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The information sherpa: role for journalists on the web

February 1, 2012 in General Media, ideas

(Image by Flickr user Sistak, used under Creative Commons license)

Following up on my post yesterday about information overload, I wanted to expand a little bit on a term I used: information sherpa. I first used a similar term “video sherpa” in a post for a Carnival of Journalism about the future of online video. I wrote:

Perhaps a new form of journalistic curator will arise – the video sherpa, a journalist who guides others through the mazes of videos on various platforms like YouTube andVimeo to find the nuggets of related content that are worthwhile, a la Andy Carvin‘sNPR tweets about the Middle East.

I should specify that I’m using the term “sherpa” in a specific sense. Wikipedia captures that essence here:

Sherpas were immeasurably valuable to early explorers of the Himalayan region, serving as guides at the extreme altitudes of the peaks and passes in the region. Today, the term is used casually to refer to almost any guide or porter hired for mountaineering expeditions in the Himalayas. Sherpas are renowned in the international climbing and mountaineering community for their hardiness, expertise, and experience at high altitudes.

Another way of looking at our age instead of as “information overload” is to look at it as a mountain of information. News consumers who want to be informed, to stay on top of events that are important to them, need to find a way to scale that mountain. And they don’t always have the tools or experience to do so. That’s where a modern journalist can carve out an important role. The journalist as sherpa guides the info-mountaineer through the dizzying peaks and passes of the mountain of information, finding and presenting just the right information to help reach and stay on top of the mountain.

But I want to be clear about some things that are happening that are not what I mean by an information sherpa. The sherpa is not the mountaineer. The sherpa is not the mountain. The sherpa is not the treacherous weather that attacks the mountain suddenly. I’ll explain what I mean:

The sherpa is not the mountain: As I mentioned yesterday, there are too many sites on the internet that aren’t really providing high quality information. They’re posting intriguing photos and blurbs, or they’re posting barely disguised press releases, or hastily re-written information provided by quality news sources to juice page clicks. Those people are part of the mountain of information. They keep piling up the heights before the information consumer.

The sherpa is not the mountaineer: This is not the first time the sherpa has climbed the mountain. The sherpa knows a path through the mountain of B.S. masquerading as information, and is guiding the person who’s trying to make it up the mountain. More than ever, a journalist can’t be a generalist. Generalists get taken in by misinformation, slant, faux controversies and technical jargon meant to obscure rather than illuminate. A journalist needs to do everything possible to become fluent in whatever topic she is covering, learning who’s got an agenda, and when that agenda is shading the information she’s receiving. A sherpa doesn’t take the easiest path, but the best path.

The sherpa is not the weather: One of the most dangerous aspects of the ascent of Mt. Everest is the extreme and quickly changing weather, which can include high winds and sudden storms. In climbing a mountain of information, an info-mountaineer can experience frequent wild swings of information that can knock one off the path – useless information, sudden Twitter storms and Facebook outrages, breathless reporting about silly products and gossip about famous people. A true sherpa isn’t the weather. A journalist worth his salt doesn’t traffic in such chasing the weather. A sherpa stays the course, is aware of the weather, and knows to avoid its traps.

Many others have focused on the analogy of journalist as curator. But I think I prefer this analogy more. I would love to know what others think. I also think this new paradigm should influence how we train college journalists for the future.

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Information overload: RSS reader edition

January 31, 2012 in blogging, career talk, General Media, industry news

UPDATE: via Jason Kottke (and my RSS reader) this related, lengthy piece from journalist Brian Lam, whose site I’ve never read.

Last week, my intro to multimedia classes discussed RSS feeds, and why they were a good thing. I love RSS feeds for keeping up to date on matters at the intersection of technology, journalism and college media. A lot of people have started using Twitter as an alternative to RSS readers, but I don’t find that a good thing, necessarily. The real problem for me is the amount of information that come through the RSS reader in a day. I was amazed at how much content some of the blogs I follow was pumping out in a day, so I decided to try an experiment. I “bankrupted” my Google Reader yesterday (Monday, Jan. 30, 2012) at 4 p.m. Central Standard Time. There were no unread items.

It’s now 2:30 CST on Tuesday, and I just went in to see how many items were in the unread RSS inbox. As you can see, there are 276 unread items. And I don’t follow any traditional media outlets (NYT, Washington Post, etc.).

The main contributors to this RSS glut?

Five sites, 170 new items in less than 24 hours!

Now, granted there’s probably a lot of good information in some of those blog posts, but who can keep up? I’m sure most people don’t read all these firehoses of niche information, preferring to focus on one or two. But if you’re trying to stay up-to-date on the latest happenings in a certain area, it’s not always an option.
It’s no wonder one of the more recent tech terms to become a buzzword is information overload.

I’m sure someone has a workable situation for this conundrum. I think one of the things we’ve created with the fast pace of the Internet is the need for constant content, some of which is little more than a picture and a blurb from another blog or a press release. And that’s not helping us get quality information, much less act upon the information we’re getting.

This isn’t specifically a college-media-related issue. But as journalists of the future, one of our college students’ key functions will still be to serve as trusted curators or information sherpas for people who don’t have time to follow all this content. And that means they will have to find strategies and tools to go where the information is and discover what’s important without having to spend hours in front of a screen sifting through stories.

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Curated links 1-30-2012

January 30, 2012 in industry news, Links

Lots of interesting information that you may have missed over the last week:

Can a Good Journalist Be a Good Capitalist (Carnival of Journalism): Good discussion this month on whether journalists can put aside their proletarian sensibilities and use the tools of the entrepreneur to ascend to the bourgeoisie.

Student Press Version of ‘Lazy Higher Ed Journalism’ (College Media Matters): “There are simply some stories that on a scroll through the archives of any student media outlet pop up again and again and again, sometimes with a fresh spin (although many times, not so much), but always with the same core issue or topic intact.” Man, have we all been there or what?

What’s your problem with the internet? A crib sheet for news exec speeches (Online Journalism Blog): This is actually a couple of years old, but it’s been updated, and, really, the content is evergreen.

10 Inspiring Social Networks for Writers (Mashable): Social networks aren’t just for posting photos of your family and cats. If you’re a writer, these might be sites to explore.

New York Times releases code to help journalists collaborate on WordPress, other platforms (Poynter): The plug-in has a “track changes” feature that looks promising. Here’s hoping it receives further development.

The Death of the Editor and the Rise of the Circulation Manager (Brain Pickings): Brain Pickings is a site that’s found it’s way into my regular RSS rounds because of posts like this. And she finds an essay that points out that everything old is new again. She writes, ”so long as we have a monetization model of information that prioritizes the wrong stakeholders — advertisers over readers — we will always cater to the business interests of the former, not the intellectual interests of the latter.” Yep.

Google already knows you’re a 24-year old woman who loves wombats (Ars Technica) I never looked at my Google Profile until I read this article. It was pretty close. You can see your own Google profile here.

 

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Against SOPA/PIPA – don’t break the Internet

January 18, 2012 in General Media, Politics

As much as possible, we try to stay clear of politics on this blog, but there’s a pair of bills before the US Congress that, if passed, would have a huge negative impact on the Internet we all know and love. The bills are the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect IP Act (PIPA).

A number of Web-based companies are blacking out portions of their sites today in protest against the measures, including Wikipedia, Google, WordPress, Reddit, BoingBoing, Craigslist and others.

The Internet isn’t broke, and there’s no need for a new US law to attempt to fix it, with all the unintended consequences that entails.

The best thing US citizens can do is contact their elected representative to oppose the acts. You can find information to do so here.

Here’s more information:

Wikipedia

Electronic Frontier Foundation (PDF)

Reddit

WordPress

Google

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On comments

December 1, 2011 in industry news

Image representing New York Times as depicted ...

Image via CrunchBase

The news industry has entered another round of comment concerns. The New York Times just implemented a new “Trusted Commenter” system that requires a connection to your Facebook account. Gannett announced last month that they’re switching their comments system to one that uses Facebook Connect.

And the college media listserv had a recent round of e-mails about the advantages of using Facebook log-ins for comments.

There are obvious arguments for going with the FB log-in. People are less likely to be nasty, brutish or mean when their “real” names are associated with what they say in a comment section. Facebook log-ins are an easy turn-key method of authenticating user names. And the FB log-in is becoming ubiquitous. Randy Lovely, senior vice president of news & audience development, doesn’t mention Gannett’s company-wide shift in an online chat about the new system, but admits that 81 percent of adults in their area have Facebook accounts.

I certainly understand the desire to have a community of commenters who are civil and reasonable in their comments about contentious issues of the day. And I can’t imagine the amount of time it takes a site like the New York Times to wade through comments every day.

But, as I’ve written before, I really don’t agree with the push to associate “authentic” real-world identities with comments on a web site.

First, these papers are outsourcing the “quality” of their site’s community to a third-party. And there are people who have legitimate issues with the entire Facebook platform, who don’t have accounts with FB and don’t want them. My parents, for instance, don’t have Facebook accounts. Should they be required to create such accounts to comment on a news site?

The second concern is a legitimate concern some people have about connecting their IRL (In Real Life) identity with comments they make online. I don’t have to go through all the hypothetical examples that have been hashed and rehashed in this arena, but suffice to say that there can be real implications for people if they say something negative about a controversial topic. So their voices will be effectively muzzled by “authenticity.”

You may think that’s a small price to pay for ridding comments sections of obvious trolls and boors who don’t know how to be polite. I’m not so sure. And I’m not so sure I’d be comfortable risking someone’s job because of something they said in a comment section.

There is a long history of pseudonymous commentary in American life. Some of it good, some of it bad. But I always thought the point was that we suffered the bad because the same rules protected the good.

In many ways, I keep coming back to what long-time blogger Anil Dash wrote earlier this year when this topic got hot again. Cultivating an online community of commenters is work, sometimes hard work. And Facebook Connect is a cop-out. And adopting the “authentic identity” paradigm just means the trolls have won.

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October Carnival of Journalism: Exploring new tools

October 31, 2011 in Carnival of Journalism

Crossposted from my personal website – Bryan

photo by Flickr user Zoriah. Use permitted under Creative Commons license. Click to see more images from this photographer.

This month’s Carnival of Journalism takes us on a tour of a truly frightful house of promise and peril: the world of new gadgets and software tools.

To refresh your memory, the prompt for this month was:

How do you decide to dedicate time to a new tool/platform/gadget? What is the process you go through mentally? And then later – how do you convince others to go through that process? And, last: How do you ensure that the tools you do adopt are used once the “newness” factor fades?

Without further delay, here are some of the responses (links open in new tabs):

Alfred Hermida writes, “The starting point for this discussion is the public, not the tools. Talking about tools is the last thing we should be doing.”

Joe Gullo looks for “the community factor” for new software tools, but says the results are often lackluster: “The hardest part is sticking with the product. It could be the most amazing service or product, but something has to keep me going back and using it.”

Dave Cohn makes an important distinction when evaluating any new tool: “Most platforms/tools/gadgets are tactical – not strategic. You should always keep your strategy in mind so that you can evaluate a tool about whether or not it’s helping to achieve that final goal.”

Carrie Brown focuses on the “evangelism” part of the question, and gives a list of ways to help others see the advantages of new things. This is important for college j-students, especially. “Contrary to popular belief, many of these so-called “digital natives” are often neither savvy about new tech nor exceptionally eager to go beyond their Facebook and Internet Explorer (?!) comfort zones.”

Lauren Rabaino walks through the process and provides examples of the best tools: “The best tools are the ones that solve a coverage problem or put a significant twist on already-existing storytelling tools. Sometimes — and these are my favorite kind of tools — you stumble upon one that fills a huge need that you didn’t even realize you had.”

Jonathan Groves explains how he decides what products to stick with, providing examples along the way. As for convincing others? His approach is slightly different. Click the link to read it. “What’s important is that we choose what best fits us, not everyone else.”

Stijn Debrouwere makes his first appearance in the carnival this month (welcome!). In his post, he posits some fountational reasons why journalists don’t adopt new tools: “our industry is slowly amassing an unsettling amount of cargo cult behaviors: we’re imitating a 20th-century writing style and ethical code without the first idea about how these contribute to journalism that is informative, engaging and fair.”

Jack Lail reiterates that, although it’s painful, “… experiment you must, lest you end up still using a 14,400 baud model and Windows 98 for the rest of your, indeed, wretched life.”

Andrew Zaleski, another new carnivore, explains “Ultimately, I stick to one governing principle when it comes to social media: how will the respective tool improve (and make easier) my work as digital media editor for Urbanite magazine?”

 

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#ncmc11 Orlando

October 26, 2011 in industry news

This is a stream of tweets from the National College Media Convention happening this weekend in Orlando. This stream will be sticky at the top of the page here through the weekend.

The stream is in Flash, by the way, so it’s not going to work on your iDevice. Sorry.



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Orlando on my mind

October 26, 2011 in College Media, Conferences

Today begins the National College Media Convention in sunny Orlando. I won’t be attending this year, but I’ll be following along with the goings on via Twitter and the hashtag #ncmc11.

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Three things to keep an eye on in iOS5

October 14, 2011 in industry news

SAN FRANCISCO, CA - JUNE 06: Attendees walk b...

Image by Getty Images via @daylife

Apple just released the latest version of its mobile operating system, iOS5, which introduced over 200 new features and enhancements.  The past 3 months I’ve had iOS5 running on my personal device as a developer.  During that time I have noticed three key features to keep an eye on over the next year.

One of the biggest features is the introduction to the “cloud.”  Certainly, the concept of the cloud is nothing new as users have been figuring out ways to use other services like Dropbox to sync files and even their iTunes libraries between computers.  As with most things Apple, it isn’t so much the groundbreaking idea as it is the implementation.  iCloud, Apple’s version of Dropbox, is tightly integrated and provides a unified experience across not just the operating system but also across devices – mobile and desktop.

With Apple creating an app “space” in the new version of OSX Lion, this means users can have an app on their phone and their desktop which sync data and information.

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ICM Interview: Brad Arendt on mobile app development promise and pitfalls

October 12, 2011 in industry news

Editor’s note: Brad Arendt, director of student media at Boise State, is a contributor to the blog and a colleague of long standing. This is structured as an interview because Brad wants to offer a service to other members of the college media community. The interview audio is below, and a transcript below the fold.

Boise State Student Media launched version 2.0 of their mobile app Bronco Mobile (iTunes link)  this August. Student Media Director Brad Arendt shared some of the experience of building a college media mobile app from the ground up, and what he hopes to give back to the community, in this interview. The audio is about 30 minutes long. A transcript is below the fold.

If, after reading or listening, you’re interested in more details of Arendt’s future efforts, contact Brad at barendt@boisestate.edu. He will also be at the Fall National College Media Convention in Orlando Oct. 28-30 and will be available to answer questions there.

Click on the mp3 player below to listen. If you’re on an iDevice and it doesn’t work, click this link to listen to the mp3.

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