Is Social Media killing journalism ?
It is undeniable that social media transformed journalism. Are journalists going to be replaced in the future by citizens reporting using social media ? Millions use their phone to report what’s happening around them and are the first to provide accurate on-location information. The amount of delivered information is huge and if you already tried searching for a specific information about a topic on Twitter you may have noticed that it’s a real anarchy. None of the content is ordered and most of the information is really repetitive.
But still, these millions of people are still observing events and being the first one to report. The United Nations didn’t get it apparently since they are still sending over observers. Sending over observers to Syria won’t help. We already know what’s happening thanks to social media.
So what can be done to improve the reading experience ?
Curation is the answer. Curation is not a new concept. Every newspaper has been doing it since the beginning. The goal is to find what’s relevant to mention by confirming information coming from a wide variety of sources.
Storify is an excellent example of how curation can be used to tell stories. On Storify, both mainstream media and individuals can use the curation tools to tell their story.
As a hacker, I believe all information should be free. A real democracy relies on a healthy press where anyone can speak up and can unleash the truth about any kind of abuse.
I see you coming :
So you believe I should be spammed with ads while reading my newspaper so the newspaper can continue to be free ? You want to kill journalism as a job ?
Most mainstream newspaper tried selling their paper edition online. People weren’t buying it and they suddenly started blaming the web and claimed that the web were killing them.
Well I don’t think they are doing it right. First, keep in mind that information can be copied at a ridiculously low cost. So trying to charge the same price for a digital version makes no sense to me. If you want to succeed in the digital age, just follow Steve Jobs advise that is true for any kind of digital content : apps, music, books, newspaper …
Price aggressively and go for volume
But this isn’t enough. People won’t be buying information that could be found elsewhere on the web. You need to provide something different, augmented news. Here are a few examples of how you can distinguish yourself from the others and succeed in getting people to actually pay for your content. Each of these differentiation factors can create jobs. Journalism isn’t dying, it’s transforming.
Curation
This is the most obvious one. A good curation is essential. Curation is a difficult task and depends on your readers. Once you targeted your audience you’ll be able to curate way easier the news to only bring what matters to them. That’s what they are paying you for.
How is the web helping curation ?
Collective curation is being done by people sharing the same set of interests on Hacker News and works pretty well in my opinion. The upvoting and downvoting system is one of the first of it’s kind in massive collective curation.
Analysis
Anyone can post on Twitter and curate tweets about a specific topic selecting those that look the most interesting to you. But one can’t do an in-depth analysis of a specific topic without having enough expertise about it. This is generally where free newspapers are doing a horrible job. They are assigning very complex topics to redactors that don’t have any special knowledge of the topic.
On the other side, the Guardian (UK), the New-York Times (US) and LeMonde.fr are some of my favorites newspapers because they succeed in having redactors for each specific topic that has a deep knowledge about the topic. And this is definitely priceless. I can easily pay for an Economist weekly edition if it’s full of analysis of news by people qualified about a specific topic but I would never pay just to have information without any analysis of these same events.
These is one place though on the internet where “Ask a specialist columns” are being replaced. Quora is a Q&A website where specialists provide extraordinary answers related to the topics they are following. A lot of answers on Quora are posted by leading specialists in the questioned field. It’s the Wikipedia of Q&A.
Data Collection & Visualization
A lot of information can be collected using social media. But unfortunately, humans are bad with numbers and these are not often meaningful.
I would pay a lot to be given an interactive way of visualizing this data precisely (it can be mapped, put on dynamic graphs or brought to life with info-graphics).
Some of the leading experts in this field are of course the Guardian and OWNI (fr).
Of course, building these tools are easier with money but I can only encourage hackers to open-source visualizations tools which can be used for other datasets.
There is definitely something going on with journalism. New devices with new censors will offer even more advanced possibilities and I’m very curious to see where this is taking us. The job of the journalist is not disappearing. It’s only being transformed by taking advantage of new tools.
PS : This article isn’t related to any new event. I know social media, cameras in phones and other platforms have been there for a few years already. I just found some inspiration to try to sum up what were the jobs that were being transformed
How to record your Ycombinator Application
You probably know that a video is required for the Ycombinator application. It needs to be spontaneous and the best way to do it is just to record a video-call.
Last March, when I applied to Ycomb I had been looking for a while on the web about the best way to record a video-call. I found some plug-ins for Skype that allowed me to record my incoming calls. But it turned out to become really messy with several video calls.
Today, Google announced Hangouts on Air. Thanks to Hangouts on Air you can record you hangout to Youtube and have a very high quality video of your multi-camera video recording. Hangouts are a great product and the technology behind it is just huge.
Other features include :
Broadcast publicly. By checking “Enable Hangouts On Air,” you can broadcast your live hangout—from the Google+ stream, your YouTube channel or your website—to the entire world.
See how many viewers you’ve got. During your broadcast, you can look inside the hangout to see how many people are watching live.
Record and re-share. Once you’re off the air, we’ll upload a public recording to your YouTube channel, and to your original Google+ post. This way it’s easy to share and discuss your broadcast after it’s over.
Watch the video about the Hangouts on Air
Functional Programming
I haven’t been doing much functional programming yet but I’m really excited to get started with Scala next year.
I just read a few lines about Functional Programming by Swizec and I thought it was worth a try.
The way I think about code now is a waterfall of data. You have data and every function in the chain is a ledge. The data stops falling, changes course a bit, perhaps even changes some properties, and falls onward to the next function.
In the end you have a pool. This is where your data ends up after falling through many functions and being changed. But then it flows onward to the next function, or wherever you might need it.
You might say this is really procedural programming, but I don’t like side-effects, imperative bits of code and so on. It’s still functional programming, but this is how my brain understands code. Your mileage might vary.
Welcome to Apple
Just found a picture on Instagram of a greeting’s note that employees get their first day at Apple. Since it was inspiring I thought it was worth sharing.
There’s work and there’s your life’s work.
The kind of work that has your fingerprints all over it. The kind of work that you’d never compromise on. That you’d sacrifice a weekend for. You can do that kind of work at Apple. People don’t come here to play it safe. They come here to swim in the deep end.
They want their work to add up to something. Something big. Something that couldn’t happen anywhere else.
Welcome to Apple