Guide #3 – Best Practices for Data Journalism, by Kuek Ser Kuang Keng.

Please download and share the guide. We would love to hear from you – send any comments or suggestions to us at mas@mdif.org.

[pdf-embedder url=”https://www.kbridge.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Guide-3-Best-Practices-for-Data-Journalism-by-Kuang-Keng.pdf” title=”Guide #3: Best Practices for Data Journalism by Kuang Keng Kuek Ser”]

About author: Kuang Keng Kuek Ser is an award-winning digital journalist. He produces and consults on data-driven reporting and interactive journalism projects. Keng is also the founder of DataN, a training program that lowers the barrier for newsrooms and journalists with limited resources to integrate data journalism into daily reporting. He has more than 10 years of experience in digital journalism. He was awarded a Fulbright scholarship in 2013 to further his studies at New York University’s Studio 20. In 2015, Keng was selected as a Google Journalism Fellow and a Tow-Knight Fellow.
You can contact him via e-mail or follow @kuangkeng on Twitter.

What these pioneers understand well is that this is not just about getting the money; it is about creating a faithful community of readers. In a way, they are searching for the lost group of loyal subscribers of the traditional newspapers who would call the newsroom in times of crisis as if journalists were family. The new fragmented audiences of digital outlets no longer gather around news-producers but around social networks, and no longer see why quality journalism has to be paid, nor how these payments help their guarantee the media true independence.

Crowd-funding helps journalism-producing outlets build a reliable community around a way of being.

Hungarians fund Atlatzo; Salvadoreans, El Faro; or inhabitants of Hong Kong, Factwire because they think good information is indispensable to survive as citizens. They know that if they support quality, well-verified stories, they will know what is really going on, and they will not be deceived with slanted or special-interest driven information.

There are however, cultural nuances in crowd-funding. In many places in the world it is still seen as a request for charity; as if the journalists were requesting a personal favor. And people may give them small change, like giving donations in church. Fortunately, this culture is changing. More citizens seem to understand that crowd-funding for journalism is a profoundly egalitarian exercise. They are growingly conscious that, as with food, they cannot only consume “junk” information.

If citizens only access information from contaminated sources, they will be unable to hold government or corporations accountable; unable to know when their interests are being harmed.

Crowd-funding is also a democratizing force because it gives power to its audiences. If they pay for the stories, they will follow them up and demand quality. Sure, the old business model that supported journalism was working, but in many parts of the world, it had been perverted by the excessive power it gave advertisers (including state advertising) over editorial content. It also left too much room for journalists to cosy-up to power. Now if citizens voluntarily fund a journalistic project, they expect something more than lazy journalism and they can speak more strongly to the journalists they fund.

Finally, crowd-funding can be a shield for journalism under attack. These same crowds that gave a journalism site money because they are convinced they need “organic journalism” made of healthy sources and verified ingredients to have a better life, could be the ones that go out of their way to defend it when under attack. For example, when there have been attempts to censor or intimidate Malaysiakini, a renowned independent media in Kuala Lumpur, its audience, who gave them half a million dollars for their new building, marched in the streets to protest. Also, as you will see in the examples below, crowds have helped pay for the defense of trusted journalists when these suffer legal abuse because they feel they stories they are telling are important and worth defending.

This story originally appeared in the May 2016 newsletter of the Open Society Foundation’s Program on Independent Journalism and is reprinted with permission.
You can subscribe to the newsletter here.

An article in The Wall Street Journal claims that desktop usage isn’t decreasing, as is often claimed. Jack Marshall explains that while the share of the market enjoyed by mobile internet access is growing fast, the total time spent online from desktops isn’t falling and might even be increasing.

However, Thad McIlroy on the Future of Publishing blog says this interpretation is misleading. The data The Wall Street Journal bases its findings on “encompasses all desktop computer usage, the majority of which relates to the Microsoft and Adobe application suites as well as email”.

“The real story is not that the PC usage is up, but that simultaneous device use — usually called ‘multi-platform’ — has changed the device landscape.” McIlroy says that data from another comScore report, The U.S. Digital Future in Focus 2015, shows that the number of people only using desktops to access the internet is declining sharply in all age groups, even the 55+ segment, and that across all ages the amount of mobile-only users is also growing fast.

This interpretation of the data – that mobile is growing at the expense of desktop – seems to be backed up by Google, which recently confirmed that it’s now serving more Google searches on smartphones than desktops in 10 counties, including the US and Japan. To respond to changing demands, Google is “rolling out new, smartphone-optimized ad formats that give users more reason to tap than its traditional AdWords. These include picture-heavy automobile ads that show users a gallery of their dream ride before directing them to dealerships, and hotel ads that sandwich together availability, prices, user reviews, and pictures into a compact mobile format.”

However, while the amount of mobile access might be outstripping desktop, an Outbrain study in the Asia-Pacific region shows that people consuming content on desktop are much more likely to engage with content compared to mobile, especially when it comes to paid content, reports Trak.in.

“In fact, if we compare desktop vs mobile, then engagement level falls drastically to 36% in Australia; and 9% in India. This means that if an Indian accesses a piece of content on mobile, then there is 9% less chance of his engagement compared to accessing content on desktop. Engagement here means sharing, commenting, liking the post or following the author/publication on social media.”

Of course mobile and desktop are both heavily used to access email. Yesware Enterprise examined more than 14 million messages sent by its users earlier this year to produce a detailed pattern of when and on what device people use to read their emails. This slideshow gives an insight into their findings.

Ingram explains that some critics say that Sullivan’s retirement signals the death of blogging, while others claim that it actually died a long time ago. BuzzFeed’s Ben Smith has argued that blogging disappeared when people like himself started to use it as a tool to power their own career. “Ben is saying that some bloggers stopped thinking as much about being part of a larger ecosystem — one in which they linked to and sent traffic to other bloggers, and in turn relied on their resources and links — and started thinking about becoming their own independent media entities instead. In effect, they turned inwards, and became more concerned with creating their own content and building up their readership, and turning that into a business.”

Ezra Klein, co-founder of Vox, thinks that the rise of the social web forced blogging to change. The niche, specialist nature of blogs that linked to other blogs, creating community and conversation, has been replaced by the search for virality through Facebook and Twitter.

In Ingram’s opinion, the truth is that blogging hasn’t died; it has changed. In fact, we are now surrounded by it. When it started, blogging was the quickest way to publish your voice, to share your thoughts and listen to what others were saying. Now, with Snapchat, Instagram and Facebook, all the elements that we used to think of as blogging are everywhere, immediately available to us all, easier to use than traditional platforms, and providing far larger audiences.

“Clinging to a specific form like blogging is an anachronism,” he says. What newspapers like the New York Times have done is to get rid of their blogs as separate entities, and incorporate that content into the rest of the paper.

Online video is a good example of this. Predictions from 10 years ago were made up of points that were so general that there was no way they wouldn’t be right.

Like the claim that video will become more and more popular. Of course it has.

source

Or another similarly vague prediction that online video will transfer from computers to other platforms.

Also true. What else?

source

And, fortunately, predictions that advertiser spending on online video will also grow – at least that’s becoming true in the American market.

sources

Prediction errors

When the predictions, however, got a little more concrete, they usually failed. The one that stands out the most is probably the idea about what type of video a viewer will want to watch in 2015.

According to the fortune-tellers, the attributes of a popular online video should be:

• short (because the attention span of an internet user is also short)
• made by an amateur (because the line between a product made by a professional and an amateur will get less thanks to cheap technologies)

Around 2010 it looked like this forecast might come true. YouTube was at that time full of cat videos with millions of views and short-form online video was the subject of such a buzz that every marketing conference included viral video presentations in its program.

Except that long-term enchantment with short amateur videos couldn’t last and because television viewer habits were eventually transferred to other devices.

Even though cat videos are still popular today, many users actually seek videos longer than 10 minutes. This is true on all devices, including smartphones where it seems the limits of mobile internet do not play a major role.

source

The second point about amateur production isn’t valid either. The boundaries between professionals and amateurs almost disappeared for a while, but only because for a long time the internet had not been attractive enough for professional production. No successful model for monetizing online video existed and, for professionals, the internet had only been a promotional channel rather than a stream of revenue.

This was changed with the success of video-on-demand services such as Netflix and Hulu, which started to pour $100 million budgets into original content.

Professionalization of online video was also helped by a partner program and YouTube grants, as well as the related development of MCN services such as Vevo, Fullscreen or Machinima.

source

So, what should you do?

While in the past, media houses could have dreamed about using short videos generated by users (ideally with production costs nearing zero) as being enough for their video content, today, it seems clear that if you want to be successful in this field, you need the exact opposite. That is, you need content which is:

• original
• coming across as professional
• typically 10+ minutes long
• and, consequently, much more expensive than content generated by users

For a publishing house, it means only one thing: though a publisher doesn’t need the budget of a television station to launch online video, it needs to accept that online video will be one of the most expensive online formats.

So, as the UGC path isn’t feasible and no publishing house has an online video budget anywhere close to a video-on-demand service, we need to look for a golden middle path.

Experiences from TV SME

The golden middle path is exactly what the TV SME project, an online television ran by Slovak daily Sme.sk, attempted to find.

Since 2007, TV SME has produced around 30,000 videos and more than 1,000 regular programs for which the production costs ran in the order of hundreds of Euro (or lower) for each episode.

Creating video content is not a necessity – news portals and magazines can survive without it. If, however, you decide to give it a try, here are the 5 most important lessons from the TV SME experience:

1. Professional content is more important than professional form

Although online video formats should be as professional as possible, in the beginning it’s essential to focus more on the content being professional, rather than the production.

Can a professional news portal afford to produce videos recorded on a web camera? Can the newsroom afford to publish an interview with a politician recorded on a mobile phone?

In both cases: yes, it can. TV SME did both of these when it started and it didn’t seem to hurt its image. On the contrary, one of the most successful TV SME videos from 2010 (over 130,000 videos made) was a recording of the daily SME’s editor interviewing the President of the Slovak Parliament, who couldn’t stop laughing at the fact that one female nationalist member of the parliament slapped another.

The editor filmed the video on a Nokia N95 mobile, which TV SME provided to some of the daily’s editors when we launched the channel.

An amateur-looking video isn’t a hindrance if it’s balanced by interesting, intelligent content. If you have amateur and insipid content, troubling yourself with form is basically pointless. It’s a cliché, but content is king and form is secondary.

However, if you want viewers to pay attention to what you’ve filmed, decent audio is crucial. If the video is shaky and low resolution, the viewer will survive. If, on the other hand, the sound is rustling and the viewer doesn’t understand what’s being said, it gets turned off immediately.

2. Duplication is not a problem

One of the cheapest formats as far as production costs go is video blogs – in other words, a kind of alternative to a written commentary.

A few years ago, TV SME regularly produced videos which were basically a narration of printed commentaries. The author of the original commentary repeated his main arguments in slightly different words in front of the camera. Here’s one example from many:

There was a fear of duplication in the beginning, the main one being that users wouldn’t see the added value and therefore wouldn’t watch the videos. There was also the opposite concern that video would reduce the audience for the written commentaries.

Neither of these worries was confirmed. On the contrary, both video commentaries and their written counterparts had equal viewership and readership even though they were both placed on the homepage very close to each other.

 3. Regularity increases ratings

Perhaps one of the most important things we learned is that it’s possible to create a viewer habit on the Internet, just as with television. Basically, you need only one thing: regularity.

A video is, of course, parked on the website all the time and doesn’t need an allotted broadcast time           like in television, but if you’re making a video series connected by a theme or author, it’s important that the time you premiere the video is the same, as is the place on the home page where it appears.

One of the most successful TV SME formats was “Tomas Hudak’s World”, a humorous program summarizing the most important events of the week.

The premiere of each new episode was on Thursdays at 8pm on the Sme.sk homepage. In the rare instances when the video didn’t appear on time, we soon received exasperated reactions from viewers asking what the problem was.

Mainly thanks to regular broadcast times, the program maintained relatively stable minimal viewership and did not drop below 20,000 views per episode.

When Tomas Hudak’s World ended, it was replaced by a similar humorous program with a different host. The time of the premiere was kept – a step which allowed for picking up the new program’s viewership.

Without regularity, you might find it difficult to create a stable viewer base. And without that, your viewership numbers will fluctuate or you may need to put in more energy and money for promotion.

4. Look for free content

In every country, there’s a lot of video-ready content that classic TV stations don’t want – either because it’s short, it doesn’t fit their various standards or simply because it addresses a niche target group and, in relation to the production costs, is therefore uninteresting

A talk show held in a theatre or a café. Stand-up comedy. Concerts. Conferences. Lectures. Minority sports. Short films. Local politics. Debates.

All of these are unattractive for large TV stations. Much of this content is financed from entry fees or a non-profit activity and will take place whether a camera is present or not.

For video portals, the largest cost can thus end up being the sending of two camera people for shooting and one video editor to select the five most interesting sequences from a one-hour debate.

5.  Popular yet cheap formats do exist

For TV SME, here are some of the economical but popular formats (in order, starting with the cheapest):

Video blogs – Basically a talking-head who comments on a current event. The success of the format lies in how strong the topic is or how controversial the opinion is (which should be made clear in the video title).

Lectures – Another talking-head, occasionally with a PowerPoint presentation behind him or her. This may sound uninteresting, but a video in this format from TV SME won the Slovak Google Award for innovative approaches to online journalism in 2012.

Compilations – YouTube is swamped each week by new “failure” compilations. A similar genre can be used in professional journalism. You’ll need a host with authority and personality who’ll regularly select and present the best videos – e.g. the most interesting sporting moments of the week – with a commentary. Besides the above-mentioned Tomas Hudak’s World, which compiled the most interesting global political events, TV SME has developed a successful program about movies built on the same principle. The ratio of production costs versus viewership makes compilations the most attractive original format for a beginner video portal.

Instruction programs – TV SME experimented with first aid instruction programs, DIY videos and directions on how to take care of personal administrative affairs.

Discussions – Several regular discussion programs about politics were recorded in a small TV SME studio. Others were recorded in theatres or were taken from public television. 99% of these broadcasts were pre-recorded – live streaming was only rarely used due to costs, technological problems and little interest.

Reviews – if there is a format where video clearly has an advantage over written text, it’s reviews. It’s better to see how a mobile phone looks and works than to read about it. The most successful reviews done by TV SME were reviews of cars.

Reportage – Abroad term but in the case of TV SME, reportage meant mainly two ways of working with video:

• Reportage as one part of an article – when the print paper’s newsroom worked on a big story, cooperation with video editors and illustrative videos were often a part of the work. In some instances, video editors attended press conferences like classic TV crews and worked on these current events.

• Reportage as a stand-alone series – a series of reportages thematically related, appearing regularly, for example about folklore, art or entrepreneurship.

While reportage is the king of online video formats, it’s also the most complex in terms of time, funds and preparation of the editors.

For more examples of how to do it well and how to tell a story through video, I recommend you visit the Vice News YouTube channel and the KobreGuide portal, which provides examples of some of the best video journalism in the world.

Filloux lists products and services found in many media businesses, then attributes a value to each one: “the sum of items in any given mix must translate into the famous Average Revenue per User (ARPU), a number that should be everyone’s obsession.” He identifies 14 products, services and target groups.

Then gives an assessment of the relative importance of each option, including:

Daily Print Occasional Reader: For most outlets, this is the least valuable customer. The costs of serving occasional, remote customers usually doesn’t make financial sense. “The practice needs urgent reassessment. In most cases, this means eliminating the weakest point of sales.”
Potential: Zero.
Priority: Low.

Daily Print Subscriber: Some – though a decreasing number of – customers will pay almost anything for their hard copy newspaper to be delivered.
Potential: Limited.
Priority: Limited.

Digital Subscribers: “For quality media, this is the most precious revenue stream.” To attract paying subscribers, you must produce “irreplaceable” content. The first step it so attract as many registered users as possible, then you have to “work on the conversion rate”.
Potential: High.
Priority: Top.

Events and Conferences: A competitive sector, though they can be profitable if they are genuine editorial products – supported by the news staff, the product of editorial thinking and provide something unique.
Potential: High if well engineered and executed.
Priority: Depends on the level of competition in your market. I’d say: High.

MOOCs (massive open online course) and Training Products: Real potential: for many people, deep training is essential just to survive in the job market. There are also dual market possibilities, i.e. corporate for paid-in-advance products and business-to-consumer for sponsored courses. A great opportunity for media to leverage their brand, reach and portfolios of advertisers.
Potential: High
Priority: Top.

Content Syndication: Serious consideration: “digital news is overwhelmed by shallow, recycled, often mediocre content. Premium is rare because it’s expensive and risky to produce. Therefore it carries tangible value.” If you create quality editorial products, you should target outlets that can’t afford original production.
Potential: High.
Priority: Should be on the very top.

Making all of this – and other items that could be added to the list – a reality, “requires agility, light structures (in some cases disconnected from the mother ship), dedicated staff who think fast and react faster. The upside is promising.”

The Knight News Challenge has been supporting news media innovation since 2007, funding more than a hundred projects to the tune of $37 million. Some of its winners have developed into successful businesses (though not necessarily doing what they originally planned), while others have sunk without a trace.

The report looks at 28 projects such as FrontlineSMS, iWitness, and Zeega and picks out important lessons that contribute to successful media innovation.

Target users with “a need you can feel”

Successful projects scale because they have identified a core audience and proven need, whereas others fail “because they developed a tool without first identifying target users”.

Get the interface right

“An intuitive user interface is vital for attracting and retaining users.” But don’t underestimate the time and expense involved in developing what appears to be a simple design.

Successful projects may appeal to a different audience than first imagined…

Tools developed to help media outlets with tasks such as visualising data have struggled to get traction in the newsroom but have found success in other industries. “Small budgets in journalism and a lack of technical understanding among journalists can inhibit adoption.”

…Anticipate resistance to innovation

Successful startups realise that their innovation may cause disruption and meet institutional resistance. Successful innovators anticipate resistance and plan ahead for it, for example by identifying a wider potential audience beyond the initial target.

Identify staffing needs early

Many startups rely on a mix of full-time paid staff and a community of users and evangelists to develop and promote services and tools. Identify which parts of your project need paid, full-time staff and those that can be carried out by volunteers, and allocate resources accordingly. The contribution of unpaid supporters can be undermined by insufficient core staffing.

The internet is not a deli: “The first misconception newspaper veterans have is the notion that interactive news teams are simply new-fangled print graphics desks.” While there are similarities in their creativity, editors shouldn’t turn to the web team as a support desk once they have finalised the story. Journalist-developers should be included in the assigning process and involved in stories from the start.

Hire new skills: You won’t find people with skills in web design, programming and motion graphics if you advertise positions in the usual journalism job pages/websites. These are the types of skills you’ll need to bring to your newsroom either through staff development or external recruitment.

Herd all the cats: Doing digital news well means bringing together staff with a wide range of skills, often from different departments. In this type of situation, the traditional newsroom chain of command doesn’t work, so you’ll have to foster new ways of collaboration. “Anyone can lead a project, but somebody must lead.”

You need a sandbox: An interactive team needs space to experiment in a way that doesn’t jeopardise the entire system: “Most CMSs are designed to prevent the kind of monkeying around that this new kind of online storytelling requires…If you’re starting a team from scratch, the very first thing you have to do is give it the tools it needs to succeed, and an autonomous development sandbox is at the top of that list.”

Iteration leads to bigger success: Experiment and adapt. Be prepared to fail. Carry out post-mortem reviews for all your projects, note what worked, what didn’t and how you’d fix it next time.

Be the journalist you want others to become: Start building a culture that supports the digital development of your company. Encourage journalists to learn about data analysis and web development – you might be surprised at how many want to be part of the digital future.

Read more: Things I never learned at newspapers about making news on the internet

Strategy, structure and culture form an interdependent triangle for change. “Any attempt to change culture without developing a strategy and structure is doomed to failure. And any attempt to implement a new strategy without working on structure and culture is also unlikely to succeed.”

Strategic change drivers: Faced with disruptive competitors such as search engines and social media, print businesses have to develop new strategies and products. Websites, mobile sites, apps, social media channels – the pace of product changes and modifications has increased tremendously. Publishers are in danger of being left behind.

Structural change drivers: Breaking the focus on daily deadlines for the printed paper is important in supporting the strategic shift to digital. So are agile product development and an adoption of improvements in technology, platforms and collaboration.

Cultural change drivers: Sometimes cultural changes demand structural change and even strategic change. For example, news types of employees: “young graduates (Generation Y or Millennials) are bringing different value sets and expectations to the workplace… And organisations must adapt to this trend.”

Dr Knoll says you should always “sweep a staircase from the top”. Trying to change culture from the bottom up will not work. “The simple fact is if managers — whether they’re in editorial or commercial areas — do not believe in a common change in vision and goal, it will not work.”

In times such as these, “transformational leaders are needed to share an engaging vision and navigate people through unsteady waters. But, first, we need managers who really understand the changes taking place.”

Read more: Sustainable culture change for media companies must start at the top

Like The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Politico and others before it, the allure of TV proved too strong for the Post to resist – it also proved to be much harder than it looks.

The Post and others have learned the hard way that you can’t just copy traditional TV formats and put them online. Not only is it expensive and beyond the capabilities of most legacy newsrooms, no matter how forward thinking they are, people don’t want to watch it in sufficient numbers to make it pay.