But did you know: As Vox makes its card stacks embeddable anywhere on the Web, Vox is working with McClatchy to bring their explainers to readers on McClatchy’s 29 local news sites. On Thursday, McClatchy began including card stacks in relevant national and world stories, which are then distributed to the company’s local and regional newspapers. Julie Moos, McClatchy’s director of shared news initiatives, says the card stacks will help add an additional layer of context to stories: “It’s a great opportunity to learn from a company that has been innovating in digital ways that are going to allow us to do things that we couldn’t otherwise do.”
Zach Kitschke, Canva’s head of communications, says that as the Internet becomes a shouting match, it’s not about who shouts the loudest but who shouts the smartest. To make people stay on the page, share your article and remember what they read, Kitschke says visuals are essential. People only retain 20 percent of what they read, but if you put that information into an image, retention jumps to 80 percent.
Media banker Lorna Tilbian believes that there’s cause for optimism in the newspaper industry as digital advertising revenues grow. While acknowledging the challenges that have hit the newspaper industry, Tilbian says the industry is headed toward a rebound in display advertising. Tilbian says: “I believe that the next decade will see newspapers move away from a free ad-funded model towards a diverse range of online business models appropriate to the publisher’s readership base.”
New technologies hold potential for new ways to serve customers, but established companies can find it difficult to abandon the technologies they’ve used for so long. To spur the adoption of new technologies, Willy C. Shih says established organizations should encourage experimentation with new tools and methods. Shih also recommends designing systems so that they can be easily upgraded and can adapt to new opportunities.
The Apple Watch is representative of a new class of devices that demand customized experiences for their users, which Joshua Benton says will expose how little publishers know about their readers. While only a small share of news consumers will have a smartwatch in the near future, Benton notes that the first generation of news apps for the Apple Watch are shallow in content and clumsy to navigate, showing a lack of understanding of what works on wearables. Benton says: “The problem the watch outlines … is a very real one. It’s a problem for advertisers; it’s a problem for building audience; it’s a problem for customizing information that meets readers’ needs.”
Eric Nuzum, NPR’s outgoing programming VP, has big plans for the future of Audible.com in his new role as its senior VP for original content. His ideas range from a documentary series to a game show, but he also wants Audible to help audio producers do groundbreaking work. Nuzum says he wants Audible to become, “the place where … top-shelf creative talent come to do the best work of their lives, and not have to worry about how to market it or pay for it.”
But did you know:Vox is partnering with McClatchy to bring its explainers to local readers (Poynter)
As Vox makes its card stacks embeddable anywhere on the Web, Vox is working with McClatchy to bring their explainers to readers on McClatchy’s 29 local news sites. On Thursday, McClatchy began including card stacks in relevant national and world stories, which are then distributed to the company’s local and regional newspapers. Julie Moos, McClatchy’s director of shared news initiatives, says the card stacks will help add an additional layer of context to stories: “It’s a great opportunity to learn from a company that has been innovating in digital ways that are going to allow us to do things that we couldn’t otherwise do.”
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The week in fact-checking As part of our fact-checking journalism project, Jane Elizabeth highlights stories worth noting related to truth in politics and on the internet. This week’s round-up includes the history behind Jeb Bush’s nickname, fact-checking a beauty pageant, and an independent fact-checking website funded entirely by donations.
Why visual communication remains a vital skill for journalists (Huffington Post)
Zach Kitschke, Canva’s head of communications, says that as the Internet becomes a shouting match, it’s not about who shouts the loudest but who shouts the smartest. To make people stay on the page, share your article and remember what they read, Kitschke says visuals are essential. People only retain 20 percent of what they read, but if you put that information into an image, retention jumps to 80 percent.
+ Why journalism needs to move away from the “single story”: “By painting a fuller picture of what’s happening in a community or in a person’s life, our stories can more accurately reflect the beauty and range of diversity” (ivoh)
UK media banker predicts that newspapers ‘will not only survive, but prosper’ (Guardian)
Media banker Lorna Tilbian believes that there’s cause for optimism in the newspaper industry as digital advertising revenues grow. While acknowledging the challenges that have hit the newspaper industry, Tilbian says the industry is headed toward a rebound in display advertising. Tilbian says: “I believe that the next decade will see newspapers move away from a free ad-funded model towards a diverse range of online business models appropriate to the publisher’s readership base.”
How to break free from legacy technologies (Harvard Business Review)
New technologies hold potential for new ways to serve customers, but established companies can find it difficult to abandon the technologies they’ve used for so long. To spur the adoption of new technologies, Willy C. Shih says established organizations should encourage experimentation with new tools and methods. Shih also recommends designing systems so that they can be easily upgraded and can adapt to new opportunities.
Whether or not the Apple Watch is a big hit, it will expose how little publishers know about their readers (Nieman Lab)
The Apple Watch is representative of a new class of devices that demand customized experiences for their users, which Joshua Benton says will expose how little publishers know about their readers. While only a small share of news consumers will have a smartwatch in the near future, Benton notes that the first generation of news apps for the Apple Watch are shallow in content and clumsy to navigate, showing a lack of understanding of what works on wearables. Benton says: “The problem the watch outlines … is a very real one. It’s a problem for advertisers; it’s a problem for building audience; it’s a problem for customizing information that meets readers’ needs.”
Eric Nuzum’s plans for Audible: Make it a place where people come to do their best work without worrying about paying for it (Current)
Eric Nuzum, NPR’s outgoing programming VP, has big plans for the future of Audible.com in his new role as its senior VP for original content. His ideas range from a documentary series to a game show, but he also wants Audible to help audio producers do groundbreaking work. Nuzum says he wants Audible to become, “the place where … top-shelf creative talent come to do the best work of their lives, and not have to worry about how to market it or pay for it.”
This editorial will be published in the June 8 edition of The Weekly Standard.
Buried deep in the House version of this year’s defense authorization is a brief provision that has great potential to improve and accelerate the way the armed services buy weapons—yes, an actual reform of Pentagon procurement. The irony is that this reform would mark a reversal of past “reforms” that helped make the current acquisition system such a mess.
The provision in question is “Section 851. Additional Responsibility for Director of Operational Test and Evaluation.” The nub of the matter is that the Pentagon’s chief test officer now must “consider the potential for increases in program cost estimates or delays in schedule estimates in the implementation of policies, procedures, and activities related to operational test and evaluation.” And not only that, he “shall take appropriate action to ensure that operational test and evaluation activities do not unnecessarily increase program costs or impede program schedules.” In other words, the physician should first do no harm.
The Pentagon testing office has, alas, been a Mengele-like menace almost since its creation in 1983. “Unnecessarily increasing costs and impeding program schedules” could almost be its mission statement. When he took office as Army chief of staff, Gen. Raymond Odierno explained the nature of the problem: “Sometimes we have tests that are done by the private industry and yet we redo the tests because we have to meet certain regulations and requirements.” Not surprisingly, he added, “I think those are areas that we could look at that could reduce those costs significantly.”
The testing office was a product of the “military reform” movement in -the 1980s, the work of a small band of Pentagon contrarians who were -convinced the “gold-plated” platforms of the Reagan buildup—the M1 tank, say, or the F-15 fighter, or the Aegis destroyer—were too sophisticated to function in wartime conditions. This proposition offered the appearance of reasoned opposition to Democrats like Gary Hart, who wished to slow defense spending without appearing too dovish. In 1986, Hart wrote triumphantly in the New York Times: “Five years ago, military reform was the province of a small band of iconoclasts in the Senate. Now the need for broad changes in the way we train, equip, and deploy our conventional forces has become conventional wisdom.” He was right: The Congressional Military Reform Caucus counted 130 members.
Creating an “operational” test office that would subject new weapons designs to supposedly “realistic” battlefield conditions was the reformers’ principal goal. “Strengthening operational testing,” promised Hart, “will give us more effective weapons at lower cost.” It was a tastes-great-less-filling argument that seemed plausible and, after the 1986 midterm elections returned the Senate to Democratic control, proved unstoppable. Reagan’s defense secretary Caspar Weinberger waited more than a year after Congress mandated the creation of the test office to appoint a director, and when he finally did, he chose former McDonnell Douglas F-15 test pilot Jack Krings for the job.
One of the first targets for the test office was the Army’s Bradley Fighting Vehicle. What originated as a complex debate about the role of mechanized infantry on a high-technology conventional battlefield quickly degenerated into a morality tale. A retired Air Force colonel, James Burton, was charged with the task, and he argued that unless the tests were rigorous, “soldiers in battle could die unnecessarily.” Senator William Roth—a moderate Republican from Delaware and a World War II vet—demanded the “Army must submit the troop carrier to realistic tests in a combat environment.” The New York Times was filled with righteous fury, charging the Army and Pentagon leadership with negligence:
The Bradley was a rolling powder keg; the Army knew it, and the brass wanted to avoid the live-fire tests because they knew a single Soviet antitank round could pierce the Bradley’s skin, blow up its stores of fuel and ammunition and burn its crew to death. Worse, in the view of some inside the Pentagon, Congress would get wind of all this and cancel the program.
Amid the controversy, Burton eventually was given carte blanche to conduct the tests. But, as a subsequent study of the program revealed, that meant “tests where the Bradley would stand, fully loaded and engine running, against overmatches, attacks with U.S. and Russian munitions that would clearly destroy the vehicle.” Tied like a lamb to the altar and smacked with a big weapon designed to kill fully armored main battle tanks, the Bradley—wait for it—blew up.
The M1 Abrams tank was likewise a favorite target of 1980s reformers. In early 1990—that is, about a year before Operation Desert Storm—Dina Rasor, head of the Project on Military Procurement (now the Project on Government Oversight), obtained data from the Army’s tests on the Abrams. She concluded that the M1 “will travel an average of only about 44 miles before something breaks.” She also argued that it had been a mistake to power the tank with a turbine engine and that, overall, the 1950s-era M60 was a better tank. The M1 was an “expensive loser.”
Desert Storm took much of the wind out of the reformers’ simpler-is-better sails. Not only did the U.S. forces equipped with M1 and Bradley make it through the famous “Left Hook” maneuver, they rapidly and with almost no loss destroyed the Iraqi Republican Guard units they encountered. An even bigger setback was the happy result of the air war: The F-15 dominated the skies, and its radar-guided missiles—another technology the reformers claimed was too sophisticated to ever work—accounted for the vast majority of the air-to-air kills.
But Hart was correct: Conventional wisdom was not rebuttable. And so the operational test office lived to fight another day and remains dedicated to proving that a big enough weapon can destroy anything. The latest program to fall victim to the testers’ logic is the Navy’s Littoral Combat Ship. The LCS is—as the name suggests—a smallish, 3,000-ton vessel intended for use in coastal waters. The LCS was originally called the “Streetfighter” and was itself a “reform” effort intended to wean the Navy from its addiction to ever-bigger and more exotic surface combatants. The Navy balked at the idea and eventually redesigned the LCS to be more survivable, but that—among other things—increased the cost and slowed the program.
Given the opportunity, the test office has attacked the LCS by arguing that a recent “shock test” in “near combat conditions,” such as a mine detonation, showed “resiliency” problems for the ship. This is, essentially, a repeat of the Bradley tests but with water added. As with the Bradley, the point of the LCS is to avoid a hit, not stand still and slug it out. But, as the blog Next Navy bitterly observes, the test office “has gamed the LCS and the Navy quite well. By forging a temporary alliance with the Navy’s resident LCS-haters, [the test office] must be absolutely giddy about the prospect of strangling the LCS after the first block buy. Nothing validates a tester more than a program kill.” And, in fact, former defense secretary Chuck Hagel, feeling the pressure of budget cuts and sequestration, limited the LCS buy to 32 rather than the 52 ships the Navy had set as the program minimum. Not surprisingly, the per-ship cost of the LCS continues to rise.
In sum, the operational test and evaluation office’s only purpose can be to say no. It is the ultimate in unaccountable bureaucracy: It has no responsibility for fielding anything, or for making the inevitable trade-offs in designs, or even for reckoning the costs of time lost in fielding weaponry. It was conceived in error and continues to make mischief and increase the cost of all it touches. By insisting on randomizing its test conditions—supposedly to replicate the uncertainties of combat—it limits their utility to weapons designers, who need to control tests in order to harvest the most useful insights.
Krings, who passed away last year, summarized the paradox of the office from the start. “There are people in the Congress who don’t think that any test is really valid until you have a real live operational unit in a real live scenario. Well, that means you have to wait until [a system] is pretty grown-up, and therefore you have invested a lot of money.” In other words, the only real battlefield test is the battlefield itself. Randomly blowing things up is not a test of survivability.
But only Congress can undo what Congress has done, and that’s particularly hard when Congress feels virtuous. It’s hardest when the Senate is pleased with itself, and from the beginning the Senate has been infatuated with the Pentagon’s test office—You do think it’s right to test weapons before we send our forces into harm’s way, don’t you? The Armed Services Committee has marked up its version of the defense bill, and it does not include any provision like the one passed by the House. The House language, which basically wants the test office to reckon the opportunity costs it creates, is a pretty mild measure. But it would be a sea-change in the meaning of defense “reform,” a first unraveling of the regulatory mindset that’s made such a mess of Pentagon procurement.
Thomas Donnelly is co-director of the Marilyn Ware Center for Security Studies at the American Enterprise Institute.
Tsai Ing-wen, leader of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) and her party’s candidate for president of Taiwan, will have her work cut out for her when she arrives in the United States at the end of May. She will aim to show voters back home that she can represent Taiwan effectively on the international stage, can advance the island’s interests, and can competently handle Taiwan’s relationship with Washington, Taipei’s most important security partner.
Tsai’s task is particularly tricky as she must convince Washington that, as president, she would not pursue de jure independence, while being careful not to stray too far from her party’s pro-independence leanings. Although Beijing continues to view Taiwan as a “renegade province,” separated from the mainland at the end of the Chinese civil war in 1949, the island is for all intents and purposes an independent state, completely autonomous from the mainland and a representative democracy to boot. Even so, the current Taiwanese administration, headed by the Kuomintang (KMT), retains the view that there is only “one China,” which includes the island of Taiwan.
Unfortunately for Tsai, whether her visit counts as a success will not be entirely up to her. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP), which maintains a party-to-party relationship with the ruling Kuomintang, has long been wary of the independence-leaning DPP. Beijing has already begun warning Tsai not to engage in “pro-independence” activities while in the United States. Just last week, China’s Taiwan Affairs Office issued a statement, explaining “we firmly oppose any person engaging in any form of ‘Taiwan independence’ separatist activities in the international arena.”
But Tsai is not necessarily the primary target of such admonitions. These statements from Beijing are as much about shaping American reactions to the candidate as they are about shaping the candidate’s own positions. China has succeeded in convincing much of U.S. foreign policy officialdom that cross-Strait relations will remain stable as long as Taiwan does not rock the boat. Statements like the recent one from the Taiwan Affairs Office are designed to remind U.S. policymakers of the difficulties that arose between Washington and Taipei the last time a DPP politician, Chen Shui-bian, was president of Taiwan (2000-2008). Indeed, Chinese diplomats are undoubtedly repeating the message ad nauseum during in-person meetings with Washington officials. Beijing will pounce on any remarks from her that suggest a divergence from Taipei’s current conciliatory approach to the mainland.
Unfortunately, the Obama administration has proven itself susceptible to this sort of Chinese shaping operation. While Tsai Ing-wen was visiting Washington during her last run for president in 2011, a senior administration official went out of his way to undermine her campaign, tellingFinancial Times, “she left us with distinct doubts about whether she is both willing and able to continue the stability in cross-Strait relations the region has enjoyed in recent years.” Worse still, according to the official, Tsai and her team did not “fully appreciate the depth of [Chinese] mistrust of her motives and DPP aspirations.”
But one wonders in turn if the Obama administration fully understands the depth, within Taiwan, of popular mistrust of Beijing, which has made no secret of its intention to unify the strategically located island with the mainland, by force if necessary. It was a little over a year ago that the “Sunflower Movement”—a coalition of student and civic groups in Taiwan—brought the Taiwanese government to a virtual halt in protest of a cross-Strait trade agreement that it believed was being pushed through the legislature without serious review. It might be conventional wisdom in Washington that the island and the mainland are headed toward an inevitable convergence, but, if election results and polls in Taiwan are taken seriously, this would be news to the people of Taiwan.
Tsai is undoubtedly in a difficult spot. Because the relationship with the United States looms so large in Taiwan, Tsai has to visit Washington as part of her presidential campaign. On the other hand, she has reason to worry that a less-than-amicable reception might be in store for her in what should be the friendliest of foreign capitals.
Taiwan’s DDP presidential candidate has to show that she won’t rock the boat… while remaining committed to her party’s principles.
Ironically, Tsai’s best bet to ensure the visit is a success may be to make the case that cross-Strait relations are not nearly as stable as they appear; that she has a realistic understanding of how far and how quickly Taiwan’s domestic politics will allow ties with the mainland to advance; and that a policy based on such an assessment is the most likely to avert miscalculations and unrealistic expectations in Beijing, thus contributing to greater stability. As she has put it, if president, she intends to manage cross-Strait relations on the basis of “maintaining the status quo…in a way that avoids surprises,” but to do so on “a more sustainable, more democratic track.”
Still, the onus is on the Obama administration to avoid taking sides in Taiwan’s presidential election as it did so publicly in 2011. The United States should value its democratic partners precisely because they are democratic. Undermining the democratic processes in friendly states will only serve to undermine, over the long-term, a U.S. foreign policy that supposedly favors freedom’s global advance.
Michael Mazza is research fellow in foreign and defense policy studies and Gary Schmitt is director of the Marilyn Ware Center for Security Studies at the American Enterprise Institute.
The American Press Institute presents a roundup from the world of fact checking, debunking and truth telling — just in case you haven’t been paying as much attention as we do.
Quote of the week
“If Mark Twain were around he would have to modify his famous aphorism about ‘lies, damned lies, and statistics’ to add another category of lies — reporter’s attempts at fact-checking politicians.” Max Boot, writing in Commentary magazine.
Fact-checking: Not just for politics
Throw a bunch of beauty-contest words, phrases and prizes into the air and see how it lands: It’ll probably look something like the “National American Miss” contest, which has been contacting young girls and their parents about the organization’s upcoming pageant. The Washington Post’s Fact Checker dives into a brochure from the organization’s officials and helps them with some math problems. Read it.
Try fact-checking at home
While watching the premiere of the disaster film “San Andreas,” U.S. Geological Survey seismologist Dr. Lucy Jones fact-checked the film on Twitter with a lively stream of advice (“Yes! Drop, cover & hold on!”); observations (“The competent young woman understands vertical evacuation”), and a conclusion: Don’t learn seismology from Hollywood. Read it.
First big safety message- if the shaking is bad enough to damage a dam you won’t be able to run
Extreme fact-checking
What, precisely, is the meaning of “extremely likely”? For those who doubt that climate change is mostly man-made, the Tucson Sentinel fact-checked phrases in the United Nations climate change report to help explain the science to non-scientists. Like Jeb Bush. Read it.
Fact-checking the 2016 Election
Jeb Bush. Maybe you know him by one of his favorite nicknames: Veto Corleone — a reference to Marlon Brando’s character in “The Godfather” films. PolitiFact Florida fact-checks the history behind that nickname and whether Bush lives up to his legacy as a serial line-item vetoer. Read it.
Fact-checking under attack
One commentator thinks he knows what’s “influencing” the conclusions made by fact-checking journalists. Surprisingly, it’s not because they’re secret socialists, communists, leftists, rightists, centrists or other-ists. Watch it.
What? Something is fake on the internet?
The silly “Charlie Charlie Challenge” making the social media circuit is really nothing more than a cheap Ouija board for tweens who’ve blown their allowance on One Direction single tracks. But the game’s origins in south-of-the-border satanism was challenged by fact-checkers who thought a Mexican demon named “Charlie” sounded a little odd. Read it.
Research The latest “It’s all Journalism” podcast features former Washington Post and NPR editor Mark Stencel, who discusses his American Press Institute report on politicians’ reactions to fact-checking. He also expresses his desire to expand fact-checking to other topics — specifically, sports trash-talking. Listen to it.
Fact-checking around the world
FactsCan, a new Canadian fact-checking organization we wrote about in February, has launched its new web site — and it was built entirely through donations from those who appreciate the founders’ independent fact-checking efforts. See it. And FactCheck.org, the non-profit fact-checking organization that encourages free use of their content, has expanded its audience — into Argentina. Chequeado translated and published a SciCheck article on global warming. Read it.
For media organizations: It’s not quite as magical as “Charlie Charlie,” but our Metrics for News tool can help you predict how readers will respond to your content. Want to see how your fact-checking and investigative journalism impacts your audience? Contact us.
