I am the incoming executive editor of digital at the Guardian as well as a proud New York Times alum. I co-founded DocumentCloud.org and Hacks & Hackers. Also, I am a yachtsman.
Have a Good Idea to Improve Journalism? Come Be The Guardian's 2015 Knight-Mozilla Fellow
The Guardian has a long history of digital innovation, from the MP expenses project through NSA Files Decoded. With Janine Gibson returning to London after three years running the US operation, the Guardian is poised for even greater things in 2015. That's one of the reasons I choose to to make the jump after nine years at The New York Times.
This will be the Guardian's (and my) third year as part of the Knight-Mozilla Fellowship, and it is by far the most open in terms of the sort of person we are looking for. Whether your specialty is data science or data visualization, we will find a way to make your time here meaningful -- for you, for us and, ideally, for journalism as a whole.
We are not looking for someone who wants to sit quietly in the corner of the newsroom hacking code. Far from it. As a Knight-Mozilla Fellow, you will have a truly unique vantage point, and we would be foolish not to take advantage of that.
You will be fully part of the London newsroom, able to collaborate with reporters, editors, graphics editors, interactive developers, designers and more. You'll also have the ability to collaborate with business-side teams as well, including the Guardian's world class digital development, analytics and product teams.
But as a Knight-Mozilla Fellow, your goal isn't just to improve the Guardian; it's to improve journalism as a whole, with one of the world's most important newsrooms as your laboratory.
The only requirement is a good idea and the ability to execute on it. A good example is Brian Abelson, who was a 2013 Knight-Mozilla Fellow embedded in my team at The New York Times. A statistician by training, Brian spent his time exploring better metrics for news. He not only helped The Times's newsroom embrace analytics, Brian's work began to touch on some fascinating new ways to look at metrics as a whole.
So what's your idea? What itch do you want to scratch? Whether it's new story forms, new tools or something totally out of left field, we want to hear about it.
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From Documents to Data: Help Build a Toolkit for the Rest of Us
From Tesseract to Tabula, there are dozens of open-source software libraries designed to help users work with unstructured data -- or what non-nerds might call documents.
Web-based services like DocumentCloud, Open Calais and Overview have solved a few of the most common problems journalists face, but there is still a big hole to fill.
That's the challenge our Knight/Mozilla fellow will tackle.
The project is not necessarily about invention so much as integration: taking stock of what's available and building an easy-to-use, easy-to-deploy suite of tools to help journalists work with original source documents. Although the toolkit will be designed in a newsroom with journalists in mind, we think it will be just as useful for members of the public as well.
What problems might this toolkit address? Well, volume for one. It's not uncommon for journalists to be confronted with huge numbers of documents -- in some cases, millions of pages at a time.
The limitations of services like DocumentCloud to work with these documents, along with limitations in their format, places a hard limitation on journalists' ability to tag, share, analyze and surface newsworthy tidbits and patterns. This is particularly true for smaller newsrooms that don't have in-house developers to work with these often complex and quirky libraries.
The fellow will be attached jointly to the two teams at The Times most involved in solving the documents-to-data dilemma: Interactive News and the computer-assisted reporting team. He or she will spend 10 months working on real stories with real reporters and editors, the end goal of which will be to develop and, ultimately, release the document toolkit that real people can understand and use.
We’re excited about the potential for this kind of tool in large and small newsrooms, in crowdsourcing efforts and even in the academy to transform investigations, opening up in-depth document analysis to everyone.
Why Design Matters: If Snow Fall Were Published in a Standard Template
I am in beautiful Bergen, Norway, this week for the Nordic Media Festival. I gave a talk this morning on digital storytelling and, of course, everyone wanted to talk about Snow Fall.
As part of the presentation -- and to drive home my point about design -- I mocked up what Snow Fall might have been had our brilliant design, graphics and video teams not taken this project on.
Since a couple people asked for it, I decided to post the images here.
Doesn't really grab you like the actual piece, does it?
I didn't get around to replacing the text here, or writing captions for the dreaded multimedia inline stack.
My favorite slide. OK, maybe it would have been something like 21 links of pagination, but still.
Matt's joining Interactive News next week, and completely unrelated to that I decided I needed to change my poor, neglected Tumblr theme. Imagine my surprise when I noticed who built the theme I ultimately picked. It's fate.
The project our Knight-Mozilla fellow will help tackle was hatched in January during a bus ride to the Austin airport with news brainiac (and karaokaholic) Greg Linch.
He had just written a terrific post on his blog, The Linchpen, about the need for more sophisticated metrics to measure the success or failure of journalism online. I'd been thinking about the same problem, but Greg crystalized the challenge and the opportunity perfectly.
In his words: "So, what if we measured journalism by its impact?"
It sounded to both of us to be an ideal project for someone to sink his or her teeth into. After all, the benchmarks we use now are so ill suited. They are the simplistic, one-dimensional metrics we all know: pageviews, time on site, uniques. We use them largely because they are there and because they are easy -- even though we all know they're a lousy way to measure impact.
We know readers know the difference between a cotton-candy piece about the latest Kardashian kerfuffle and, say, David Barstow's policy-changing Wal-Mart investigation. One will change laws and lives. The other will be forgotten in a day. Are pageviews or uniques really the right measure? Of course not.
What we do not have are ways of measuring how a piece of journalism changes the way people think or act. We don't have a metric for impact.
This is not a new problem. The metrics newsrooms have traditionally used tended to be fairly imprecise: Did a law change? Did the bad guy go to jail? Were dangers revealed? Were lives saved? Or least significant of all, did it win an award?Â
But the math changes in the digital environment. We are awash in metrics, and we have the ability to engage with readers at scale in ways that would have been impossible (or impossibly expensive) in an analog world.
The problem now is figuring out which data to pay attention to and which to ignore. It is about setting up frameworks for testing, analysis and interpretation that are both scalable and replicable.
It's about finding that clear signal among the white noise that tells us whether our journalism is resonating or not, whether it is having the impact we believe it should. Helping us clear away the noise is the goal of our proposal to host a Knight-Mozilla fellow.
Now, we are under no illusion that in 10 short months we will emerge with a single granite tablet on which all the answers will be found. This is an incredibly complex question, starting with what we even mean by the word impact.
What should emerge from this fellowship is something far more enduring and impactful: A framework, methodology and tool set for newsrooms to study and answer these questions for themselves.
The ideal outcome would be a suite of open-source tools, techniques and best practices that, in aggregate, help all of us understand readers better and enhance the impact of our journalism. At a bare minimum, we hope to start asking the right questions.
If you're an analytics nerd, a news junkie and think it would be neat to spend some time working on a problem like this using The New York Times newsroom as your laboratory, we'd like to hear from you. The deadline is August 11th.
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
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