In the recent Reuters report, “What’s Happening to Our News,” an “investigation into the likely impact of the digital revolution on the economics of news publishing in the U.K.,” author Andrew Currah explores the situation facing U.K. publishers. He offers three broad suggestions for moving forward: kitemarks, public support and digital literacy education.
Owen Amos explained recently in the U.K. Press Gazette that a digital kitemark (somewhat similar to the digital watermark concept), would “differentiate quality journalism from the noise of the Web. …[It] could be visual and electronic — for example, via embedded metadata.”
Currah’s adaptation of the kitemark idea seems to have stirred up some fuss.
In the first of a series of e-mail exchanges, I asked Currah how kitemarks might make a difference in how people consume newspapers — and how they could work in practice.
Here are his edited responses:
Currah: Yes, the kitemark idea has triggered quite a response. … Unfortunately, as the discussion online suggests, the term has implied to many a top-down, centralized system of certification that would lead to some form of “apartheid” between bloggers and journalists.
That was certainly not our intended message. The [Reuters] report simply wanted to foreground the idea of digital labeling as a means of improving transparency in online news coverage.
All we meant by a kitemark was a symbol (expressed visually, and electronically as metadata) to convey to audiences, bloggers, journalists and others that a piece of news content had been intelligently labeled with relevant information and that it is open to derivative checking or use … similar in a sense to the Creative Commons “mark” that travels with media content across the Web.
Our report only touched upon this project of labeling, which the Media Standards Trust is busy working on. For a more detailed discussion, see Martin Moore’s post or read NewsCredit’s related efforts.
So, in summary, we are in favor of an open-source, voluntary, bottom-up system of tagging — NOT an archaic, top-down system of certification dividing amateurs and professionals. We did not envision participation in such an initiative as a precursor to public funding. However, intelligent labeling and linking to external sites could, for example, be far more developed at the BBC.
In terms of value, intelligently labeling the news might enable all sorts of valuable derivative uses, such as helping users filter content by criteria or triangulate stories.
It might also help to avoid the failures of purely algorithmic search approaches to news, such as the fiasco surrounding the publication of an outdated United Airlines story on Google News last August. That was triggered, in part, due to the lack of any embedded metadata about the story’s publication date.
Is this similar to ideas being explored by Sir Tim Berners-Lee in his Knight-funded project?
Currah: Yes, absolutely. This is something we only briefly touch upon in the report. We’re hoping to spend more time looking at this approach in follow-up research. I think the initiative being developed by Tim Berners-Lee and the Media Standards Trust has a great chance of improving transparency — especially when tagging and labeling technologies are seamlessly integrated into newsroom work-flow.
I can see how something around metadata could help users find original journalism, but how do you see this kitemark keeping journalism alive in a business sense?
Currah: Whether this would realistically boost the economics of news is difficult to answer. But on the basis of our research, it seems that a more transparent, systematic way of tagging the news could help publishers in a variety of ways.
For example, developing a more comprehensive network of tags that connect stories, themes and content theoretically might keep people on a site longer — in turn, strengthening ad revenues. It might also perpetuate the value and profile of a story long after it was published.
Metadata is also the key to techniques such as search engine optimization, social media marketing and the like — all of which are about attracting more attention around the content for longer. It would also provide a system for displaying stories in new formats, such as digital maps.
When or whether all of this will translate into enough ad revenues to keep publishers afloat is an open question. Investing in the systems and training to make this archival linking possible is another hurdle.
An alternative approach might be to buck the trend toward free by introducing new forms of online paid subscription to provide access to a premium, searchable and fully digitized archive of all back content. Metadata would also be a key step in that direction.
Further reading: The Freeman’s Journal has an excellent critical overview of the Reuters report, with thoughts from Currah in the comments.
