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OK. Good afternoon or good morning,
everyone, I want to talk about
nerds and news, so
I want to talk to you about.
Talk to you about why I find it exciting
to work in a news organization.
And I've been doing so for
the past year and what I've learned
there. So I'm
part of this program called Open News.
It's a joint venture between
Mozilla, Mozilla Foundation and the
Knight Foundation in the United States.
And basically, what they do is they send
technologists like myself and Annabel
and Mike, who are sitting up there into
news organizations for 10 months to kind
of work with journalists there and figure
out what kind of technical solutions can
we find to some of journalism's problems,
whether those are in how to make money
or how to tell better stories, I'm more
interested in the latter part.
So basically, open news is this kind of
place where we trying to kind of bring
together journalists who are interested
in in technology and in
the application of the web, on journalism
and technologists who are interested in
telling stories with the web and telling
stories in new ways and
open news also organizes a number of
other things, including hack days, hack
events and
a website called Source Source.
Sort of a news story that you should
look at where we have a lot of articles
on best practices for
technology, for news and similar things.
So, well, I don't know what
to do. I have to explain the relevance of
journalism to what what's happening at
add to to all of us at this conference.
I don't think so, right?
The biggest feature is by a journalist.
Journalism and hackers have already met
in many, many ways.
It's clear that this field is
these fields are more and more
overlapping that what's in the hacker
ethics that you should
use public information and what
journalists do does overlap.
And there's there's a clear link between
the two things.
So obviously, it's interesting to look at
what journalists are doing, but I think
you can go even further and look at, OK,
what can we do?
Not just in terms of telling people the
story of what's happening with
technology, what's happening with
surveillance, what's happening with all
these things? But what can we also do in
terms of making journalism itself
better, making the news better?
And also this this this little fact that
if you think the the music industry got
it bad with the internet, look at news.
They really, really in deep trouble
with what's happened and
the business model now is more than
questionable. So how do we how do we make
sure that news that gets done,
that the kind of Fourth Estate gets
preserved right?
It's funny to look at it because like
journalism used to serve many, many
different functions.
They used to be the part that that kind
of did.
Advertisement. They used to be the part
that did it told you where to buy a used
car and all this kind of stuff.
And then there's the part that tells you
whether your government is corrupt or
not. And we've kind of taken the easy
parts and ported them to the web.
We've taken taking what to buy your
car and put it on eBay, Craigslist,
all this stuff. And then there's the hard
bits which are kind of figuring out
whether your government is corrupt,
figuring out whether policies and policy
decisions are good and all that stuff.
And we haven't really figured out how to
kind of rebuild those natively on the
web. What we do is still basically do the
same journalism that we used to do a long
time ago.
Another reason why journalism is really
interesting, I think, for nerds is
because it's a great place to build open
source software.
Here's just a few things that have been
built in. Newsrooms are kind of
maintained by newsrooms.
Django was built initially for
it to be a content management system for
news organizations.
Backbone came out of a project called
Document Cloud that was meant to
store documents for for a journalist to
look at timeline, for example, as a nice
tool to to to visualize
the stories over time and data driven
documents. I don't know who here has
heard about D3 and data visualization
that comes with it.
But it's a power tool for kind of
visualizing visualizing stories.
So kind of open source is really alive in
some news organizations.
And that also makes it fascinating to
work there because you kind of get to
share the message and then have the story
exclusively to yourself.
So where do you kind of
nerds and journalists really
meet? I think one of the most interesting
points for the two kind of overlapping
and their interests and activities is
something like data-driven journalism.
So journalism that isn't, isn't,
isn't based just on making a telephone
call or verifying information, but having
interviews with people.
But that uses data as a source and also
as a way to present information to
present the story in the end.
You, as data journalist, has has made
this nice phrase that data journalism was
kind of social science with a deadline.
So the idea is that you were trying to
conduct very small kind of experiments
on on on what is true about society.
And one of the most important tools
for doing that nowadays is all the public
data that's available for
making this information more and more
available for, um,
for for analyzing and understanding how
society works, how politics works, how
the economy works and how business works.
And so this idea
of data-driven journalism isn't entirely
new. It's been around for a while and.
Used to be called computer assisted
reporting. But I think what's exciting is
that there is now a growing community of
people that are really
looking into this in more depth.
This includes kind of
organizations that are not traditional
news organizations and have really taken
data as a part of
their essence of what they do
in the US. You've got organizations like
ProPublica or the Texas Tribune,
which are kind of very data driven
news organizations.
In Europe, you've got organizations like
Open Data, City or Journalism Plus
Plus that kind of take this as
one of their offering principles.
But even more exciting than these
companies, I think, is this idea of hacks
and hackers.
So I don't know who of you is familiar
with this, but there's this growing
network of of of meetups, essentially
where you bring together hacks like
journalists and hackers and try
to get them to find a common language to
talk about the problems that are trying
to solve in doing good investigative
work.
And so
one one one of them is in is in Berlin.
There's this one in Hamburg here.
If you're interested, they're all over
Europe and the whole world.
This one here is in Berlin is Iris, where
you have hackers from all over
Latin America. Come together and
figure out, OK, how do we how do
we get information from public and public
bodies better? How do we how
do we present this information?
How do we kind of condense it into a
story?
And so I think if you have an
opportunity and if you want to kind of
find out a bit more about how journalists
think, what their needs are, how
you can do something that is journalists
and journalism, in essence, I think
going to one of these meetings, talking
to some journalists there and trying to
figure out what is it that we can do
that will support their activities is
really a valuable thing to do.
So you've got these two worlds really
right? You've got one world, which is
where we are right now and
and it's the kind of the world
of the nerds. And this is where I spent
last year Spiegel's hack
for her, it happens to be just opposite
the old town from here suggests that the
other other side of town.
And these are very different
worlds and therefore very different
rules, right?
And I want to show you or kind of talk
to you about a few of the differences
that I think are interesting.
So before I before I joined
the open news program and Spiegel and
I worked on open data projects, and
this is maybe a minor point for
basically, I think it's really
interesting to look at how open data
can be made relevant.
So when I when I am
before I used to work for an organization
called the Open Fondation, which, as I
have been asked to announce, doesn't meet
up at 6:30 in Noisy Square,
and we used to think a lot about how can
we change governments policies to make
the data available?
How can we make sure that the data that
comes out is free of any copyright claims
is free?
And it's free of
of any restrictions?
Basically, it's like the first
discussion that we keep having about
software as well.
When you come into a news organization,
the stuff kind of gets more tangible.
What you worry about is not so much.
Is this stuff free of copyright?
But hey, can I get it?
And B can I analyze it?
And if that's given, then you're fine and
you'll be. You'll be all happy.
So one one thing that that some of the
fellows of the openness program have been
doing to give an example is this
tool called tabula because often
public information isn't available and
spread leads. The way it's available is
as a PDF file that's somewhere on a
government government website, and
getting data out of PDFs is notoriously
hard.
It's a horrible format.
It's often being used intentionally out
of malice and out of kind of obscurity
to to to obscure public information to
make sure that it cannot be analyzed.
But Mike was over here and Manuel
worked on this tool called tabular.
And basically what it does is try and
take PDFs.
In this case, I've got the budget of
Nepal and
and let you highlight all
the all the sections in there, the
tables. And and then make
sure that these these sections that kind
of come out to you as a CSV file that you
can then analyze and understand.
And I think building these tools and
making make sure that they're easy enough
to use for a journalist.
So this also has a seelye,
but like nobody in journalism would
be able to use a command line tool making
sure that this stuff is accessible enough
for normal people to use.
I think it makes it really, really
interesting as a way to support
journalism, as a way to kind of make sure
that they have more powerful tools at
their hands.
Maybe this is this.
This is a horrible thing to say, but like
one, one thing we can try is roll back
the NSA's capabilities that they have in
terms of analyzing all of our
information. But another thing that we
need to start doing is to make sure that
we also have tools to understand what the
government is doing.
We need to have tools that are
that are there as strong in understanding
government activity and understanding
business activity and understanding what
companies are doing, how companies are
related and how kind of global
structures of tax and revenue work
in order to kind of keep these structures
under control as they have now for spying
on a.
And if you look at this, this is a long
way from prison.
So the other thing that I find kind of
interesting is is coming from
here, coming from from a background.
As a computer guy, I'm really interested
in building platforms and tools and all
this kind of stuff, right?
And then you talk to people at a news
organization, and the one thing they're
interested in is telling a story.
Nothing else matters, right?
You don't want to build a platform you
don't want, want to kind of build tools.
You don't want to do any of these things.
What you want to do is you want to tell a
good story that people can read and that
maybe has an impact on, on, on,
on whoever it is about.
And that's a really hard gap to bridge.
And it's interesting because for me, it's
still really hard to kind of condense all
the stuff that I'm doing down into
stories.
But also, I think for basically all
the main media organizations, at least in
Germany, it's virtually impossible to run
something that we would call a platform
that would look like a platform,
maybe to give an example.
This is a story that should have come out
of this building.
It's about the census that was conducted
in 2011, and it's about
how and the the
the methods that we use for sampling
are insufficient.
And therefore the entire census might be
ruled to be to be
insufficient as a basis for
for the distribution of funds between
state and and and local or municipal
level in Germany.
So I mean, lots of people in this room
and lots of people at this conference
have been fighting against the census,
and I think that we need to get better
at telling it in a way that kind of makes
it makes it something that is tangibly
explaining, OK.
They didn't ask enough people.
Therefore, this thing is really not a
good proxy of how many people live there,
what they're what they're what
they're who they are.
And therefore, we cannot use this as
reliable foundation for, for,
for a state.
And so that's kind of the story.
Point of view is the story way of looking
at it. Another project I want to show
very quickly, it goes the other way is
kind of this, which is something that I
built during the fellowship, and it tries
to take all the data that comes out of
German statistics. There's a system
called Genesis and run by the German
statistics office, and it tries to make
this data available in a better form and
makes it makes sure that there's always
an up to date kind of see version of the
data that you can use easily.
And then it makes available an API for
the data so that you can easily
connect visualizations to statistical
data and make sure that they always
represent the latest state of the data.
So that's a very different way of
thinking about things, right?
On the one hand, you've got something
that you can read and then and it's just
something. This is much more of a kind
of, oh, we're building.
We're building a foundation for things
just to say that this doesn't have to be
ugly. This is what it looks like in the
United States.
And they've got a project there called
Census Report, which I think is really
fantastic. They they have prepared fact
sheets on every I think county
in the United States, and
they make it possible to compare these
counties and then kind of find things
that are interesting about them.
How does Mike and how does how does a
place where I live right up against all
the other places that are out there?
How does this compare to to to the rest
and what are the most extreme places and
why are they so extreme right?
And then then you get back into
storytelling territory once you do this
whole loop of kind of going through the
thing like that.
The interesting thing is, I don't think
that any media organizations, Germany
would be able to run such a thing right
now.
One thing that I still want to do and
that I try to pitch to media
organizations was about
making, I think, an
app that would, would would track
the coalition treaty.
So you've got this coalition treaty and
whether you agree with it or whether you
don't agree with it.
There is something like 200 or so
agreements in there.
And it wouldn't it be interesting to look
at and to look at
how many of these agreements are actually
going to be implemented and how many of
these agreements are going to be
transformed beyond recognition in the
process of being kind of being formed
into law? And how many of these things
never actually make it onto the agenda
over the next four years?
Or how many years we'll have to endure
this? And
so, so and to kind of track
this stuff, right?
But this is kind of a project that that
would have to last over four years and
would would be something that is that is
bigger than just kind of one story that
you write up in six hours or even two
weeks or even four weeks is something
that that that would be run continuously.
And that is something that I think media
organizations haven't learned how to do
yet. And I still think that it's
something that is interesting that we
need to start doing, especially if you're
talking about data, because often the
kind of initial upfront costs of of
working with the data is quite high.
You need to invest a lot of time into
making the stuff accessible and then
kind of having it just for for for a
story that runs on your home page for one
day just doesn't make economic sense, so
you need to get it.
Get into a place where this,
where this and the stuff gets used
continually.
And that is something that I think people
in this, in this building and in this
room should look at doing and should
look at at starting.
This has already started at CCC.
Like there's a fantastic app that someone
I think, ahem, has
done around the Basic
Law and how it's evolved over time.
This. Of stuff kind of creates a
foundation for then doing very simple
analysis. OK, how many how many basic
freedoms have been have been modified
over the past 60 years?
And have there been any any
extensions or has it always been been
going back into into reducing these
freedoms?
So that's I think one of the most
interesting things is
we've basically managed to turn a lot
of what journalism used to do into
platforms. We've managed to turn
part of the business model of journalism
into platforms like Craigslist, eBay
and whatever the names are.
We've managed to turn the funny part of
the comic section, right?
That's BuzzFeed now.
That's that's the things like
like, what's it called a nine jack or
wherever you get your entertainment,
if you can. Facebook, to some extent, has
that function of informing me about what
my community is up to.
And in that sense, I think we can
consider it a bit of kind of journalism
replacement. No journalist would ever
agree to the fact that Facebook is
journalism, but it's actually replacing
some of what the functionality of
journalism used to be.
But we also have to look at the kind of
hard and nasty bits of journalism
that looking at really complex and
complex power structures and looking at
really complex institutional
kind of fuck ups and and how
these can be can be understood.
And that's something that we haven't
really started working on yet, but we
haven't really got the appropriate tools
for.
And I think when we do that,
one of the more important things is we
shouldn't disregard these institutions.
They have a lot of knowledge about how to
do things.
And that's one one really good thing.
So understanding
having having kind of established
journalistic ethics, having
having knowledge about how to double
check and how to verify facts, having
knowledge about how to how to write
something up, how to construct a
narrative. These are all things that are
they're really important.
Another reason that we shouldn't
disregard them is because they're really
big and
there's something there where and
if we the internet to kind of try
to try to make a case, try to kind of
make ourselves heard against an
institution that's really big, like the
German government or the US government.
The only thing we can really do as a
shitstorm, right?
And citizens are kind of bad mechanisms,
right? You you have these things and
they're they're unreliable, they're
messy. They may go the wrong way.
And you can't you can't really start one
intentionally very well, and you kind of
rely on the fact that they're going to be
they're going to be successful, right?
So they're really bad way of arm
wrestling with a big institution like a
government or a big multinational company
and media organizations.
For all that you can say about them,
that's kind of weird and a bit
strange. They are big organizations
too, right? They can kind of do arm
wrestling with these, with these
entities. On one level, it's kind of
funny, right? When you get an email
address that ends on something that's a
German media organization, the response
time of German government bodies kind of
two quarters and the
responses are radically different, right?
You go from.
No, we cannot give you this data to do.
You need it by two o'clock.
Three o'clock still, OK?
So there is something there about kind of
this institutional arm wrestling that we
need to either take either
kind of kind of continue to have or we
need to we need to we need to find an
appropriate replacement, but I'm not sure
what that would be.
Third, this kind of this this this thing
between tools and literacy, right?
If you're like me, you like sitting down
at your laptop building something really
amazing, right? So for example,
I couldn't stop myself from building this
thing. I don't know who here has looked
into German voting law, but it's
really messed up at this point because
there's been lots and lots of kind of
political compromise going into how votes
in the federal election are being
tallied.
And in order to really understand it, I
wanted to build a little tool that would
kind of implement
the tallying procedure and
for me to kind of play through different
scenarios. What is kind of the most
extreme parliament we could have, we
could have gone up to something like 800
to 210 seats in Parliament
if things had gone gone wrong and
FDR, FDP had gotten
into parliament.
And what are what are the different kind
of cases of this voting law we
have, right?
The problem with this is that it's not
really valuable to any journalist on this
planet.
And so for them,
I think a lot of what we need to do in
order to support journalism and for
journalists is about building literacy.
So as I
said, I have colleagues smarter than me.
Noah Veltman is at the BBC, and he
instituted what he called learning
lunches.
And I think these are really fantastic
and fantastic little ideas.
What he did was bring
together a lot of journalists who had
never kind of heard about
much, much kind of technology
stuff before and tell them about
some specific topics.
So in this case, he talked about maps and
he kind of explains, What's the
longitude, what's the latitude?
And then goes into, well, how do you
express that in the computer?
How do you project a map?
OK. These things are not actually
accurate. Wow.
Good recognition.
And then he kind of goes beyond that.
And what kind of the current state of the
art and mapping technology is?
And he did this for a number of things.
For example, how does how does a web
server and a web browser work?
And I think having this information out
there and keeping it reasonably abstract
because I think at this point, it's clear
that people of just have like an
understanding of, well, that's the bar in
there and that happened in the internet
address. And then the web page pops
up, pops up.
That's not enough. That's neither enough
if you're if you're
trying to get people to report correctly
about the web. But it's also not enough
if you want them to use it in creative
ways.
And there's this kind of observation that
we used to that that
among print on basically every print
journalists could tell you in very minor
detail how the product kind of
went from being on whatever the
typesetting system was to the
doorstep of whoever the readers were.
And people really used to have an
understanding of this, and that means
they understood well.
And we have to get this done by
11:00 tonight and then we'll be out in
the morning and all this kind of stuff.
Now this has become more complex and
people need to understand more about the
technology they're using to tell stories
IMR. Because only then can
they start using these technologies in
interesting ways. Only then can they
start presenting
presenting stuff in ways that is
different from an article, right?
I mean, what are we doing at the moment
is we're still kind of presenting news as
if in any given moment we would, we would
expect this techno, a couple of
a couple of apps where we would have like
five minutes to print all the articles
out and they would still need to have a
need to look the very, very same, right?
We're still making print articles and
just putting them on the web and this
kind of literacy and this knowledge of
how the web kind of works of how digital
technology works, I think enables people
to get a better understanding of of what
the medium they're working with is and
then kind of work with this stuff.
And that kind of brings me back to hacks
and hackers because that's I think one of
the places where if you do it well,
you can get you can get into an
interesting discussion where you can
learn something about journalism, how to
make a case, how to tell a story, how
to present something to people in a way
that that makes it matter to them.
And on the other hand, where
a journalist can also learn something
about the media that they now working
with and how to use those beyond just
kind of typing into the narrow window of
the CMS.
So that's kind of a very
quick review, and I think
working in a media organization has been
really interesting in terms of
of differences between how you'd like
to do stuff, whether it is about kind
of platforms versus stories, whether it
is about caring, about free and liberal
and open or just kind of trying
to get stuff to work or whether it is
about whether you want to kind of hack
on tools or try to build up literacy
and to build up capacity in these
organizations.
And I think that it's really important
that that we get either
more journalists to learn something about
about technology and
to use it in their work.
I think it's implausible that a
profession that is still things that can
have a telephone is a great as
information retrieval device we have
is going to provide us with good
information over the next over the next
decades.
And on the other hand, I think it's
also really interesting and really
appealing for technologists like
ourselves to kind of learn more about.
Journalism and to engage in it, and
whether you do that with a media
organization or whether you do that
independently, that's up to you.
I would say try to work
with a media organization.
They have the reach, they have the kind
of power to to to talk
to many people at once.
And that is something that we need to do
when we have found good, good, good
stories in whatever kind of data we are
looking at.
Well, thank you.
We will have a Q&A, please
line up on the microphones throughout the
audience. We have full and a
signal angel in the internet.
No internet questions at the moment.
Please start with your question.
Hi.
If you allow me, I'd like to ask about
money.
Because being a journalist and
the CEO of a fellowship program
for journalistic innovation myself, I
have experienced that. It's very
difficult to get, well, computer games,
guys like you like you just said
into the newsrooms and
to have them work with journalists
because it just the pay, it sucks.
So I would like to know what your
experience is and what you think.
Beyond the things you said, you said
that it should make people
want to go into newsrooms.
But what can I what can
journalists do?
What can what can we do just to get
programmers who might on
the free market get a lot more money to
still get interested in journalism?
The honest answer is, I don't know.
There is not a lot of money in
journalism. It's about kind of doing
something that's interesting.
And I think that that's what you can
pitch a lot of people on, right?
Like, everyone here is attending so many
interesting talks about what stuff that
really needs to be revealed and
and making it clear to people that they
can do that with the media organization
is probably one of the best ways because,
as you say, you can't pay them and pay
them good enough money.
The other thing is is learn some, learn
some stuff or kind of encourage
journalists to learn. Some learn some
tech themselves, right?
There is, of course, a lot of stuff that
that that is hard.
Learning programing is something that I
think pays off after a while,
but kind of just learning how to how to
do some very simple stuff, some data
visualization, some data analysis.
I've done a lot of training for
journalists in the last time and kind of
in the last two years.
And like often you have to start
with teaching them how to sort stuff in
a spreadsheet.
And I think
that's something you can learn by
yourself. And often that already gives
you some, some stories.
And I wouldn't I wouldn't disregard the
idea of just kind of becoming
a bit more nerdy yourselves.
I, Friedrich, it's nice to see you again.
I'm thanks for this.
It was good to get a sense of what
you've been doing over the last year.
So my question is sort of, I think
probably following on from what you just
started talking about, which is that how
do you negotiate the resistance that
journalists have to working with
data or data fine journalism?
I mean, some of the people I've been
talking to at the moment kind of see
it as, Oh, there's a story, and then you
add some, you know, some pie charts on
the side and we know from,
you know, the New York Times and, you
know, the Guardian and things that there
are very different ways to actually
kind of bring tech and the design of
websites and the and the interaction
that readers can have with data and
storytelling. And but yet
there are some maybe it's a generational
thing as well, just a different kind of
journalist who says, No, that's I
don't need data on my story or you
have investigative journalists who are
already very good and adept at managing
their information and their data.
So I'm wondering if you can just talk a
little bit about any experiences you've
had in trying to negotiate resistance.
Thank you.
I'm not sure I have a good answer, I
think often people aren't that
reluctant to use good information if they
can have it. I had something very, very
nice when when I
scraped a lot of information about
European public procurement contracts
that European governments had met with
and private companies.
And so you sit down with a journalist,
you kind of have a sequel problem and you
type in queries that kind of loosely
correspond to the kind of questions that
they come up with. And it's really cool
because they can see that you can get
basically all the answers to arbitrary
questions out of this database, right?
But then then the more more difficult
thing is really the next step, right?
How do you how do you managed to get
this kind of capacity gap where if they
if they just have the skill and they
don't have you, how do they still have
the capacity of doing doing this stuff?
And I think that often people don't
aren't resistant against kind of
involving data and their stories.
They just don't know how to.
And for that, I think I think people
would have to would have to train up
themselves.
I think hacks and hackers as a place
where you can find maybe a friendly
techie to work with and and
all these kind of opportunities you have
to look at.
Hi, I'm married, I'm
a journalism student from the
Netherlands, and I'm starting
an internship and about a week
at Bits of Freedom in the Netherlands.
And I've seen a kind of a development
in journalism that there's much
more interest in data journalism.
And I want to learn how to
make like graphics myself.
How can I visualize
the information that I find I can?
How can I find this information?
And I think it's great that you, you, you
do trainings.
I think it's also great when
maybe a bunch of hackers who are also
interested in in this
subject can
make like a website,
a sort of a how to guide
for a guy like me who
doesn't have a lot of time and not a lot
of money to attend these trainings.
They already did.
Good news.
OK, so there's a project called the
School of Data that I would like to point
at school of data that arc, which
is basically like a map of the air
and talk to Michael over there.
He helps to run it.
And so they have a lot of
resources, whether it's very simple stuff
like How do we how do we
kind of how do I sort
stuff in a spreadsheet?
And they also do data expeditions where
basically you meet up for a week and you
have a you have a challenge.
Find out about extractive
revenues in Nigeria
and then you try to work together on
these things. And because you're in a
team with people who have different
skills and maybe some some have more
skills than you and you actually learn a
lot about how to do this type of analysis
and few other resources to point out.
There's this website called Drawing by
numbers.
There is lots of stuff on on on
all these kind of online learning sites
like Coursera and and Khan
Academy.
And that that can help you.
But really, the main thing is not trying
to read a book, it's not trying to.
This is actually something that I think
journalists consistently believe more
than technologists is that you learn
stuff by reading a book.
And that's not true for technology.
For technology, you need to pick a
project and do it.
And in the process of doing it, you learn
it and you need to have
something that you want to solve.
And then when you can kind of find out
how to do it and Google it.
So sacks of Frederick Blumberg
for the talk, he will
have a session on the nose
at Square.
Yes, so OK.
And if you're interested in open data and
open knowledge, there's a session at 6:30
in Noisey Square.