Archimedes’ Hot Tub

Michael Massing is assessing and mostly assailing digital journalism in a three-part series he’s writing for the New York Review of Books. Apparently he has things exactly right, because although he’s gone after the biggest names in digital journalism, from Arianna Huffington’s Post to Buzzfeed to Vox, they are not fighting back. Maybe they are too busy laughing their way to the bank to care about a mere media critic, writing for a publication that believes people should pay for it.

I went through the second piece, Digital Journalism: The Next Generation and summarize it like so:

Michael Massing just put a dart into the head of digital journalism. He looked at “The Next Generation” and found that it isn’t measuring up. Here is the list of points he makes:

• It does nothing innovative. Blinded by Buzzfeed, digital journalism is not breaking any new ground in reporting. Maybe presentation is better than it was, but so what?

• It is afraid of offending people, especially advertisers. Hard to believe, given the amount of trolling that goes on out there, the vitriol and vituperativeness of commenting. But stories lack bite, and important topics get shunned in favor of cute stuff.

• People are not a platform. Despite much adulation for Nate Silver, Ezra Klein and other journalists qua celebrities, the sites they left (the New York Times, the Washington Post) are doing better without them than vice versa. Newsletters are not news.

• Digital media mumbles to itself. There are great vertical sites for almost every topic, but the only people who read them are fanatics. Their great reporting goes into a void.

• The big experiments have failed. Longform and citizen journalism, hailed as thrilling new forms of content driven by the internet, have turned into mush. Toxic, angry mush.

• Digital media wishes everything went viral. But almost nothing does. No one can predict what will go viral. And if they tell you they can do it, they’re lying.

• New York is the only place that matters in the entire world. Journalism in the U.S. has always paid obeisance to New York, but digital journalism is even more parochial. Freed from geographic constraints of broadcast signals and newspaper delivery regions, digital media have flocked to New York. Desperate for scale and national advertisers, the digital media world is “clubby, inbred.”

Massing ends by saying that despite all the money going into online journalism, the best journalism still happens at The Washington Post, The Guardian, The New York Times. His irony is unhappy:

These organizations are commonly referred to as “legacy” institutions – a gently derisive term that lumps them in with Blockbuster and Radio Shack as enterprises that, once thriving, were undermined by more innovative startups. When it comes to actual journalist practice, however, it’s the media startups that in general seem the laggards.

I though this evisceration of digital journalism would evoke outrage on line, with strong defenses of the medium marshaled by the likes of Jeff Jarvis and Jay Rosen. I would at least think they would argue that The Times and the Post have better patrons than Vox and its ilk, and give it time. Or that these old school publications only thrive because they have given themselves over, finally, to digital journalism. Instead, I’m seeing a few sighs on Twitter and that’s about it.

I think Massing makes many good points, and it could take some time to rebut him effectively.  I agree with a lot of what he says and am not interested in mounting a serious rebuttal. But silence? From the Web?
Here’s the first piece, largely focused on The Huffington Post, Talking Points Memo and other blog pioneers that have stagnated. Plus a shout out for Politico.

My interviews with people on the front lines of hiring, developing and implementing analytics programs.

Tuck Rickards, Russell Reynolds, on how to hire data driven leaders.

Michelle McKenna-Doyle, CIO of the NFL, on how the NFL uses analytics to connect with fans. (video)

Amadeus’ Denis Arnaud on how it finds data scientists.

Michael Rappa of North Carolina State’s Institute for Advanced Analytics, the nation’s first master’s program in analytics, on educating tomorrow’s analytics professionals.

It was the year of Big Data. I wrote these five posts on aspects of using analytics and data at various points in the fall for MIT Sloan Management Review.

Data Scientist in a Can?  Companies trying to close the skills gap can look to automated tools.
Analytics Meets Mother Goose. Those who work with data need to learn to tell stories about it.

Coming Soon: Doctors as Data Analyst. Kaiser Permanent’s John Mattison says fully data-driven healthcare is on the way.
Predictive Analytics Are a Traveler’s Best Friend. How Amadeus uses analytics to help customers avoid air travel headaches.

The Four Traps of Predictive Analytics. How to avoid some common mistakes of making predictive analytics.

I tend to tune out at conference Q&A time, but there was a terrific little give-and-take about IBM’s Watson today at EmTech MIT, hosted by MIT Technology Review.

The session had been really quite good, a forthright discussion between Jason Pontin, TR’s editor-in-chief and publisher, and Mike Rhodin, who runs IBM’s Watson group. Then the audience got to ask a few questions. One of the people who spoke turned out to be Michael Bueche, who works in USAA’s innovation group. USAA, a financial services company for military personnel and their families, announced in July it would pilot Watson Engagement Advisor to help soldiers transitioning to civilian life.

Bueche said there had been some challenges in adopting Watson. One issue is that when you ask Watson a question, “You can’t necessarily clarify the question further,” Bueche said. “Watson tends to start from scratch every question,” he said. Bueche said that USAA also has had to work to figure out how to balance privacy issues around personal data. “When they ask questions you need to know things about the person to make the recommendation. Putting that type of information into Watson you get into issues of privacy and things like that.”Bueche also said that curating data to make it useful for Watson took “a lot of time,” and that Watson was designed to work with larger amounts of data than USAA was using for the pilot. He also recommended companies plan on extensive training time to get Watson up and running.

Rhodin took Bueche’s comments in stride, and said that IBM was working on them. He said IBM was working to change redefine the system so that the corpus, the data Watson uses to answer questions, is generally available information, and personal information “comes in as part of the question, not the corpus.”

For the issue of clarifying questions, Rhodin said that it is broader than just programming Watson to allow for follow-up questions. “We’re trying to teach Watson when to not answer the question,” Rhodin said. He said that some questions were ambiguous, which means Watson cannot give a correct answer to them. “We are starting down that journey,” Rhodin said, noting that in May, IBM bought a company called Cognea, which had used artificial intelligence techniques to help computers engage in dialogue with people. IBM is working to integrate Cognea with Watson.
Rhodin also acknowledged that Watson is designed to work with very large amounts of data.

Rhodin also said that IBM was also finding that corporate customers don’t necessarily come with questions. “Many times people hand us problems. Those have to be broken in to many questions,” he said. He mentioned that IBM was working with the Cleveland Clinic to develop a reasoning engine.

Rhodin said from the stage he looked forward to seeing Mr. Bueche at USAA on Thursday, before moving on to the next question.

This kind of open discussion about an ongoing technology project doesn’t happen often at conferences; Rhodin handled it well enough that I wondered if the discussion had been staged. I’d love to be at that meeting this Thursday.

Journalists could learn a lot about source protection from drug dealers.

“Go watch The Wire!” Oliver Day  told a session at Byte B@ck, the Society of Professional Journalists recent conference. “Figure out why the drug dealers are using burner phones [cheap cell phones that can be thrown away, protecting anonymity].  Extend that to notebooks.”

Chromebooks and other cheap notebooks aren’t at the $20 per device level of some cell phones, but MicroCenter’s latest flyer has a Windows 8 laptop for $220 and Amazon is advertising a ChromeBook for $199. If you have an important story, is $200 too much to spend to guarantee secure communications with a source whose identity needs protecting?

Of course, you want to be careful about what email you use. Fake Gmail accounts were scorned by Day and his fellow panelists, Andy Sellars of the Digital Media Law Project and Cara Rubinksy, the New England News editor for the Associated Press.

“Email is dicey,” Rubinsky said. “Fake email accounts don’t protect you.” You’re likely to use them from your main computer, which means the IP address used to create them will lead back to you (hence the burner notebooks). “If you’ve got a source you don’t want revealed, don’t email about your story and create a paper trail.”

Hence the use of ‘burner’ phones, quickly discarded. The AP recommends reporters use these phones and give them to specific sources whose jobs might be endangered for talking with the press, as well.  “If you can’t protect your sources, people are going to stop telling you things,” Rubinksy said.

I wouldn’t seem to be the type of person who needed this session. Most of my reporting now involves explanatory features. I went to this session because you never know when you might need to protect a source, and it has clearly become more difficult to do since I was a working beat reporter.

Rubinsky offered some other tips: if you’re going to call sources at work, call them all the time. Every day. Better, though, is the burner phone. “Go to Wal-Mart or 7-11. Pay with cash. Don’t give them your real name. If they ask for your name, say your name is Eric Holder. Use the phone for three months and throw it out.” She also advised against using WiFi while in coffee shops and corporations, especially if you aren’t using encryption.

Day, who runs Securing Change, a non-profit that helps non-governmental organizations create secure communications, says the landscape for hacking is radically changed from just a decade ago. “There are more hackers than there were and more commercialized hacking tools. You don’t need skills, you can just go buy the stuff.”

Governments are also more willing to hack. He related stories about the Ethiopian government spear phishing a U.S. citizen, and the NSA’s hack of Al Jazeera.

• Day loves OTR, an encrypted instant messaging service.
• He also suggested journalists consider using GPG (Gnu Privacy Guard),
• the Tor Browser Bundle, which protects against monitoring.
• Tails Amnesiac is a privacy-loving operating system journalists could think about.
• He also cited TrueCrypt, for encryption software, though he warned that passwords “will not get you past judges or the rubber hose decryption method.”

He also warned that security and convenience do not go together. These tools are for the most part either not simple to use, or much slower than conventional, unprotected means of communicating.
Andy Sellars of the Digital Media Law Project talked about the twin challenges journalists face. One is hackers and bad actors, but a potentially more potent and insidious one comes from the powers that be. Law enforcement and intelligence agencies have the legal right to come after journalists for information. Ask yourself questions like “Who has my data? Who has access to my data? What requirements do they have to give up data if law enforcement asks? What incentive do they have to fight back if law enforcement asks for my data? ”

Using encryption and burner phones can help, he said. It reduces risks of cloud storage providers, telecom providers and ISPs giving up your sources. Above all, he said “don’t write sensitive stories on Google Docs! Google has access to them and can be subpoenaed.” He suggested SecureDrop for document submissions.
He said journalists should consult the Committee to Protect Journalists’ extensive Journalist Security Guide. He also said the Digital Media Law Project will later this year release a guide that spells out what rights journalists have. He said the law is evolving; some journalists have been able to avoid giving up their crypto keys by invoking the 5th Amendment against self-incrimination.

During Q&A, I asked about the safest way for Bob Woodward to communicate with Mark “Deep Throat” Felt if he were working on the Watergate story today. “I would still prefer a garage,” said Sellars, “still prefer going offline.”

Time for me to go watch The Wire.

Politics has a kind of magic to it; some man or woman emerges on a dais and makes pronouncements and they come to life. At least, these pronouncements get talked about as if they were alive, or could be, if the politician has the right kind of magic and can get other people to follow along.
I was on the 5th floor of Boston City Hall one night last week, examining the Vermeerish trappings of Boston’s mayoral bureaucracy, the large desks, the high ceilings, the pictures and maps on the wall, the statue of the eagle that once graced City Hall, back before the hall of power became a transparent testament to the bare-knuckles nature of the city’s politics. I was there for a meeting of BostonNow, a quasi grassroots organization aiming to channel energy from the great Boston software tax revolt of 2013 into an ongoing force in Massachusetts politics.
I’m interested in how ideas come to life, but I haven’t written much about political life and politicians. I’d never been to the 5th floor of Boston City Hall, was late due to delays on the T, and could not figure out where I was supposed to go for the meeting. Councilor Ayanna Pressley came sweeping along, also late for the meeting, and led me and a couple of other strays to where we needed to go.

The speakers were from FWD.us, a Mark Zuckerberg/Bill Gates-backed group pushing for immigration reform, and the Mayor’s Office of New Urban Mechanics, a Tom Menino creation that has received praise for its creative use of technology (I wrote about it in Five Steps to Digitally Transforming City Government). New Mayor Marty Walsh kept the Urban Mechanics intact, and appears to be backing an expansion of its efforts (it is best known for fostering Citizens Connect, an app to report potholes and other city problems).

Walsh himself entered the room at 6:46 p.m., 46 minutes after the event started, and 20 minutes after Pressley left.  He told the 40 or so people in the room, many of them young entrepreneurs, that he wanted to make Boston a better city for them, with better schools that produced better workers, a way to keep the highly educated immigrants coming out of the region’s universities (an obvious nod to Fwd.us) and with rents that were more in keeping with the budgets of scrappy startups than the $50 plus per square foot in the Innovation District. He asked for their help; “you’re the leaders in a lot of ways,” he said. And after four minutes, he went off to a ward to do “some political stuff.”

The ritual is fascinating: people like Pressley and Walsh have to be in multiple places at the same time, and their schedules become rigidly choreographed so they can pull off this sleight-of-hand (more political magic). Sycophants show up to be seen, and the especially desperate will leap up and walk the politician to their car if they can (one man did that with Walsh). I liked that Walsh spoke without notes and without stumbles. Four minutes sounds short, but it is more than enough time to look out of touch, or worse. Walsh did not.
I think of politicians in modern America as having a heroin-like relationship with money, but I didn’t actually sense this in listening to Walsh or the New Urban Mechanics. Nigel Jacobs, one of the co-directors of the Mechanics, said their job was to be “the risk aggregators” for innovative ideas, crossing the barriers of the various city departments to bring new civic innovation to life. What they wanted from the entrepreneurs present was ideas, and a little digital elbow grease.

The New Urban Mechanics are, in effect, an API for the city.  That’s a twist on politics.
For another look at the evening, here’s BostInno’s piece on the event. 

I’ve gone  on air plenty of times, but I don’t often get quoted in text, which seems somehow more important. Must be my profession that makes me undervalue talking heads.  Anyway, I was interviewed for being one of the co-authors of a report on why it’s so hard for companies to get something remotely like transformation out of digital technology. Here’s the link to the FierceCIO piece CEOs lack vision to lead digital transformation. It came out of this report, Embracing Digital Technology, I co-wrote for MIT Sloan Management Review.

We hear a lot about big data, but for most of us it’s really abstract. What does it mean and do we really need it?
Some good answers came out of a recent panel I attended about social media and big data, as part of my work on digital transformation for MIT Sloan Management Review. I wrote this post about some highlights, When social networks and analytics intersect.

Pay special attention to the radical ideas put forth by Shane Green, the founder of Personal.

In my work as a contributing editor at MIT’s Sloan Management Review, I’m looking at the way traditional companies are using technology to transform their businesses. We’ve launched a Digital Transformation Hub to cover new research from MIT’s Center for Digital Business and its partners. I’ll be interviewing top thinkers and corporate leaders on how to actually get transformation out of technology, instead of merely substitution or extension effects.

Here’s an interview I did with George Westerman, a research scientist at MIT’s Center for Digital Business. [Sorry for the link, but I can’t figure out how to put it in Wordpress, an issue with my outdated configuration, and a humbling example of non-transformative use of technology.]