Here are a few of their favorite tools: Experiments in social media, part 2

"There's a huge value in doing things just because they're fun," said tumblr's Mark Coatney. Sounds great, but for those of us who are untutored in the ways of new media, where to begin?

TBD.com's Steve Buttry (more below) shared some of his favorite resources, including a blog called Zombiejournalism, whose tagline reads: dispatches from the walking dead of today's "old" media. It's a source for keeping track of what's going on in the new media world. National Wildlife Fund's Danielle Brigida added  Mashable as a favorite source for news in social and digital media, and Best Blog, a blog review site on Wordpress.

Several tutorials exist to help newbies jump into social media. Steve Buttry's blog has a lot of Twitter resources, he says, because Twitter is his main tool. And for those of us who worry about wasting hours on Twitter, you'll find a time management tool as well.

To find what you need on Facebook and Twitter, the speakers mentioned two sources, Social Mention and Kurrently. Finally, Brigida posts all of her presentations on Slideshare. "It's like PowerPoint on youTube." And it's a great way to find presentations on a topic you want to learn about. Her slides from today's presentation are here.

Mike Spear from Genome Alberta reminded the audience that all of this new media is just another communications channel. The same rules apply to traditional and new media. "If you can't tell a good story on radio or TV, you can't tell a good story online." Think in old media terms for how you tell the story, but think outside the box on where you tell the story and whom you tell it to.

TBD.com was launched 3 months ago to cover local Washington, DC, news. The name is a perfect fit, according to Buttry, director of community engagement. "In a digital world, news is always unfolding. And the path to success will involve a lot of changes, surprises, and failures along the way." He spent the bulk of his talk discussing the departure of TBD.com general manager Jim Brady. One more reason TBD makes sense.

Video for the Web

Trigger happy? You're in luck. Christie Nicholson, video producer and contributor to Scientific American, says now is the best time to get involved with online video. People’s TV and online video streaming are soon going to be one and the same, and Web video is growing at a phenomenal pace.

Nicholson and Eric Olson, video and audio editor for Nature Publishing Group, ran a hands-on workshop today on the basics of good video production. After a quick introduction to the basic equipment that a science writer-turned-producer would need, and tips on shooting and interviewing, volunteers from the audience played interviewer and producer. Here are some tips I took away from the session.

Action is key to telling an interesting visual story. Running, jumping, eating, biting. Nicholson's tip for judging good visuals: is the image/video still interesting if you turn the sound off? Take this New York Times video of cuttlefish that they showed us: http://bit.ly/192mY4 See where the cuttlefish bites the scientist? That’s good action. (It would have been neater still, Nicholson says, if they got the creature to bite Zimmer too. More biting, it seems, is key.)

Take time to find characters who speak with emotion. If they talk with their hands, and with their face, that’s a valuable bonus.

Pay attention to sound quality – you only get one shot at recording all your source matter, so keep your headphones on. Stay away from trucks and sirens. Keep out of the wind, and don’t be afraid to stop your interview and start again until your sound quality is just super.

When shooting, make sure the person talking is well lit. Take your time. Avoid windows.

While interviewing, take a few questions to get the interviewee comfortable on camera (Olson says people usually get comfy after three questions). Ask them to repeat the questions in their answers – this makes stitching together the final video easier. (And, don’t forget to sound check!)

When shooting additional footage (b-roll in production parlance) zoom slowly, pan slowly, almost twice as slowly as you’re tempted to.

Finally, when editing, keep it short. Online videos these days typically run for about 2 minutes, Nicholson says. The scripts for video and audio pieces are snappy too. Nicholson, who produces the “60-Second Mind” weekly podcast for Scientific American, said these one-minute pieces don’t typically run longer than 200 words on a page.

The Penthouse Is Falling

David Dobbs, accomplished author and moderator of the session "Rebooting Science Journalism: Adapting to the New Media Landscape," described his dismay at finally feeling like he "made it" in the freelance writing world, only to have the industry change and the magazine he worked for close.

"I was at the party in the penthouse, then they began taking the building down," Dobbs said. At first he faulted people changing their news habits from print to the Internet, and predicted doom for science journalism because of it. But now he's come to admit that science journalism is alive and well, it's just changed its form and pay scale.

Betsy Mason, editor of Wired Science, claims to have heard of the "penthouse" of writing, but characterizes herself as playing ping pong in the basement. She edits both blogged and reported stories for Wired Science and struggles with differentiating the two forms effectively for readers because they are posted right next to each other on the site.

Despite her biases in coming from the print world, Mason has come to realize that it's OK to tweet a story even though all the reporting is not complete yet. "I've learned that sharing online is good. There are more opportunities now for contributing to the science discussion. Instead of placing blame, we need to think about science journalism as a whole and how we can make it stronger than ever."

Most of the discussion in this session involved changing expectations and taking advantage of the new tools available (blogs, tweets, Facebook) for writers to showcase their expertise. Although doing so may not pay at first, it can eventually open up opportunities.

The ability to cover a story more thoroughly without space constraints was noted by panelists as an advantage blogging has over traditional media. Bloggers are also not constrained by writing to a certain reading level.

"Blogging makes journalism better by adding value and through personal reporting," said Dobbs. "There's no set inventory on the internet."

How do we reveal the hidden patterns in data?

There they are: hundreds of digits nestled in their little cells, staring back at you from within the Excel file they call home. Like a swarm of bees, the numbers assault your mind with a collective buzz signifying nothing. But there is a language to learn. You need to pull the melody out of the static, to give these pixelated numbers color, texture, flavor and symbolic meaning. You've got to visualize this data.

At the Data Visualization for Reporting and Storytelling session, three speakers discussed how to make information beautiful, how to mine data sets for hidden narratives and where to find free online data imaging tools anyone can use. The session featured Peter Aldhous, San Francisco bureau chief of New Scientist, David Harris, Editor of Symmetry magazine and Eric Hand, who works for Nature and is an MIT Knight Fellow.

The take home message: Symbols, shapes and colors reveal patterns and distinctions that raw numbers often conceal.

"Columns of numbers are not very good ways to find patterns," said David Harris. It's simply too difficult to see relationships between data points when all you look at are the numbers themselves. Harris further explained that visualizing data can provide some unexpected benefits: (1) you can find errors in data sets and (2) you can uncover manipulated data.

When it comes to representing data, scientists are often too detail oriented and have difficulty in relating with the lay reader's perspective, Harris argued. In contrast, journalists can provide a more useful perspective infused with context. But, Harris cautioned, one should only use data visualization when it's genuinely the best way to tell the story - it's not a gimmick.

In one visualization, Peter Aldhous compared healthcare spending and life expectancy for various countries including the U.S., Japan, Australia, France, Canada and the United Kingdom. Life expectancy was displayed on the X axis in years and spending on the Y axis. As dynamic Google Motion Chart made clear, a shift occured in the 1980s: the amount the U.S. spent on healthcare suddenly became incommensurate with the benefit to life expectancy. Whereas the other countries continued to improve their life expectancy without a sharp increase in healthcare spending, the trajectory of the relationship between spending and longevity for U.S. citizens swung up at a sharp angle. The U.S. was suddenly spending a lot more than everyone else but the extra investments did little to improve life expectancy - and that trend continues to the present day.

Eric Hand emphasized sifting through databases, like the U.S. Census, to discover stories that most people don't bother to discover or have no idea even exist. Consider, for example, how many people in America actually have indoor plumbing. Many of those who don't must rely on outhouses - even today. Hand found one 80-year-old woman who daily carried buckets of water between her home and the nearest outhouse, quite a distance away.

The speakers also suggested a couple of free online tools:

--Harris recommended MIT Media Lab's program Processing, "an open source programming language and environment for people who want to create images, animations, and interactions."

--Aldhous pointed to Google Motion Charts, "a dynamic chart to explore several indicators over time"

"Use these tools to explore data, poke it, see what's there," Aldhous said. Data visualization does not need to be scary or overly complex. Anyone can do it.

Looking for a story? Try a spreadsheet.

Last year, 14 stem cell biologists from outside the US complained to journal editors that their papers were being sabotaged in the peer review process, resulting in delays or rejections. A provocative claim — but was it true?

Peter Aldhous, San Francisco Bureau Chief of New Scientist, got to the bottom of the story: Yes, in top journals, stem cell papers submitted by American researchers are published faster than are papers submitted by non-US researchers. What's more, one researcher — Shinya Yamanaka — gets cited far more often than anybody else. Aldhous discovered all this thanks to data visualization.

If I learned one thing at this afternoon's data visualization session, it's this: working with data can not only help journalists tell great stories, but find great stories.

Aldhous and his fellow panelists — Eric Hand, a reporter at Nature, and David Harris, editor of symmetry — showed dozens of examples of the ways in which they have incorporated data sets (large and small) into their stories. Eric once used census data to map all of the outhouses in Arkansas. David helped his wife, a criminologist, track life events of prisoners.

Luckily, spotting interesting patterns in data is easier than you might think. The panelists mentioned several free and easy-to-use online tools for making infographics. Here are a few of my favorites:

--Tableau Public: Allows you to publish interactive data to the web — for free, and no programming skills required!

--Google Docs Motion Chart: Simple bubble-chart maker that allows you to look at data over time

--geocommons: Create and share interactive geographic data and maps

Of course, putting together a clear and compelling infographic takes skill. I'll leave you with three tips from Eric:

1. Sometimes the best chart is no chart. If you can say it in words, say it.

2. Keep it simple (and in the service of the story). That is -- avoid infoporn. (Case in point.)

3. Be fair. You can manipulate people with data just as easily as you can manipulate them with words.

Image courtesy of New Scientist

New funders for science journalism: Is transparency enough?

By Jim Downing

A growing share of science news – particularly online – is produced with funding from foundations, industry and government. For science journalism, this reality raises a bundle of ethical questions: How much disclosure is enough? Is it possible to have a meaningful editorial “firewall” at an organization that gets all its money from a single funder? And are these new content sources contributing to the decline of in-house coverage of science at old-line media organizations?

Here’s a list from Robin Lloyd, the moderator of this afternoon’s “Partners and ethics in the new media era” session, of some of the most prominent examples of this trend, along with news coverage, and links to ethics policies.

Today’s panelists are playing central roles the evolution of this new tier of science writing. And it’s clear that there are still many open questions. Telling readers who paid for a story to be written is a good start. But things quickly get complicated.

Some highlights:

When a content provider has only one funder (as opposed to a the old model of a pool of advertisers), there’s more pressure on publisher-editor firewalls. On WebMD, noted Karl Bates, Duke University director of research communications, a sponsor such as a pharmaceutical company can fund the coverage of a particular topic – including a topic that is directly relevant to one of its products. Compare that with the old newspaper model, Bates said: “When we ran a tire company ad on page 2 of the paper, we wrote about a lot more than just tires.”

On the other hand, said Michael Lemonick, a longtime Time magazine reporter who is now a senior writer at Climate Central, the firewalls at legacy publications aren’t what they used to be either. He gave the example of how Time’s publisher pushed for more stories on addiction to please a pharma advertiser.

Peggy Girshman, executive editor at Kaiser Health News, described the variety of disclosure/transparency relationships KHN has with news sites that publish its stories. For stories that run in USA Today, for instance, KHN can’t quote anyone from the Kaiser Family Foundation, which means that a key voice on health issues gets cut out of the piece. Other partners, like the Washington Post, don’t have that same restriction. And there’s little consistency about what sites tell readers about KHN.

More broadly, it’s unclear whether the proliferation of free, donor-funded science content is helping to speed the decline of in-house coverage of science at magazines and newspapers. Girshman said this issue gives her pause; Lemonick was skeptical: “I don't think that if we don't give them content, they'd go find a reporter.”

It's about the conversation: Experiments in new media

"Social tools are a way to answer the phone for your readers," said Mark Coatney, director/media evangelist at tumblr. It's value is in interaction with your reader.

The four session presenters are trying different ways to chase their audiences and connect with them. Danielle Brigida, digital marketing manager at National Wildlife Fund (NWF) answered the phone and held onto a subscriber who described her problem via Twitter (see image). That told Brigida there was a problem, which she fixed. She also contacted the reader, who tried again and resubscribed, then tweeted happily about it. NWF tries many ways to reach its audience, with the motto "failing fast, failing cheap." They jump in and try lots of things, then measure how it works.

Tumblr, where anyone can set up a blog, allows lots of peer-to-peer interaction and elevates commenting, which is traditionally buried at the bottom of a website. Tumblr has reduced the barriers between consuming content and sharing it and stating your opinion. It's a good platform for sharing quickly, whether you're an individual or The Economist.

The website, GenOmics aggregates news from the genetics community for Genome Alberta, a funder of genetics research. They post material from many sources. Readers can post comments and video. Mike Spear, director of corporate communications, admits they have lots of readers, but not a lot of interaction--which he's after--yet. he invited journalists and PIOs to post original material.
None of the speakers were ready to call their projects stunning successes or brilliant failures. It's still too early to tell. But NWF's Brigida noted:"I only feel like I've failed when I've missed an opportunity to learn."

Stay tuned for a posting on TBD.com's launch and the tools these new media wonks use to do their jobs.