It is the ninth performance of the world premiere of my play, The BOX, and the screaming and banging has been getting to me. My play, based on stories I collected from people in solitary confinement in prisons across the U.S., was a culmination of years of investigative work. Thus far I’ve been in the audience to watch every show, but this time I decide to sit one out.

I’m out in the lobby with my eyes closed and feet up, listening to the muffled yelling of actors on stage. About twenty minutes into the performance I hear footsteps coming from behind me. I open my eyes just in time to see a figure rush past, heading toward the front door. I see a tall man in his thirties, with mid-length curly hair, wearing a baggy T-shirt and pants. It’s then that I notice his clothes are wet. I realize he’s literally drenched in sweat.

Wait, I say, standing up.

The man already has one foot out the door when he turns to look at me, his eyes darting back and forth.

Are you all right? I ask, walking toward him.

He glances down at his clothes then looks up at me.

This has never happened before, he says, I don’t know why I’m sweating like this.

He tells me he’s never been to prison, and he has no idea why a play about solitary confinement would provoke such an extreme physiological reaction. He reassures me he has somewhere safe to go, that he won’t be alone. Then, after less than a minute, he’s gone.

As a multimedia journalist, storyteller and artist, I’ve learned a lot from playing with form. I’ve told stories based on my own investigation into solitary confinement in U.S. prisons in mediums that span from traditional print journalism to immersive theatre, and now a graphic novel.

Each time, I’ve found the impact my projects have had and the audiences they’ve reached have been distinct. This has shown me how flipping content into different creative forms can be strategic and focused, a way for journalism to reach widespread, diverse, new audiences and have the impact our stories deserve.

Audience: Who does it reach?

While I was a John S. Knight Fellow at Stanford in 2019 I had the opportunity to collaboratively create a graphic novel (Flying Kites: The 2013 Prisoner Hunger Strike) that drew heavily from my own years of research on solitary confinement. In addition to being less visceral, graphic novels also appeal to a very different demographic, often young adults or teenagers. Take, for example, Arthur Van de Weghe, an eleven-year-old from Belgium whose father gave him a copy of Flying Kites.

After reading our book, Arthur wrote the following, “I really liked reading your graphic novel because now I know how inhumane solitary confinement is. I will never forget how creative inmates can be to survive by using ropes to pass letters and trade food under their cell doors. I recommend everybody read this book!”

A graphic novel is a very different container for story than theater. The figures depicted are not live actors in the flesh, they are small abstractions on a page. The format itself is more distancing, with various snapshots of a scene separated by space on a page (called “gutters”) that the mind is forced to string together into a cohesive narrative.

When story is immersive and intense, some people have the reaction of wanting to push it away. For example, after seeing The BOX on stage, some audience members felt so shell-shocked that they came up to me during the intermission with ashen faces: Is it really that bad? they’d ask. Are you sure this isn’t exaggerated?

Of course, no two viewers will ever react the same. Others approached me after the show with huge smiles and high fives, many of them formerly incarcerated individuals who experienced validation from seeing their lives depicted accurately on stage, rather than cognitive dissonance or disbelief.

Although graphic novels are generally not as visceral as live theater (it’s a stretch to imagine a reader sweating profusely while reading Flying Kites), they are powerful in another way. They create a safe container for the reader’s imagination to occupy.

A parent can give a graphic novel about solitary confinement to their preadolescent child (depending, of course, on the particular child’s specific needs) without excessive fear of nightmares or distress. Likewise, an adult who might sit out a play on solitary confinement, perhaps due to lack of time or lack of an emotional commitment, might be more inclined to give a graphic novel a shot.

In the private, intimate world of pen and ink, each reader has the privacy to find a unique path into the characters, understanding their motivations and inner world through his or her own. It can provide just enough distance from disturbing material to make space for critical thinking and empathy to grow.

Scale: Where can it go?

Our stories can’t have impact unless they reach the people who can use them, the people who need them the most.

The first production of The BOX reached over three thousand viewers, many of them people who had no direct experience with the prison system. Many reported being deeply affected by the experience, even years later. Though theater may pack a visceral narrative punch, it has a design flaw in that it is very expensive, involving heavy sets and physical bodies, and therefore difficult to scale.

Graphic novels are also expensive and labor-intensive to produce, but unlike theater, once they are published they can go almost anywhere. The books I’ve worked on about solitary confinement (see Hell Is a Very Small Place: Voices from Solitary Confinement and Sliver of Light: Three Americans Imprisoned in Iran) have been translated into other languages, excerpted in magazines, used in classrooms and adapted into short films, as well as being referenced in many other works. We have sent copies of Flying Kites to Russia, to Jordan, and perhaps most importantly, to hundreds of prisoners in solitary confinement across the U.S., back into the prisons where the real stories began.

It used to be that mass media, mainly television and newspapers, was about reaching as many people as possible. It didn’t matter who they were because the underlying belief was that, in a democracy, all people needed the same information. But the internet has exploded that belief while at the same time inspiring specialization and a more audience-centered design approach. A journalist’s reach can now be strategic, almost surgically focused, on the audience that needs a particular story the most.

Choosing the right container for a story means we’re no longer hurling stories into the dark. We can hone in on a specific demographic, profession, community or geographic region. We can start by asking ourselves what audience needs a particular story the most, what medium they favor and how our story, and the information contained within, might impact their lives in a meaningful way.

In addition to traveling across physical space, story can travel across social, identity-based and geographical bubbles, as well as bridge divisions in our own minds.

Impact: Who does it change?

Early one morning in 2016 I’m sitting in Michael Krasney’s studio at KQED in San Francisco being interviewed on Forum, a radio show that has been airing in San Francisco for almost three decades. We’re nearly at the end of our month-long run of The BOX, and I’m talking about the different audience reactions we’ve been getting, from shock to empowerment, when Krasney decides to bring in a caller.

The woman on the line had just seen the play. She encourages everyone listening to go see one of the last performances before it disappears. “It’s not an easy experience,” she warns, “but it’s an important one; after all, how often does a story change you?”

This question stuck with me, and it’s one I’ve examined a lot, particularly during my year as a JSK Fellow at Stanford. My conclusion is that stories change us a great deal. Studies have shown that a good story travels directly to the part of our brain that processes lived experience. Story is already a bridge, traveling the very short distance between “us” and “them,” so that an experience that was once alien to us now feels almost like our own. Stories influence our behavior, the decisions we make little and large. Stories may be one of the main ways we humans evolve, and one of the main hopes for our future on this planet.

For many people, journalism is about the facts, and it’s no doubt an essential part of the profession that our work be rigorously researched, sourced and fact-checked. But stories themselves, especially true ones, also contain information about the world-facts-albeit from an arguable, more subjective point of view. Stories, for example, of how prisoners in isolation are resisting the inhumanity in their conditions in California can provide valuable information to prisoners in Colorado or New Jersey facing the same or similar obstacles in their lives. In this way, stories can give people ideas, provide inspiration and even spark action that can improve their lives, reduce suffering their communities and help create a more meaningful world for all of us.

The second full production of The BOX was performed on Alcatraz Island in the San Francisco Bay, the site of the infamous penitentiary that is now a museum and tourist attraction. The circumstances were entirely different from the multiple productions of two years earlier. It was incorporated in a year-long exhibit, “The Future IDs of Alcatraz,” and from the get-go the curator of the project, Gregory Sale, set an intention of reaching the people most affected by incarceration. That meant The BOX didn’t need to be a loud bang that would rouse an audience removed from the reality of incarceration out of its slumber into action; it could be quiet, reverent, an opportunity for collective healing and collective witness.

The result was a very different production: a smaller cast, bare-bones set, limited screaming and banging and the words themselves performed at spoken-voice level (partly to avoid disturbing a semi-endangered bird species, Black Cormorants, mating outside the building; after all, we were performing inside a national park).

This production gave the audience an opportunity to lean in and really listen: to the waves crashing outside, the long silences, and perhaps even the voices of the people who had once been brutalized in what was now a beautiful place. It gave the words — and audience — space to breathe.

After the show we formed a circle, and, one after another, audience members, many formerly incarcerated, shared more deeply than I’d perhaps ever witnessed after a performance. I was reminded that the shape and texture of the container we pour our stories into changes what’s inside.

The medium is the house in which our stories live.

Thanks to The Pulitzer Center for supporting my reporting on solitary confinement, including co-producing performances of The BOX on Alcatraz Island in June 2019.

The house where our stories live was originally published in JSK Class of 2019 on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

How could someone possibly believe that?

Like many journalists and media researchers, I’ve found myself asking this question about disinformation that has gone viral via social media. Though I’ve spent years learning how and why disinformation is created, I’d never had the opportunity to explore the motivations of the people who believe and share these stories. That is what led me to do more in-depth research during my year as a John S. Knight Journalism Fellow at Stanford.

Over the course of six months, from December 2018 through the spring of 2019, I conducted in-depth interviews with nine Americans who were selected for their relationships with both disinformation and mainstream news. I had planned to interview more participants, but life circumstances got in the way.

Through these conversations, I came to the conclusion that the media industry isn’t facing a disinformation problem as much as an engagement problem. It isn’t merely the insidious and convincing nature of disinformation that drives people to consume, believe or share false news, but is also a profound disconnection from the mainstream media and how it works.

The final report from this research is available in full at the Project Disconnect website. Knowing that reading a lengthy report on disinformation isn’t for everyone, I’ll give an overview of the insights and my conclusions derived from these participant interviews.

1. Distrust in the power of the media

The people I interviewed were wary of the power of the mainstream media, aided by social media, to shape public opinion. Even those with positive feelings about the news said they did not trust the media’s motivations or sense of responsibility in wielding the power to determine “good guys” and “bad guys“.

2. The media isn’t “one of us”

Many of those interviewed felt the national/regional media did not really care about them or their communities, as reporters only appeared during times of crisis. That said, most of them did not take in locally produced news even if it was available.

3. Difficulty discerning facts and opinions

Most interviewees said they found the media least credible when it was difficult to distinguish between facts and opinion in the reporting. The participants did not object to expressions of opinion in news in and of itself, but they took issue with news that seemed as if it were giving opinion disguised as factual reporting.

4. Information overload from news aggregators and social media

An overabundance of news stories, all of which are fed into news aggregators like Google News, Apple News and Flipboard, as well as social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook made it very difficult for the participants to figure out what to read, where it comes from and whom to believe. This confusion was amplified when pieces (or passages) of analysis were mixed in with factual news items.

5. Digital device “time sucks“

Everyone I spoke with uses digital devices, smartphones in particular, to access the internet. Most said they felt these devices were addictive, and that time spent on them was problematic, often creating problems in their personal lives.

6. The overestimation of disinformation

The participants said they believe that disinformation is a major concern and that propaganda and hoaxes are taking over the internet. Research shows this is not the case, but this exaggerated concern has led to disbelief fatigue among many.

7. Overestimation of media literacy skills

Each participant said they believed that they have an effective process and approach for discerning real news from intentionally false news. Most relied on Google searches to research claims, others trusted their gut. These approaches often can make the problem worse.

8. The creation of “bubbles“

All of the participants had carefully crafted their media and social media experiences. While some of them actively seek out opposing viewpoints, a few knowingly shield themselves from them.

9. The importance of community and lack thereof

The subject of community, both in real life and virtual, came up with most of the participants. Many had lost touch with one community only to find another of like-minded people, while others are still searching for a lasting connection.

10. Negative feelings about social media, especially Facebook

Every participant had used Facebook at one time, but many had recently left or dramatically cut back on their use of the platform. Only a few cited concerns about data privacy, but nearly all were concerned about how interactions on Facebook made them feel.

11. Life-altering events lead to a change of heart about institutions

More than half of the participants blamed some sort of pivotal life event for changing their view of institutions such as media, law enforcement, government, science and education.

The full report has much more detail on each of these themes, with added context from the participant interviews.

Summary conclusion

I’ll be upfront in that I can’t draw any grand societal conclusions from this research because it is a small sample set, but I do feel that I have a greater understanding of the audience for disinformation.

• The primary problem facing the news industry as it pertains to the issue of disinformation is its deteriorating relationship with its audience. If the audience doesn’t trust the media’s motives or processes, it follows that it also wouldn’t have faith in such important journalistic practices as fact-checking.
• Though it is easy to assume that those who believe disinformation are unintelligent, incurious or uncaring about the false news they help amplify, I found this not to be the case. The participants I spoke to were educated and exceedingly thoughtful about their media-consumption choices. I do hope you’ll take the time to dig further into their case studies and get a better idea of who they are.
• The importance of context as it pertains to news and history cannot be overstated in understanding disinformation. People consume information through their own individual lenses, so one person’s news is another’s “fake news” — seen this way, all sides can believe they are right, and the opposing side wrong.
• Everyone has their own filters, via conscious choice or applied unwittingly through technology, that dictate what information they will see and what they will believe.

As for me, this study was critical in determining the next step in my career path. This work and my conversations with these participants showed me the importance of healthy information communities. I believe robust local news sources and positive, personal interactions with journalists can be key to creating these healthy community connections, which, in turn, can drive more trust in the media overall. This sparked my interest in joining The Compass Experiment at the conclusion of my fellowship, so I could do my part to help local journalism grow and thrive.

For more detail on background research, participant case studies, insights and methodology, please download and read the full report.

Mandy Jenkins was a 2019 Fellow in the John S. Knight Journalism Fellowships program at Stanford University. This research was financially supported by the Tow-Knight Center for Entrepreneurial Journalism at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York.

The news we believe was originally published in JSK Class of 2019 on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

What do you see in this drawing? Do you see a boy encouraging a girl to walk up the stairs? Or do you see a boy pushing her down the stairs? If the races of these children were flipped, would you see it differently? Bias is a prejudice that favors one person or group over another. What you saw at first glance was informed by your biases. (See Acknowledgment #1.)

Artificial intelligence isn’t a far off futuristic reality, it is already commonly used in all aspects of civil society today. It is informed by our biases. It influences our decision making, emotions and actions, as well as the privileges or penalties we might receive. The problem is that since these invisible systems are embedded with our biases, inequity and inequality are inevitable byproducts.

As a part of my John S. Knight Journalism Fellowship at Stanford University, I am a participating in research with Maneesh Agrawala, the director of the Brown Institute for Media Innovation, Kayvon Fatahalian, assistant professor of computer science, and James Hong, PhD candidate. We are exploring ways to use AI-based image, audio, and transcript processing techniques to analyze patterns and trends in content, bias, and polarization in TV news broadcasts, and eventually other platforms. Ultimately, we plan to release interactive web-based tools that will provide another way for journalists and data scientists to increase transparency around their editorial choices. This is one application of AI as a tool to identify expressions of our human bias specifically in journalism. But what about the biases in the algorithms?

When programmers choose which attributes to include in predictive modeling tools and which ones to ignore, they can significantly impact the accuracy and results. Biases built into the actual algorithms and models are hard to detect and even more challenging to fix.

Automated decision-making gives authority and power to algorithms built by a narrow demographic of programmers who overwhelmingly share similar interests, experiences and opinions. Which means, algorithmic bias needs to be consistently identified with checks and balances. The biases of programmers informs the training data they use. In other words, bias creeps in long before data is even collected. Our personal perspectives inform the codes we write. The results can be unrepresentative of reality and a reflection of existing prejudices.

Here are real-world examples that reflect biases in algorithms and the resulting life consequences.

Is artificial intelligence helping or exacerbating our biases?

In response to mass shootings, schools and hospitals are deploying surveillance technologies with audio detection tools to monitor and identify aggression. Wired magazine and ProPublica have found that these tools don’t take words or meaning into account. Instead, they monitor tone and register rougher tones, like a strong cough, as aggressive. It isn’t able to identify potential shooters or violent aggressors who are outwardly calm or quiet. How do these tools make distinctions between tones that may be loud and clamorous, but not necessarily aggressive?

Amazon built an internal tool to help with gender balance in recruiting and pay equity. They used data from hiring decisions, which historically favored men over women. This included identifying verbs that are highly correlated with ranking men over women, such as “executed” and “captured.” In other words, the algorithm they built to fix this problem repeated the problem. It dismissed female applicants. Amazon stopped using this tool and disbanded the team that created it.

Across the country, there is a network of cameras that capture your face. Authorities are able to identify you in a crowd and trace your movements. The problem is that these algorithms are less accurate with African Americans, women and younger people, according to Center on Privacy and Technology at Georgetown Law, and this data can be used any number of ways. San Francisco is the first major city to ban the use of facial recognition surveillance technology.

A U.S. Government Accountability Office report found that some of the TSA full-body imaging technology machines used at airports “had a higher false alarm rate when passengers wore turbans and wigs.” ProPublica found that the same scanners also frequently give false alarms for Afros, braids, twists and other hairstyles worn by black women.

The sentencing and risk assessment software used across the country to predict the likelihood of someone committing a future crime is demonstratively biased against blacks. Bernard Harcourt, Columbia University professor of law and political science, found that these automated risk-assessment tools make racial disparities exacerbated by the criminal justice system more acute. Los Angeles has eliminated this program. Many courts still use it.

There is a large racial and gender bias in AI services from companies like Microsoft, IBM, and Amazon, according to Joy Buolamwini, a researcher at MIT’s Media Lab. “On the simple task of guessing the gender of a face, all companies’ technology performed better on male faces than on female faces and especially struggled on the faces of dark-skinned African women.” She also identified the potential for discrimination in online targeted advertising. (See Acknowledgment #2.)

UNESCO warns of negative consequences of Apple’s Siri, Amazon’s Alexa, Microsoft’s Cortana and Google’s Assistant. They claim that female voice in the default settings of these personal assistants perpetuate the idea that “women are obliging, docile and eager-to-please helpers, available at the touch of a button or with a blunt voice command.”

Local community councils in the United Kingdom are developing “predictive analytic” systems to predict child abuse and vulnerability to gang exploitation, with the goal of intervening before abuse or violence happens. It’s still to be determined if this system works. Beyond the obvious concerns of accuracy and effectiveness, this system raises questions about what a “safe” family looks like.

Can the biases in algorithms be fixed?

We all have biases and prejudices. The AI algorithms we create are informed by these biases, unconscious or not. Fortunately, some AI researchers are already trying solve this problem. They are developing algorithms to help mitigate hidden biases within training data. They are also developing algorithms that use more inclusive data, like Google’s Inclusive Images Competition, and evaluating algorithms with the Pilot Parliaments Benchmark (PPB), which is a data set specifically designed to evaluate biases in computer vision systems.

San Francisco has taken the step of implementing an automated system to make prosecutorial discretion less biased. They are using an AI “bias mitigation tool” that automatically redacts anything in a police report that might be suggestive of race, from hair color to ZIP codes. The goal is to reduce any possible racial bias among prosecutors reviewing police reports.

The good news is that the same ingenuity that is used to create these AI tools can be used to fix them as well. If we want technology to represent all of us, we all have to participate. It means gaining an understanding what algorithms can do and supporting pipelines to increase representation.

Acknowledgements:

1. See Jones, Elaine F; Parker, Bonita L; M Holland Joyner; Ulku-Steiner, Beril. The influences of behavior valence and actor race on Black and White children’s moral and linking judgments. The Journal of Psychology; Provincetown Vol. 133, Iss. 2, (Mar 1999): 194–204.
2. See Brendan F. Klare et al., Face Recognition Performance: Role of Demographic Information, 7 IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security 1789, 1797 (2012).

If you have recommendations of ways to combat algorithm bias, I’d like to hear from you. DM me on Twitter @geraldinemoriba.

Is demography destiny? was originally published in JSK Class of 2019 on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

“A dance class in how we become the worst dancer possible.” The description of this Stanford offering caught my eye. “As a class, we purposely explore chaos, failure, and ‘bad’ dancing, with the hope that then we will have a greater chance to understand and refine our personal notions around beauty.”

I spent a good chunk of my childhood trying to become a good ballet dancer. To fit that ideal of the ethereal ballerina, to master those wicked turns and leaps. As an adult, Argentine tango, another highly prescriptive dance with crystal-clear notions of good and bad, became a new goal and obsession.

And here I was, some years later, enrolled in a class called Hot Mess where the goal was to ‘unlearn’ those ideas of beauty and good dancing and explore what can happen when we allow ourselves to be lost.

As we ran across the studio improvising moves or sounds or infusing our ‘dancing’ with phrases that made no sense (birds! ice-cream! shrimp!), it became clear to me that there were two well-defined groups of students in the class: those who were having the time of their lives; and those like me who were excruciatingly trying to unlearn decades of “proper” dancing.

On my bike ride home after class, I started to draw parallels between my experience at the dance studio and journalism. Our profession, too, is in the midst of a great deal of chaos, transformation and promise. There are forces at work — economic, technological, political — whose course we can hardly predict or control. And then there’s us, journalists, reinventing our profession and the business models that might sustain it into the future, experimenting, distinguishing shining objects from those with true value, acknowledging that we need others — different perspectives, experiences and skills — to build something that lasts.

There is so much to be hopeful for.

Earlier this year, I helped judge the AI and the News Open Challenge, which funded creative ideas at the intersection of artificial intelligence and the news. I was impressed with the inventiveness of many of the more than 500 projects submitted. In the U.S. and worldwide, the nonprofit news space continues to grow, with charity and community supported newsrooms popping up at a fast pace in response to shrinking media freedoms and expanding news deserts. Collaboration powered by data and technology has forever changed the way investigative journalists work, creating opportunities for impact at a scale never seen before.

It’s a time of destabilization, learning, fear and opportunity in journalism.

Yet, how are we journalists tackling it to make sure our organizations last well into the future? What assumptions and mindsets are we bringing to these new journalism spaces?

Here’s my take on five ideas we need to unlearn as an industry if we want to seize the potential of our own hot mess moment:

1. Our job is just to tell the story.

It’s more complicated than that. We need to be intentional about the impact of our stories. In other words, be clear about why we are doing what we are doing and what needs to change in the world as a result of our journalism. This mindset has big implications for story selection, for the way we report our stories (collaborating with other newsrooms every time it makes sense and with the communities we serve always) and for the resources we invest to stay with a story over time. At the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, we are still tracking the money governments around the world are recovering as a result of the Panama Papers ($1.2 billion so far is the conservative estimate) and continue to report about the developments of investigations we did six years ago, such as Offshore Leaks, which recently sparked multiple bank raids in Germany. Along the way, we have presented our findings in parliaments, met with high-school students to talk about the inequities caused by tax havens, and published an interactive database of offshore companies that allows citizens to do their own exploration of the data that underpins our work. When one of our colleagues was murdered in Malta, many of our partners joined forces to continue her work.

2. Culture scales automatically.

Silicon Valley, where I have spent a year as a John S. Knight Journalism Fellow, is full of horror stories of startups that imploded as they grew fast and lost their values and identity along the way. Curt Coffman and Kathie Sorensen, authors of “Culture Eats Strategy for Lunch,” argue that culture “is not the enemy of strategy and performance but an equal player in the game” and an essential competitive advantage. “Our competition can copy our products, methods, and service, they can hire our stars, duplicate our marketing, use our vendors, lure our customers with amazing offers, but they can’t clone the culture that created those advantages.” As our journalism startups grow and get more attention and funding, let’s remember the foundational days — the energy, the focus, the sense of mission — and let’s see that our core values are lived out every day in our newsrooms. No tech, cool innovation or branding can make up for a mediocre culture. Sooner or later, that bad culture will catch up with your strategy and crash it.

3. Journalism is an unhealthy profession.

How we take care of our people is exhibit one of the culture of any organization. In my job leading global investigations, I come across an ever-larger number of journalists who tell me, quietly, how physically and mentally exhausted they or their colleagues are. It’s not just the daunting events they witness in their reporting, the physical and online harassment they face routinely or the debilitating lawsuits they battle. Now it is also the worry about the stability of their jobs; the pressure to raise funds to support their work and the work of the people they lead; the apparent inescapable reality of having to play multiple roles in journalism startups or in decimated local news outlets. The good news is that journalism-induced burnout has become less of the taboo than it was, and more journalists are talking candidly about their experiences. “I am tired. I can’t continue doing investigations and raising money. It’s not humane,” said Mónica González, one of Latin America’s leading investigative editors, in a recent interview as she stepped down from Ciper, the nonprofit investigative news outlet she founded 12 years ago. Unlike Monica, many other journalists would not know or admit that they, too, are at the end of their rope, as they model unhealthy behaviors to younger generations of reporters. Studies have shown that female journalists are burning out at higher rates than men.

Journalism leaders, board members, funders, schools and professional associations need to take on newsroom burnout head on before it consumes our newsrooms and our business.

4. We must adopt/develop/fund the latest shining tech tool.

“What kind of world do we want to live in and how can technology serve it, rather than drive it?” asked NYU professor Kate Crawford, one of the leading thinkers on the social implications of artificial intelligence, at a recent Stanford event. We can easily extrapolate that question to journalism. We grapple with it a lot in the field I know best, investigative reporting, where dozens of tools have been funded and developed, but only a few have scaled and made a difference, with Document Cloud being one of those successful examples. Not long ago, a group of journalists and technologists met to discuss the creation of an all-encompassing “super tool” for investigative journalists that would rival those used by the intelligence community. The project had a price tag of nearly $20 million, which has not been, and likely will not be, raised any time soon. To complicate things more, big tech companies and platforms are stepping in and offering journalists their own tools as well as training and funding.

Perhaps a more reasonable strategy, following Crawford’s logic, is for journalists to take a step back from all the confusion and the panic and ask ourselves what problems we are trying to solve with technology, what “pain points” in the reporting process we believe technology can help us address and what tools already exist out there that we can adapt for our own purposes without compromising our data or our independence. During my year at Stanford, I have studied how newsrooms can effectively partner with academia to use machine learning techniques in big data investigations.

5. We can do this on our own!

In this area, we have come a long way since the days when investigative reporting was largely a lone-wolf affair. Working together across newsrooms and borders journalists have reported stories that toppled governments, exposed corruption on a grand scale, prompted regulators to ban harmful products and continued the investigations of their jailed colleagues. Residual reluctance to collaborate with others remains in pockets of the media, most notably in the United States. One can only wonder what the impact of certain stories such as the crisis on the U.S. southern border, Trump’s business deals around the world or the contamination of drinking water in the U.S. would have been had journalists collaborated more deeply with their peers at home and abroad. At the end of the day, it comes down to the impact we want our work to have on society (see point 1!).

Scientists just gave us a powerful example of what happens when we let go of our fear to share our work with others for the sake of something bigger than ourselves. It had been impossible until now to photograph black holes because they are so big and so far away. Scientists would have needed a telescope the size of the Earth. So instead, more than 200 scientists coordinated radio telescopes in different locations around the world to act like one giant telescope. As Seth Fletcher of The New York Times wrote, they had to adjust the telescopes to work together; they had to get the timing right; they had to hope that the weather would cooperate in multiple places. “Oh, and they had to hope nothing broke. It sounded crazy, but it worked.”

The premise for my Hot Mess dance class at Stanford also sounded crazy (“Dancers confront a number of movement and vocal prompts that are literally impossible to execute in any good way”). But it also, to my huge surprise, worked. I saw beautiful, expressive and powerful dancing as classes went by and we let down our guard. A new kind of beauty. Messier, less predictable, more inclusive and more authentic.

Five ideas we need to ‘unlearn’ to build resilient media organizations was originally published in JSK Class of 2019 on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Recently, I was invited to talk about journalism and immigration with some residents of Palo Alto, California where I’ve been living for the past 10 months. At the end of my talk, one of the attendees approached me and asked, “How come I’ve read a hundred stories about how good immigration is for our country, but I haven’t read a single one about the workers’ struggle in Appalachia and how they are losing jobs to immigrants?”

I noted that the US economy is performing strongly enough, with the lowest unemployment rate in nearly 50 years. And that immigrants often fill the jobs Americans don’t want. But I also told him about the crisis of journalism and how newspapers are closing across the country. So it’s true, it could be harder to find stories about the economic problems in the Appalachians.

His question was a good reminder of the reason I came to Stanford as a John S. Knight Journalism Fellow. I wondered how can we dig deep into immigration issues with depth and nuance to produce impactful stories. How can we do more investigative reporting to explain the real impact — social and economic — that immigration has in neighborhoods and cities across the country.

As I’m wrapping up my fellowship year, I’m convinced that collaboration is the answer to take on this challenge, especially after years of sustained newsroom cuts, that left us with fewer journalists with the necessary skills, knowledge and resources to tackle these important stories.

In February, I circulated a short online survey asking immigration reporters and editors for their opinions on collaborative journalism. I asked if they would be interested in joining forces to tackle investigative stories in different cities, and connecting with colleagues abroad to develop cross-border investigations of immigration issues, which I believe are among the most pressing human rights concerns of our era.

Nearly 100 reporters from several countries responded — most of them women — working as reporters in the U.S. While most said they had not worked on collaborative projects before, all of them expressed interested in joining a collaborative network to report on immigration.

Reporters cited several advantages of working together, which can be grouped as follows:

• It creates the potential to better reach local audiences, in different languages, and to increase the impact of our stories.
• The opportunity to collect data from different sources in various cities and countries allows us to tackle more complex investigations.
• It is a great opportunity for freelancers, who often face financial constraints, to engage with a team that has more resources and to receive mentorship and editorial guidance.
• Collaboration increases our ability to innovate, use new technologies and approach immigration in a more scientific and interdisciplinary way.

Respondents also cited several reasons that prevent them or their newsrooms from participating in more collaborative work on immigration with other newsrooms in the U.S. or abroad. These include:

• Many outlets prefer sending their own staff reporters into the field, rather than collaborating with journalists based in the city or the country where the story takes place.
• It is hard to secure funding from foundations and philanthropy organizations to develop and to sustain lengthy and complex collaborations.
• Skepticism exists among editors who don’t believe in collaborative work or who don’t trust reporters over whom they have no control.
• Partnerships require time, commitment and generosity. Years of newsroom cuts and scarcity among staff and resources have made it difficult to pursue ambitious partnerships.

In the survey, I also asked reporters if they thought it necessary to have an investigative news platform solely focused on covering the U.S. immigration system. Ninety-seven percent of respondents said yes.

Nearly everyone expressed enthusiasm with the idea. They shared their thoughts and noted their interest in furthering discussions about the project. With this feedback, and the many conversations I’ve had in recent months as part of my fellowship work, I have begun developing a project to conduct more collaborative reporting on immigration.

Over the next few months, I plan to create the Immigration Reporting Network, a consortium of small newsrooms and local reporters who partner with established media organizations to expand the scope and impact of immigration coverage in the U.S. and beyond. The network will focus on underreported stories, especially in cities with large Hispanic populations, where immigrants are receding further and further into the shadows, after constant vilification by the White House.

This initiative will connect local journalists who have been covering the borderlands for years, and who have access to local sources and data in different cities, with colleagues who have a wider view of the immigration system and more resources to tackle complex investigative projects. We plan to begin with a project manager/editor and data reporter to support members of the network with editing, data analysis and training.

Reporters working on collaborative investigations initially will be paid by their media organizations as the network seeks to amplify our fundraising efforts.

Eventually, we may explore the creation of a nonprofit investigative journalism site focused on covering immigration in the U.S. and fostering collaboration across borders.

I’d love to talk with you if you have ideas to help fine-tune this project, want to participate in the network or help me develop it, or if your organization could help fund our launch. You can reach me on Twitter (@ronnyrojas) or via email: ronnyrojas@stanford.edu.

Let’s create an immigration reporting network was originally published in JSK Class of 2019 on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Journalism, as it is currently celebrated in prizes and taught in universities, is too US-centric.

1.

While we’re all reinventing journalism, crafting new business models, and redefining how to measure its impact, we might as well take another look at the core mission of journalism. From a truly global perspective.

One way to do that is to ask the same two questions, again and again:

1. Why do we do journalism the way we do it?
2. How can we do it better?

For the most part, the answers to these questions are obvious and easy to answer. We are journalists because the profession can be exciting, rewarding and impactful. It can be a service to society. It can be both a career and a calling.

But when we continue down this path, other questions come at us. Questions with no easy answers. Like the one I posted on Twitter.

H R Venkatesh on Twitter

Dear Twitter-verse, what do you believe is the true role of journalism? Most times, you can say 'most or all of the above'. Sometimes though, these goals are contradictory. Please pick one, even though I concede it's super difficult. Hint: there is no 'right' answer.

Even though a majority of those polled say that our job as journalists is to uncover the truth at all costs, all four choices are valid. We want to safeguard our democracies (if we happen to live in one). We all want to use to journalism to help people make meaningful choices about their lives. And indeed, as citizens of our countries, we want to protect our institutions.

It’s when these four goals contradict each other that it gets more tricky.

Consider two instances:

First, what happens when the truth places your democracy in jeopardy? Imagine there’s a big election in your country. Imagine then, that a Wikileaks-like organization releases dozens of cables, which upon verification, are deemed accurate. Publishing these cables on the eve of an election are guaranteed to alter the election. Do you wait till after the election is over to publish them?

Second, what happens to your journalistic mission when you live in a semi-democracy or an authoritarian country? When uncovering the truth can get you and your family murdered. Our current model says that a journalist must uncover the truth at all costs. But the fact is, there are thousands of outstanding journalists who just cannot do that for various reasons. Should it be their fate then, to not be acknowledged for their excellence?

2.

There are currently 195 UN-recognized nations. But from a press freedom perspective, these can be aggregated into three categories—‘not free’, ‘partly free’ and ‘free’—as Freedom House does every year.

For example, the press in Russia, Venezuela, Zimbabwe and the United Arab Emirates is ‘not free’. India, Brazil and South Africa are ‘partly free’. And the United States, France and Australia are ‘free’.

For each of these three types of countries, journalism has a unique role, depending on how the three branches of government—the judiciary, the legislative and the executive—perform. Yet our rhetoric around ‘good journalism’ is often ethnocentric. This is so particularly in the way journalism is taught at U.S. universities, and the elevation of particular types of reporting over others.

In 2016, I spent a semester at the Newmark School of Journalism at the City University of New York grappling with the issue of journalism entrepreneurship. In 2017 and part of 2018, I was an ICFJ Knight Fellow based in New Delhi, but the job also included travel and conversations with several U.S. newsrooms, and exchanging views with journalists from several African countries. In 2018 and 2019, I’ve been a JSK Fellow at Stanford.

I say all this because I’ve seen at close quarters this tendency to celebrate U.S. journalism at journalism schools, festivals, foundations and fellowships. There’s good reason for this trend of course, because the U.S. produces truly outstanding journalism.

But there are other, more relevant examples of great global journalism too — even in countries where the press is ‘not free’ and ‘partly free’. Because I am a journalist in a country defined as ‘partly free’ (India), it might be more useful for me to learn from fellow Indian journalists or journalists from other ‘partly free’ countries such as Indonesia, South Africa, Brazil and Argentina.

Eventually, each country’s journalistic mission ought to be recognized as unique based on legal, political, cultural, economic and ethical lenses. Another way of putting it is: we need at least 195 different journalism missions.

3.

Journalism doesn’t have a single holy book, a pope, or a high temple. Yet, ethics are central to the practice of this profession.

According to Stephen J.A. Ward, a media ethicist, we’re in the fifth revolution in journalism ethics. The current stage, he says, is an ongoing activity. It is “process-oriented”, “open and global”, and crucially, it also incorporates “non-Western interpretations of practice.”

The Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ) has a code of ethics based on four principles. They are: seek truth and report it, minimize harm, act independently, be accountable and transparent.

The journalist Tom Rosenstiel, who co-wrote The Elements of Journalism, now runs the American Press Institute. Its website states that the purpose of journalism is to “provide citizens with the information they need to make the best possible decisions about their lives, their communities, their societies, and their governments.”

But for the purposes of this argument, let’s go back to Stephen J.A. Ward. In his book The Invention of Journalism Ethics, he says a journalist has about fifteen different functions. He groups these fifteen functions under four broad categories: individual, social, political and ethical.

Implicit in Ward’s argument, and indeed in all other descriptions of journalism’s mission is that it needs to be rooted in the legal, political, cultural, economic and technological context of a given country. (This doesn’t mean cutting journalistic corners. Indeed, journalism will continue to have to be independent and verification-driven.)

4.

Given the unique needs of people across the world, and based on my argument that journalism globally ought to be tailored for context, we might need a new movement.

Call it the Global Journalism Project.

We would need to figure out exactly how such a project would work, but here are some preliminary thoughts for how several stakeholders would benefit.

• For U.S. journalism schools, fellowships and foundations, it’s an opportunity to be less ethnocentric. They can also be better at preparing internationals who return to their home countries to practice journalism.
• For journalists and students who travel to the U.S., such a project would provide a framework to organize their work, measure their impact and find meaning in journalism.
• For most other journalists and aspiring journalists around the world, such a project would be a source of learning. Brazilians can learn from South Africans, Germans can learn from the Japanese, and so on.
• For U.S.-based journalists, it would be an opportunity to learn from other countries.

Let’s get started.

This post is the product of my talk at Stanford University in April 2019. It was titled, “Journalism’s ‘mission problem’ and implications for journalists around the world.” Thanks to Jay Hamilton, Jill Geisler, Tran Ha, Pam Maples, Michael Bolden, Djordje Padejski and all the fellows of the JSK Fellowships 2019 at Stanford University.

The world needs a new journalism project was originally published in JSK Class of 2019 on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Throughout this incredible year, many of my fellow John S. Knight Journalism Fellows have profited enormously from academic collaborators, both at Stanford and around the world. Geraldine Moriba has effectively become a member of Maneesh Agrawala’s computer science group on campus, working on applications of artificial intelligence to identify different forms of bias in journalistic work. Others, like Mandy Jenkins and Chris Horne, have found inspiration in ethnographic and psychological research. In classes about nonprofit management at the Graduate School of Business, fellows thought about designing randomized controlled trials — the gold standard of scientific practice — to measure the impact of their publications instead of vaguely gesturing at outcomes.

It’s been thrilling to see their work trampoline off these scientific ideas — and humbling. I’m a science journalist, and because of my background, I was well-positioned to take advantage of the scientific community at Stanford. But I didn’t — not at the beginning, at least. After nine months at Stanford, I’m only now appreciating the opportunities that present themselves when I think of scientists not just as sources, but as potential colleagues and collaborators.

Not that I ever doubted the value of a scientific approach to journalism. In the beginning of my fellowship, I thought a lot about what journalists can learn from the scientific method, inspired by those who seek a shift toward scientific or precision journalism. I believe the transparency and replicability of this approach support two critical goals: establishing public trust in reporting and empowering institutions to take action on open evidence.

But I drew a line between patterning journalism on scientific practices and actively working alongside scientists. I met with academics at the Meta-Research Innovation Center at Stanford (METRICS) early in the year — one of my original motivations for coming to JSK — but didn’t end up working closely with them. I shared a little, they shared a little, and we left it at that.

I shied away from collaboration because, as a newsroom leader, I take my responsibility to the ethical standards of journalism seriously. I’ve reported on issues of open access and reproducibility in science — some of the main topics studied by the METRICS researchers — and I worried that working too closely with those scientists would prevent me from objectively reporting on their work.

In fact, I thought, a collegial relationship with any scientist could jeopardize readers’ trust in my reporting. I can never know what kind of science I’ll find myself covering, which meant all scholarly partnerships were a no-go. (Science journalists don’t often have the luxury of beat specificity; I’ve reported on everything from neural correlates of creativity to the genetics of marijuana to the efficacy of canvassing to change voters’ positions on same-sex marriage.)

But after seeing so many journo-scientific partnerships succeed at JSK, I’m rethinking my position. Scientists will always be my sources, and the reporting that comes out of those arm’s-length relationships is valuable. But there’s also great value in the ideas that emerge when two epistemological traditions collide. If I’m mindful about how I manage and disclose my partnerships, I can work alongside certain scientists as fellow … let’s call us “information professionals.”

In the course of my year, I’ve worked toward building a database of conflicts of interest in science, which are voluntarily disclosed by scientists in the course of publishing their research. I’m excited by the potential to surface biases in the scientific process, and to increase journalists’ awareness of the role business plays in research. I dove into my first real coding project in more than a decade, and thrilled at every small success. But my progress slowed as I realized my coding skills weren’t up to the task. So I started looking outward.

Instead of using the single tool in my box, I broadened my net to other programming languages and found a robust community of scientists that I could use as a springboard for my own work. I am grateful to Stephanie Kovalchik, a statistical researcher conducting sports analysis at Victoria University, for generously updating an R package that I found crucial to some of my work. Vivek Kulkarni, a natural language processing researcher at Stanford, helped me by applying his background summarizing scientific manuscripts in bulk to my simpler problem of collation. I’m in awe of their smarts, and I appreciate their collaboration so much.

Now, the tricky part. I’ve covered sports science as a journalist before, and NLP is definitely in the cards. So if I ever find myself reporting on those areas again? I’ll either avoid talking to Stephanie or Vivek directly (not hard, science is big). Or I’ll simply exercise the same level of transparency I expect from every journalistic organization I trust: I’ll openly disclose my relationship with them.

Which, of course, I should have figured out before — because that’s exactly the point of the scientific conflict of interest statements I’ve been working to collect and organize this year. The mere presence of a conflicted relationship doesn’t necessarily undermine the authority or validity of a piece of research, be it scientific or journalistic. But it’s absolutely necessary to disclose all those relationships, to allow information consumers to weigh the potential biases for themselves.

I’m excited to see what else can come out of collaborations between scientists and journalists. We’ve got plenty of examples already: Any big data journalism project is likely to have consulting social scientists on the roster, who help to design statistically valid methods. As sensor technology becomes more distributed, some journalists are essentially undertaking their own public health research, tracking heat spikes and air pollution in urban communities and delivering results directly to the communities being impacted.

Both science and journalism are powerful ways of collecting and disseminating new information about the world — and each comes with its own strengths and weaknesses. But the impact of both institutions seems primed to increase when we expand our approaches and collaborate. With full disclosure, of course.

An ode to people much smarter than me was originally published in JSK Class of 2019 on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

What we need to understand as journalists is that AI offers a new dimension of opportunities and challenges to build upon computational and data journalism.

It’s being discussed how useful it will be for investigative journalism but definitely, there are interesting solutions and I think its usage is going to spread in newsrooms around the world. As it happened with blogs, video, mobile, social media, and data journalism.

Scientists argue about the name Artificial Intelligence and that it should be renamed. Either way, there are several definitions of AI and I’ll stay with this one from Google Dictionary.

“Artificial Intelligence is the theory and development of computer systems able to perform tasks that normally require human intelligence, such as visual perception, speech recognition, decision-making, and translation between languages.”

It’s intrinsically related to the world of computer science (CS) and data science (DS). I’ve heard AI named as “fancy statistics”.

TYPES OF AI

The first recorded use of the term “artificial intelligence” was in 1955, by Professor John McCarthy at Stanford University.

Interested in history? You can navigate a comprehensive historical infographic prepared by Stanford’s new Human-centered AI Institute.

There are two main types of AI you should understand right now. They’re usually called Strong/General AI and Weak/Narrow AI.

Strong or General AI. This type implies that computer systems have consciousness, sentience and self-awareness. They could ideally multitask among different challenges and projects.

This type is NOT happening anytime soon and as I heard from scientists and researchers it’s doubtful it will ever exist.

This is the scary kind of AI you might see in movies, where robots come after the humans. At one conference, I heard that some consultants are raising money to research on General AI exploiting people’s fear of this type of AI.

Weak or Narrow AI. This is the type that has been evolving to solve specific problems. It can reason logically, find patterns, and “learn” within a scope of focus.

This is the kind of AI that is referred to, tested and used in academic, governmental and business areas.

As journalists, we should perhaps be more concerned about bad stuff associated with Weak AI, like autonomous weapons, and the increased automation in specific job markets.

Subdomains of Narrow AI.

From there, different subsets of AI have been developed.

The most relevant for journalism that you’ll probably read about are Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing (NLP), Speech, Vision, Expert Systems, Robotics, etc.

These subdomains have other subsets. For example, Machine Learning can be Supervised or Unsupervised. But you will also read about reinforced supervised learning or weak supervised learning and deep learning’s neural networks.

DO NOT PANIC!

What journalists need to know is that there are different subsets of those subdomains of AI. They have different goals and they even intertwine within projects and challenges.

Machine Learning is the predominant and has general purpose algorithms which are also used in the more specific AI subdomains (e.g language, speech, vision). Expert systems are an older version of AI but it has been used as lead generator.

In this graphic, one of many included in the Artificial Intelligence Index 2018 Annual Report , you can see how Machine Learning has led AI research papers over the last 15 years.

MOMENTUM

Why is AI exploding? What’s happening?

The most basic answer is: data + technology

Data: Large amounts of data are needed to train computer systems and models using AI techniques. Governments and corporations are producing those required amounts. Journalists can work with a large volume of data obtained through leaks, scraping, Freedom of Information Act requests, open data, etc.

Technology: Data storage capacity and computing processing power have increased too. The challenge is money. The financial cost can become a burden, depending on the quantity of data being analyzed. News organizations and universities will probably need to collaborate to help some journalism projects happen.

AI AND JOURNALISM

So, why should we care?

1) To fulfill our journalistic mission.

2) To take advantage of a great opportunity for newsrooms.

Any journalist with a strong mission for public service should understand the challenges AI presents to society.

It’s already happening.

Decision-making algorithms being run on government and corporate projects are producing unfair results.

Is your city using facial recognition tools to pursue criminals? What are they doing with the data? How many false positives do they have? How are they preserving privacy rights? Is it a worthwhile balance of security versus privacy? What happens if an abusive government uses the technology for the oppression of dissidents and control of its own followers?

On the other hand, in an era of shrinking newsrooms and competition with digital-only players, a long-term strategy using AI solutions for the different phases of the news cycle sounds like a must-have.

I’ve been collecting inspiring examples for journalists and have shared below some relating to different subsets of narrow AI.

Machine Learning (general purpose algorithms)

Supervised (implies labelled training data): Atlanta Journal Constitution’s “Doctors & Sex Abuse” story “…collected more than 100,000 disciplinary documents. To assist us in identifying those involving sexual misconduct, we then created a computer program based on “machine learning” to analyze each case and, based on keywords, [gave] each a probability rating that it was related to a case of physician sexual misconduct. We then read all the documents in over 6,000 cases to determine the nature of each case and board action. …” (Methodology)

Unsupervised: The Associated Press’s “Guns in school-accidents” story “used unsupervised machine learning to find hidden patterns in a data set of 140,000 human-entered incidents documented by the Gun Violence Archive (GVA). After discovering a host of errors in the initial data, the AP used unsupervised machine learning to simplify the data and flag certain entries for further review without specific guidance” (The Future of Augmented Journalism Report p. 10. )

Natural Language Processing (NLP)

The most comprehensive guide I’ve found during these last months is Jonathan Stray’s “What Do Journalists Do With Documents? Field Notes for Natural Language Processing Researchers” paper, in which he states different examples that use custom NLP.

Topic modeling, Reuters’ “The Echo Chamber” story is about a small group of lawyers and its outsized influence on the U.S Supreme Court. (Methodology J. Stray, 4.1)

Sentiment analysis. The Washington Post’s “Whistleblowers say USAID’s IG removed critical details from public reports.” (Methodology J. Stray, 4.2)

Speech

Speech to text. In Folha’s “A whole presidential campaign categorized” project, “…We also captured and stored TV spots and videos posted on Youtube, using Google’s Speech-to-text API to [transcribe] the audio content of these videos to text. By the end of the first round campaign, we had [transcribed] more than 95 hours of videos. …”

I’ve found more examples of different AI subdomains and subsets. You can check them on my Pinboard, using tag combinations with “journalism.”

What am I excited about? Satellite imagery, the environment, and human rights.

I’m interested in the opportunity to combine satellite imagery and AI tools.

Take a look at some examples.

Environmental projects

Stanford has projects to identify potentially polluting animal farms in North Carolina and map every solar panel in the United States.

This year’s WiDS Conference datathon winners worked to detect oil palm plantations, using satellite imagery.

Texty “Leprosy of the Land” project “ …used a deep learning model to search satellite images of 70,000 km² in northern Ukraine for traces of illegal amber mining. (More methodology via QZ’s AI Studio)

And Reuters used satellite imagery and AI that provided a first pass. Then their team manually edited the initial results to ensure there weren’t any false positives or missed buildings to track expansion in the South China Sea.

Human Rights

Amnesty International’s project, quantifying destruction of villages in Darfur, used crowdsourcing and transfer learning to automatically analyze satellite imagery on a country-wide scale in Sudan.

AP’s “Seafood from Slaves” story where The AP used satellite imagery to secure high-resolution images of sea vessels in Southeast Asia. Reporters gathered critical evidence for an investigative project on abuses in the seafood industry that won a Pulitzer Prize for Public Service in 2016. (Detailed behind the scenes, in The Future of Augmented Journalism Report, Vision p. 14)

Human Rights Watch wishes to apply a neural network to scale an expert eye and tell the difference between smoke plumes and puffy white clouds, as when monitoring the outbreak of ethnic violence in Myanmar in 2017.

This is the end of my journey at Stanford. Now I’m returning to Argentina and LA NACION, where I plan to increase my understanding in this field, work on related projects and exchange experiences within my extended data community.

Keep in touch! Twitter @fcoel or fcoelho [at] stanford [dot] edu

BIBLIOGRAPHY

To learn more about opportunities and tools for newsgathering, production, and distribution, these have been my favorite sources.

AP’s report: A guide for newsrooms in the age of smart machines by F. Marconi and A. Siegman

Making Artificial Intelligence Work for Investigative Journalism by Jonathan Stray

What do journalists do with documents? by Jonathan Stray (NLP)

Knight Center for the Americas MOOC News Algorithms: The Impact of Automation and AI on Journalism with Nicholas Diakopoulos.

Computational Journalism Symposium 2019 (videos and papers)

QZ AI studioColumbia Journalism Review by Nicholas Diakopoulos

Weapons of Math Destruction by Cathy O’Neil (algorithm bias)

Artificial Unintelligence by Meredith Broussard (expert systems)

Artificial Intelligence for Journalists by Daniel Kirsch y Julius Tröger (explanation of different machine learning algorithms). It’s in german but you can use Google Translate.

What I’ve learned about AI and why journalists should care was originally published in JSK Class of 2019 on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I have always found merit and power in creative curation. The way headlines are written, which films get the green light, and how stories are presented can be as powerful as the stories themselves. I came into my year as a John S. Knight Journalism Fellow at Stanford hoping to explore my own creative side and learn how seeing myself as a creator and not only a curator might better inform my work. It turns out, learning from artists can help inform all of our work.

I found in speaking to artists that there are several lessons to take and use in journalism. First, embrace limitations rather than working within the seemingly unlimited space of the internet. Second, be more open about the way we understand analytics and audience interaction. And lastly, bring emotion and wonder back into our work.

I’d rather really affect 10 people deeply, make them see the world in a different way, than entertain 10,000. A lot of people don’t want to go there, but when those 10 people go there… then I’ve communicated something deep. That means a lot to me ― more than having 1,000 people standing on their feet.

― Morleigh Steinberg, photographer, choreographer, curator at Arcane Space

In September I’d just transitioned off an ambitious project — growing Journalism 360 to a global community of 1,600-plus immersive storytellers. I arrived on campus energized by my role funding projects like the Pulitzer Prize-winning experience The Wall at USA Today and the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s WebVR-powered Spot the Surveillance. I was excited to continue exploring the possibilities offered by virtual reality and augmented reality to expand how we explain the world.

But I also relished the opportunity to take a step back from the day-to-day and spend some time figuring out how we got here and where we’re going. I’ve been working in online news since 2003, when I started as a full coverage editor at Yahoo! News. Stanford was the perfect place to take a bird’s-eye view of the web then and now and figure out where we went wrong, what we did right, and how we can do better as technology continues to shift and change. How did we go from a utopian view of what’s possible — an ethos very much still alive in Silicon Valley and part of the opportunity I see in VR and AR now — to a place that has too often shown us the worst of humanity?

And what ends up happening is that these crowds will form around the person with the phone….They are standing together and creating these sort of impromptu communities around these experiences. And to me that’s like the ultimate subversion of the of the technology, a technology that’s really intended to keep you on your ass on the couch.

― Nancy Baker Cahill, artist

When I first started experiencing news stories in VR and AR, I immediately saw the possibility these technologies hold to bring us closer to the subjects we are covering and bring in a more engaged audience. It also highlighted the dangers of putting people directly into stories and the ethical concerns of how easy manipulation can be in virtual environments. In approaching my fellowship, I started thinking — “Who are the people putting themselves out there the most and experimenting in ways we can’t always afford to as journalists?”

Conceptual artists are coming at complex topics from what most consider to be a fairly radical approach and still achieving impact. I spoke with artists working in three specific areas: one creating projects in the public space (Refik Anadol), choreographers (Morleigh Steinberg, Jonah Bokaer), and those working specifically in immersive technology (Nancy Baker Cahill, Kel O’Neill and Eline Jongsma). These conversations yielded interesting and surprising results, all of which can help us as journalists rethink our approach to complex stories, without sacrificing content quality or ethics. They opened up my understanding of the art world and I found some clear takeaways that will help us as journalists tell better stories.

I just looked at the building and I just was so sad. It’s silent. So I was just like all right, what will happen if the building has like a layer of information, a skin.

And then turn this into a kind of a living entity that can dream and feel and remember and ultimately, a cognitive idea.

― Refik Anadol, data artist

1. Embrace limitations

Traditionally, journalists have always worked in a world of limitations — column inches, broadcast schedules, ad layouts. The internet changed all of those parameters. With the advent of increased internet speed and accessibility, suddenly the barriers were lifted and stories could be told in an hour-long podcast or a 10,000-word story. We expect the audience to just keep scrolling. But just because we can doesn’t mean we should. While taking up more space for issues that require it can be a good thing, this lack of boundaries has caused a design problem that loses readers and decreases impact.

Self-imposed limits are hardly a new idea. Projects like Smith Magazine’s Six Word Memoirs and TED Talks time limitations have been wildly successful in creating digestible but substantive content that forces the creators to think inside an extremely well-defined box. One of my favorite early internet projects was Miranda July’s Learning to Love You More, which gave website visitors a directive like “tell someone you love them” — the results were astounding. The project was later acquired by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Give people an assignment and they tend to complete it.

Artists achieve the ultimate trompe l’oeil. They make us believe the world is their oyster while actually working under extreme limitations that are part of what allows that creativity to take shape.

“The space really is very determining in terms of what we can or can’t do,” says choreographer Jonah Bokaer, who was the Mohr Visiting Artist at Stanford this past winter. “So it tends to be kind of a creative process that way … certainly with dancers. Restrictions, parameters can be super helpful.”

2. Allow room for all kinds of interaction and experimentation

News organizations as a whole get wrapped up in what “counts” — does someone who reads through the dozens of groundbreaking stories in the ProPublica Trump Inc. series count as much as someone who simply likes one of the organization’s Instagram photos?

News organizations are always working to determine which interactions are meaningful and how we can capitalize on them, experimenting with new models to make news profitable. Artists see value in both the person who sees something for five seconds and the person who spends an hour with a piece.

“I’m not opposed to technology at all,” says photographer, choreographer, and gallery owner Morleigh Steinberg. “But there’s a lot more to filter through. You’re just looking at things that are candy. You think, well, ‘Why am I spending so much time communicating with people like that?’ But if you get people that are like that, then you might find the five that would be interested in investigating [an issue] differently.”

We also need to experiment — it may not be clear how people will interact with a project until it’s out in the world. Artist Nancy Baker Cahill explains that she was surprised how people have interacted with her work and experienced it in ways she couldn’t have predicted. “I didn’t expect the wild diversity and range in interpretations. When you invite someone into a conversation that allows them to be creative, too, it is truly astonishing what they come up with — and that to me is humbling and inspiring.”

“I do create a very open space for interpretation. But I think it being very visually accessible and visually enticing is a good place to work from.”

― Jonah Bokaer, choreographer

Jonah Bokaer Choreography x Charles Renfro, DS+R - Work Samples

Cahill’s 4th Wall app encourages people to share her artwork and place it in their own space using AR. This opens up not only new ways of interacting with content but also questions about legality and usage. Artists are testing these waters in new ways and we need to be paying attention to see what may work for journalistic storytelling — and what may be too risky.

3. Spark thoughtfulness and wonder

Sparking emotion and creating a memorable experience is at the crux of a successful immersive piece. It’s imperative that we bring purpose to immersive projects and think beyond the story to how the audience feels as a result of the interaction and how that interaction stays in their mind afterwards. If we only use immersive technology to show what already exists in other places, we are not using the medium to its fullest extent.

Spending the year with many investigative journalists during the fellowship opened my mind up to the possibilities that immersive storytelling holds to tell data-driven and long-form stories in new ways. VR and AR work so well for visual stories, but we already have filmmaking and photography that do those things pretty well, too. To take immersive storytelling to the next level, it needs to be a space where in-depth longreads come to life.

L.A.-based data artist Refik Anadol has created massive scale projects that interpret information in stunning ways — like taking the history of the L.A. Philharmonic and projecting it on the side of Disney Hall. He sees working with data as a way to bring seemingly unfathomable amounts of information into something we can simply enjoy.

“Data is a living thing. And it yes, it changes. Because if the big question is, What does it mean to be human in the 21st Century?, the answer is in their tools.,” Anadol says. “And then if those tools are coming to us to make art — wow. So that’s hopefully something positive, to make the story better.”

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What’s next? I aim to build on this framework to create a working model and checklist to help journalists create more impactful immersive projects in virtual reality, augmented reality, and even in the physical space around us. I also plan to include ways of threat modeling to keep in mind the legal and policy implications of this kind of work. We are just scratching the surface of this technology and its potential effects on society. Imagine what’s possible when journalists think a little more like artists.

What talking to artists taught me about immersive journalism was originally published in JSK Class of 2019 on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

How journalism can be more collaborative

A year ago I boarded a plane to rural Louisiana looking for a story, and I ended up finding an audience.

Or, I guess I should say, a new approach to audience. I was flying to meet a man named Mike Schaff, who sometimes goes by the nickname Swampy Dog. Mike’s an environmentalist who doesn’t believe in climate change, a belief-system combination I previously didn’t know existed. In fact, before I spent three days driving around with Mike in his small town and drinking beer on his couch, my story about those who reject mainstream climate science could be summed up with two words, “ignorant” and “wrong.” Mike was neither.

Let me explain. Mike’s an oilman. He worked his way out of poverty only to have his dream life destroyed when his town was partly swallowed up by a gigantic sinkhole. A company called Texas Brine used a cavern under Bayou Corne to mix and store a thick salt paste used in the oil refining process. When one of the cavern’s walls collapsed — authorities suspect from over drilling — a sinkhole opened up, swallowing acres of water and trees and releasing toxic fumes into the community. Mike’s town was evacuated and the Environmental Protection Agency did almost nothing to help. Still a climate doubter skeptical of big government, Mike was now a converted, committed environmentalist.

I came to interview Mike for an episode of my podcast, “Of Two Minds,” which puts two people in conversation with very different views on a subject to try to understand the nature of their difference. In a sense I came wanting to write an episode about Mike, but I left wanting to write to him.

Or at least understand him. I’m not saying the only people I wanted to reach now were Libertarian, tree-hugging fishermen — that would be a pretty small audience. I’m saying I left Bayou Corne wanting to know my audience, well, before putting pen to paper (or voice to tape). Instead of finding an interesting story, pursuing it relentlessly, and hoping the right audience would come, I wanted to start with the people I was trying to reach and work backwards. In a nutshell, I wanted my journalism to become collaborative.

I’ve heard a lot of journalists say that when they think of their audience they try to imagine someone they know. It could be a friend from high school or the guy that works at Trader Joe’s, someone they can easily conjure up, someone they think they “get.” The problem with this habit is that it largely keeps the stories we tell limited to the bubbles we live in and the frames we’re used to. We write stories about climate change to people who are already alarmed — often to the point of paralysis — about climate change. The people who read these articles and repost them might not know a single person who isn’t worried about climate change, and if they do, they have already given up on talking to them about it.

Since my trip to Louisiana, I’ve had a year at Stanford as a John S. Knight Journalism Fellow to explore this new approach to audience, and hash out what it might look like in practice. I’ve come up with three steps.

First, in order to reach an audience from a very different social, economic, cultural and ideological bubble than our own, you have to start with yourself. In order to see outside your own limited frame you have to know who you are. You have to know how you think, your own blindspots and biases, as well as the intersecting events, experiences and ideas that have shaped your worldview. To get there, you have to have done a ton of self-scrutiny and have received a ton of feedback from all kinds of people in all kinds of contexts.

I’ve had a life of constantly pushing myself (and being pushed) outside my frame. It doesn’t hurt that I grew up being taught to question everything and to question myself. This has left me with the ability to drop my own perspective, or frame, pretty quickly, to try on another one. It’s made me a storyteller.

Next, after scrutinizing yourself, you interview your audience, extensively. At the Stanford Hasso Plattner Institute of Design, the d.school, they call this “starting with the user.” For me, as a journalist, this means starting at the finish line, with the people you’re trying to reach, and working backwards. You don’t just imagine your audience, you get to know them very, very, well. Who needs this story the most? How do they explain what’s going on? What words, ideas and information do they use to frame it?

Third, and last, once you have a strong grasp of both your audience’s frame and your own, you’re ready to leave them both behind. Now that you’ve become fluent in multiple frames, you look for a way to tell the story that weaves them together into a complex narrative, one that builds on and transcends the frames you’ve taken such pains to identify.

In Mike’s case, I quickly learned that even the mention of “climate change” put him on the defense. For him, the phrase evokes the condescension he’s felt his entire life from politicians, liberals and environmentalists, and maybe even taps into some underlying feelings of shame left over from growing up poor. Mike shared a story, for example, about being spit on by leftist protestors after he came back from the Vietnam War — not a great association.

After the sinkhole that destroyed Bayou Corne opened up, Mike might have been immediately labeled a “traitor” by his neighbors if he started framing the problems his community was facing — pollution and an alarmingly high cancer rate — as contributing to or in any way being connected to climate change. Those words, that frame, were unproductive and actually harmful for advancing his cause. Mike wanted to improve people’s lives and reduce suffering by forcing companies to adhere to strict environmental regulations. Instead of focusing on climate change, Mike and I started talking about the solutions he saw available in his context, not mine.

I approached my conversations with Mike by being very open about my background and my reasons for being there, and it soon became clear that Mike wasn’t so much my subject as he was a collaborator. The way to win his trust was to show him respect, and to convince him that my intentions were solid, that my exploration of his life and community would not only benefit me, or the people who would listen to my podcast, but that it would benefit his community as well.

By building on what’s already there, journalism can give people the stories and information that they need to make the most informed choices, not just a cookie-cutter, one-size-sits-all version of truth. We contribute to creating, strengthening and sustaining communities of action, not by telling people how to solve their own problems but by looking at their problems through as many lenses as possible.

Once we know our audience well — and have honed the ability to recognize our own limited perspectives — there’s nothing stopping us from telling stories that destabilize both our audience’s blindspots and assumptions, and our own. But before we decide what the story is, we need to know the people we’re telling it to. We need to be able to articulate their frame before we can challenge it, and create a new one.

Thinking in multiple frames: How journalism can be more collaborative was originally published in JSK Class of 2019 on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.