The Copenhagen Project

JPG Magazine is a mix between a photo sharing site and a rating service that in effect is a user edited photo magazine. Bi-monthly the editors sets up different themes after which users contribute and rate each other’s photos.

In the end, the highest rated photos are selected for the print magazine, which is then available at newsstands and by subscription.

Voting isn’t completely the final basis of the print magazine as editors still have the last word, but in general they seem to follow the voting pretty closely (yes, I subscribe). JPG Magazine is therefore an interesting blend between online and print.

The analysis of the print magazine Monocle looks like this:

This is the first posts in a series of short media analyses, which will illustrate our model on a range of different media types.

Here is the structural analysis of Jezebel.

Citizen journalism and user involvement is just two buzz words from the last five years. Perhaps our media model can help us look through these concepts and see what unexplored possibilities there’s yet to try out - we’re building the model not to make boring analyses, but to help us become creative :)

Two examples of user involvement

OhMyNews, USA Today and The New York Times share the common theme of being oriented toward society and politics. They thereby take on the same role/identity as most newspapers have done throughout their existence. The three sites are structurally highly similar, but the differences are interesting.

All three are run as a business. They all feature original content, are all traditionally prioritized and edited centrally by humans - with USA Today having some mixed features. All three take advantage of the Internet and update their sites continuously. Besides from the continuous update, The New York Times online is more or less a straight copy of the paper version, both in terms of structure and presentation.

The main feature of OhMyNews is of course the user contributed writings, a concept that has received a lot of hype through the years. Our model is open for users “providing” the object while they haven’t got the possibility to also edit and prioritize. In the case of OhMyNews, the users doesn’t edit - it is editors who select and prioritize the content.

Looking at USA Today the situation is opposite - here the editors provide the objects while users can vote (”recommend”) on items. The prioritization is not completely user-based, as an algorithm seems to blend votes with how long time the content has been online. Editors also seem to influence the list, but the concept of opening the site for user editing as opposed to user contribution is new and interesting.

In my personal opinion, user editing should be much more widely considered where appropriate. Currently this feature is mostly seen at sites as social bookmarking services and weblogs, where the users literally edits the Internet. WikiNews is another news site that features both user contributed articles and user editing.

The real value of user contribution might not be content but knowledge about content

Understandably The New York Times really can’t open up for much user contribution of content and editing - their readers expect a high quality product they can trust. But what could be interesting and actually might work very well in terms of user contribution, was if The New York Times opened up for user contributed context in e.g. a Digg-like system connected to each article separately.

It would be both useful and engaging if readers alongside each article could contribute links to background information, different perspectives, maps, blog posts, Wikipedia entries etc. With many million readers a day, each article at The New York Times would probably quickly be “tagged” with a lot of interesting perspectives, and users voting on these links to context would ensure that the most interesting background information was featured first.

Currently context at most news sites, including The New York Times, is limited to earlier articles from the same media. This is probably due to the factor of news sites not wishing to direct readers to other sites and thereby loosing out on advertising revenue, but I guess the biggest factor is the time it takes to find really good context. Journalists simply haven’t got the time to digg through search engines and sort through all the relevant material and subsequently decide what to feature alongside the article itself.

While journalists in most cases are the first in the know and has the best skills to convey information, millions of users together have a much better overview of background information already available than a single journalist does. Giving the users the option to contribute valuable background information would be like giving them the job they are best at, and it would add a whole new explorative dimension to news, especially if it is combined with highly evolved conversation tools, as e.g. Digg’s commenting-system.

Citizens journalism is hard to implement and it’s real value is still doubtful. It would be an interesting experiment to let journalists do what they are best at, while tapping into the real useful resources that users collectively hold: A great overview and a lot of knowledge about what valuable content there’s out there.

Whereas Google News and Techmeme shared the fundamental characteristic of beeing edited by an algorithm, Boing Boing and MetaFilter shares the wide definition of beeing weblogs. But how well does the definition of a weblog hold up when we apply our model to the sites?

As can be seen from the above table, there are two fundamentally differences between the two sites. First of all, Boing Boing is edited by a small number of editors, whereas MetaFilter is edited by anyone who bothers to participate. That’s a pretty huge difference in terms of site dynamics. Secondly, but closely related to the first one, not only does users at MetaFilter edit the site, they also provide the original content.

In that way MetaFilter’s media type is the most open that our model can represent – everything is decided by users, including layout changes, banning of trolls, content etc. Boing Boing’s media type on the other hand shares the common characteristic of medias before the Internet age, as there is an editorial board that produces a final product.

Why, then, does Boing Boing and MetaFilter still feel very much alike? First of all it’s in the presentation of information. The content at both sites isn’t prioritized, whereas content in a traditional media type - e.g. The New York Times – is. And then there’s the social aspects. Both Boing Boing and MetaFilter allows social interaction around their content. So if we look at the aspects of presentation and social interaction, Boing Boing and MetaFilter is identical.

But if we look at the editorial structures, we see that Boing Boing and MetaFilter is fundamentally different. Interestingly we can also see that the editorial structures of Boing Boing and The New York Times are identical. They are both based on a central editorial board that produces the content and edits it into a final product.

Comparing MetaFilter and The New York Times we see that they are very different from each other, whereas Boing Boing is kind of “in the middle”.

If the New York Times decided to omit it’s prioritized frontpage and allow commenting, their media type would be the same as Boing Boing’s - it would be a standard weblog. If it wanted to be as MetaFilter they would have to go much further than that and fire all it’s journalists and editors and give the users the power. I’m not in any way saying that The New York Times should do any of this. I’m just suggesting that editorial changes and differences according to our model might be more fundamental than those regarding presentation.

If we regard Boing Boing as a standard weblog, how much of a weblog is MetaFilter and The New York Times then? In terms of social interaction, MetaFilter is a weblog whereas The New York Times isn’t. But if we look at the editorial structures, we see that The New York Times is more of an weblog than MetaFilter is.

Conclusion: A weblog isn’t just a weblog, and a newspaper site isn’t just a newspaper site. It’s much more complex than that.