Validation.



Validation.
A few months ago, the first mobile expression of a news concierge materialized in the form of NOD – News On Demand. NOD is an iPhone app that tailors news to the user’s available time and attention by providing three important stories daily, in two sizes, and allowing to find them from a catch up calendar.
It’s about separating signal from noise to a quite extreme extent (wtf, 3 news per day only??!) and I’ve received many questions – at presentations, in meet-ups and conferences – about the selection process of these 3 stories. Why only 3? And why these and not others? But the question that people are really asking me is: define “important”.
So, I tried to explain what I talk about when I talk about “important” news:
Interesting: is the story telling you something insightful, necessary or fascinating about the world we live in today?
Matter: will the story also matter tomorrow? Is this the beginning of something that you may hear from in the next few days (think: a trial start, a cop killing leading to protests)? Is this the conclusion of an event that will make history?
Pressing: is the event very likely to be in conversations with friends or at work today, or in a few days maybe? Then you may want to be caught up on it.
Original: is there an odd and unique angle to an apparently “light” news story? Taking the opportunity of George Clooney’s wedding to learn about the great work of human rights lawyer Amal Alamuddin makes a celebrity story more important.
Relevant: our users send us a lot of signals through their behavior. We try to act on them : for example, our users give a lot of “nods” to stories on climate change, so when Chile is flooded or a typhoon of uninque size hits the Philippines, it seems more relevant than a man past-retiring age saying he’ll retire.
Trending: is the story making headlines in a wide array of outlets, including major publications, aggregators like Google News and social media like Twitter and Facebook? Will our users wonder why everyone’s making a fuss about this?
Accurate: too often, stories are broken and then turn out to be falsely stated or completely trumped up. Fake kidnappings, murder charges that are dropped, people tested for Ebola who make headlines for 2 days cause they’re found to be healthy after all… So I’d rather wait 24 hours. For breaking news and breaking corrections, there are other outlets.
New: is the story about something we didn’t know yet? A lot of “NEWs” is merely an update in a longer story arch or a quote ping-pong (think Hillary’s email-gate, negotiation processes and plane crash theories).
Timely: obviously, all the stories we curate need to be fresh. If we put out an edition every 24 hours, the events have to have been reported on in the same time-frame.
There will be instances where at least one of these criteria may apply to something that doesn’t show up in the daily NOD edition. This is not enough, though: stories need to score, if not all, as many of those criteria as possible. Sometimes, I push the boundaries a bit: I do this on purpose to trigger user feedback and make NOD better (please write when you disagree!)
Of course, this is anything but perfect. Being human, we shouldn’t aim for perfection anyway, but for continuous improvement. So, I want to know: how do you define important news?
Late last year, I found myself hopelessly stuck. I had been experimenting quite successfully (translation=gathered interesting feedback) with Newstapes for almost a year. Trying to bring this timely news experience to a mobile device, however, I seemed to hit the same wall over and over again. While the idea of adapting content to your time sounded attractive to the users harassed at various cafés and commuter hubs, how to do it effectively didn’t appear very compelling so far. No love, no hate, just encouraging smiles. The worst place to be in.
Until a woman made this fantastic comment: “news is not that important“. Her remark was both sobering and life-saving: it led me to reframe the question from what I was doing to why it mattered. And to question the purpose of getting news in general.
I set up an online survey to ask a random sample of online users about their attitude to news. 70 people were kind enough to participate. Their answers were essential to help me design my next timely news experiment, NOD: News On Demand, an attention-centric mobile app that has received the support of the Knight Prototype Fund. Their answers are also very interesting to hear for anyone in the business of creating news content.
Here’s what they said.
Why do you read the news? The top reason mentioned is “be a better citizen” (36%), followed by “to make business decisions” (13%). My take-away: don’t insult your reader’s intelligence. There may be value to serve news vegetables. The trick may just be to present it like a Michelin-starred restaurant rather than prison food.
But something else deemed to be very interesting. A whole third of the respondents offered an “other” reason to those offered (sound smart, entertain, be entertained, argue, just because). One theme came back over and over again in those spontaneous responses: the idea of finding one’s place in a bigger cosmic setting. Here’s how they said it: “to understand the world better”, “to improve my knowledge of the world”, “because I want to know what happens around me and in the world”, “because I am curious about the way the world works”, “to see what’s happening outside of my cave” (and many more variations)… This idea suggests a quest for a sense of general awareness of someone’s surrounding, and a curiosity for global and diverse matters, that could be distinguished from the wish to become an expert on anything through the media…
Now that we know why people get news, let’s look at how they go about it. Question nr.2 was: what matters when you get news? (multiple answers allowed) Here’s what doesn’t matter: Facebook likes! Embedded video! So maybe we can save some valuable space on a mobile screen now. What does seem to matter…. is the source. A reassuring 40% of people picked the fact that it comes “from a trusted source” as the number 1 criteria that matters when they get the news. The second most important item was “it’s recent” (21%), followed by an “impact on my daily life” (10%). Also, longer detailed content (8%) seemed more important than “short” (5%). One explanation could be that, in “other” reasons suggested by the users the notion of “learning” or getting “new insights” came up several times.
Having in mind that news is “not that important” and therefore competing for attention with many other things in a user’s daily life, I asked what was more and less important than news. Here’s how we fare:
Some good context to keep in mind…
Finally, the last question was an open-ended wild card, planted to gather maybe some surprising use cases or odd views: “what’s special about your attitude to news?“,I wondered. Here’s how users perceive or describe their views and routines of getting information:
This experiment, although led on a very small scale and totally randomly sampled, has proven to be very insightful and interesting. I would like to extend again my gratitude to all the participants who helped me advance my project this way. Also, as a news producer, I believe we should check in with our users regularly. I will definitely try to do so more often.
The customer comes first. What seems obvious for most industries seems still hard to find in the news industry. Maybe because we are still conflicted about who’s our customer – advertiser or reader/viewer. So, for those who still need some convincing, here are 3 good reasons, from prominent thinkers, to put readers first.
Slowly (why of course!) but surely, the “slow news movement” is becoming part of the media conversation. This week, online magazine Journalism.co.uk dedicated a podcast to the question “Is is time to slow down the news?”
It features Newstapes and De Correspondent, but also more recent players to the game, like The Charta founders Carolina Are and Charles-Edouard van de Put. They just launched a Kickstarter campaign to fund their “slow news magazine”, that would wait for events to unfold before starting to cover them.
The Charta and De Correspondent are both exploring an interesting territory as they are trying to prove that “slow news” does not equal putting out a weekly magazine but really is more about redesigning the content for the age of the permanent update. Listen here.
Friend and colleague Simon Decreuze shared this excellent piece on Facebook earlier today. The problem with too much information is a great article from Aeon, totally worth the 7-8 minutes it takes to get through it. Why? Because for once, and unlike what the title might imply, it is NOT just another piece on FOMO, information overload, filter bubbles and the likes. It is a good and deep look at what it actually means to be faced with “too much information” and how it relates to WHY we actually want information: to make sense of the world we live in:
Knowledge has a point when we start to find and make connections, to weave stories out of it, stories through which we make sense of the world and our place within it. It is the difference between memorising the bus timetable for a city you will never visit, and using that timetable to explore a city in which you have just arrived. When we follow the connections – when we allow the experience of knowing to take us somewhere, accepting the risk that we will be changed along the way – knowledge can give rise to meaning. And if there is an antidote to boredom, it is not information but meaning.
Read it in full here.
Just saw this on Nieman Lab: “The Guardian experiments with a robot-generated newspaper“. Called The Long Good Read, this new publication is a weekly digest of the “best longform stories of the previous seven days”.
The philosophy behind the product fits perfectly into a “slow” approach of news. Nieman Lab writes:
Jemima Kiss, head of technology for The Guardian, said The Long Good Read is another attempt at finding ways to give stories new life beyond the day they’re published: “It’s just a way of reusing that content in a more imaginative way and not getting too hung up on the fact it’s a newspaper.”
The algorithm put behind the experiment is merely a way of making the selection more efficient. But it may promise more future computer-assisted selection of content that ends up being printed…
The project overall reminds me of The Guardian weekly I subscribed to years ago, which was a digest of the world’s news stories published in the British paper.
Mediactive.com: LAX shooting again highlights the need for a slow news approach
“The closer we are (in time) to a major event, the more likely that reports about it will be wrong. Believe nothing until there’s better evidence than unnamed “sources” or the other speculation that passes for journalism even from our supposedly finest organizations.“
Young people (18-30 yo) spend almost half as much time reading, listening or watching the news than their grandparents, according to Pew Research.
According to Poynter, this is terrible news for the news. “News organizations clearly and correctly see digital readership as vital to their future. But again, this data suggests that expectations have to be modest with respect to regaining the huge audience the media once enjoyed.”…
According to Jeff Jarvis, this is proof that Millenials are just smarter (I told you, “lazy” is the new “intelligent”!) in the way they access news. Thanks to tools like Twitter and Circa they don’t have “to sift through a newspaper to find what matters to them and more time sitting, passively watching an hour or more of local and national TV news to get a one-size-fits-all summary.”
Interestingly, the author of Buzzmachine comes up with a service to make the experience more efficient overall… NewsPal.
“I want News Pal to be an emergent system that watches what I watch in news and feeds me accordingly with no effort on my part. If it sees that I watch news about Android, it should prioritize Android news. If it sees that I stop caring about Android after I buy a phone, it should stop caring for me. If it sees that I never read sports, it shouldn’t give me football stories. If it knows where I live and work, it should give me relevant news for those locations. Of course, this system should also give me the news that everyone will want to know, feeding me reports on the Kenyan mall attack even if I haven’t shown an attraction to Kenyan news. Editors recognize those breakthrough stories. So does Google News’ algorithm.
I also want News Pal to cut through the worsening clutter of repetition. (…) In the net, my News Pal would give me greater relevance because it knows me, higher quality because it knows news sources, and greater efficiency because it reduces the noise in news.“
Sounds cool and oddly familiar, doesn’t it? Like he’s the cousin of some News Concierge or something… ^^
As a 2013 Knight fellow, I spent the past 10 month working on a way to make news consumption more time efficient. I placed myself in the vast “slow news movement” (hence this site), as I focused my work on allowing people to catch up at convenient times, rather than helping them spend less time reading the news (say hi to Cir.ca, Summly!)
The result of my explorations became a web-based prototype, The Newstapes. And a memorable talk in the Bing Auditorium at Stanford, on July 12, where I introduce the concept behind all this. Meet the News Concierge!
I am now working on taking this project to the next step. Any thoughts, interest, ideas are most welcome :)
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