#jonathan stray

[onthisdayinhighschool]

What can I do about it? More and more, this is the only beat I care to cover. Accurate news is essential to know the world, but reports of what just happened do not tell you what can be done about it, at a personal level. I don’t believe that citizens have become apathetic; I believe we are overwhelmed in the face of large and complex problems where it is hard to know where to start. We already know that stories that include solutions are more engaging. The main problem is one of plausible effectiveness: If you have ten dollars or ten hours to donate, where should you put your resources? Not every problem can be helped by large numbers of small actions — but some can. You could build a whole product around the question of what the reader could do.

http://jonathanstray.com

[onaissues]

Jonathan Stray on how to protect yourself, your sources, and your scoop on sensitive stories

[onaissues]

Jonathan Stray on what every single person in your news org should be doing to secure the newsroom

[nerveandwire]

The Internet has solved the basic distribution of event-based facts in a variety of ways; no one needs a news organization to know what the White House is saying when all press briefings are posted on YouTube. What we do need is someone to tell us what it means.

Jonathan Stray, Objectivity and the decades-long shift from 'just the facts' to 'what does it mean?'

[reginasperger]

As both information and misinformation become far more widely available, journalists are being called to “move up the food chain” and pass judgment on what is truth. The fact-checking movement demonstrates this. But without the right training, there will be certain topics where journalists won’t be any better at knowing what is true than anyone else. Quotes from an expert will no longer cut it — not least because the expert is often speaking publicly anyway. (...) When there is a need for certain kinds of understanding, I want journalists to know of the existence and the uses of these remarkable ways of figuring something out. I want them to be able to produce state-of-the-art critiques of knowledge — and equally, to be able to understand and admit when something can’t actually be known. Just as crucially, they need to be able to explain the logic of their knowledge to the audience, and listen to criticism honestly. This isn’t to say the path forward is obvious. It’s often unclear how tools from other disciplines can be applied within the demands of news production, and there will be a balance between journalists applying the tools themselves versus curating sources that do. It’s all a brand new territory to explore.

Jonathan Stray in The rise of the quants, clip-and-share video, and a more diverse NPR: Some of Spark Camp’s big ideas of 2012  

[project1115-blog]

We need to get beyond counting pageviews and ad impressions and build better ways of judging how our work changes the world around us.

[aakruse]

Search engines know where the gaps between supply and demand lie, but they’re not in the business of researching new answers. Newsrooms can produce the supply, but they don’t have an understanding of the demand. Today, these two sides of the industry do not work together to close this loop. Some symbiotic hybrid of Google and The Associated Press might be an uncannily good system for answering civic questions.

Jonathan Stray » What should the digital public sphere do?

[jordanwb]