Mashalist

Switcheroo

Greetings, Mashalists!

For the last year I’ve been posting here sporadically, mostly about online news and our progress with Faneuil Media. 

That’s worked out well, but Faneuil Media is growing up, and it needs its own blog.

So with the help of the fantastic Ryan Swarts, we launched one earlier this week. You can find it here. 

I assume most of you are subscribed to Mashalist because you’re interested in the work we’re doing. With that in mind, I’ll switch all your Mashalist subscriptions to the new FM blog. You don’t need to do anything. The next post you get (hopefully later this morning) will be from the FM blog.

As for Mashalist, it will be mothballed. Eventually, I’ll set up a new blog for occasional life-in-Cambridge posts I’ve been holding back from Mashalist.

And now, a new phase …

Benkler's Book

If you want to spend some time thinking about the plate-level changes underlying our shifting news business, go get yourself a copy of Yochai Benkler’s The Wealth of Networks.

It’s an academic tome that reminds me of stuff I read in college, and didn’t understand (Habermas, Durkheim, Foucault). But Benkler resonates with me in ways that those 20^th-century stalwarts didn’t –- maybe because I’m living through the changes he’s describing. 

Most of all, he makes me optimistic. Take this passage I came across last night:

Writing a free operating system or publishing a free encyclopedia may have seemed quixotic a mere few years ago, but these are now far from delusional. Human beings who live in a material and social context that lets them aspire to such things as possible for them to do, in their own lives, by themselves and in loose affiliation with others, are human beings who have a greater realm for their agency. We can live a life more authored by our own will and imagination than by the material and social conditions in which we find ourselves. At least we can do so more effectively than we could until the last decade of the twentieth century. 

This is one of the wonderful themes of change in the news business. As individuals we are empowered to be journalists –- whether we report on events we’ve witnessed, a community we’re a part of or an issue we're investigating.

Who knows what this does for businesses. That will work itself out. The great news is that these changes can create more productive, fulfilled individuals, and a stronger, better-functioning society.

Breaking News on Gothamist

The folks at Gothamist launched our latest Faneuil Media project last week. It’s a map of breaking news in New York City. Check it out.

In addition to being plain cool, I think the map highlights some of the benefits of automatically updated content. Think about it: Readers have a new way to find out what’s going on that’s constantly updated with fresh events. Meanwhile, the folks at Gothamist don’t have to do anything. They just sit back and watch people use the page.

One other thing: The icons for this package were designed by Coryanne Sharer. I think they make the map. Way to go, Cory.

Data That Talks

Parke Wilde raised an important issue on his U.S. Food Policy blog last week: As public data becomes more accessible, we should focus on ways to pull together disparate bodies of data.

Parke explains how he used data from the Environment Working Group and CSPAN to show overlap of federal farm aid and campaign contributions.

The challenge, as Bill Allison put it on the Sunlight Foundation blog (where I found Parke’s post), is that “these disparate sets of data don't talk to one another.”

Dan Gillmor and his Berkeley class seem to be focusing on this problem. Their project in California’s 11^th Congressional district seems designed to pull together public resources (including data, I assume) to make it easier for citizen journalists to cover the race.

Opening up data the way folks at the EWG, CSPAN and many others are doing, makes it possible for masses of curious citizens to poke around and expose government rottenness. 

But to really get the masses poking around, the data needs to be highly accessible. One part of that is being able to pull together similar, separate bodies of information

Publish Data – It’s Good for Business

In an important post earlier this month, Adrian argued that news organizations need to move away from the “story-centric worldview.”

Instead of grinding information they collect into unstructured stories, he said, news sites should build operations that collect structured data and repurpose it in as many useful ways as possible.

He’s exactly right, and I’d add one point: Publishing structured, community data is good for business. 

Data? Good for business?

In cases where it’s the best way to consume information about a community, absolutely.

Think about how newspapers used to make money: Their articles were the best sources of information about their communities. That meant community members had to read the paper and businesses had to advertise in the paper. A paper’s business was built on its status as the best source of information in the community.

Today articles are not always the best sources of information.

Consider standardized testing results. If you’re a parent looking into local schools, you care about test results. But you don’t want to read an article summarizing results from across your county –- you just want to see the raw results in your town. Same goes for many other forms of data –- crime reports, campaign finance data, election results, census data, etc.

To remain the best source of information in their communities –- to protect the foundation of their businesses -- news organizations need to publish data as easily as they publish articles.

Collecting and publishing data the way Adrian suggests will also help news organizations defend against challengers.

Structuring and cleaning data is a lot of work. If your operation collects clean, structured data and takes advantage of that data, upstart publishers will have a tough time competing with you. Brad Burnham explained the idea of data as a defensive tool on the Union Square Ventures blog.

If you’re still not convinced, consider these successful online publishing businesses: NYTimes.com/movies, ESPN.com and Yahoo! Finance.

These sites all run articles, but none of them are designed with a singular focus on articles. They’re all built with the understanding that users want information that comes in many forms –- charts, showtimes, prices, video, you-name-it. Data is so important to The Times that it just bought a company that provides data for its movies section.

The community news sites that grow into successful businesses will be the ones that follow this model –- the ones that invest in data and publish information in the most useful formats possible.

Shapes, Maps & Massachusetts Campaign Contributions

At Faneuil Media we often use maps to make data more accessible to readers. Because it’s so simple and people are familiar with it, we frequently use Google’s mapping platform.

Unfortunately, Google’s API doesn’t make it easy to map shapes and areas. It’s simple to map specific points, like the location of crimes, but not areas, like neighborhoods.

To help readers really penetrate a body of geographic data, it’s often important to provide a detail-level view (specific points) AND a summary-level view (areas). But until now, we haven’t been able to do both with the Google API.

Now we can.

Last week we launched a package on Boston.com that maps campaign finance data for Massachusetts gubernatorial candidates. As in the past, we’ve plotted detail-level data on the map -- in this case, campaign contributions.

But this package is special because readers can also view summaries of the data. Readers can see that Chris Gabrieli’s contributions to his own campaign dominate Boston contributions, that Western Massachusetts is Deval Patrick country and that Tom Reilly leads fundraising in many of the state’s suburban and exurban communities.

This project stretched us further than anything else we’ve done. The data set was bigger and messier than anything we’ve worked with. Even after lots of cleanup, there were many contributions that we couldn’t find coordinates for and therefore were not able to map. Also, the layers are very resource-intensive and we spent a lot of time figuring out how to host the package.

But thanks to some amazing work on Theo’s part and a huge amount of patience at Boston.com, we addressed these problems, and ended up with a package that we’re very happy with. By building a deep, intuitive interface it’s now easy – not to mention kind of fun – to see who’s contributing to candidates. Hopefully we’ve made the election process in Massachusetts a little bit more transparent.

Now that this has been up for a few days, we’re beginning to think about next steps. If you have any thoughts or other feedback, let me know.

Serious Sunlight

Wow, the Sunlight Foundation is doing some amazing work. They’ve been operating since January, trying to use “information technology to enable citizens to learn more about what Congress and their elected representatives are doing.”

They’ve already acomplished a lot, but their Exposing Earmarks project this week really hits the ball out of the park. No need for me to repeat the praises already sung by Craig, Jeff and Jay. Just check it out.

How do you measure ... ? 'You Can't'

If you spend time thinking about investments in online classifieds and content, this piece by Harvard Business School professor Andrew McAffee is worth reading.

McAffee coined the term Enterprise 2.0 a few months ago. In this piece he contrasts evaluation of traditional corporate investments (e.g., widget assembly lines) to less-tangible technology investments (e.g., wikis). I think there are parallels with evalution of investments in classifieds and harder-to-measure online content.

This particular vignette will resonate in online newsrooms:

A little while back I was presenting the concepts and structure of my MBA course to a diverse  group of my HBS colleagues.  Pretty early on one of the professors in the Finance area asked me the question I was most dreading and least prepared for:  "Andy, what do you teach students about conducting a financial analysis of proposed IT investment?  How do you build a business case for IT?"

I was about to launch into a long-winded and poorly argued answer, but Bob Kaplan spoke up first.  "You can’t," he said.

Ned Lamont & Tolerance for Crappy Content

Earlier this week Scott Karp offered the following excellent “observations and lessons”:

- Companies used to be able to get away with making crappy products and offering crappy services because they were able to mass market people into submission and because consumers didn’t have a way to make their unhappiness widely known.

- Thanks to the proliferation of content (both “professional” and “consumer-generated”) and content channels, mass media and thus mass marketing are now dead, so there is no longer an effective way to sell crappy products and services.

- Through blogs, video sharing, and other platforms for cheap content creation and distribution, individual consumers now have a powerful way to spread the word on crappy products and services on a large scale.

The Connecticut Senate race is turing into a great case in point.

I don’t have a strong opinion about Joe Lieberman and I know nothing about Ned Lamont (except what I know from YouTube). But it seems lots of folks in Connecticut are finding Lieberman’s content kinda crappy:

Percent of Likely Voters Supporting Candidates in the Democratic Senatorial Primary:
Lieberman: 47
Lamont: 51
(7/20 Quinnipiac University Poll, via NYTimes.com)

Total Funds Raised:
Lieberman: $7,128,977
Lamont: $776,880
(Opensecrets.org)

A Distribution Deal – But of What?

This piece in Business Week (via The Local Onliner) caught my eye:

Yahoo! (YHOO ) and a loose consortium of newspaper publishers are mulling a partnership that would encompass Web classifieds, local news, and content packages based on general themes, like travel …

Newspaper companies would build a network within what is one of the Web's top destinations and win a crucial concession in today's search-engine economy: getting a cut of the ads sold around search results of their content.

No question, this is good news for the companies involved. But I hope these guys don’t think distribution of content is their only problem. The quality of their content is a more serious problem.

A lot of the best local content being produced today is coming from independent sites like Westport Now and Coastsider, not local newspaper web sites.