Crunchberry Project

In fall of 2008, Team Crunchberry- six journalism students at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism - partnered with Gazette Communications in Cedar Rapids, Iowa to explore the broad idea of building better conversations around news. After four weeks of researching and defining our project, six weeks of designing & developing software, and two weeks polishing & presenting our work, we went live with our final product, News Mixer.

And now for the moment you’ve all been waiting for - how we did it. Now available for download is our final report (80 pages - 2.7MB pdf file), which documents all 12 weeks of our research, design and development processes. We also provide our findings and recommendations for the journalism industry, as well as further development of News Mixer.

You might also be interested in this roundup of reactions to the News Mixer site, written by our professor, Rich Gordon.

This has been a very educational experience for us, and we hope this final report will help educate journalists, media organizations and journalism schools (in addition to bettering conversations around the news!). We would like to extend one last thank you to our partners at the Gazette, our industry experts, our research panel, and of course - you - our readers who helped us develop News Mixer. Thanks!

For your edutainment needs, we present a short how-to video outlining the various commenting structures and navigation schemes of http://newsmixer.us

 
How to use News Mixer from Stuart Tiffen on Vimeo.

Team Crunchberry has spent a better part of the last 11 weeks thinking about how to engage an online news audience, particularly young adults, and encourage discussion. The culmination of what we learned is the recommendations we would like to pass on to fellow journalists, news organizations and media companies.

Journalists must interact with their audience. Start the conversation by inviting questions and constructive criticism. Monitor commenting on your work and respond, especially to  thoughtful comments, criticisms and requests for further information. The involvement of credible sources and thoughtful contributions will elevate the audience’s perception of the comments and increase the value of the format to readers. 

Encourage and fund experimentation with online media. The only way someone will find out how to make money on the Internet is to try something new. 

Participate in different types of social media. To really understand what works and what doesn’t and to understand the unwritten rules of social media, journalists need to participate themselves. Use social media to build the audience for journalism, identify sources and generate story ideas.

Work to integrate the “journalism” side of your newsroom with the “technical” side. Typically these two entities work distinctly from one another, but the more each side understands what the other is doing the more possible it is to work toward an end goal together.   One idea worth considering is hiring developers to work in the newsroom to help build new content, services and ways of interacting with the audience. 

Provide your audience with tools to interact with the news organization and with each other. This will enhance the quality of journalism and also build loyalty and time spent on your Web site.

Use social media to reach young adults. Social network sites generate more usage and loyalty than news sites. Use them as a distribution platform and as a way to build a network of followers. 

Allocate staff time for social media and user interaction. Give journalists the time and opportunity to engage in online discussion around their articles.  Assign staff to build connections through social networks. 

Enlist young creative minds in developing your digital products. One way to do this, as the Gazette has done for our project, is to partner with universities and their students.  Another approach is to inject people from other fields (e.g.,  software developers).

When inviting users to react to and talk about your content, don’t just offer an open-ended comment box.  More structured forms of interaction have the potential to engage audiences more deeply and improve the quality of conversation. 

Make more use of links to related content. Connect stories so people are not required to work to get what they are looking for.  People will always use multiple online sources – Web sites that provide relevant outbound links will increase user loyalty. 

Highlight user-generated content on your Web site.  For the users who see their video or comment featured, it will give them an added bonus for contributing, and a greater appreciation for the online discussion.

Consider integrating your Web site with Facebook Connect and/or comparable services from MySpace, Google and Yahoo! These services allow users to log in without creating a new user ID and password and may encourage deeper engagement and participation by leveraging users’ social networks.

Monitor the evolution and adoption of digital identity services such as Facebook Connect, especially the balance between benefits (for instance, no need to set up a separate user ID) and drawbacks (for instance, users’ concerns about privacy and the use of their Facebook profile information). Do what you can to support the adoption of more open, transparent standards such as OpenID and OpenSocial.

We also have a few recommendations for journalism schools:

Teach people new tricks. Recruit programmers/developers and teach them how to integrate what they do with journalism, or collaborate with engineering schools. Teach journalists how to better their stories through the use of new technology. The more you know about these technologies the more you know how to make them work for you (and your story). If it’s not practical to teach the technology in journalism school, publicize opportunities to learn it elsewhere on campus and guide motivated students to resources they can use to teach themselves. 

If you publish content to a publicly available Web site, allow comments and give journalism students a chance to experience real-world audience interaction. This is a fundamental skill for 21st century journalists. 

Provide classes in which students write and contribute to blogs, and make use of social media. Because social media is an emerging industry for many newsrooms, skills in these areas are vital to have in this industry.

To build News Mixer we had to complete a lot of research first. Research on the current state of journalism, society and media audiences. Research on young adult news consumers, industry leaders and our Cedar Rapids market. Research on digital content, technology and social software. Needless to say, we learned a lot. We digested what we learned into a list of findings to share with fellow journalists, news organizations and media companies.

Findings on journalism, society and media audiences:

(1) Journalism is not just about reporting and distributing facts; the role of journalism is also to generate conversations and provide a forum for debate. In the early years of American newspapers, as journalism historian David Paul Nord wrote in his book Communities of Journalism, the forum function was dominant. Newspapers served as a place for conversation and debate, and some papers filled page after page with letters from readers. But by the mid-20th century, as the number of papers declined, journalism became defined mostly as reporting and conveying facts.  Opinions were banished to a heavily edited page or two of the paper. 

(2) Overall levels of civic engagement have declined over the past 50 years, as documented in Robert Putnam’s book, “Bowling Alone.”  Putnam, for instance, found declines in volunteering, PTA membership and voter turnout. The decline in civic engagement connects also to declining use of news media, especially local news.

(3) The 2008 election suggests, however, that online social networking tools have the potential for regenerating civic engagement among young adults. Barack Obama’s campaign engaged millions young people by tapping into online social networks.

(4) According to the PEW Research Center for the People & the Press’s News Consumption and Believability Study, “Four in 10 Americans under 25 say they feel overloaded by the amount of news available today.

(5) Young adults prefer to get their news online. “Abandoning the News,” published by the Carnegie Corporation, thirty-nine per cent of respondents under the age of thirty-five told researchers that they expected to use the Internet in the future for news purposes; just eight per cent said that they would rely on a newspaper.

(6) Eric Alterman, wrote in “The death and life of the American newspaper,” in the March 31, 2008 issue of the New Yorker, “Print newspapers are not managing to engage young adults.  The average age of the American newspaper reader is 55 and rising. Only 19 percent of Americans between the ages of 18 and 35 claim even to look at a daily newspaper.”

(7) According to PEW’s News Consumption and Believability Study, “Many young adults say they are too busy to keep up with the news.  “Many people in their mid-20s through their mid-30s say they are simply too busy to keep up with the news. Overall, just 30% are too busy to follow the news, while 68% say it is “pretty easy.” But about four-in-ten (41%) younger adults – those ages 25 to 34 – say they often are too busy to follow the news.”

(8) Young adults are far less likely than older Americans to enjoy keeping up with the news.  “Consistent with the Pew Research Center’s past media consumption surveys, young people are far less likely than older Americans to say they get a great deal of enjoyment from following news. Enjoyment of the news has consistently been associated with higher levels of both news interest and news consumption,” according to the PEW study.

(9) Most young people check in on the news from time to time rather than get it at regular times.  “An overwhelming proportion of very young people are news grazers, checking in on the news from time to time. Nearly eight-in-ten of those younger than 25 (78%) say they get the news from time to time. Even among people only somewhat older – those ages 25 to 34 – a much smaller majority (56%) says they check on the news rather than getting it at regular times. Among those 50 and older, most say they get the news at regular times,” according to the PEW study.

(10) People who get news from time to time watch and read less news overall than those who get news at regular times.  “Americans who gather news from time to time watch and read less news overall than do those who get news at regular times. News grazers spend on average 56 minutes per day consuming news. By contrast, regular-time news consumers on average spend 79 minutes per day consuming news,” according to the PEW study.

(11) Social networks are extremely popular among young adults. According to the Pew report, 82 percent of 18-24-year-olds have established a profile on MySpace, Facebook or another social networking site. The same is true of 60 percent of those 25-29 and 41 percent of those 30-34.

(12) According to the June 2008 Associated Press study, A New Model for News: Studying the Deep Structure of Young-Adult News Consumption, “Young adults are dissatisfied with the way news is presented online.  They feel overwhelmed by facts and updates, while not getting enough context and understanding.”

(13) One way to interest young adults in news is to capitalize on the value of news as “social currency in their interactions with others,” the AP report said.

(14) The interaction tools used on news Web sites – generally, an open-ended comment box – often become platforms for ranting, hostility and racism rather than reasoned dialogue.

(15) Many online users don’t like comments as they currently exist: 

– People think there is no pay-off or gratification from participation. 44 percent of our survey panel said they wouldn’t get anything out of participating in online commenting and conversations. 

– People do not think comments are believable. 43 percent of those surveyed said they thought most comments left by others are inaccurate. 

– People don’t like communicating with strangers. 62 percent of our survey respondents replied that they disagreed with the statement, “I like to communicate online with people I don’t know.”  In phone interviews, this continued to be a significant subject.  Some participants were concerned about the ramifications of interactions with people they didn’t know for fear of insulting someone or causing a negative impact on their future employment, others simply preferred to avoid contact with strangers in most if not all cases.

Findings on digital content, technology and social software:

(1) Successful digital journalism/media products require deep integration of content and technology, and deep collaborations between journalists and computer programmers. This means media companies need to bridge the gap between the two disciplines.

(2) There is a fundamental disconnect between programmers and non-programmers, but they have a lot in common that can be leveraged. People on both sides of the development disconnect need to understand the vision of the project to reduce the potential for problems. People generally have a lot of experience using computer systems and may find it easier to understand how they are built then they think. Non-programmers should use this opportunity in working with developers to learn more about how computer systems work, and programmers should put forth the effort to teach.

(3) Agile programming is a powerful way to organize interdisciplinary teams to produce functional Web sites.

(4) By using an almost completely free and open source toolkit — most notably Django, MySQL, Wordpress, and Trac — we were able to hit the ground running, at no cost, and build News Mixer faster than any of us anticipated.

(5) Enabling user interaction can dramatically drive traffic and user loyalty on news Web sites. For example, the Monroe (Mich.) Evening News’s Monroe Talks site, which has been operating since March 2007, averages close to 1 million page views per month, and has served as an effective forum for its readers to discuss the things that affect their community. As of December 2008, Monroetalks.com boasts more than a quarter-million comments on more than 11,000 topics; all generated by about 3,400 members. While traffic is heavier on the Monroenews.com site, the Monroetalks.com forums receive nearly twice as many page views as the news site. Shaw said the average user spends about 15 minutes on the site – a great amount of time in the Internet news industry.

(6) Advances in Web technology in recent years now allow designers and developers to design rich systems for user interaction, far beyond what was possible using HTML pages in the earlier days of the Web.

(7) Only a minority of users participate in online conversations. According to web usability expert, Jakob Nielson, 90 percent of online users are lurkers (people who read or observe but do not contribute), nine percent of users contribute from time to time, and one percent of users participate a lot and account for most online contributions.

(8) Passionate people are essential to online discussion, but the passion can also  deter othersfrom participating.

(9) People don’t like to register to participate in online discussions, but user anonymity – or a lack of consistent online identity – can contribute to incivility.

(10) Online conversations can be made more productive and interesting through human intervention — moderation or encouragement.                              

(11) Successful “social software” (e.g., Slashdot, Vita.mn, Intense Debate) often leverages technology in creative ways to channel people’s interactions more productively.

(12) Social network sites such as Facebook and MySpace are beginning to make user identities portable across other Web sites. This trend offers advantages to users (fewer logins, the ability to interact with your social network on multiple sites) but also raises privacy concerns.

(13) Facebook Connect offers rich possibilities for building more successful Web sites geared to conversations around news. A Web site integrated with Facebook Connect allows users to log in without creating a new user ID and password. The quality of conversation may be enhanced by the fact that people’s comments are visible to their Facebook friends. Through Facebook Connect, the site becomes personalized automatically – posts from your social network are highlighted.  Furthermore, posts to the site can be distributed to your social network via the Facebook news feed.                              

(14) Over time, new standards may emerge that will standardize how personal data is shared across Web sites and give users more control over their personal information. Forrester Research analyst Charlene Li predicts that within five to 10 years, social networks will be “like air.” Michael Arrington, founder and co-editor of TechCrunch says, “Users eventually need one place on the Internet to store their data, or lots of places to store different types of data. But what they don’t want is today’s world where they are recreating and storing the same data over a plethora of social networks just because all those sites refuse to share.”

Worlds Fair 1893

After four weeks deep in designing and developing new ways to approach commenting and conversation around news, we have an interesting challenge. How do we show off our work? As we have discussed in previous posts, our goal for this project was to look at ways to improve the quality of conversation on news Web sites. We’ve developed three ways to facilitate conversation - Question & Answer style comments, short format, tweet-like comments, and Letters to the Editor. And we have built all of these systems to integrate with Facebook. Over the next couple weeks we will focus on polish, and more importantly, developing a way to demonstrate what we’ve built.

There are a few ways that we can show off. We could build a news Web site, host content and attract viewers to participate in our community. We could try to export our app by making it embeddable into other websites. We could release the code and let others use it in existing sites.

We will definitely release the source code, but we can’t rely on others to show off our stuff. So in light of our time constraints, we have decided to build a simple news website. Something with local Cedar Rapids news that will allow interested people interact and discuss the news with other readers and Facebook friends.

So what should our local news website look like? How should we apply our commenting systems? Short-format twitter comments on entertainment and sport stories? Letters to the Editor for hot button issues? Questions and Answers on investigative stories? Some combination of the three on all stories?

These are some of the questions we would like to answer this week.

We’ve been writing this blog since the project started.  For the first few weeks we wrote about the theory of the project, since that was what we were struggling with - the major decisions of which task to tackle, which features to include, and which to cut.  

Those were the heady days of philosophical discussions about Journalism and Conversations and Democracy and there was much to blog.  

Then came the era of the research, wherein the consumer insights team wrote about their findings, and the industry researchers dug through the host of products already in existence, and the team gleaned many new answers that provided course corrections for the project.  Since then we’ve blogged about some of our industry research discoveries.

The act of blogging served as a catharsis.  It was the cleansing act of articulating the problems we were combating.  It helped us organize, provided objectivity and some of the input we’ve received from comments has been invaluable.

Happy programmers write happy code. by Stuart Tiffen

But after much hand-wringing and painful decisions suddenly, overnight we were in full-on development mode.  Since now our day-to-day grind consists of tackling innumerable design and development obstacles, with some research and now final report and presentation preparation thrown in, such pursuits do not always make for interesting blog posts.

And so, I ask you, our loyal reader(s), what is it that you would like to know about the riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma that we call the Crunchberry project?

photo by ashe-villain/flickr

Lately we’ve had all sorts of posts about various bits of industry research that we’ve been doing on sites like MonroeTalks, Salon.com’s letters to the editor model, Plurk and personas, but we haven’t taken the time to actually give an update about where we are in the process of this project.  

Well, here it is folks:  We are in the midst of our fifth development iteration.  We have so far successfully designed, developed and are testing the first of our comment structures - Q&A.  Ryan and Brian, our overworked dev team, made an solid product in minimum time.  

We have also designed our second comment structure - Short Format - and that is being developed during the current iteration and we’ll be testing next week.  

The design team, which consists of Kayla and I, augmented by Josh and Angela is working hard on the Letters to the Editor comment structure, as well as ratings structures to be reverse engineered into Q&A and Short Format, all of which are to be developed next week.  

Through each of the last three iterations we’ve been plumbing the depths of Facebook integration, asking how much is too much, how little is not enough and how should it all look?

After a subsequent round of surveys, Team Crunchberry gathered new data on Internet usage rates from our user panel.  From the survey we’ve gleaned that participation intimidation, one of the barriers we’d earlier identified, is not a significant factor for the Cedar Rapids area.  We also eliminated the barrier “Comments lack are not valuable” choosing instead to investigate “Comments are not believable,” as it is a subset of the former, and since it is the more measurable problem to solve.

On Tuesday we finally hammered out a narrowed-down list of super-features and began actual development.  Many hours were spent agonizing over eliminating some features and barriers from our wish list that we wouldn’t have the time to implement, but what we’ve ended up with is a (still over-broad) list of super-features and subordinate features that mitigate many of the barriers to strengthening communities of our target demographic in Cedar Rapids.

The subordinate features on the image above only represent a tiny portion of the overall list of features we’ve written, and that list continues to evolve as the iterative development process gets underway.

Due to time constraints we will not be able to accomplish everything on our narrowed super-feature list.  We are not ruling any of this list out entirely, but to get the ball rolling we are beginning to develop two super-features:  Comment Structure and Facebook integration.

We’re at the point in the project where it is finally time to decide once and for all what we are going to do. We’ve done research. We’ve spoken to our audience. We’ve identified the needs. Now we need to know how we will charge ahead.

We all came up with ideas for what might work. While our ideas were varied, by the end of the day they had settled into two camps. Either we would build a niche website specifically targeted at a need as expressed by our audience (20-35 year olds in Cedar Rapids) OR we would focus on the way people interact with the news, with the goal of building conversations around the news.

We found there was a fundamental difference between meeting our class goals and meeting the big goal. Our class goals consists of things like: we want to build something new and innovative, something people will talk about and use, something that will help get us jobs. Our big goal is to build and strengthen interactions between 20 and 35 year olds in Cedar Rapids. We had a tough time figuring out one product that would meet both of these goals.

We split into groups. One team was charged with creating a niche website that would inherently address a need in the community, but would be something that hasn’t been done before, and would also take into account the unwritten goal of tying this project to the improvement of journalism. The other team was to create something new and innovative that would also take into account the needs of our community.

Enter Your Crew and Pie Social (working titles).

“Your Crew: Connecting friends, connecting family” is a niche website for young families in Cedar Rapids with a mission of strengthening family connections in the community by giving families in Cedar Rapids the very best news about what’s happening, where to go and how to have fun together. It would involve such features as an interactive calendar, social networking, a tie to local news, and a plethora of community created content such as reviews, how-to videos, recipes, craft projects and more.

In the end, we chose the Pie Social model. QuintanaRoo/Flickr

The mission of “Pie Social: What are you reading?” is to make the community of interested people around local news and information visible and accessible and to encourage participation through ease of use and structure. Much of this idea has yet to be defined but the super-features in the works right now involve transparency, making connections between users based on what they read. This model will likely involve Facebook integration and improved systems of commenting.

Both presentations were incredibly strong and very persuasive arguments could be made in favor of pursuing either project. In the end, it came down to a vote. We will be pursuing the “Pie Social” model. And while we don’t know exactly what it will look like or how we will pull it off, we are relatively confident that it is the more experimental and innovative model of the two options.

Our professor, Rich Gordon, made a great point before he left the room so we students could debate until a winner was chosen and the white smoke emerged. He said that media companies, bound by tradition and financial constraints, often have to pick the safe model, the model that is proven to work. As journalism graduate students we have the ability to experiment, be wrong, mess up, fail, but hopefully succeed and come up with something media companies don’t have the freedom to pursue.

What do you think of our decision?

“Whether ’tis nobler nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune or to take arms against a sea of troubles;” - Shakespeare

photo by Martin Hartland

Today we tackled the tough problem of knowing some of our target demographics’ needs - but how best to address them?  After some deliberation we concluded we may proceed in one of two directions.

Option A) a niche site, that provides an in-depth treatment of a specific selection of needs.

Option B) a broader charge, something we’re loosely calling “general applications,” or non-niche, that tackles the amorphous concept of improving local news.

The team will pitch each option tomorrow (Wednesday, Oct 15) and ultimately we will pick a direction and begin the real arduous task of development.  Either camp will be guided by our overall mission, to build and strengthen connections among 20 - 34 year-olds in the Cedar Rapids community.