journalism

On Wednesday, NPR ran a story on the use of "performance management" as a means of teacher evaluation in the Chicago school system.

From the NPR story:

Some urban school systems are turning to the tough tactics businesses and law enforcement use to improve employee performance. The sometimes-contentious approach, known as performance management, has yielded promising results in Houston, New York and some other districts. In Chicago, it's forcing city educators to embrace a cultural revolution in how they go about their work.

And:

Top district officials argue that performance management offers principals a way to tackle tough educational problems that seem insurmountable. And they point to other districts, like Houston, where these methods are working.

The superintendent there, Terry Grier, credits performance management with forcing his principals to use data to pressure their worst teachers to get better or get out.

Unfortunately, Houston ISD did not receive accreditation due to a developing cheating scandal. If a success story fails to receive accreditation, what does failure look like?

How can anyone make the claim that performance review is working in Houston when Houston ISD has yet to receive accreditation due to concerns of widespread cheating? And it's not like Houston is any stranger to allegations of falsifying data under pressure of a top-down mandate.

More importantly, the NPR story ran on March 10th. The news of Houston ISD not receiving accreditation was published on March 5th. Why didn't this get caught as part of routine fact-checking?

If this detail was missed, what other details were overlooked or ignored in pursuit of the narrative that the only thing wrong with schools is those darn teachers, and all that's needed is some common-sense know how from the business world?

I don't know what's more stunning: the lack of fact-checking in a piece put out by a respected, credible national news outlet, or the fact that as the world's economy is still teetering due to widespread malfeasance in the corporate world, we are still trumpeting increased corporatism as the "solution" to our education "problem."

I may be naive, but I believe that we will get a better understanding of how to improve our educational system with a more accurate depiction of the actual problems. Getting basic facts straight is a good place to start.

Over at TechCrunch, Paul Carr is taking an individual to task for her role in broadcasting information about the Fort Hood shootings. At the outset, I agree with a central point of Carr's argument: a person at the scene of a tragedy has an obligation to do what they can to make the situation better. Our first obligation is to the people in the world around us.

And with that said, I don't know enough about the specifics of her situation to render anything that approaches judgment. Also, the twitter account in question has been locked, so I have not been able to read the accounts Carr references. So, my only source of this information is secondhand, via Carr's post.

However, Carr states:

"And yet, the first news and analysis out of the base didn’t come from the experts. Nor did it come from the 24-hour news media, or even from dedicated military blogs – but rather from the Twitter account of one Tearah Moore, a soldier from Linden, Michigan who is based at Fort Hood, having recently returned from Iraq."

While the analysis that comes from mainstream media outlets (aka, the people who used to be known as professional journalists) often resembles something as sloppy as a twitter stream, the two should not be confused. A twitter stream is raw, unverified information, where we assume (often erroneously) that "analysis" coming from "professionals" has undergone more thorough vetting. This is a failing of traditional media, and while it is convenient to lay this at the blame of social media, this blame is misplaced. Initial accounts will by nature be inaccurate. With complex events, an accurate accounting can only be created through synthesizing multiple perspectives of the event. You just won't get this from a single source. Carr's point also begs the question as to why the mainstream media would elevate hearsay into news.

I will also admit a certain amount of skepticism about cautionary tales on social media coming from a writer on Techcrunch, which has breathlessly celebrated "news" of social media startups for more years than I care to remember.

In an earlier article on Techcrunch, Carr describes his experience at an invite-only event put on by MySpace. In this earlier post, he takes his experience (a bunch of people at a social media event) and generalizes it to the world at large. His argument is that social media has converted the general population into voyeurs and narcissists. Just for the record, many of us who have the excellent fortune to work in/with technology outside the Hype/Bullshit Bubble that envelops parts of Silicon Valley can actually use social media when we want to, without an obsessive need to tweet every detail. We can both talk and live; experiences without an audience are just as significant.

Case in point (and this is anecdotal, so take it for what it's worth): last week, the house across the street from mine experienced a fire. The inhabitant of the house -- an elderly woman -- was saved by a neighbor who kicked in the back door and pulled her to safety. His wife called 911. No one died, the house was saved, and no one tweeted about it. To the world of social media, this event never happened. To those of us in the neighborhood, our neighbor is a hero.

And that's exactly the point. Unless something gets dropped on Twitter (or any other social media app), it remains below the radar of social media, and therefore outside of the conversation within social media. Social media can only concern itself with what is visible within the world of social media -- this is normal, as you can't see what you can't see (duh). But the nearly unforgivable conceit of many people who write about social media is that human nature can be defined by what you see on social media. I don't know whether this is cluelessness, arrogance, lack of life experience, or just plain oversight, but the reality is that much of life transpires beyond the view of social media. Video clips that go viral offer us a deep, often terrifying glimpse of corners of human nature that are frequently left unexplored, but these deep glimpses should not be confused with balanced, broad insights. Good social media resembles, more than anything, a great piece of microfiction: a snapshot that encapsulates a truth about a larger whole, told from an individual viewpoint.

At the risk of stating the obvious, details coming from social media should be regarded as suspect, just as any unverified information coming from a single source should be regarded as suspect. To blame this on social media, however, misses the larger point: people who are paid to report the news should verify what they report, or indicate how reliable(or unreliable) it is. Be transparent. Be honest. And if you happen to be at a situation where you can help, don't video the event rather than make it better.

But that's also just common sense. Before social media, these were the types of people who ran away from an emergency without doing anything. Now, ironically, they broadcast their inactivity, often using one of the many social media startups celebrated on the pages of Techcrunch.

PS: To find out about the latest and greatest mobile hardware, just browse Techcrunch's mobile section: http://www.mobilecrunch.com Then, in a few months, they can complain about how you use the technology they cover.

Over the last weekend, we had the opportunity to install and test Managing News, a Knight Foundation funded project built by Development Seed. Managing News will be released later this week; we were fortunate enough to get an early preview.

Brief Overview

Managing News is an install profile built on Drupal. All of the components used in Managing News are available for free under open source licenses.

In short: it is free to obtain, and it installs like any other Drupal site. For the visual and auditory learners, this video -- produced by Development Seed -- provides an overview of the site.

Managing News contains three sections: Feeds, Search, and Channels.

Each of these sections is covered in more detail below.

Digging In: Adding Feeds

At a first glance, some people might confuse Managing News for a feed reader. This misconception is understandable, as the first step in using Managing News involves adding feeds to bring in content. This process is straightforward: click the "Add Feed" link, as shown below.

Once feeds have been added, information from these feeds will be imported into the site. As data begins flowing through the site, more of the features of Managing News can be used. Every section of the site (Feeds, Search, and Channels) contains consistent display options:

1. Title, with summary, organized chronologically;
2. List format, 1-2 line summary, organized chronologically;
3. Visual representation on a map.

These options allow people to navigate the news in the way that best suits their need. Additionally, as people read through stories, they can share posts that they see by clicking the "Share" icon, as shown below.

When content is shared, the path to the original article is included as the link, and the url is automatically shortened. The included link points back to the original place where the article was posted, so the original source receives credit -- and the resulting web traffic -- for their post.

The site streamlines the process of sharing content to Twitter, Facebook, and via email.

Two Notes Before Moving On

Two additional notes before we move on:

Note 1: this post covers one one way of bringing data into the site -- via RSS feeds. However, content can be brought into the site in a range of other ways, including via CSV import. Some of these additional options are covered later in this post.

Note 2: mapping works out of the box. As posts come into the site, geographic information is automatically extracted. This allows posts to be displayed against a map to highlight relevance to a specific region. To emphasize: this mapping functionality just works, with no additional configuration required. Moreover, it has been designed to be customized and extended as needed, but more on that later.

Search

Once feeds have been brought into the site, information can be sorted and discovered via text-based search. Searches can be saved; this way, if there is a specific type of information that needs to be highlighted or discovered from the incoming information, the saved search can help make this happen automatically.

Saved searches also generate RSS feeds, so people can subscribe to these results.

Channels

Channels provide an additional way to vet, display, and redistribute content. Channels can be created by site members; once a channel has been created, people can tag individual articles to be published in a channel. Like saved searches, channels generate an RSS feed, so people can subscribe to a channel.

Channels are created from the Channels page, or when viewing the search results.

To add a post into a channel, select the active channel, and then click the icon next to the post.

Taking a Step Back

The natural flow of information within the site -- from all feeds, to saved searches within these feeds, to channels that group and recontextualize individual items according to an arbitrary theme -- helps illustrate how the site can be used in different ways by different people within the same organization. The Feeds page functions much like the home page of a newspaper, magazine, or blog: it shows you all of the latest news. For people who are more focused in what they are looking for, the Search page allows them to carve through the content by searches. Finally, for people looking to browse through content on limited time, the Channels provide information that has been vetted/singled out as having greater value.

And this is where the real value of Managing News begins to become clearer: with most products, you can break down the value of the product in an answer to one simple question: what does it do? With Managing News, the breakdown is not as simple, as it does different things for different people at different times. Moreover, these general categories (feeds, searches, and channels) can be used for different things; as one of many possible examples, a local paper could use a channel within Managing News as a tipline; people could email tips into the paper, they could be imported into Managing News via Mailhandler, and the more promising leads could be highlighted in the Tipline channel. A similar process could be used to sort through hashtag-based coverage of breaking stories via Twitter or other social media channels: posts with the hashtag could be imported, and then a selected number of these posts can be republished in a channel -- and, as we discussed earlier, the channel would have its own RSS feed, making the channel a cleaner version with a better signal to noise ratio than the original disparate sources.

A Product and a Platform

In its current form, Managing News provides powerful functionality. The standalone product will allow many organizations to extend their online presence with little to no additional expense. This is a tool that levels the playing field by giving smaller organizations access to tools previously reserved for bigger, richer organizations -- however, it will likely be adopted and extended by various types of organizations because it is both easy to install and easy to extend.

It's very easy to see how an application like EveryBlock could be built on top of Managing News -- with the caveat that Managing News could be developed to simultaneously support the hyperlocal, the regional, and the national. Using building permits as an example of just one of the nearly countless potential data points, a site like Managing News could collect building permit info for any city that made that info publicly available in a readable format. Then, that information could be displayed on a block by block basis within a city (like Everyblock currently does) or it could be used as the basis for comparing building activity across regions, across time, or against other data points that have been imported into the site. The geotagging would need to be modified from the default configuration, but the system has been build to support these types of customizations.

Managing News could also be used to give organizations an internal version of something like Publish2. Where it really starts to get fun, though, is that Managing News-based services wouldn't need to compete with an application like Publish2, they could actually work alongside it in a mutually supportive way. An organization could have their internal system based on Managing News, and then create a publicly accessible channel that would connect up to Publish2 by extending the "Share" feature described earlier in this post.

For our part, Managing News provides us some great opportunities for our own Knight-funded work. The aggregation-collection-republishing workflows can be leveraged as part of our platform, and the fact that Managing News exists allows us to focus in on other aspects of development, such as harvesting data from handheld devices. This collaboration highlights another advantage to developing these tools within an open source ecosystem: in the process of doing our work, we will contribute both code and documentation back into Managing News. The existence of Managing News will improve the quality of our work, and in turn, our work will filter back into Managing News.

Conclusions

Managing News gives organizations a powerful, flexible tool to use as they work online. The functionality of the site is well defined, and cleanly focused. Moreover, the design of the site keeps things looking simple, when there is some fairly complex data management occurring. The official release will be announced later this week; watch the Development Seed blog for the announcement.

Wolfram Alpha was released recently, and by all accounts it's a great tool. Groklaw breaks down the terms of service of Wolfram Alpha, and it's a good read for those interested in both search and journalism. The short version: WA claims copyright over search results, and requires attribution. Failure to attribute WA as a source could possibly be "academic plagiarism or a violation of copyright law." The full Terms of Service are worth a read; the above quotation is pulled from the Attribution and Licensing section.

This reminds me of the efforts by some news outlets to control how people link to content. Wolfram Alpha claims to be "an authoritative source of information," and that the process of "gather(ing), compar(ing), contrast(ing), and confirm(ing) data from multiple external sources" gives it copyright over its responses to questions." (from WA Terms of Service -- Attribution and Licensing).

Given that some WA results will likely use data pulled from news outlets and other copyrighted sources, it will be interesting to see where this leads.