Journalism as service: Lessons from Sandy

November 28, 2012 by Jeff Jarvis
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I was badly informed in the aftermath of Sandy. I blame the news. After all, isn’t that its job: to assure we’re informed? Shouldn’t news organizations be judged by that standard?

The other day, I argued that news should be seen as a service, not a product, and that journalists should measure their success not by column inches or by page views but by results: whether we, the public, know what we want and need to know. Sandy provides a good test-bed for this idea of outcomes-based journalism.

After Sandy, what journalists provided was mostly articles when what I wanted was specifics that those articles only summarized. Don’t give me stories. Give me lists.

I wanted lists of what streets were closed. I wanted lists of what streets the power company was finally working on. Oh, the utility, JCP&L, gave my town, Bernards Township, lists of streets, but they were bald-faced lies (I know because my street was on that list but their crews weren’t on my street). The town and our local media outlets only passed on these lists as fact without verifying. I wanted journalists to add value to those lists, going out to verify whether there were crews working on those streets. In a word: report.

I wanted media organizations or technology platforms to enable the people who knew the facts — my fellow townspeople — to share what they knew. Someone should have created a wiki that would let anyone in town annotate those lists of streets without power and streets — if any — where power crews were working. Someone should have created a map (Google Maps would do; Ushahidi would be deluxe) that we could have annotated not only with our notes and reports of what we knew but also with pictures. I’d have loved to have seen images of every street blocked by trees, not just for the sake of empathy but also so I could figure out how to get around town … and how likely it was that we’d be getting power back and how likely it would be that buses would be able to get through the streets so schools could re-open.

But instead, we got mostly articles. For that’s what journalists do, isn’t it? We write articles. We are storytellers! But not everything should be a story. Stories aren’t always the best vehicle for conveying information, for informing the public. Sometimes lists, data bases, photos, maps, wikis, and other new tools can do a better job.

My local weekly paper was as useful as always. Not. It gave me articles days after the fact that told me nothing I hadn’t already ferreted out. In my town, Patch* blew it. Here was its opportunity to be *the* hyperlocal resource for my town. Even though it had no newspaper to fill, it still insisted on giving me articles. When I couldn’t reliably find out about where power work was occurring from the town or Patch or the paper, I did use Patch to post an open letter to the town complaining about officials passing on JCP&L’s bogus lists and I learned more from the comments there than from those articles. NJ.com* gave me articles but also did give me some lists, constantly updated, which I hung on to find out the latest on roads and transit — and so I could decide whether I had any hope of getting into New York and work. Those lists were great but, a statewide paper being what it is, they couldn’t tell me about my neighborhood.

That’s where the need and opportunity remain: in very local information. No one has cracked the geographic nut well — not big papers, not big networks of sites, not Twitter. Desperate to find open gas stations, we gathered around the #njgas hashtag but it wasn’t terribly useful learning that a station 50 miles away just opened up. I needed someone to add value to that list of posts about stations by putting them on a map.

After my neighbors and I got out our chainsaws and cut through probably three dozen trees to free us from our blocked streets and driveways, I went to Nextdoor.com, a platform that enables neighbors with verified identities and addresses to create private networks.

In a neat bit of functionality, I was able to delineate my own neighborhood — which is valuable information to a site, knowing what someone considers a neighborhood to be. But Nextdoor scolded me and said I didn’t have enough neighbors, forcing me to include people who live 2.5 miles away I’ll never meet — because Nextdoor thinks it knows better. Its mapping data sucked and many of my neighbors couldn’t join but Nextdoor wouldn’t let us fix the addresses — even though we know better. We wanted to talk about power and buying generators and trees still lying over our streets and more but Nextdoor gave us a tab to talk about “crime and safety” because they think they know what we want. No. You’re a platform only if and when your users take over what you’ve built and use it in ways you never imagined because they find it that useful.

What I want from news and technology companies is a platform that enables us in the community to share our knowledge. I want them to provide an opportunity for — or shame — shame town officials, utility companies, transit officials, as well as local businesses — even gas stations — into using such a platform to share the data they have and invite residents to add to and improve that knowledge. I do not expect the journalists to be able to gather all that information. In the words of Emily Bell, Clay Shirky, and Chris Anderson in their new tome, Post-Industrial Journalism, I expect the journalist to move up the value chain. Or in my words, I want the journalist to add value, to ask and answer the questions that aren’t already known. Do what you do best and link to — or build a platform for — the rest.

* Disclosures: Patch has long listed me as an advisor though I am not one. I am, however, an adviser to NJ.com and helped start the service back in the day. I have no relationship with Nextdoor.

Defend our net (from Germany, this time)

November 27, 2012 by Jeff Jarvis
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At long last, Google is standing up to fight the ridiculous ancillary copyright (Leistungschutzrecht) bill heading to law in Germany, a law that would require Google and others — you? — to pay publishers to quote them, to link to them (to benefit them).

On a site called “Defend Your Net,” this video shows a wealth of searches and answers and at the end says (my translation):
“For more than 10 years, anytime you want, you can find what moves you. A planned law will now change that. Do you want that? Take action. Defend your net. Continue to find what you seek.”

Sign the petition to defend our net here.

More information about the bill (in German) says it will hurt the German economy, threaten diversity of information, cause legal uncertainty (for bloggers, too), and cause a setback for innovative media. The paradox, Google says, is that publishers can pull their content off Google search — and lose the many clicks it sends their way — whenever they want.

This is a horrid collusion of two institutions — media and government — threatened by the disruption of technology.
I’ve been shouting about this travesty. I’m glad Google is finally — if tardily — making its voice heard.

Content vs. service in media & education

November 19, 2012 by Jeff Jarvis
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Content is that which fills something. Service is that which accomplishes something.

Content starts with the desires of creators to make things. Service start with the needs of clients to achieve outcomes.

We think of media and news and content businesses. Education, too, runs as a content enterprise.

But shouldn’t both be seen as services?

“Now we can provide students with a course that mirrors our classroom experience,” the provost of Washington University, Edward S. Macias, said last week as 10 universities announced yet another consortium to provide online education. What struck me when I read that was how much it sounded like the early days of newspaper editors facing the web. They tried to replicate what they used to do, treating the net as merely a new means of distribution for their content.

Shovelware. Media did it. Education does it. Since those are the two fields I’m in, I’m finding parallels and lessons in both.

Education at least has some aptitude for thinking in outcomes, as that’s how we’re supposed to measure the success of programs: What should students learn and did they learn it? Still, to be honest, some of this process of determining outcomes is reverse-engineered, starting with the course and its content and backing into the results. (And one unfortunate side-effect of outcomes-thinking, I should add, is the teaching-to-the-test that now corrupts primary and high schools.)

Journalists are worse. I find a disease among students that continues into careers, starting a pitch for a story (or in my program, a business) with the phrase, “I want to…” Playing the curmudgeonly prof, I tell them no one, save perhaps their mothers, gives a damn what they want to do. The question they should be asking and answering is what the public needs them to do.

Outcomes.

If journalists started with outcomes, they’d measure their success not by unique users or page views or other such “audience” metrics adapted from mass media. They’d measure their success by how informed the public becomes: Did the public find out what it wants or needs to know because of what we’ve done? Is the electorate better informed? (How’re we doin’ with that?) Do New Jerseyans know where to find gas in a crisis? Today when we do research about news “consumers,” we ask them what they think of our products. Shouldn’t we ask them instead what they didn’t know and now know? If we want to reverse-engineer journalism, we need to start with a standard for an informed public and then examine how best to achieve that goal. A more informed public will not always come as the result of articles — content. It will also come via platforms where the public shares what they know without mediators (i.e., media) as well as data and analysis of data, with journalists trying to add value where they’re most needed.

If education were truly constructed around outcomes, it would start with researching the skills and knowledge students need to meet their goals — whether that is a job or an expertise — and then determine the best ways to accomplish that. And that won’t always come from delivering content in the form of the lecture, time-honored though that may be from the days of teachers reading scarce, scribal texts. I’m beginning to rethink journalism education that way: starting with outcomes, curating curricular materials, making all that open, then adding value for some students in the forms of tutoring, certification, and providing context for how tools and skills are used: service.

When we think of ourselves as services, then we strive not to own products but instead to add value to a process. When we provide service, we become more accountable for the outcomes our clients achieve. (When a teacher gives every student in a class bad grades, it’s the teacher who’s failing. When a community is ignorant, it’s the journalists who are failing.) How much better it would be to architect these industries — and they are industries — in reverse, giving clients the ability to set goals and then providing marketplaces of competing means by which they can meet those goals.

I went to an unfortunately off-the-record conference recently at which I asked a long-time leader in education and the founder of an online education startup about the fate of degrees. The long-timer said that from the moment IBM starts hiring engineers when they can show certificates of completion for some set of online courses, the degree will fade.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t think that is the way the new online startups are built, so far. They deliver courses: content. That’s understandable. It’s phase I of a process of transition: we take what we know and try it out in the new setting, as media have done. These education startups are also searching, as media have done (and still are), for a business model. Coursera is free but promotes its top-tier universities (and might sell a bunch of text books for profs). Udacity wants to make rock-star profs, I think. 2U is charging $4,000 a course for credit (!) in small classes; it’s the anti-MOOC. The University of the People has a mission to educate worldwide masses for free.

Just as I hope that education learns from the disruption of the news business, Clay Shirky hopes it learns from the disruption of music. For much of his post, Clay sees online education the way various of these enterprises do and the way I did when in What Would Google Do? I imagined a distributed Oxford/Cambridge system of international and digital lectures and in-person and local tutors.

But then, as is Clay’s habit, he noted what I think is a key question from these startups: “Meanwhile, they try to answer some new questions, questions that the traditional academy — me and my people — often don’t even recognize as legitimate, like ‘How do we spin up 10,000 competent programmers a year, all over the world, at a cost too cheap to meter?’” That was the same question put forward in what I still think of as a seminal meeting held by Union Square Ventures in 2009 called Hacking Education: They set the goal at making the marginal cost of education zero. That is what these MOOCs are trying to do. If they succeed, then education suddenly scales (and we stop bankrupting our children’s future).

Back again to the media parallel: The marginal cost of gathering and sharing information is already approaching zero. That’s what scares the media industry, built as it is on selling a scarcity called content. At that same off-the-record business conference last week, I heard one media executive say that his industry’s goal is soley to “protect the value of content.” That’s what the copyright wars are over. That is what is beginning to scare universities.

But what’s really scaring them is the the shifting value of content versus service. Google is a service. It delivers and extracts value through knowledge of its users. It doesn’t want to own content, only learn from it. Its highest aspiration is to intuit our intent and deliver what we want before we’ve even said it. Service. Media are factories. They gain value from selling content to customers they don’t know. Products. There’s the real conflict.

I ask us — in journalism and in education (and in journalism education) — to aspire to being services. That requires us to start by thinking of the ends.

Thanks

November 9, 2012 by Jeff Jarvis
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I’m pretty darned good at complaining about bad service or products. That means I’d better praise great service as well. So I want to thank some folks for helping my family through the storm. We have power back today. Thousands more still do not have power and, worse, do not have homes. Once again, we are most lucky.

The staff at the Bridgewater Marriott has been exemplary. As Sandy threatened New Jersey, I made a two-day reservation for last Monday night. When it was clear we couldn’t even get out of our street, I managed to shift it a night. The front-desk staff fixed a problem with the reservation (whew) and managed to extend our stay through this morning (whew x 10). The first night, the hotel was overwhelmed. Even the front-desk staff helped serve in the restaurant. Absolutely every member of the staff we dealt with that harried night and on for the rest of our stay was incredibly helfpul, friendly, and empathetic — all the while many of them were worried about their own homes and families. Their generosity of spirit was most impressive. I told the wonderful Grace Lizardo, manager of the front desk, that we were so grateful to have an advocate and a friend there to help us.

I’m grateful for the power crews from Texas, Virginia, and Indiana who came to our street yesterday and restored our power — exhausted, far from home, doing dangerous work in hard conditions, but cheerful nonetheless. No matter what you may think of the utility companies, these guys are the heroes. As Bert Williams said in Twitter: “Utility line crews are the unsung heroes of any disaster recovery effort. Tough job in harsh conditions.” Amen to that.

Countless more staffers in restaurants and stores and gas stations and on the phone from Verizon, too, were helpful even as they were suffering through their own trials. Last night, my wife and I had a great dinner at a Greek restaurant in Somerville, NJ, (highly recommended) and the young waiter working a second job said his power came back on, then all the transformers in the neighborhood blew, and he’ll be without for another two weeks. We’ve come across so many folks like that.

As I said in my last post about the storm, I’m also grateful that I live in a neighborhood where folks banded together to help each other.

We are lucky and I just want to say thank you.

* * *

While I’m thanking, I’m overdue expressing my gratitude to @ahugo68, aka Alex Hugo, who a few weeks ago saw on Twitter that I was having a problem with my AT&T account (holding onto my precious unlimited data plan). Out of nowhere, he appeared and said that he was an AT&T store staffer and that he’d fix it. Little did I know how far he would go to help. I didn’t realize that he went into the store on a day off and got a flat tire on the way, to boot. But he said he couldn’t stand to see his company make a mistake. I thanked him and his boss on the phone but I also want to thank them publicly and say to every company that the key to success is not obvious: You need thousands of Alexes and Graces.

What stands between us and electricity

November 3, 2012 by Jeff Jarvis

Six days powerless so far. Looking at this, I’m guessing another week or even two.

Ideas to handle NJ’s gas crisis.

November 3, 2012 by Jeff Jarvis

#Sandy

November 1, 2012 by Jeff Jarvis

My family and I have been witness to and beneficiary of amazing providence in this week of Sandy. We are incredibly lucky. Seeing the complete destruction of entire neighborhoods on the Jersey Shore and in Staten Island and Queens and Hoboken only drives that home. This morning my wife saw an aerial picture of the shore town where she spent her young summers and was in shock: whole neighborhoods she knew had disappeared.

In our neighborhood in central New Jersey, we benefitted from acts of wonderful neighborliness. Our dead-end street was blocked by more than two dozen large, fallen trees. Most of our neighbors got together, got out their chainsaws, and proceeded to clear the street and driveways all day Tuesday. (Friends and family will be horrified to know that I, too, wielded my brand new chainsaw, but they will be relieved to know that I managed to break it in short order.) Our street is still blocked by a fallen utility pole but we managed to get some cars around it, until our route turned into a muddy trap, so we shuttle back and forth from this barricade.

On Monday night, as the winds of Sandy hit frightening velocity, a tree fell against the back of our house but we were terribly fortunate as it damaged the deck and roughed up the roof and some gutters but did not breach our home. Another 15 or more trees fell that night around our house — but fell away from it. (We live in the woods, though that may now be singular rather than plural.)

This was a fortunate story repeated up and down our block, where far more trees fell than anywhere I’ve seen in our part of the state (we live on what New Jersey calls a mountain, which apparently accelerated the winds). At one home, a garage roof got a bad gash but that was all. At another couple’s house, the wife worried about a tree falling in the master bedroom and so she moved to a grown child’s bedroom but the tree she feared fell right on top of it, sending wood through the ceiling a few feet above her head. She’s fine. Other houses were similarly hugged by dying trees but overall unharmed. More important, of course, is that all our neighbors were unharmed.

We live in an area with well water, which means that when we lose power, we lose water and toilets, in addition to heat and — thanks to being on Fios — the phone and, of course, the internet. Also, our nearest cell towers appear to have suffered damage or lost power, so we lost total communication in our house. Thus the social media that I tout so much was not as useful to me as I’d have thought. And now, after the storm, it’s still not giving us the very practical information we crave: which streets are blocked; where power is returning; when power will come to us; what restaurants and stores are reopening; where to get gas….

But I was lucky to have managed to make a hotel reservation and the staff at our Marriott has been amazing, letting us extend our stay and helping us with unfailing cheerfulness even though they are harried and overworked and surely worried about their own homes and families. At the restaurants that one-by-one reopen and stores, we have found the staffs to be gracious and generous just as we have found neighbors and strangers to be ready to help in a moment. At our reopened mall today — instantly filled with refugees from the storm — I saw a couple of guys commander electric plugs with power strips so they could watch over folks’ gadgets as they recharged. Yes, crises bring out the best in people.

There are frustrations. We have no idea when we will get power back. I have seen only *one* crew working within miles of our home. I’m frustrated and worried that our downed utility pole has prevented police and firefighters from reaching a home on our street with a bad gas leak and I am concerned about our elderly neighbors being out of reach of ambulances. Our police have been very helpful but we haven’t seen much of our town. Sitting in gas lines, I’m reliving my first big story as a reporter — the ’73 oil embargo — and wonder at how little we’ve learned. I doubt I’ll be able to get to the airport for a trip I’ll probably have to cancel and without trains or bas, I have no idea how I will make it into New York for my class on Monday; millions of commuters are in the same bind. Frustration will surely grow as our powerlessness continues for days and then weeks.

I’m also struck by our lessened investment in infrastructure and standards. When we built the POTS — plain old telephone system — we ended up with a system that assured us we’d still get a dial tone (remember that?) in spite of any problem short of a cut wire. Now, if you believe that weather could become more frequently extreme, then our wires on polls and breakable phone and internet systems and dependence on power to stay constantly charged and connected make us feel only more fragile at moments such as these.

But at the end of this long week, I am aware of one thought more than any other: I am lucky.

Crossing the Channel

October 16, 2012 by Jeff Jarvis
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Some people wonder why I go to Germany so often. It’s to meet some brilliant people who are doing amazing things there, among them Wolfgang Blau, for almost five years the editor-in-chief of Zeit Online. Now I won’t have to go as far to see him as Wolfgang is moving to London to become director of digital strategy at the Guardian. Don’t you love it when friends marry?

I’m reminded of John Paton, who was executing much of his strategy for digital-first news in the U.S., but no one saw it because it occurred in Spanish, at Impremedia, a roll-up he engineered with publications he then re-engineered. Only when he took over two English-language newspaper companies under Digital First Media did our world take note of what he was doing. Same for Wolfgang: At Zeit Online he did phenomenal things, complementing a still-successful (!) print paper in Germany with an innovative journalism online, growing the site and its audience tremendously. But my friends over here couldn’t see it because he did it in German.

Now Wolfgang comes to my favorite newspaper in the world to extend its digital lead. The Guardian — under another friend, Emily Bell, now a friendly competitor at Columbia’s j-school — showed the way for news online. Now, in my view, the Guardian will be competing with The New York Times (under its new ex-BBC CEO) and the BBC and perhaps the Wall Street Journal to become the leading English-language news brand online. That battle is just underway and the battleground is digital.

As I was writing this post, someone in Twitter noted the timing of the Guardian getting ready to launch a next round of layoffs. My view: newspapers have to finish the process of shrinking so they can grow again, and they’ll grow digitally.

Wolfgang is a dear friend and I’m delighted for him and for Alan Rusbridger and company at the Guardian. (And disclosures: I’m on the Digital First advisory board and I have consulted and written for the Guardian over the years.)

Here’s the Guardian announcement in English and here’s the Zeit announcement in German.