Lars Nyre

Locative journalism: Designing a location-dependent news medium for smartphones

This article provides an account of the tensions between locative context-awareness and the act of writing journalistic copy for a mobile application. Based on the field trials of the interdisciplinary LocaNews project, the article discusses locative media’s potential for spatially sensitive news journalism. In 2009 researchers in Norway made a medium design called LocaNews, and tested it out with pre-planned procedures for the two fundamental activities: production and reception. Of those who participated, 12 people worked as journalists, editors, technicians, and they generated 93 journalistic stories that were read and watched by 32 test-users who were interviewed. The present article deals with findings regarding the production of news content, and presents the strategies used to reinterpret the traditional news criteria of journalism to be fit for a GPS-equipped smartphone. First, the article discusses the connection between journalism and cartography, and then introduces the experimental method used for this research. The bulk of the article consists of an evaluation of the experimental attempt at practising location-dependent journalism. It deals with four issues: putting stories on the map, the characteristics of ‘zoom in stories’, the construction of an implied position for the readers, and finally the formulation of news criteria that focus on spatial proximity instead of temporal actuality.

The Next Generation Platform: Comparing Audience Registration and Participation in Digital Sound Media

There are a number of communication technologies that challenge analog broadcasting; mainly digital broadcasting, mobile phone networks and various types of audiovisual media on the Internet. Compared to the old broadcasting paradigm, these media have better sound and image quality, more versatile reception features, and interactive services for listeners. But is there an improvement in the opportunities for audience participation? This article evaluates a number of different media platforms according to the terms of access set by providers and the techniques of participation available for citizens. We conclude that two-way contact in digital communication systems is accompanied by more detailed registration and data about the individuals who communicate, and we consider this an irresolvable dilemma when using digital media for individual participation in public communication.

MINIMUM JOURNALISM: Experimental procedures for democratic participation in sound media

This article presents a sociological experiment with public speaking in a controlled studio environment. We tested several procedures designed to make it possible for ordinary Norwegian citizens to discuss and deliberate public issues more freely than is currently possible in public service broadcasting and the commercial sector. Demostation ran two different series of editorial programming where the dynamics of public speaking between the participants was our chief concern. We had groups of people connected through IP-telephony (Skype), and chains of people speaking on the telephone. The conversations were hosted by an editorial member, and a full production team coordinated the effort to get the programme on air. In the course of 2005 Demostation produced nine hours of live public speaking by 89 participants, and the project employed a staff of 11 people. Bertolt Brechts idea about making radio into a communication apparatus instead of a distribution apparatus is at the heart of this experiment. But much of broadcast journalism in practice limits the growth and influence of a more dialogic mass communication. Experts, high-profile journalists, politicians and celebrities dominate the airwaves. It is possible to change the balance in favour of ordinary citizens, and this is minimum journalisms ambition.

Television and the Meaning of Live

Make more knowledge even in less time every day. You may not always spend your time and money to go abroad and get the experience and knowledge by yourself. Reading is a good alternative to do in getting this desirable knowledge and experience. You may gain many things from experiencing directly, but of course it will spend much money. So here, by reading television and the meaning of live, you can take more advantages with limited budget.

Apologetic Media Research

It is supposedly not the communication researcher’s job to be political, that is, to make communication into a question of conflicts of interest and societal struggle. The ideal of ethical neutrality from Max Weber prevails. Many media researchers think of this attitude as a virtue, but in my view it is apologetic. Apologetic media research is my collective term for research projects that protect and prolong fundamental values of the media businesses without problematizing the legitimacy of these values. Such research fails to communicate its own adherence to the present order of things in a given society, and as such it promotes the means and ways of certain interest groups by ‘neutrally’ explaining how the media mix functions.

Urban Headphone Listening and the Situational Fit of Music, Radio and Podcasting

Many people wear headphones during movement through their city, and they listen to a variety of sound genres like music, talk, lectures, etc. This study focuses on the pedestrian headphone listener who may spend an hour or more traveling every day. It explores the situational fit of three media; music playlists, live radio, and podcasting, during public transit. A field trial was conducted in London, UK in December 2013. Ten adult iPhone users were exposed to a music playlist on Spotify, live news from Londons Biggest Conversation (LBC), and educational podcasts from BBC Radio 4, while simultaneously going about their business in Central London. This study discovered informants were more interested in curating their music, and less interested in engaging with the social concerns of live radio, or the learned address of educational podcasting. Music was felt as relaxing while radio and podcasting were felt as more imposing on their concentration. In sum, the participants found radio and podcasting to have weaker situational fit than music during pedestrian headphone listening.

BBC Broadcasts to Portugal in World War II: how radio was used as a weapon of war

for the researcher attempting to tackle the great challenge of representing the man. Stead’s many escapades and contradictory philosophies evoke such personal responses from his critics that what is published seems always to be a version of him and never the version. What Robinson’s biography lacks in research it makes up for in fluidity and style. Until a major ‘‘Life of . . .’’ is published, W. S. Robinson’s Muckraker will serve as a fine introduction to anyone interested in investigating the extraordinary and brilliant life of W. T. Stead.

Word cloud visualisation of locative information

Abstract This article describes an explorative study of a prototype for visualisation of locative information from Wikipedia. PediaCloud is a smartphone app that uses word clouds for graphical display of links to text and photos relating to a particular place. This approach to accessing location-based information is different from more common approach of using interactive maps to visualise the information. PediaCloud gives you a word cloud representing your location, and the words are links to Wikipedia articles. In addition to reading the Wikipedia entries, you can re-centre your information probe by getting a topical word cloud weighting the located information content in relation to that particular word. This results in word cloud visualisations that could bring the user into a variety of topics. In this article, we explore the potential use value of a service like this and identify opportunities for further design and development. PediaCloud was tested in 2014 in a field trial in London, a big city with large amounts of located information, with eight participants from the city. The data collected indicate that PediaCloud will be experienced as an explorative locative service, where you discover nearby information by coincidence rather than after searching for it instrumentally. The analysis has explored the nuances and potentials of this ‘sideways’ search that is embedded in PediaCloud, and shows how this can be considered a serendipitous search approach, giving the users information in a manner that can be considered fun, surprising and interesting.

The Broadcast Public and its Problems

Abstract It was a loss for Western democracies that wireless transmission technologies, which were discovered and invented from around 1900, became broadcasting and not something more democratic. Transmission acquired a centralised structure, an expert-oriented journalistic ethics, and a relatively passive domestic culture of reception. This was good, but not good enough. In strictly technical terms, the new transmission technologies could have been constructed as a participatory public platform. Transmission could have become an everyday realisation of John Dewey’s democratic vision, but it ended up as one-way media in the spirit of Walter Lippmann. Much has happened in radio and television since then; there has been a slow and determined increase in audience activity and user-generated content from the 1990s, and television has been rejuvenated with reality TV and talent shows, and other things. However, transmission still does not support participatory communication to the extent that it could technically have done. This article critiques the Western broadcast media industry and its scholars for being too complacent about radical change in a participatory direction. By appealing to the political energies of the “Lippmann-Dewey debate,” the article pits the dominant paradigm of broadcasting against a participatory communication ethics that has not yet had a chance to prove itself technologically and socially. It deals with three interrelated problems of the broadcast public: (1) an elitist rationale for the construction of a one-way technological infrastructure, (2) a lack of social equality between professionals and amateurs, and (3) a commercial rhetoric of the media empowered citizen. If these three problems were solved or at least countered more robustly by a participatory communication ethics, the live transmission of sounds and images might finally realise their public potential.

Making the News: Digital Creativity Support for Journalists

This paper reports the design and first evaluations of new digital support for journalists to discover and examine crea-tive angles on news stories under development. The support integrated creative news search algorithms, interactive crea-tive sparks and reusable concept cards into one daily work tool of journalists. The first evaluations of INJECT by jour-nalists in their places of work to write published news sto-ries revealed that the journalists generated new angles on existing stories rather than new stories, changed their writ-ing behaviour, and reported evidence that INJECT use had the potential to increase the objectivity and the boldness of journalism methods used.