Lytro Photography and the Advance of Data Journalism

The Lytro camera

The Lytro camera

Until this weekend, when I came across Rob Walker’s brief article about it in the December Atlantic, I had figured the new Lytro camera was more cool gimmick than serious game changer. You’ve probably heard about the technology already. Rather than focusing when you take the picture, you let others focus it later, when they view the image, by clicking on the area they want to see clearly. (Confused? See Lytro’s examples.)

This effect is made possible by capturing far more data than a typical camera. One way to achieve it, Walker writes, is to use “hundreds of cameras to capture all the visual information in a scene,” then use a computer to process the results “into a many-layered digital object.” Another is what the Lytro does: squeeze “hundreds of micro lenses into a single device.”

As technological advances go it’s impressive. But to a photographer, it’s not a big deal. Autofocus usually works just fine.

But Walker’s article made me realize who really benefits from the Lytro: not the photographer, but the viewer. The technology takes part of the artistic decision away from the artist and gives it to the audience. Likewise in journalism, the technology may help shift control of content from the producer to the consumer, as UC Berkeley new-media professor Richard Koci Hernandez told Walker:

Imagine, he suggests, a photojournalist covering a presidential speech whose audience includes a clutch of protesters. Using a traditional camera, he says, “I could easily set my controls so that what’s in focus is just the president, with the background blurred. Or I could do the opposite, and focus on the protesters.” A Lytro capture, by contrast, will include both focal points, and many others. Distribute that image, he continues, and “the viewer can choose—I don’t want to sound professorial—but can choose the truth.”

I’m still not convinced that the Lytro technology by itself is, as Walker says, revolutionary. But it is yet another development that hands more power to the consumers of journalism by giving them more data.

Journalism, of course, has always involved data. Even when you tell a story about an event, as in narrative journalism or photojournalism, you’re presenting the viewer with data. But those data are limited and selective, in the service of a particular point of view about the reality you’re describing. If you choose to focus on the president, that’s what your audience sees. With the Lytro, however, you give them access to far more data; now they, not you, choose what to focus on.

If you don’t think data journalism is going to be a big deal, consider the Lytro and the trend it represents. Technology will not stop here. As it evolves, it will enable everyone to capture and distribute increasingly large amounts of data. And in response, journalism’s role will correspondingly shift from telling stories to giving its audience the data they need to tell their own.

Rethinking the Article as the Basic Unit of Journalism

A spate of recent blog posts have, independently it seems, questioned the traditional preeminence of the article as the basic unit of journalism.

The first of these, chronologically, is a liveblogged review by Adam Tinworth of a News:Rewired conference session on liveblogging. In it, Tinworth summarizes a point made by presenter Matt Wells of the Guardian:

Matt thinks that liveblogs are one of the best ways of covering stories that don’t have a clear beginning, middle and end. The inverse pyramid story may be the single biggest reason that journalists are mistrusted. It encourages sensationalism.

A day later, Jeff Jarvis cited a number of examples of real-time news coverage that are leading him, as he put it, to

think of the article not as the goal of journalism but as a value-added luxury or as a byproduct of the process.

Then Monday Jenn Webb interviewed Cheezburger’s Ben Huh about his recently announced project to revitalize news coverage. Her final question focused on the article:

Do you think the “article,” as a form, needs to be reinvented?

Ben Huh: I think it should be augmented and, in some cases, tossed out entirely.

While Jarvis stays neutral on the value of the article form (despite Matthew Ingram’s reaction that he doesn’t), Wells, as channeled by Tinworth, sees it as a potentially misleading one. By forcing a “clear beginning, middle and end” on a set of events, Wells suggests, the meaning of those events may be exaggerated or otherwise distorted.

I don’t think that articles always mold a narrative structure onto events, but we generally expect them to do so. And it’s certainly the nature of any narrative to impose meaning on formlessness. That’s why we like narratives and use them so often.

But liveblogging, tweeting, and other real-time modes of expression don’t really abandon narrative. Rather, they give greater control to someone other than the writer or assembler in the process of creating the story. Those co-creators include the various people whose statements and data are being aggregated as well as the reader trying to make sense of it all.

As Jarvis strives to make clear, the rise of real-time formats doesn’t eliminate the article as an important mode of presentation. But it does suggest that other forms of expression or units of information are gaining power and prominence in journalism.

I’ve argued elsewhere recently that freelance writers should stop thinking of the word as their primary unit of value. In the same way, journalists in general may want to stop thinking of the article as their basic unit of output. That’s not to not say that freelancers should stop using words, or that journalists should stop producing articles. Those items are still essential to the craft. But they are not the only or necessarily the best way to help people understand the world. If journalists aren’t open to real-time formats like liveblogging and Twitter, they are failing both themselves and their audience.