For three days in late September, Professor Paul Voakes and JMC students Lo Snelgrove and Kai Casey attended ONA14, the annual conference of the Online News Association, in Chicago. The conference was a regular five-ring circus, chockablock with sessions on trends and how-to instruction — all about digital journalism. So we divided and attempted to conquer – and eventually pooled our reports here.
By Paul Voakes
1) “The Holodeck is Real!” Sort of!
One of the most interesting themes of the conference for me was the increasing interest in immersive journalism, sometimes called augmented-reality or virtual-reality journalism. If there was one question that buzzed the most around the conference, it was “Have you done the Oculus Rift for Harvest of Change?
That referred to the story that Gannett is promoting as this year’s “Snowfall,” that is, this year’s display of what tech-assisted journalism might be one day. “Harvest of Change” is a deeply researched series by two reporters at the Des Moines Register, about how global forces, including the global economy, geopolitics and climate change, impact the livelihood of the independent American farm family. Gannett and its journalists partnered with a video-game developer and an independent film-maker (using a 360-degree video camera) to present a virtual farm, based on an actual farm that’s been operated by the same family for six generations. Readers could strap on the Oculus Rift headset, which is normally used for virtual-reality video games, and “move” through the farm, choosing to dive into various aspects of the story by use of the hand-held game controller. Here’s a 60-second overview of what it was like.
I spent about 20 minutes on the farm with the Oculus, and I’m not sure yet what to make of it. The renderings were fun, very much like a 3D video game (except with no violence), because you could control your scope of vision simply by turning your head or body.
It is indeed immersive journalism, in that a “viewer” gains a much fuller awareness of the visual story, and the viewer can also control the amount of information and the order of information he or she wants to learn from the story. Of course it also appeared in the paper and its Website as a more traditional piece, with 13,000 words in a five-part series of articles, with seven video packages as well.
Of course you can’t get a VR game designer to make rendering of a breaking-news site as the news is happening. It took the Gannett team months to make this virtual environment, which was fine because it was an in-depth, explanatory piece that was not timebound. One Gannett rep explained to me that in a breaking-news situation in the future, a reporter could strap on the 360-degree camera, after a little training, and go live with it on the scene. So if viewers had a 3-D headsets at home they could strap them on, presumably, and experience the live news scene in something approaching 3-D, in real time.
And it’s no longer just for millionaires and large corporations. Syracuse’s Dan Pacheco said the camera and software that transfer video to VR renderings are now available for about $300. And there is open-source software from a company called Unity, on their site unity3d.com, that provides step-by-step for building a VR gaming experience, so presumably one can build a feature story in the same way.
So how can this be good for journalism? Several editors from Gannett were on hand to talk about the value of empathy. For centuries journalists have tried to take their audiences to new and different places, using pictures and words, to deliver the dimension of empathy to their stories. Now empathy can be intensified, that is, the “you are there” sensation could be more intense.
A few people did debate the ethical side of this technology. For one thing, the fun part of this immersion is the VR world. The renderings are done by digital artists, using photos and video as their guides. How can we be sure they are rendering the reality and not the scene as someone would want us to see it? Others suggested, on the other hand, that 360-degree “you are there” representations would make it more difficult to put any sort of spin on the situation being reported.
2) BRANDED CONTENT
The branded-content controversy began in earnest about a year and a half ago, when The Atlantic magazine ran a lengthy story on its website about the Church of Scientology. Here’s what it looked like:
http://poynter.org/extra/AtlanticScientology.pdf
The problem? The Church had paid the Atlantic a handsome sum to place that article and pictures. It was Branded Content. The article was so well written that its quality resembled the stories that normally appear in The Atlantic.
Media ethics experts and editors around the country howled over the breach of ethics. The firestorm of protest was so great that the magazine took down the story after about a day. But it opened people’s eyes to the trend that had snuck under a lot of people’s radar.
Branded Content was defined by one panelist at the session I attended as “advertising that’s trying really hard not to look like advertising. “ Whether in print or online, it runs alongside stories and images produced by staff journalists or independent journalists, and it looks entirely professional. But it is increasingly part of an ad campaign because if it’s professionally written, the client loves the legitimacy and professionalism of its message. And, another panelist pointed out, with layoffs and hiring freezes on traditional, journalistic news staffs, there are plenty of skilled, trained journalists who are looking for work – and will cross over and write these stories.
In the last year and a half, this practice has evolved from an ethical scourge that journalists make fun of, to a session at ONA in which the entire panel sought to justify the use of Branded Content. The title of the panel was “Branded Content With Integrity.”
Do readers care? The moderator cited an experiment in which readers were randomly subjected to a mix of branded content and staff-written news and features. Apparently 2/3 of the readers who been given Branded Content to read said they felt deceived after discovering the stories were Branded Content. One panelist dismissed the experiment’s method as bogus.
For what it’s worth, here’s how the panelists would ensure that Branded Content is as ethical as it can be:
1) Label the paid-for stories conspicuously as Branded Content. Be transparent. Make potential feelings of reader deception impossible because the content is labeled so clearly. Several journalistic websites now use different fonts, different colors of type, and different background shadings for Branded Content. Even on Twitter, they recommended, distinguish between your news tweets and the Branded Content tweets.
2) Do not allow the client to copyedit the articles written for him/her.
3) Keep news-editorial staffers updated on any plans to produce Branded Content, so there will be no surprises over what appears.
3) THE NEW CODE OF ETHICS
While the Society of Professional Journalists, the organization with the best-known code of ethics, and the Radio-TV-Digital News Association, (RTDNA) are revising their existing codes of ethics this year, the ONA has developed an ethics code for the true digital journalist of the 21st century.
It’s called the DIY code of ethics, as in, yes, “Do It Yourself.” The ONA is providing a blueprint by which any news organization, whether it’s the New York Times or two 14-year-olds using their iPad to blog about the latest trends at school, can adopt their own code of ethics. Here’s what it looks like on the ONA site:
http://journalists.org/resources/build-your-own-ethics-code/
Yes, it’s DIY, but the ONA does not want a moral free-for-all, where anything goes. There are certain universal principles that underlie good journalism. So, Step One: Before you get to the fun part of custom-building your own code, you need to see if you can live with the core set of values:
1) Seek and Tell the Truth
2) Address Conflicts of Interest
3) Nurture Community
4) Be Accountable (and transparent).
If your group can live with these four, proceed to Step Two. Each news organization should decide whether it will adopt the traditional model of impartial journalism or the newer model of Point-of-View journalism. The POV model allows for ideologically-based journalism, for social-cause-based journalism, for journalism that is truly inspired by a particular version of truth-seeking that not everyone in our society would agree is “the truth.” They’re not condoning stories that ignore obvious facts and are slanted in sleazy, obvious ways; POV journalism still works hard to provide context, and to include opposing points of view (OK, sometimes to knock those down). But the ONA wants to acknowledge that we should not dismiss high-quality investigative journalism or compassionate journalism simply because it was sponsored by a political or social-change organization.
At Step Three things get more specific. The ONA has “crowdsourced” about 40 different ethical challenges that today’s journalists are likely to face. Most of them include suggestions for alternative policies for the DIY ethics code. So the DIY questions become (1) which of these 40 issues are relevant to your own journalistic life, and (2) within each of those, which ethics policy do you think is most fair?
The issues I’m thinking will attract the most interest are policies for newsgathering with user-generated content (UGC); corrections; reader comments; respecting or invading privacy. Before you know it, you’ve constructed an ethics code from some of those 40 building blocks, based on the foundations of steps one and two.