News:Rewired and Navigating the Information Overload January 15, 2010

“The brain is not intelligent because of the sheer volume of data it can ingest, but for the way it can quickly discern patterns—and then guess the rest.” — Jeff Stibel

Yesterday I had the benefit of attending Journalism.co.uk’s inaugural conference, News:Rewired. I joined more than a hundred journalists from across the UK (and beyond) for the day, attending talks and break-out sessions on multimedia, online troubleshooting, social media, data mashups, and so on. Our speakers and panelists came from the likes of the BBC and the Telegraph to independently-run non-profits, community sites, and blogs, such as MySociety.org and SoGlos.com. (To my luck, I scored an internship of sorts after talking to a speaker from the conference. I’ll be working with a MySociety project called The Straight Choice, which collects campaign leaflets so citizens can see how their candidates present themselves in different areas, how much they’re spending on campaign literature, if they’re violating any campaign finance laws, the whole nine.)

But I digress. The purpose of the conference was to explore new ways of practicing journalism online, and that purpose found its way into both the speakers’ PowerPoints and the attendees themselves, many of whom live-blogged and tweeted throughout the day (although the activity dropped off near closing time—presumably because our computer batteries were all dead by then). The News:Rewired hashtag (#newsrw) was actually a trending topic in the morning (before the US woke up). And the buzz has been steady even after the conference’s end.

In terms of discussion, what quickly gained urgency was the issue of managing it all. How do you put out a quality product at the necessary speed on a significantly reduced budget? And for journalists working without the cushion of a news agency, how do you find the time to both write and sell your work? And then there’s the social media aspect—how do you effectively use the hundreds of mediums out there to stay in the conversation and promote your craft? Where is the time?

Well for starters, for as many time-sucking social networks that exist out there, there are just as many tools that can automate and interlink a lot of your online work. Take number-crunching, for example. The data-mashup session focused mainly on the back-end of presenting information—the raw data. This stuff is not pretty, and it’s not fun to work with. But thanks to Yahoo Pipes and Google Fusion Tables, you won’t have to spend hours sifting through mountains of data to find your story; instead, you can spend hours designing a beautiful interactive flash presentation that will display your data in an interesting way.

But again, simultaneity seems to be the key. Long gone are the days of working on just one project at a time (that goes for everyone, not just journalists—just look at how much multitasking my Mom does), and they’re never coming back. When achieving global connectivity is as simple as reaching into your pocket, even the nay-sayers have to admit there’s something beautiful in that. Instant sharing, instant audience—it’s the kind of thing us childhood users of AOL instant messenger would have flipped for back then. So now that it’s here, there’s no question that we should take advantage.

But are we really training in the right way to do it? Here’s what I think: Journalism is quickly becoming its own version of improv theatre.

Of course, you could probably say that it’s always been a bit improv-theatre-esque—determining the right angle for a story, weaseling your way into an event, and getting a quote out of a tough source all require ingenuity and quick thinking, qualities the best journalists absolutely have. But now, instead of the more “deceptive” or quick re-thinking that characterized improv journalism before, people have to improvise the performance—taking in all that’s out there and creating the right response, to the right people, without missing a beat. With improv theatre, the process of digesting the moment’s information and spitting out something equally witty gets repeated ad nauseum; now in real-time journalism, the same process is beginning to take hold.

That doesn’t necessarily we should be on our phones tweeting everything as it happens, because sometimes you just have to watch stuff unfold instead of reading about watching stuff unfold. But the ones who emerge on top are the ones who can actually pay attention while tweeting, typing, and generating a smart analysis simultaneously. Let the journo-acting training begin.

Purposeful or Pointless: the Twitterati October 31, 2009

I’ve been doing my morning run through the papers, and this caught my eye—ironically, I clicked on it because I saw it posted by @guardiannews on Twitter. From John Henley’s “The Power of Tweets” in today’s Guardian:

Brendan O’Neill, journalist, writer and editor of Spiked Online, coined the term, in an article for the Irish site Forth, “the offencerati” to describe the “those computer-bound Twitterers who enjoy nothing more than being outraged, scandalised and allegedly harmed, and who refuse to tolerate anything so intolerant as a Daily Mail rant”.

In person, O’Neill freely confesses he “really hates Twitter: it’s not a place you can talk in detail or actually debate anything, so on an intellectual level it doesn’t work; and organisationally it doesn’t work either – it’s just all these people clubbing together in cyberspace for this mass outpouring of outrage.”

All Twitterers are doing, O’Neill reckons, is “trying to be part of the in-crowd”; the site deals in “bite-size slogans, which we know never work”, and “encourages a herd mentality, the jumping-on of some Twitterati leader’s bandwagon”.

The rest of the article casts Twitter in a much more favorable light. But as I continue to use this bizarre service, I do wonder if we’re heading down the path of every science fiction movie, when you finally give life to the machine and it turns around and vaporizes you. And since Twitter is on the internet, it’s EVERYWHERE, capable of liquidating our brains through the computer screen in a snap!

But seriously, I sometimes wonder why we use Twitter at all. A number of my classmates tweet about lectures during class. Some engage and comment on the professors’ points, but most just repeat lines from the lecture—digital note-taking, if you will. But why do people do this? I’ve asked, and no one seems to know. That seems to be the case with most of Twitter’s “uses” these days—you just do it, even if there’s no purpose, because we assume that at some point someone will figure one out. How generous of us, then, to provide all this information in advance! But it’s far more likely that such tweets will do one thing only: annoy your followers and possibly make them dump you.

Does this mean I will stop using Twitter? Of course not! But maybe I’ll try to cool it with the gratuitous navel-gazing…