Vision Paper: Getting Ahead of Myself

As I pursue a career in digital journalism, there’s no choice but to prepare myself for the dynamic evolution of emerging technologies and how they will change the way we tell and share stories.

Over the next several decades I can imagine that independent publishers will continue to struggle. The overtake of streaming content, pivot to video, and acquisition of small newsrooms will force publishers to reconsider their business models and ability to hire young professional writers.

But, we can also be hopeful for the benefits of new tech that will make publishing easier, faster and more immersive. Anyone can already have a website or blog, and now that more people are becoming adept at visual media creation, anyone can publish complete story packages from their personal mobile devices.

This isn’t really new or unexpected. But this class has taught me to look past where storytellers are currently pushing the envelope, and into an ambitious future where the opportunities for innovation are limitless.

I think facial recognition technology will be at the center of storytelling — in a good and bad way. People will use their faces (and body language) to unlock devices, to browse the web and interact with software seamlessly. This will be extremely convenient for accessing centralized platforms or remembering passwords.

But it can also help verify identities and validate increasing aspects of our lives. People will use facial recognition tech as a source of their own credibility — it will likely be the authenticating factor for everything we do: signing in to social media, buying groceries, applying for jobs, and more. And since so much of our lives will rely on the presence of our face, it will be impossible to go through life without a digital presence, which presents a security risk for people, businesses and governments.

Using artificial intelligence and facial recognition tech to verify our identities will become a liability for law enforcement, espionage, identity theft and insurance fraud. Having photos of someone’s face will allow people to access data about their lives and personal history. It might make it easier to tell stories (what a helpful way to verify a source!), but it could also be a way for newsrooms and the communities they serve to be hacked or held hostage.

As we continue to find new uses for AI, it’s critical that we find a balance between innovation, security and civil liberties.

A Deep Dive into Drone Footage

As beach season begins, swimmers in North Carolina are being warned to take extra caution when entering the water. Rip currents have claimed the lives of five people in the state so far, and authorities are worried that the average beach-goer might not be able to identify a strong current before diving in.

The local paper in my hometown of Greensboro, North Carolina, published an infographic that explains the signs and strategies needed to avoid drowning in a rip current.

But an illustration can only go so far.

This is exactly the type of story that would be enhanced by drone footage to provide an aerial view of a shoreline, and the real-time visuals of current that could pose a danger to swimmers.

It’s unclear from the state government website whether journalists are considered operators for recreational or commercial use, but I would follow the commercial guidelines just to be on the safe side.

While it’s illegal to fly over people or private property without the consent of those in view, flying over the ocean would be different. The UAV would have to be within 400 ft. and always in the line of sight of the operator.

A lot of the N.C. beaches are within airport zones according to the Know Before You Fly map, but finding a beach that is far enough from the airport or other restricted zones would be a journalist’s best bet.

I’d perform a field test by including aerial footage in the article as well as social media posts, and embed a poll on the article page that asks people to rate how useful the footage is.

I could test engagement with the poll by requiring a response in order to read the rest of the article, or embed the poll at the bottom of the article instead.

Sensor Journalism and Climate Change

Earthquakes lower than a magnitude of 2 on the Richter scale happen hundreds of times a day across the world.

And while scientists are still building a case of direct correlation between earth’s increasing temperatures and the incidence of earthquakes, researchers have found links between the amount of heavy rainfall and earthquakes in some areas.

In order to monitor these links, I propose journalists and researchers could implement several types of sensors. After perusing the SparkFun site, I found a few that might work.

1. An earthquake monitor: this tracks seismic movement and can identify earthquakes in one’s own back yard.
2. A weather monitor: this includes a weather sensor, soil moisture sensor and a water temperature sensor.

Hypothesis: Together, these three can monitor any movement linked to small earthquakes, and catalogue incidents of rain or other types of precipitation.

Test: Over several years, this could hopefully identify a pattern of precipitation, ground temperature and seismic movement in a single area. I think it would be wise to consult climate science researchers to make sure I’m tracking the right variables, and get their opinions on the best places to implement these sensors so they are not disturbed by wildlife or people.

ChatBot2020

For my final project, I will create and test the effectiveness of a chatbot for a presidential candidate campaign for the 2020 election.

The problem: Who is even running? The New York Times has an interactive page where readers can see how many candidates have declared whether they’re running from both major parties. This is a wonderful resource, and provides a central overview of the stakes in the race so far. But if someone wanted to learn more about a candidate, they’d have to look in several different places: a candidate’s website, for information about their campaign; news articles, to see what critics are saying; Wikipedia, for personal and professional history.

Across all these sources, messaging is bound to differ, both in quality and accuracy. Such is the state of news media in the age of ephemeral information, but it’s not enough to help reporters fact-check efficiently, let alone help constituents sort through the onslaught of information.

What if there was one place to find everything?

The hypothesis: If a chat bot can realistically and intelligently converse with users about a presidential candidate’s campaign, then users will be more conveniently informed while maximizing their media literacy.

The test: I will create a chatbot to serve as a resource for one presidential candidate, and practice learning from conversations about different policy ideas, news events and aspects of their personal history. I will then have a variety of people chat with the bot to gauge their user experience and level of news literacy before and after the test.

I hope to discover through this test whether a bot could learn quickly and efficiently from the interactions with real users. Hopefully, the bot will serve as a resource for reporters, supporters and critics of a candidate’s campaign by providing consistent information in a timely manner.

I’m not sure how to incorporate a control group, though I could survey people who try to learn about a campaign without a chat bot, and ask about different facets of their user experience.

Virtual Reality: Shoot for the Moon

For the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission, NASA released new materials for scientists to play with: moon rocks that haven’t been touched by anyone other than Armstrong himself.

The Washington Post reported on the event, bringing readers’ imaginations inside the pristine lab space:

“NASA’s Lunar Sample Laboratory, a maze of gleaming metal cabinets and spotless linoleum floors, was built in the 1970s to house the rocks brought back from six moon missions.

A sophisticated HVAC system, designed to keep the air 1,000 times cleaner than in the outside world, fills the facility with a faint artificial breeze. Scientists enter only after donning special white jumpsuits, caps and booties to limit contamination.

These are some of the most valuable rocks in the solar system, Zeigler said. Just look at what they have revealed so far.”

Illustrative writing, yes, but wouldn’t it be so cool to see for ourselves? Imagine the inspiration set off by a virtual reality version of this story. Walking around the lab, looking down at your own white jumpsuit amid the cleanest air imaginable.

The report describes, for context, the different theories that scientists have about the moon’s origin:

“About 4.5 billion years ago, the theory goes, a long-gone giant planet called Theia, named for the mother of the Greek moon goddess, smashed into the newly formed Earth. The impact shattered both Theia and the proto-Earth and splashed millions of tons of material into space. Some of the rock coalesced in orbit around the Earth, and our satellite was born. The heaviest bits sank to the moon’s center, while the light minerals floated to the top of the worldwide magma ocean and crystallized, forming the thin anorthosite crust. The rocks and dust retrieved by Armstrong and Scott are relics of this long-ago tumult.”

Though there’s no actual footage of this theory, it’s one a journalist could certainly set up in Unity 3D with different packs of environmental elements and textures. The visual of rocks and planets colliding would be great context for size and impact, and might help people who have little understanding of astronomy find a new entry point into this story.

I think adding VR or Unity media to a news story would greatly increase engagement with the web page, and could be an added benefit of subscribing to a publication like The Post.

A field test for this type of work might require working with a scientist or researcher familiar with the theories mentioned, and try to create visual representations of the theories. Then, embedding the visuals as videos or gifs in the content to test readers’ interaction with them. Engagement could be measured by views and time on page.

The content production team could also use a heat map to track where readers spent the most time on a story, and could gauge how effective the Unity or VR elements were with that data.

 

Up-Close and Personal: 3D Photogrammetry

I write about health care and mental health a lot, and I could see the 3D scanning and annotation technology being very helpful with writing stories about medical treatment or care.

Often times, new research about health is published in a white paper or academic journal, and then turned into a digestible news story by health care writers at NPR Shots, NYT Well, or Stat Health.

These journalists do so much work to make the concepts accessible and comprehensible to the average person, but an interactive model could be helpful to show physical medical devices.

For example, when the 23 & Me kits were approved by the FDA, medical providers were worried that the average consumer would lack the clinical support of a medical provider to 1) show them how to use the device and 2) understand how to interpret the results.

A 3D version of the kit and its equipment would help people understand what they’re ordering, and what important points to pay attention to. This type of storytelling could make health stories more accessible to people who might live far away from medical care or aren’t able to afford coverage.

Also, the annotations feature makes this technology more accessible to people with visual or auditory impairments, as the text could be processed through a screen reader to describe the visual elements of the model.

In more widely-consumed news stories, like this one about the structure of Notre Dame after it burned, it’s easy to see how photogrammetry will be a necessary venue for telling stories about structures that are no longer fully intact.

However, this was only possible because someone had decided to document Notre Dame using this technology. How will we be able to recreate structures that were destroyed or deteriorated before anyone ever took a photo of them? Historical sites and monuments may require a journalist’s collaboration with historians or archeologists.

One possible use of this technology is to report stories about court proceedings that may not allow photos or video documentation inside the hearing. Journalists may be able to use models of people and structures available in software like Unity to recreate a scene that they witnessed but weren’t able to record. Then, members of the community would be able to understand — with complete visual context — how an event transpired.

Seeing is Believing: 360 Video Will Change Journalism

Source: AR/VR Journey

The technology isn’t new, but it’s growing, adapting and becoming more accessible for storytellers and consumers.

Virtual reality and 360 video will make it easier for journalists to be a one-person crew. There’s no “i” in “team,” but there sure is in “iPhone,” which is currently making it possible for untrained professionals to produce professional-level videos and story packages. Mobile devices are also helping trained journalists take the place of an entire production crew.

And in just a few years, if not months, 360 cameras and VR software will become so ubiquitously accessible that one person can film or create an entire immersive experience with little-to-no overhead, and certainly no bulky camera bag.

With 360 cameras, journalists will be able to capture all the possible angles of a scene by themselves. But, the new computing power of these devices will change the expectations that newsrooms have of recent graduates entering the field. A comprehensive list of multimedia skills will become the norm.

VR will continue to blur the line between real life and online presence, which is already happening with social media — and that’s only in 2D. Being able to move freely through a digital world may make it hard for people to distinguish URL from IRL.

All-encompassing frames will make it difficult to exclude any aspects of a space during a scene, so producers will have to painstakingly edit out unwanted images. But what would that look like in practice? Time-consuming and noticeable.

If they’re able to do this well, viewers might have an inauthentic experience of how a story actually transpired, and producers will have to answer to ethical dilemmas of capturing a scene versus staging one.

Story Idea: VR Concert

A consumer of this story could be able to see, hear and fully experience the adrenaline and excitement of a live concert from the performer’s perspective, as well as that of the audience. Being able to move through the audience and see the performance from different angles provides more context to the experience. It also shows the size of the crowd, the depth of the music and the awe of being on stage.

I have two hypotheses about this production idea:

1. Because so many large performances for top-charting artists already involve a production crew for documenting or streaming, the stage experience for the performer(s) will be largely unchanged. They’re already used to having camera equipment on stage with them, and this wouldn’t be much different. If anything, it would be less equipment on stage because one camera can capture so many angles at once. A performer could test this by including VR and 360 cameras during a rehearsal to see if they feel disrupted or disturbed by the presence of the tech on stage.
2. If a performer’s show sells out, or they only perform their show a few times (looking at you, Beychella), then people could still buy tickets or access to a VR or 360 version of the show and experience the show. This eliminates the prospect of the artist losing revenue from over-shared footage of their performance, and maximizes opportunities for ticket sales. The revenue streams could be compared with ticket sales and reviews of the experience to see if people enjoyed the media and would still be willing to pay to see the show live.

We’ve seen the success of Beyonce’s Homecoming documentary with Netflix’s 149 million global subscribers; imagine how much the experience would change if viewers could be on stage with her.

 

Unity & Digital Skills for Journalists

 

Source: The Wrap

Unity, as a concept, opens up opportunities for the average person to become a creator through free software — a space for creatives to apply their traditional skills to a digital environment.

In practice, this was much more complicated than expected. Though I was able to move through Unity’s tutorials on setting a scene on the website, I was unable to start building locally on the app. The app never moved past the license screen; no matter how many times I put in my information, the app stayed on the following screen over the course of several hours. Not a great look:

I did, however, find some cool examples of what other, more successful people have been able to create. The categories of assets shows the breadth and depth of contributions made by other users and creators of the platform, to help new users get their bearings and start building with generalized items like characters and natural scenes.

Here’s one where Unity’s Principal Designer Timoni West shows an audience how to use the “Chessboard” feature to build VR games. Wearing a VR headset while building seemed to provide a real-time perspective for the creator to test out the end result as a user:

Another tutorial created by a Unity user shows how to create scene transitions for games – a critical part of storytelling, whether it’s a reported journalistic story or a virtual game. Transitions help us move a consumer seamlessly from one idea or experience to the next. Being able to make transitions feel natural to the point they’re almost unnoticeable is a key part of keeping a reader or user’s attention, and it’s a skill traditional journalists can and should learn to recreate in a digital experience.

Considering the impact that VR could have on the journalism field, I was compelled by Josh’s comment in the async discussion that no other storytelling technology is quite as transportive as VR. Being able to immerse a reader in a scene has always been the goal with other mediums, but VR allows us to completely recreate the scene rather than just relay it to the consumer.

As I’ve mentioned in my post about VR and empathy, I think recreating experiences is an extremely powerful way to share a story with a reader or consumer. However, we were warned in our Multimedia Storytelling course about the ethical quandaries regarding recreated audio and video. As soon as a journalist tries to manufacture a scene or sound byte, it’s no longer purely factual — even if they’re just reenacting or restating facts.

Most scenes look obviously fictional, as the characters and elements are clearly animated or computer generated. Like the Lewis & Clark scene we watched as a class, the scene would never be mistaken for real footage. But what then, is the purpose of creating an animated version, when a user would likely feel just as immersed or captivated by watching actual footage of the behind-the-scenes production? Maybe that’s just my preference for live-action media.

But I expect that the industry will move toward trying to make VR media seem as realistic as possible. VR concerns me for this reason, that people would be unable to discern what is original footage from that which has been created in a platform like Unity. Of course, the purpose of Unity specifically is for gaming, but as VR software becomes more accessible, we’ll have to continue to be careful and critical of how we use re-engineered spaces to tell stories.

New Media and the Disruption of Women’s Health

Photo by Omar Lopez on Unsplash

The Innovator’s Dilemma is centered around one question: will the newest version of a product or idea always become the most successful? New products and innovations will always have an appeal to early adopters, but sometimes we don’t need to reinvent the wheel. In fact, the innovator’s dilemma suggests that, even though researchers and developers may be working to improve the quality of a product or service, they may miss the mark by ignoring the ‘good enough’ line, which indicates a more original option, which may have sufficed all along.

Source: Dan Pachecho for Communications@Syracuse

We can explore this dilemma through the lens of new media technology dedicated to women’s health and wellness.

Sustaining Innovation

Gender-neutral health media technology, including wearable devices and fitness apps that track health information without regard to gender or sex. These made it possible for users with smart phones to leverage the data-sharing capabilities of their devices to accommodate their fitness and health routines. MyFitnessPal, Headspace and Fooducate are all examples that can be utilized by people of any gender identity.

Health apps are a great alternative for people who might be uncomfortable consulting a medical provider or lack access to one nearby.

Disruptive Innovation

Women’s health-focused apps allow users who identify as women to track information about reproductive and sexual health, menstrual cycles, mental health and emotional wellness. Flo, Glow, Ovia, Clue and other similar apps are designed to cater directly to women’s specific needs, and often partner with companies to promote products or services for women as well.

These apps have the potential to help deliver health care and health information to people in rural communities, and provide cost-efficient information for women who need health advice but lack the time or accessibility of visiting a medical provider in person.

With shared data, women’s health apps can help track and monitor specific incidences of chronic conditions, diagnoses or disease spread. However, this data will continue to be regulated by the GDPR and any future federal data privacy legislation in the U.S. As of right now, many women are concerned about data privacy breaches within these apps, and how much marketers may be taking advantage of this nuanced and vulnerable information.

Good Enough Line

Before health applications, people could just consult a medical provider or trusted source of information online. Of course, these resources are limited by the digital divide and income-inequities in the U.S. and the world.

Looking Forward

In the future, it would be an improvement to see more apps that are dedicated to specific gender identities, as people who are gender non-conforming have their own unique health needs that deserve equal attention and resources, and have historically suffered the most discrimination and impediments to quality health care from medical providers.

It would also be reassuring to see more decentralized versions of these apps that aren’t connected to advertising or data mining dollars. The prospect of cybersecurity attacks on women who have shared vulnerable information without fully understanding the risks is too high to be ignored by app developers.

Virtual Reality and Empathy in Storytelling

Source: 360 Stories

Combat, carnage and catastrophe: Vietnam was the first truly televised war, and the results of seeing such brutal images of the physical and emotional damages was enough to irreparably warp Americans’ perceptions of boots on the ground.

Almost 50 years later, the innovations of multimedia storytelling have dragged American media further down the path of trigger-laden, three-dimensional stories of terror, trauma and political turbulence. But with the rise of computing power came the capacity to manipulate and falsify the news.

Fake news, as we know it now, has the divisive power to turn every day people against each other. But what if there was a way to turn us toward one another?

Virtual reality has been around for several years, and beautifully implemented in video games, physical therapy and entertainment media. But there are only a few instances of VR use in factual storytelling and journalism — and even fewer cases of research on its impact in the reporting field.

But these instances are growing, and they have the potential to completely change how journalists approach multimedia storytelling.

“Journalists will be able to develop multiple storylines in a single environment. Audiences will no longer be guided in a linear progression, but will be able to choose different story paths as they freely explore the virtual space—a ‘choose your own adventure’ version of journalism,” explained Taylor Nakagawa in the Columbia Journalism Review.

Journalist Nonny de la Peña is using VR for Project Syria, which transports users to the war zones where they can ‘“feel” the power of gunfire overhead in Syria and “stand” shoulder to shoulder with grieving Syrians in the aftermath,’ according to a report published in Wired Magazine by Caleb Garling.

No matter what side of the cultural divide a user may have come from, they all have the same experience under the headset. Suddenly, their political affiliation won’t matter, because bullets don’t discriminate.

de la Peña is known as “The Godmother of Virtual Reality,” and, as her projects reach more and more users, other journalists will likely incorporate her same storytelling strategies when possible.

Of course this style of immersive storytelling will change the way we consume (and likely monetize) reported journalism. But it also presents a host of new issues — namely how we will shield readers from the emotional and mental tolls inflicted by experiencing virtual triggers:

• How can we warn readers that the story may not be safe for everyone?
• Does that warning take away from the immersive qualities of the story?
• What can we learn from social media sites that already monitor the amount of graphic content, and warn users before they read it?
• How do we define the scope of what may be triggering or traumatizing to viewers?

There are only a few of the many questions we will have to answer as a profession, as a society. But perhaps this one has always been a problem for us to solve: How do we tell accurate and meaningful stories of trauma without inflicting trauma on those who want to learn?

As this software becomes more accessible and useful to practicing and aspiring journalists, it’s likely that professional associations will develop ethical standards for those in the field. But we can’t wait for the official standards to be published before we start considering and implementing them.