This post is part of a series featuring interviews with some of the
fascinating individuals who joined our community for the 2014-2015 year. Conducted by our 2014 summer interns (affectionately known as
"Berkterns"), these snapshots aim to showcase the diverse backgrounds,
interests, and accomplishments of our dynamic 2014-2015 community.
Interested in joining the Berkman Center community? We're currently accepting
fellowship applications for the 2015-2016 academic year. Read more on
our fellowships page.
Q&A with Miguel Paz
Berkman fellow and journalist
interviewed in summer 2014 by Berktern Sarah Saad AlSaleh
@miguelpaz
What inspired you to start Poderopedia?
It was a means to an end more than a goal. I was a little bored with the slow pace of change and lack of experimentation at my news job, and I felt we were missing out on fascinating stuff such as structured journalism, semantic technologies, entity extraction, data visualization and social network analysis. Plus, I saw that newsrooms in general did not care about their archived content, which is the blood of information engines. There was an opportunity to test turning information into valuable insights that can provide answers to users and stop thinking of what newsrooms do as a "today shop" with no context or background history.
Poderopedia came from a very basic concept: it would be great if we could have a site that continuously maps the connections of the most influential people and organizations in business and politics - saving 30% to 40% of the time we spend on background fact-checking. It then developed into a platform that highlights conflicts of interest: promoting more transparency and allowing citizens to hold powerful people, companies and institutions accountable for their actions. This is based on inequalities in Chile where your last name and where you are born determine how powerful and influential you are. This in turn affects (for better or worse) the course of public affairs, government decisions, and bills approved in Congress. This system also exploited the weakness of journalism, which has to ask the right questions at the right moment with the best contextual information in order to dig deeper and discover new things that are relevant to the public. With an overflow of information, it’s hard to distinguish what’s urgent and important, and often media companies don’t have the time or money for it.
In this mega real-time data ecosystem, there is a big opportunity for curating, sharing, hacking and linking, as writers Clay Shirky and Jeff Jarvis and others have said so many times. It’s a chance to provide filtered content, meta-content and context-driven content to help people understand what happened and why, and who is responsible. Everything has to do with who’s connected with whom and how, whether it’s a company merger that leaves thousands out of work, the approval of a hydroelectric project that the community rejected, or the decision to pass a bill that will neglect our children’s education but will serve corporate interests. All this data is out there. It’s in articles written by journalists, in documents, wikis, and public databases provided by government offices, in studies made by scholars or NGO reports, in information given by whistle-blowers that reaches the hands of citizens. These are the sources Poderopedia feeds on.
What challenges did you face when starting Poderopedia and how did you overcome them?
Strategic management and team building are probably the most challenging elements of developing projects like Poderopedia. You want to hire the best people and spend the right amounts of time and money for the stage your startup is in, but it’s difficult to assess what stage that is! The most common problem with start-ups is the inability to validate the start-up’s value proposition. When I started Poderopedia, I had my journalist hat on without the experience of an entrepreneur. While a journalistic approach is excellent for reporting and sourcing, it is often not the best mindset for building and shipping products like a news venture. For the latter, the goal should be to deliver a product to users as soon as possible and learn from feedback. I learned this the hard way. But every mistake taught us how to do things better, and more importantly, how not to do things.
Berkman fellows play a crucial role in discovery, learning, and engagement at the Berkman Center. How do you plan on doing that?
My main "hands on" project aims to expand and democratize the use of data for visual storytelling by giving people that don’t know how to program (journalists, civic advocates) a simple way to create data visualizations, following the footsteps of projects like TimeLine.js. This could open a world of possibilities for anyone interested in publishing data visualizations. To have the chance to work with members of the Berkman community on this topic as well as with really advanced teams like the MacroConnections group from the MediaLab could turn this idea into reality.
A more strategic aspect of my being a Berkman Fellow has to do with the ability to study and ask totally new questions for innovative news startups and civic media to build quality sustainable journalism models. A startup, by definition, is a group of people that find a problem that is worth solving, come up with the solution, and have exponential growth. But if the news industry is based on information or content that needs people to create it and therefore takes time and energy, producing more traditional growth, what can we learn from other industries for doing groundbreaking work on the newsware ecosystem?
What trends do you see that are changing the way the newsroom and journalism space operate today?
The biggest change to come for me has to do with how we shift organizational structures, workflows and team definitions in the news ecosystem into adaptive organisms. We’ve had over a century of linear ways of working and keeping silos within the media companies, and this is the broken paradigm that we need to overcome via disruptive innovation and experimental testing within a information ecosystem that is no longer proprietary nor understood as my paper versus your paper. I like a lot what Joi Ito`s been speaking about “stop doing futurology and start doing now-ology”. His 9 Principles sound a lot like good old punk journalism for today`s needs. Felix Salmon’s concept of Promiscuous Media and the vast landscape encompassing Vox Media, Mic.com, @140journos, and MidiaNinja are things worth paying attention to.
What advice would you give to young journalists who are interested in digital journalism?
Read, think, write, go for it all and remember why you got into this.
How do you define success?
When I manage to do the things that I like and that contribute positively to society while also keeping family life on a sane, happy level. Hard, fun tasks!