Josh Benton of the Nieman Journalism Lab interviewed Dawn Garcia and me last week when we were in Cambridge. Video is posted here (and let me say also that the Nieman Journalism Lab is an excellent contributor to the ongoing discussion about the journalism issues we’re all interested in).
The Knight Fellowships program got a nice shout-out from the start-up Apture when it got a round of financing in March. PRODUCT DESCRIPTION ALERT: Apture is a technology tool that enables multi-media publishing on the websites of journalism companies like the Washington Post. Journalists can use the tool to more seamlessly publish deeper, multi-layered stories online by allowing them to find and incorporate related material in all forms — video, text, audio, photos — directly into their pages. Journalists decide which material, both original and existing, to add. Readers access this material without ever leaving the page or website.
Anyway, this is what Apture said in its release:
Apture was created out of conversations with the Stanford Knight Fellows, a group of distinguished journalists from all over the world, about how to improve online news. Those conversations led the Apture team to develop a rich communication platform that allows people for the first time ever to fully immerse themselves in the ideas they are reading about without ever leaving the page.
I knew that Knight Fellows Pam Maples, now of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and Martin Turner, of the BBC, had been in those conversations, so I asked Pam for the background. Here’s her account:
In the winter of 2006, Stanford senior Tristan Harris started talking to some Knight fellows about online news. Harris was a computer science major, focused on human-computer interaction. He was also a news junkie. And he and a couple of his friends, also CS students, were frustrated with online news. It was a clunky, click-click-click process that often didn’t even yield much information. Harris and his friends believed there had to be a way to allow users to dig deeper into stories/topics that interested them and pull from multiple sources without surfing endlessly. Harris believed that if this were easier, people would consume more news and be more informed. Online news should be more dynamic and interactive. But could such an experience be created entirely through automation? Harris didn’t think so. Although he wasn’t a journalist, Harris understood that editors played a role that couldn’t be replaced by a computer. But he had no idea how, or why, they made news judgments or how a typical mainstream newspaper or broadcast organization produced and edited its stories.
He turned to the Knights. And over the next few months, Harris and his friends got a crash course in all of these questions. The Knights, meanwhile, were exposed to new ideas about how to enrich/deepen online news.
When the conversations began, Harris and friends were drawing ideas on paper for the Knights. But soon, Harris was showing a couple of the fellows his first prototypes for critique and testing.
The “news project,” as it was called then, became his senior Computer Science project.
A couple of the Knights [Maples and Turner] have remained volunteer advisers to Harris and Apture. Beginning in late summer 2006, they helped open doors for him with major news organizations, including the BBC and Washington Post/Newsweek, leading to opportunities for him to show the beta and begin to build relationships that eventually led to the use of Apture by those sites. Harris says those early demos provided vital feedback… Since it launched in late spring 2008, Apture has received a lot of positive reviews from some of the most important tech and innovation journalists and bloggers. Tristan has been asked to speak at several major journalism and tech conferences, including the Online News Association, the national APME convention. In December 2008, Apture was one of about 30 start-ups from around the world asked to present at the LeWeb conference in Paris.
I would say that this is the kind of collaboration that we intend our program to encourage, and this anecdote demonstrates that it’s already been occurring.
We’ve finished our initial review of U.S. and International Knight Fellowship applications for next year — the first under our new orientation — and boy, has it been enlightening.
For starters, we had a record number of people applying, a total of 298. That’s up from 254 last year and 215 the year before that. The increase in U.S. applications was even more striking: 166, which nearly doubled last year’s total of 88, and was 30+ more than we have ever had before. (International applications were down, from 166 last year to 132 this year, perhaps reflecting our announcement of our program changes less than 30 days before the application deadline.)
We know that some of this increase in U.S. applications is due to the economy — over the last couple of decades, the number of our U.S. applications inversely tracks the economy. When the economy’s good, our applications go down, and when the economy is bad, our applications go up. There’s no reason to think that’s not at work here, too.
But that’s not the only factor. In analyzing the U.S. applications, we estimate that about one in five were from people who probably wouldn’t have applied under our earlier format, or who wouldn’t have been considered eligible (for various reasons) if they had applied. That tells us that our efforts to cast a wider net for potential fellows has worked.
And, wow. People really took seriously our focus on journalism innovation, entrepreneurship and leadership, and our new expectation that they come with a coherent proposal that will lead to a tangible result. We were highly impressed with the range of ideas, the thought that went into them, and their potential value to journalism. Because we’re still in the selection process (interviews are later this month, with the selection itself in early May), I’m not going to cite specific projects, but when we do, I think you’ll be impressed.
To a sobering degree, however, the applications graphically portrayed what is happening in the craft and business of journalism. We had only 31 applicants from U.S. daily newspapers, which represents fewer than 20 percent of the total application pool. As recently as three years ago, more than half our applicants came from daily newspapers. By contrast, 61 U.S. applicants (slightly fewer than 40 percent) had the word “freelance” somewhere in their job description. Last year it was 28, and the year before, 21. Both those measures indicate the way journalism is moving.
It was disheartening — and worse — to read application after application from journalists who have lost their jobs in the last few months or will be in the next few months. This was especially striking in the realm of foreign correspondence, where so many news organizations have drastically reduced or eliminated outright their foreign bureaus. We counted seven foreign correspondents who fit this description, and another 13 people based in the U.S., which works out to one applicant out of every eight. This included some very good journalists who have done outstanding work in the past and have lots of good work ahead of them, if they can find a place to publish or broadcast it. Very tough, and a reminder that there are huge impacts on individual journalists and the quality of journalism. Stay tuned as we move through the selection process.
Walter Isaacson, head of the Aspen Institute and formerly of CNN and Time, wants an efficient micropayment system pursued by newspapers and magazine. His lecture making this argument, delivered yesterday, makes an excellent case that giving people something for free removes an essential bond with them.