Case study #1: Metadata
Mark Schneider, University of British Columbia
Everything has a history. Every story has a pedigree. Our effort was to push
it to the extreme to see what it looks like.
Mark Schneider's enthusiasm for the capacity of technology to assist in "rehabilitating" the news is infectious.
"I see nothing but opportunities," he says, eagerly describing some of his many research interests.
But his optimism for the news industry wasn't always so steadfast.
The visiting lecturer in the master of journalism program at the University of British Columbia in 2005-06 has a long career as a broadcast journalist and producer at CBC and CTV. He also has extensive experience as a new media editor.
Over the course of his career, he says he became increasing disillusioned over newsroom practices for verifying information.
"It's fair to say that, as a journalist, I began to get very, very discouraged by the process that I had seen develop over my career."
As an editor, he says he often questioned material from other news providers that crossed his desk. He says he frequently couldn't confirm the veracity of the people interviewed for a story. And he had no way of confirming facts with the story's original author. Still, he felt obliged to approve such information on a regular basis.
"There was no way of checking it out," he says. "There was this whole sense of delegated trust that just because another news organization has reported it you can use it without question. It's so un-journalistic."
Reflections on this experience brought him this past year to work with students on a way to improve the quality and transparency of information that appears on the web.
He is intrigued by the capacity of authors to use emerging technologies to describe online content so that news consumers can better see what it is and where it came from. The process is called tagging information with metadata -- data about data -- to enable users to better see linkages among pieces of information. Schneider says the poor connection of information in most current news hinders audiences from gaining a full understanding of a story's origins and its relation to others.
"In this day and age where news seems so disconnected from any kind of historical perspective, everything seems new and surprising and baffling," he says.
Schneider's attempt to improve the situation was to require his students to put "food labels" on their stories describing the "ingredients" they used. It was an effort to create what he dubbed "100% free-range organic news" on the school's student-produced news site, the Thunderbird.
As a starting point, he required students to declare their information sources. If they had referenced any online news releases they had to provide a link to the text of those documents. They had to keep a faithful list of every online search they had conducted. Further, they had to declare whether they had negotiated any aspect of the news gathering process -- for example, whether they had interviewed people and agreed to withhold their names from publication, or whether they had received embargoed material. He also required them to declare their personal biases.
With help from technical assistants he placed fields for the ingredients list inside the publication's content management system so students could tag their stories as they authored them. He says the list, which appeared alongside every published story, forced students to consider the basic premises of their journalism.
However, he says it wasn't an easy sell.
"I was a constant nag on my students at this," he says. "I can't say it was a pretty process. A lot of the students thought, especially in terms the tagging exercise, that it was adding an unnecessary burden of work. "
Still, he says, many students adopted it with gusto. And he adds quickly that the learning value of the exercise, coupled with a lofty aspiration to "rehabilitate the news and recover the trust of news consumers," was worth every minute.
"I guess the conceit is that if the journalist will actually share the process, including the inadequacies of the journalism and the contradictions and some of the difficulties of the journalism, then that itself would indicate a superior kind of journalism."
He describes the exercise as a part of a broader effort in the academic community to help authors label information so readers can distinguish quality information from mediocre information online. He says a popular example of the possibilities can be found on Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia, which allows readers to identify an author and track revisions to an article.
He envisions a system in which a content management system captures much of the information as a reporter collects and enters it.
"A lot of it could be done very elegantly if it was integrated into the news process. I mean, I don't know a journalist today who doesn't use Google or any kind of a database. It would be nice if you had a protocol that automatically stored everything you had done and stored it into a RSS (headline syndication) feed or a structured database that chugged along and followed you like a valet, keeping track of what you had done."
This process of applying meta-data to journalistic practices, he says, is still in its infancy.
"I know of no other news organization that is doing this, with the exception of the NewsML project that is being largely developed by Reuters in Europe that is to create an XML tagging system for news products," he says.
He adds that the exercise this year was highly experimental and, in many ways, impractical. He says its primary purpose was to examine the possibilities for future news production and to encourage students to think about their stories as a process, not just an end product.
"Everything has a history. Every story has a pedigree. Our effort was to push it to the extreme to see what it looks like."
In the end, he says, the effort could ultimately help create a stronger community for news.
"I see this as a huge issue of trust. That's the main purpose of all of this -- developing a trust relationship between journalist and news consumer."