October 2012 – Anna Wahrman

Just say no to reading comments

October 25, 2012 Anna Wahrman Leave a comment

A few choice quotes from Salon’s Mary Elizabeth Williams about why you should never read the comments on your own pieces — or ever, really. Needless to say, I agree.

I used to believe that as an online writer, I had an obligation to read the comments. I thought that it was important from a fact-checking perspective, that it somehow would help me grow as a writer. What I’ve learned is that if there’s something wrong or important or even, sometimes, good about a story, someone will let you know.

I want it to be better. But it’s just not.

[Not reading comments has] calmed the negative chatter in my head and it’s made my experience of the Internet a whole lot healthier. I highly recommend it.

Talk about (as I often do) the differences between print and online! This is one of the bigger ones, in terms of psychic drain if nothing else. I don’t know how it got this bad, but it did. Perhaps it’s a reflection of the general (lack of) discourse in the public and political arenas nowadays. Perhaps the technology has made it permissible. Perhaps I’m just sensitive. In any case, my self-protective instincts, like Williams’s, just make me want to disengage completely.

I feel about Internet comments roughly the same way I’ve started to feel about television news, with its know-nothing talking heads and lowest-common-denominator coverage made for an attention span–less public that’s apparently eager to share their opinions (about which I care very little). They’re both icky and make me feel bad, angry and frustrated.

Two recent and related stories about others who are taking the opposite stance from the “just walk away” model and are actively trying to make the Internet better:

Good luck to them — to us all.

Junk at scale vs. quality in proportion

October 12, 2012 Anna Wahrman Leave a comment

SF Weekly recently published an in-depth look at the Bleacher Report, a sports-centric site whose content is populated almost entirely by its readers. As the article notes, it “[tapped] the oceanic labor pool of thousands of unpaid sports fanatics typing on thousands of keyboards.” The site is user-generated content taken to its logical extreme, for good and bad. The good being the scale of coverage; the bad, the poorly written content.

But now it’s gone pro, hired real writers and editors, and been polished up — and the “lowest-common-denominator crap,” editor King Kaufman says, has been gussied up. The site is now owned by Turner Broadcasting, which snapped it up this summer for a couple hundred mil. Not bad for a site that was built on the backs on unpaid superfans.

I’m not interested in the Bleacher Report per se, but I am interested in the idea that nowadays, crap at scale matters less than quality in proportion, because it’s part of a larger trend sparked by disparate forces in the evolution of the Internet. They’ve come together to wipe away a short-lived business model that called for garbage content that ranked well in search but left the user unfulfilled. This model’s most prominent proponent was Demand Media (and its sites, among which are eHow and Livestrong), but certainly the Bleacher Report qualifies too.

The article does a good job explaining how Bleacher Report (and Demand) initially found so much success — basically, by cheating search engines:

Reverse-engineering content to fit a pre-written headline is a Bleacher Report staple. Methodically crafting a data-driven, SEO-friendly headline and then filling in whatever words justify it has been a smashing success.

The piece also touches on the larger context of the shift from what it calls “legacy media” to the current landscape:

After denigrating and downplaying the influence of the Internet for decades, many legacy media outlets now find themselves outmaneuvered by defter and web-savvier entities like Bleacher Report, a young company engineered to conquer the Internet. In the days of yore, professional media outlets enjoyed a monopoly on information. Trained editors and writers served as gatekeepers deciding what stories people would read, and the system thrived on massive influxes of advertising dollars. That era has gone, and the Internet has flipped the script. In one sense, readers have never had it so good — the glut of material on the web translates into more access to great writing than any prior era. The trick is sifting through the crap to find it. Most mainstream media outlets are unable or unwilling to compete with a site like Bleacher Report, which floods the web with inexpensive user-generated content. They continue to wither while Bleacher Report amasses readers and advertisers alike.

But that being the case, we’re now entering a brand-new era, one that will attempt to combine the scale and optimization of the new guys with the polish of the old. And we’re seeing the end of the SEO-engineered-dreck model for three reasons:

1. The rise of social media as currency
2. Google’s Panda algorithm change
3. Advertiser interest

1. The rise of social media as currency
Used to be, back in the aughts, when you were looking for (for example) a podiatrist, you’d Google “podiatrist 10017.” You’d get pages and pages of results; you’d sift through them and cross-reference them to your insurance provider, then go to the doctor, discover he had a terrible bedside manner, and decide you’d rather keep your darn ingrown toenail. Nowadays, your first move would probably be to ask your friends on Facebook or Twitter, “Anyone in NYC have a recommendation for a good podiatrist who takes Blue Cross?” And you’d get a curated response from a dependable source (or even a few of them).

Plainly, social media users endorse people, products and articles that are meaningful. You’d never tweet, “Great analysis of how to treat an ingrown toenail on eHow” (at least not unironically). But you might recommend an article from Fast Company on the latest from ZocDoc.

There will always be a place for search — it’s one of the main entryways into any news or information site, and that’s not going to change anytime soon — but good quality content from a trustworthy source is becoming increasingly valuable again.

2. Google’s Panda algorithm change
In early 2011, Google changed its algorithm in an update it called Panda. This meant that, broadly speaking, better content ranked higher in Google’s results. Its advice to publishers regarding SEO was basically, “Create good content and we’ll find it.”

No longer could Demand Media’s and Bleacher Report’s search-engine-spamming formula win them page views. In fact, Demand Media completely retooled itself in response, saying that “some user-generated content will be removed from eHow, while other content will run through an editing and fact-checking process before being re-posted.”

In other words, quality started to matter to users, who let Google know it, and Google responded accordingly. The result was a sea change from how it had been done, leading to a completely new business model for Demand and its ilk.

3. Advertiser interest
Advertisers have long shunned poor quality content. From the beginning, they almost never wanted placements on comment pages, which can feature all-caps rants, political extremism at its worst and altogether unsavory sentiments (which is why many news sites feature comments separately — you thought that tab or link to comments on a separate page was a UX choice? Hardly). The SF Weekly article quotes Bleacher Report’s Kaufman, who says of its transformation to better quality stuff, “This was not a decision made by the CEO, who got tired of his friends saying at parties, ‘Boy, Bleacher Report is terrible.’ Bleacher Report reached a point where it couldn’t make the next level of deal, where whatever company says ‘We’re not putting our logo next to yours because you’re publishing crap.’ Okay, that’s the market speaking.”

So it is. A longer story for another time, but neither advertisers nor publishers are getting a lot of bang out of banner ads, CPMs and click-through rates. Increasingly, the least you can do to appeal to the market, if you’re a publisher, is create good content. How to do it without breaking your budget and while devising new technologies, maintaining your legacy product and operations, and appealing to readers…well, if I knew the answer to that, I’d be a rich woman.

Meantime, even though “critics from traditional journalistic outlets continue to knock Bleacher Report as a dystopian wasteland where increasingly attention-challenged readers slog through troughs of half-cooked word-gruel, inexpertly mixed by novice chefs,” they’re making money like you wouldn’t believe. They don’t break stories, they own them (the same is true of the Huffington Post).

Time for the “legacy” to embrace the future.

My Barbra obsession, then and always

October 10, 2012 Anna Wahrman Leave a comment

In honor of the Barbra Streisand “Back to Brooklyn” concert tonight (and the preshow fans’ dinner, and the postshow fans’ drinks outing…), I’m posting my recent contribution to Alison Waldman‘s new book, Barbra Memories. She used my essay as one of dozens included in the book (click for full size).

It is posted below in its original form.

I was 10 when I saw Yentl on a rollaway VHS player in Sunday school at my synagogue in Toledo, Ohio.

Her voice was so pretty, she was so strong, and she was Jewish, just like me! Thus began my raging, decades-long obsession with Barbra Streisand.

In short order, my dad sought out 12-inch records for me from the local library and garage sales: Funny Girl (the movie), The Barbra Streisand Album and My Name Is Barbra. I was as entranced by her voice as I was by the pictures of her on the covers. Though I had fallen for her in Yentl, it was those early albums that cemented the fascination. Her voice was like no other I’d heard before: gorgeous, playful, resonant, full of personality. I’m quite certain I didn’t understand the ennui of “Cry Me a River” or the irony of her version of “Happy Days Are Here Again.” I’m sure I didn’t know the heartbreak of “My Man.” All I knew was that her voice — brassy, belty, zippy — spoke to me on a level I’d never experienced before. It was like she was singing to me. I was transfixed. I was moved. I was obsessed.

I continued the pursuit. When I was 13 I checked out the biography Streisand: The Woman and the Legend from the Wood County Library and read it passionately. The book portrayed her as bold and brash, confident and a little weird (boldly dropping the extra A?!). I ate it up. Every fact of her life spoke to me on a deep level. She was born one day before my mother, both in Brooklyn, NY. Somehow this transmogrified in my mind as though Barbra was my real mother — they must have been born in the same hospital, so maybe my mother was switched with her, and so I’m really Barbra’s daughter…? It all made sense in my adolescent mind.

There was more. She played clubs in the ’60s New York’s Greenwich Village; my grandfather owned a bar in the ’60s in the Village! Did they ever meet; did she ever go there?! I read other biographies. I bought tapes. I borrowed CDs. I rented bad sex farces. I also rented great love stories. I was transfixed when she was onscreen. She was like me — but talented! And that voice, that voice…

I developed a highly attuned sense of Barbra; I took her on as a role model and a hero. I shook my head at the Jon Peters years. I was dismayed by the press’s portrayal of her as an inflexible haranguer. I admired her unwavering support of liberal causes. I cheered her unrelenting quest for perfection in all things. And I marveled at her undisputed artistic achievement.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the peak years of my Barbra obsession coincided with the time I was developing my sense of self, the age when one is most influenced by and impressed with idols of all kinds. The summer before college, I even forced my teenage friends to watch Yentl and was positively dismayed when they shrugged her off as a middle-aged woman who didn’t remotely carry off the conceit of playing a girl pretending to be a boy. But this didn’t stop my adoration, nor did it prevent me from forcing my freshman-year roommate to listen to The Concert night and day.

But hero worship often ends. It ends roughly about the same time you start to realize it’s not the drinking that kills you, it’s the daylong recovery instead of the hour-long one. You’ve grown up and grown past it — or at least I did.

I found criticisms where I used to find only abject adulation. I thought Barbra’s new material was overproduced, overorchestrated. Big-voiced, belting Barbra, backed by a 60-piece orchestra, can be uplifting and life affirming (for example, “A Piece of Sky”). Intimate, lush Barbra can be smooth and inviting (“Speak Low,” “Lazy Afternoon”); pop Barbra can be upbeat and fun (“Stoney End,” “Guilty”). Sweet Barbra can be lovely and enchanting (“Evergreen”); jazzy Barbra can swing and dip (“Cornet Man”). But where was the simple bass-drum-piano accompaniment that let her voice be the star? The funky approach and unexpectedly off (but somehow perfect) pronunciations that showcased her talent in her early years had been replaced with sappy life lessons, bombastically produced. She was different. Or maybe I was.

When she toured in 1994, I couldn’t afford tickets (I was only 17 and still in high school, after all). I vowed that if she ever toured again, I would go no matter what. Thankfully that came to pass in 2000 (the “Final Tour”!) and again in 2006. Despite the fact that I’d grown up a bit — and, I thought, grown past my obsession — in both instances, I was moved to tears (during the “Yentl Medley” and “Down With Love,” respectively). And I expect to be bawling my eyes out again this time. Her unique take on the lyrics and surprising phrasing can still stop me in my tracks and give me goose bumps. Quite simply, she moves me. I don’t know how, exactly, she will move me this time, but I know that she will. How could she not? She’s been a precious and well-loved (and -respected, and -esteemed) part of my life since I was a child — since before I was able to put the emotions she made me feel into words like this.

Put simply, I am grateful for the many gifts she has been blessed with and with which she has, in turn, blessed me. Occasionally, on moments like this, when she’s on stage and in strong voice, I let myself feel that gratitude, let myself be transported back to my teenage bedroom, back to that classroom in shul — the one by the rabbi’s office, with the red carpet and the rollaway VCR — where I was first mesmerized and charmed by her voice, her look, her charisma, her authenticity, her talent.

Narrative Science and the Future of StoryTelling

October 7, 2012 Anna Wahrman Leave a comment

On Friday I had the good fortune to attend the Future of StoryTelling conference. Among the leaders and luminaries in attendance (whose names I will not drop here) was Dr. Kris Hammond, who is the CTO at Narrative Science, which has created an artificial intelligence product called Quill that transforms data into stories (the product generates a story every 28 seconds, per Hammond). I’ve written about Narrative Science before, and I argued in that post that Narrative Science “is not a threat, it’s a tool, and it fills a need.”

Now that I’ve met Dr. Hammond and heard him speak, I’m more a believer than ever that this is the future of journalism — and not just journalism, but all of media, education, healthcare, pharmaceutical, finance, on and on. Most folks at FoST seemed to be open to his message (it’s hard to disagree that translating big data into understandable stories probably is the future of storytelling, or at least part of it). But Hammond did admit that since the Wired story came out in which he was quoted as saying that in 15 years, 95 percent of news will be written by machines, most journos have approached him with pitchforks in hand.

I went in thinking that the two-year-old Narrative Science went hand-in-hand with Patch and Journatic in the automated-and-hyperlocal space, but I now think that Hammond’s goals, separate from these other companies, are grander and potentially more landscape-altering.

I know I sound like a fangurl, but I was truly that impressed with his vision for what his product can be, and what it will mean to the future of journalism. No, it can’t pick up the phone and call a source. It can’t interview a bystander. It can’t write a mood piece…yet. But they’re working on it.

With that, my top 10 quotes of the day from Dr. Hammond:

The first question we ask is not “What’s the data,” it’s “What’s the story?” Our first conversation with anyone doesn’t involve technology. Our first conversation starts, “What do you need to know, who needs to know it and how do they wanted it presented to them?”

Our journalists start with a story and drive back into the data, not drive forward into the data.

We have a machine that will look at a lot and bring it down to a little.

The technology affords a genuinely personal story.

It’s hard, as a business, to crack the nut of local. For example, Patch doesn’t have the data, but they’re the distribution channel. There’s what the technology affords and what the business affords…. We don’t want to be in the publication business.

Meta-journalists’ [his staff is one-third journalists and two-thirds programmers] job is to look at a situation, and map a constellation of possibilities. If we don’t understand it, we pull in domain experts.

The world of big data is a world that’s dying for good analysis. We will always have journalists and data analysts. What we’re doing is, we’re taking a skill set that we have tremendous respect for and expanding it into a whole new world.

The overall effort is to try to humanize the machine, but not to the point where it’s super-creepy. We will decide at some point that there’s data we have that we won’t use.

Bias at scale is a danger.

The government commitment to transparency falls short because only well-trained data journalists can make something of the data. I see our role as making it for everybody…. Let’s go beyond data transparency to insight transparency. It can’t be done at the data level, it can’t be done at the visualization level, it has to be done at the story level.