Dec/110
2011 – Achievements and Standpoint | Feitos e Ponto de Situação
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The year is almost over and I have the need to put things into some perspective. So, despite considering it as one of the worst years I had in my life, I’m going to look at the things I did, and try to prove myself it wasn’t really that bad. ACHIEVEMENTS Professionally, the first half was good, I was teaching in a training program created by Porto University, instructing journalists from Cofina, one of the biggest portuguese media groups. I worked with over 200 journalists and editors and it was a really rewarding experience. I think I changed some minds and helped many improve their skills. The rest is not up to me. I also worked as an instructor with the team of P3, a new youth oriented news website, which was a different challenge because they were online only, thus with a whole another approach to content production. And my teaching days were then over. I had to go back to be a student and finish my overdue MA final project. It wasn’t that good, and I could make all the excuses in the world because I really have a few good ones for not doing better and they would all be true, but the fact is I could have done better. Still, I had a commendation over it and I got an upgrade in my degree. So far it hasn’t impressed anyone. I wanted to develop a few projects but with all the problems I had this year some were postponed and I had to give up on others. I wanted to open my own business as a multimedia journalism producer/ consultant, but there’s a crisis going on, and people around here weren’t very impressed with my credentials. I have far better recognition abroad than in my own country, which kinda pisses me off. The fact is, I didn’t create my own job, nor I have one to complain about. Meanwhile, I invested in video content, using a HDSLR, all my efforts can be seen here (only those uploaded in the last 3 months count). I did a short doc about a cultural association I work with, and most of the stuff I made is based on the events we have there, like concerts and exhibitions. It’s a good testing ground and I’m planning to use what I’ve learned to create more journalistic stuff. |
O ano está quase a acabar e tenho a necessidade de pôr as coisas em perspectiva. Apesar de achar que este foi um dos piores anos da minha vida, vou olhar para o que fiz e tentar provar que afinal não foi assim tão mau. FEITOS Profissionalmente, os primeiros meses foram bons, fui formador num programa criado pela Universidade do Porto para a Cofina, onde trabalhei com mais de 200 jornalistas e editores das várias publicações do grupo e foi uma experiência fantástica. Acho que mudei algumas mentalidades e ajudei muitos a melhorar as suas capacidades. O resto não é comigo. Também dei formação à equipa do P3, o que foi um desafio especial porque eles estão exclusivamente online, logo com uma aproximação completamente diferente na criação de conteúdos. E a seguir acabaram-se os dias como professor. Tive que voltar a ser estudante e acabar o meu projecto final de mestrado. Não correu lá muito bem e podia dar todas as desculpas – e até tenho algumas muito boas e que são verdade – para isso, mas sei que podia ter feito melhor. Mesmo assim, passei com louvor e tenho agora um grau académico melhor. Até agora ninguém ficou lá muito impressionado com isso. Quis desenvolver alguns projectos mas com todos os problemas que tive este ano alguns foram adiados outros esquecidos. Queria abrir o meu próprio negócio como jornalista multimédia / formador /consultor, mas há uma crise lá fora e as pessoas não parecem muito impressionadas com as minhas credenciais. Tenho melhor reconhecimento noutros países do que aqui, o que me deixa um bocado lixado. A verdade é que falhei em criar o meu emprego ou a arranjar um de que me possa queixar. Entretanto investi na produção de vídeo com uma HDSLR, podem ver aqui alguns dos resultados (só os dos últimos 3 meses contam). Fiz um pequeno trabalho sobre a associação de que faço parte, e muitos dos videos são sobre coisas que por lá vão passando como concertos e exposições. É um bom tubo de ensaio (!), e estou a planear usar o que aprendi para fazer conteúdos mais jornalísticos. |
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I also wrote some interesting posts for the blog (check list below) and started a monthly column in a computer magazine, and did some articles for P3 (people there like me, what can I do?). I wrote an article about documentaries in this non-linear world, and a post at Innovative Interactivity about what features a news product should have. |
Escrevi ainda uns posts interessantes aqui no blog (ver lista abaixo) e comecei uma coluna mensal na PCGuia, e fiz ainda alguns artigos para o P3 (o pessoal lá gosta de mim, que é que posso fazer?). Escrevi ainda um artigo sobre documentários neste mundo não linear, e um post convidado sobre as características que um produto jornalístico online deve ter. |
- The upward spiral and the tornado effect: monitoring the spreading of news
- The failure of the single product business model
- #MAProject: Basic concepts – The JTeam and Views to a Crisis
- The Rise of the Zombie Articles (or why staying up late doesn’t make you smarter)
- O DN tem uma nova redacção, mas tem uma orientação para o online?
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Standpoint This was one of the longest, strenuous years I have ever experienced. Even though I was able to accomplish some goals, they look meaningless in the overall outcome. I’m broke, unemployed, I have no perspectives. It has always been one step forward and three behind. I had to give up on a lot of things, and basically I feel like it’s 2001 for me (another bad year) but with a heavier burden. I wasn’t expecting this. My projects are moving slowly, there is no money or time to devote myself fully to them. I’m starting 2012 on basic survival mode, but that’s the outlook for millions of Portuguese people this year. Going abroad is a possibility, I understand Nando’s is always hiring. There’s a lot to decide in the upcoming weeks. Still, I’m on the market, I’m trying to sell training and consultancy programs for local and regional newspapers, I’m available as a freelancer both for national or international media, and I’ll be presenting a few more ideas if things don’t get any worse. 2011 won’t be missed, too many bad things have happened, but such is life. I’m finishing way worse than I started, and I’m considering other options for my future, because life is unstoppable in its motion and either you roll with or get crushed. I’m a roller. Death to 2011, I’ll look back on it with a bitter taste in my mouth. |
Ponto de situação Este foi um dos anos mais longos e extenuantes que vivi. Apesar de ter atingido alguns objectivos, tudo parece inútil no balanço geral. Estou basicamente falido, desempregado, sem grandes perspectivas. Foi sempre um passo para a frente e três para trás. Tive que desistir de muita coisa, e sinto-me de volta a 2001 (outro ano péssimo) mas apenas com um fardo ainda mais pesado. Não estava mesmo à espera disto. Os meus projectos pessoais estão a andar devagar ou parados, não há dinheiro ou tempo para me dedicar a eles. Vou começar 2012 em modo de sobrevivência, mas sou e mais uns milhões de concidadãos. Ir para fora é uma possibilidade, também se lavam pratos lá fora. Há muito para decidir nas próximas semanas. Por enquanto, estou no mercado, a tentar vender programas de formação e consultadoria para media locais e regionais. Estou disponível como freelancer para publicações nacionais ou internacionais, e tenho mais algumas ideias na manga se isto não piorar. Não vou ter saudades de 2011, aconteceram demasiadas coisas más, mas é a vida. Termino o ano bem pior do que quando comecei e estou a ponderar outras opções para o meu futuro, porque a vida não pára, ou a acompanhamos ou somos esmagados pelo movimento. Morte a 2011, vou-me lembrar deste ano com amargos de boca. |
Dec/116
Mestrado | MA Online Journalism #done | #feito
"MA-MA-MA-MA-MAAAA DIPLOMA" by The Knack
As some of you might now already, I finally finished my MA in Online Journalism that I attended last year at Birmingham City University (UK) under the guidance of Paul Bradshaw. I had to postpone the delivery of the final assignment so this is why I’m getting my diploma now. And now I can say a few things.
I want to thank everyone who supported me in this great experience, from my colleagues in Birmingham who helped me out and had fun with, especially Dan Davies and his wife Jules who received me in their home in the first night I got there and put up with me through out the year, Caroline Beavon that is like my British sister, Ioana Epure who is amazing in everything she does and Mikel Plana, though he dropped out mid course he is related to some of the best and funniest moments I had there.
And there are many others, with whom I still try to keep in touch despite the distance, but life sometimes has other plans. I expect to see most of you again in the future, if things turn out for the best for me. To you all my deepest thanks and appreciation for those amazing moments.
I’d also like to thank all the staff at BCU that had to deal with me now and then, to the teachers who asked the right questions and made me look at things from a different perspective.
I realized in the last year something had changed in me, and although sometimes I don’t know what it was, I know “why”, and I feel I’m better because of that. Now and then people come and ask me about the course, and I always say it’s worth the shot, and that they at least should consider seriously the option of doing this MA.
The most important of this thank you list is Paul Bradshaw, who has been really patient with me in these last 18 months. I remember clearly the day he asked if I want to be part of the first class of his MA: my life was not going well, I was broke (again) and considering giving up all things journalism. I went for a run that day to sort things out in my mind and establish a plan, feeling like Indiana Jones rescuing his hat in the very last second.
I asked for a loan because I never had the money to pay for something like this, and so I joined the inaugural class of this course, that was brilliant because Paul got us in touch with real people, real situations and real work environments. This business is changing too fast to grasp all the novelties, but he managed to keep us up to speed. He’s a brilliant guy and I respect him a lot. So, thank you so much Paul, this meant a lot to me.
Closer to me are others that I already thanked for everything they did. You know who you are because I already told you how much your support meant to me. But I have to publicly thank my parents, who have always been there for me. My family is not average middle class, make that lower middle class, we don’t have a car, we don’t own a house, they make the minimum wage but still managed to make things happen. And of course, in this picture there’s my grandmother that always saved the day when I was in a financial distress. She passed away this summer and I feel I never thanked her enough.
To tell you the truth, I say the year I spent in Birmingham was the best one of my life, despite the hardships, frustrations, failures and micro-disasters along the way. I can say the opposite of 2011, it’s been one of the worst years ever, and though I had a magnificent work experience with Porto University, too many bad things happened through out the year, and my final project resented that. The final result isn’t brilliant, but I have to be honest, for a moment there I though I wasn’t going to make it. I wanted to pass with flying colors, but it’s amazing as it is.
The future from here looks dark, I’m broke (my financial records are a roller-coaster from hell), trying to survive in a dying economy in a country where hope is something that faded long ago, and I’m stuck with a loan for the next 7 years that I can’t pay. And there’s the regular expenses, like a roof, light, water, food, internet. I’ve been here before, but this time it’s a bit more complicated. But I’m trying, and I’m not leaving my hat behind in any circumstances.
Anyway, it’s done, there are no regrets, quite the opposite: I am better, happier, richer as a person (and hopefully financially too anytime soon), and this is a huge achievement for me, probably the biggest one so far, because no one just hand it over to me, I’m still fighting for it.
Thank you.
Sep/110
Survey: analyzing the need for Multimedia Production in Portugal
For my MA report, I conducted a small survey about multimedia production in Portuguese newsrooms, and although it is not statistically relevant (only 13 responded), it was answered by some of the most important media companies in Portugal, including two reference national dailies and two major TV networks.
The results do not fall far from the expected: there isn’t still a solid investment in the newsrooms to create and publish multimedia/interactive content, in spite of the desire to do so, mainly because they lack the skilled professionals to do so.
Point by point here are the conclusions reached with the survey:
Confronted with the importance of multimedia in today’s news practice they all consider it is at least important but most don’t have the habit of producing them. This may be explained by the insufficient staff available to create them, many times overlapping functions as page makers, and the habit of only use in house production.
Most of the interactive content that comes from external sources is created by LUSA, the national news agency, which sells exclusive infographics or retail videos.
As you can see in the following chart, the types of content are mostly very simple to produce, being photo galleries and videos the most common. Very few take the time to build their own multimedia packages, but these have increased significantly in the last years in other brands that did not respond to the survey, some of them featuring multimedia packages on a regular basis.
When asked if their companies were interested in buying content created by others, the answers were quite conservative. It is understandable that they wish to have control over the process despite paradoxically they don’t produce multimedia content due to staff limitations.
And how much they would be willing to pay for a basic multimedia package? The example given was one with 4 videos plus an interactive chart. Most of them indicated the usual price range here in Portugal for this type of products, between 75 to 150€. This is clearly insufficient, even if we look at it as a one-man-band endeavour. To make them profitable, these packages would have to be made in a 10 to 15 hour period, and have at least 10 orders per month.
I’m currently producing a similar package and first video only took 7 working hours total (it was more than that but i’m not counting with hardware glitches).
But the idea of acquiring multimedia kits, which by definition would be pieces that could be assembled and adapted to each newsroom’s editorial and design guidelines, was more appealing. Again, the issue of control over news content creation is present.
I also asked for their insights about the need for multimedia production in Portuguese newsrooms and the answers were pretty similar: many agreed that though multimedia content is important “newsrooms aren’t ready enough to operate them” and “there isn’t enough money to invest in external production”.
This seems to be a structural problem within news organizations, as pointed out by others: there is a lot of interest in the newsrooms in multimedia contents, finding them valuable “from an editorial point of view” and as a support for their text stories.
However, “because of the unpreparedness of the professionals, or by having the need to recruit new staff or acquire external content, it will be difficult to persuade administrations of the importance of those contents, mainly because websites haven’t been able to impose a profitable business model”.
The idea that media administrations are reluctant to invest in multimedia was also reinforced in other answers.
So, as a freelancer, things don’t seem that bright for me. And all I can say from first hand experience is that there is a strong will to produce multimedia content in portuguese newsrooms. They just don’t have the time or the money in most of them.
What do you make of this picture? Let me know in the comments.
Aug/110
#MAProject: Basic concepts – The JTeam and Views to a Crisis
As I’m trying to finish my MA Project, I realized that when I write my final Production Report it will be more about failure than success. But this could also be because I haven’t got much feedback on what I’m doing, so I’ll just put it all out in the open. Tell me what you think.
The JTeam
The starting point was to create an informal team of journalists, specialized in multimedia and interactive narratives, that would follow specific production guidelines to tell marginal stories to main issues. This was also my main idea when me and my MA colleagues started developing Hashbrum, a hyperlocal website dedicated to cover the “neglected stories of Birmingham” (looking back through the filter of recent events we could have done so much more), but we failed to follow that line, although the basic concept was there.
When I say “informal”, I mean “not fixed”, the team would vary from story to story, since every story needs different skills and sensibilities. It could also work as an external Multimedia production company embedding journalists from established media brands. Another example of this would be Spot.us, and the way they change journalists and editors for every story. Having the people and the tools, this would be a team of journo-mercenaries (at least we would admit that), although mimicking the A-Team for journalism doesn’t look that good after you’ve seen others doing the same for other (probably more successful) businesses.
And this would be it: a pool of eager, talented, skilled journos ready to step into action armed with multimedia and interactivity and witty remarks. This also has a more broad organizational model, but for now this is enough.
So, what would be the J-Team’s first assignment?
Views To a Crisis
While living in the UK, I noticed that most of the information about the standards of living, the economical and social situation in Portugal we’re skewed – to say the least - and, above all, inaccurate. Portugal looked worse a year ago from the outside than it really is nowadays, and I thought about how much speculative journalism can affect the image of a nation. Not that the news were wrong, the facts were just a bit blown out of proportion. If we consider that many media groups are cutting back in correspondents, and that the international media doesn’t care for local media if they can’t understand it (i.e., speak in a foreign language) maybe they will never be able to deliver an accurate account of what is really happening. I’m not saying that I didn’t see a good coverage from some British media about the risks Portugal was facing, but I wondered how they could paint such a bad picture and how much of that was cause or effect.
Not trying to imply foreign media in Portuguese mismanagement, my idea was to have a more human approach to the subject, and turn those doom and gloom numbers into real faces and places, and share their stories of perseverance, misfortune, readjustment or evolution in a critical economical environment, and show them to an international audience by making that content available in Internet’s lingua franca, English.
But once back in Portugal and having being in touch again with the national media industry, I realized the “real” country wasn’t just misrepresented by foreign media: Portuguese newsrooms, due to their own hardships, have been concentrating their coverage on the mainframe issues and falling into the number and statistics trap. Not all, fortunately, but we are being fed the crisis every single time we look at a newsstand, or listen to the radio or watch the TV news, and sometimes it all looks like a damned math problem. Well, it is, but I hated Math. And since major news outlets are cutting back on their own local correspondents, I got that feeling that something was skewed all over again, with most of the message being conveyed from and directed to major urban areas, most specifically Lisbon, which does not reflect the realities of the rest of the country.
In my research for outliers from this type of coverage, I came across with an initiative by Público, one of Portugal’s leading newspapers, that developed an interesting approach to depict the effects of the crisis in regular people. Their approach is to follow five different families from different parts of the country. Called “A year in the crisis“, their goal is to have first person accounts using dynamic languages like video, set against background analysis provided by data and critical reports. It’s a very solid concept, and that meets many of the ideas I have for my own project. They are trying to figure out what has changed in these people’s lives and how they are adjusting to cope with all the setbacks created by an economical downturn, while keeping the stories human.
My idea is a bit more broad though. These families are sharing their experience, but I also care about the young graduates who are thinking about leaving the country because they can’t find a job, or those who are going back to their hometowns since they can’t afford living in great urban areas although the job offers are even more scarce. Or how some are demonstrating their discontentment through urban art, or how they are helping others in more dire situations. And I also want to know how life is for those who have always lived through their own crisis, that this one will only aggravate. Others are creating new opportunities reinventing their own life and career options, and many are trying to keep doing the same things they always did before: there weren’t any big losses in the Summer music festivals that happened all over the country, for example.
This would be complemented by a comprehensive set of data visualizations that would show how the situation has evolved, how it has its toll in different parts of the country (I’ve been trying to create a map of unemployment by municipality), and provide tools so each user could relate to specific data sets, using calculators or queries. I’ve been playing with some data viz tools and the only thing I can show now is a sunburst graph depicting the money the government has spent in its executive responsibilities. It has no framing or further explanations, it’s just a technical experiment.
A set of production guidelines still has to be established, but these depend on the range of the content, how it will be produced, and under which business model it will fall under. But business models will soon be discussed here too.
I have been trying to establish partnerships with other people and organizations – some related to independent media – especially aiming at the non-profit model, but I’m open to suggestions. And if you feel you have what it takes to be a part of it, registrations are open. Well, not real registrations, just send me an email if you’re interested.
What do you make of this? Would foreign media be interested in a coverage “from the ground”, and would Portuguese media also be available to work in the production of this type of contents and use them in their own platforms? What flaws do you see in this concept?
I’m all eyes and ears.
Aug/110
#MAProject: Visualization experiment with Portugal’s Expenses and Jit
So the deadline is approaching fast to deliver my final assignment and finally finish my MA. I’ve been trying out lots of different types of visualizations, especially under the guidance of Nathan Yau’s Visualize This, which I recommend because it has a great practical side to understand data visualizations and how to start building them.
I have been taking a self inflicted crash course on Excel, Google Refine, JSON, ScraperWiki and Java, not to mention R, Protovis, Processing and other assorted tools, trying not to build readable charts but also making the interactive without resorting to Flash. During my quest for interactive tools I rediscovered Jit, which can be a great starting point to have interesting types of data visualization.
In this specific situation I used data referring the executive expenses of the Portuguese Government in the first half of this year, and worked around the Sunburst model available on Jit. I had to work two different levels of data with JSON to get these two dependent rings. Ia also thought about doing it as a Treemap, but this seemed to be more clear. It’s still a mockup but you’ll get the idea (hopefully).
Click on the image to check the vis and let me hear from you.
Jan/112
Year Zero
A Brummie skyline. This was home for a good part of 2010
Though all the reflections about the year are usually made in its last week, I’m only writing them down now. 2010 was an amazing but busy year, so busy I had to leave this post to 2011. Here are my thoughts on it.
The first half of the year I was in Birmingham doing the MA Online Journalism with Paul Bradshaw heading the course. It was probably the smartest thing I have ever done in my life because I got to learn new things and meet amazing people, my colleagues included. I blogged extensively about my time there and some of my experiments during the course with online journalism tools and narratives, so you can browse the blog for more info on that.
I still have a final project to wrap up the MA, and that is one of my priorities for this year. But I’ll talk about this later, because I think I’ll need your help.
In the second half of the year I’ve been working as an instructor – which is different from being a teacher – training journalists to face the needs of the online medium. It has been a rewarding experience, and I’m surrounded by talented, skilled people, with different expertise and with whom I’ve been learning a lot.
In between I wrote a few articles for Journalism.co.uk, a big one for a documentary magazine, worked briefly for a major newspaper defining their social media strategy
And this is the good stuff. Not that there’s anything bad to say about 2010, it was a hell of a year, but with so many things happening I neglected a few things, like this blog. And I kinda lost my mojo (not mobile journalism). I am a reasonable juggler, but not at a Cirque du Soleil level. I had lots of ideas and opinions, you know, the stuff I used to share with all of you and that made me “famous”, but I never got to find the time to post them. That was my biggest regret in 2010, but on the other hand, I’m glad I didn’t, because it made me look at the big picture and see that there are too many “changes” going on. Yes, the inverted commas are supposed to have a ironic effect (both in “famous” and “changes”). No matter how interesting my ideas were, two weeks later they would be outdated.
We saw the iPad craze amongst the media tycoons, which is nothing but a feeble attempt to transport the print logic to a digital device (again). That is not the way, sirs. We watched the Wikileaks effect in different times of the year, and the debate about what is journalism, and what is not. I can say that debate is not journalism, and that once again media focused on the accessory and not on the important stuff. Facebook became the T-Rex of the web, and still many think it’s foolish. Sometimes it is, but it also has big teeth, and it’s smart to be in good terms with it. All in all, instead of broadcasting the news and make their content more interesting and valuable, most media faced the internet like if it was 1999. We’re a bit more advanced than that.
But this makes me happy and more confident about the future. The good stuff will survive and the bad will deliberately jump off a cliff. Never the Darwin theories have been so well applied to an industry.
2010 was year zero, for me and for the future of journalism. Changes are happening in different ways and in different paces, in different places, but the wheels are moving forward. We just have to enjoy the ride. 2011 is going to be the year to do things, after all the learning and thinking, all the mishaps and dead ends. Today is always a good day to start. I just need to be a better juggler.
Just do it, and make it consequent. That’s my motto for this year. What is yours?
PS: by the way, I’d like to thank to all the people that I met this year and helped me move forward, I could have never done this on my own. It’s a long list, but you know who you are. And to those who have always been there for me, well, you know…
Jul/100
The blog, the MA and the future
This blog has been neglected. There, i said it. Call the Blog Protection Services and i might lose custody. The problem is that i have a reason for that. Several, in fact, but these are the ones that matter, and most of them sound so lame i won’t even bother to list them, like “time” or “i needed a break” or a “fresh perspective”.
As you may know, i’ve been doing the MA in Online Journalism at Birmingham City University, under the guidance of Paul Bradshaw, for the last nine months. Best thing i ever done in my life: not only i got to learn with one of the best minds in online journalism, but i also had a great time living in a foreign country, a first for me. It wasn’t a life changing experience or anything like that, but it ‘s damn close. Now that i’m back in Portugal i’m slowly recognizing the effects it had on me, and i’m in what i call a “hangover period”. You know, you wake up a bit disoriented, and wonder about what you’ve done the night before? No regrets in my case though.
But since i was busy as hell, i put the blog aside for too long. I have a list of posts i want to write, and i’m starting to work on them this week. I have stuff waiting to be posted since last year, but now i know how to do it better. So pay attention to the forthcoming posts, i’m back.
Meanwhile, i was doing this MA like i said. I still have one project to do during the Summer, and i’ll talk about it here soon, but you can take a look at what i’ve done in the last six months in this blog post Paul wrote about the assignments and experiments me and my colleagues did.A timeline, the spontaneous online coverage of the Madeira floods, a multimedia project, those were some of my relevant efforts.
I’m proud of mine – though i think i could have done so much better - but my colleagues were great. Read the whole series of posts so you can have an idea of what we were doing. We got in touch with amazing people, and though sometimes the brits seem hard to reach, i met some of the nicest people ever related to journalism. Maybe i was lucky, maybe they were just polite, but what a difference! The small country blues hit me hard sometimes, but then i also realized that in Portugal we are not behind anyone, we have incredible people working in journalism and new media, the problem is that we don’t have many chances to grow. Well, we do, but no entrepreneurial attitude (i had a class on that), fortunately some people don’t think that way. But that’s for another post.
Anyway, i’m on a break now, doing this course in Porto, and then i’ll be working on my Summer project for the MA. And afterwards i may have a job that allows me to do lots of stuff on the side, and push the boundaries of journalism a little further. I have lots of ideas, so all i have to do is work on them, no matter if i stay here or change countries again.
The future is now, and there’s no better place than that.
PS: by the way, the reason why i’m writing english only posts is that writing both in portuguese and english is time-consuming and i’m a bit late, but i’ll try to go back to dual language soon.
Jun/102
MA Online Journalism – The Paranoia Timeline
One of the assignments i did for my Online Journalism module was a timeline depicting some of the major events that caused social stir across the world in the last 20 years. Some were real, some were just, well, paranoid behavior, hence The Paranoia Timeline. This is a description of the project – that stayed incomplete, still in a conceptual phase - and the steps and views i have on it.
I would like to hear from you, about what can be done with archive journalism, with different narratives, and if you want to help me develop the timeline (it’s filled with mock content, and it’s maybe in the 5% of its full potential) let me know. I wanted this to be a collaborative project, with different people contributing with ideas, videos, text, pictures, graphs, opinions, so any help is more than welcome.
So you can have an idea of what is the spirit of The Paranoia Timeline, here’s a small video i edited as a promo.
“Paranoia is a thought process heavily influenced by anxiety or fear, often to the point of irrationality and delusion.” Wikipedia
The Project
In an attempt to explore new ways to report stories, I decided for this project to use a timeline as a platform to report on some events that had social impact in the last 20 years. The kind of aftermath these events had is not constrained to geographical levels, and they altered our everyday lives, and in some cases, our world views and personal experience. Some of these events caused social hysteria or global discussion and forced governments to act in ways that affected the common citizen.
The Paranoia Timeline[i] is based in a type of journalism that I believe to be quite ignored by mainstream media, which is archive journalism. This type of reporting works with – as the name implies – with archive information and preexistent content, and my idea was to use available data and information to create a retrospective view on a few events that fulfilled the parameters presented before. Being the Internet the world’s largest archive, it was logical to work exclusively with online content, and reuse it to make something new, using computer assisted reporting and mashups.
Though the current result falls short of my initial goals, it is a prototype for a more involving experience, and I consider it to be a work in construction. What I’ll be defending here is a concept with a few examples using interactive tools, but I realize this is just a small sample of what it can really be: an immersive, ongoing project, with more interactive features, providing a journalistic approach to issues highly debated and prone to partisanship, many of them used by religious and political groups to spin their own ideologies to the general audience. The purpose is to create context.
Research
First of all, I had to look for the most reliable and customizable timeline creating tool available for free[ii]. After pondering a few options, I chose Dipity[iii], mostly because of its reliability and ease of use, but I must admit I preferred something even more powerful: Dipity still has some glitches.
The first question was how to pinpoint in importance and time the events for this timeline. At first I used my own memory and experience and then used other people’s to limit it to the most important and visible ones. Wikipedia is a great resource when it comes to sum up the most important events in a decade, so I looked up the decade entries, in this case the 90’s and the 00’s. It was a good starting point to find the candidates for this timeline, and, simultaneously, to have more links for my research.
But when it came to limit those events in time I had a problem: how could I limit the span of the importance of the events in public opinion? The best way I found was to use Google and their timeline tool.
By searching for peaks in the timeline created by Google, I could define exactly the period when the subject was widely discussed. Since Google also has the Google News Archive, with copies of pre-Internet newspapers, I also had a long run perspective for the subject at hand that could be used for historical context.
Other valuable resource was Archive.org. This website has an immense collection of media under public domain that can be used to illustrate some of these stories. I made a pastiche video using almost exclusively footage available there, with the exception of some stock footage available for free at a specialized website. The video works as a promo for the website, and it should have included two interviews, but I wasn’t able to do any of them. Still, my idea was to create an audiovisual narrative for each subject of the timeline, like a mini documentary series, using both archive footage and actual interviews with experts. I also tried to use Google’s Newstimeline[iv], but it wasn’t embeddable I had to give up the idea of having a scrolling timeline with newspapers about the specific subject.
Data
I chose two subjects to investigate using data: the recent swine flu and the credit crunch. Both of them are rich in statistical information so I decided to do a death map for the flu[v], and a graph showing loan evolution in the United States since 2003, using Tableau.
The swine flu data came from Wolfram-Alpha[vi] that generated a rather reliable (after cross checking with other official websites) amount of data, with the number of cases and deaths per country. I had to make an option about which would be highlighted, but discrepancies in the logical amount of cases between countries made me go just for the death numbers. The conclusion that I got from the map is that swine flu was either more serious or reported in the developed countries. Traditionally considered Third World countries do not have many reports, which reflect the lack of structures to deal with the problem or how overhyped it was in the Western world. But France on its own had almost 3 million cases reported against 57 thousand in the United States, which led me to verify closely other sources. It seems Wolfram Alpha had the number wrong, there were only about 5000 reports, which proves that outliers in data are either new stories or just input errors.
For the credit crunch[vii], I researched the FDIC – Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation[viii] database. They have a considerable amount of statistical data available for download. My idea was to chart the evolution of loans in the United States in the last years, and the main idea was that overall loans slowed down since 2009 but individual credits rose, meaning an increase in personal debt to cope with overall difficulties caused by the crunch.I selected the items that seemed more relevant and went for a simple line chart. My purpose was served.
Production
The timeline had to be embedded in a website, so I used WordPress as a platform. The timeline would provide links to the posts about each topic, and each post would have developed content besides the one already present in the timeline items.
I tried to crowdsource some of the work, using Google Wave and my own network of contacts, but it didn’t work. I also tried to use HARO[ix] network, but they don’t call themselves HASO for a reason (they don’t help students out). Taking all the responsibility for the reporting made me narrow down the content for this assignment to just a few events. I asked permission to use some works already created by other users, like the chart in the 2012 post and some pictures from Flickr. An issue stood out immediately: my idea was not to aggregate content, but to create new content from what I had found. But eventually I realized there are many works out there that fit the needs for contextualization that are so much better than what I could try to create.
So I focused more on the concept, and that’s why I have so many empty posts, like I said, it is a prototype that needs further development. That’s also why I didn’t use social networks, although their importance would be paramount in the future, to engage users into debating the subjects of the timeline.
Copyright and ethics
Using Public Domain material is not an issue, but we always need to read the small print in some of the Creative Commons available content. Not all allow transforming the original, so I had to make some options. Overall, it was quite easy to find audio and visual content to work with, and I have a long list of links to videos to assess. I asked for permission to use some visual elements, namely the 2012 chart, which was what I was looking for, kindly granted by its author.
The disclosure of the Paranoia Timeline as a non-conspiracy theory website also allows me to avoid one sided views and the usual partisanship that we find in other websites that address these subjects.
Innovation
What makes me look at my project as an innovative narrative for journalism is my idea that retrospective journalism should be made, especially now that we have easy access to so much archived content. The perennial quality of web content makes it easily available and thanks to the efforts of Google, even non digital content – old newspapers – is available, which makes it, in my perspective, an interesting and valuable journalistic narrative. Context is the keyword here, and I believe this is the most important objective of new narratives in a world of fragmented torrents of information. This could be also a premium feature for news companies.
This is yet far from finished, but I’ll be working on the project in the near future, and hopefully not as a one man band.
[i] TPT website http://www.theparanoiatimeline.com/
[ii] My blog post about timeline tools http://tinyurl.com/28erszn
[iii] Dipity timeline http://tinyurl.com/38zk5ug
[iv] http://newstimeline.googlelabs.com/
[v] Swine flu post http://tinyurl.com/39c282w
[vi] Wolfram-Alpha swine flu data http://tinyurl.com/39urc6d
[vii] Credit Crunch post http://tinyurl.com/24xb7ok
[viii] FDIC – Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation http://www2.fdic.gov/SDI/SOB/
[ix] Help A Reporter Out – http://www.helpareporter.com/
May/109
Creating Timelines
Timelines can be a great way to tell a story. Since i’m basing my last assignment for the Online Journalism module in a timeline depicting the most important social scares of the last 20 years (and beyond), i researched a few (free) timeline creating tools that i’m considering for my project, while i don’t have a more customized option.
The features i need are the following:
- it must be embeddable – i’m creating a website for this project and i need to embed my timeline there, as a center piece;
- it must look good – this is hard since most free apps are not visually customizable, so i’m going for the most visually appealing if it provides the remaining items;
- i can be able to insert information , data and multimedia – click on the dot and there you have it, all the information and videos, audio you need;
- it must be reliable – i had some problems in my experiments with slow servers hosting the timeline.
After some Google digging, i found these tools – i already knew and used some of them – which are presented in no special order:
Dipity
Dipity is a huge reference for timeline creators. Highly customizable, reliable, it offers four types of presentations, from the basic timeline to a map. A pro in the list, it can be RSS fed, like the one here, showing all the posts i wrote for my previous blog. It’s one of my top choices.
Simile
Simile is quite interesting when it comes to show simultaneous events. The problem is you need some xml skills to work with it and host it yourself (i prefer that, to tell you the truth). Gina Trappani wrote a post in 2007 explaining how to build a timeline with Simile, and even offered a xml creator interface, that was really nice of her 
. I haven’t tested it properly yet, but i think that it can get the work done.
xTimeline
I like xTimeline a lot just because of the way you can embed multimedia in the event’s description. But you can’t customize it much, it’s a bit ugly, and sometimes goes AWOL, can’t really understand why. But it has lots of potencial, although it hasn’t been seeing much development for some time now…
Timeline Tool 2.0
This tool is quite interesting to create simple timelines. Although it’s not good for precision works, it’s self hosted and allows you to embed video, audio and images through a simple interface. I believe if we tamper with the source files we can customize it, but it’s a bit far from what i want, though i installed in my server and liked playing with it.
Timetoast
Another great option. I havent signed in to try it out, mostly because i don’t like the black dots thing but besides that it’s a quite complete and competent tool. I really need to take a closer look.
Timerime
Timerime seemed to be quite powerful but it’s too messy for my taste. Anyway, it can be amazing for some projects, especially if they have overlapping events. I like the style and the navigation, and if i can control the amount of clutter i’ll use it.
Good examples
While researching for this assignment i found a few websites using timelines in an amazing way. One of my favorites is the NYT Time Glider, a search engine based timeline that uses the NYT’s articles database: input a keyword and you’ll see the articles spread out or concentrated certain periods of time.
The other is one that i really enjoyed because it relates to one of the issues in myn own timeline. The GTD – Global Terrorism Database offers different visualizations of terrorism data using timelines. It’s an amazing resource.
What other tools and cool timeline websites do you know? If you want to help me out building my timeline just join the Wave, i’m on a deadline here, so any help is welcome.
May/101
Help me out with my #ParanoiaTimeline
My last assignment for the Online Journalism module for this term is going to be a timeline. Well, it’s more than a timeline, because I want to create an interactive graph, that resembles a timeline, with videos, graphs, interviews, the works. But i want to do it in less than two weeks. Are you willing to help me?
The idea is to show the biggest social paranoia events, at a global scale, that happened between the end of the longest paranoia period of the 20th century – the Cold War – in 1990, and the next catastrophic “event” set for 2012 (believe me, some people are terrified over that). I have a list for Pandemics, like SARS, Mad Cow syndrome, swine flu, bird flu; Environmental, like the ozone layer and global warming; Technology includes items like Y2K; and Terrorism, a real situation that keeps our society on borderline paranoia.
As you might have noticed, most of these events were huge on the news, they affected our lives in some way, but most of them never amounted to nothing, or to not as much as the media predicted. I need your help to give depth, and sort the time windows for each one of these events, and if you can interview someone who can talk about this, or tell me about good experts in any of these fields, share information or previous works you made before about any of these subjects, I’d be most grateful, and you’ll all be credited in the assignment. Anyway, if the timeline is not finished by the established deadline, I’ll be working on it for a few more weeks. I’m building a website around this and I really want you to contribute, this is also a crowdsourcing experience.
How can you participate? For now i’m using a Public Google Wave, anyone can join in, but i have a wiki, if you want to use it instead of the Wave just send me a message. I’m thinking about opening a Facebook group, but I’m still thinking about it. I’m open to suggestions. If you know any similar projects just leave the links below in the comment box. Thank you.
