News, Interactivity and the Digital DividePractice-Based Research and the Contextualization of

News

Paper prepared for the IAMCR Conference, TheCommunication Policy and Technology Section,

Stockholm, July 20-25, 2008

Inger LindstedtProfessor of Media and Communication Studies

School of Arts and CommunicationMalmö University, MalmöInger.Lindstedt@mah.se

Bo ReimerProfessor of Media and Communication Studies

School of Arts and Communication

Malmö University, MalmöBo.Reimer@mah.se

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Introduction

In an increasingly interconnected world, people become more and

more dependent on mediated news. Therefore, it is crucial that

news producers manage to present news in such ways that people

are able to better make sense of the world and of their

surroundings. But it is also crucial that they manage to reach

not only those sections of the population that already are

information rich; it is crucial that news producers aid in

decreasing the knowledge gaps that exist.

Much hope has been put on digital media to solve the knowledge

gap problem. But the potential of such media has not yet been

fulfilled. It may even be the case that the situation is

deteriorating; unequal access to information technology leads

to a digital divide, it is argued.

What is there to be done? In early discussions concerning the

promise of digital media, a key concept was the concept of

interactivity (Downes and McMillan, 2000; Kiousis, 2002). The idea

was to make it possible for citizens to interact with the

producers of mediated messages. Instead of just passively

receiving messages, citizens would be able to communicate; to

take part in discussions on equal terms. In this sense,

interactivity was closely linked to the notion of democracy.

However, thus far, interactivity has not had a radical impact

on communication patterns (cf. Oblak, 2005). It has primarily

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amounted to giving citizens control over when to consume

something, and to give the consumer the control over which

platform to consume the material on. Less attention has been

placed on what should be consumed, and how it should be

consumed

It could be argued that one of the reasons for the lack of

“true” interactivity is technology; the tools available have

not allowed more than simple response possibilities. It could

also be argued that media companies may not have a real

interest in dramatically changing the relationship between

producers and consumers.

But things may be changing. New technologies are being

developed and blogging, as well as activities on sites such as

MySpace, Flickr and YouTube, make it clear that consumers more and

more act as media producers themselves, and thereby challenge

the producer/consumer divide (cf. Lasica, 2005; Jenkins, 2006).

How will this affect the future media landscape? How will it

affect journalism? What does it mean for the possibilities of

decreasing knowledge gaps? And furthermore, what does this mean

for the role of academic work in relation to these questions?

Knowledge is increasingly produced either outside of academia

altogether or as collaborative work in various formations

between academia, industry, government, grass root

organisations and citizens, often in the shape of “collective

experiments” (Latour, 2001). What will – and what should –

academic work consist of in this situation?

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In this paper, we will discuss these questions with the point

of departure taken from a concrete example of collaborative

work on digital media and interactivity, the EU funded research

project New Millennium, New Media (NM2). In a collaboration

between technical experts, media theorists and media producers

from nine countries, a new production tool for non-linear media

productions was created, as well as eight new media productions

in different genres. Our work (the writers of this paper)

within the project consisted primarily in taking part in the

construction of a prototype for an interactive news service,

MyNews&SportsMyWay. We will discuss the ideas behind the news

service and present its features and we will discuss what it

means conducting practice-based research and collaborative work

together with non-academics. We will also reflect on the

implications of such work. We will start the paper by

contextualizing the problematic within the framework of

knowledge gaps and the digital divide, then move on to a

discussion of the NM2 project.

Knowledge Gaps and the Promise of Digital Media

The original knowledge gap hypothesis, as coined by Tichenor,

Donohue and Olien in 1970, stated that when the amount of

information available through the mass media increases, already

existing differences in knowledge levels tend to increase,

leading to an even greater knowledge gap between the

information rich and the information poor. Studies carried out

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since then seem to confirm the hypothesis (Viswanath and

Finnegan, 1996; cf. Rogers, 2001).

The result as such is not especially surprising. Generally, the

choices people make are on the whole social rather than

individual; when people are able to choose between different

options, they tend to make choices similar to those of others

positioned similarly in social space. And when the number of

choices increases, so do the differences between different

groups. This has been the case also in relation to the uses of

the mass media (Reimer, 1994).

What would be needed in order to turn such patterns around? The

knowledge gap hypothesis was based on an analysis of mass

media, of communication of the one-to-many kind. New

information and communication technologies (ICTs), or digital

media, are at least partly based on other kinds of

relationships, on the many-to-many kind, and with greater

possibilities of interaction (cf. Burnett and Marshall, 2003:

48). However, the roles these new technologies, or these new

media, can play, have been interpreted in two different ways.

In one view, access to easy to use technology will make it

possible for people on a global level to access and use

information in ways that was not possible with traditional mass

media. In the other view, digital media will lead to a further

increase of knowledge gaps; it will lead to a digital divide.

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Which view is the most reasonable one? It is not an easy

question to answer, of course. It may not even be a question

that can have one answer. The pessimistic view is based partly

on the notion that bad journalism does not get any better just

because it is made available over the Net, partly on the notion

that digital media’s technological possibilities are not

utilized. Scheufele and Nisbet (2002) argue that the role of

the internet in promoting citizenship is limited. And in an

article documenting the history of online journalism, Scott

argues that as long as the major actors within the news

industry continue to be the same, nothing can get better. He

writes:

A serious analysis of the state of online journalism in 2002 and beyond belies this façade with painful clarity and highlights the dangers of delusion. It ismy contention that not only has the internet failed to stem the crisis, it has aggravated it. The very trends that have served to batter the condition of journalism for years are aggressively exacerbated by the intentional actions of the major news providers coping with the conditions of the digital marketplace(2005:92).

In relation to the potential held by digital technology, in a

review essay about journalism and the internet, Robinson

writes:

But for the technology to be used to its greatest democratic potential, online news sites must contain more original editorial content, better opportunitiesfor reader interactivity and more profitable businessmodels. Right now, web publishers have yet to unleashfully the powers of the internet in such a way that enhances user gratification, improves perceptions of

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media credibility and otherwise assures a viable internet journalism (2006a:844).

The optimistic view is based on the notions that important

material through new technology is available and possible to

access in more meaningful forms than ever before and that

citizens are using digital media in creative ways, turning from

being mere consumers of media to being media producers. Major

newspapers – for instance Washington Post, New York Times and

Los Angeles Times – offer personalized news sites, making it

possible for citizens to access the material he or she wants.

Other news sites, such as Wikipedia News, CNNs iReport and

Independent Media Center (IndyMedia) are based on user generated

content. Some sites consist of a mixture of professional

material and user generated content. The South Korean site

OhMyNews was one of the first. One of the most elaborate is

Newsvine. Taken together, it is possible to speak of a new form

of citizenship. As Hermes argues: “Most of all Internet-based

communities make clear that new communication forms do allow

for (new) citizenships and new groups to take up citizen

identities” (2006:307). This new form of citizenship could be

called a “cultural citizenship” (Uricchio, 2004:87).

Conducting Collaborative Research on Digital Media: The New Millennium, New Media Project

As an academic, it is of course always possible to take a step

back and critically evaluate things going on, offering views as

above. But it is also possible to take a step forward and take

active part in developments. The New Millennium, New Media (NM2)

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collaborative research project is such an example. It was

funded by EU, and it consisted of twelve (from the beginning

thirteen) partners. The overall objective of NM2 was to create

new non-linear, interactive media genres as well as the tools

necessary for the production of these. It was funded within

Framework 6: Information Society Technologies, and lasted 2004-

2007. The funding was 4,8 million Euro for the three year

period (http://www.ist-nm2.org/; cf. Williams et al., 2004,

Williams et al., 2006, Larsson et al., forthcoming; Ursu et

al., forthcoming).

The partners came from both industry and academia. Some were

technical partners, some were media producers. The technical

partners were British Telecom (BT), Telefónica I+D, Joanneum

Research Forschungsgesellschaft, Dept. of Computing, Goldsmiths

College, Dept. of Informatics, Aristotle University of

Thessaloniki, TNO (Netherlands Organisation for Applied

Scientific Research Telecom) and initially Sony NetServices.

The media producers were The School of Arts and Communication

(K3), Malmö University, CUMIS (Cambridge University Moving

Images Studio), University of Art & Design Helsinki, The School

of Art and Design, Ulster University, and Illuminations

Television Limited.

Eight individual NM2 productions for broadband delivery –

ranging across news, documentary and fiction – were created;

productions exploring and challenging traditional genres. City

Symphonies made use of the classical screen language – montage –

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and explored the relationship between cinema and the

architecture of the city. Gods in The Sky – Choice was an

interactive version of a BBC programme exploring ancient myths

in drama, dance and puppet theatre form. Based on a BBC

Television production of the Mervyn Peak novel Gormenghast, the

interactive production Gormenghast Explore dealt with flexible

narrative structures in drama. In Runecast, the NM2 system was

used to enable engagers to compose their own coherent story

constellations of songs, tales, music and images from mixed

audio-visual media. Accidental Lovers was a participatory black

comedy about love for television, mobile phone and Internet,

where in real-time, the user was able to affect the unfolding

drama of the romantic couple. In A Golden Age, the arts of the

Renaissance in England could be explored by in versions

determined in real-time by the preferences or the user.

Interactive Village was a reconfigurable portrait of life in a Czech

village, functioning as an interactive ethnographic

documentary. Finally, MyNews&SportsMyWay was a digital,

interactive news service that made it possible for users via

broadband to discover, select and recombine news and sports

items and stories according to their individual tastes.1

During the whole project, the productions and the tools were

developed through collaborative work between the producers and

the technical partners. The first productions were made with an

embryo of the tools. The aim of these productions was to

specify the requirements from the producers, to test some

1 Although called MyNews&SportsMyWay, for financial reasons the project has focussed on news.

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functionality, and to lay the foundation for the work. The

requirements ranged from basic needs to more advanced

challenges. As the tools developed, the productions could

develop, and more and more facilities could be explored and

tested within the tools. The first productions laid the ground

for the second generation, which in turn made the third

generation of the productions possible.

The productions were mostly only meant to be part of the

development of the tools, and therefore never were meant to go

public. But some of the last productions were from the

beginning meant to be public, like Accidental Lovers, broadcast on

YLE, the Finnish television channel, during December 2007, and

A Golden Age. MyNews&SportsMyWay was a semi-public production as

it was shown and used during live trials at the premises at

SVT, The Swedish National Public Television, during one day.

Anybody working or visiting SVT that day could see and use the

news service.

The production and design of MyNews&SportsMyWay

The productions had very different needs and requirements

depending on genre and kind of production. For the fictional

productions the possibility to create a totally new experience

for the user every time was a core requirement. For the news

service, on the other hand, the objective was to make possible

a more in-depth and contextualized news consumption than what

traditional news services do. That is, the idea was to make

interactivity in relation to news more meaningful. This attempt

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was made by combining technical skills, design skills,

journalistic skills with theoretical media knowledge.

The work started by exploring the genre of news. A specific

characteristic of the genre is its rather formalized structure,

both concerning the news story’s structure and the news

programme’s structure. To challenge this genre can therefore be

done both on the micro level – the news item – and/or the macro

level – the news programme. For the MNSMW production we worked

on both levels, but primarily on the programme level.

The production was done in collaboration with SVT Syd, the

southern Sweden branch of Swedish National Public Television.

We thereby had access both to the latest news clips and to

SVT’s archive material, a kind of material that was used as an

extra resource for contextualization and more in depth viewing.

SVTs’ archive material is available through a digital archive

system called META. A database of news clips was created by

choosing and downloading news stories and programmes from this

system. The starting point was the journalistic workflow of the

day where an event happens and made into a news story. This

story is in itself often a development of a course of events.

We used that line of event to create a series of related clips.

The criteria for extracting the different news items from META

were based on our research and knowledge about news, news

events and the Swedish society. The news items were imported

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into the NM2 tools, tagged and marked with narrative

structures. In this way, the research group built a news

service with its own archive, based on SVT material.

For the user to be able to interact with the news service the

research group also created an interface. Three main objectives

were singled out for its design:

to aim for a TV experience (rather than a PC experience) to meet the challenge of many choices and to give the

feeling of an easy to use/leaned back experience to enable different modes of interaction within the same

interface.

In aiming for a TV experience rather than a PC experience, we

wanted to support the link between media consumption and the

routines of everyday life. Already today news are of course

consumed through the use of a computer, and this will become

even more common in the future, but we wanted to build on the

social experience of watching news and sports. It was a way of

trying to keep the consumption communal, making it possible for

consumers to discuss what they are watching at the time they

are watching.

One of the major challenges was trying to incorporate flexible

and interesting interaction functions in an easy way, suitable

both for user groups that are not common users of interactive

media and for groups that are highly experienced in active and

participatory media consumption. The goal was to lower the

knowledge threshold of using interactive possibilities and at

the same time enable interesting and attention grabbing

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interactions in a way that could engage audiences in or between

these polarized groups.

Since the production was situated in the borderline between

television and internet, certain decisions and issues had to be

dealt with. Firstly, a remote control was used for executing

the interactions and not a keyboard or a mouse. Secondly, the

television screen was the medium to design for and not the

computer monitor. Thirdly, the design did not demand audience

activity but rather enabled a passive consumption that engaged

the audience to interact.

The remote assured that the interactions were available on a

device everyone was used to, and was more or less comfortable

in using. It also made the interactions easy to reach since

they were all available by the click on a button. The

television screen is a device audiences have gathered in front

of for decades; consumption patterns may be changing but the

desires to enjoy moving images in a large screen format still

have great weight. A major factor of the news is that they are

there to be discussed and debated in the micro environment of

the living room; this is also one reason for designing for the

television screen.

Using the MyNews&SportsMyWay news service

The service is based on dividing news into six major sections:

MyNews, General News, Sports, Culture & Entertainment, Economy

and Home & Leisure. The four latter sections contain the latest

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edition of each programme section broadcast by SVT. It also

contains the four latest clips within each section. The user

can choose either to watch the latest edition or any of the

individual clips. General News is similar to these four

sections, but it contains one local news section and one

national.

Figure 1. Entry screen MyNews&SportsMyWay

MyNews is based upon a person’s user profile and it is compiled

automatically. It also adds new clips to the mix when available

– and relevant. The playing time for the MyNews programme is

normally 20 minutes, but that can be altered by the user. This

could be done in real-time.

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Figure 2. The MyNews section

One of the core goals for the project was to explore how to let

the users have more meaningful experiences than the ones

consumers are able to gain today. Two interaction modes were

therefore developed. The first, the More function, is a

possibility for the user to add clips on the same subject to

the currently playing news item. If the function More is

pressed a clip is added after the currently playing clip and

seamlessly a new clip starts playing automatically. After the

added clip has ended, you return to the same point as before

within the programme. If the button More is pressed during

playback of the added clip, another clip will be added in the

same manner as above.

The second interaction mode is the Related function, which is a

possibility for the user to view a list of clips that is

broadly related to what she or he is currently watching. The

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function is always available during playback. If the button

Related is pressed the user is presented to a populated list

with related stories to choose from after the current clip has

ended. After having watched the “related clip”, the user will

return to the same point as before within the programme he or

she was watching.

Reflections

As has already been described, the NM2 research project was a

collaborative project in many aspects. Collaborative work can

be both enriching and fraught with conflict; enriching as there

are great possibilities to learn from each other, fraught with

conflict as the interests for taking part in a project may

vary. Collaborative work may also be difficult due to

communication problems; people in different traditions do not

always speak the same language.

In this particular case, the Industry/Academia dimension was

not unimportant. Within academia we are at least normally used

to openness; research results are always made public. Within

the industry, market opportunities and market shares determine

ways of dealing with results. Within the academia we are also

used to, as researchers, to be able to make our own decisions

and say yes or no. Within the industry, decisions are often

made on a higher level in the organisation, above the project,

which means that many decisions must be anchored higher up in

the hierarchy. As researchers from the academia we therefore

had greater freedom in this project.

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The Industry/Academia distinction was not the only relevant

one, however. The twelve (originally thirteen) partners came

from eight countries, and they came from different disciplines.

Most importantly in this context was the distinction between

technicians (“techies”) and media producers (“creatives”). For

the technicians, the development of a general tool was of

highest importance, whereas for the media producers, the

specific productions were in themselves more crucial.

However, on a more a more general level, a major task for the

work within the NM2 project, shared by everybody, was coming up

with ideas on how to expand on the notion of interactivity; of

making it into something more than just time-shifting. The end

result is something we have termed shape-shifting. The objective

is to make it possible for a consumer not only to decide when

to watch something and on which platform, but also to be able

to shape the material he or she chooses to watch in ways that

make sense to him or her. It is of course not a question of

being on equal terms with the producers of the material but it

is a way of reconfiguring the material in a meaningful way

(http://shapeshift.TV; cf. Ursu et al., forthcoming; Larsson et

al., forthcoming).

An important feature of the MNSMW prototype is that it

facilitates the personalization of news, making it possible to

select items one is interested in altogether. But that feature

is not unique; that is something many news services offer. Much

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more important is the possibility of contextualization. With

the help of the “more” and “related” functions, it becomes

possible for a user both to “drill” down deeper into any

subject she or he is interested in, and to link it to other

similar events. The linkage is maybe the most important feature

in the sense that it on the one hand creates a concrete

contextualization of an event, but that it on the other hand

also can function as a movement away from an event to something

else, a movement which may be unexpected, but still rewarding.

In our live trials with the news service, we have seen examples

of users starting viewing a clip dealing with environmental

problems in a specific Swedish region but winding up watching –

with deep interest – a clip about something happening in

Africa. In a sense the function creates similarities between

interactive broadband/TV news viewing and newspaper, where the

sheer layout of a page opens the reader for unexpected stories.

It thereby deals with a critique often raised against

personalization: people only tune in to things they know they

are interested in. This way, people start with things they are

interested in but they wind up in completely different places.

How interactive is this news service? The features described

above are important components in an interactive service and in

the way collaborative projects work, they were developed in the

course of the project. It was not clear when the project

started that those features would be the outcome, but in the

end they were. At the same time, looking at the situation from

the perspective of today, it is clear that something is

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missing, and that is user generated content. The fact that such

material is not included is partly due to that one particular

project with a limited budget cannot do everything, but it is

also due to an extremely rapid development in the last couple

of years; when the NM2 project was planned, user generated

content was not the popular term it is today. But this does not

mean, of course, that the MNSMW service cannot be thought in

relation to such material. Quite the opposite. In the final

phase of the project, work was carried out on opening the

service for the possibility to integrate user generated content

with professionally produced content, and for the possibilities

of communication between users. This work was carried out under

the heading of OurNewsOurWays, and it has led to a concept

demo, showing a possible way ahead

(http://webzone.k3.mah/k3jolo/ONS).

What does this work on the MNSMW news service say about the

digital divide, then? Of course, in itself the construction of

a new news service prototype does not solve anything. But it

does show possibilities and problems in working with digital

media and interactivity. And conducting concrete, practical,

collaborative work makes it possible to find new perspectives

on the problematic. In relation to the field of media and

communication studies, which we come from, it is a matter of

experimenting with new ways of acquiring knowledge, or maybe

even experimenting with new forms of knowledge, in this

particular case knowledge in the shape of an artefact.

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But by working collaboratively with actors in the media

industry, it is also a case of getting insights that are

difficult to obtain from the outside. This is not the place to

go into this in detail. But a work such as ours means getting

into close discussions with media actors about what journalism

is all about, as well as what it should be about. Journalism is

changing. No one could seriously argue against that. It can be

seen, for instance, in the shape of public journalism, where

journalists try to find new, closer relationships to citizens.

But changes take time, and there is resistance. As Platon and

Deuze write in relation to public journalists: “The notion of

’us and them’ is still used to describe the difference between

journalists and citizens” (2003:340). In other words, citizens

can be important sources to news but the journalist is still

the one deciding “what’s news”. But there also changes due to

the arrival of new actors – at least on the digital stage. New

news sites, such as Indymedia, are based on contributions from

readers, and they work on the principle of open publishing,

thereby challenging the traditional way of doing journalism. As

Robinson writes, “the online medium is forcing journalism to

define a new identity” (2006b: 79). In our work, and especially

in our collaborations with SVT, the ambiguity with which

journalists at the public service company met with the ideas of

new ways of working with their audiences was very visible. On

the one hand, one could see the advantages of creating a news

service where work previously produced, available in the data

archive, could be put to use again. But there was also a clear

feeling of fearing the loss of control. Being used to being in

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command, making all choices, suddenly citizens themselves can

decide what to view – and how. That is for some journalists a

scary and unsettling thought. New digital media may not lead to

a reversal of existing power structures. But as Bentivegna

(2006:335) argues, they may have the power to destabilize the

system. That is not too bad.

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