event mechanics

News Ltd has anounced they’re moving to the Méthode content-management system. Méthode seems to be the favoured newsroom CMS for a number of publishers. A part of the News Ltd announcement focused on the integration of social media streams into the newsroom. This is possibly the least interesting feature in the rollout of Méthode. In most circumstances Méthode is an attractive CMS for large cross-platform publishers (newspaper, magazine, web, app, etc.) because of the way it deals with content.

What is Methode?

I’ve come up with a list of features of Méthode largely framed in terms of how I have taught my ‘Online News’ journalism unit this semester. My main focus for part of the unit was to introduce students to using a CMS for editorial production purposes. (The other focus was ‘data-driven journalism’ and presenting students with the challenge of finding, assembling, analysing and incorporating ‘big data’ into their set of practical journalistic skills.):

1. Integrated cross-channel publishing platform.
This is the “One CMS to rule them all” approach. In LOTR there was a single ring of power; in publishing land, there are integrated CMS packages that bring together all publishing channels into a single integrated production flow. Méthode is produced by Eidos Media. Eidos calls this cross-channel publishing. A properly integrated cross-channel publishing has been the ‘holy grail’ of publishing:

The holy grail of the CMS producers has been creating a onesize-fits-all solution; something which seamlessly integrates the reporters producing the content, the production journalists, and the website and print production software and hardware.

This has a few practical implications.

2. All staff engage with the same production process interface.
Everyone is (or at least can be) working through a CMS. Copy is not ‘filed’ as much as it is copied and pasted into specific fields. I am currently typing in the ‘body’ field of a ‘new post’ in WordPress. There is also a title field and various SEO fields. (I experiment with new SEO plug-ins on my site for teaching purposes.) I also have access to my site’s media library for inserting multimedia files. Méthode is integrated with industry-standard Adobe software for the designers to do their thing. Eidos even treats advertising the same way with advertising copy and so on entering the production work flow. It is not surprising that the most advanced in-house or custom content management systems I’ve seen are normally organised for advertising sales and placement.

3. Every editorial element in Méthode is a database element.
‘Data-driven journalism’ normally refers to stories produced by critically engaging with a dataset. Méthode transforms all editorial copy (and other elements) into database elements. A good example is the way Méthode handles images:

When several channels are being served from the same content base, images will be required in a wide range of formats and resolutions, both during the workflow process and for final publication. Wherever an image is published, in a print page or an online channel, it must first be tailored to the resolution and ‘colour space’ requirements of its destination.

When an image is uploaded to the CMS it auto-formats these images to be used according to the necessary standards of each page template of each publishing channel. There is a single content base which is repurposed across multiple channels. Every different element of a story/package can be published in a number of different ways, including body copy, standfirsts/ledes, headlines/titles, captions, etc. The same headline may exist as a print headline, website post title, email newsletter subject line and so on. Eidos calls repurposing of editorial elements and republishing of stories across channels ‘compound stories’:

4. Automation.
I don’t know if News Ltd print designers use templates and if they do to what degree, but Méthode enables the sophisticated use of CSS templates, which will save a great deal of time. This means copy can be posted and the formatting and design work is already done at the template stage. I imagine that some competent journalist/editors will be given responsibility of some sections without any design input (beyond the template stage) whatsoever.

Not everyone thinks that the use of templates is a good idea, however. A few creative directors will be very unhappy if the level of customisation possible from non-template design was ever completely removed from the production process. As one CMS developer told the Press Gazette a number of years ago:

The efficiency of any technological publishing solution is dependant on the amount you are willing to use templates. The CMS companies can provide this – but editors are generally unwilling to make too much use of templates on newspaper and magazine pages because they want to have the creative freedom to display stories as they see fit, so this is where the idea of having a fully integrated system breaks down.

Even in the design-heavy world of magazines, the use of templates in some parts of he production process would surely free up valuable time. There are many staff writers who have been given the unenviable task of preparing copy for email newsletters by hand normally using the editorial copy of magazine ‘contents’ pages and simply copying and pasting the headlines and standfirst/extracts that reside in the contents descriptions. Contents pages, email newsletters and other regular sections of magazines (‘Coming next issue’, ‘News’, etc.) could easily be based on templates and only require very minor tweaking.

5. Future-proofing the production process?
Méthode is an XML-based system. Basically, this is the web designer/developer/engineer way of saying that all the editorial content is being translated into an XML database. Through the use of filtering with appropriately categorised data (editorial) elements, any piece of data can be repurposed for any given XML-friendly platform, even those that do not exist yet. Eidos has already produced an iPad version of the CMS editorial interface, which basically turns the iPad into a mobile mini-newsroom.

CMS Thinking? Journalism Education

Perhaps the introduction of an integrated CMS will see other changes at News Ltd. Amy Gahran argues that “tools embody mindsets” and she suggests that journalists need to develop a ‘CMS thinking’:

Content management systems have become the core tech tool of the journo trade. These days, journalists absolutely need to know how to use a CMS — not just to file stories, but also at least the basics of how to set them up for projects, integrate stylesheets and themes with them, choose the right CMS tool for the job, integrate content from a variety of sources (including feeds, databases, and XML), and creatively distribute and promote their stories.

Gahran further develops this line of thinking in the discussion around her original post:

Think of content as modules that can be structured, mixed, mashed, and reused — rather than thinking strictly in terms of narrative stories. This is a key point where hands-on experience with a CMS affects journalistic practice. When you start thinking of your end product as a series of modules that can be configured in a story but that can also be used and distributed in other ways on your site and beyond your site, that can affect how you go about doing the reporting.

We’ve decided on using WordPress in class. It is a cheap and relatively powerful system. It does not really allow for a properly integrated approach across non-online channels, but it does present the opportunity for students to begin developing their ‘CMS thinking’. I use the Edit Flow plugin to transform the blog-based CMS into something closer to an actual newsroom CMS. As part of the changes to the UC Journalism course we are creating a final year ‘Newsroom’ unit that is designed to provide students with the experience of using a CMS in limited ‘newsroom’ conditions. We are gradually going to incorporate greater functionality into our WordPress-based publishing platform.

As a sidenote, the font I’m using in headers does not render accents above letters (the é in Méthode) and apparently neither does The Australian’s font package.

“With the emergence of a privileged mediocrity, the innocent life became accessible to the masses.”

One of the more interesting essays in the Media Archive collection is on Contemporary Nihilism: Innocence Reorganised. I have elsewhere described a quality of this as ‘performative stupidity’. From ‘Contemporary Nihilism’:

The innocent thrive on everyday ritual; it’s what makes them happy. A failing washing machine suffices to drive one up the wall: The bloody thing simply must function. The plight of materiality is that it’s always breaking down, failing, malfunctioning and generally behaving in odd ways, and that it cannot be quietly replaced. Untrammeled consumption holds a promise that from now on, nothing will ever happen.

Foucault points out how the neoliberal mode of governance seeks to control events (plague, recession, etc.) more than it attempts to control a population. Contemporary anaesthetics sets up populations on autopilot (or perhaps alienpilot) so the aggregate system (and constituent distributions of greater access to opportunity for some over others) reproduces itself. ‘Innocence’ is this anaesthetic nexus; an assemblage of human and alien being.

[Desire] is tempted by the offer of a secure existence. By displaying good behaviour, one is assured that the ongoing changes in the vast world outside will not cause any catastrophes. Rebellion is punished and virtually pointless.

Rather than rebellion, my response is to always accelerate beyond the current implicit demands for productivity to the space of opportunity that exceeds the requirement to be functional: I’ll do my 8 hours of work in 6 hours, then do 4 hours of my ‘own’ work. I do this because I am a child of neoliberalism and because I can. It is all possible, if you are a freak (and childless, familiness and even friendless in extreme circumstances). There are other ways to accelerate beyond the structural demands of the system, however. For example, harness the surplus value of others to maximise the freedom from the burden of maximal-productive functionality. This is a neo-marxist rearticulation of the neoliberal discourse of ‘opportunity’ that properly locates entrepreneurial-nodes in their place. Hence, the ideological function of The Pursuit of Happyness. The maximising-functionality mode of anaesthetic control is failing however; as the modulating system of constraints continually accelerates and individuals and class cohorts reach to the future to free up time in the present with credit and so on, or despair.
As I’ve witnessed in various workplaces, those incapable of accelerating beyond the system of control, or keeping up with the increased demands for functionality, are therefore attacked on two fronts: 1. from within the system for “rocking the (anaesthetic) boat” and 2. by those that are capable of accelerating beyond the system of control. “Tolerance means envy of the other’s simplicity.” Is there a tactical anaesthetics? A return or reversal, to revel in the dynamic cell you’ve been given? Acceleration-beyond is too hard to maintain, it lapses into a resolute ironic accommodation and becomes absolutely cynical. The use of revolutionary soviet era motifs by creatives in the advertising industry is a deployment of irony so as to cope with one’s intimate implication in the anaesthetic mode of control. Witness Twitter.
Hence the travesty of contemporary journalism. Journalism is a profession organised around always-already reaching beyond the anaesthetic status quo. It needs to get the ‘story’. Yet, contemporary news-based media have very little interest in disrupting ‘innocence’. Scandal is a resource for reproducing the anaesthetic conditions that delivers an audience cohort for media to sell to advertisers as much as it delivers a voting-bloc of citizens to politicians.

The others are scrutinized distrustfully, in a form of surveillance which it is impossible to sanction since there no longer exists any common exchange to define a norm. Normality can no longer define any aberration. Only drug-related nuisance, streetwalkers’ districts, travelers’ sites and refugees’ centers may now temporarily unite citizens in mobs, for fear of declining property values.

The Herald Sun leaking the 2012 gold Logie winner is useful for understanding how Google News works differently to regular Google.

The Herald Sun/Logies incident is very useful for pointing out the different ways Google approaches the indexing of general websites as compared to the indexing of news websites. For those unfamiliar with Google’s ranking algorithms, the big shift Google introduced in the 2000s was to rank web pages based on the number of inbound links. Of course, there is no point trying to rank news website content on the number of inbound links as the point of news is to be ‘breaking’ therefore it won’t have any inbound links at all. News website publishers can either let Google figure out their news content or they can submit a sitemap.

How Google News Works

Google ranks news websites based on a number of factors. Google says: There are no human editors selecting stories or deciding which ones deserve top placement. Ranking in Google News is determined based on a number of factors, including:

•Freshness of content
•Diversity of content
•Rich textual content
•Originality of content

It makes me wonder about whether there are alternative strategies for maximising traffic within a single news-based website. Do news website designers think about how much traffic they think they’ll get from Google News searches as compared to the traffic from Google ‘search everything’ searches? Why is this important? The design strategies for maximising user activity and time on site will be different for a regular website as compared to news website when both are trying to maximise ranking on the search engine results page (SERP). Over the weekend I asked on twitter if any news websites have a hybrid approach, with some sections (‘channels’ or ‘verticals’) classified as ‘news’ and optimised for Google News and other sections designed to cluster or curate ‘news’ content and SEO for Google ‘search everything’. I’m very interested to find out if anyone has approached the Google everything/news problem like this. For example, the Guardian sometimes has ‘project’ pages that bring together a series of different stories about a single topic, but I am not sure if this is designed as a hybrid SEO approach. Here is the Reading the Riots series page.

The other possibility is that Google indexes news content as general web content after a certain period of time, but I have not found any information about this in Google’s support information.

Last week in Online News we discussed the tension that exists between editorial judgment based on ‘journalistic gut feeling’ and a publishing strategy organised around search engine optimisation. Students were introduced to Google Analytics and I went through a brief history of online metrics. The history is a brief but important one and tracks the development of online metrics from early use of ‘hits’ (up to mid-2000s) to slightly more sophisticated appreciation of ‘unique visitors’ to the contemporary approach that draws on both ‘website analytics’ combined with ‘user analytics’. The two main ways that ‘editorial quality’ is judged with online media enterprises is in terms of the number of ‘unique visitors’ or ‘time on page/site’. I am sure both are tracked by most online publishers, but ‘time on page/site’ is more important for a super-niche market media outlets. ‘User analytics’ relies on users logging into unique accounts so specific activity for individuals can be aggregated into marketable chunks for ad sales teams.

This post is based on a comment I left in reponse to a post on Prof Mark Pearson’s blog where Pearson outlines his reservations regarding the suggested News Media Council as a recommendation of the Finkelstein Independent Media Inquiry report and my colleague at the University of Canberra, Jason Wilson, agrees with Pearson’s points. I’ll quote Jason’s comment below because it sums up Person’s points and briefly respond. Then I turn to Pearson’s example and argue that the effect of judgements made by the News Media Council would actually benefit advocacy journalism.

Jason:

This represents an impost and a raising of the barriers to entry for small publishers. The key points made by Mark here, which I agree with, is that (i) this constitutes a de facto licensing scheme for news media, which operates by determining who and who isn’t subject to this regulation (ii) because any disputed outcomes will end up in the courts, small publishers may either be ruined or intimidated into compliance because of their lack of resources. The solution to the problems the report raises is, generally, more media, more voices. This is another piece of regulation that makes it more difficult for independent voices to emerge.

I am not sure what the ‘barrier’ is that Jason is describing. The report rules out economic sanctions (such as fines). The suggested News Media Council is designed to be as user friendly as possible, so I imagine that this would mean remote video conferencing participation or online submissions.

Pearson raises a very good point in his post regarding the character of protections for small publishers:

And what if such a Council orders a leading environmental news site or magazine to publish an apology to a mining magnate for the ethical breach of publishing a ‘biased’ and inaccurate report about the company’s waste disposal practices, based on sensitive material from confidential sources? Where would the power and resources rest in a court appeals process in that situation?
To publish such an apology or retraction would be an affront to the blogger, and in their principled belief it would be a lie to do so.

Firstly it is necessary that everyone agrees that small publishers will be subject to the same laws as they are now (regarding defamation, racial vilification, etc.), then I argue that rather than a bariier and a chilling effect of free speech that the opposite will occur.

The worst that could possibly happen with a journalistic report that draws on confidential source is that the News Media Council demands that a journalistic report has to be withdrawn from circulation. The journalist/publisher has to weigh up the decision to publish knowing that the journalistic document be withdrawn or the prospect of giving up the identity of a confidential source. Pearson argues that to publish such a retraction “would be an affront to the blogger, and in their principled belief it would be a lie to do so.”

Principles of journalistic ideals are fine if we lived in an ideal world. We do not live in such an ideal world. I prefer the reality of journalism to the ideals. What will happen if the above scenario involving a direct action group (say GetUp!) creates an online news media enterprise and publishes a journalistic article about environmental issues and a mining company? Or better yet, say the News Media Council itself becomes corrupt, and a journalist publishes a story relying on a confidential source about the corruption of the Council itself?

The journalistic article will be published. Mining company, member of the News Media Council or whatever will lodge a complaint. In three or four days a decision will be handed down that in a worst case scenario (beyond the conditions already in place for existing laws regarding defamation, racial vilification, etc.) means the journalistic article is withdrawn.

Both Jason and Pearson suggest that this will be offensive to journalists and/or media publishers because of a principled refusal to withdraw a published article. Offensive to principles or not, I think most publishers of advocacy journalism would welcome the News Media Council complaints mechanism, even if they have to withdraw their article. Why?

I suspect, and without it actually happening I can’t really frame it more strongly, that this will be a classic case of the Streisand Effect. The mining company, member of the News Media Council or whatever will draw attention to something it does not want attention drawn to.

I am making a number of assumptions of course.

The first is that rather than defining journalistic practice as establishing the truth and therefore it matters whether or not a journalistic report is retracted, I am instead assuming journalistic practice in the current media ecology operates as an economy of attention. There is a surplus of media messages and catalysing audience attention around an issue or event is precisely what the sort of advocacy journalism example Pearson provides is attempting to do. Does anyone have any doubts whatsoever what the response would be from the ‘public’ (which is at a minimum other journalists and interested parties) if such an order to retract a journalistic article was handed down? I am largely following the description of the news-based media industry by Stanley Cohen in the preface to the third editon of his famous Folk Devils and Moral Panics (basically he outlines how ‘moral panics’ are a tool for directing attention).

There are other assumptions regarding the details of the implementation of such a regulatory body (ie lodging a complaint is public, but this is not essential). Also that involvement from the News Media Council will commence only after the lodging of a complaint, and hence the publication of a journalistic article, which I think is a sensible assumption.

I can foresee the release/publication of such advocacy journalism reports via email (so it exists forever on mail servers, regardless of the News Media Council’s findings) late on a Thursday or Friday so it remains ‘live’ for at least a number of days. This way such reports will still catalyse critical attention in an audience around specific issues.

The Federal Government’s Independent Media Inquiry published its report today by Mr Ray Finkelstein QC assisted by Professor Matthew Ricketson. It is a massive report and will take some time to work through. This hasn’t stopped Tim from mUmbrella already getting stuck into the report around the issue of what sorts of ‘online media enterprises’ (as the Convergence Review calls them) will be classified as ‘news media’ for the purposes of any posssible regulation.

Tim has a blog post and a news piece about the issue. The news piece is some early analysis, and the blog post raises the example of a blog belonging to one of Tim’s mates. The blog is called Banana Watch and consists of photos of banana peels. The issue is regarding whether or not ‘Banana Watch’ would be subject to any new regulatory body. This is a pertinent question as it raises the issue of a multitude of long tail bloggers (of which I have been one for 8 or so years) becoming part of the regulatory scheme. In both of the posts on mUmbrella, Tim quotes an extract from the report. In the news piece he writes:

On which media would be covered, the Inquiry said: “There are many newsletter publishers and bloggers, although no longer part of the ‘lonely pamphleteer’ tradition, who offer up-to-date reflections on current affairs. Quite a number have a very small audience. There are practical reasons for excluding from the definition of ‘news media’ publishers who do not have a sufficiently large audience. If a publisher distributes more than 3000 copies of print per issue or a news internet site has a minimum of 15 000 hits per annum it should be subject to the jurisdiction of the News Media Council, but not otherwise. These numbers are arbitrary, but a line must be drawn somewhere.”
Finkelstein appears to be using the word “hits” to describe page views. 15000 per annum would equate to just 40 page views a day.

The ‘second change’ Tim quotes above discusses various (outdated) ways of thinking about inclusion as a measure of traffic and looked at this traffic issue alone as a point of contention. The context of this quoted extract in the document is the NZLC definition of ‘news’ to which the rport is suggesting changes (page 295):

For the purposes of the law the “news media” includes any publisher, in any medium, who meets the following criteria:
· a significant proportion of their publishing activities must involve the generation and/or aggregation of news, information and opinion of current value;
· they disseminate this information to a public audience;
· publication must be regular;
· the publisher must be accountable to a code of ethics and a complaints process.

Banana Watch, entertaining? Maybe. But does it belong to “news, information [or]opinion of current value”? In anyway that isn’t purely for amusement, then no.

Point 11.61 (page 294) of the document defines news media: “The news media are those that gather, analyse and disseminate news, often with their own opinions added.”

The first question that needs to be put to online publishers: is your content of news, information or opinion of current value? If the answer is ‘yes’ then move to next question. Next question: how much traffic do you get, etc.?

What about the “non-news entities” like Banana Watch? Point 11.68 (page 295 and immediately below the extract Tim selectively quotes as above) “it would be appropriate to permit non-news entities which see value in the role of the News Media Council to opt into the system. That, however, would likely be a small part of the overall regulatory system.” Yeah? Opt in or not for sites that are ‘non-news entities’.

EDIT 3/3/12: It seems like there are two misreadings of the report emerging.

The first is Tim’s above that mistakes the report’s focus on the functioning of news media for a focus on news content. The report does not seek to define ‘news’. It seeks to define the ‘news media’.

The second is from Chris Berg of the IPA who suggests that the recommendations of the report are equivalent to a licensing regime. Chris is looking at it from the consumer side and worried about restricting access to content (that is what a licensing regime does). I am not sure how this is possible when there is no discussion of restricting different forms of content at all in the report.

Disclaimer: Prof Ricketson works in my department at UC and I made a submission to the Inquiry.