Tag Archives: atlantic

Participation

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Another noteworthy Atlantic article on Obama, this time on his plans to use the web and technology in governing:

What Obama seems to promise is, at its outer limits, a participatory democracy in which the opportunities for participation have been radically expanded. He proposes creating a public, Google-like database of every federal dollar spent. He aims to post every piece of non-emergency legislation online for five days before he signs it so that Americans can comment. A White House blog-also with comments-would be a near certainty. Overseeing this new apparatus would be a chief technology officer.

See also:

Obama’s machine

Nei til pretensiøs blogging!

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Barack Obama photo by clockwerks

Lett forsinket slutter jeg meg til Espens nyttårsforsett: ett innlegg per dag må da være mulig å få til. En velplassert lissepasning i form av rett lenke til rett tid er som oftest bedre enn en møysommelig uttenkt og anstrengt verdensforbedrende epistel.

I dag må det handle om den amerikanske presidentvalgkampen. Andrew Sullivan skrev et glødende anbefalingsessay for Barack Obama i desembernummeret av Atlantic. Konklusjonen:

At a time when America’ls estrangement from the world risks tipping into dangerous imbalance, when a country at war with lethal enemies is also increasingly at war with itself, when humankind’ls spiritual yearnings veer between an excess of certainty and an inability to believe anything at all, and when sectarian and racial divides seem as intractable as ever, a man who is a bridge between these worlds may be indispensable. We may in fact have finally found that bridge to the 21st century that Bill Clinton told us about. Its name is Obama.

Samme Sullivan blogger på magasinets nettsider, og har en viktig observasjon i dag som fort kan overses av veldig Clinton-vennlige norske medier (og opinion): Clinton-dynastiet var og er veldig upopulære blant amerikanske medier. De følte seg ofte ført bak lyset i Bill Clintons presidenttid. Dette gir Obama en stor fordel. Atlantic plasserte Sullivans Obama-hyllest på forsiden. Det er et rimelig klart signal.

Sullivan viser også til David Brooks i New York Times, som tar fram de store ordene om Obamas Iowa-seier:

Whatever their political affiliations, Americans are going to feel good about the Obama victory, which is a story of youth, possibility and unity through diversity – the primordial themes of the American experience. And Americans are not going to want to see this stopped. When an African-American man is leading a juggernaut to the White House, do you want to be the one to stand up and say No?

Men som Sullivan peker på: det er akkurat det Hillary nå må gjøre, hvis hun fortsatt ønsker å vinne.

(Foto: clockwerks. Med Creative Commons-lisens.)

Timing in journalism and how to improve it

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Monday this week, Karl Rove resigned as advisor to President Bush. Yesterday, The Atlantic unveiled its September edition, with a cover story about… Karl Rove. The article wasn’t of the type you can produce in a couple of days, so the Rove story must have been planned for quite some time.

Perfect timing of this kind isn’t possible to achieve very often, and timing in journalism certainly is no science. No art, either, maybe more like a craft. Sometimes it’s very straightforward — you don’t have to be a genius to know that you must plan the coverage of an election campaign that takes place every four years at the same time. But for other topics, you must be able to make informed guesses about what to concentrate on and present to the readers at what time. And this doesn’t apply only to magazine and long-form journalism.

I think there are basically two questions the editorial team can ask itself in the idea discussions: which issues do we want to report on in the coming months/year? And which issues do we assume that our readers want us to report on? If you don’t have any answer to the first question, you don’t have any publisistic will of your own and should probably be doing something else. The second question is trickier. Here you both need the team’s combined imagination and some facts. You could poll the readers, but you also want to surprise them and give them information and experiences they didn’t know they were looking for. The facts that help you guess can come from readers’ panels, focus groups, analysis of statistical data uncovering demographic and economic changes, etc. A discussion forum on your website could be very useful. Internal idea seminars where you bring in external experts on important topics could be extremely helpful. But I think the most useful tool is simply to involve the staff in a continous search for the best ideas, and give them some time to develop them, guided by the editors. Hence, the best tool is actually an intelligent recruitment policy and an open culture of idea sharing internally (journalists can be very protective of their ideas, so this is easier said than done).

Editors that combine this kind of semi-long time perspective with day-to-day improvisation will be more successful over time, at least I believe so. There’s nothing more gratifying than to see the story you have planned for half a year enter the public’s imagination at the right time — and then observe what the public debate adds to it.

I want that photograph

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In a wonderful Atlantic article (sub.req.) about the architecture photographer Julius Shulman, Virginia Postrel writes:

An architectural photograph can conjure three possible desires: “I want that photograph,” “I want that building,” or “I want that life.” Shulman’ls best work evokes all three. At a time when the public thought of modernism as a cold, impersonal style suited only for office buildings, he made its houses look seductively human. His photos do not merely record modern architecture, California style; they sell it.

By looking at the photos displayed in the online Shulman exhibition, I for one understood exactly what she means!

The article also contains an interesting discussion of how modern architecture has taken different forms in the very different physical and mental environments of California and New York.

The small things that matter

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People who publish something – anything, please listen to what The Atlantic’s copy chief Marge duMond says in the latest newsletter from the magazine:

The copy editors also make sure that all articles conform to The Atlantic’ls house style, and that the logic of every sentence – and of each article as a whole – flows smoothly. Seemingly small elements play a big part. “We take care of visible details – making sure that things look right, that we have consistent capitalization and correct spelling,” duMond says. “By getting these little things right, we help the reader trust us to get the big things right.”

Exactly. It doesn’t help to get the big things right if the reader doesn’t trust you – because you didn’t put in all the work that’s needed to get the little things right.

Does participation generate loyalty?

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A group of researchers at the University of Oslo have interviewed 37 Norwegian media executives about their motivations for experimenting with different kinds of audience participation (allowing comments on news articles, reader forums, text messages published during TV debates, among others). These are the top 10 reasons, according to forskning.no:

1. Audience loyalty

2. New revenue streams

3. Innovation

4. Building the brand

5. Access to more sources

6. Immediate response

7. Political legitimation

8. Round the clock service

9. Democratization

10. Meeting need to participate

19 out of 37 respondents put “building loyalty” on top of the list. 31 of 37 had this as one of the top three. The researchers are not certain if the strategy of building loyalty through participation will work. But is there an alternative? I think the quality of the participation will be important decisive. Of course, participation can be achieved or channeled in many ways. It doesn’t even have to happen online. At in-depth magazines such as The Atlantic Monthly or Mandag Morgen, an important “interactive” element is talks/conferences/meet-ups. At Mandag Morgen that works exceptionally well.

By the way, the interviews mainly took place in 2005. It would have been nice to link to the original material, but it’s not online on the research project’s website… Just another piece of invisible knowledge?

This weekend # 8: Web narratives

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The next time someone tells you that in-depth journalism on the web is nearly impossible, just show them two new examples that help shatter that myth.

  • The Desert One Debacle tells the story of the failed attempt to rescue the hostages at the US embassy in Teheran in 1980. This is the cover story of The Atlantic’s May issue, and on the web it has been enhanced with video, audio, photos, maps and documents. Though I haven’t seen the print version yet, I would guess that the web version conveys a richer understanding and experience of the narrative’s different aspects. Even so, it’s possible to suggest some further improvements: Actually it worked better to read the whole text virtually uninterrupted, then go back to view photos and maps afterwards. That’s probably because the different pop-ups and formats aren’t seamlessly integrated with the main narrative; one idea would be to use more of the screen’s width and embed, if possible, all the different elements on the main page.
  • Faces of the Fallen is a database from Adrian Holovaty and the team at the Washington Post, of US military personnel who have died in Iraq and Afghanistan (actually a new version of an existing database). If the Atlantic story is a classic narrative with a beginning, middle and end, in Faces of the Fallen the user has to construct a narrative of his or her own from the bare facts of name, face, age, incident, home state, military branch. Importantly, each soldier gets an own page, personalizing the war and its consequences. Actually, the database is so optimized for the web of today that you can subscribe to a feed updating you on forthcoming casualties… One comment to the database on Holovaty’s site is relevant: what is missing is the other – Iraqi dead, be it insurgents, soldiers, civilians, foreign terrorists. But one will, of course, encounter them in the WaPo’s general Iraq coverage and analysis.