying to relay that to the audience,” she says. “I think we can sometimes get lost in trying to tell the story we want to tell. Every reporter does that.”

The same goes for newsrooms and which stories get covered. As organizations try to figure out how to cover more with smaller staffs, it’s easy — and common — to go with what’s been done before.

In the process of trying to find their way forward, “we’ve kind of forgotten about the audience, and that we’re not typical consumers of news. You’ll get journalists saying ‘the audience doesn’t want this.’ How do you know? When’s the last time you talked to a regular human? Being able to tell stories that are useful, empathetic and newsworthy in a quick manner on multiple platforms is a challenge right now,” she says.

P. Kim Bui, director of audience innovation for The Arizona Republic, joins producer Michael O’Connell to discuss empathetic journalism and why listening to “real humans” can help newsrooms better serve their readers, viewers and listeners.

#359 Reporter uses pop-up newsrooms to amplify Philly’s unheard voices

Better News: Post & Courier uncovers new revenue with mini-publisher model

The Post & Courier of Charleston, South Carolina was in dire straights. Its traditional revenue streams — print advertising and circulation — were in decline and the newspaper needed to find a way to reverse that trend — and fast.

The Post & Courier‘s solution, according to Executive Editor Mitch Pugh, was to take a mini-publisher approach, which mobilized the editorial and sales teams into creating new content products in areas like food, politics and real estate. Over two years, the initiative generated almost $900,000 in new product revenue and increased digital subscriptions by 250 percent.

In April, Pugh wrote a report for the American Press Institute‘s Better News Initiative to share some of the lessons The Post & Courier‘s staff learned by adopting its mini-publisher model. Read the full report here.

Mitch Pugh, right, the executive editor of *The News & Courier*, speaks at a Pints & Politics event, which grew out of the newspaper’s politics mini-publisher group. He’s joined by, from left, Political Reporter Caitlin Byrd, former congressman and governor of South Carolina Mark Sanford and Political Reporter Schuyler Kropf.

The Better News podcast is a partnership between It’s All Journalism and the American Press Institute to a) showcase innovative/experimental ideas that emerge from the Knight-Lenfest Newsroom Initiative and b) to share replicable strategies and tactics that benefit the news industry as a whole. Sign up for the Better News newsletter to receive news about the latest resources, case studies and insights. For more news about the It’s All Journalism podcast and future episodes of Better News, sign up for the weekly IAJ newsletter.

#376 Citizen journalists help CitizenDetroit document public meetings

As newsrooms continue to shrink, communities are losing valuable information when civic boards meet and no one’s there to explain what happened.

Documenters, an organization that started in Chicago a few years ago and has branched out to Detroit, wants to change that, by training and hiring interested and curious citizens and dispatching them to attend public meetings, take notes, and file their observations.

“We’re very intentional about being accurate about facts and trying to get Detroit to be the most civically engaged in nation,” says Vassilis Jacobs, the senior policy analyst at CitizenDetroit and a Documenters manager.

His team is working closely with WDET, Detroit’s NPR station, to expand Documenters deeper into Detroit. Eleanore Catolico, a civic reporter at the radio station, came to Documenters while in Chicago in 2015. She picked up where she left off, taking extensive notes in Detroit’s charter school board meetings and relaying that information to Documenters’ online portal.

“I’ve learned a lot about the civic reporter role,” she says. “It marries the two focal points of the program in an interesting way. We’re training journalists to provide more equitable coverage in the city but also giving people the opportunity to learn skills and attend meetings and get paid for it and learn the importance of city government.”

The notes taken by Documenters are uploaded onto a website and shared for story idea leads and inspiration. Catolico says she sometimes uses information obtained through a Documenter’s notes, building it up with details and insight that would not have been attainable otherwise.

“The program is really about awakening democratic involvement of people here in the city of Detroit, learning about these boards and commissions, and getting the information inside these boards and commissions and authorities out,” Jacobs says. “Getting nuggets of information out, like water shutoffs in the city and the rate that’s happening … or whether boys can wear shorts in Detroit public schools.”

Without fully staffed newsrooms to make those calls and attend those meetings on a consistent basis, people are losing access to vital information they need to live their lives. The Documenters help bridge the gap, giving journalists information on civic meetings while helping people learn how to take good notes and earn money in the process.

Catolico says notes provided from Documenters has helped inform her reporting, especially when she needs to cover a topic she with which she’s not familiar.

“When I’ve talked to other reporters, they’ve been impressed by how easy it is to use the site,” she says. “It fills a need for them.”

Producer Michael O’Connell is joined by WDET civic reporter Eleanore Catolico and Vassilis Jacobs, senior policy analyst at CitizenDetroit and a Documenters manager, to discuss their efforts to train people to take detailed notes at civic meetings to help keep journalists informed.

#375 What does it take to cover hate?

Michael Edison Hayden didn’t have any designs on being a reporter, let alone one who spends his time covering hate groups. He started out as an American playwright who was just looking for work while living overseas.

After several years as a de facto correspondent for U.S. papers in India and Nepal, he and his family moved back to the U.S.

The idea of protecting the safety of immigrants and people of color in the United States is of particular importance to him — in addition to his wife being from India, his mother immigrated to the U.S. from Egypt.

He was covering for someone at ABC News when the 2017 Unite the Right rally happened in Charlottesville. He’d covered a similar rally earlier in the year, in the same town, and used his contacts there to report in real time the horrors witnessed by activists who saw James Fields run through an intersection at the city’s downtown mall, killing Heather Heyer.

“I was very upset after Charlottesville,” Hayden says, now an editor at the Southern Poverty Law Center. “I wanted to sharpen the reporting on extremism because I felt they had gotten away with too much in the leadup to that rally. Those dapper white supremacist stories about RIchard Spencer.”

With that in mind, Hayden stresses that reporters who want to cover hate groups and white supremacist/nationalist organizations understand what they’re getting into and how to protect themselves while working to report on dangerous people.

“If you want to do it the right way, put a lot of work in,” he says. Coming into a newsroom and accusing someone of being a neo-Nazi isn’t enough to warrant a story. “The more thorough the reporting, the more detail-oriented your report is, the more impactful your reporting will be.” It’s easy to shrug off accusations without evidence or proof to back them up.

“Quoting people, getting as many sources as possible, using the person’s entire online history” is a smarter approach. “Thorough is better. It tends to be that when you come in with ‘someone shared a naughty link,’ it doesn’t work. You have to get really dirty with it and actually go long and spend a lot more time,” he says. “We need fewer stories about far-right extremists but more reporting. … We need deeper reporting on how these things work, where the money flows are coming from, who people are from behind the scenes, how they organize when they’re not being seen.”

Hayden also stresses the importance of knowing what to do and who to contact if a reporter feels under attack or under threat for their work.

He’s recently written a guide on open-source intelligence for the Tow Center that features a detailed section on security and how to keep a reporter — and their family — safe from these types of threats.

“You want to pull all your information off the internet if you’re going to get involved,” Hayden says. “You want to keep your family protected and keep their pictures off the internet. If you feel you’re in an unfamiliar place, you can DM me, you can email me. I’d be happy to hear you out. … If someone’s concerned, you always have time. You don’t need to break scoops and you don’t need to slam a story through. If it could be dangerous to you, slow it down. It’s more important to make sure you’re safe.”

It’s All Journalism producer Michael O’Connell sits down with the Southern Poverty Law Center‘s Michael Edison Hayden to discuss the dangers of covering white supremacist groups, the lingering ghosts of the Charlottesville rally and why Twitter locked his account for two days due to a photo printed in a Tennessee newspaper.

#374 What’s changed for women in newsrooms? Less than you think

Across decades and mediums, women in newsrooms have a multitude of experiences in common. That includes shedding, or trying not to shed, a few tears at the office.

It’s something that took Kristin Grady Gilger and Julia Wallace by surprise when they were writing their new book, so much so that it inspired the title, There’s No Crying In Newsrooms: What Women Have Learned About What It Takes To Lead. Gilger and Wallace, both faculty at Arizona State University and former editors, wanted to show what it’s like for women to move up the ranks in journalism.

Kristin Grady Gilger and Julia Wallace, authors of There’s No Crying in the Newsroom: What Women Have Learned About What It Takes To Lead

“I spent 20 years in newsrooms, and I knew women had a lot of really interesting, sometimes funny, sometimes sad, sometimes outrageous stories to tell about what their experiences were like,” said Gilger, senior associate dean and Reynolds Professor in Business Journalism at ASU’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication. She previously worked as a reporter and editor for publications including The Times-Picayune (now The Times-Picayune | The New Orleans Advocate) in New Orleans, the Statesman Journal in Salem, Oregon; and The Arizona Republic — the latter two overlapped with Wallace’s tenure there.

Gilger said that not long after Wallace joined the Cronkite School she approached her about writing a book together.

“We talked to almost 100 women, over 100 people in total,” said Wallace, the Cronkite School’s Frank Russell Chair and a former news industry executive. “And so, you know, the reporting took some time, because one of the surprising things for us is we got people — first, everyone wanted to talk to us. And then when we got them on the phone, they couldn’t stop talking, because people had so many stories and so much insight they wanted to share. And then we also spent time in person with a number of the women we interviewed, especially those who are going into depth with and profiling in chapters. So we had some fun to three day visits with some of these women.”

Gilger and Wallace wanted to highlight women who broke through barriers and overcame obstacles to get to where they were in the industry, as well as help prepare their students for the workforce. In the end they settled on a mix of interviewees including Marcy McGuinness, who worked at CBS News for about thirty years and then at Al Jazeera, and Melissa Bell, publisher and co-founder of Vox Media.

Women from public radio, magazines and newspapers, as well as a range of ages and ethnic backgrounds are also featured in the book, Gilger said.

Hearing their stories, Wallace said something that surprised her and Gilger was not so much the frequency of sexual harassment, but rather that so many of these highly accomplished women often doubted themselves at work.

“Most of them just never really felt like they had truly arrived, that they felt like they had to keep proving themselves over and over, even when you thought, wow, you know, look at how far you’ve gotten in your career,” said Wallace, who was the first female editor of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “And, you know, that’s not an entirely bad thing — who wants to work for someone, who you know, thinks they’re absolutely right all the time, and never has any doubt? But it can be a bad thing if it paralyzes you in terms of making decisions.”

Other comments they heard included being overlooked for certain reporting beats or leadership positions, and the feeling of becoming invisible past the age of 50 or 60. And once women did make it to managerial positions in newsrooms, many said it was difficult to exact authority without being viewed as overly “bossy.”

So some didn’t — take Agness “Aggie” Underwood, for example. Wallace explained how Underwood, who started as a crime reporter for the Los Angeles Evening Herald and Express in 1935 and was promoted to city desk editor in 1947. Underwood kept a baseball bat and pistol in her desk, to chase off publicists or get the newsroom’s attention.

“She had to be so tough to get the respect of all these men who worked for her,” Wallace said.

Today, Gilger and Wallace said it’s clear from efforts such as the #MeToo movement, as well as the attitudes of their own students, that women are less willing to put up with certain workplace behaviors. The reluctance to speak up more readily is something which Gilger described as mistake on the part of her generation of female journos.

“I mean, we kind of thought, you know, keep your head down, do great work, work harder than anybody else, bring up other women behind you. Keep your seat at the table, and we would solve the problems,” Gilger said. “And clearly we didn’t.”

It’s why the women said writing the book was as much about hope for the next wave as it was acknowledgement of the past.

It’s All Journalism producer Amelia Brust talks to Kristin Grady Gilger and Julia Wallace about their new book, There’s No Crying In Newsrooms: What Women Have Learned About What It Takes To Lead, which examines what it’s like for women to move up the ranks in journalism.

#132 – Vox.com adds context to the news

#373 Media outlets worldwide push for greater climate change coverage

Mark Hertsgaard, environmental reporter for The Nation, grew up with a news anchor father but didn’t intend to go into journalism. He did, however, have an innate understanding of and respect for the environment.

“The environment is a theme I keep coming back to,” he says. “At a fairly young age, I realized if you don’t get that issue right, none of the other issues are going to matter. If we don’t have a livable planet with drinkable water and breathable air and healthy soil, it doesn’t matter what we do about health care or incarceration policies because there won’t be a society to sustain it.”

The United States media has been a decade behind in climate coverage since at least the 1990s.

Considering Al Gore’s work on sounding the alarm about our rapidly heating planet, and that he was vice president of the U.S. at the time, that’s a grave assessment.

But the confusion between talking about the science of climate and taking a political stance when reporting about climate issues has made the topic difficult or scary for some reporters and made news organizations hesitant to write even basic stories about climate-based research.

For one week, starting September 16, that will change.

The Nation and the Columbia Journalism Review are spearheading Covering Climate Now, an international push and emphasis on covering climate, leading up to a meeting of the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in New York.

The American press “tends to reflect the discussion going on with political elites” when it comes to climate, he says. “In the United States, unlike in Europe, the political elites have essentially tried to ignore or outright deny the science around climate change. This has been evident for many years.”

Even in the ‘90s, with Gore in the White House, the discussion in the American press was about whether climate change was real. In Europe, even in countries whose leaders were “right-of-center,” the argument wasn’t whether climate change was real but what was to be done about it and who would pay for it, Hertsgaard says. Unfortunately, not much has changed in the past 20 years.

Last October, the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released a concerning report saying the world as a whole has 12 years to become carbon neutral and slash heat-trapping gas emissions. It was a report that should have caused a greater stir in the media, but it didn’t.

Hertsgaard points to Margaret Sullivan, a media columnist at the The Washington Post, who said this should be the number one issue in American media and should be front-page news every day. Of course, that hasn’t been the case, because some outlets still believe reporting or discussing climate science is taking a political stance, something he vows is not true.

After many emails and months of discussion, news outlets around the world have signed on to devote time and space — online, in print, on broadcast, etc., — to covering the current state of the climate and the dangers therein, leading up to this year’s UN environmental conference.

In all, more than 160 outlets will dedicate a week to climate coverage, outlets ranging from tiny websites in Togo and Rhode Island to the Guardian and Bloomberg News and the Times of India.

Producer Michael O’Connell is joined by Mark Hertsgaard, environmental reporter for The Nation, to discuss next week’s Covering Climate Now initiative, organized by The Nation and the Columbia Journalism Review. More than 160 outlets of all sizes, around the world, will spend the week highlighting the science of climate change.

Better News: Amplifier highlights Charlotte through its diverse music scene

When Joni Deutsch arrived in Charlotte, North Carolina to become the podcast lead at NPR station WFAE, she wanted to create something that captured the city’s unique identity beyond just football and banking. To that end, she launched Amplifier, a biweekly podcast that highlights the region’s diverse music scene in September 2018.

In early 2019, Deutsch wrote a report for the American Press Institute‘s Better News Initiative to share Amplifier’s success and encourage other public radio stations to create local music podcasts of their own. Read the full report here.

Better News: Events may be difficult, but they’re still worth doing

#372 Algorithms are changing how journalists do their jobs

Nick Diakopoulos is an assistant professor in communication studies and computer science at Northwestern University where he’s also the director of the Computational Journalism Lab. In addition, Diakopoulos the author of Automating the News: How Algorithms Are Rewriting the Media. Recently, it was announced that he is joining Jeremy Bowers’ team at The Washington Post to develop a computational political journalism R&D lab to help the Post’s election coverage. Diakopoulos joins It’s All Journalism host Michael O’Connell to discuss how algorithms are changing the way journalists are doing their jobs.

It’s All Journalism: When I get a guest on the podcast, who’s sort of coming from a mix of disciplines, I usually like to ask which came first? Journalism or computers or computer science?

Nick Diakopoulos: It’s such an interesting question. I mean, you know, I’ve been coding since I was probably about six-years old. I’m writing computer programs on the old Commodore 64 in Basic, but I also grew up in a household where my father was a journalist for a long time. So I guess I was exposed to both at a pretty young age. I studied computer engineering in college and then moved into computer science for my Ph.D. So that’s, that’s really where my formal training comes in. But I was certainly exposed to journalism at a young age and,worked at a magazine and high school and that kind of thing. So tying the two together kind of made a lot of sense for me.

IAJ: What inspired you to write this book about automating the news?

ND: When I was in grad school back at Georgia Tech, this would’ve been in 2006, I really started discussing with my advisor there what would it mean to kind of smash together computing and journalism and what would that look like? For the last, I guess 13 years, I’ve been sort of thinking about the intersection of those fields pretty deeply. And around 2016, it just all started to come together and it felt like the right time to start working on really kind of writing it down. What did it mean to do journalism computationally? What does it mean for journalism and what did it mean for computer science? Really kind of inspired to take some of the applied research that I’ve been thinking about over the years and frame it in a way that’s accessible to practitioners as well. So try to translate some of the results and findings in the research in a way that they can be useful for reporters and editors.

IAJ: OK. When we talk about computational journalism, what does that encompass?

ND: So in the book, I really kind of cover the whole gamut of what I think it encompasses. So that includes everything from data mining and machine learning to find stories and large data sets to automatically producing written articles or data visualizations, interactively generating content in the form of news bots or chat bots. But also things like how are algorithms used in news distribution. So if you look at something like a search engine or a feed or recommender system, how do those algorithms play into the way that people are exposed to news? And then finally I also think about and talk about this kind of the broader issue of algorithms in society and how journalists can start investigating and scrutinizing algorithms that are used now throughout government and throughout the private sector to contribute to sort of decision making processes. So when I talk about algorithms in journalism and computational journalism, I’m really kind of talking about all of those things. It is sort of a widely scoped field.

IAJ: What are some of the ways that algorithms are rewriting the media, changing the way that we cover the news and the way we report and present it?

ND: Yeah. So, I think it really, algorithms are changing all kinds of different facets of how the media is produced. Again, you know, from how the stories are found using algorithms to identify interesting patterns or happenings in datasets to the way stories are written. What I focus on in the book is how algorithms are changing news production, and in particular how people need to work together with algorithms and together with machine learning systems or data mining systems in kind of what I call hybridized workflows. So what are the things that, algorithms do well and what are the things that people do well and then how do you kind of marry those together into a productive work process, so that you get more than the sum of the pieces there.

IAJ: A lot of people, when they think about algorithms and media, they think about negative things like bots that are spreading fake news or trying to get your information. But I take it, you talk a lot about the benefits of what this type of computational journalism can actually provide and less about the downside or the negative side. Is that correct?

ND: Well, I’m an optimist. I’m trying to be optimistic about how this technology can really be useful for enhancing news production. So, I mean, every technology has some good and some bad, and algorithmic approaches to news production are sort of no different. I mean, on the plus side, I think news automation can help produce news more quickly. It can produce news on a wider scale or wider breadth of material. It can be used to personalize content to make it more relevant to individuals. And it can also help produce higher quality journalism. So, you know, when we talk about investigative journalism, the ability ability to use data mining and algorithmic approaches to dig through some of these large document corpora, that’s a real advantage and it allows journalists to discover more unique and original stories, and do sort of a more comprehensive job investigating these things than they otherwise could without algorithmic approaches. So that’s kind of on the, on the plus side of the ledger.

Of course there’s also disadvantages to automate a news production. Certainly, these techniques require a lot of data. They require clean data. And so if you’re working in a domain where data is not sort of available or if it’s often dirty data and requires a lot of cleaning, then that’s going to limit your use of automation. Sort of a broader point there is that if information is not quantified, if there’s some important piece of context for a story that’s just not, that hasn’t been digitized or hasn’t been quantified, that’s not going to be accessible to an algorithm.

And I would say another big issue with algorithmic approaches and, and AI in general is that they tend to be very brittle. Typically, these systems are engineered to work in a narrow domain, where it’s been sort of very carefully thought through and engineered. And that really ends up being a pretty substantial limitation, right? Because in the world of news, things are always changing. The world is a dynamic place. There’s a lot of different things that can go wrong in the world. And if you’re just using a sort of narrowly engineered piece of software that could easily break, if something out of bounds kind of kind of happens in the news. So obviously, advantages and disadvantages adhere to automated production technologies.

IAJ: Are there any projects or newsrooms that you’ve seen out there that you think are doing cutting edge or exceptional work with computational journalism?

ND: Yeah, absolutely. There’s a variety of examples in the book. One of the ones that I really like to point out is a story from a couple of years ago that was produced at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution newspaper, where they used a machine learning technique to help identify doctors in a large document dumps. So they collected like a 100,000 documents from various medical boards’ websites online. And then they use this machine learning technique to identify documents in that corpus that pointed to doctors that may have been involved in sexual misconduct cases. And, of course, this was a months-long effort. It certainly wasn’t the case that the machine learning acted on its own. I mean, there were some very smart journalists involved who built the system, but then also had to chase the leads that, the machine learning system produced. So, they took 100,000 documents down to maybe 6,000, but then they still had read through those documents and do all the reporting and look into these doctor’s backgrounds and so on, in order just to kind of finish that investigation. So that’s one example that I, that I like to point out of sort of as success of using data mining to find a story.

IAJ: It’s interesting. Just recently was working with, with someone and it was just something as simple as she wanted to create a Google map. And then once, as we were building this map and taking advantage of the data that’s part of the whole Google system that she realized that, she was putting together just a presentation about something that she saying. Then all the data that, that Google had was sort of come up into that. And, and so that actually made this little presentation that she was doing much more rich in content and much more useful to the reader. So, I think people, you know, journalists, I, you know, I know many journalists who are always looking for ways to enhance their stories sometimes in a very little way, but other times, sort of what you’re pointing to, this opportunity to dig deeper and find stories in the data to tell interesting stories in the data. There are just lots of opportunities I think to do that. What would you say to somebody who wants to sort of move their career more toward being, I guess, a computational journalist, somebody who writes more data rich stories maybe, uses a different types of algorithms or programs to assist them in their reporting?

ND: I think this get that kind of how the world is changing and how people need to kind of adapt and retrain themselves to be able to use all this technology that’s emerging. I think sort of the next generation of journalists or where this generation of journalists that wants to keep up, they’re going to need to learn how to be able to update and tweak and validate and supervise these automated and algorithmic systems. If we’re talking about a journalist who wants to use an automated writing tool, they might need to learn some data skills like how to work with structured data, how to work with formal logic, like “if then else” statements on that data. I think some fluency with the basics of computer programming, would probably be quite helpful for a lot of people. I’m not saying that everyone needs to be a software engineer, but we’re talking about some basics. You know, understanding how computer programs work, being able to write some simple computer programs I think goes a long way in helping someone think computationally. And what I mean by thinking computationally is being able to think in a way that you can set up a problem that you have in your reporting in a way that you can get the computer to help you with that problem. I don’t mean that people would actually think like computers, but it’s more thinking about how do I break this problem down in a way that I can get a computer to do a piece of this problem for me.

That’s some of the things that people can kind of learn and adapt to. I mean, another aspect of this would be kind of at the high end, learning advanced statistical techniques, machine learning techniques. Again, I wouldn’t claim that every journalist needs to learn this or it needs to know about this. But I think if you really want to kind of innovate or try, entirely new techniques or adapt some of the techniques that are being used in data science now, then I think developing some of these advanced data science skills could open up new avenues for journalists.

IAJ: Now I know in the past, having talked to lots of different journalists about their day to day working environment, often they find themselves in the situation that, “Hey, I want to do this type of story. I want to do that, use this new type of technology or something.” And it usually comes back onto them to sort of bring it to the newsroom. What can newsrooms do to sort of create an environment where the reporter doesn’t have to know everything. I mean, certainly it’s helpful to know how certain types of systems work and how to report and provide data to help support it. But what can newsrooms do to create that environment to where they can, across the team, pursue this type of reporting?

ND: A lot of what I’ve seen is that these computational journalism projects often times do happen in teams and you have maybe someone who is more expert in data science, paired up with someone who’s more expert in reporting techniques, and then maybe you even have a product person there or a project manager to kind of tie things together. These techniques, these computational techniques, they kind of demand that you bring together different skills on a team. And so I think, in terms of how to set that up in a newsroom, having cross functional teams that come together, in order to tackle particular projects I think is an interesting way to set things up. I think dropping some data scientists in a newsroom could kind of be interesting in the sense that those data scientists might see the typical reporting projects in a slightly different angle or through a different light. And they might have different ideas about how to approach those types of reporting projects. So that’s something to try and generally kind of creating some collisions between different skillsets and different ways of approaching problems, I think can be a productive, productive way for making progress here.

IAJ: I interviewed a couple of computational journalists from The Washington Post last year about this special project that they had done. And it was a whole team of people, a whole team of reporters, a team of tech people who were, basically taking these large data sets about, crime rates across the country and sort of putting them into a system where they could search for certain types of information and lay them across the maps and, then build ways to present them. And it was definitely a team effort. And then when you got to the end of it and, the presentation was there, you saw the richness of the whole project. But, that’s something that they worked on for a period of time. But anyway, speaking of The Washington Post, it was a recently announced that you’re going to be joining the Post’s new computational political journalism R&D lab. So what are your aspirations for that position and what the lab’s going to be doing in general?

ND: I’m really, really excited about this. I have a sabbatical coming up this fall, and when I started chatting with the Post, Jeremy Bowers there got excited about the potential to work together. So, I’m going to be joining up with him and working on this computational political journalism R&D team. And really what I’m hoping there is that we can start to catalyze some advances in the quality and the scope of elections coverage that the Post can produce next year. And, I come from a kind of an applied research background and I think bringing that perspective into dialogue with folks in the newsroom, folks from engineering teams at the Post. I think that’s gonna be really, really productive. We’re already kicking around a bunch of different ideas to think through how we might capitalize on automated and algorithmic news production. How to augment the capacities of journalists and reporters there and how to develop new, unique experiences for readers. And I’m also kind of thinking about how computational techniques are changing politics more broadly or how they could change coverage more broadly. You know, how’s this going to change the way reporters and editors need to cover elections? In terms of say, the way that algorithms are used to promote different different perspectives in the media or the way in which bots are used to push different ideas and so on. So I’m really kind of looking forward to exploring a lot of these ideas and collaborating with different editorial folks in advancing some of these ideas.

IAJ: I know we talked a little bit earlier about bots that are used to sort of spread fake news or to gather information, personal information and things like that. One of the things that sort of separates journalists from somebody just posting information online is that we have sort of these ethical standards that we apply to how we cover a story, how we report something and how we present it. How do we sort of maintain these standards in a computational environment? Are they mutually exclusive? Is it something, do we have to change our approach to journalism or do they just work together really well?

ND: There are some new challenges that computational approaches bring up for the ethics of journalism. I think we’re still in the pretty early stages. Ethics is, you know, something that gets negotiated over time as people think through, where to draw the lines of what is kind of appropriate versus inappropriate. I can sketch out a few of the areas that I think are kind of interesting ethically through this lens. So, you know, take for instance, machine learning. Machine learning, you know, can be used in a data mining context to identify an individual that is maybe newsworthy for some story. Maybe it’s some kind of statistical evidence about that individual, but with machine learning there’s always going to be some statistical uncertainty based on the method. And that means that journalists need to understand that ethical issues of using uncertain statistical evidence, with respect to the kinds of claims that they want to make in their stories. So if you want to make a public indictment of malfeasance, that maybe requires a higher standards of evidence than a data mining method can provide. And so, you know, that will in turn kind of mean that journalists need to do additional reporting on the leads that our data mined.

Another example would be sort of the use of predictive modeling in journalism. So this is the kind of stuff that we see from election models that 538 in the New York Times publish. There’s an interesting ethical question there that kind of gets to the issue of feedback loops and the potential for a public prediction to then impact social behavior and social reactions in some way. So, is it ethical for journalists to publish predictions on voting day that could impact voter turnout? Uh, I don’t know. I mean, that’s, that’s something that maybe we need to think about some more.

Finally, I think there’s sort of the question of transparency, when journalists use machine learning techniques or other types of opaque algorithmic methods in their journalistic process. So, how can you be transparent with these types of tools? I mean, I think that that transparency isn’t as an ethics and ethical goal that I think a lot of journalists share. Um, but the question is, well, how do you be, um, as transparent as possible when you’re using these outward techniques? Those are the ethical issues that come up.

And another ethical issue that comes up is kind of the labeling of automatically generated contents. The question is if you generate content automatically, does the public have a right to be notified that content was automatically generated? In the same way that you, you would byline an article to signal who is responsible for writing that article. Should we also byline articles, if they’re automatically produced? I think there are some emerging, kind of approaches there. I think most of the major outlets like Reuters and Bloomberg and AP that routinely use automatically generated articles, they’ve sort of arrived at wanting to label that content as such. But I don’t think that there has been a broader ethical conversation about the overall standards there. And that might be something for industry to kind of think about some more.

IAJ: When we’re talking about automatically generated articles, I think AP, like last year, they were experimenting with a certain sports stories that are like super basic. Here’s the box score, here’s who won and here’s who’s lost, rather than have a reporter spend time on that, generate those. So is that what you’re sort of talking about stories that, all the elements are pulled together by an algorithm and not so much with reporting?

ND: Yeah, that’s right. So, if an algorithm has kind of produced a story from end to end, shouldn’t we also label that as such, so that the audience understands where that content came from?

IAJ: So this is all really fascinating, and I appreciate you coming in to talk about it. Looking forward in the next five years, how do you see the new newsroom changing? How do you see computational journalism changing our industry?

ND: I think there’s some really exciting things to sketch out. Where I see this all heading. One is I think there’s some opportunities for news organizations to start developing their own algorithm and tools and technologies that better reflect editorial values that many journalists have. So, for instance, The Washington Post has been developing machine learning techniques to help them moderate comments on the site. By developing the technology on their own, they’ve sort of better been able to reflect editorial standards of how to moderate those comments. So they’re not just using some generic algorithm to do it. It’s really kind of a journalistic algorithm. I think this is a really interesting direction for journalists to think about. What are the journalistic values that they want to build into this algorithmic, automated AI future of media that’s emerging? Or, are they just going to be content to pull off the shelf, some generic technology that Google gives them, or that some other big tech company gives them? That’s one area.

I think another interesting area is just thinking more about this whole hybridization of work. How are journalists going to work effectively with algorithms and AI and what are the jobs of tomorrow going to look like? I think they’re going to be more and more hybridized, but I think we also need to think as managers and designers of this new hybrid labor, we need to consider the very human concerns of what does that work look like? Is it good for the journalists who were doing that work? We want to make sure that journalists don’t just become cogs in some bigger technological process where the algorithm is your boss and the algorithm told you, you have to call this person and get this piece of information. We want to avoid that. But I think it really kind of boils down to like, how do you design the work, so that it’s efficient but also satisfying for the people that work.

#314 — Data reporting fuels Washington Post’s massive homicide project

#371 NLGJA continues to transform how newsrooms cover LGBTQ issues

Twenty years ago, the media landscape was very different for the LGBTQ community. Years after Ellen DeGeneres became the first mainstream actress to confirm she was gay, the sitcom Will & Grace brought prominent gay characters into American homes on a weekly basis in a way that wasn’t shameful or audacious.

It was also about 20 years ago that Sharif Durhams first started working as a professional journalist and, shortly thereafter, he joined the NLGJA — The Association of LGBTQ Journalists. As an “out” gay man himself, he wanted to learn more about how to be a full participant in his newsroom.

Now president of the organization’s board, Durhams says things have gotten much better in terms both of coverage of LGBTQ issues and of the language journalists use when covering such topics.

“The industry was so different back then,” he says. “A lot of the discussion back then was, would some of these large organizations have policies that recognized they’d treat LGBTQ people the same” on matters of insurance, in particular, as well as other workplace benefits. “That’s a big fight NLGJA led. If you were to google it and find when large companies adopted these policies, it’s because of NLGJA. Since then, things have changed so much. We’re looking at the policies of newsrooms, are they using appropriate language to describe our communities.”

Now the new coverage emphasis is on issues relating to the trans community, but there’s a new challenge here that goes beyond how a person identifies.

“Unfortunately, we’ve been dealing with so much violence against trans people and so many trans deaths, where people can’t speak for themselves,” he says. “We’ve had to school news organizations, making sure they get the terminology right, making sure they deal with issues when the police misgender someone, making sure that they might be diving into a story in a well-meaning way but making sure they have the information they need.”

While newsrooms have received information and stylebook suggestions from NLGJA on pronoun use, sometimes the organization needs to get ahead of the news cycle. They issued a press release immediately when Chelsea Manning affirmed her name and identity, which happened to occur during the organization’s annual meeting. The editor of the New York Times happened to be speaking at the meeting the next morning and confirmed she’d informed her newsroom that the suggestions from NLGJA were immediately adopted as the paper’s official terminology.

NLGJA’s suggestions aren’t taken to heart because of the advocacy of its members alone, but because they’re journalists talking to other journalists about a community of which a reporter might not be a member.

“It’s that kind of ability to connect that’s been very valuable,” Sharif says.

Producer Michael O’Connell is joined this week by Sharif Durhams, a senior editor for CNN Digital and board president for the NLGJA — The Association of LGBTQ Journalists, discussing how media coverage for the LGBTQ community has changed in the past 20 years and where it needs to go next.

#362 What is the future of LGBT media?

Survey: What tools do you use to do good journalism?

A few months ago, we asked readers to fill out a survey and provide some of their favorite journalism tools.

The good news is, most of them are free and available to anyone and everyone who needs them; the better news is that we have multiple people singing the praises of common tools including Scrivener, Evernote and the omnipresent Google programs.

What tools (apps, programs, etc) do you use to help organize your workflow?

Here, respondents gave us everything from a trusty ol’ reporter notebook to some higher tech, 21^st Century capabilities:

Microsoft OneNote was touted by one person: “Catch all notebooks for project memos, form letters, emails on projects, organized by topics. Coupled with the OneNote add-in for Microsoft Outlook to make it easy to move emails from one inbox to project folder.

Trello project boards were upheld for the ability to “keep action items in the proper priority buckets.”

Scrivener and Evernote appeared multiple times in different answers. “I use them to categorize and organize my folders and sub folders for topics and related content towards my true crime newsletter and my blog focused on local independent pop-punk and punk bands.”

PowerPoint Design’s Ideas feature was praised because it “quickly and automatically creates clean, eye-catching layouts from multiple photos, which you can then export for an alternative featured image.”

And sometimes the simplest answers and tools are best: Email inbox organizing tools, from Outlook to Gmail to Chrome extensions. “I keep emails unread until I am ready to act on them. I use the search function to find what I need and slide stuff to save into a special folder.” Another person sang the praises of If This Than That, calling it “simple and streamlined.”

For something different, try using not a tool but the Airplane mode: “To prevent phone call and Face Time disruptions of recordings during an interview. Airplane mode makes certain that calls won’t stop the recording like it usually does.”

What tools (apps, programs, etc.) do you use to help with your writing?

Here again the responses ran the gamut, including nothing in particular but an organized mind to some simple add-ons.

Microsoft Word Fast Fox Text Expander has been praised for allowing a user to “store repetitive text material and recall it into documents or emails with a few keystrokes.”

There was another vote for Scrivener and Endnote for keeping content in one place, in addition to Microsoft Word and Microsoft Sway to design digital and print versions of newsletters.

For those who have to transcribe their work, two suggestions: Temi.com, which offers “automated transcriptions of audio, 10 cents per minute. Not verbatim but 80-90% accurate, with text synch’d to audio.” This helps to provide “a roadmap to a long interview, helping me go back and quickly find the portions I want to transcribe verbatim to use in a story.” The other tool for transcription suggested is the Rev app, which will “translate a recording in less than 24 hours. It’s great if the interview is an hour long or more,” but here, too, there is a fee for service.

Another person really likes Werdsmith, calling it an “easy app to just pull up a blank page for note taking and easy location later.”

Don’t discredit Notes or email, tools so simple they’re built into most phones as a default.

What tools (apps, programs, etc.) do you use to help with research/collecting data?

Here, again, we’ve got some repeat entries: notebooks, Google tools, OneNote, Scrivener and Evernote.

New entries include Hunter in combination with the LinkedIn Sales Navigator plugin for Chrome and Gmail. Using the two tools in combination can help track and confirm email addresses, while Hunter can help find email addresses which can be verified via LinkedIn. There’s a free version that can do all the work without a payment.

AppleNews+ was suggested for “reading and researching long-form magazine pieces for content and quotes.”

Microsoft Excel was suggested as it assists in “collecting data, creating graphs from that data and it’s easy to copy and paste in other documents.”

One respondent relies on Feedly for managing RSS subscriptions.

Our friends with Pew Research get a nod as well: “One of the best national organizations that collect and observe data.”

What tools (apps, programs, etc.) do you use to help with visualizing data?

Data visualization isn’t quite a big concern or need among our survey respondents yet, but they do have a few suggestions:

Easy Dynamic Charts from Data Wrapper and WordPress tables were mentioned as simple tools for easy integration.

Microsoft Excel also came up for “creating easy to make graphs,” along with Prezi, a plug-in for PowerPoint.

What is one piece of technology you can’t live without?

No surprise here: smartphones are top of the heap here. From voice recording apps to digital notepads and email within a few taps, they can do everything and we rely on them to do just that.

Runners up including Adobe Audition, a recorder, SD card adapter for smartphone (“makes it easy to transfer pictures from a DSLR or other camera to a phone for quickly posting high-quality images on social”), and voice dictation.

Did your favorites make the list or are there other tools you’ve used in your journalism work that might be of help to others? Feel free to add to our online resource by taking our online survey. We’re also conducting an online survey on how we can improve our podcast. If you fill out one of our surveys, we’ll send you an It’s All Journalism mug while supplies last.

#346 Helping journalists decode research

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