Fake news is as old as news itself, but at least in the West it was most clearly defined during World War I, when “the art of Propaganda was little more than born,” in the words of Charles Montague, formerly a leader writer and theatre critic of The Manchester Guardian and latterly an intelligence captain in the trenches of France. Montague saw up close the early probing efforts to plant what were then called ‘camouflage stories’ in the local press in the hope of misleading the enemy; one in an obscure science journal which recklessly overstated the Allies’ ability to eavesdrop on German telephone calls in the field.

Montague, as his intelligence bosses, saw the huge potential fake news offered for deception — which, after all, was the business he was in. “If we really went the whole serpent,” he wrote later, “the first day of any new war would see a wide, opaque veil of false news drawn over the whole face of our country.” (Rankin, Nicholas: A Genius for Deception: How Cunning Helped the British Win Two World Wars)

This didn’t happen but there was enough censorship and enough force-fed propaganda of the British and American press for there to be a backlash in the wake of the war, as told in the March 2018 edition of Science Magazine (‘The science of fake news’). The norms of objectivity and balance that most of us abide by or aspire to today are those century-old ones wrought of that conflict.

So it’s worth remembering that the serpent we’re fighting isn’t some newly created hydra born out of social media: it’s age-old the servant of governments, movements, forces who understand well how minds work. But that’s only part of the story.

One of the first problems that media face is that while we stood on our plinths of noble principles those plinths were for decades — nearly a century — built on powerful commercial interests. As the authors of the Science Magazine article put it: “Local and national oligopolies created by the dominant 20th century technologies of information distribution (print and broadcast) sustained these norms. The internet has reduced many of those constraints on news dissemination.”

It has, and very effectively. Not only that, it has helped change the language, format and tone, something we’ve been slow to pick up on. An academic study in 2012 by Regina Marchi of Rutgers University, based on interviews with 61 high school students, found “that teens gravitate toward fake news, ‘snarky’ talk radio, and opinionated current events shows more than official news, and do so not because they are disinterested in news, but because these kinds of sites often offer more substantive discussions of the news and its implications.” She quotes a 2005 study that such formats are “marked by a highly skeptical, alienated attitude to established politics and its representation that is actually the reverse of disinterest”.

Take note the ‘fake news’ reference predates the Trump era by a good three years. But the style, the content, the contempt for fact and sourcing was a trend already visible a decade before Trump and others rode its coat-tails to power.

In researching data journalism in the era of big data, I have found myself trying to define what “data” means in this context. Of course when we refer to data we usually envisage significant amounts of numerical information, but as data sets get unimaginably large this itself becomes problematic. So I decided to take a step back, and look at a successful story that is data driven closer to home.

I chose,a cluster of stories,  from Manila, by the Reuters reporting team of Clare Baldwin, Andrew Marshall and Manny Mogato, who covered Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte’s war on drug suspects. (Transparency alert: I was, until earlier this year, an employee of Thomson Reuters.) The three of them won a Pulitzer  in the International Reporting category for this coverage. I wanted to just focus on a couple of stories because I think it helps define what data journalism is. This is how their story of June 29 2017 described how Philippine police were using hospitals to hide drug war killings:

• An analysis of crime data from two of Metro Manila’s five police districts and interviews with doctors, law enforcement officials and victims’ families point to one answer: Police were sending corpses to hospitals to destroy evidence at crime scenes and hide the fact that they were executing drug suspects.
• Thousands of people have been killed since President Rodrigo Duterte took office on June 30 last year and declared war on what he called “the drug menace.” Among them were the seven victims from Old Balara who were declared dead on arrival at hospital.
• A Reuters analysis of police reports covering the first eight months of the drug war reveals hundreds of cases like those in Old Balara. In Quezon City Police District and neighboring Manila Police District, 301 victims were taken to hospital after police drug operations. Only two survived. The rest were dead on arrival.
• The data also shows a sharp increase in the number of drug suspects declared dead on arrival in these two districts each month. There were 10 cases at the start of the drug war in July 2016, representing 13 percent of police drug shooting deaths. By January 2017, the tally had risen to 51 cases or 85 percent. The totals grew along with international and domestic condemnation of Duterte’s campaign.

This is data journalism at its best. At its most raw. The simple process of finding a story, finding the data that supports and illustrates it and then writing that story and using the findings to illuminate and prove it. Of course, the data set we’re talking about here is smaller than other data-driven stories but it’s still the point of the story, the difference between a story and much lesser one.

But how did they come by that data? Andrew tells me it was done the old fashioned way: first, they got the tip, the anecdotal evidence that police were covering up deaths by using ambulances to carry away the dead. Then they went looking for proof — for police reports, which are public information in the Philippines and so can, in theory, be obtained legally. These they found, because they looked early and persistently. Then it was a question of assembling these, and cleaning them up. In some cases, it meant taking photos of barely-legible police blotters at a station entrance.

All their stories, Andrew told me, were driven by the reporters already having a sense of what the story was, and then looking for proof. That means already knowing enough about the topic to have formed an opinion about what to be looking for: about what may have happened, about what angle you’re hoping to be able to prove, about what new fresh evidence you believe the data will unearth for you. A data-driven story doesn’t always mean wandering around the data without a clear idea of what you’re looking for. In fact, it’s better to already know. “The key thing,” he told me, “is that this all grew out of street reporting. We wouldn’t have thought to look for it if we hadn’t heard.”

That’s the first lesson from their experience. Data is something that is there that helps you prove — or refute — something you have already established to be likely from sources elsewhere. 

This is where I think sometimes data journalism can come adrift. By focusing too much on the “data” part of it, we lose sense of the “journalism” part of it. “It’s the blend of street reporting and data analysis that paid the great dividend,” Andrew said.

A  definition of data journalism should probably start somewhere there; but it tends not to. Instead we tend to get: data journalism as a “set of tools’, or “locating the outliers and identifying trends that are not just statistically significant but relevant”, or “a way to tell richer stories” (various recent definitions.)  These are all  good, but I’m not sure they’re enough to help us define how to best use data for journalism.

By emphasizing data over journalism we risk removing and rarifying the craft, creating a barrier where it doesn’t need to exist. As in the previous examples in the Philippines, data is not always something that sits in databases, servers, libraries or archives. Nor is it something that you have to ask for. It’s something you use to gather information to help better storytell and to reinforce the facts in your coverage.  A study by Google last year trumpeted that more than half of newsrooms surveyed had a dedicated data journalist.

Aren’t we all, or shouldn’t we all consider ourselves, data journalists? Shouldn’t we all be looking for data to enrich — if not prove the thesis that underlies — our stories? 

Back to Andrew’s example. For the team it was something of a no-brainer to work on attaining this data. The story would have been unthinkable without it. This might not be part of every journalist’s instinct, but it’s telling in this example, that it became central to their story and took weeks, months to assemble.

The place to start from was with the local police and hospitals to get this data.  To do so was legal. But it wasn’t easy, and became increasingly less so as the work developed.. Clare Baldwin was greeted at one station by homicide detectives who shouted and lifted their shirts to display their guns. Later, Andrew told me, it became much more difficult to have access to this information as the Duterte government realized what it was being used for.

The lesson from this is that data is not necessarily something that is easy to get, or easily given up. Or that arrives in pristine form. It requires some major work in verifying, identifying and compiling. is more akin to the example of Bellingcat, the crowdsourcing website created by journalist Eliot Higgins, which conducts what it calls open-source investigations of data sources, ranging from social media photographs to online databases.

Of course, not all stories are going to be like this, and not all data is going to be like this. But all journalism, data or otherwise, requires thinking that starts from a similar place: a strong knowledge of what the story might be, and where to find it; whether there might be data that might help, to know where to find it, to not be daunted in obtaining it, or by the condition it is in, and to understand the context of the data that you have, and to know what to do with it. And finally, in Andrew’s words, “to use that data quickly, not just to sit on it“.

The aforementioned team’s stories stand on their own.  As another example, the Reuters’ graphics team, led by Simon Scarr, also did some extraordinary visualizations which helped readers understand stories better, and provided additional impact. Visualization and data journalism are obvious bedfellows.

This isn’t to say sometimes the idea for a story doesn’t lie in the data itself. Data journalism can mean taking data as inspiration to explore and write a story — rather than beginning the process by talking to sources.. At its most basic this could be a simple story about a company’s results, or a country’s quarterly trade figures — data-driven stories where the journalist reports the new numbers, compares them with the earlier numbers, and then adds some comment.

But when there is overemphasis on data journalism as a separate part of the news process it can pose problems. There’s been quite a lot written about a backlash against ‘nerd journalists’ and an exodus of those computer-literate staff in newsrooms who are sick of the skepticism and relatively low salaries. I’ve not witnessed this firsthand, but I have seen how little interest there is in learning more about the ‘techie’ side of journalism that might help reporters wrestle with data beyond their familiar charts and tables. Editors are partly to blame: stories that involve dirty or larger data-sets do take longer and so are often unwelcome, unless they fall into a special category. So reporters quickly figure out they’re better off not being overly ambitious when it comes to collecting data.

Data journalism tends to be limited to a handful of really strong players. In my neck of the woods in South and Southeast Asia there’s an impressive array of indigenous (i.e. not one of the big multinational) outfits: Malaysiakini are almost old hands at this process now.  Their sub editor,  Aun Qi Koh told me that as it gets easier in terms of knowing which tools to use and how to use them, so it gets harder because “we want to push ourselves to do more, and to better…and of course, there’s the challenge of trying to streamline a process that often involves a team of journalists, graphic designers, programmers, social media marketers and translators.” she tells me.

This is impressive, and is demonstrating what is possible. News organizations are making the most of governments’ gradual commitment to opening up their data, and to leveraging issues that the public care about. In the Philippines Rappler has been making waves, and won an award for its #SaferRoadsPH campaign, which compiled and visualized statistics on road crash incidents and has led to local police drawing pedestrian lanes outside schools.

These kinds of initiatives are tailor-made for visual data journalism. Not least because journalists don’t have to rely on government data that might be either absent, incomplete or wrong. Or, in some cases, just unreliable. Malaysiakini’s Aun Qi Koh said that the data in a government portal set up in 2014 was neither “organized properly nor updated regularly.” That seems to be par for the course. And while staff everywhere need better training, those that do have the necessary training tend to get snapped up by–and attracted to–private sector companies rather than relatively low paying journalist positions, according to Andrew Thornley, a development consultant in Jakarta.

I’m impressed by all these projects, especially those doing great journalism on a shoestring. But I hope it doesn’t sound churlish if I say I still think this is scratching the surface of what is possible, and that we may not be best preparing ourselves as well as we could for the era of big data.

Take this story as an example: Isao Matsunami of Tokyo Shimbun is quoted in the Data Journalism Handbook as talking about his experience after the earthquake Fukushima nuclear disaster in 2011: “We were at a loss when the government and experts had no credible data about the damage,” he wrote.  “When officials hid SPEEDI data (predicted diffusion of radioactive materials) from the public, we were not prepared to decode it even if it were leaked. Volunteers began to collect radioactive data by using their own devices but we were not armed with the knowledge of statistics, interpolation, visualization and so on. Journalists need to have access to raw data, and to learn not to rely on official interpretations of it.”

The data he’s talking to was created by Safecast, an NGO based in Japan which started building its own devices and deploying its own volunteers when it realised that there was no reliable and granular government data on the radiation around Fukushima. Now it produces its own open source hardware and has one of the largest such data-sets in the world, covering air quality as well, covering sizeable chunks of the world.

The future of data journalism lies, I believe, in exactly this: building early, strong relationships with outside groups — perhaps even funding them. More routinely, journalists should find their own sources of raw data where it’s relevant and practical, and fold the mindset, tools and approach of data journalism into their daily workflows the rest of the time. You can already see evidence of the latter on sites like Medium and Bloomberg Gadfly, where journalists are encouraged to incorporate data and charts into their stories and to build an argument. Much of this is already happening: Google’s survey last year found that 42% of reporters use data to tell stories twice or more per week.

But the kind of data being used may be open to question. Data is no more a journalist’s friend than any source — it has an agenda, it’s fallible, and it can often be misquoted or quoted out of context. As journalists we tend to trust statistics, and interpretation of those statistics, a little too readily.

For the sake of balance, here’s a Reuters story from 2014, still online, that quotes an academic study (“Anti-gay communities linked to shorter lives”) despite the fact that in February this year a considerable correction was posted to the original study. (“Once the error was corrected, there was no longer a significant association between structural stigma and mortality risk among the sample of 914 sexual minorities.”) We are not, as journalists, usually given to expressing skepticism about data provided by academics and similar but maybe we should. (And I suppose we should be better at policing our stories, even if the correction is required years after the story first appeared.)

Tony Nash, founder of one of the biggest single troves of economic and trade data online at CompleteIntel.com, believes journalists tend to let their guard down when it comes to data: “The biggest problem with data journalism is that data is taken at face value. No credible journalist would just print a press release but they’ll republish data without serious probing and validation. Statistics agencies, information services firms, polling firms, etc. all laugh at this.”

Day to day journalism, then, could benefit from being both more skeptical and more ambitious about the data it uses. Tony says he’s tried in vain to interest journalists in using his service to mash stories together, so instead writes his own newsletter, often ‘breaking’ stories long before the media: “In July 2017 I showed that Mexico and China are trade competitors but journos always believe China has an upper hand in trade. For all of 2017, Mexico exported more TVs to the US than China. For the first time. It was not a surprise to us. Most journos still have not woken up to that,” he told me recently.

Coupled with tools that make it easier to combine visuals into their stories — Datawrapper, a chart making tool, for example, has launched an extension called River which makes it easier for journalists to identify stories or add data to breaking stories.

But this is just the start. We are in the era of big data and we are only at the beginning of that era. The Internet of Things (IoT) is a fancy term to cover the trend of devices being connected to the internet (rather than people through their devices, as it were.) There will be sensors on everything, but there will also be light switches, washing machines, pacemakers, weather-vanes, even cartons of milk, telling us whether they’re on or off, full or empty, fresh or sour. All will give off data. Right now only about 10% of that data is being captured. But that will change. According to IDC, a technology consultancy, more than 90 percent of this IoT data will be available on the cloud, meaning that it will be analyzed, by governments, by companies, and possibly by journalists. The market for all this big data, according to IDC, will grow from $130.1 billion in 2018 to over $203 billion in 2020. This market will primarily be one about decision making: a cultural shift, to “data-driven decision making”.

You can see some of this in familiar patterns already: Most of it is being used to better understand users — think Amazon and Netflix getting a better handle on what you want to buy or watch next. But that’s pretty easy. How about harder stuff, such as taking huge disparate data sets — the entire firehose of Twitter, say, along with Google searches, Facebook usage (all anonymized of course) — to be able to slice target audiences very thinly. One Singapore-based company I spoke to has been able to build a very granular — as they call it — picture of who they want to target, down to the particular tower block, their food preference (pizza), music (goth) and entertainment (English premier league). Not only does this make advertisers happy they’re going after the right people, it makes it much cheaper.

But this is just the beginning of big data. Everything will be spitting out data — sensors in cars, satellites, people, buildings; everything we do, say, write etc. Knowing what data there is will be key: Another Reuters graphics story — which won the award for Data visualization of the year at the Data Journalism Awards 2018 involved realising the value of a data-set of GPS coordinates of infrastructure gathered by aid agencies working on the ground at a Rohingya refugee camp in Cox’s Bazaar to analyze the health risks of locating water pumps too close to make-shift toilets. And then there’s knowing whether there might be other data hiding within the data: Buzzfeed’s application of machine learning to Flightradar aircraft data to single out the clues that revealed hidden surveillance flights, which also won a Data Journalism award.

These are small glimpses of the future of the kinds of data journalism we might see.

In the future it will be second nature to journalists to not only know what kind of data is being collected and to turn it to their own uses, but to try to pre-emptively collect it. This will require lateral thinking. Journalists have been using satellite imagery for several years as part of their investigations but this is likely to become even easier, cheaper, and more varied. One entrepreneur I spoke to recently is launching dozens of micro-satellites to monitor methane emissions — data of interest to oil and gas companies worried about gas leaks, governments enforcing greenhouse gas regulations, as well as hedge funds looking for exclusive economic indicators. Imagine if a journalist is able to peruse that data and uncover military activity from heat emissions even before governments know about it.

This is just the tip of the iceberg, and while journalists may not be at the front of the queue for this kind of data, it’s going to be important to know what kind of data is out there. Already the notion of what a “leading indicator” is has begun to change — an investor in China is much more likely to be trawling through data from Baidu than government statistics to get a sense of what is going on, and smart journalists already know that.

The future of data journalism, if it is successful, will still be journalism. And data will still be data. But as the world of data gets bigger, it pays to remember that the relationship between ‘data’ and journalism is still about thinking and acting creatively and quickly to uncover stories others may not want us to tell. 

We are currently in a phase of seeing in blockchain, the ledger technology that underpins cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, the solution to problems in nearly every industry. There is something alluring about a technology that is so easy to set up, does not require a leader or central controller, and which can store anything permanently. But would it work for media?

First off, it’s worth talking about what blockchain is – and isn’t. Blockchain is the name we have given the underlying database system created by Satoshi Nakamoto, the so-far unidentified maker of bitcoin. Nakamoto needed to solve a couple of problems if he (or she) was to create a digital currency that was unhackable. He first needed to get around the problem of copying: when it’s easy to copy something digital, a digital currency needs to not only be impossible to duplicate, but also everyone needs to be able to see that it cannot be duplicated. The other problem he wanted to get around is to make sure the process of recording and validating transactions was not dominated by one person, either relying on some central authority, or that someone could take over the system and manipulate transactions.

These problems were neatly solved by the blockchain. Embedded in software, copies of the ledger of transactions would be stored on multiple computers — basically anyone who wanted to join in. All subsequent transactions would be added to the ledger in sequential order, connecting each block cryptographically, so any attempt at tampering with the record would be discarded. The task of recording those transactions would be done by miners — people who had a copy of the blockchain on their computer, and used their computer’s resources to run through permutations until they found a particular sequence of digits. The first to do so would have the right to add a block to the chain, and earn bitcoin. This created an incentive for people to participate in storing copies of the blockchain, and to record the transactions.

So what has all this got to do with journalism? Well, the blockchain has lots of parts to it that appeal. Together they offer what some believe would be a different way of connecting the components of the media economy — those who produce content, those who consume it, those who publish it and those who currently finance it through advertising.

To understand this, it’s better to take each part of blockchain’s appeal one by one.

Micro-transactions

Micropayments — basically defined as pay per article — have long been the holy grail of digital media, as an adjunct to rather than a replacement for subscription and advertising. The idea is compelling because it means that people who care enough about a single piece of content could pay for it; no need for a subscription, no need to whip out a credit card, no need to think too hard about whether the content is worth it.

The reality is that micropayments will only work when the transaction costs are reduced to near zero. This hasn’t happened because we’re still using credit cards, or a variation thereof (PayPal, Apple Pay), where costs remain high. The alternative is to store value elsewhere — in a wallet, say — which is then transferred in the form of micropayments. But it is still one or two many steps for most users. Wallets are only appealing to users when there are obvious benefits or no alternative. Think ride sharing, or bike sharing. If I can only unlock a bike by uploading credit to their account, then I’ll do it, but I won’t be happy, because that money is all locked with them. And in a recent case, the money might disappear entirely if the company closes down suddenly. Expect wallets to get a bad rap from here on in.

So how could blockchain help? The first, and perhaps only, proven use case of blockchain is Bitcoin. The Bitcoin blockchain network has been running for nearly 10 years, and has an uptime of 99.992364787%. (Really.) So it’s a proven payments system. Unfortunately, it’s also hugely expensive: to move bitcoin from one address to another (in other words, to make a transaction) is still costly — often more than the value of the transaction itself. This is because the miners — the people running the computers that are adding blocks to the blockchain — need an incentive beyond earning bitcoin from the correct ‘guessing’ of the mathematical puzzle. So those making a transaction add a ‘tip’ to the transaction request to bump it up the queue. All this is hugely inefficient and often means transactions can take hours to be recorded. This is fine if you are moving large amounts, or if you just see bitcoin as a valuable commodity, but this is not what Bitcoin and blockchain were designed for. The idea is that it would make it possible for people to transact simply, securely, and without anyone creaming anything off the top (or blocking the transaction.)

Now we’re getting closer. If cryptocurrencies can overcome some of their limitations — high transaction costs associated with adding blocks to the chain, poor usability and security issues — then they definitely offer a way forward. You’d still have to convert from fiat into a currency or token, but that might be feasible if the transaction costs can be lower than real-world transactions. This will probably happen first on Bitcoin Cash, which is what is called a ‘hard fork’ from the original Bitcoin (now called Bitcoin Core.) Bitcoin Cash adherents talk about reclaiming Bitcoin from the Core people by focusing on increasing the transaction volume; Bitcoin Cash supports about 100 transactions per second. Compare that to Bitcoin Core’s 7.

One example of a media company exploiting this is Yours.org. The site, according to its founder Ryan Charles, is a platform designed to reward content creators. After trying several other cryptocurrencies unsuccessfully, they turned to Bitcoin Cash allowing users to charge for content if they wished, using Bitcoin cash. One user, Rivers and Mountains, charges about $5 for the full article after a short précis. His articles (about Bitcoin Cash, mostly) earn him up to $900 each. (Yours charges 10 cents to post content and takes 5% of purchases.)

As the founder of Yours, Ryan Charles, puts it: “With Bitcoin Cash we have actual low fees and the payments are actually irreversible. This is kind of amazing. This didn’t used to exist. This is actually the fantasy of micropayments that people have talked about since the 1990s. We actually have it for real starting last August.”

Tokenisation

Yours.org is somewhat unusual in that no extra tokens are involved. You buy Bitcoin Cash and you use that to pay for content. And that may end up being the most popular way of doing things. But most other platforms in this space use their own tokens — basically a version of bitcoin on its own blockchain, like a separate currency. Remember, a blockchain is like any database, it can pretty much store whatever you want on it. Bitcoin, a digital currency, was the original use case which inspired (and required) blockchain. But anything could be stored there, usually in token form.

Steemit, for example, is a social media platform that rewards users with its own token — Steem — which can be converted into dollars on an exchange. And, like Yours, not only are content creators rewarded but anyone clicking on like buttons, adding or voting on comments. All this, the argument goes, helps to oil the ecosystem and promote better content. (Steemit is doing very well, although you might think of it as more of a social platform than a media one. Steem’s market capitalisation — if you add all the tokens together and sell them at the present price — is more than $400 million at the time of writing. It has about half a million accounts.)

Having tokens opens up new ways to move value around the system. Brave, for example, is essentially a browser like Safari, Firefox or Chrome, that among other features builds into it a way for users to reward publishers. It works like this: download Brave, buy some Brave Attention Tokens with a cryptocurrency like bitcoin, and then decide how much you’re going to pay your favourite websites each month. So long as you use the Brave browser to visit those websites, this will be calculated and distributed automatically.

This is probably too many steps for most people, but it’s a start. Brave, like a lot of blockchain-based startups, raised money through something called an Initial Coin Offering, or ICO. An ICO is a bit like an IPO, in that those who are enthusiastic about the business buy into it by buying the tokens. Owners of those tokens can then use them in some way tied to the service. But as I explain below, this is not quite as simple, or legal, as it sounds.

In theory though, the idea is simple enough: those holding tokens can reward other people on the same platform — Brave, for example — for activity that benefits them. The token is a currency, but with benefits. The obvious one is paying for articles but they could also be used, for example, to reward contributors to an article (crowd-sourcing): So the author could ask for data for an article, and disperse tokens matching the size of each contribution.

The potential of tokens is that could unleash all sorts of new micro-transactions, effectively monetising content and content-related activity that so far has not been monetised. For example, existing content — think all the stories lying in archives, photos, videos, lying in archives that can’t be readily monetised because it would be too administratively cumbersome. Each item could be indexed to the blockchain and each user charged via a smart contract (more on them below.) Tokens promise a way to increase the overall value of content and access to content created by other readers. So, for example, you could charge users to comment on certain stories, effectively filtering out (some of the) time-wasters and trolls, and thereby increasing the value of the content produced by commenters by raising the bar. Similarly, you could charge for access to that content, creating a sort of club of readers. These costs would be small, but might act as enough of a barrier to flippant and time-wasting content.

Fighting censorship

Another appeal of blockchain technology is its distributed, decentralised nature. The blockchain — the ledger of transactions, but also potentially the database of the content itself — is not held anywhere centrally, so no one person or institution, in theory, can close it down or change that content. (Nor, in theory, can they monitor it because, while the transactions themselves may be visible to all, who or what exactly was transacted may not be. The Bitcoin blockchain, for example, can be explored in detail, but all you can see are amounts of bitcoin, bitcoin addresses (where the bitcoin travelled from and to) and the date and time of the transaction. Deeper study might reveal patterns, especially when an address is linked to an individual. But it’s detective work, and still more art than science.)

The blockchain — the ledger backbone — can therefore not be easily destroyed, disrupted, hacked or altered. That means it is more likely to survive some government’s, or individual’s, attempt to stop information from finding its way out. But it also means that the information stored on it has credibility: it’s much more likely not to have been tampered with, and because it has timestamps and other data attached, can be relied upon as an accurate record of what happened.

So several outfits are exploring opportunities the blockchain offers to reduce the potential for censorship. Publiq, for example, offer their distributed storage infrastructure to store all content — think of a peer to peer network like Napster, where users who host the content would be rewarded with Publiq’s tokens. A hash — a short unique code — of each piece of content on Publiq’s P2P network would be stored in Publiq’s blockchain, so any corruption of the data, intentional or otherwise, would be noticed straight away. So no-one can alter or remove the existing content — think censors or fake news hackers — but the content can be amended. So authors could for example add notes or corrections to the original content. Publiq’s Gagik Yeghiazarian tells me this has already happened, when one content provider was able to add amended transcripts to a story that some readers rightly claimed was incorrect. The correction was added to the original content, leaving it annotated but intact. With even mainstream news organisations over-writing or ‘fixing’ content without properly flagging it to readers, this feature is welcome.

Funding

The obvious way to reward journalism — the creators of content — via the blockchain is to remove the obstacles preventing people from paying for content that has been created — the micropayments model described above. That’s great for people who can create content on spec — in the hope that someone is going to reward them for it, either through tips or through a paywall.

Then there’s the funding of proactive journalism: the crowdsourced model, where enough people believe the story or content will be worth consuming that they’re ready to pay for it in advance. Similarly, the blockchain can help, not only with micropayments but with an immutable record of who paid what for what, and what that entitles them to.

But what about bigger content that require deeper funding — an investigative podcast series, say, or a documentary? Companies like Qravity are looking to break down the various tasks of a project, which are then farmed out to team members. Instead of being paid for their contribution they’re given tokens, which give them a stake in the ownership of the project proportionate to the number of tokens they hold. They’re therefore transparently tied to the project and can share in its success.

Content licensing

And then there’s monetising that content once it has been created. Or finding a way to monetise one’s archive. Take AllRites, a media company based in Singapore which handles licensing of content on behalf of major TV and video players in the region. They’re creating a platform that would move this marketplace onto the blockchain, in theory simplifying the licensing of that content, while also opening up B2C licensing — where you or I could buy streaming rights to movies, tv shows or documentaries by the hour, say — as well as a content funding platform. Initially, content would be represented on the blockchain via a unique identifier, but ultimately, their CEO Riaz Mehta hopes, technology will allow the content in its entirety to be stored on a blockchain, simplifying the process.

So why? What’s the point of this? There are several advantages, Mehta says. First off, an ICO allows them to raise money that venture capitalists would never provide because they wouldn’t see the longer term, and they’re only just starting to get blockchain. “For them,” Rias told me, this is the frontier land and they’re very cautious about what they put into it.”

But more significantly, they believe that not only will it make for a more efficient marketplace, but that content locked up in the long tail of providers could be more readily found and monetised. By registering the content on AllRites’ blockchain even niche providers or content creators themselves would be able to prove their rights, advertise their wares and sell to a much larger market.

There are other efforts in this area. Po.et is a shared ledger recording ownership and metadata for digital assets. Qravity is both a studio and a distributor of content created by decentralised teams. Both aim to build platforms that level the playing field for content makers. In other words, disintermediating the middle parts that conspire against smaller producers of content.

Smart contracts

A key part of the appeal of blockchain is the idea that embedded into it could be more than just tokens of value. You could store the content itself, theoretically, or you could store applications — code that actually does something. These are, or could be, smart contracts — a piece of code that, in its simplest form, kicks off an action, or sequence of actions, based on some input. So, on a certain date, ownership of a token could change hands. So imagine I have loaned a video to you, the record of which is stored on the blockchain. When that loan expires, ownership (and control) of that video returns to me. Part of the smart contract could delete it from your device, say, or require you to extend the loan, releasing tokens to me in payment. These smart contracts would effectively unleash a lot of the potential for what is otherwise just another database. Qravity, for example, plans to use smart contracts to determine how many tokens to distribute to each member of a team based on their contribution, in the example described above.

Warnings

ICOs

There are concerns however. Quite a few of these blockchain companies are launching, or have launched, initial coin offerings, or ICOs, to raise funds. These have proved very lucrative for some startups, but their appeal is beginning to fade. Regulator anxiety is forcing every ICO to move away from calling their tokens securities, for one thing — so while they are still raising money from the sale of tokens, those tokens do not represent a stake in the underlying company. Instead the tokens will be used to buy services or products. And there’s the issue of incentive: if companies do raise money through ICOs, how can they be held to account over how that money is used?

The first problem with ICOs and the subsequent blizzard of tokens is: why? Why can’t people just buy those services with their own currency? The argument is usually two-fold: the tokens allow money to be transferred without constraints of borders/currencies, and secondly, that it allows more value to be transferred than was available previously. Brave moves tokens (value) between the three main pillars of media — the users, the publishers and advertisers. So users, for example, can earn money directly from advertisers by giving their consent to view ads. Similarly, they can reward content producers on a proportional basis depending on how much of their content they viewed during a month.

But I think the bigger worry is that these systems are too complicated for the end user. I tied myself in knots trying to chart the various transactions that would take place within Brave’s ecosystem. And that was one of the simpler ones. These complicated arrangements may work in B2B, but the diagrams that accompany nearly all these models highlight the same problem: For the solution to work it must be invisible or intuitive to the end user. He or she must not have to juggle multiple tokens, or perform elaborate calculations in her head, or have to require lots of separate apps, accounts or wallets. And they don’t want to see lots of real money locked up in tokens. I can’t help coming away from reading some of these white papers (the conventional way these days to explain how these blockchains and tokens might work) and feeling there might well be a simpler way of doing things.

Blockchain is often mentioned in the same breath as the invention of the internet. That could be true. I would say that for it to be successful it must be closer in analogy to the invention of the World Wide Web — when Sir Tim Berners-Lee came up with a simple layer of links embedded in a familiar text-and-graphic interface which unlocked the potential of the plain vanilla and impenetrable internet. Until the blockchain is able to offer that, talk of its disruptive power in media is premature.

Of course, I might be wrong. Efforts like Civil hope to build a whole ecosystem — a platform encompassing many of the features I’ve described — and are already building a portfolio of news organisations. They describe it as a Netflix strategy — instead of waiting for someone else to aim big, they’re doing it themselves. And Yours Inc’s Charles points to his company’s buy button, seamlessly woven into any webpage, that would allow anyone with Bitcoin Cash to pay a user for his content, in the same way we click on the Facebook like button now. So there is traction, of sorts.

Platforms and standards

Most of the startups I spoke to are keen to point out that they’re not pursuing blockchain technology blindly, and ignoring other technologies — like artificial intelligence, for example. Inkrypt’s co-founder and CEO Muhammad Ali Chaudhary, for example, says: “It is important to realize that blockchain ledgering is just one piece, albeit a very necessary one, of the technical solution being provided by Inkrypt. We are implementing blockchain technology in a particular way for a specific use case and at the end of the day we are a media tech company, as opposed to a ‘blockchain’ company.”

For sure, there will come a time when these companies decide it’s better not to even use the word blockchain to describe what they’re doing. And I think we’ll see some quietly disappear when they realise that journalism is for most people both a passion and a job, and that it might be hard to build a critical mass of journalists and content creators willing to be guinea pigs for untried and untested business models.

What I think needs to happen in the longer term is that independent media, organisations, or funders should work on building standards and platforms that allow all these tokenised initiatives to cooperate. We are some way from a world where people will be comfortable with handling lots of different tokens, and it feels like a reverse if we push users in that direction. Better would be to encourage interchangeability — say an exchanges where you can easily buy and transfer your tokens. Or, where one token rules all. In that sense, companies like Yours.org may have a head start — building APIs, or application programming interfaces, software that allows services to talk to each other — for other content makers to plug into the Yours.org platform.

Ultimately though, I am optimistic that out of all these spaghetti-like flowcharts might emerge a model for media to find a better way of rewarding great content, keeping advertisers happy, and tapping into loyal audiences. I just don’t think we’re quite there yet.

I’ve been a nomad worker for some time. And I’m shocked at how few journalists seem to be prepared for mobile working. So I thought I’d offer a few tips.

If you can afford it, buy your own equipment.

I’ve been buying my own laptop for nearly 30 years, and while it brings pain to my pocket, I’d never dream of relying on my company’s equipment. In the old days it was because they were too slow and cumbersome, but nowadays it’s mainly because of compliance issues: restrictions on what software you can put on your laptop, as well as what the company is allowed to do and view on its hardware. I would rather retain control over how I organise my information and what apps I use.

Buy your own software.

I’m admittedly a bit of a software addict. (I think it’s probably a thing, I haven’t checked.) But there’s a reason for it: we spend most of our day at our computers, so it makes sense to find the software that best helps you. And with journalists, that’s a broad array of tasks: if you’re a freelance, you want to be measuring your word count and timing how long you’re spending on something. If you’re writing a lot then you want an app that looks aesthetically pleasing (I can’t stand Microsoft Word, and hate it when I see journalists writing stories in it, but that’s me). Then there’s how you collect and store information, be it from the net or from interviews. It needs to go somewhere and it needs to be easily retrievable when you want to write. More on this another time.

Get a decent mouse.

There’s a guy in my co-working space that still uses his Macbook touchpad, that rectangle near the keyboard, to move the mouse around. Very few people are adept at this, so it’s painful to watch guys like my co-worker waste hours a day scrambling around. Buy a mouse. Really. They’re cheap — you can even get a bluetooth one for less than $50 these days, so you don’t even need to take up a USB port. I guarantee it will save you an hour a day.

Save your own neck.

Mobile journalism can mean standing up, moving around, but most of the time it means bringing enough equipment with you to be able to work away from the office — a hotel room, a conference centre, or whatever. This is where I see far too many people hunched over a laptop, looking like Scrooge on Boxing Day. The problem with laptops is they weren’t designed for posture. But you can fix that, with a $20 stand. These are light, foldable, and lift the screen up to a height closer to eye level, which is where it should be. You’ll need to bring an external keyboard with you, but they’re cheap and light too, and your chiropractor will thank you.

While you’re at it get a second screen.

Here’s another tip: Laptop screens are too small to store more than what you’re writing on. If all your source mverkkorahaterial is also stored on your computer, then you’ll need a second screen. You likely have dual monitors in the office, so just because you’re on the road, why should you deny yourself that luxury? There are some good cheap monitors that don’t even require a power supply — plug them into your USB port and they’ll draw the power from there. For several years I had a AOC monitor, which was basic but did the job. I recently upgraded to an Asus monitor which is a beauty, and has made me much more productive and the envy of my co-workers — even the guy fiddling around with the touchpad.

A word of warning to Mac users: recent updates to their operating system have broken the drivers necessary to get the most out of these second screens, but there is a workaround that half fixes it. Email me if you need help.

Be safe.

Being mobile with cool equipment does leave you vulnerable to theft, either financially or politically motivated. Don’t take your main laptop with you to places like China. Have a cheap backup laptop with just the bare essentials on it. Always put your laptop in the room safe, and, if you want to be super clever, buy a small external USB drive to store any sensitive data on, and keep that in your pocket. Samsung do some nice, SSD (solid state, and hence smaller, faster) drives, the latest called T3. I attach mine to the laptop with velcro and then remove it and put it in my pocket when I’m heading off to dinner.

Stay connected.

Don’t trust other people’s wifi. Bring your own. I have a wifi modem, still 3G, which does me fine. Buy a local data SIM card and fire it up. Everyone in your team now has internet access — and the bad guys sniffing the free hotel or coffee shop wireless network will be frustrated.

Finally, stay cool.

By far the most popular thing in my mobile toolkit is a USB fan. Most conference venues are either too hot or too cold, and it’s amazing what a $2 fan can do.

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.

Yet to navigate a complex digital environment in which more than two billion participants are constantly producing information, journalists — who are supposed to be at the forefront of news — are forced to learn their trade almost from scratch.

How can they compete with the crowd? It is a daunting challenge, particularly for many mid-career journalists. In fact, it starts with a simple but fundamental change in mentality; writing a story doesn’t end when it is published, but continues well after users finish reading it – if indeed they do.

The next step is to learn how to develop and use products that will help you report, verify and explain stories. You need flexible teams with varied specialties capable of adapting or creating tools to rapidly analyze data needed for investigations, capture what users are talking about and engage with them so they can contribute with their own expertise. You should connect with peers and other professionals to cover realities that go beyond borders and topics that require expert knowledge. Finally, you have the challenge to steer audiences and communities away from click-bait traps set by trolls, bots and con-artists.

Fortunately for journalists, there is a growing number of media and journalism schools and research centers investigating new trends, helping to understand digital disruption and its impact. With their newsletters, websites and interactive online training, among other resources, they can inform you about inspiring innovations, share academic research, spot threats, provoke critical thinking, highlight valuable journalistic endeavors, and report on moves in the industry that will affect how stories reach people. Their work equips editors and journalists to deal with the digital waves that have busted business and editorial models. It provides an important source of information for potential investors, philanthropists and inventors in the field.

Well-known English-language organizations sharing knowledge in this field include the Nieman Lab, sponsored by the Nieman Foundation, at Harvard University. So far, it has focused on US-centered innovation, but it is now starting to publish in languages other than English and increasing its coverage of innovative media projects in other parts of the world. The University of Texas’ Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas connects journalists in North and South America, helping them understand and take advantage of digital change. The Center produces weekly stories on new enterprises in Latin America, such as for example, “Daily Corruption”, a researcher’s project to build a regional corruption database sourced from newspaper coverage. It also offers free online courses on new tools and best practices, such as “Product management for journalists”.

Another well-established global English-language knowledge-sharer is the US-based Poynter Institute. It is a tech-savvy journalism education and innovation center, which also provides a news platform covering trends in media. It offers practical courses, for example, How to write sharper social headlines. The British, Brighton-based Journalism.co.uk, a for-profit online publisher, covers, also in English, innovation in the media industry, offers training, lists jobs, features press releases and organizes the News Rewired conference series. This piece on Dutch start-up The Playwall, which gives readers the option to pay for content by giving their opinions or extra information about a story, is a good example of the kind of stories they carry. Digiday, a platform with branches in both the US and the UK, aims to foster change in the media and marketing sectors. They feature reflections on the industry such as this podcast by Washington Post’s Chief Risk Officer, Jed Hartman, which invites publishers to stop whining about the Facebook-Google duopoly and start figuring out their own unique contribution to the information marketplace.

Specialized outlets are covering media trends and innovation in other parts of the world too. These usually publish their stories in different languages. For example, the ICFJ’s International Journalists Network (IJNet), highlights a variety of projects undertaken by their fellows in several countries. They recently shared a great piece on 8 key trends in local journalism in Arabic, Chinese, Spanish and Portuguese. Similarly, the Global Investigative Journalism Network (GIJN), an international association of nonprofit investigative journalism organizations, has created regional feeds to share content across multiple platforms in Arabic, Chinese, Russian, and Spanish, as well as from across Africa. The European Journalism Observatory (EJO), a network of independent non-profit media research institutes, is publishing stories based on their research findings, such as this one on the surge of ad blockers in Poland, in up to 14 language.

Among the regional knowledge-sharers up and coming are The Splice Newsroom, a media specializing in the Asian market, and Jamlab, a platform from Wits University’s Journalism Department in South Africa, reporting on innovation across the African continent. Both start-ups publish original content in their area of expertise. For example, a recent Splice piece was: Asia’s top journalists and editors share their best advice for aspiring young reporters, while in Jamlab’s section “Innovator Q&A”, FrontPage Africa founder Rodney Sieh speaks of how this platform revolutionized digital media in Liberia.

With such a rich array of options, you can chose to subscribe to whatever source is most relevant for you, depending on your geography, language or interest. Just following a few could inspire you with new ideas and make your next trip to the digital galaxy that much more fun.

This story originally appeared in https://medium.com/@OSFJournalism of the Open Society Foundation’s Program on Independent Journalism and is reprinted with permission. You can subscribe to the newsletter here.

Stories such as this one, when the sheer impact of the revealed truth rocks the audience, are occasional at best. In everyday journalism, however, to get the public to pay attention to your story, to make it not only truthful, but also credible and attractive, is a hard task. And it has become even harder in the digital era. Information flows constantly through our portable electronic devices, like a river of muddy waters, dragging the authentic pieces of story-telling together with the fake; the verified; and the gossip. So if journalists want to have any chance at succeeding in this battle, to keep people informed about what really happens and why, amidst the immense debris, they must not only find good stories, but must also elevate their story-telling to an art.

There are examples of this inventiveness all over the world. For example, there is the traditional long-form literary journalism, of which Latin Americans seem to be masters. El Faro in tiny El Salvador just won the Gabriel Garcia Marques Excellency Award for their moving stories and documentaries.  Other organizations, like Initium have created a data sounds project where average temperature for the last 131 years in Hong Kong is visualized and played as musical notes.

Others are turning to explaining and making things more understandable in a confusing world of multiple competing versions of every event. One of the first to try this was US Vox.com, with “explainers” in short cards, such as this one about the hacked emails of Hillary Clinton’s campaign. The New York Times created The Upshot, with pieces like this one that shows people how to read the current conflicting polls on the US presidential election. In the South, GKillCity from Ecuador has tried a similar version of explaining cards like in this story about UN human rights recommendations to Ecuador. There are other tools to make things clearer to the audiences:  timelines about the history; maps to locate the events; or even crossing place and time in interactive multimedia like this one made by Kloop in Kyrgyzstan to show how a protected forest in the capital Bishkek is disappearing as developers expand on ever-stretching rules.

The best way to tell stories is conversation. In the recent coup attempt in Turkey, journalists of Medyascope explained to their followers in a live-broadcast on Periscope what was going on and how they understood it and bringing the makers of news closer to their audiences. The news bots are actually lots of fun, particularly for topics people get passionate about, like soccer and elections. Univision tried the Purple Bot during the party primaries and the number of its fans grew by thousands. You don’t have to be rich or sit in the Silicon Valley to develop a bot.

Two young Spanish entrepreneurs developed politi_bot in the chat application Telegram, and did a great job informing people about the latest elections in their country.

Bots imply that a journalist and a developer have sat together to think about stories: like in art, content and form become one concept.  The potential to communicate and engage depends a lot on how well the journalist and developer work together. The result of such team work could be games, such as this one developed by ProPublica in which the user not only knows about failures in health care services to treat emergency heart attacks in New York City, but can also personally experience the anxiety of the patients; or this one crafted by Caixin, in which users can help a mayor of a Chinese city reduce pollution. These games can say a lot more about what’s happening in your part of the world than many editorials.

Where things are tough, and telling truthful stories can cost you your liberty or life, many journalists have become experts in nuance and subtlety. And under such circumstances, good political humor is always truthful. See how Medialab from Armenia reveals their political scene through cartoons.

The name of the story-telling game in the digital era is to be creative, break molds, think about your audience and work with other professionals, such as artists and software engineers. The trick is to make the routine news of everyday a bit more fun and engaging; and the deep and dead serious, attractive and, yet, still believable.
This story originally appeared in https://medium.com/@OSFJournalism of the Open Society Foundation’s Program on Independent Journalism and is reprinted with permission.

You can subscribe to the newsletter here.

According to Brady, it’s less about what you cover in your community and more about how you cover it that matters. Digital media need to build relationships with their audience and understand the issues that are important to them, then provide them with information they need to take decisions about their lives. It’s not about telling people how to think or what to do, but about giving them the tools they need to make their communities better in whatever way they choose. Future digital audiences won’t be satisfied with just being told what has happened and don’t want a diet of pure “accountability journalism” – “it’s the relationship with the local reader that will determine success or failure”.

News organisations should also remember that they are no longer the only voice in their community and use it to their advantage. Social media like Twitter and Facebook understand that people want other information sources and link out to other sites, and this makes them more attractive, not less. “How many of the top 100 papers in the country actively link to other media or citizen sites in their communities? Not many.”

As for what makes a successful online news operation, Brady doesn’t pretend that there’s a simple formula and doesn’t underestimate the scale of the challenge. It’s undeniable that audiences and revenues are moving away from legacy – all you can do is make sure you’re built for a digital future: find newsroom and sales staff who understand digital and reward them for it.

One thing that successful digital news sites do have in common is “a willingness to try something new, whether it’s a laser focus on a specific community, an interesting membership model or a major events business. Honestly, I don’t know that the traditional model of hiring a lot of reporters and just writing stories will ever work for a local digital news site.”

Mobile is now the most important platform to watch. “The move to mobile is happening at lightning speed, and there’s no sign it’ll slow down. And, to me, the key to mobile for local sites will be location.” Local media have to take advantage of the fact that they know exactly where their users are and what they care about – this is critical for providing the best coverage and the most relevant advertising.

1) Data will become even more of a strategic resource for media.

2) Better tools will emerge that democratize data skills.

3) News apps will explode as a primary wayMeasuring the impact of data-driven journalism for people to consume data journalism.

4) Being digital first means being data-centric and mobile-friendly.

5) Expect more robojournalism, but know that human relationships and storytelling still matter.

6) More journalists will need to study the social sciences and statistics.

7) There will be higher standards for accuracy and corrections.

8) Competency in security and data protection will become more important.

9) Audiences will demand more transparency on reader data collection and use.

10) Conflicts over public records, data scraping, and ethics will surely arise.

11) Collaborate with libraries and universities as archives, hosts, and educators.

12) Expect data-driven personalization and predictive news in wearable interfaces..

13) More diverse newsrooms will produce better data journalism.

14) Be mindful of data-ism and bad data. Embrace skepticism.

Read more:
The Art and Science of Data-Driven Journalism
Data Journalism Handbook

Most see journalism going in “wrong direction.” Six in 10 journalists (59.7 percent) say that journalism in the United States is going in the wrong direction.

Newsrooms are shrinking. Six in 10 journalists (62.6 percent) say their workforces have shrunk during the past year, while only about a quarter (24.2 percent) said their staff numbers remained the same, and even fewer reported some growth (13.2 percent).

Journalists are getting older. The median age of full-time U.S. journalists increased by six years to 47 from 2002. This trend applies to journalists at daily and weekly newspapers, radio and television stations, magazines, wire services and online news sites.

More women in journalism. The number of women in journalism increased by 4.5 percent. However, women still represent only slightly more than one-third of all full-time journalists working for the U.S. news media, as has been true since the early 1980s. This trend persists despite the fact that more women than ever are graduating from journalism schools.

Journalists are more likely to have at least a bachelor’s degree. About 92 percent of all full-time U.S. journalists have at least a bachelor’s degree, but slightly fewer proportionately are journalism majors (37.4 percent).

Gender pay gap persists. Median income has climbed to about $50,000 in 2012, up 12.9 percent since 2002. This increase was less than half of the combined inflation rate of 29.5 percent during this decade (2001-12). Women’s salaries still trail those of men overall, but not among journalists with less than five years’ experience.

More journalists say they are independents. In 2013, about half of all journalists (50.2 percent) said they were political independents, up about 18 percentage points from 2002.

Job satisfaction drops further. Job satisfaction dropped from 33.3 percent of journalists who said they were “very satisfied” with their job in 2002, to 23.3 percent who said so in 2013. This trend continues the decline in job satisfaction that was observed between 1971 and 1992 but was interrupted with a positive bounce in 2002.

Source: Indiana University Press Release

Read more:
Report: Journalists Are Miserable, Liberal, Over-Educated, Under-Paid, Middle-Aged Men
Indiana University survey: journalists grow more negative about their work
Three charts that explain how U.S. journalists use social media