For a while now, I’ve been of the mind that innovation at the intersection of news and technology is stuck. Most likely at this. The pipeline is broken as far as I can tell. Even if there were a miracle and every journalism program had a “news-coder” program, it would be two or three years for students to make it through.

This is unfortunate. Media companies are technology companies, and have been as long as they’ve existed. David Cohn tried to write about this too. I remember back in the day when newspaper companies spent millions of dollars to build better printing presses. It was a source of pride to own your own press. Transitioning from black and white to color, don’t you remember that? Color ads scored more money than the black and white ones.

On the web… well, the web isn’t a priority. Print makes the money, therefore print is the priority. For any newspaper, magazine, or print publication, until these priorities switch, you’re dead in the water. You are a ripe target for disruption.

Your new priority: you are an arbiter of information whose mission is to empower people to make better decisions.

But I feel like this is known, and we’re in a waiting period to see all of this play out. From here on, it’s just hard work needing to be done. If you’re at a loss of ideas, I have plenty you can steal.

I need to raise money so I can short the education schooling system.

It’s interesting that in Mars Edit and WordPress for iOS, the tags field is right under the title, like this:

This puts a greater level of importance on the tags field than the main content area (with the title as the most important for that matter). Yet we don’t do much with tags. Clay Shirky has an awesome piece on this matter called “Ontology is Overrated“.

Aside: Actually, as I spent ten minutes skimming through his piece, I realized it didn’t have much to say about tags not being used. It’s a great piece nevertheless.

I use tags for organizing my relationship to the world. For instance, here are all of my previous engagements with Clay Shirky. It’s pretty sparse, and doesn’t include, for instance, when I went over to his holiday party last December with Cody and talked to his cute niece most of the time. Here’s what I think of Portland, in the form of pictures, embedded tweets, beer, and the outdoors. Here’s all of the times I thought it worth posting that I went running.

There’s something that can be done with this structure around my data but I’m not quite sure what it is yet. One thought is to have a chart appear at the top to show month by month how many times I posted on the topic. If information companies tagged pieces with a particular story term, they could track when they were producing an abundance of coverage vs. no coverage at all. Another thought is that it would be neat make all of the content associated with the topic accessible on one page.

I think the information architecture would depend on the type of topic. For instance, if I linked you to my running tag, it would show a log of every time I ran, my most common routes, average pace, etc. If I linked you to my music tag, it would give you access to my listening history, and let you browse my collection. And so on.

I use tags to structure my content because I want WordPress to be my personal data store (Google search for an exploration of what that means). In short: I’m building a repository of data I’d like to be infinitely reusable.

I get to contribute to WordPress.com under the auspices of Team VIP. On Twitter, I love how I can one-click open a new posting window by hitting “n”. I want that across WordPress.com. I also want WordPress.com to properly respect post formats.

It’s terrible annoying that every app and every website has taken it upon themselves to reinvent which keys should be bound to which actions. Sparrow, I’m looking at you with your “Spacebar opens the email in a new window instead of scrolling it.”

When I accessed my parent’s wifi network this evening, an airline receipt I accidentally command p’ed three weeks ago was finally delivered to the printer, and made physical. Semi-sentience in the real world.

Editing time.

One last thing. I think I’ll do a post about content analytics soon, especially because Edit Flow v0.7 is nearing release.

The success of these online competitors and the crisis among many of higher education’s traditional institutions are far from unique. These are familiar steps in a process known as “disruptive innovation” that has occurred in many industries, from accounting and music to communications and computers. It is the process by which products and services that were once so expensive, complicated, inaccessible, and inconvenient that only a small fraction of people could access them, are transformed into simpler, more accessible and convenient forms that are also, ultimately, lower in cost. We are seeing it happen more rapidly than one could have imagined in higher education, as online learning has exploded: roughly 10 percent of students took at least one online course in 2003, 25 percent in 2008, and nearly 30 percent in the fall of 2009.

[...]

Although this transition has begun, much of online learning’s promise for higher education is still on the horizon. For example, online learning has not yet led to lower prices from the perspective of many students—even though many of the online universities operate at lower costs than the traditional universities and enable students to fit coursework around existing jobs or other responsibilities. To date, moreover, significant portions of online learning have not taken advantage of this new medium to personalize instruction and create new, dynamic and individualized learning pathways within a course for students.

Clayton Christensen — Colleges in crisis. Emphasis mine.

Last week, I said:

I think I’ve solved journalism. Based on my experience as a newsroom & J-School developer who’s had repeat experience with crappy vendor software, this Knight-Mozilla challenge needs to do to crappy CMSes & support ticketing software what Google Chrome Frame has done to IE6,7,8. We must subvert corporate IT like nobody’s business.

Initially a semi-sarcastic remark, this comment started an off-list conversation that I’d like to bring public again, at least on my side. I do believe ground-up subversion can be an effective way of getting things improved when legacy culture presents such a formidable challenge. Here are a few things we’re doing at the J-School:

One: Everyone that works with me on a project has to use Basecamp. Email is not a collaboration tool, nor is it a project management tool. If a new collaborator haven’t used Basecamp, I give them a short introduction during the kick-off meeting and follow up with written documentation. I’ve had almost 100% success in shifting project conversations to Basecamp, but only about 50% success with getting people to check off tasks and milestones. Baby steps. The rest of IT has more or less adopted it, and there are a few people who have expressed using Basecamp in other contexts. Most of the core faculty have accounts now too. A summer goal is to introduce ways in which they can use it for fall courses.

Two: We’re writing documentation for everything. Use of new technology is dropped if the user gets frustrated with it, or forgets or doesn’t know how to use certain pieces of it. As such, we’re trying to prepare a piece of documentation for every support ticket we handle. Users should be empowered to learn for themselves. Technologists’ roles should focus on creating environments where experimentation by non-technologists is easy.

Three: Support requests are funneled through our (terrible) help desk software. If a user needs help, the current culture is either to email or go try and find the person they think can help them. I can’t even tell you how many questions I’ve gotten about Flash because I’m the “internet guy.” And I’m still reminding three or more people per day to file a support request instead of interrupting me while I’m in the zone. We’ll be a lot more effective at answering questions if we can instill a new culture that leverages technology to find people and resources (e.g. “go to Russell instead of me for Flash questions” and “the answer to your question is available on the tech website“)

Four: I’m pushing for more accountability. Use of project management software like Basecamp and collaboratively creating meeting notes in Google Docs are two ways of ensuring everything is written down. The sheer number of things that simply aren’t done because of miscommunication, poor planning, or lack of accountability has surprised me significantly.

When I use the word “subversive” in this context, I really mean “just do it. Have a vision for what you want your future to be, and hack the people and technology systems necessary to make it a reality. Pad next year’s budget by 10% so you can hire the contractor you need for that neat, untested idea. You don’t need anyone’s approval.

Reading through the surveys, it really seems like a lot of the grantees “scaled back” from building software to simply using existing tools or just community organizing. This response was representative:

The technological capacity of the organizations… whom we were encouraging to use our tech was lacking and therefore hindered adoption of [it].

This is a good example of the kind of thing that needs to be worked out prior to applying, or vetted during the application. Sure, no matter how much vetting you do, some projects are going to fail, but the rubric for success can’t be “throw them at the wall and see what sticks.”

I think in the future incarnation of this deal, whatever it is, people need to be more accountable to what they’ve proposed to achieve — not the scaled back “oh shit, this is hard, what can we do with existing tools instead” end product. To me, the word “innovation” connotes a certain focus on new technology. There should be at least one component of the proposal that is a new tool and will be built by the end of the proposal, or else there had better be a really brilliant reason for a proposal that just introduces existing tools into some organization or community.

There’s a ton of emphasis in the application on what you want to achieve and how it will impact a community, but not very much on how, specifically, you’re going to achieve it, and who’s on board to get it done. Compare with Y Combinator where they really make you sweat about the team and the technology, and demonstrate what you’ve already built.

The other thing that is more and more disconcerting to me is the “Knight News Challenge is an experiment” vibe that I get from a lot of the responses. Making it a grand experiment kind of screws up the incentive to stick to your plans, because failure to launch is justified, in retrospect, as an interesting outcome of the experiment. There seems to be a little bit of broken window syndrome (or whatever you would call it) going on. The less accountability people see for the other grantees, the less pressure they may feel to achieve their original goals. This critique isn’t point at any individual: doing this stuff is hard, and scaling back near the deadline often makes sense. But perhaps it makes a little too much sense in the context of the current KNC. Scale the project back during the application phase, so that the grant matches what can realistically be achieved.

I think it would be worthwhile to look at the responses (and concrete results) from “News Games” and “Playing the News.” Two projects about games, both granted around $250k.

One thing that stood out was the outliers in the number of KNC apps submitted. The Ideas Factory submitted 11. MobileActive submitted 48 other applications? Not, say, 4-8? Sup with that?

It seems weird to me that that it’s so hard to find this kind of information News Challenge website. If we’re serious about developing story forms and information repositories that go beyond narrative journalism and hub-and-spoke or blog navigation, we should see some of that in the contest itself.

The Knight Foundation has an important role to play encouraging innovation and experimentation within the news industry — because let’s face it, not many people in news media have that kind of money to throw around these days (KNC has granted about $22 million over the past four years). Knight has a responsibility to the projects they’re funding, the communities that rely on those projects, and the journalism community as a whole to see that their money is put to good use.

What I’ve gleaned from breaking down the numbers, reading the various survey responses and generally observing KNC practices over the past few years is this:

• Knight appears to “play favorites,” awarding money to people who have applied multiple times or to people they have previously known and met in person. One survey respondent even commented that only the projects that would sound good in a NYT article are selected.
• After projects are funded, adios! No communication with Knight commences, which shows an incredible lack of accountability and makes it easier for projects to fall by the wayside.
• There are inefficiencies in the processes related to applying for and obtaining money from Knight.

We can take a hint from one project, TileMapping, that according to their survey response is having “a great experience so far!” This project was already in the process of being actively built before the grant money was attained. TileMapping used the funds for a second iteration of their project, so they had a clearer scope of what they were trying to accomplish and what resources were required to do it.

So many of the respondents who haven’t had such a good time as TileMapping said they changed course because they realized that they:

1. Just didn’t have the technical capacity
2. Vastly underestimated the amount of time it would take to build something
3. Couldn’t get the industry connections or user base to pull off what they desired.

I think many of these problems can be tackled by the solutions Daniel poses, that I need not repeat (shorting funding cycles, milestone-based funding, smaller amounts of money). Related back to TileMapping, projects need to have a clearer plan of execution and sustainability, beyond simple speculation. The Knight News Challenge should be an investment in the future of news, not a gamble.

And while, yes, some projects will most certainly fail, they shouldn’t fail quietly and unacknowledged. There should be clear transparency, enforced through Knight, that requires grantees to explain why projects failed and how future projects can learn from those failures — because what’s the point of experimentation if there are no clear takeaways? Otherwise, it’s just lost time, money and effort. And that’s not how you shape the future of news.

OK, so we can all agree that Knight is ready to take an evolutionary step, right? It’s time for the thing to hold itself, and its winners, a little more accountable.

Not every project is going to be a success. But reading through the responses, it’s not clear to me that there’s a working definition of what Knight Challenge success is. And couching everything as an “experiment” — both the projects and the Challenge itself  allows that lack of accountability to continue. Call something an experiment and the stakes are removed — it’s a success just for being conducted.

So how do you increase accountability? Incubators like YC and TechStars, which have a leg up because they fund for-profit endeavors with a clear-cut barometer for success, offer a model that Knight could adapt. Some chief differences:

• The incubators give away far less money.
• They offer a fixed amount, which lets ideas be judged more easily against each other and discourages pie-in-the-sky endeavors. With only $18k, your project needs to be simple and executable.
• The incubators focus as much on the founders as on the idea — if you don’t have the skills and passion to make your project a success, you’re likely not getting funded.
• Post-selection, the incubators offer far more hands-on support.
• That hands-on support often leads to the initial idea evolving and improving.

The incubators have this in common with Knight: they’re making a bet. The question is how hard you work to improve your odds. And doing that work is tough if you haven’t defined what a win really looks like.