On why data could be the next offering for media companies.
Yesterday we had The Guardian´s developer advocate Chris Thorpe over for a visit. He helped us hold a workshop about developing with APIs and the implications that this can have for media companies. Very interesting and inspiring.
During his presentation, Chris mentioned the verbs that usually are associated with media production:
* creation
* fabrication
* distribution
* monetisation
He noted, insightfully, that they were all industry verbs, and could be applied to most types of industrial production. But by simply adding the prefix "co-" to all of the above, we get closer to where we should be going.
Media companies are currently adding to the 'creation' by finalizing their version of something - an article or similar. But adding the co-creation aspect would be acknowledging that their version will merely be the starting point for someone else to continue creating.
So in a world where everyone creates, what should the media be adding? Curation of stories and news is something that I, and a lot of other people, have been talking about a long time. What stuck with me from yesterdays workshop was that Chris added data to that offering. Media companies should be the curators of data, as well as stories and news.
It makes sense. If curation is choice based on preference and credibility, why limit the offering to the 'finished' products? Instead, it's all seen as a starting point for the stories or projects that are to come. If you want to rewrite the article, create a slideshow of a large set of photos, or build a web app from the data - that's your choice.
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Comments
I'm interested in the aspects of co-creation. I believe that 'data curation' could stand for much more than 'collection, hosting and sharing of data'. Just like curators in the art world have managed to establish themselves as creators (of meaning) in their own right, a data curator could offer an interactive platform for curation, visualisation, and dissemination. Substituting the word author for curator is interesting if the new breed curator manages to work his/her influence on the material to shape it and guide the unfolding narrative. Look at the success of Hans Rosling's Gapminder. As pure data it's no different from any other data provider, but the application that turns this data into compelling narrative is what facilitates the unique and captivating presentations. Could it be that smaller, more flexible and tech-savvy operations create more interesting and arresting visualizations and presentations of stories? I am thinking of Khoi Vinh’s work for the New York Times, where under his direction, stories are being unfolded over time, in-depth and using a combination of text, visuals, images and visualisations. Moving away from the standard 'article' to a thematic media-rich 'micro site'. One could further imagine such presentations taking more advantage of and harness the input and feedback of visitors/readers. This is what's happening over at Good. A kind of curated crowd-sourcing. Here the notion of co-creation is very much at work. As pure data curators, how would any media company be able to compete with the exposure, brand name and sheer muscle of companies such as Google: http://bit.ly/502DFv ?
Fredrik Jönsson, November 21, 2009
Many things to answer - but to try to summarize, I wasn't saying that this was entirely foreign from what media companies are doing today. Actually, I wrote that it made sense - because it was fairly similar. However, I see very few actually providing data (or other types of sources) freely accessible along side the regular journalism. It may not be what the average reader is after, as you say, but it may very well be what makes the company into a content platform ready to power other types of journalism. And those pieces will then reach the end consumer instead, so the two are clearly linked. As for the comparison to Reuters, I think you might be on to something there.
Björn Jeffery, November 10, 2009
The referenced earlier article by Björn Jeffery seems to point to a kind of (harvested) 'outsourcing' of the source material for news and stories. In other aspects it's not articulating any change to journalism great enough to label it 'new journalism'. Crawling the internet for data, stories and so on, may imply a shift of process while less so of product. Most media companies have always been about content curation. Regarding the notion of 'data curation', I think the last paragraph of this article is only reiterating something that has always been the case and taken for granted by every user/reader. Source material becomes article which becomes source material ... Every node is a hub, so to speak. However, I think the brand credibility many established media publishers have earned by producing high-quality finished products may be undermined by shifting focus from node to hub. It may win a new audience in the short-term, but it won't keep them. Many readers welcome some sense of closure and depth/verticality rather than being sent elsewhere infinitely. The data mash-up, the story, is what buyers/visitors/readers come for, not the data in itself. Shifting focus towards data curation fels a bit like turning say the Guardian into Reuters?
fredrik jönsson, November 8, 2009
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