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The Conclusion of Class but the Beginning of My Futuring!

I waited a year to take this class because I was overwhelmed with enough classes my first year in the Newhouse Doctoral program (http://newhouse/syr/edu).  It was definitely worth the wait.

As a legacy journalist, this course has forced me to look at the business of news in an entirely different way.  At first I said that my reason for going getting my PhD and the basis of my research was to find a way to “save” journalism but subconsciously I really wanted it to go back to the way it was (thanks go out to Professor Masiclat for busting me on that).  I had to accept that I was very uncomfortable and nervous about these changes because I have no idea what is going on!  That and the fact that photojournalism was my 3rd career and my lifelong dream, so when I got into is when digital just started UGHHHHH.

Every week though this class I have been greeted with an enthusiastic, techno-optimistic professor who loves what he does.  How can you not be excited?  He also knew me well and could tell how uncomfortable I was with this new stuff.  Each week, either through the readings or the guest speakers I was taken on a journey into the future and taught a different way of looking at the bright side of what is and can be instead or yearning for what was.

I get it now!  It’s still early for me as a techno-optimist, but I’m determined to keep growing.  I had no idea how to forecast and now I am reading reports and making my own determinations about trends.  How did that happen?  I am thinking about career choices, not only for myself but for the students I will be soon teaching all the while understanding that even by the time I start teaching in 1.5 years that too may change, but I’m up for it.

Most of all I get that’s it’s not magic. It’s analytics, forecasting, studying trends, looking at what happened, what’s happening and why and most of all not being so scared about it that I get run over and left behind.

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YESSSS!  This has helped me to get started on Blockchain and if you are as freaked out by technology as I am then we can conquer this together.  It also helps to understand the Blockchain is not just Bitcoin (which I will delve into after I get a sense of this).

I’m also going to list some other links that are helpful and then the two that I started with and led me to backtrack all the way back to this one.

https://www.marketplace.org/2017/09/22/tech/ico-bitcoin-blockchain

this is a short little vocabulary review but also helps to understand what is going on.

https://www.marketplace.org/2017/09/22/tech/why-are-countries-so-afraid-bitcoin?utm_campaign=Marketplace+Midday_20170922&utm_medium=email&utm_source=sfmc_Newsletter&utm_content=Why%20are%20countries%20so%20afraid%20of%20bitcoin?

This is one of the first ones I started with and thus left it in my reading list for weeks, too afraid to try and read it.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/26/business/initial-coin-offering-critic.html?ribbon-ad-idx=4&rref=technology&_r=0

Given my fear of this new technology, I shouldn’t have even tried to read this article with horrify in the title.  I’ll get back to this one too.

However, one way or the other I am going to be tech savvy and a techno-optimist.  As the article in the link on the post says, I don’t have to know how blockchain (or any of this for that matter) works to make it work for me.

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AHHH this kind of piggy backs off of the last post going from a different perspective of what to do with big data and digital identity.

I have to admit I try not to think about all of the privacy I am giving up to have the comforts of a digital life, but they are there. There are also too many security hacks happening where that digital identity is being compromised increasingly.  The e-Estonia ID card is the answer claiming it can replace 10 identifier cards we currently use.  This could be efficient and convenient as the article states and more secure using blockchain technology.

So I will stop here because I don’t fully understand blockchain yet, but I don’t have to fully understand it to like this idea.  I’ll write more about blockchain in my next post.

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ARGHHHH and a note that the visual for this article reminds me of the “old” days of newspapers and a newspaper printing press.

Now this makes me crazy already and I have only read the first in the series.  I am taking a class called “Applied Research in Content Management” and I have previously stated how I was slow to come around to the new way of thinking and acting but I do get it now. However the author could have been talking firstly to me with this paragraph: “I could mention dozens of large media brands afflicted with those ailments. For them, money is not the problem. Incompetence and carelessness are the main culprits. Managers choose not to invest in recommendation engines because they simply don’t understand their value.”  YIKES

But there is a solution because in every problem there can be an opportunity. News media, journalism, are you listening to this? “How can scoring stories change that game? Powered by data science, the News Quality Scoring Project is built on a journalistic approach to the quantitative attributes of great journalism. (This part is provided by a great team of French data scientist working for Kynapse, which deals with gigantic datasets of the energy or health sectors.)”

I don’t know what all of this means yet at first glance, but I am going to follow the series and keep talking with my content management professor in order to get caught up to speed!

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Here we go!  This can go with my previous post about AI and content management.

This is the other side of the coin on that.  The scary part about intention and then usage. As a PoC (Person of Color) I am concerned anytime I hear policing, whether it is actual policing or big data policing, because of the history and current situation with police and communities of color. The author writes “The math behind big data policing targets crime, but in many cities, crime suppression targets communities of color … People of color, immigrants, religious minorities, the poor, protesters, government critics, and many others who encounter aggressive police surveillance are at increased risk” It’s not that we commit more crimes but our communities are policed more, convicted more and I am guessing easier to target because we don’t have the financial or political power to fight this targeting.

I have seen NYC’s “stop and frisk” policy in action while living in Brooklyn to many a young man of color.  I have been profiled in stores while shopping and followed as well long before big data was in place. My community of color has already been profiled however the statement by the article sums up my concern with big data content management from a different side that my previous post; “New technologies will open up new opportunities for investigation and surveillance. The technological environment is rich with possibility but also danger.”

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I’ve been scouring over net neutrality articles and this is the one I choose to lead with (I’ll provide links to the others at the end of this post) because I am an artist/photojournalist/storyteller/journalist at my core and I cannot afford to lose ANYTHING.

Dismantling net neutral is another way for a few to get richer but more importantly it is another way for MORE to get less informed.  Think about this; the article was about break out sensation Issa Rae and her rise to stardom with her platforms “Insecure” and “The Misadventures of an Awkward Black Girl”.  Neither of which would have been on the radar for her to get a deal with HBO without “Awkward Black Girl” being seen by millions of her YouTube followers.  These new rules to take down Net Neutrality make all of that; her and others, go away.  It will also control which important news and reporting get through to mass audiences.  It will no longer be considered mass communication since the masses won’t have access to any and all information out there on the information superhighway.

I’ve stayed away from politics as much as I can but politics is trying to control the press along with artists.  It may not be the people who are missing out on investigative reporting, it may be those who can’t get a certain website or internet artist without having to pay a premium who takes this on and wins, but we are going to win!

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/21/technology/fcc-net-neutrality.html?_r=2

https://techcrunch.com/2017/11/30/fcc-commissioner-clyburn-takes-down-chairmans-net-neutrality-doom-and-gloom/

https://www.commondreams.org/news/2017/11/16/say-goodbye-local-media-trump-fcc-opens-corporate-merger-floodgates

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I am looking at this from the point of view of a photographer whose intellectual property has  been used without permission. The decline in journalism’s profits include a number of factors, which may or may not again be affected if this copyright law change goes into affect.

However this goes back to the current debate I am having with someone about whether content or the technology/platform is more important (I think I have that right, if not I am sure we will talk about it this week and I can update).  I always argue that if it weren't for the content, there would be no need for the digital platforms! Thus we should pay for the content that we consume.  To think otherwise is denying the creators of the content a right to be paid for their intellectual property.  There are a whole bunch of people getting paid in this digital, technological realm and the contend creators are not among them.

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Continuing with the photojournalism theme, this article is also inspirational and makes me want to get back out there shooting images and telling stories throughout the viewfinder.

It took me 3 tries to get into Eddie Adams or Barnstorm as some call it.  I was in the first digital class they had back in 2000. I used the $25,000+ Kodak digital camera that at the time could make amazing, noiseless images at ISO 6400        (why Kodak lost it’s mind about digital photography is a research paper/dissertation for the ages)! I got my feelings hurt by Micheal Williamson in a portfolio review that had onlookers asking me if I was okay after the smackdown (he graciously doesn’t remember it and even apologized if he did hurt my feelings many years later when I mentioned it to him at the Atlanta Photojournalism Workshop), I made lifelong friends as well and have been able to follow their careers and felt I had arrived in photojournalism.

Again, I know we are talking innovation, trends, technology, and the future but we still need the content to put into all of these platforms that audiences are logging on to. That will never change!

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Wow there are a lot of emotions for me in this piece because Mel was a teacher of mine at Empire State College and it was one of his classes that I met a great friend of mine, David Handschuh!  Mel showed me a new way to look through the viewfinder, which was with my heart and soul. He himself was a gentle soul who loved to offer advice and also listen to you.  I last saw Mel walking on West End Ave, maybe with his dog, I can't remember that part, but what I do remember is Mel asking me what I was working on! So I was saddened to hear of his passing last month through this article.

I have been struggling with returning to actively shooting images for a few months.  Being in a PhD program while as single mom raising two young sons is a lot and also transitions from producing images to teaching students how to produce such images has taken me from behind the lens.  For me this article reminds me of why I ever wanted to be a photographer and that regardless of the technology, you still have to have the heart and soul to know when to press that shutter.  There is no AI for that

Everything else I am learning about will undoubtedly make me a better photojournalist and storyteller.

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This article posted a little over a week before the article I tolled about in my last post may have some of the answers or paths to the questions that were brought up about where do we go from here?

Reis is talking about taking it “old school” in the form of the giant companies that have been created from startups themselves growing or from acquiring multiple startups to implementing the startup mentality in different departments within the behemoth.  Looks like a classic business cycle to me where eventually those working in the behemoth will need to branch out on their own and there we have the cycle going towards the small, entrepreneurial model.

The author notes that may top managers get bogged down in minutia of the big picture (stay with me) that don't allow them to look at the intimate aspects of innovation.  This has not changed regardless of technology, innovation, startups, the internet and so on because it is human nature in some respect.  That is where the cycle will repeat, we just don’t know how long it will take in this business cycle for that to happen.

The last post I was nervous and now this post I am again energized, excited and hopeful!

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YIKES!  Just like Professor Branagan says, if it’s already here it’s not a trend-it’s not the future, it’s the NOW.

This. Right. Here!

“Today’s big businesses are arthritic dinosaurs soon devoured by these nimble, fast-growing mammals with sharp teeth. Right?

Er, actually, no. That was last decade. We live in a new world now, and it favors the big, not the small. The pendulum has already begun to swing back. Big businesses and executives, rather than startups and entrepreneurs, will own the next decade; today’s graduates are much more likely to work for Mark Zuckerberg than follow in his footsteps.

The web boom of ~1997-2006 brought us Amazon, Facebook, Google, Salesforce, Airbnb, etc., because the internet was the new new thing, and a handful of kids in garages and dorm rooms could build a web site, raise a few million dollars, and scale to serve the whole world. The smartphone boom of ~2007-2016 brought us Uber, Lyft, Snap, WhatsApp, Instagram, Twitter, etc., because the same was true of smartphone apps.”

So now it’s like my elementary school teacher said in math...It’s time to put on our thinking caps. Because this is ominous and a bit depressing.  The author ends the article basically saying we can have hope that the cycle will return to the hustle days of the hot startups.  But this semester has taught me that we are the hopers, we have to be the ones that create what consumers are hoping for.  

This article aligns so well with my end of the semester paper that I’m going to stop here and you can continue following my thought pattern in the paper to be posted on Medium shortly.

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I did not read this publication bur had heard of some of its other brands and thought what a needed entity.  Regardless of how the trends are moving, there is a need for local news coverage.  From the comments on this article, people still want to see themselves, literally or figuratively in the news.  Now the question has been how to monetize it?  Once commenter asked “Isn't there another billionaire who can bring it back?”  

The author mentioned that “The move came one week after newsroom employees in New York voted to unionize” but doesn't elaborate on that more.  I believe that the statement is crucial and needs to be researched more.  A billionaire businessman who shuts down an journalism organization after employees decide to unionize deserves more than one sentence. This is not just a problem in journalism but with business in general.  I won’t go into the current political climate but I noted that because journalism, news and media are near and dear to my heart as you know and this could have been a business model that worked.

The author Robert Feder could have done a better job with this piece if he had done more research into the unionization statement especially since his “About” paragraph states he is a lifelong Chicagoan covering media.

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This is why we have to stand together as journalists! The short lived Disney ban could have been a dangerous precedent to journalism had others not stood up and with the LA Times.  This was clearly a power play and meant to quite a voice that was in opposition to Disney’s.

Long story short: Disney revoked prescreening passes to the LA Times because of an article written about the business practices Disney has with the city of Anaheim, pointing out in one instance that the parking garage that Disney leases for $1 per year collects at least $35 million in that same year!  There were many more examples of corporate welfare Disney gets from the city of Anaheim and the elected officials who are for and against the company.

Now you have a corporate giant, who is unhappy with professional, investigative reporting being done and they take action against that news organization.  Does this look anything like freedom of the press or is it oppression of the press.  The interesting this is that Disney thinks it’s so big and powerful that it doesn’t need the press (as other entities currently do), yet when the ripple effect hits them and more news organizations, journalists, entertainment figures and citizens join in, they begin to understand the power of the press and social media.

I felt a sense of pride that the NY Times would not attend the screenings until the the LA Times was allowed back.  We MUST protect our free press. We MUST protect our journalists. And I have said this all along, what would happen if one day, just one day, journalists walked out or decided not to go to the WH press room at all?  I believe the respect would return.

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I am so happy about this post because the subject matter is something special to me and I am happy for Michelle Ferrier, one of the editors, who has been inspirational and a mentor to me in my pursuit of my PhD and my research agenda! This certainly is a great time to have this book available to educators and students alike!

I was a freelance photographer in NYC trying to figure out a business model to survive before multimedia storytelling/journalism was beginning to buzz.  I took a job at a university in the south and created a multimedia storytelling curriculum for the department and I pitched a course titled “The Business of Freelancing and Entrepreneurial Journalism” because I knew the industry was changing, that most graduates would not find a staff job like I used to have and because I could help them from making the same mistakes.  At the same time CUNY had just started their own entrepreneurial journalism graduate degree program.  I tried to tell the director this was going to be a “thing” but I was only allowed to teach the class between semesters twice.

Today I am fortunate to be at the Newhouse School where we have the Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship and to have this resource as I go forward with my research agenda and ultimately out into the academic world to teach and train young media entrepreneurs!

I wish Michelle Ferrier @mediaghosts all the best and look forward to working with her in the future!  Check out her Troll Busters site @yoursosteam as well.

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This article takes content management into the political realm.  The companies listed, Facebook, Google and Twitter already use AI to manage their content.  Used complain about how often Facebook’s algorithms change or how the company dictates what content they will get.  So we have some AI in place but does that mean it needs to be regulated?  With every new invention there comes the intention and then the actual use of it.  Perhaps the creators of the algorithms did not know how it would target one piece of content and then overlook the other?  Perhaps the companies are working on it and have not come up with a solution?  Perhaps this is just the way it is going to be?

Until that time, we can be our own intelligence with content management.  I think for a long time we were so intrigued and infatuated with this technology that we did give up our rights to think for ourselves and turned it over to these sites.  Now that we, or someone we know or someone we see gets harassed or blocked unfairly, we start to return to our own intelligence.  

As I creep into being a techno-optimist as Professor Sean Branagan says, I believe we must still use our own intelligence to manage the content that we see and use until AI and the algorithms get better at it, which they may never get there all the way so we must stay self intelligent!

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I am new to CMS since I am taking my first class on in this semester.  My introduction was a crash landing into CMS and I am still recovering.  The old school me was rolling my eyes and sighing with discomfort but as I actually started to get it, I see how useful CMS is in journalism and content management, particularly at the story conception level.  I first thought it was cheating but now I understand that this is really a new landscape and this is how it is done now.

This article is talking about AI doing the content management for all of the content that has been already created and stored in the cloud in order to utilize it and get value/information/knowledge from that?  It is a huge undertaking especially since the article states that there are approximately 30 billion files to manage and he noted that a majority of them consist of images!  

So I have two thoughts.  First, I think this is a great way to use existing information that may have been missed or put aside for another time. As a photographer, I often think about “the ones that got away”, those images that were great but weren't right for the assignment or project that I was working on in the moment.  What can we do or learn with those?  Second, how can AI be used to examine that existing information and allow us to build on that knowledge to create something even better than what was in the existing content?

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Different Direction

I was using this blog as a way to vent about what I wanted to happen and how I wanted things to be.  But over the course of this semester, I have learned from two different professors, Steve Masiclat and Sean Branagan, that I actually want things to go back to the way they were (Masiclat) and that I am not feeling this technology stuff (Branagan).  Neither is going to get me a seat at the tech table or a job teaching what I love; journalism with an emphasis on visual storytelling!

Now I am moving in a different direction!  This entire semester I have saved articles on tech stuff but have just been so averse to reading them because of the two previously stated reasons!  I was in denial and that’s a dangerous place to be right now in terms of media, journalism and technology.

I am grateful that both of these professors gave me this wake up call so I can get out of my own way, take a different direction and get to moving along the technology super highway!