Studio 20 @ Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute

You are cordially invited to the Studio 20 Open Studio, a presentation of innovations in journalism by the students and innovators of Studio 20. These final projects are the both the capstone project for students enrolled in the NYU Arthur L. Carter School of Journalism, and a survey of cutting edge advances in journalism today.

Time: 5:30 PM, December 14th, 2011

Place: Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute, New York University 20 Cooper Square, 6th Floor New York, NY 10003

Presenters:

Chelsea Stark partnered with Forbes to explore how to make online video a better return on investment. She focused on optimizing its video content for search and social spaces and built up its online contributor network. She also created guides and repeatable work flows to allow Forbes to repeat these processes in the future. @chelseabot

‘Chao Li spent the summer prepping Future Journalism Project for the work she is doing for them this fall. Chao’s Studio III project is to create tutorials for people interested in digital journalism. A part of that includes interviewing CEOs of startups and helping them create tutorials while they are busy launching their App or service. @cli6cli6

Niel Bekker helped manage and produce social gaming content for the Huffington Post. For Studio III, he is producing an original newsgame that addresses the inefficiencies of game development in an online news environment. @nielbekker

Brittany Binowski drew inspiration from many innovative social feeds on Twitter as well as CNN’s In America documentary unit to help create a list of best practices and suggestions for investigative news organizations. The suggestions aim to better connect sources with reporters and producers in the newsroom and, therefore, create better and more informed journalism.@binowski

Blair Hickman is developing a digital toolkit to help journalists report on social change more effectively. Her partner, Dowser Media, is trying to broaden the scope of typical news coverage by pioneering thoughtful, critical coverage of social innovation—what they call Solution Journalism.@amandablair

This semester, Colin Jones worked on developing a live video chat project with the New York Daily News. These chats took user comments, submitted through Twitter, Facebook and other platforms, and had them answered live on the site by reporters and guests. @Colin_Jones

Radio ProPublica is an experimental audio project that Assia Boundaoui is developing for ProPublica. The project included producing narrative-driven investigative podcasts that seek to explain news in the public interest and engage users by soliciting UGC and crowdsourcing questions in need of explanation. @assuss

This fall, Rachel Slaff is working with GoodHousekeeping.com to solicit and showcase user-generated videos. She’s thrilled to experiment with the traditional journalistic framework of narration by allowing users to share their own stories. @rachelslaff

For Tom Chen’s Studio III project, he teamed up with Artinfo.com and designed an interactive video companion for the website. It will be a video component that largely enriches the visitors’ interactive experience with the site. And it will live on different platforms (website, mobile app, podcast). @tomstation

For Studio III, Nasry Esmat worked with Mujaz.me on creating the first social media news page in Egypt. Mujaz is an Egyptian news aggregator and the created page aims to tell news stories by curating social media posts that challenge the official narrative of traditional news sources. @nasry

Erin Evans worked with the New York Times’ education site, SchoolBook, on an experiment in community outreach. She produced a case study based on her findings at a school in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. @heyerinevans

David Holmes is working with the New York Daily News to implement automated news quizzes while developing a workflow model for algorithmic journalism. @David_M_Holmes

This past summer, Matt Diaz interned with the User Experience and Product Research Team at the New York Times doing both qualitative and quantitative user research. This fall Matt is continuing his work with The Times. His Studio III project is an original research effort centered on the digital identities and behaviors of young adults with a focus on how they produce and consume news on mobile devices. @mgdiaz

This fall, Ruth Spencer explored how data literacy is emerging as a necessary journalistic skill. She created The Datamaster for Jim Brady, Editor in Chief of Journal Register Company. The Datamaster is a comprehensive plan for how Journal Register Company can integrate data resources across its network; it includes a corporate strategy and staff training guide. @onthewag

Din Clarke ’s project, Sight and Sound, has both a video and audio component. She built a prototype for a portable video recording booth to collect stories from residents who have limited or no internet access and taught audio recording/editing to young adults at Reel Works. The pieces will air on local radio station WBAI. @dinclarke

Todd Olmstead collaborated with Mashable to grow engagement through their comments. Mashable already has a highly active commenting community, and Todd’s goal was to optimize the quality contributions that these readers make on the site. @toddjolmstead

Studio 20 - New York University from The Local East Village on Vimeo.

In its second year, Studio 20 is again embarking on a big collaboration with a major media partner. In 2009-10 it was The Local East Village with the New York Times. In 2010-11 it’s the Building a Better Explainer project with the investigative journalism non-profit, ProPublica.  The project will focus on the art of explaining the sort of sprawling complicated stories that ProPublica covers. The new site students built for the project, Explainer.net, launched last night. 

Studio 20 Director Jay Rosen’s students, consulting closely with the editors of ProPublica, will:

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  • research best practices in explanatory journalism;
  • collect relevant knowledge from other disciplines about how users absorb complex subjects;
  • pick one of ProPublica’s major investigations and produce model explainers suitable for publication at ProPublica.org;
  • experiment with different ways of delivering critical background knowledge, using all the tools of the Web
  • investigate how to make the explainer genre more interactive with Web users;
  • share their findings with ProPublica and the wider journalism world            

Professor Rosen details the background of and plan for the project on PressThink:

We will start by researching what’s working now, and by going beyond journalism to fields that might know something journalists should know. In the spring of 2011, we’ll devote a whole graduate course (18 students, two instructors, plus consultants) to producing explainers that we hope ProPublica can publish, as well as a kind of tool kit to make the task easier. At the project site, explainer.net, we’ll post highlights from our research, solicit help, and publish interviews with thinkers and do-ers who are pushing the practice forward.

Recently, Nieman Journalism Lab’s Lois Beckett visited Studio 20 to speak with students about the project. She writes:

Students will divide into three groups tasked with exploring different elements of explanation. One group is interviewing the members of ProPublica’s news team, from reporters to news app builders to the managing editor, in order to understand the organization’s workflow, what it does with the data it collects, and how its reporters explain what they’re learning to themselves as they report a story.

Another group is building Explainer.net’s WordPress website, which sometimes means teaching themselves and each other skills on an ad hoc basis. 

A third group  is researching the different “explainer” genres. They’re starting with examples of good and bad explanatory journalism, from maps and timelines to more specific visualizations like The National Post’s chilling illustration of how a stoning is carried out in Iran. But they’ll also be reaching far outside the media world to research techniques used in many different fields. Rosen suggested that they focus on situations where people “can’t afford to fail,” like people fixing combat aircraft, or NFL teams explaining complicated plays. The students are also looking at the “For Dummies” book franchise and the language-learning software Rosetta Stone.

Keep up with the project on Explainer.net. Or by Twitter.

Studio 20’s first class of students are in their third semester, and working on innovation projects with a variety of media partners. They work independently and present their progress in Jay Rosen’s Studio 3 course. Here’s what they’re up to this term:

Tim Stenovec is working with Saul Hansell of Seed.com to design and build a site for AOL that helps people sort through the claims of the food industry.

Anjali Khosla Mullany is establishing a noise beat for the New York Times Local East Village. Her project involves data visualization, video reporting, and designing a dynamic new beat page system for reporters and the community.

Jami Katz is creating a cultural calendar for UrbanDaddy.com that is being used as an internal tool between editors to streamline editorial work flow. She has been coordinating events and creative story ideas for UrbanDaddy’s New York, Los Angeles and National editions. She has also been developing new ideas for the company’s Twitter site and making recommendations.

Suemedha Sood has developed a column for BBC Travel called Travelwise. BBC Travel is a new travel website from the BBC in association with Lonely Planet.

Roque Planas is helping The Miami Herald revamp its blog “Cuban Colada” by adding a daily aggregator and developing ways to encourage user interaction and debate.

James Matthews is integrating SeeClickFix, an organization that allows citizens to report non-emergency local concerns, on The Local East Village website and developing best practices to use the information for in depth hyperlocal reporting.

Amir Shoucri developed a video component for the New York Observer’s website.  This included creating a signature “Observer” visual style, devising a workflow for posting video, and producing a variety of original video content. Here’s an example of a feature posted on the home page.

Tracy Wang is working with AlliSports.com to develop multimedia elements and employ social media.

Lesley Messer is working with People.com to better understand Facebook as an editorial tool, and to  develop a posting strategy for the future.

Matylda Czarnecka is working with PBS’ Channel Thirteen to prototype a website and show about the New York City startup ecosystem.

Studio 20’s Niel Bekker recently published a post exploring two new startups, Storify and Qwiki, which are finding ways to disrupt storytelling. From the post:

Which is more disruptive: connecting users to a library of machine-made knowledge remixes, or connecting users to each other’s curated content, shaped into narrative by human hands?

Read Niel’s full story on MemeBurn.

Studio 20 Director Jay Rosen recently gave an Inaugural Lecture to the incoming class at Sciences Po école du journalisme in Paris (read reports of it in English and in French, with videos of the talk) that was meant not only for French students, but for anyone interested in journalism.

Rosen elaborated on his talk in a post he published titled The Journalists Formerly Known as the Media: My Advice to the Next Generation, in which he takes a thoughtful, retrospective look at the evolution of the public, the audience and the media:

In 1764, for example, the King of France ruled it illegal to print or sell or peddle on the street anything about the reform of state finances—past, present or future.  It’s not only that there was no freedom of the press.  That was true, but more than that: The king’s mystery was not considered the people’s business. The whole idea that the affairs of the nation belonged to the people of that nation had yet to be accepted. Without an idea like that (today we would call it “the public’s right to know…”) the very practice of journalism is impossible—in fact, unthinkable.

It took a while before those outside of the government began gaining access to information and developed ways to communicate what went on behind closed doors, and when they did, they began changing the culture of news around diplomacy: 

Let’s jump ahead to Paris in 1919 and the Peace Conference that ended World War I. Something new was seen at Paris. At previous international conferences intended to conclude wars and settle borders, the diplomats would negotiate in secret and emerge weeks later with a result which was then conveyed to the home countries as a more or less finished product. In Paris a new pattern was seen. The American delegation was accompanied by over 150 newspaper correspondents. They shocked the diplomats by demanding entrance to the opening session.

Rosen alludes to his famous post on The People Formerly Known as the Audience and builds upon it, calling out to the journalists formerly known as the media:

Seeing people as masses is the art in which the mass media, and professional media people, specialized during their profitable 150-year run (1850 to 2000). But now we can see that this was actually an interval, a phase, during which the tools for reaching the public were placed in increasingly concentrated hands. Professional journalism, which dates from the 1920s, has lived its entire life during this phase, but let me say it again: this is what your generation has a chance to break free from. The journalists formerly known as the media can make the break by learning to specialize in a different art: seeing people as a public, empowered to make media themselves.

In conclusion, Rosen offers 10 pieces of advice to the next generation of journalists. Read the full post for an explanation of each point.

1. Replace readers, viewers, listeners and consumers with the term “users.” 

2. Remember: the users know more than you do. 

3: There’s been a power shift; the mutualization of journalism is here. 

4: Describe the world in a way that helps people participate in it.

5: Anyone can doesn’t mean everyone will.

6: The journalist is just a heightened case of an informed citizen, not a special class.

7: Your authority starts with, “I’m there, you’re not, let me tell you about it.” 

8: Somehow, you need to listen to demand and give people what they have no way to demand. 

9:  In your bid to be trusted, don’t take the View From Nowhere; instead, tell people where you’re coming from.  

10: Breathe deeply of what DeTocqueville said: “Newspapers make associations and associations make newspapers.”

The Local East Village will launch on Monday, September 13. The site is a collaboration between The New York Times and New York University’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute, and will cover New York City’s East Village. Studio 20 students have been planning and working towards its launch throughout spring semester and into the summer.

The site will feature a specially developed Virtual Assignment Desk that will let contributors from the East Village easily communicate with the staff to pitch story ideas and contribute articles and multimedia. From the press release:

The site will feature a Virtual Assignment Desk, an interactive digital platform that has been created as a Wordpress plug-in. It provides an editorial work flow system for both assigning stories, and receiving and managing ideas, tips, and finished work from community and student contributors. Any registered user of nytimes.com will be able to go to a special page to see what assignments are available.

Students from all universities will have the opportunity to experience the East Village while gaining real world journalism experience by applying to the Hyperlocal Newsroom Summer Academy:

Starting in May 2011, the Hyperlocal Newsroom Summer Academy will welcome journalism students from across the country to cover East Village beats and help coordinate wider community involvement. These include pre-college and college tracks as well as a select number of three-month graduate-level LEV internships, credit and non-credit, available on a competitive basis. For more on the The Hyperlocal Academy, click here.

The site will be live starting Monday at http://eastvillage.thelocal.nytimes.com and http://localeastvillage.com.

Got a burning question that a simple web search can’t answer? Ask it at Studio 20 Director Jay Rosen’s ExplainThis.org, where “journalists are standing by.” Studio 20’s Tim Stenovec is working with Rosen on the project.

Explainthis.org recently partnered with The Breakdown, the explainer podcast with Chris Hayes of the Nation. More details here.