Dan Sinker by Daniel X. O’Neil (Flickr: danxoneil) under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0

New media is pushing the boundaries of journalism by introducing new technologies. But the question is how newsrooms and journalists can innovate without having to dive into the programming world themselves. This is where the Knight-Mozilla Fellows come in.

The Knight Foundation has long supported quality journalism and journalistic innovation. In 2012, they teamed up with the Mozilla Foundation, which actively promotes an open internet and open source software. The two created the OpenNews partnership with the idea of bringing journalism and technology together.

In 2013, Knight-Mozilla Fellows are hacking newsrooms at the prestigious media organizations such as the New York Times, the BBC, the Guardian, Zeit Online, Spiegel Online, the Boston Globe, ProPublica and La Nacion.

DW Akademie’s Steffen Leidel met with the head of the Knight-Mozilla OpenNews project, Dan Sinker. They talked about why hackers are interested in working with journalists in the first place, how journalists can tap into the world-wide community of hackers and a revolutionary new piece of software for data scraping.

What is the Knight Mozilla OpenNews about?

We are dedicated to building and strengthening the community that is helping to rebuild and rethink journalism for the web. A lot of what we do is help support technologists who are interested in the journalism space and help them move towards making tools for journalism. The core of what we are doing is a fellowship program where we embed developers in newsrooms around the world for ten month stints. This is so the developers can really understand journalistic problems whilst doing experiments and open source development on projects and ideas that they have during this time. We also do some small funding of journalism codes bases, something we call Code Sprints grants.  We also run a website called Source which is really the hub of this community and helps document what is happening in code and journalism. We also sponsor journalistic-themed hack days around the world as well to really bring developers in to spend some time hacking on journalistic problem sets.

Why is it important for developers to work together with journalists?

I don’t think that anyone would argue that journalism’s future is on the open web. We are now at a point that it is not simply about taking content that existed in some other medium and putting it on the web. We really need to build content that is of the web. In order to do that we need to engage a lot more people to make things for journalism on the web. Right now, there are not a lot of programs that are thinking about that and who are able to really speak to developers in the language that they are used to speaking and getting them to engage in ways that they want to engage. That is really what we are trying to do – build the community of people that are able to build the journalism on the web.

Many journalists don’t seem to be so interested in the digital possibilities of journalism. Why aren’t they embracing technology?

Historically, folks that are attracted to journalism are storytellers and investigators and people like that. Expecting them to suddenly become high-end developers is an impossible expectation. We are talking about a completely different skill sets and completely different areas of expertise. What we need to do is to get those journalists to really think about how do they collaborate with developers. Traditionally, it has been quite alienating for developers to have journalists simply say, “I need you to build me this”. It’s like, “Wait! What you want is not actually that interesting. If we were collaborating, I could really help you think about what this could potentially be instead of you telling me what it should be”. So we need to get journalists to think about collaboration and we need to get developers to really think about the fact that journalist problem sets are very interesting problem sets for developers right now.

Which kinds of problems are you talking about?

We are talking about a number of things. Some of them are pure data questions. You have developers who are very interested in open access to information. Being able to liberate data sets, being able to dive into that data and get information out of it, is a really compelling thing for a lot of people. Journalism is an excellent outlet for that. You are also talking about some of the fundamentally engaging development questions on the web. How do we present information on the web? How do we build frameworks that are agile and adaptive and able to do x on this day, and y on another day? Those are problems of journalism that actually help push the whole web forward.

One of the things I find very interesting is if you look at the building blocks of the web we have today, especially in the area of frameworks. Two of the leading frameworks that people develop on the web on are Django and Backbone. They came out of newsrooms and there is a reason for that. There is a reason why Jfree which is a visualization library has also come out of newsrooms. Because these things are widely used beyond the newsroom itself. If we can get developers interested in journalism, no only does journalism move forward but the whole web moves forward.

You are talking about a community of developers. How do journalists find them?

One thing that has changed fundamentally in the last decade and has really accelerated in the past five years or so is the ability of developers and hackers and engineers to self-organize around code. A lot of that is thanks to the maturing of the open-source community. But it is also thanks to the introduction of tools such as GitHub which have really made it incredibly easy for communities to form around code bases. I think that is a key part of engaging in developer communities. These folks are already organized. And so you need to go to where they are organizing and say, “look at this awesome stuff you are doing. We want to help with that. And we also want you to help us with this”.

Are any countries where you are especially engaged?

We are involved with global news. One of the first ways we approach the community is if someone there wants to organize a hack event around some kind of journalistic theme. We’ll give them some sponsorship money so they can get food or rent a space or whatever it is they need to make that happen. One of the places that has been working amazingly is Argentina, especially in Buenos Aires. We have really found an incredible community of developers who are really engaged – especially in open information and open data. They want to build tools and want to work with journalists and want to get information out there by any means necessary.

Why Argentina?

My theory is Argentina has a very vibrant startup tech culture. But also most of the people driving that came of age during the past financial crisis there. They, at a fundamental level,  know that data is power. Being able to liberate that data, being able to give anyone access to that data, is a really powerful motivating factor. To me, it is the only explanation that makes sense. To me, that is why you see it in Argentina and not in Europe or the United States.

Can you give us an example of where a hacker is working successfully in a newsroom.

We have a fellow who is actually working at La Nacion in Buenos Aires this year, Manuel Aristarán.  Prior to working with us, he was working on a satellite project. He has always been interested in open data and he was even interested enough to start an open data portal for his town. He was the lead programmer for La Nacion on building a census portal for Argentina, with census data, maps and that kind of thing. But in his spare time he has built a tool for pulling data out of PDFs. Which is an incredibly hard problem and is a big bump in the road towards open governmental data is that a lot of that data is inside PDFs and not in tabular data that you would want to be able work with. Getting the data out of that has been a problem for ever. And he developed a system for pulling that out that is simple as can possibly be. Once he was at La Nacion, he was able to spend more time developing it, and we were also able to pair him with our fellow who is working at ProPublica with a team of people to get it done and now it is in alpha. It is an application called tabular and it is revolutionary.

What lessons have you learned in the two years since Open News started up?

We are seeing that we have an incredible potential for being a conduit for collaborative newsrooms across borders by having these fellows in newsrooms and also by being this third party that is interested in solving shared problems. Newsroom organization are in their nature not collaborative entities. Because we are an external party, we are able to be a collaboration broker between folks who are not naturally inclined to collaborate. This is interesting because the open source software world is all about collaboration. So especially as you have newsrooms that are beginning to build sophisticated software teams, New York Times, ProPublica, The Guardian, La Nacion, you actually begin to see internally a want to collaborate because they understand that sharing code bases are natural to a developer. And to horde that information is anti-ethical to a hacker. So for us, being able to help those kinds of collaborations have been a great lesson.

Are you targeting media organizations in developing countries as well?

The first year, we were working exclusively with big news organizations in the United States, England and Germany as well as Al Jazeera English. In our second year, we included La Nacion. We are hoping to be able to continue to expand to other developing countries. The trick is to have partners that don’t just see us as a free developer. Our developers are not staff members: they are internal/external entities. They are as much researchers as they are anything else. What they are researching is the culture of the newsrooms so that research can influence the developments and the experiments and the kinds of things that they want to do.

Many of the tools are in English. Is language then a problem in some developing countries?

Historically, it has been a problem but it is rapidly fixing itself. As more and more developers and their own cultures begin to build up in these countries, they begin to translate the tools and they begin get the information out. In South America, the Data Journalism Handbook has been translated into Spanish and not just translated but also localized. So they are beginning to address the fact that this was mainly written by US and European data journalists and different problems apply in South America.

Does this mean journalists need to learn programming?

I don’t believe journalists need to transform to a highly functional developer. There are some that will traverse that path but it is a long path. What journalists need to be able to do, and they need to be able to do it quite desperately at this point, is to understand how to talk to developers, how to engage them and understand how to collaborate with them. This is really about having a shared knowledge base. It’s not about, “I know how to program as well as you”. You don’t expect a programmer to write a story as completely as a journalist. But you need to be able to collaborate and that means being able to converse in a way that is conscious of each other’s cultures.

DW Akademie’s interview with Dan Sinker took place during the International Journalism Festival in Perugia, where he was taking part in several panel discussions.

© picture-alliance/dpa

After years of hype surrounding the rise of social media and the Internet as alternative sources of news and information, a growing number of voices are warning that traditional journalistic standards of objectivity and impartiality are still necessary even in the digital age. One of them is journalism professor and former head of BBC news Richard Sambrook.

In a recent study, Sambrook (@sambrook) writes of serious concerns about the quality and practices of news media. While acknowledging that it is difficult to enforce professional standards in the digital age, he concluded it would be “dangerous” to “disregard such standards”. DW Akademie’s Steffen Leidel discussed these issues and more with Richard Sambrook.

How do you define quality journalism in the digital age?

Of course, it means different things to different people. For some people it is about depth and expertise and specialism. For some people it is about variety. For some people it is about openness and interactivity. So it is a subjective term. But I think one of the trends we are seeing in a digital age is that the old ideas of quality, which were about objective information and impartiality, are beginning to break down. This is because of the huge competition and public access to media space. Therefore I think we need to reinterpret those ideas of impartiality and objectivity which used to define quality. We need to try to define them and think about them in a different way in this new context.

Are objectivity and impartiality still important then?

A lot of Internet evangelists are saying that the idea of objectivity – that a journalist can put aside their personal biases and sort of pretend to be neutral –  doesn’t work anymore in a digital age. I think that is a misunderstanding of impartiality and objectivity. Reporters weren’t pretending not to have views. Rather, these ideas were like processes that journalists subjected themselves to in order to improve the quality of the information. They would try to get both sides of the story. They would try to be balanced. That was actually what those journalism norms of objectivity and impartiality meant. However, people are saying that that is now gone.

The American academic David Weinberger came up with the new phrase, transparency is the new objectivity. In other words, if you are completely open with your audience, if they know what your biases are, they know what agenda you have, then the audience is sophisticated enough to take that into account and that is sufficient.

Do you also think it is sufficient?

I think transparency and openness are very important now but I don’t think they are sufficient to drive quality. I think there are at least two other elements that need to be taken into account. The first one is a focus on evidence – eyewitness accounts, first hand evidence – and that is basic, old-fashioned news gathering in a way. The Internet is awash with opinion but there is very little evidence-led news gathering on the web and in many ways you see less and less of this. I think the Boston bombings was quite a key moment because some of the old-fashioned virtues of journalism which people had been dismissing actually proved their value. Reporter Pete Williams of NBC was lauded as a gold standard because he did very old-fashioned reporting. He made sure he had two sources before he broadcast anything. He was very measured. He attributed everything. Also the New York Times didn’t run with any rumor, it was very sober reporting. People appreciated that. In comparison, a lot of social media was hyping up speculation, throwing out rumors.

The other point is to ensure a diversity of opinion because otherwise people tend to select the opinion they are comfortable with. In a digital environment where people chose what they want to read, they can self-select only those opinions that they agree with. Actually, it is very important that people understand and recognize that there is a range of opinions and that people are stimulated by those things.

You were formerly the director of global news at the BBC. In your experience, when you talk of openness, do the traditional media organizations like BBC and Deutsche Welle struggle to be open?

Yes, culturally it is very difficult for many of the larger organizations to be open. They are used sitting on high being gatekeepers and being able to say, “we will tell you what we think you need to know at 6 pm if you tune in”. Or, “if you buy our newspaper, we will tell you what we think you need to read”. And these organizations also tend to be very closed and defensive about how they arrive at those judgments. But it is very important to respond to the audience and answer questions such as how did you arrive at those judgments or why did you arrive at those judgments. Showing how journalism works is as important to gaining people’s trust as the end product itself.

You recently co-authored a study looking at BBC’s online and television audiences for international news and found that TV was still the most important medium. Do you think the importance of social media as a source of information is being exaggerated?  

People who work in media or talk about the media believe that everyone else is on Twitter all the time, and they are not. Like many new developments, I think social media is overestimated in the short term and underestimated in the long term. All of the things we are talking about now are going to happen in the long term but it is going to take longer than we think. At the moment people still watch television and read newspapers. Increasingly people are using the web and social media as well but those who work in this environment tend to overestimate their importance.

I sometimes think there is a lack of critical discussion about the use of social media in news gathering. For example, BBC presented so much information in their coverage of the Boston bombing. Yet in your study, you found that audiences tend to switch off after 15 minutes.

Because media organizations can have access to all this material, they quite often want to use it all too. When covering bigger events, for example the Japan tsunami, the editor of a news bulletin wants to use 25 minutes of material and you can understand why. It’s extraordinary material with lots of important ramifications, plus the nuclear issue, so there is a lot to talk about and discuss. But what the study showed was that after about 15 minutes, most of the audience felt that they knew enough and turned away. There was  a limit to their interest and their attention. Again, this is a disjunction between those who work in the media and are obsessed with it and the audience who live in a slightly different environment.

With all this evolving and developing has journalism forgotten its core responsibility though?

There was a wave of enthusiasm around social media. Over the past few years, traditional broadcasting and traditional newspapers looked rather old fashioned and tired compared to the energy, vibrancy and enthusiasm of social media. But after a few years, we have now reached the stage where people are actually saying that some of the ethics, the processes, the traditions and values of traditional journalism still do matter. They are asking how we can combine those things with the energy of social media and have the best of both.

You are now a professor of journalism at Cardiff University. What advice can you give up and coming journalists on how to prepare for the digital change?

To be a journalist, you have to be immensely curious about the world and that hasn’t changed. The technology changes all the time. Now we have digital technology, such as iPhone reporting or Twitter. It is good to be open and learn about all of those tools but they are only tools. The fundamentals are still about accuracy of information, quality of information, fairness in how you approach it.

Richard Sambrook is a professor of journalism at Cardiff University. He was formerly the Director of Global News at the BBC and has more than 30 years of journalism experience. Sambrook was recently a guest fellow at the Reuter’s Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford where he completed two research papers – Delivering Trust: Impartiality and Objectivity in the Digital Age and the Public Appetite for Foreign News on TV and Online. DW Akademie’s interview with Richard Sambrook took place during the International Journalism Festival in Perugia, where he was taking part in several panel discussions.

New media pioneer Shahidul Alam

UNESCO has defined digital literacy as “the ability to understand and use information in multiple formats from a wide range of sources when it is presented via computers”. With the emergence of social networking, digital literacy has become a major factor in enabling people to raise their voices, communicate, collaborate and pursue wide-scale social and political reforms.

People begin to think digitally when material things are not the only measurable items, Shahidul Alam says. As a promoter of new media, he helped introduce email to Bangladesh in 1994 and set up the first web portal in the country. Alam is also a founding member and advisor in the LEARN Foundation, which is dedicated to information and communication technology (ICT) training in rural regions.Watch the video interview and find out more:

Now it’s your turn. Do you know how digitally literate you really are? The Digital Literacy Survey is a useful and fun self-assessment tool to find out just how computer-savvy you are. It was designed by the European Computer Driving Licence (ECDL) Foundation. You can measure your own perceived levels of digital literacy against your actual abilities based on common ICT tasks. It’s available in almost 20 different languages, including Cambodian, Chinese, Thai and Vietnamese.

by Juan Ju and Thorsten Karg

Danh-Quy Nguyen at DW GMF

You graduated from DW’s International Media Studies program last year. Now, you’ve been invited back as a guest and expert for a panel-discussion at the DW Global Media Forum. How does that make you feel?

Firstly, I feel great and honored to be invited by my teachers and colleagues. I think it’s an experience that not everyone can have. So I feel very happy. Secondly, I’m also very happy to see my old friends and many colleagues from Deutsche Welle.

What do you miss most about Germany?
What I miss most from Germany is lots of trees, lots of green and the Rhine River.

Can you apply the knowledge that you learned at DW to your work in Vietnam?
Of course! I learned a lot at DW and I use it in my work every day. The most important thing I learned from the DW Master’s program is how to communicate with people from different countries and different cultures. This is very important for my daily job. As Managing Editor, I have to communicate with different editors and people from the fashion industry all around the world.

New Professions for New Media was the topic of the panel that you participated in at this year’s DW Global Media Forum. What do social media mean for your magazine?
In my magazine, we use social media more as a marketing tool than something that produces serious content. We use Facebook, for example, just to stay in touch with our users and fans, not as a channel to send out serious messages. At EllE magazine, the best goes into the print edition and not online.

Is it true that Facebook was unofficially blocked in Vietnam until early this year? So do you have any problems at work?
No, it’s not true. I think Facebook is blocked in Vietnam for some hours before some events, but not more than a day. So I don’t have any difficulties.

Interview by Juan Ju

Facebook and Twitter are well established tools of the trade for many journalists but less so in countries such as Uganda. However, the recent elections may well have changed that. In a guest blog post, Ruth Aine a journalist from the Radio station Power FM in Kampala, describes the rise of social media during Uganda's recent elections.

I rise early everyday, but Friday 18 February 2011 was different. I knew I was going to be a part of history and witness history being made in my country.

I had never taken part in an election before. This was the first time I had even registered to vote. And better still, along with voting, I was taking a part in this historic day as a journalist.
The mood leading up to election day was very tense. With the Electoral Commission labelled by the Opposition as inadequate and the public’s anticipation that something bad might happen, there were mixed feelings and a lot of uncertainty in the community.

At about 6:45am I posted my first tweet. I was on my way to work and when I passed by my polling station I saw there was some activity – but no polling officials, no voting materials.
That was my first eyewitness report – dispatched to the world by the microblog service Twitter.

After arriving at work and reading my first bulletin on air, I walked to the nearest polling station which was at the Buganda Road Public Library.

There I found that voting had begun right on time. There was also a host of international observers and media people. That too I tweeted. A simple fact to report but sending it via Twitter under my own account and voice, I felt as if journalism was being reborn. Most of us were using our mobile phones for reporting.

I work for a radio station in Kampala, but our internet access is restricted. Our station management says that social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter are a waste of time. Thus they have been blocked. Thank God for my phone! We were on the move and this was mobile reporting.

#ugandavotes

With the hash tag #ugandavotes, journalists and Ugandans began tweeting about what was going on around them. It felt great I must say – definitely a wow feeling. It was amazing how in a split second you could see what was happening in the rest of the country.

Rosebell Kagumire, a local journalist with The Independent newspaper, an IPS Africa Contributor, and a reporter with Isis Women’s International Cross Cultural Exchange (Isis-WICCE), says that it was the first time that she witnessed so many Ugandans using a social network for an event that was important to the future of the country. Rosebell believes Ugandans use Facebook more than Twitter, but Twitter was more engaging and had a lot of breaking news throughout during the elections.

“I believe we would make a bigger impact if Ugandans had started using the social networking sites from the day of the launch of the campaigns. I would actually say that with all the much televised impact of the sites on the revolutions and protests across the Middle East, many Ugandan youth began to get more involved in the discussions of what was going on in their country.”

I could not agree more. I had friends that were drawn in by the discussion by social media, and were not journalists. Timothy Bryan Matsiko, a lawyer by training, says that over the past few months Twitter in Uganda evolved into an efficient tool for citizen reporting.

John Kiggundu Abimanyi, a journalist working the Daily Monitor, one of Uganda’s high circulation dailies, says that this was the first "online election" that we have ever had in the country. He believes that Facebook and Twitter helped to attract the interest of Ugandan internet users in the election process. And, ordinary people took on the role of citizen reporters by posting status updates and tweets.

Old media using social media

This election period also saw established media houses try their hand at social media – many for the first time. A newspaper known more for its racy tabloid content than hard news created a Twitter profile. The Daily Monitor joined the Twitter ranks as did the New Vision. Interestingly the Daily Monitor began re-tweeting updates posted by tabloid competitors. In a world where everyone is scrambling to be the first to break the leading story, this was something different.

However it is important to note how and when Ugandans usually log-on and use the internet. Most Ugandans are online only during office hours. And even with many high income people with better net access tweeting, #ugandavotes never made the international trend list on Twitter.

As John Kiggundu Abimanyi puts it, "This was terrible!" However, for journalism and democracy in Uganda, we cannot ignore though that this small start was definitely a step in the right direction.

Abimanyi is confident that journalism and the use of social media in Uganda is developing. He argues that when more people realise the impact of Facebook and Twitter, the number of active users in Uganda will grow. Of course we're proud to have watched the first steps of how the media and citizens began using these new tools and know that our pioneering work during the 2011 elections in Uganda is likely to have a lasting impact.

There is a lot of openness on Twitter. People speak frankly and are not afraid to say whatever is on their mind. It is amazing – if only the media here was that open and direct.

And while tweets were mainly about politics commenting on who was winning and losing, there were also some light and memorable moments. Timothy Bryan Matsiko began #BeigyePlaylist. Dr Col Kizza Besigye is the leader of the opposition. He came second in the polls and has disputed the results, citing massive irregularities. So on a day when his greatest rival was announced the winner of the elections, what music would he listen to? People offered their suggestions by Twitter – that's what the #BesigyePlaylist was all about.

#ugandavotes was the definitive reference for anyone who wanted to know what was going on exactly in the country. It gave birth to citizen media in Uganda.

Ruth Aine participated in a DW-AKADEMIE election reporting workshop for radio journalists that took place in Kampala in September 2010.