#gabriel dance

By Heather Martino

Last week I was fortunate to attend NICAR, the Investigative Reporter’s and Editor’s Conference that Ben Welsh of the LA Times’ Data Desk called "the nerdiest room in the history of journalism." 

"This is like the nerdiest room in the history of journalism!" said @palewire #NICAR14 pic.twitter.com/a5nCtRcYFn

— Heather Martino (@HeatherSaidTHAT)

February 28, 2014

Returning late Sunday night, the forthcoming week was a whirlwind of activity. On Monday, Jeremy led an engaging and math-heavy discussion on Profit Forecasting and Margins.

On Tuesday, I attended by very first NY Tech Meetup at NYU, where I got to hear pitches from Verbalize.It, RentHackr, Shodogg, ScoreSynch, Peatix, Oscar, To.Be and Collaborizm. While there were many cool demos and highlights, the best part about the MeetUp was during Q&A when someone in the audience offered advice instead of asking an actual question. I live tweeted NYTM's President, Nate Westheimer’s response:

"It's okay to share ideas instead of just asking questions here - we're a community helping one another." via Nate #nytm @renthackr

— Heather Martino (@HeatherSaidTHAT)

March 5, 2014

After the Meetup, some of my classmates and I were fortunate to be invited to a selective weekly gathering at a local Spanish restaurant with Dawn Barber, who co-founded the NY Tech Meetup. It was an excellent networking opportunity and it gave me the chance to speak to some more people about my project and get feedback for my market research.

Dawn joined my class the next day at CUNY as we each gave 4-minute presentation on our projects, but not before we had a public speaking 101 prep session with Stacy Marie Ishmael, a 2012 graduate of the program. Stacy spoke about the notion of being prepared and knowing your audience when public speaking, saying that even “the best improvs are very well rehearsed.”

She had us each stand up and gave us outrageous topics that we presumably knew nothing about, and told us who our target audience was and what we were trying to persuade them to so.

“Too often the focus is on ‘how I am going to be impressive,’” Ishmael said, “and less on how people are going to be impressed.”

To our amazement, most of us were able to hold our own up there just by knowing who we were talking to and what our goal for the talk was, even in the absence of understanding the topic at large.

It’s about confidence and not taking yourself seriously,” Ishmael explained, adding that “nobody knows what you are going to say and in what order it was. If you find yourself nervous because you can't remember your well rehearsed pitched, just run with it.The audience is none the wiser.“

Ishmael said that some key questions to ask yourself before public speaking are:

Who you are solving the problem for?

Why you are there? Why are you qualified to be standing there?

Why are the people in the room there?

Do they want to learn? Are they expecting to be challenged? Inspired?

We rounded out the week by visiting The Guardian’s US Headquarters in SoHo, where we had the privilege of hearing from none other than the insanely talented Gabriel Dance.

“Journalism and Technology are so intertwined right now it’s hard to do one without the other,” Dance told our group.

He spoke out “the gamification of news,” and while no one has quite figured it out just yet, he thinks that when a news organization does it well, it’s going to be a home run. Since I took News Games and Quizzes last semester with Amanda Hickman, I have some experience with building my own choose your own adventure game using Twine. Some great examples of games being used for journalistic and education purposes include:

Slavery Footprint: How Many Slaves Work for you?  

Entry Denied: Would your grandmother or grandfather – or any of your ancestors – be denied entry today?

Dance also talked about the mobile-first notion, and what it means for interactive journalism. “If they’re on mobile they’re not trying to engage too much,” said Dance. “It’s a passive experience.”

Aside from video, he explained, interacting with graphics and using your thumbs to click and move is challenging on small devices. However, it’s not all bad for the mobile-first generation. “We’re in this grace period where if it doesn’t work you’re going to hear it,” Dance said, “but if it works minimally, that’s acceptable.”

He went in-depth on the NSA Files Decoded story that the Guardian debuted a few months ago, and said that while they wire-framed and prototyped for months, the text was the last thing they wrote. The reason for this, Gabriel said, is that “text is much more flexible than the other things we produce.“

While Dance’s discussion about interactives and data visualization was great for me, having just come off my NICAR-high, some of my classmates were more interested in The Guardian’s take on branded content.

As it turns out, The Guardian does have sponsored content agreements. A very lovely young journalist that I met at NICAR named Jana Kasperkevic was actually hired by The Guardian to work on a series of CEO interviews that Harvard Business School is funding. However, Kasperkevic explained that she has total autonomy on who she interviews and the questions that she asks of them.

During a later discussion with my classmates, Sky Canavas brought up a good point about this agreement. Even if the writer didn’t ask the CEO he/she was interviewing anything about Harvard, what if they just happen to say something negative about the school? Would that that get printed or cut?

To play devil’s advocate, of course, I mentioned that a writer always makes judgement calls about what quotes to chop and which ones to include, so I don’t feel it’s misleading to cut something negative like that.

However, I’m not too sure how the person being interviewed would like it if they specifically mentioned a distaste of Harvard, only to find themselves later quoted in a series that is sponsored by none other than the institution. I’m assuming that the issue of sponsored content is something that Kasperkevic discloses when securing interviews, but then again you know what happens when I assume.