As I am auditing Mozilla News Lab, I’m going to deviate from the assignments a little bit. Later this week, or early next week I will explain why I am auditing instead of participating as a potential fellow, but for now I’d like to discuss two impressions that I have.
As an outsider, I’ve been quite frustrated at some of the opinions and debates that journalists have had about the way forward in the age of the internet. Because of that jaundiced perspective, the last month has been a bit of a revelation to me. My participation in MoJo has acted as a focusing lens for my interest in technology, investigation and journalism, and has provided the impetus for me to do something that I hadn’t cause to do much previously, that is, to talk to journalists interested in tech innovation.
I am currently more hopeful for the current progress and fate of journalism than I have been in a very long time. I have in the past followed along with some of the debates and opinions in journalism, but what was not apparent to me at the time was that there is a solid vanguard of tech-savvy journalists out there building tools to make journalism better. MoJo itself speaks to this point.
The first week of lectures for the Mozilla News Lab reinforced a common thread from my discussions. The first three lectures for me have really focused on the process of crafting a project, whether that means how to produce mockups to communicate your ideas (in Aza Raskin’s case), building an agile project (in Burt Herman’s case), or the importance of sketching ideas, and collaborating with others (in Amanda Cox’s case).
What is important to me about this is that news production is a parallel process. What has been impressed upon me over the past week by journalists such as Sarah Cohen and others is that news reporters aren’t conservative, or dismissive of new tools. Instead, their primary problem is that they are overworked, and uninterested in tools that will don’t help them accomplish their existing goals, e.g. producing news stories.
This is particularly relevant for people building new news tools with the goal of making Journalism better, because when someone tells you that they wish to make something better, the first question should always be “better for whom?” Journalism, as with any heterodox field has multiple constituencies, some of whom do not get along, and most of whom do not have the same motivations, objectives, or needs.
So, what I endeavor to do, and I hope that other MoJo participants do when developing their projects, in focusing on the process that they intend to use to develop their project, is ask specifically “what journalistic process am I trying to improve?” and just as importantly “am I making the process or lives of my users or participants more complicated?”
