Hasta La Gadget!

THE lead-up to the war in Iraq in 2003 was not The Times’s finest hour. Some of the news reporting was flawed, driven by outside agendas and lacking in needed skepticism. Many Op-Ed columns and Times editorials promoted the idea of a war that turned out to be both unfounded and disastrous.

Can a robot-journalist win a Pulitzer Prize? Will humans be sidelined in the media?

“With DocumentCloud, journalists at newspapers such as The Guardian and The Washington Post have been easily able to plot dates from disparate documents on timelines, highlight and compare key passages, and give their audience deeper information by publishing primary source documents on their website,” wrote Thodoris Georgakopoulos.

Robo-journo = Pulitzer? (courtesy Innovation International)

He said soon enough journalists at these papers might not even need to put data in context since a startup called Narrative Science has taken the automatic analysis of data to the next level: its technology writes articles.

Georgakopoulos provided his insights in Innovations in Newspapers World Report 2014.

The Guardian announced in April it was testing a newspaper produced entirely by robots and Narrative Science co-founder Kris Hammond told The New York Times that in five years a computer program would win a Pulitzer Prize, Georgakopoulos added.

Innovations in Newspapers World Report 2014
(courtesy Innovation International)

Cloud computing, aggregators, digital scraping and Glasshole Journalism (in reference to Google Glass) are not new. They just add to newspaper publishers’ modus operandi and the need to ride the techno wave.

But that wave is also taking to the skies with drones creating their own buzz in the reporting of news as detractors claim the devices pose security, safety and privacy threats.

Journalists high on drones (courtesy Innovation International)

The report, a publication by Innovation International Media Consulting Group for the World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers (WAN-IFRA), is a useful guide on how print media cope with the need to reinvent themselves.

A key element is digital content that is undergoing its own fast-paced transformation.

As newspapers shift much of their focus from print to online and digital first, they must keep ahead of the curve that requires them to provide content in smaller and more fragmented bits to fit pocket-sized and other mobile or wearable devices.

Decades ago, a comic book detective called Dick Tracy used his watch as a transmission device. Today, journalists are looking into how a highly-anticipated iWatch can serve as a reporting device.

According to Innovation’s report, access to digital content via smartphones is set to increase in the next five years with consumption going from 38% to 54% and tablets coming in second at a rate of 23% to 28%.

Digital content consumption (courtesy Innovation International)

A study it featured also showed digital content consumption through desktops dropping from 37% to 17% during the period 2014-2019.

The Advanced Strategy Center at Pinnacle Peak conducted the qualitative survey in partnership with Innovation Media Consulting Group and WAN-IFRA this spring. It yielded the equivalent of 50+ in-depth interviews from a broad set of WAN-IFRA members.

To help secure the smooth transition to all things mobile, newsrooms have had to retool, and fast.

One of several case studies in the report is Costa Rica’s Grupo Nación that transformed seven separate print, radio, web and TV newsrooms – home to 331 journalists – into one, unique open space producing content for all platforms.

A superdesk is surrounded by six content desks: public life (world, country and politics, education, science, tech); leisure: (events, culture, art and literature, television and trends); business; sports; magazines and supplements (magazines, journalistic and commercial supplements and editorial products for distribution with all of the group’s and stand-alone titles); and, popular journalism (content for a daily tabloid not covered by other desks).

Grupo Nación (courtesy Innovation International)

Innovation’s take on this change:

More than anything, integrating a newsroom is a change of culture that forces us to stop looking inwards and to focus on how the audience consumes content.

A participative process, not a democratic one, facilitates and accelerates the buy-in and implementation of new rules and work methods. Top editorial management must be fully on board: strong leadership is obligatory for the success of such substantial transformation.

Part of newsrooms’ strategy is (or should be, where it’s not yet implemented) the creation of pop-up video newsrooms – makeshift work areas with mobile technologies and wi-fi connections from anywhere in the field – and the realization that newspaper video is not TV.

Pop-up video newsrooms (courtesy Innovation International)

Transformations are well and good provided the media in question sustain themselves financially.

But that hasn’t always been the case.

Given slumping print sales, there’s been a serious move to view and accept sponsored content as a legitimate part of the news dissemination process.

Brand content (courtesy Innovation International)

A rose by any other name, or in the media vernacular, brand content, native advertising, and content marketing.

While purists see it as a deal with the devil, newspaper publishers and editors increasingly justify their reliance on such income-generating schemes by pointing to the separation of editorial and advertising desks that produce content slipped into “legitimate” stories.

In some cases, the branded content is produced by the advertisers and integrated into copy generated by the media.

Perhaps all is not lost. Newspapers are devising creative ways to generate income from multiple sources.

In newspapers’ golden days, advertising was the primary source, now seen as shifting to online and mobile platforms.

To supplement digital’s financial intake, newspapers have turned to paywalls, with varying degrees of success, and reader memberships.

Memberships, not paywalls (courtesy Innovation International)

Memberships seem like a softer side of the paywall equation, requiring readers to pay for some or all of the content they wish to access online.

Innovation’s take on memberships that connect readers emotionally:

With all of the free content out there, attracting readers willing to pay is a monumental task. Paywalls may be successful at some papers, but they are few and far between.

What remains true is that newspapers inspire a certain loyalty with a certain percentage of their audience. Even if that audience isn’t willing to pay directly for content, membership packages allow newspapers to offer something different, an emotional connection with their core readers complemented by special deals and opportunities. Expect memberships to become a more common feature of publisher offerings in coming years.

Digital ID cards are still a rarity in most countries, but they’re a staple of everyday life in Estonia — locals use them for everything from e-voting to buying mass transit tickets. You currently have to live in the country to take advantage of…

Scientists at Facebook have published a paper showing that they manipulated the content seen by more than 600,000 users in an attempt to determine whether this would affect their emotional state.

WARSAW, Poland (AP) — President Barack Obama has taken the U.S. gay rights revolution global, using American embassies across the world to promote a cause that still divides his own country.

Sometimes U.S. advice and encouragement is condemned as unacceptable meddling. And sometimes it can seem to backfire, increasing the pressure on those it is meant to help. With gay pride parades taking place in many cities across the world this weekend, the U.S. role will be more visible than ever. Diplomats will take part in parades and some embassies will fly the rainbow flag along with the Stars and Stripes.

The United States sent five openly gay ambassadors abroad last year, with a sixth nominee, to Vietnam, now awaiting Senate confirmation. American diplomats are working to support gay rights in countries such as Poland, where prejudice remains deep, and to oppose violence and other abuse in countries like Nigeria and Russia, where gays face life-threatening risks.

“It is incredible. I am amazed by what the U.S. is doing to help us,” said Mariusz Kurc, the editor of a Polish gay advocacy magazine, Replika, which has received some U.S. funding and other help. “We are used to struggling and not finding any support.”

Former President George W. Bush supported AIDS prevention efforts globally, but it was the Obama administration that launched the push to make lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender rights an international issue. The watershed moment came in December 2011, when then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton went to the United Nations in Geneva and proclaimed LGBT rights “one of the remaining human rights challenges of our time.”

Since then, embassies have been opening their doors to gay rights activists, hosting events and supporting local advocacy work. The State Department has since spent $12 million on the efforts in over 50 countries through the Global Equality Fund, an initiative launched to fund the new work.

Just weeks after the Supreme Court struck down parts of the Defense of Marriage Act last June, consular posts also began issuing immigrant visas to the same-sex spouses of gay Americans.

One beneficiary was Jake Lees, a 27-year-old Englishman who had been forced to spend long periods apart from his American partner, Austin Armacost, since they met six years ago. In May Lees was issued a fiance visa at the U.S. Embassy in London. The couple married two weeks ago and are now starting a new life together in Franklin, Indiana, as they wait for Lees’ green card.

“I felt like the officers at the embassy treated us the way they would treat a heterosexual couple,” said Armacost, a 26-year-old fitness and nutrition instructor. “It’s a mind-boggling change after gay couples were treated like legal strangers for the first three centuries of our country’s history.”

Some conservative American groups are outraged by the policy. Brian Brown, president of the National Organization for Marriage, calls it “a slap in the face to the majority of Americans,” given that American voters have rejected same-sex marriage in a number of state referendums.

“This is taking a flawed view of what it means to be a human being — male and female — and trying to impose that on countries throughout the world,” Brown said. “The administration would like people to believe that this is simply ‘live and let live.’ No, this is coercion in its worst possible form.”

The American efforts are tailored to local conditions, said Scott Busby, the deputy assistant secretary for the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor at the State Department. Ambassadors can decide individually whether to hoist the rainbow flag, as embassies in Tel Aviv, London and Prague have done, or show support in other ways.

While some gay rights activists say support from the U.S. and other Western countries adds moral legitimacy to their cause, it can also cause a backlash.

Rauda Morcos, a prominent Palestinian lesbian activist, said local communities, particularly in the Middle East, have to find their own ways of asserting themselves. She criticized the U.S. and Western efforts in general to help gay communities elsewhere as patronizing.

“It is a colonial approach,” she said. “In cases where it was tried, it didn’t help local communities and maybe made things even worse.”

An extreme case has been Uganda, which in February passed a law making gay sex punishable by a life sentence. In enacting the bill, President Yoweri Museveni said he wanted to deter the West from “promoting” gay rights in Africa, a continent where homosexuals face severe discrimination and even attacks. In response, the U.S. imposed sanctions and Secretary of State John Kerry compared the policies to the anti-Semitic laws in Nazi Germany and apartheid in South Africa.

In Russia, President Vladimir Putin has waged an assault on what he considers the encroachment of decadent Western values and the government last year banned “propaganda of nontraditional sexual relations among minors,” making it a crime to hold gay rights rallies or to openly discuss homosexuality in content accessible to children. Afraid for their security, some Russian gay advocates try to keep their contacts with Western officials quiet.

The official U.S. delegation to the recent Winter Olympics in Russia included three openly gay athletes. Soon after that the U.S. Embassy in Moscow opened its basketball court for the Open Games, an LGBT sporting event which had been denied access to many of the venues it had counted on. The U.S. Embassy also operates a website where Russian gay and lesbians can publish their personal stories.

Jessica Stern, executive director of the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission, praised the U.S. policy but said there have been missteps along the way, citing a 2011 U.S. embassy gathering in Pakistan that prompted a group of religious and political leaders to accuse the U.S. of “cultural terrorism.”

And in Senegal a year ago, President Macky Sall bluntly rebuked the visiting Obama for urging African leaders to end discrimination against gays. Sall said his country was neither homophobic nor ready to legalize homosexuality, and in an apparent jab at the U.S., he noted Senegal abolished capital punishment years ago.

“The response in the local press was voluminous praise of the Senegalese president, maybe not actually for his stance on LGBT rights, but for effectively asserting Senegal’s sovereignty, yet the two became intertwined,” Stern said.

Busby, the State Department official, denied that increased harassment by governments is ever the consequence of U.S. advocacy, instead describing it as “a cynical reaction taken by leaders to advance their own political standing.”

In some countries, like Poland, the U.S. efforts are a catalyst for change.

The embassy there financed a 2012 visit to Warsaw by Dennis and Judy Shepard, the parents of Matthew Shepard, a gay Wyoming college student who was tortured and murdered in 1998.

A group of parents who heard their story were so shaken by the Shepards’ tragedy that they founded a parental advocacy group, Akceptacja, which is fighting homophobia. The parents are now reaching out to their lawmakers personally, in what advocates say is the conscious adoption of an American strategy of families of gays and lesbians appealing to the hearts of officials.

“The killing of Matthew Shepard represents the fear I have that my son could be hurt for being gay,” said Tamara Uliasz, 60, one of the group’s founders. “I realized that what happened in Wyoming could happen here.”

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Associated Press writers Ezequiel Abiu Lopez in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic; Rodney Muhumuza in Kampala, Uganda; and Jan M. Olsen in Copenhagen, Denmark, contributed to this report.