I've followed Rheingold's posts and videos for some time now, attended presentations, and participated in some of his courses. He's not only an expert in virtual communities (a term he coined himself) and social media, but also teaches digital journalism.

I had the opportunity to interview him recently about the implications of his thinking on media, journalism and journalism education.

Q&A

MediaShift: Howard, how Internet-savvy are digital natives -- do they need experts such as you to find their way?

Howard Rheingold: I started thinking seriously about the social media literacies that didn't exist 10 years ago but are crucial today when I faced students at Stanford, a room full of "digital natives" in the birthplace of Silicon Valley, and was shocked to see the blank looks on so many faces on the first day of class, when I tell them that they are going to blog reflectively and collaborate on the wiki.

I had believed the mythology of digital natives and also assumed that most of today's college students are like my daughter and all her friends. Some digital natives are extraordinarily savvy. When I taught digital journalism for five years at Stanford I learned to ask the other teachers who the most technically savvy students were. I made an effort to get acquainted with the most technically advanced students before they joined my required class.

A couple years ago, one of these students insisted that not only should digital journalism students blog, they should know how to lease their own server and set up their own instance of WordPress. "Can you show me how to do that?" I asked him. In turn, I took the instructions he gave me and made a step-by-step guide for the other students.

Eszter Hargittai's empirical research seems to show that the economic class and amount of education that parents have is a strong indicator of whether a young person is likely to be able to competently evaluate information found online. And the latest report from the Pew Internet and American Life project indicates concerns about a widening knowledge divide and warns that "contrary to popular belief, young people are not digital wizards."

More in particular: What are the special needs of journalism students?

Rheingold: My syllabus is a couple years old, but it's a starting point -- and the degree that my syllabus of a few years ago is out of date indicates how fast the knowledge needs change for today's journalists.

A journalism student needs more than ever to learn and practice the arts of discovering and qualifying sources of information, cultivating networks of informants, developing a sense for newsworthy events, an ability to test the veracity of claims, a talent for putting together verified claims into active narratives -- all skills that predate digital media.

But today's media make it possible to set up an information radar within a few minutes after a newsworthy event occurs, summoning streams of information and media from thousands of sources that relate specifically to that event, filtering those streams socially and technically, curating and editing the results into a rapid response that broadcasts the refined information -- the "news" -- in a variety of media.

Learning how to use today's and tomorrow's tools, from social bookmarking to curation platforms, persistent searches to RSS feeds, is now part of the daily work of the journalist -- who must exercise judgment about which of these skills are vital enough to learn, which are compelling enough to learn deeply, and which are best left to others.

Journalists don't have audiences, they have publics who can respond instantly and globally, positively or negatively, with a great deal more power than the traditional letters to the editor could wield.

How far should the tech skills go -- should a journalist have programming skills? Or is that something best left to others?

Rheingold: I think learning a simple programming language -- you can get JavaScript lessons via Codeacademy -- enables journalists to better know how to deal with the programmers they are going to work with. Much of journalism has become networked -- the informants, the publics, the journalists, the journalism teams. You don't have to be the best video editor in the world -- sometimes you will team up with video editors and others -- but every journalist ought to know how to put a simple digital video together quickly.

The point is not that every journalist needs to become a wizard, but that learning a little bit about something entirely new like programming is good exercise of the learning-new-stuff-all-the-time muscle that today's and tomorrow's journalists need.

You are known for giving students exercises in attention -- rather than just ordering them to close their laptops during the course. In "Net Smart" you explain the importance of attention for all of us living in this era of ubiquitous computing.

Rheingold: Attention is the fundamental instrument we use for learning, thinking, communicating, deciding, yet neither parents nor schools spend any time helping young people learn how to manage information streams and control the ways they deploy their attention.

Why not include basic media mindfulness in the fundamentals that parents AND schools are expected to provide to their children if they want them to succeed in the networked society? Don't parents need to weigh their urge to check their BlackBerry against their sons' and daughters' requests for their attention? Attention, and especially attention to media, is a topic that deserves a discussion more nuanced and more proactive than "multitasking doesn't work" and "too many people are bumping into other people while looking at their smartphone screens."

Both mindfulness meditation disciplines and modern neuroscientific study of metacognition strongly suggest that people can learn to deploy their attention more effectively. Teaching people elementary mindfulness is extraordinarily inexpensive compared to the cost of producing smart devices and deploying global broadband networks.

Another important theme is crap detection -- fact checking, scrutiny of discourses.

Rheingold: There are several important approaches to crap detection that ought to converge. First, this is another essential literacy. The authority of the text is gone forever; in the age of print, the author, editor, and publisher stood as guarantors of the veracity of claims.

Now that anyone can publish anything and search engines turn up inaccurate information, misinformation, and disinformation along with accurate claims, the consumer, not the producer of information, must test the validity of claims. Everyone must learn some elementary critical skills for evaluating information. However, both algorithmic techniques and social (crowdsourcing) techniques are emerging for trying to filter out the bad information and float the best information closer to the surface.

I get into detail about these emerging techniques in my book. So there certainly is a place for multiple kinds of automated and social-algorithmic approaches, in addition to the education necessary to spread the essential literacy.

Some would say that most people are gullible, ill-informed, and easily influenced. At the beginning of the 20th century, the American journalist Walter Lippmann made this argument in his book, "Public Opinion."

The American philosopher and educator John Dewey responded that if this was the case, we need to build better educational institutions and encourage better journalism, so that people would be less ignorant and better informed. I'd say that this tension still holds, but is multiplied by the overwhelming floods of information that new media afford.

The "people formerly known as the audience" are now participating very actively.

Rheingold: The web and the whole world of digital media are built on broad participation. Without millions of people putting links on their blogs and websites, there would be no web and search engines would not be able to aggregate those decisions.

People participate in building the value of the every day by reading, tagging, liking, favoriting, plussing, commenting, linking, posting, refactoring (editing wiki pages), arguing in comment threads and discussion forums.

The political public sphere, citizen science, crowdsourcing and crowdfunding, open-source production, emergent collective response to disaster, the blogosphere -- many capabilities and institutions that didn't exist a few years ago are now wielding computational, economic, political and cultural power, not because of top-down planning by big government or big corporations but by the active participation of billions of people.

Knowing the importance of participation and how to participate has suddenly become not only an individual survival skill but a key to large-scale social change.

Should media evolve to many-to-many networks, with peer-to-peer learning processes, or should we preserve the values of the classic broadcasting model?

Rheingold: Wikipedia, open-source production, distributed computation, citizen science and citizen journalism, crowdsourcing, smart mobs from Arab Spring to Occupy Wall Street, massive open online courses, global citizen response to disasters such as the Asian tsunami, Hurricane Katrina, and the Haiti earthquake, grassroots political organizing from the Howard Dean campaign to the Tea Party -- digital media and networks have lowered the barriers to collective action in practically every sphere of human life -- the collection of knowledge, the application of computing to scientific problems, the scientific examination of large amounts of data, the selection of political candidates and the organization of political demonstrations, the cooperative creation of encyclopedias, operating systems, and browsers, the delivery of educational material, reporting of news events.

Knowing how to participate is just the first step. Knowing how to collaborate has become essential to individuals who want to succeed in the 21st century and to the health of the culture that is emerging.

Collective intelligence, virtual communities, smart mobs, crowdsourcing, social production, peer learning are distinctly different forms of collaboration that have sprung up now that every desktop and every pocket is a potential printing press, broadcasting station, marketplace, community forum, political organizing force.

Knowing how to use these forms of collaboration is a critical uncertainty -- the raw technical power to organize and coordinate collective action is provided by the technology, but whether that power will be used effectively depends on how many people know how to implement and deploy the right kind of collaboration in the right kind of situation.

Peeragogy

Rheingold is a believer in learning. We can learn the necessary literacies in order to deploy "the right kind of collaboration." Right now he facilitates a collaborative project aimed at creating a peeragogy handbook. Peeragogy is like peer-to-peer pedagogy, self-learners collaborating via a variety of social media to create, deliver and learn an agreed curriculum (which they compose themselves).

I participate in that project, which proves to be a fascinating confrontation with the possibilities, but also the challenges, of peer-to-peer produced media. I hope to report about it in a later installment.

In the meantime, here's a video in which Rheingold explains "Net Smart" for the Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) Change11.

Roland Legrand is in charge of new media at Mediafin, the publisher of leading Belgian business newspapers De Tijd and L'Echo. He studied applied economics and philosophy. After a brief teaching experience, he became a financial journalist working for the Belgian wire service Belga and subsequently for Mediafin. He works in Brussels, and lives in Antwerp with his wife, Elisabeth.

Quickly though, we learned that despite the opportunities the iPad offered, there were strings attached.

It wasn't surprising that Apple wanted a piece of the revenue. But I'm not sure everybody anticipated the possibility that the company would also claim ownership of users' data -- a sensitive issue in the digital media world.

HTML5 to the Rescue

We all started to wonder if the iPad would be just a shiny prison for unfortunate media outfits, all of us forced to offer our precious content through that new channel while having to pay a hefty price. But HTML5 seems to have come to the rescue.

The Financial Times made headlines last week when it launched a web-based application for smartphones and tablet computers written in HTML5 -- allowing it to bypass Apple's App Store and Google's Android Market, as well as other distributors.

In doing so, the British newspaper is aiming to secure a direct relationship with readers.

For the user, it makes no difference. The FT icon on my iPad looks the same as the native app icons, and the whole experience is very app-like.

The Benefits of Bypassing Apple

So what are the advantages and disadvantages of using HTML5 and bypassing the App Store? I asked my colleague, multimedia manager Tom Peeters of Mediafin, the Belgian publisher of De Tijd and L'Echo, and he explained that as targeted advertising grows, the user data part is a crucial one.

"I think it's very important for us as a publisher to have full access to the user information ... in the App Store it's totally impossible to have this data," he said.

In addition, having an HTML5 app would allow Mediafin to keep the 30 percent revenue that goes to Apple every time a sale is made. In fact, taking into account the VAT (value added tax), it's more like 40 percent.

HTML5 will also enable Mediafin to shorten the app's release time.

"Updating the app will be easier and faster, and what's also important -- at times that we decide," Peeters said.

An App Store app has to be approved by Apple, a procedure that takes time and is fully controlled by Cupertino.

Peeters also expects that it will be easier to tweak the HTML5 apps to optimize them for other platforms such as Android or BlackBerry. However, he admitted the project has its challenges. Here's an extended interview I conducted with Peeters recently:

So our strategy for now seems to be a hybrid one: maintaining the native app in iTunes while also launching HTML5 apps for the iPad and other tablet devices.

What will your media organization do? Go for the native app or take the HTML5 route?

Roland Legrand is in charge of new media at Mediafin, the publisher of leading Belgian business newspapers De Tijd and L'Echo. He studied applied economics and philosophy. After a brief teaching experience, he became a financial journalist working for the Belgian wire service Belga and subsequently for Mediafin. He works in Brussels, and lives in Antwerp with his wife, Elisabeth.

I had some ideas, of course, but I wanted to eat my own dog food and actually tap into my social media networks to write the piece.

After reading about Mathew Ingram's "news as a process" on GigaOm, I was inspired to create a "making of" process with my readers, interacting with them on a daily basis while I was researching and writing the article.

Here's how I did it, and what worked and what didn't:

Posting the Question All Over

We run a blog about Communication, Innovation and Frustration, so on May 24 that's where I announced what I was up to, inviting readers to comment on the question, "What will news media look like in 15 years' time?"

I asked the question on Twitter, of course, on Facebook (Dutch) and Facebook (English), LinkedIn, Quora and The WELL. And, I told the readers on the blog that these were where I would look for answers.

On Quora, where I started my question as a new item, I got some responses, but I got even more inspiration by reading similar questions that already existed, like "What will the Internet look like in 2020?"

The WELL + TEDTalk

What inspired me even more was the discussion at The WELL, which, in web terms is an ancient institution: It was launched in 1985 as the Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link, and "provides a watering hole for some articulate and playful thinkers from all walks of life," according to the site.

The WELL has some very specific rules. People unveil their identities; they even pay a fee to participate. It's not exactly the fastest-growing network out there, but there's a remarkable intimacy. That also means you cannot just publish The WELL conversations without asking permission to do so.

On The WELL someone pointed me to a TEDtalk by Eli Pariser about The Filter Bubble, and I realized this would become a central point in my article.

In the meantime, I got other suggestions on LinkedIn Answers (a great place to get expert advice) and on the Facebook group Newslab - Exploring News 3.0.

MindMeister, Twitter, Storify

All of which was inspiring enough to set out to make a wiki mindmap and publish it on the blog, on May 25. I used MindMeister, embedding the map and explaining to readers that they were free to change the map, add stuff, and so on.

I also posted Pariser's TEDTalk and another video, EPIC 2015.

At this point, I started to worry about Twitter. No responses! So I started identifying knowledgeable people and asking them personally, on Twitter, to suggest posts and videos about the future of news media. This yielded results. I got answers from people like Howard Rheingold and Paul Bradshaw who referred me to their social bookmark collections. Author Bruce Sterling provided me a moment of fun, tweeting a link to an ancient museum.

On May 26 I decided to organize a selection of the reactions and suggestions in a Storify-box, embedding this also in my blog post. I pointed to suggestions I thought were interesting, but ultimately would not be part of my article in case some readers might want to explore those matters further.

That evening, I could start writing my article. (I published an English-language version on my personal blog, MixedRealities.) Instead of talking only about new developments on a gadget-level, I focused on the issue of filtering. Nearly everything you do on the Internet, whether it's looking at Facebook status updates or searching on Google, is personalized and customized -- filtered. That has its advantages but also risks locking you inside your own comfortable bubble where you will no longer be surprised by new and challenging opinions and information. That made me ask questions about blogging and journalism as a curating process and about human and algorithmic filters.

On May 27, I told my blog readers that the article was ready for publication. As soon as the story was published, I informed not only the readers of the blog about it, but also the members of the Facebook group and people on The WELL and Quora (and, of course, I tweeted it). One nice result was that a French-speaking member of the Facebook group offered to translate the article for his audience in France -- which I happily accepted.

Five Lessons Learned

1. Forums such as Quora and The WELL are useful for researching ideas and new developments. It takes some time to familiarize oneself with those groups. As in every group, there are explicit and implicit rules. In both places, people use real identities, so contacts tend to be more personal and courteous.

2. I'm not a Twitter celebrity, so chances are my tweets are not noticed. However, by asking knowledgeable people in my network, I got useful answers.

3. LinkedIn Answers is not very well-known, but it's a useful place for expert advice. Also, explore the Facebook groups -- they are yet another place where people use their real identities and will help you out.

4. I think it was a good idea to document "the making of" the article in a blog post. There were more than 600 people who consulted the Storify curation, not bad for a rather specialized topic on a blog. Most of the views came from the blog. I think it's essential that curating tools are embeddable so that your readers find the information in a familiar environment.

However, I got no reactions on that post. (I did get a few reactions on the article itself.) Maybe this was because the question interested only a limited part of the community of our business newspaper, and the whole idea of publishing "the making of" as it happens is rather new.

Also, I posted "the making of" in English, which is a second or third language for my readers in Belgium. I posted in English because the wider, distributed discussion was also in that language.

5. The MindMeister map (pictured below) was only consulted by about 50 people -- I guess wiki-mindmaps are rather exotic for most members of my audience, and it takes a high level of engagement to start modifying such a wiki.

Doing my research via social media gave me useful insights for my story. Writing the "making of" post, making the mindmap, and organizing the suggested links in Storify surely were not a waste of time: I had to do those things anyway.

Conclusion

Researching a story often yields far more results than you can use in your article, video or graphics. Rather than stashing away all that material in some private file, it seems more useful to make it social: posting it on a blog, curating it, organizing social bookmarks and the like.

As I explained in my opinion editorial, transparency is crucial for journalists and bloggers who want to stay relevant. Inviting people to participate, explaining where the information comes from, and giving access to curated sources and to raw material have to become part of the default workflow.

Being a curator (whether you consider yourself to be a blogger or a journalist does not matter) is not self-evident. Even though chances are some members of your community will participate in the effort, the overwhelming majority will stay passive and just consume your content -- which is fine and to be expected. After all, the real scarcity in these matters is time.

Question: Are you also reorganizing your editorial workflow so that it involves more transparency and collaborative efforts? What are the limits of that transparency?

Roland Legrand is in charge of new media at Mediafin, the publisher of leading Belgian business newspapers De Tijd and L'Echo. He studied applied economics and philosophy. After a brief teaching experience, he became a financial journalist working for the Belgian wire service Belga and subsequently for Mediafin. He works in Brussels, and lives in Antwerp with his wife, Elisabeth.

Take, for example, uber-blogger Robert Scoble. When Flipboard's servers went down around the time of its launch, some said it was because of a positive review on his blog, Scobleizer. Scoble currently works for hosting company Rackspace as a kind of online media ambassador, but he's also a media brand of his own.

So, when I met him a few weeks ago at the Lift conference in Geneva, Switzerland, I wanted to talk to him about how bloggers can outsmart mainstream media, and what this means for aspiring journalists, among other things.

Need for Entrepreneurial Skills

During our conversation, which is captured in the below video, Scoble made five key points about breaking into media and building a brand:

1. Getting a job at a newspaper or television station is very hard these days. Consider other options.
2. Focus on a niche and think about timing. The ideal niche serves a dispersed community of people who are just as enthusiastic about something as you are. The fact that they are dispersed and "just a niche" means mass media is probably neglecting them. For example, one of Scoble's friends started a blog about Facebook -- nothing but Facebook. He did this at a time when Facebook was not particularly popular (timing!), and his popularity grew along with that of Facebook. Now he runs other blogs as well.
3. Get access to something other people don't have access to. This could be possible because of contacts you've cultivated, and special knowledge you acquire via research and reporting.
4. Be entrepreneurial and produce multimedia coverage: Video, audio, and pictures tell a more complete story.
5. Get to understand how Google, Twitter, and Facebook work in order to learn how distribution works.

Scoble said journalism departments don't focus enough on equipping students with entrepreneurial skills. In his view, this is because mainstream journalists have traditionally relied upon other people in their organization to find an audience and handle distribution.

"In this new world you need to do a lot of that hard work yourself," Scoble said.

This hard work has its advantages. By taking control of distribution you cut out the middle men and are able to control your content. By working on attracting an audience, you have the opportunity to build a stronger connection. Distribution is today less of an issue -- the hard thing is getting people to pay attention to what you're doing.

"That's the fun thing," Scoble said.

No matter what you end up doing -- whether you start your own website or company or work to push innovation at an established organization -- you'll need to develop a deep understanding of what it means to be a new media entrepreneur, according to Scoble.

Here's my video chat with Scoble:

******

What do you think? Is Scoble correct about the skills needed by today's journalists? Share your thoughts in the comments.

Roland Legrand is in charge of new media at Mediafin, the publisher of leading Belgian business newspapers De Tijd and L'Echo. He studied applied economics and philosophy. After a brief teaching experience, he became a financial journalist working for the Belgian wire service Belga and subsequently for Mediafin. He works in Brussels, and lives in Antwerp with his wife, Elisabeth.

Social Media content on MediaShift is sponsored by the John S. Knight Journalism Fellowships, a program offering innovative and entrepreneurial journalists the resources of Stanford University and Silicon Valley. Learn more here.

In my previous post I explained how easy it is these days to integrate social streams into articles by using services such as Storify. Since that article appeared, I had the opportunity to meet and speak with Xavier Damman, the co-founder of Storify.

Echoing what is an increasingly common refrain, Damman told me that everybody is a reporter now. Which means it's the responsibility of journalists to find the best content and turn it into a story, adding context and making sense of it all. You can watch our discussion in the below video:

Damman has a strong focus on "social media optimization" (SMO). I must admit that the acronym SMO sends shivers down my spine. It reminds me of search engine optimization (SEO), which in itself is a good and logical thing. Unfortunately, it has led to countless "SEO experts" who have infested Twitter.

As author Bruce Sterling said recently in an interview at The WELL:

There was a halcyon period there where people seemed lost in the info overload and the search machines were full of limpid lucidity. But we may be approaching a period where the machines will feed you an infinite amount of cunningly engineered gibberish and you have to climb to the mountaintop and talk to some human greybeard in order to have any idea what's going on.

There are those who say that the perfection of SEO leads to the increasing uselessness of Google. That's true, but then I found myself sitting with Damman as he advocated social media optimization. He said that social media, rather than Google, are increasingly responsible for the traffic referrals to blogs and other websites. SMO is all about facilitating the sharing of content. In Storify, when you use a tweet, you're prompted to inform the sender of that tweet that you used her content. The idea is maybe that person will retweet that notice so her followers will get the news your story is out there.

I can live with that, because it just seems a straightforward way to say thank you and maybe to start a conversation.

In Search of SMO

In an effort to gather more about this new discipline, I looked up "social media optimization" on the young but increasingly popular Q&A site Quora. I stumbled upon this question: "What is social media optimization and how do you leverage it?" Benjamin Gauthey, who works in digital marketing at Microsoft, replied and said he published a how-to article about the topic. I must admit his reply made me hesitate because it was phrased in evil SEO language: "This post will focus on learning Social Media Optimization, to acquire eyeballs to your websites and increase conversations about your brand."

In fact, his post is pretty good. Gauthey starts with a very sound principle: "Forget about money for now and focus on common interests."

He recommends: Releasing information, producing charticles and infographics, using social media bookmarking, offering widgets, providing sharing options, immersing yourself in social networks and discussions, and not forgetting about RSS feeds and badges and reward systems. I recommend reading his post, as he offers plenty of advice.

All of this sounds very sensible; and yet, I sympathize with what Sterling said in the above quote. It's so easy to get this stuff very wrong. I don't believe in "increasing conversations about brands." I hardly see any such conversations on social media, except between SEO and marketing people who end up talking in social media echo chambers.

Forget About Brands

I don't really think people want to discuss the brand of my newspaper. They want to discuss the news, and eventually they want to discuss how we cover the news. They also want to discuss things with other readers and citizens, and eventually the regular participants also want to talk about ways to improve the site's moderation and/or discussion features and practices.

I also don't believe brands create communities. The communities are already there, and we, the media, have to find ways to serve them by covering news, curating reports and facilitating conversations.

So what does this mean for SMO and the tools Gauthey recommends?

Before using those tools, engage in lots of conversation with community members. Have a good look at what they do and don't do.

This may make some social media aficionados cringe, but many online communities are filled with people who are not on Twitter. They may be on Facebook, but perhaps they only use it for their friends and family, and not for brands or news reading. RSS feeds are another tool whose use varied widely.

Does this mean we should forget about these tools? No -- but use them wisely. In the community my newspaper is involved with, Twitter is not a very popular network. But using Storify to curate and embed tweets seems to be highly appreciated.

Curating and Connecting

I'm convinced curating and connecting are of paramount importance for today's media.

Curating means eliminating noise, checking facts and enhancing the quality of information, and providing context so that news stories take on meaning for your community.

Connecting means facilitating conversations. For some communities, it will be enough to launch a hashtag on Twitter and organize discussions there. For others, it means embedding social streams and discussions in a more familiar context. Storify is one way to do this. For example, StockTwits does this for its community of investors by integrating Twitter on its site and providing categories and contextual information.

In order to be successful with this, you must make sure you become a true member of the community you work for. I do realize there is this journalist ethos of being separate and detached, but what we actually want are journalists doing their jobs in a fair and balanced way. If we expect them to contextualize news that matters, they need to be intimately aware of what drives their community.

For each and every tool or strategy, ask yourself how it will serve the community and how you could adapt it in such a way that it becomes meaningful to the community.

In fact, this is part of what I learned from Rohit Bhargava, who launched the SMO concept with his August 2006 blog post suggesting 5 Rules of SMO. As is explained in Wikipedia, his thinking evolved and in August 2010 he suggested 5 New Rules of SMO. Bhargava wrote:

The core change I would make is to add and focus on a word that I think truly describes the social web today in a way that few people really grasped four years ago: sharing.

Instead of saying "reward inbound links" he now focuses on rewarding engagement:

Today the real currency is around conversation or engagement. While there are a million definitions for "engagement" ranging from comments and discussion to posting or sharing content -- this is the behavior that matters most in the social web and the one that we should all focus on rewarding when it happens.

There's a crucial point to take into account when we talk about communities and communicative action, something which the German sociologist and philosopher Jürgen Habermas discussed at length: the importance of the claims to moral rightness, ethical goodness or authenticity, personal sincerity, and aesthetic value (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy).

In other and considerably less philosophical words: don't play games when you try to incite community engagement. There are no tricks for optimizing social media. In our case it boils down to being the best journalists we can be. In these times, that means connecting, curating, and providing great tools to facilitate conversations.

Roland Legrand is in charge of new media at Mediafin, the publisher of leading Belgian business newspapers De Tijd and L'Echo. He studied applied economics and philosophy. After a brief teaching experience, he became a financial journalist working for the Belgian wire service Belga and subsequently for Mediafin. He works in Brussels, and lives in Antwerp with his wife, Elisabeth.

Social Media content on MediaShift is sponsored by the John S. Knight Journalism Fellowships, a program offering innovative and entrepreneurial journalists the resources of Stanford University and Silicon Valley. Learn more here.

Curation is a way for journalists and bloggers to help the public make sense of the overwhelming amount of information out there by carefully selecting the interesting bits and pieces and by providing context. In this new information environment, the thinking goes, we need fellow humans to make sense and filter for us.

For me, curation is part of the all-important process of telling stories and connecting people around these stories. Storytelling is about involving people, finding out new information and providing context so people can find out why that particular story is meaningful to them.

Storify

Storify is one of the new curation tools I've been using to tell stories and organize conversations. To gain access you still need an invite code, which you can find in various places on the web such as in this TechCrunch post or on Mashable.

Here's a short video introduction to the tool:

Storify demo from Burt Herman on Vimeo.

In this post I'll focus on why Storify is an interesting new tool for media sites and blogs.

For background, in the above mentioned Mashable post you'll find some use cases (and the home page of Storify has some interesting examples). On Zombie Journalism, Mandy Jenkins offered ten ways journalists (and bloggers, of course) can use Storify: Gathering reactions on breaking news; combining past content with newer information and social streams; showing your own quests on Twitter, Facebook etc.; or organizing your own live tweets from a conference.

Mark Luckie at 10,000 Words also identified several ways that journalists are using the tool.

I recently used it on the financial blog of my newspaper for a post about U.S. GDP statistics that included some lively comments from economics professor Nouriel Roubini being pessimistic about growth prospects. I also used Storify from a post that collected some initial reactions on the Federal Reserve's quantitative easing. (MediaShift's Craig Silverman used it to collect the notable tweets of a Canadian politician.)

Five Reasons to Use Storify

From my readings and experiments with Storify, I've come up with five reasons why you should use it:

1. It helps you to discover stories on social media. While using Storify to look for reactions to the GDP statistics, I came accross the rather vigorous discussion of professor Roubini's predictions. That became part of my story.
2. It's graphically appealing for readers and it's easy to use for content creators. Basically, you use Storify to search for content on various social media services and the web, and then drag and drop them and then rearrange it, adding text in between items to create a story. Readers see a clean, interesting presentation of your story, and you can also track traffic to your Storify story.
3. It makes your work transparent. Your community gets to view the raw material you used to write your story. Storify also makes it very easy to notify the people who created the individual tweets, pictures and status updates that you've curated. This makes it easy to them to react to what you've done.
4. Even though it presents the raw material, it also enables you to filter out the noise, such as retweets and other distracting elements.
5. Last but not least, Storify enables you to integrate things such as Twitter into an environment that is more familiar to your community members: Your own blog or website. It works with what you already have.

Things to Think About

Now that you know a few reasons for using Storify, here are things to think about before you do so:

1. A Storify presentation can be confusing, especially for readers who are less familiar with social media. Make sure you offer a bit of background about what they're looking at, especially if Storify is new to your website. I also found that keeping things in chronological or reverse chronological order helped our readers better understand what they were looking at. Finally, be careful about how much you're mixing YouTube, Twitter, Facebook and Flickr with blogs and your own text. Don't try to tell too many stories in too many ways in a single Storify story.
2. Providing context. The neat thing about Storify is that it allows you to insert your own text in between the curated items. But it's also sometimes a good idea to start with a classical long form blog post or written intro above your Storify story, and then embed the Storify below. Often times, just inserting Storify into a blog post isn't enough to help people understand the context of what they're reading.
3. Beware of the unknown. Storify is still in private beta and more and better features are being added. However, we don't know if the company/product will succeed, so I wonder what happens to all of my Stofiy stories if it shuts down? What if the company decides to integrate ads in a way that's not acceptable for you or your media company? I asked (on Twitter of course) Storify whether it's possible to export one's stories, and the good people at the company said you one can export stories using their API." Just append .json to the story URL and you're good to go!

The Future

I think Storify has the potential to become a very interesting platform. While services such as Seesmic make it easy to monitor social streams from many different services, they don't provide a very easy and straightforward way to combine all that stuff into stories. I look forward to seeing how Storify will develop its service (for instance, on tablets).

*****
What are your experiences with Storify or similar services? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

Roland Legrand is in charge of Internet and new media at Mediafin, the publisher of leading Belgian business newspapers De Tijd and L'Echo. He studied applied economics and philosophy. After a brief teaching experience, he became a financial journalist working for the Belgian wire service Belga and subsequently for Mediafin. He works in Brussels, and lives in Antwerp with his wife, Liesbeth.

As Wikipedia explains it, agile software development is a group of methodologies based on iterative and incremental development, where requirements and solutions evolve through collaboration between self-organizing, cross-functional teams.

Key points from the Agile Manifesto are:

• Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
• Working software over comprehensive documentation
• Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
• Responding to change over following a plan

Even though these principles may seem rather vague, the agile philosophy has very concrete and precise implementations such as the Scrum methodology. The main roles in Scrum, according to Wikipedia, are:

• The "ScrumMaster," who maintains the processes (typically in lieu of a project manager)
• The "Product Owner," who represents the stakeholders (such as the customers or users) and the business
• The "Team," a cross-functional group of about 7 people who do the actual analysis, design, implementation, testing, etc.

When combined with an open source approach, this can be an efficient way of doing things. For instance, the virtual world Second Life is reworking its "viewer" (user interface) using the Scrum methodology and it's publishing the documentation of the entire process.

The developers reach out to users in order to determine priorities, and users can monitor the progress being made in fast iterations.

The founder of Second Life, Philip Rosedale, recently started another company, LoveMachine, a crowdsourced review and bonus system (among other projects). Here's how the company's website describes the operation:

We are also a different kind of company. Instead of interviewing to work here, you just get to work. If you'd like to join our team, first sign up at the worklist, where you can see and bid on the jobs we need done, then enter our live workroom and talk to other team members!

LoveMachine attempts to be completely transparent, and to introduce market-based price discovery systems for jobs that are typically done by employees in a traditional bureaucratic structure.

I wondered whether we could imagine a newsroom being so transparent and open: Publishing worklists that are open for bidding, granting open access to a live workroom, allowing anyone to collaborate.

I met Philip Rosedale in Second Life and asked him what he thought about applying these principles to a media organization. What follows is an edited version of our conversation.

Q&A

Philip, is LoveMachine an example of Scrum?

Philip Rosedale: That company started from scratch with not one line of code written. So we could do things completely differently in order to create software as efficiently, enjoyably and fast as possible.

Scrum is really becoming the mainstream way of looking at best practices. At LoveMachine we brought this to another level, for the whole company. We provide a tremendous amount of transparency. We ask people to bid for a small piece of work, or if you do a small piece of work, you set the price afterwards -- we trust you. Psychological research -- using brain scans -- demonstrated that this tends to be much more rewarding than being paid upfront. Because people set their own prices, it makes them very engaged.

Within the company, there are people with a budget and they accept work from other people. Because everything is transparent, there is a rapid setting and finding of the right price.

You recently returned as CEO at Linden Lab (the company behind Second Life). Do you apply the same principles there as at the LoveMachine?

Rosedale: We are not applying those same principles in Linden Lab. That is a relatively large company involved in complex projects. However, Linden Lab is the place where six years ago we started applying these ideas of recognizing the work of [colleagues] in a transparent way.

So does this mean that large companies cannot apply the methodology of LoveMachine?

Rosedale: Large companies will partially apply this because these techniques allow for such fast and efficient work. For instance, they'll do so for open source projects. But they will not adopt this en masse, because of the weight of tradition.

Could it be applied by newspapers or other mainstream media?

Rosedale: It's a promising way of organizing highly motivated contributors working in a decentralized way. Traditional, well-established companies will not [implement] this overnight, but they'll experiment.

99 designs is a bidding platform which can be used when you want a logo or web design. It is highly efficient and is also used by media companies.
More in general, one should take advantage of the fact that many different people are capable [of doing] a certain task. Instead of only relying on a very limited number of employees, one can appeal to a much larger distributed community of contributors. It makes much faster and cost-effective development possible.

Speaking from a European perspective, I cannot imagine the labor unions would applaud this.

Rosedale: Labor unions as collectives can only agree on increases in wages, while in some situations it's more rational to lower the wages. There is a trade-off between job security and efficiency. In times of technology-driven major change, unions are an interesting problem.

Could developing countries benefit from this, and who would profit most, the West or developing countries?

Rosedale: Developing countries have less institutional hurdles for adopting this way of working. I've been reading the book The Rational Optimist [by Matt Ridly], which explains how technologically driven change is beneficial for humanity, and actually the developing world profits even more from technological change than the industrialized countries -- which means that technology helps narrow the gap.

More trouble for established media companies

Rosedale's vision is optimistic on a macro level and seemingly well suited for young, small and nimble companies. But his points also made me understand that big, established media companies may be in more trouble than they realize.

Today's media companies are increasingly becoming technology companies. So while the big, established companies find it difficult to lower their cost structure and change their legacy organizational structure, newer start-ups are adopting transparent methods that enable them to develop technology much faster and cheaper.

Chances are that they will be the champions in an era of mobile, ubiquitous media.

Image of Agile process via Wikipedia

Roland Legrand is in charge of Internet and new media at Mediafin, the publisher of leading Belgian business newspapers De Tijd and L'Echo. He studied applied economics and philosophy. After a brief teaching experience, he became a financial journalist working for the Belgian wire service Belga and subsequently for Mediafin. He works in Brussels, and lives in Antwerp with his wife, Liesbeth.

At the moment, though, people seem intrigued by the opposite approach. They say from the outset what they're trying to do. They use social media to think about and discuss the idea out in the open. They encourage other people join in and, in doing so, help create something new and daring, something that couldn't have been developed in secret solitude.

Liquidnews, or the Liquid Newsroom, is an emerging news project that's all about the above strategy, radical openness. I found out about the project on Twitter via the #liquidnews hashtag. It's where a group of people, many of whom are journalists, discuss a project for a "liquid" or a "virtual" newsroom. They talk about what a Liquid Newsroom could be, about the business model, and the technological platform necessary make it happen. They exchange tweets such as this one from Steffen Konrath: "Currently exploring ways to add Sparkbox (@tonihopponen) & Clp.ly (@Kinanda) to the Liquid Newsroom project #liquidnews."

Often, the tweets consist of reaction to posts published on Konrath's blog, Future of Journalism - News 3.0. Konrath's day job is director of web applications at Verlag moderne industrie GmbH in Munich, Germany, and the Liquid Newsroom is his project.

On September 1, Konrath published a Liquid Newsroom Manifesto on his blog, which reads like a proposal for a kind of postmodern virtual enterprise. In his model, the relationship between the "outside" and the "inside" of a company changes fundamentally. For instance, he writes, that in this newsroom "the content is triggered by events and interest of the people, and not by the purpose of keeping a company alive."

Or this: The "Liquid Newsroom is first a concept model for a specific type of (news) content representation and collaboration. The concept model needs a technical platform to come into existence. (curative journalism)."

All this was intriguing enough to lead me to conduct a Q&A with Konrath via Skype. An edited version of our conversation is below.

Q&A

Steffen Konrath: I've a background in computer sciences, IT and marketing. But also in mime and acting, which is quite an asset for telling stories.

What is the Liquidnews project about?

Konrath: Well, look at it as a platform where people can collaborate. I use the notion of Yentity: the "Y" symbolizes different, sometimes even opposing, streams and perspectives which merge into one curated stream. The "entity" can be considered as an atom of news, part of the stream. It is important that the stream is curated by a human being.

But who are the content creators?

Konrath: Even though traditional media will not disappear overnight, they will no longer play such a big role anymore. There is a lot of information and expert opinions on individual media such as blogs. The liquid newsroom could help to gather all that dispersed information.

So this implies that you'll need a technological platform?

Konrath: Exactly. We're reaching out to various other companies and persons [who have] experience with this. The platform must enable the curated merging of the streams, but must also be open. The communities involved should be able to see what the raw content stream is, what the curators do, what community members select. The news will be published on several portals.

Which communities will those portals target? In other words, what will they cover?

Konrath: [Showing slides via Skype] See that square in Munich? One could imagine hyper-local daily coverage of that neighborhood. Or one could launch an international coverage of a very specific subject. What is important is that the portals have a strong focus, in order to mobilize communities of interest and in order to generate revenues.

You are suggesting several possible revenue streams on your blog.

Konrath: Yes, I'm heavily in favor of a fair pay. The focus of the portals will be important. We've had the discussion on the blog and on Twitter about the business model, and now I even get help from students from a Munich business school.

It's remarkable how this project, which is still very early phase, is discussed on Twitter, on blogs. Aren't you afraid that some competitor will steal your ideas?

Konrath: There is too much preoccupation with protecting property rights. That makes collaboration more difficult, when what is really needed in today's world is just that -- collaboration. That being said, we'll have to avoid [having] the platform appropriated and licensed by other companies, which would block the innovation. So we'll have to look into this.

Speaking of competition, how do you see the relationship with traditional media companies?

Konrath: First of all, blogs do exist already, but no, there is no antagonism towards traditional media. Platforms such as Liquidnews will help traditional media to focus on their strong points. One could consider the portals of Liquidnews as pilot fishes.

Entrepreneurial Journalism

I don't know whether the Liquid Newsroom project will succeed in becoming a promising start-up. What is interesting, though, is the openness that's at the core of the project. If it succeeds, we'll be able to study its every step on the road to success. If it fails, we'll be able to study why and where it went wrong. The result? An even more vibrant and sophisticated new media landscape.

Visiting Konrath's blog and reading the #liquidnews feed, you see that many questions are without a final answer. People offer related blog posts, make suggestions, and offer names of platforms for aggregating and curating news streams. It's a process, a kind of open school for media entrepreneurs. And in the end, I think that all journalists, regardless of where they work, should consider themselves entrepreneurs.

Roland Legrand is in charge of Internet and new media at Mediafin, the publisher of leading Belgian business newspapers De Tijd and L'Echo. He studied applied economics and philosophy. After a brief teaching experience, he became a financial journalist working for the Belgian wire service Belga and subsequently for Mediafin. He works in Brussels, and lives in Antwerp with his wife Liesbeth.

The iPad (and similar products) is potentially a disruptive device, empowering people to publish not just blog posts or status updates but also their own books and magazines, as the example of Flipboard (left) demonstrates. There is a danger, however, that traditional media won't understand this and will revert to its old ways by producing slick end products that broadcast without actually engaging in a conversation.

You can see this tendency at work online in the videos produced by newspapers. Yes, you can (often) embed their videos, share them on Twitter and Facebook and via email. But often you can't participate in a discussion about the video. Sometimes you can't even leave a comment. Too little effort is being made to evaluate and integrate interactive and community aspects into video.

For example, have a look at the impressive video production on WSJ.com. The videos are well done, but the integration of community interactivity is underwhelming. We're struggling with this at my own newspaper as well, but we're in the process of applying some of the solutions I suggest below.

10 Suggestions

In order to help media organizations do a better job of making video interactive, here are 10 suggestions for integrating video into a wider discussion with the community.

1. Enable people to leave comments on a video. What I often see on YouTube, however, is that the producer or uploader of the videos do not participate in the discussion. The same rules apply here as for text articles: If you don't respond to comments, there is a risk that people will consider the comments to be akin to graffiti on a blank wall, and not participate.
2. When interviewing colleagues or experts in a video, provide a back-channel so the audience can chat along and add to the discussion. For example, Livestream.com and Ustream.tv offer a chat and social stream next to the live video. Ustream also does this rather well in its iPhone App.
3. It's also possible to integrate video into a text-chat module, such as the previously discussed CoverItLive. A word of caution: Most people are not good at being a talking head on video while simultaneously chatting -- it tends to give clumsy and boring results. So let the live video host focus on her job.
4. The same rules apply as for a regular chat session: It helps to have a fixed schedule for conversational sessions, and to provide an introductory article or post to provide context and discussion material, thus enabling people to ask questions in advance and to prepare for the discussion.
5. You can invite community members to have a video conversation by using their webcams to appear directly on camera. I've done some experiments with Seesmic video and will note that some psychological and technical barriers stand in the way of doing this well. Which means we need more experimentation.
6. Especially when it comes to local news coverage, it could be interesting to invite your community members to contribute their own videos. In my previous post about immersive journalism, I mentioned Stroome as an interesting platform for collaborative video editing.
7. You can easily build a virtual studio in Second Life and invite guests to participate in a live discussion with an audience of avatars/community members. Second Life enables you to combine audio (for host and guests) and chat (for the audience/community members), and a video stream all in one. You can do this for guests who would be hard to convince to come in person to your newsroom for a live discussion. To see this in action, have a look at the Metanomics show. You can find other related practices in the aforementioned immersive journalism post and the comments on that post.
8. Do not underestimate the importance of text. It could be interesting to have three live streams: 1) The live video stream of an interview; 2) the chat channel; and 3) a live blog. The live blog enables people who missed the live event to quickly find out what the chat was about. During the event it helps those who are hearing impaired, or who are in office settings and can't watch the video.
9. A very simple but effective technique is to announce a video interview in advance and to ask the community for input in terms of questions or topics for discussion. This seems very straightforward, but it's mindboggling how reluctant journalists are to ask the community for input.
10. Along the same lines, there are many ways to ask for help when preparing for a video interview: You could use a wiki, a collaborative mindmap, or let people vote for the best questions. But in my opinion the good old blog post does a great job because it's conversational and not technologically intimidating. Just explain what your intentions are for the interview, what the context is (as you would do for your newsroom colleagues), and ask people to react. A follow-up in the video or in a separate blog post would be nice. Be sure to mention which community questions made it into the interview -- and make sure you tell your guest when a question comes directly from the community.

Those are my ideas. Please share your own suggestions for turning video into a community experience below in the comments.

Roland Legrand is in charge of Internet and new media at Mediafin, the publisher of leading Belgian business newspapers De Tijd and L'Echo. He studied applied economics and philosophy. After a brief teaching experience, he became a financial journalist working for the Belgian wire service Belga and subsequently for Mediafin. He works in Brussels, and lives in Antwerp with his wife Liesbeth.

As a journalist, I'm not satisfied when people just scan my headline and then move on. As a citizen who also wants to discuss certain developments in the world, I would like to participate in online venues where people have an attention span longer than 70 seconds.

Of course, enticing people to hang out longer on your site or blog has financial value, as advertisers value that kind of engagement. In this post, I'll suggest a few ways to encourage people to interact for a longer duration and with a higher level of engagement. I'll start out with a few fairly traditional ways to achieve this, and end with a new approach: immersive journalism.

Five Ways to Increase Engagement

1. Provide context. One interesting experiment is Google's Living Stories. This model helps provide context to news articles, which increases how much people understand the topic and better engages them. Matt Thompson, one of the participants in the Future of Context panel at this year's South by Southwest interactive conference expressed the importance of context this way:

Hundreds of headlines wash over us every day. And part of why many of us engage in this flow is because we have faith that over time, this torrent of episodic knowledge is going to cohere into something more significant: a framework for genuinely understanding an issue. And we live with it 'cause it sort of works. Eventually you hear enough buzzwords like "single-payer" and "public option" and you start to feel like you can play along.

But mounting evidence indicates that this approach to information is actually totally debilitating. Faced with a flood of headlines on an ever-increasing variety of topics, we shut off. We turn to news that doesn't require much understanding -- crime, traffic, weather -- or we turn off the news altogether.

It doesn't require any new kind of design or technology to provide context -- giving background information or providing links to relevant material is a good start.

2. Ask people for their take. In other words, don't just write another article; try to create and foster a conversation. People are more likely to be engaged if they have an opportunity to become part of the process, to share their views and knowledge.

3. Live-stream your newsroom. I covered this idea in a previous post for MediaShift. This is a way to open up and let people get an inside look at how things work. It could spark their interest.

4. Use video. Video-sharing services are a great resource, and video itself is hugely popular online. Don't be afraid to use smartphones, Flip cameras and other quick-and-dirty ways of shooting video. Do it as long as it helps to tell your story and moves people to interact. Also invite people to send in their video footage.

5. Use video collaboratively. Have a look at Stroome, a collaborative video editing platform with great potential for community journalism projects.

The Future

This may prove to be the more controversial part of my post. It's about how journalists and bloggers can use the rapidly growing ecosystem of virtual objects, casual games, games on social networks and virtual environments to increase engagement.
This is what some call "immersive journalism." I also think that augmented reality presents many opportunities for increasing engagement.

Nonny de la Peña, a senior research fellow focused on immersive journalism at USC Annenberg, is one of the people leading the way in this field. In this context, immersive journalism is a novel way to utilize gaming platforms and virtual environments to convey news and non-fiction stories.

It's a bit hard to explain, so let me show it in action using a video. The below video is about the Cap & Trade immersive journalism project, a collaboration with the USC Annenberg School of Journalism and the Center For Investigative Reporting, and is based on the PBS Frontline World story Carbon Watch. This machinima showcases the proof-of-concept Second Life experience:

De la Peña uses other techniques for immersive journalism. There was a game about Darfur and a PC game about John Kerry's Swiftboat battles, all of which are showcased on ImmersiveJournalism.com. It's a great place to learn more about this concept, and to see what's possible with it.

In terms of augmented reality, a company such as Layar provides a platform where you can build layers of digital information and then superimpose them on a physical reality using a mobile phone. It can also be combined with location-based social networks such as Foursquare and Gowalla.

Using this kind of platform, you could superimpose facts and narratives on structures and places within a neighborhood, and invite your community to add their own comments and notations. You could create location-based games using reporting and other information. You can even have your layer behind a pay wall (for those who find that of interest).

Challenges and Opportunities

The possibilities are seemingly limitless, but it's difficult to know where to start, and what to watch out for. As much as I'm thrilled by augmented reality, gaming applications and virtual environments, I'm also aware of the dangers. Here are ten points to reflect upon before and while engaging in these new media from a news perspective.

1. Keep a close eye on costs and benefits. Realize that virtual environments are, at least for adults, a niche activity. People in general don't like to download stuff and to go through technical hassles.
2. Ask and answer some basic questions. Who are your community members? Is access to wireless broadband Internet ubiquitous? Do they have sophisticated smartphones? Your strategy will depend on the answers to these and other questions.
3. Choose your game format wisely. Developing even a simple game is time-consuming, and not every game will be appreciated by your community. An article by Nora Paul and Kathleen A. Hansen in Nieman Reports about news-focused game playing reports on the results of their tests of different approaches. This is essential reading for anyone thinking of building a news game.
4. Look for collaborative platforms. Try to get help from educational institutions, for example, or others in the community. It's not just about you and your organization.
5. Don't forget that the developers of your new media experiment need guidance. You have to provide facts and you should be able to help create storyboards and deliver a philosophy and goals for the project.
6. Don't hesitate to use relatively low-tech solutions. Developing a full-fledged game can be expensive. Maybe a Flash-based game is okay as well (sorry Steve Jobs!). Or even organizing a quiz or a scavenger-hunt related to the kind of news you're covering could be an interesting way to animate your community.
7. If you're not a gamer, familiarize yourself with games and virtual environments. There are lessons to be learned. For instance, did you ever think about the use of audio in the context of a game?
8. If you start exploring games and virtual environments, you will soon find out that there are very different approaches. In some games participants follow a relatively set rule structure. Other games or environments offer a framework, a theme, and people are encouraged to respond by telling their own stories.
9. Capture your experiments on video so you have something to show the people who chose not to participate. (And those who did participate should of course be asked for feedback.)
10. Don't forget your ethics and best practices. These should be part of your development and execution.

*****

If you're already trying any of these strategies to increase the attention span and the engagement of your community, I'd love to hear about it. What challenges and opportunities do you see? How can we practice "affordable immersive journalism"?

Roland Legrand is in charge of Internet and new media at Mediafin, the publisher of leading Belgian business newspapers De Tijd and L'Echo. He studied applied economics and philosophy. After a brief teaching experience, he became a financial journalist working for the Belgian wire service Belga and subsequently for Mediafin. He works in Brussels, and lives in Antwerp with his wife Liesbeth.

Programming means going beyond learning some HTML. I mean real computer programming.

As a journalist, I'm fully aware of the reasons why we don't learn programming -- and I'm guilty of using many of them. I initially thought there were good reasons not to take it up:

• Learning to program is time-consuming. One look at the thick books full of arcane code and you remember why you became a journalist and not a mathematician or an engineer. Even if you are mathematically inclined, it's tough to find the time to learn all that stuff.

• Your colleagues tell you you don't need it -- including the professional developers on staff. After all, it took them years of study and practice to become really good developers and web designers, just like it takes years for a journalist to become experienced and knowledgeable. (And, if you start trying to code, the pros on staff are the ones who'll have to clean up any mess you make.)

• Learning the basics takes time, as does keeping your skills up to date. The tools change all the time. Should you still bother to learn ActionScript (Flash), or just go for HTML5? Are you sure you want to study PHP and not Python?

• Why learn programming when there are so many free, ready-made tools online: Quizzes, polls, blogs, mind maps, forums, chat tools, etc. You can even use things like Yahoo Pipes to build data mashups without needing any code.

• When Megan Taylor wrote for MediaShift about the programmer-journalist, she asked around for the perfect skillset. One response nearly convinced me to never think about programming ever again: "Brian Boyer, a graduate of Medill's journalism for programmers master's track and now News Applications Editor at the Chicago Tribune, responded with this list: XHTML / CSS / JavaScript / jQuery / Python / Django / xml / regex / Postgres / PostGIS / QGIS."

Those are some of the reasons why I thought I could avoid learning programming. But I was so wrong.

Why Journalists Should Program

You've heard the reasons not to start coding. Now here's a list of reasons why you should:

• Every year, the digital universe around us becomes deeper and more complex. Companies, governments, organizations and individuals are constantly putting more data online: Text, videos, audio files, animations, statistics, news reports, chatter on social networks...Can professional communicators such as journalists really do their job without learning how the digital world works?

• Data are going mobile and are increasingly geo-located. As a result, they tell the stories of particular neighborhoods and streets and can be used to tell stories that matter in the lives of your community members.

• People have less time, and that makes it harder to grab their attention. It's essential to look for new narrative structures. Programming enables you to get interactive and tell non-linear stories.

• You don't have to build everything from scratch. Let's take JavaScript, which is used for creating dynamic websites. Tools such as jQuery, a cross-browser JavaScript library, enable people to create interactivity with less effort. Web application frameworks such as Ruby on Rails and Django support the development of dynamic sites and applications. So it can be easier than you thought.

A Way of Looking At the World

Maybe you're not yet convinced. Even though jQuery makes your life easier, you still need a decent knowledge of JavaScript, CSS and HTML. Django won't help you if you never practiced Python. All of this takes time, and maybe you'll never find enough of it to get good at all this stuff.

Still, we must try. The good news is that it doesn't matter if you become proficient at the latest language. What is important, however, is that you're able to comprehend the underpinnings of programming and interactivity -- to be able to look at the world with a coder's point of view.

I'm still just a beginner, but I feel that this perspective provides you with an acute awareness of data. You start looking for data structures, for ways to manipulate data (in a good sense) to make them work for your community.

When covering a story, you'll think in terms of data and interactivity from the very start and see how they can become part of the narrative. You'll see data everywhere -- from the kind that floats in the air thanks to augmented reality, to the more mundane version contained in endless streams of status updates. Rather than being intimidated by the enormous amount of data, you'll see opportunities -- new ways to bring news and information to the community.

You probably won't have time to actually do a lot of the programming and data structuring yourself. But now you're equipped to have a valuable and impactful conversation with your geek colleagues. A conversation that gets better results than ever before.

So, even though it's probably a bit late for me to attend the new joint Master of Science degree program in Computer Science and Journalism at Columbia University, I can still learn How to Think Like a Computer Scientist using the the free MIT OpenCourseWare, take part in the Journalists/Coders Ning network, and find help at Help.HacksHackers.Com).

And so can you.

******

Are you a journalist who has taken up programming? A programmer with advice for journalists? Please share your experiences and insights in the comments.

Roland Legrand is in charge of Internet and new media at Mediafin, the publisher of leading Belgian business newspapers De Tijd and L'Echo. He studied applied economics and philosophy. After a brief teaching experience, he became a financial journalist working for the Belgian wire service Belga and subsequently for Mediafin. He works in Brussels, and lives in Antwerp with his wife Liesbeth.

When the value of complexity turns negative, a society plagued by an inability to react remains as complex as ever, right up to the moment where it becomes suddenly and dramatically simpler, which is to say right up to the moment of collapse. Collapse is simply the last remaining method of simplification.

What's the relevance for media companies? Shirky wrote that there are two ways to generate profits: Raise revenues above expenses, or cut expenses below revenues. "For many media businesses, that second option is unreachable," Shirky wrote.

The reason has to do with organizational culture and a well-known fact about bureaucracies: That it is far easier to add layers of complexity, rather than eliminate them.

His rather chilling but nicely worded conclusion:

When ecosystems change and inflexible institutions collapse, their members disperse, abandoning old beliefs, trying new things, making their living in different ways than they used to. It's easy to see the ways in which collapse to simplicity wrecks the glories of old. But there is one compensating advantage for the people who escape the old system: when the ecosystem stops rewarding complexity, it is the people who figure out how to work simply in the present, rather than the people who mastered the complexities of the past, who get to say what happens in the future.

I've been thinking about the lessons newsrooms and individual journalists can draw from this.

Complexities in the Newspaper Business

Large newspapers are very complex organizations. Producing a newspaper involves a newsroom with reporters, editors, news managers, graphics editors, a picture desk, several layers of people and technology for the printing process, etc. And, less visibly to us journalists, there's also a sales department, circulation department, administration...

Going digital further increases this complexity, especially in the case of the integrated newsroom. It involves producing stories all day and night, creating animations and visualizations, shooting video.

On top of this, many newspapers also run blogs. But rather than seeing blogs as just another layer of complexity, the reality is that they can bring a powerful piece of simplicity to a news organization. Blogs can battle complexity.

Why Blogs

In some cases, a kind of subculture emerges around blogs run by news organizations. This creates a focused, immediate, interactive and informal community. Running a blog is much simpler than producing a newspaper and website. Blogs started out as one-person projects and have developed into a formidable media form. If you want to get up-to-date news and analysis about technology, chances are that subscribing to the feeds of a number of tech blogs will help you more than reading mainstream newspapers.

Fellow journalists tend to shrug when I say this, claiming that it might be true for a very specialized beat, but not for the broader stuff. They are mistaken. First of all, technology coverage is not necessarily more specialized than sports, finance, politics or culture and entertainment. Second, blogs are becoming very efficient in other beats as well. For my beat, finance, an increasing number of academics and pundits run excellent blogs.

I think it's a telling sign of the times -- and where blogs fit in -- that so many newspapers have started running their own stand-alone blogs. Famous examples are the markets blog of the Financial Times, FT Alphaville, or All Things Digital from the Wall Street Journal. These blogs are very good at putting out news and analysis and interacting in a lively way with their communities. It's anything but a complex experience for readers.

Sure, they benefit from the marketing power and brand name of the flagship publication. But their cost is extremely low compared to those of mainstream media. FT Alphaville, for example, has been profitable since its earliest days.

Tips for Newsrooms and Journalists

Though people have begun to talk about the end of blogging, I think the complex nature of news organizations is making it more important than ever before. With that in mind, here's three tips for larger newsrooms to help them make the most out of blogs:

• Avoid a bloated staff and proprietary software: There is an abundance of cheap or even free tools, such as WordPress, that allow everyone to master every aspect of running a blog. Don't bring complexity to a simple situation.
• Treat blogs like a small business: Each blog is a small enterprise, even if it's embedded in a (much) larger organization. An entrepreneurial approach will
  help the blog stand out and reach out to the community.
• Give your bloggers freedom: Let them be in charge of their work; don't bog them down with too many rules and procedures. As with the above advice, the idea is to spare the blogger the complexities of the big machine.

if you get the opportunity to run a blog under these conditions, don't hesitate. You'll learn to be your own publisher, all while enjoying the benefits of getting a salary. However, you should realize that one day you may stop receiving that salary -- the day that the big machine around you breaks down. And that possibility makes building a blog even more important. It's called personal branding and, though I know many journalists hate the concept, it's essential.

It's essential because when the complexities of the system around you causes a breakdown, you'll be on your own. By running a blog and being part of a community and conversation, and having developed an entrepreneurial approach, you'll have built a network. In the end, that means your chances to survive in tomorrow's media will be that much greater. The same is true for a big, complex organization that can embrace the simplicity of blogs and set their people free to make them work.

What if Shirky and all the other doom-and-gloom prophets have it wrong? What if mainstream newspaper groups manage to flourish again? Well, the organizations and people who have built strong blog brands will be far more valuable than others. Running a blog is not egotistical -- you're doing your newspaper a big favor, especially in these complex times.

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Does what Clay Shirky said about complexity and the difficulty for large complex organizations to correspond with your experiences? Do you think blogging can help news organizations survive?

Roland Legrand is in charge of Internet and new media at Mediafin, the publisher of leading Belgian business newspapers De Tijd and L'Echo. He studied applied economics and philosophy. After a brief teaching experience, he became a financial journalist working for the Belgian wire service Belga and subsequently for Mediafin. He works in Brussels, and lives in Antwerp with his wife Liesbeth.

That's the oft-heard lament in newsrooms. More and more traditional journalists recognize the benefits of blogging and social media, but many just can't figure out how to add them to their existing workload.

I have a solution that seems to work in our newsroom. When faced with this issue, I recommend colleagues do everything they usually do, such as have brainstorming sessions, take part in editorial meetings, do research and collect web links -- except now they should do it publicly.

So now, for example, brainstorming can be done with a wiki-like tool, and notes from a meeting or background research can become a blog post. Instead of saving bookmarks as private "favorites" in a web browser, you can publish them as social bookmarks. Ideas and discussions can be expressed as blog posts or as status updates on social networks.

I call this approach "live-streaming the newsroom." It was the subject of a three-day workshop I recently gave in Moscow. I was brought there by two Russian media NGOs: Eurasia-Media, the media training department of the New Eurasia Foundation, and the Foundation for Independent Radio Broadcasting (FNR).

Below is an overview of the tools we used and discussed during the workshop. We also put them into use to cover the "end of the line" of several Moscow subway lines (an approach that was inspired by a project by The New York Times).

Tools for (Almost) Instantaneous Blogging

• Mindmaps In preparing the project, I published a MindMeister mindmap that charted out various social media tools. The map was published as an open wiki, and, as a result, people have added useful information. My colleague and co-organizer Charles Maynes at FNR also translated some key nodes into Russian. For the Moscow subway project, we made yet another mindmap.

• Posterous/Tumblr Between classic blogging and micro-blogging services such as Twitter, there are new possibilities that allow for rapid blogging in short or long formats that also incorporate multimedia. We used "Posterous"http://www.Posterous.com, though we also could have used Tumblr. These platforms enable bloggers to post using email. Simply attach pictures, audio files or a link to YouTube, and Posterous integrates it all into a post. Here's how we used it on our workshop blog, newsroomru.

• RSS Reader While preparing the workshop -- and during the workshop -- I used Google Reader as a feed reader and Diigo as social bookmark platform. I like the fact that Diigo enables you to create public or private groups. Have a look at the MixedRealities group.

• Twitter During the event, I commented on the workshop using Twitter. I used the hashtags #newsroom and #newsroomru.

• Photo/Video Sharing Flickr is extremely useful for various reasons: You can select the appropriate Creative Commons license for re-publishing pictures, and publishing pictures on Flickr can also attract new visitors to your site or blog. For video, we used YouTube. We shot using semi-professional videocameras as well as the Flip video camera, which enables fast and easy recording, editing and publishing.

• Audio Sharing Are your colleagues still hesitant to write their own blog posts? Talk to them and record your conversation using AudioBoo (using either a laptop or an iPhone), and publish the result instantaneously via Posterous.

• Chats Why not discuss coverage, or even the preparation of coverage, in a moderated chat session? We tried out CoverItLive on the workshop blog (on Posterous) and it worked perfectly. Within the CoverItLive interface, you can integrate streaming video (I showed Ustream), Twitter feeds and Twitter lists.

• Twitter I think it's essential to recontextualize services like Twitter. For example, try curating with Twitter by using lists. Posterous can also be recontextualized by easily integrating into some of the major blogging platforms. Diigo, Twitter, Flickr etc can also be aggregated in a FriendFeed stream, which one can embed easily on a site or blog. No scripting knowledge required...

• Community We also thought about how to keep in contact after the workshop ends and the participating journalists go home. Then there's the larger question of how to set up a platform for your media community. We used Ning to create the newsroomru group. Maybe we'll also use Second Life for synchronous immersive encounters in the future. (I also briefly demonstrated Second Life, which recently made it much easier to integrate web content.)

Mindset

All the above mentioned tools only become game changers in the newsroom if journalists stop thinking that they should only publish a nearly perfect, finished product. Newsgathering is an ongoing process. It's great to publish perfectly crafted articles, videos and audio -- but this should not stop us from streaming the production process.

It will, of course, be difficult to do this for some investigative work; but I think many projects can benefit from bringing your community into the brainstorming phase. It hardly takes any time at all.

Most of the things a journalist does to cover his or her beat can be live-streamed using the above mentioned tools, among many others. The value is that the audience will give you helpful suggestions, and practicing transparency will lead to increased credibility.

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How do you integrate social media into the workflow of the newsroom? Which other tools would you use? And don't forget that you can still add to our social media mindmap wiki!

Roland Legrand is in charge of Internet and new media at Mediafin, the publisher of leading Belgian business newspapers De Tijd and L'Echo. He studied applied economics and philosophy. After a brief teaching experience, he became a financial journalist working for the Belgian wire service Belga and subsequently for Mediafin. He works in Brussels, and lives in Antwerp with his wife Liesbeth.

Communities already exist. You can try and offer them a news service or a platform that the community finds useful and engaging, but forget trying to control that community or shape it to meet the needs of your media company. The community calls the shots, not you or your company.

In December, I attended the LeWeb conference in Paris. I was impressed by Chris Pirillo, who told us that people who view communities as "tools" are tools themselves. Control is an illusion. (In fact, during his passionate presentation, Pirillo said "control is bullshit.")

With that in mind, I'd like to suggest a simple way to make your newsroom or website do a better job of connecting with the community you serve: writing meta-stories.

Meta-stories are stories about what's happening on your website, and about what happens in the newsroom. They're a great way to engage the community.

Tell a Story From Forums, Comments

We allow people to post comments directly to our newspaper's website, but we intervene and moderate whenever the debate gets personal or off-topic. This is a story in itself. I have started writing a daily story about the comments on our site and in our discussion forums. I've been amazed by the hidden gems of insight I've found. It really is a story in itself to examine how people react when a story breaks, and how the discussion evolves.

It's also important to have a forum where people can come together and interact. This is a way for them to help tell a meta-story. Using CoveritLive, I hold chat sessions each weekday (for between 30 and 60 minutes) with or without a special guest. (We're a financial newspaper, so mostly we chat about what happened with the markets.) This synchronous contact with our community builds trust. Beyond that, often people make very useful suggestions, like "why don't you publish that investment guide each quarter instead of only once a year, we really like and need it." Or they suggest interesting new angles for news stories.

Allow the Community to Listen In

My next way to create a meta-story is very simple: I talk to my colleagues. I ask them what they're up to, and what their thoughts are about ongoing stories. I just jot down a list of topics and ideas and post them on our financial blog. This becomes a story about what's going on inside the newsroom as we prepare our reporting.

Go Where Your Community Is

Once I've written my meta-stories, I share them on Facebook and Twitter in order to try and reach an even broader group of interested people. But even though I use Facebook and Twitter, I suggest focusing on the places where the community tends to focus its presence and attention.

For our paper, we generate the most debate and comments on our website, rather than on Facebook or Twitter. Our audience is interested in finance and economics, which means they have an interest in innovation and technology. But they're not geeks and aren't necessarily tech savvy, meaning that only a minority of them actively use Twitter.

Even though I'm personally inclined to spend lots of time on Twitter, I force myself to hang out more on our site. Maybe it's not the latest in social media technology, but it's where our community hangs out.

They Actually Like It

At first I was afraid that community members would complain about my comment meta-stories: 'Why did you mention his comment and not mine?' It didn't happen. People actually told me they appreciated the effort, even if they weren't the one being featured. I also get the impression some of them have started writing carefully worded comments in order to be included in the comments story.

As for my colleagues, my fear was they would object to being quoted when they are in the early stages of their reporting. It seems, however, they have no objections at all. They actually seem to appreciate the fact that their work is being noted and updated, and all they have to do is to speak to me or to jot down what they're up to -- much like status updates, in fact. It gives the editorial work a stream-like, real-time web urgency.

Keep Things Simple

So forget about complicated community-building strategies. Meet the existing community you want to serve, talk to them, talk to your colleagues, write down the whole process, and put it out there for everyone to read. (This approach works equally well for those who work with sound or video.)

Then combine that with a synchronous session (such as chat) and have real-time interactions. You'll be surprised how much your community will teach you -- not only about the news, but about what you do.

*****

I'd love to hear about your suggestions and thoughts about using meta-stories! Please share then in the comments.

Roland Legrand is in charge of Internet and new media at Mediafin, the publisher of leading Belgian business newspapers De Tijd and L'Echo. He studied applied economics and philosophy. After a brief teaching experience, he became a financial journalist working for the Belgian wire service Belga and subsequently for Mediafin. He works in Brussels, and lives in Antwerp with his wife Liesbeth.

The 20-somethings there are indeed fast to pick up new technology such as social networking, RSS and the use of Flip cameras. They are also wonderful colleagues, as well as dedicated and intensely engaged journalists. Of course, that's not the secret. What is surprising is that our youngest colleagues are by no means revolutionaries. They're not the ones looking to adopt or push disruptive innovations or invent new formats. That's largely done by people who are well into their 30s or older.

Opportunity Cost

This has puzzled and, I admit, occasionally irritated me. Fortunately, I gained some insight into this issue a few weeks ago while attending the Metanomics show in Second Life. It is hosted by professor Robert Bloomfield and he interviewed blogger, author and economics Professor Tyler Cowen.

Both men are media innovators. At the end of the show, Bloomfield talked about exploration, and he outlined the concept of "opportunity cost," which refers to the cost of the alternatives you aren't pursuing. Here's a bit of what he said:

Rough economic times like these are excellent for exploration. Some of you are unemployed. More of you are probably underemployed. It may sound counter-intuitive, but now is a time for exploration, because your opportunity costs are low.

There is a second meaning to the age of exploration. The very young -- by which I mean the 20-somethings -- are filled with energy, ambition and creativity. But exploration is very expensive for them, because they get so much value from the pursuit of traditional credentials, like degrees from George Mason or Cornell. But if you are listening to this, you are probably in the 35 to 60 range. Many of you could be devoting far more of your time exploring new opportunities -- again, the opportunity costs are lower for you.

I think the concept of opportunity cost can help explain why the young journalists in our newsroom seem to be more risk adverse. Contrast this reality with the persona of the young Internet entrepreneur today. They are celebrated for upending convention. Either they succeed and are applauded, or they fail, which is considered normal in the world of entrepreneurs and startups.

But the 20-somethings entering the newsroom of established media organizations seem to be a different breed. They are also entering a very different workplace environment than the one faced by young entrepreneurs. Within a large newsroom, the expectation and requirement is that young journalists work to acquire the skills and emulate the behaviors displayed by the older leaders within that environment. They are required to integrate, rather than upend convention.

If young journalists choose to revolt against convention, they will likely be rejected by the group. This means isolation within the workplace, or outright dismissal. Pushing the limits of the organization can result in a very real cost for younger journalists. It's high risk, with potentially few rewards.

Common Good

Professor Bloomfield also spoke of another concept that relates to this issue: social good. Here's what he said:

Finally, let me emphasize that exploration is a delight and a privilege that not everyone can pursue...but it is also your duty. Exploration is a social good. Explore to the extent your opportunity costs allow. We're counting on you to help pull us out of troubled times, and give us new ways when we get to the other side.

This means that older generations in the newsroom -- those of us who have been professional journalists for quite some time and have less to lose -- have a special responsibility. We have to explore, to innovate, to take risks. This is beneficial for society, and also for the 20-somethings who want to join us in exploration, but can be hamstrung by existing conventions.

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What about your experience? Does the "opportunity cost" theory make sense when it comes to your newsroom or media company? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

Roland Legrand is in charge of Internet and new media at Mediafin, the publisher of leading Belgian business newspapers De Tijd and L'Echo. He studied applied economics and philosophy. After a brief teaching experience, he became a financial journalist working for the Belgian wire service Belga and subsequently for Mediafin. He works in Brussels, and lives in Antwerp with his wife Liesbeth.