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Newsies beat bloggers? Some caveats on memetracker study

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news-cycle-image2

A new study examines the interplay of mainstream news outlets and blogs in forming the news cycle. One of its findings is that, as a report by Steve Lohr in today’s Times puts it, “For the most part, the traditional news outlets lead and the blogs follow, typically by 2.5 hours.”

This story won’t buck that trend. Lohr’s piece was posted online last night and my post here follows by about 10 hours or so. One reason for this is that I slept through the night. Another is that I decided to actually read the study before posting.

The study — Meme-tracking and the Dynamics of the News Cycle, by Jure Leskovec, Lars Backstron and Jon Kleinberg — is fascinating work; though I’m not qualified to assess its math, I found it careful and thoughtful in its approach to the subject. But before its core finding coalesces into a hardened soundbite — “pros beat bloggers by 2.5 hours!” — I want to offer some cautions and raise some red flags.

The most important caveat is that the study isn’t really tracking “news.” It looks at the propagation of specific quotations in news and blog coverage of the final three months of the 2008 election cycle. In other words, it’s tracking soundbite phrases — like “lipstick on a pig” and “palling around with terrorists.”

Such phrases are sometimes proxies for real news but most often they’re just part of the partisan slagfest. The memetracker study emphasizes the trivial at the expense of the substantive. In its world, if there’s no brief quotation that sums up a particular story, the story doesn’t exist.

Last fall, surely, the biggest story of all was the near-collapse of our financial system. In the study, this story is represented by a few phrases like “our entire economy is in danger” and “fundamentals of our economy are strong.” While these phrases are reasonable ways to track the language the candidates used to discuss the crisis, they don’t provide any hooks for understanding the extraordinary outpouring of explanation and analysis of an extremely complex story in both the mainstream media and the econo-blogosphere.

The researchers find that the news cycle is governed by two factors: “imitation” and “recency.” In other words, phrases rise in prominence because media and blogs copy one another, and fall as individual phrases age. This is a useful model, but it leaves no room for valuing originality in coverage. (No surprise, since it’s looking exclusively at quotations.) Both traditional news organizations and bloggers place great value on getting a story that no one else has, or expressing a point of view that can’t be found anywhere else. Most of us — bloggers and pro journalists alike — assume that originality drives attention. But the memetracking research is biased against originality, and it simply excludes material that doesn’t hang off the soundbite quotes of public figures, so it offers no help assessing whether we’re right in that assumption.

One of the central argument of my book Say Everything is that blogs have enhanced our culture by extending the width and depth of public dialogue. But the memetracker researchers’ focus on quoted phrases excludes such contributions.

As for that 2.5-hour lag: since the study focuses on quotations as a sort of genetic marker for ongoing news threads in election coverage, of course the traditional media are going to have the jump on bloggers. They’re following the politicians around with microphones and notebooks. The study did find that, 3.5 percent of the time, phrases are injected into the news cycle first by blogs and then picked up by traditional news outlets. It’s certainly possible that this pattern would be found to apply outside of election news, and with a wider set of stories than those defined by political quotations. But we don’t know that.

Another limitation of the study: It misses the interplay between both traditional media and blogs on the one hand, and the two other vast channels through which soundbites propagate, cable news outlets and social networks like Twitter and Facebook.

Finally, the study relies on Google News to draw a boundary between the news media and blogs. A site that appears in Google News is considered media; everything else is a blog. While this approach is convenient, it ends up slicing off some of the top layer of the blogosphere in arbitrary ways: for instance, Gawker and Daily Kos end up as “media” rather than blogs, but Talking Points Memo is a blog.

I think the study’s authors are being careful about not overreaching in their claims for their research. Kleinberg tells Lohr: “You can see this kind of research as further elevating the role of sound bites… But what we’re doing is more using them as the approximation for ideas and story lines… We don’t view quotes as the most important object, but algorithms can capture quotes.”

Nonetheless, I fully expect to see it taken as conventional wisdom from this point forward that “news starts with the traditional media and then moves into the blogosphere.” Perhaps the Memetracker folks can follow the phrase “2.5 hours” and show us exactly how that happens.

[You can find neat visualizations of the data from the study at a companion site, memetracker.org, from which I inserted the image at the top of this post.]

BONUS LINK: Chris Anderson outlines his research into the news cycle. Anderson took one story, followed it through the maze of coverage online and in print. It’s what he calls a “qualitative” approach to complement the Memetracker study’s quantitative work.

UPDATE/CORRECTION: I wrote above that Talking Points Memo would be considered a blog by the study because I couldn’t find any posts from it on Google News, but Zach Seward at Nieman Lab did (here). I’m further confused by the study’s description of the list of “early reporters” of many stories as being “blogs and independent media sites” including HotAir.com and Talking Points. This whole business of dividing the world between blogs and traditional media is, as Mark Glaser argues in the comments to Seward’s piece, increasingly difficult to pursue or defend.

“Images are not a representation of reality”

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Last Sunday the NY Times mag ran a photo feature on abandoned, half-built real estate projects — casualties of the big bust. The pictures were stunningly otherwordly — eerily lit, human-free canvases of financial devastation. Dayna, my wife, handed me the magazine and asked, “Are these computer generated?” They had, she added, an uncanny-valleyish feel.

The feature noted that photographer Edgar Martins “creates his images with long exposures but without digital manipulation.” Now it turns out the Times has removed the photos from its website and posted an embarrassing editor’s note admitting that the photos had been “digitally manipulated: “Most of the images,” the editors wanly declare, “did not wholly reflect the reality they purported to show.” It seems that, in some sort of misguided effort to create more pleasing images, Martins duplicated and then flipped portions of some photos to create a barely perceptible mirror image: a sort of fearful — but now, we know, bogus — symmetry.

As I read up on the controversy (here’s the original conversation on Metafilter that exposed the matter, here’s Simon Owens’ account of how that happened, and here’s some photographic detail) I had two thoughts: One, sounds like this photographer didn’t come clean to his editors, and that’s unprofessional and probably unforgivable. But, two: the images did not wholly reflect the reality they purported to show? Huh? Does any image? Can any image? Or article, or representation of any sort?

Before I get any more Borgesian on you, let me point you back to the interviews I did with the photographer and multimedia artist Pedro Meyer back in the early 90s — one from the San Francisco Examiner, and one from Wired. (Please note that the Wired piece got mangled somewhere between the magazine and the Web; the intro paragraph appears at the end.)

This, from the Examiner piece:

Pedro Meyer points to one of his photographs and says, “Tell me what’s been altered in this picture.”

The photo shows a huge wooden chair on a pedestal – a Brobdingnagian seat that looms over the buildings in the background with the displaced mystery of an Easter Island sculpture.

It’s difficult to say what’s going on here: A trompe l’oeil perspective trick? Or the product of digital special effects?

Meyer is a serious artist and philosopher of technology, but today he’s playing a little game of “what’s wrong with this picture?”… The truth about the chair photo is that it’s a “straight” image: It’s just a really big chair.

Meyer says he took the shot outside an old furniture factory in Washington, D.C. But the self-evidently transformed pictures that surround it in his exhibit – like that of a pint-sized old woman on a checkerboard table carrying a torch toward an angelic girl many times her size – call its accuracy into question. We stare and distrust our eyes.

So is Pedro Meyer, who started out as a traditional documentary photographer, out to subvert our faith in the photographic image, our notion that “pictures never lie”? You better believe it.

“I think it’s very important for people to realize that images are not a representation of reality,” Meyer says. “The sooner that myth is destroyed and buried, the better for society all around.”

[You can see that chair photo in the “Truths and Fictions” gallery available off this page — click through to screen 26.]

And this, from the Wired interview:

I’m not suggesting that a photograph cannot be trustworthy. But it isn’t trustworthy simply because it’s a picture. It is trustworthy if someone we trust made it.

You’re interviewing me right now, you’re taking notes and taping the conversation, and at the end you will sit down and edit. You won’t be able to put in everything we talked about: you’ll highlight some things over others. Somebody reading your piece in a critical sense will understand that your value judgments shape it. That’s perfectly legitimate. Turn it around: let me take a portrait of you, and suddenly people say, That’s the way he was.

We don’t trust words because they’re words, but we trust pictures because they’re pictures. That’s crazy. It’s our responsibility to investigate the truth, to approach images with care and caution.

After learning what Meyer was trying to teach me, I can’t get too huffy about Martins’ work. There is no sharp easy line between photos that are “manipulated” and those that aren’t; there is a spectrum of practice, and when a photo is cropped or artificially lit or color-adjusted or sharpened or filtered in any way it is already being manipulated, even if Photoshop is never employed. Martins’ pictures are beautiful and arresting, and if he’d simply told the world what he was up to, I don’t think anyone would be too upset.

Of course, if Martins had been forthright the Times would probably not have printed his work, because it has an institutional commitment to, I guess, attempt to “wholly reflect” reality. Somehow.

I don’t demand that of photographers or journalists or newspapers. I just ask them to tell me what they’re up to. As David Weinberger put it at the Personal Democracy Forum: “Transparency is the new objectivity.”

Every newspaper is a glass house

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The halls of professional journalism rang out with schadenfreude-fueled howls of derision this week at the Washington Post’s ludicrously misbegotten “salon” scheme. (Catch up with the story here if you’re out of the loop.) That the Post’s publisher would have even considered trying to turn her living room into a sort of influence-peddling bazaar has shocked, shocked everyone in its newsroom and most journalists outside.

Of course it was a bad idea. Arguably the Post did even more damage to its credibility in trying to explain itself than it did with the original concept — as for instance with the declaration that a beautifully designed and widely distributed flyer was a “draft.” (Surely the paper of Watergate record understands the old adage about the coverup being worse than the crime? Maybe not.)

But before the critiques gets too self-righteous, let’s recall that the blurring of editorial and business lines is happening everywhere. Magazine journalism is full of it. We will see even more of it as the business of print publishing continues to decay and publishers scramble for revenue. The Post’s “salons” aren’t the first instance of this kind of aggressive monetization of a journalistic reputation, and they won’t be the last. Because, alas, integrity doesn’t pay for health insurance. I say that with no glee, but rather as someone who fought countless similar battles over the years at Salon — mostly, I’m happy to say, winning ones — to keep the lines from blurring too far.

The Post’s hamfisted exercise in influence-peddling was a sitting duck the moment it became public. It’s the more obscure and fuzzy integrity questions that can be more dangerous to a publication’s credibility over time. I’m thinking of the questions that popped into my head as I read a recent New York Times profile of a society wife named Lisa Marie Falcone. About halfway into the piece, the writer informs us that Falcone is married to a man named Philip Falcone whose hedge fund “owns about 20 percent of The New York Times Company.” Whoa! (The story also tells us that Falcone became a billionaire by betting against subprime mortgages. So while the government was busy bailing out the financial firms that had made the stupid bets in the mortgage market, the cash went right into the pockets of the people who’d made the smart bets — presumably, the Falcones of the world.)

Is there any direct connection between Falcone’s stake in the Times and the article I read? Probably not — but who really knows? The piece’s problematic scent is unmistakable; you can’t help thinking that every word it uses to describe its subject — “wide-eyed idealism,” “quirky, independent” — had to have been agonized over. And that awareness on the reader’s part that something is off about the piece makes it unsatisfying and opaque. Whatever the story behind the story is, we’re not getting it.

The dance of awkward partial disclosure performed by journalists given the unenviable job of writing about their owners is even more painful to watch than the ritual self-lashings of an institution caught, as the Post was, in straightforward acts of corruption. I can’t help thinking that one remedy for both species of trust-eroding behavior is for newsrooms to get way more serious about transparency — which is a fancy way of saying they should be honest, forthright and open. Journalists have the opportunity to model for the rest of the world the behavior their work demands of others: tell the truth; don’t hide from questions; reveal your practices and processes; and if you screw up, tell all, fast.

The Times profile of Falcone concludes with this quote from her: ““I speak from my heart… I know that sometimes can get me in trouble. But that’s the only way I know how to be.” On the basis of the Times piece I actually think Falcone is hardly a paragon of “speaking from the heart.” But it would be nice if more journalists, editors and publishers understood how valuable “speaking from the heart” can be today. And if they did, we might pile on them a little less mercilessly on those occasions when they screw up.

Another Say Everything excerpt: Journalists vs. Bloggers

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Today: a second full-chapter excerpt from Say Everything for your consideration. This time, it’s Chapter Nine: Journalists vs. Bloggers. (Previously I’ve posted the introduction and Chapter One, the story of Justin Hall.)

I have been writing about the tormented relationship between journalists and bloggers for a decade. When I reached the part of Say Everything that involved chronicling this long relationship, part of me quailed: Oh, no — not again!

Then I started writing and everything came together: 10,000 words or so of my effort to wrangle this sprawling subject into a single narrative.

A side note: My reflex in naming the chapter was to write, “Bloggers vs. Journalists.” But after finishing it, I realized that over time, the preponderance of the aggression in this relationship has shifted. Once upon a time, certainly, you would find bloggers on the attack more frequently, and journalists simply going about their business. Today, I think, the situation is more frequently reversed. Thus the ordering of the title.

Salon.com IPO: It was ten years ago today

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Ten years ago today, Salon.com, the website I helped found in 1995 along with a group of colleagues from the San Francisco Examiner under the leadership of David Talbot, went public. We raised $25 million in an IPO that, from the vantage of a decade later, looks mirage-like in its improbability.

Today, of course, a Web company with little to offer besides some (extremely good) original content could never raise $25 million from investors, right? Actually, it seems to happen again and again. Strangely, this is a road that others continue to charge down with, apparently, only a vague sense of the history or the pitfalls.

One of the things we were proudest of about Salon’s IPO was the open, Dutch-auction style approach taken by our lead investment bank, W.R. Hambrecht & Co. (Jim Surowiecki wrote about the approach in Slate.) Hambrecht’s idea was to make the entire IPO process more fair and transparent by allowing investors to participate in setting the opening price in public through a novel auction approach. Our choice of this model was later vindicated when another little Silicon Valley company named Google adopted it for its own IPO in 2004.

Other things about that era are, certainly, painful to contemplate from this distance. The idea of using the IPO proceeds to go on a hiring binge looks insane, in retrospect — even though it was “what everyone else was doing” and it was what the company had explicitly promised investors it was going to do with their money. Almost precisely one year after the IPO, Salon, having grown to roughly 140 employees, would begin the first of several rounds of layoffs that eventually returned the company to the rational size it has remained at, roughly, to this day. (Read Gary Kamiya’s piece on Salon history from the site’s tenth anniversary in 2005 for more on all this.)

As I’ve written, during the dotcom bubble I was a father of newborn twins, and I spent much of the era in a haze of caffeine and adrenaline. Meanwhile, the pace of decision-making at Salon at the time was crazy — we were one small precinct of an entire industrial outbreak of madness. One conclusion I’ve drawn from that experience for myself is: never rely on a vehicle that’s moving too fast to steer. (And no, to answer a question some will probably have, I never made a cent on the offering myself: insiders weren’t allowed to sell stock at first, and by the time we were allowed to, the price had already begun to plummet. Besides, I really did believe in the company’s future.)

Salon survived, against the predictions of a chorus of schadenfreude-driven critics, and found its place as the Web resumed its growth from the post-bust rubble. I left the company two years ago to work on Say Everything, but I’m proud of the project I conceived and developed in my final year there, Open Salon. Under Kerry Lauerman’s leadership it has emerged as a true community of writers and readers — in some ways, fulfilling the original concept of Salon that David Talbot articulated in 1995 even more fully than the old-school Salon site.

Every post I’m writing here at Wordyard these days is mirrored over at my Open Salon blog (as well as on Facebook and other services). Write once, publish everywhere, talk with people anywhere they want to engage with you: not a concept that would have made it into a 1999 IPO prospectus, but one that makes a lot of simple Web sense today.

Peggy Noonan to Silicon Valley: cut out the silly names

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At the end of an otherwise reasonable column about the Iranian uprising Peggy Noonan went off the deep end again yesterday. First she unleashed her inner Edmund Burke, dialing the Wayback Machine to the 1790s to try to reimagine the excesses of the French Revolution ricocheting around the world via Twitter. She asks, “Would Thomas Jefferson have been able to continue his blithe indifference if reports of France grimly murdering France had been Twittered out each day?” Hey, Tom — forget about the allies who just helped you win independence. Never mind your own revolutionary experience. Disavow those tumbrels!

This spasm of Noonanity is immediately followed by another, even sillier one, an observation on the inconsiderate naming habits of technological innovators:

The great question is what modern technology can do not in the short term so much as the long. It is not the friend of entrenched tyranny. Connected to which, it would be nice if the technologies of the future were not given babyish names. Twitter, Google, Facebook, etc., have come to be crucial and historically consequential tools, and yet to refer to them is to talk baby talk. In the future could inventors please keep the weight and dignity of history in mind?

That’s right, Sergei and Larry, Ev and Biz, Zuckerberg et al: Listen to your old aunt Peggy. Stop making fools of yourselves. Every time you give one of your companies a wacky name, you are sabotaging the gravitas of pundits everywhere. Just stop it, kids, now: you’re making the talking heads look silly!

MediaBugs: a Knight News Challenge winner

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This qualifies as “woohoo!” level news: my entry in the Knight News Challenge is one of the winners this year (announced today).

The project is called MediaBugs. The plan is to build a Web service that’s like an open-source project’s bug tracker, but aimed at correcting errors and resolving problems with media coverage. You can read an FAQ about MediaBugs here.

It’s an idea I’ve been talking about for a long time. (I posted briefly about my application last fall.) I’m grateful to the Knight Foundation for giving us a chance to see how the idea will actually pan out. It’s a two-year grant; we’ll be starting a pilot project in the San Francisco Bay Area later this year.

I’m at Knight’s Future of News and Civic Media conference now and for the rest of this week. Much more on this before long. With this grant and the July 7 release date of Say Everything, this is turning out to be a very busy — and happy — time indeed.

All is flux

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I’m at the Oakland Airport waiting for a flight. They’re rebuilding the terminal here to accommodate fancier and doubtless more expensive concessions. The seating area near the gate for my flight was crowded, and I was early, so I moved to a less crowded area down the hall. Twenty minutes later, I looked up and saw that the flight’s gate had been changed: I was now sitting five feet from my plane’s departure doorway. I’d been stationary; the situation had just moved in my direction.

When I was studying software development, I learned that smart developers build products not for the market as it exists at the time but for where they think the market is going to be in the future. This wisdom recalls the famous hockey saying about skating not to where the puck is but where it’s going to be.

I’ve been thinking about these ideas as I watch the news industry struggle with changes that it could have (and should have) foreseen years ago. For me, making the transition from newsprint to digital in 1995 looked like the obvious thing to do — surely that was where the puck was heading, right? What surprises me today is not that the media-industry meltdown is happening but that it has taken so long to happen.

I recently discovered the wonderful game Fluxx, which I’ve been playing with my kids. It’s a simple card game with one profound concept: the rules and goals of the game are constantly shifting; the cards you play frequently alter both the process and the winning conditions.

Fluxx is enormously fun and entirely unpredictable. It’s also, I think, excellent training for life. It’s a crash-course in flexibility and agility. It teaches you to plan for change — but also to not get too attached to your plans.

Perhaps the next time news executives gather to ponder their options they should set aside a session for a few games.

Chronicle of an industry death foretold

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As a young man in love with the nuts and bolts of publishing, beginning in high school in the 1970s, I spent a lot of time in print shops. The industry had just undergone a wrenching transition from “hot type” to “cold type” — abandoning a venerable technology involving hulking machines and heavy metal slugs in favor of phototypesetting systems that input text digitally (usually clumsily, via paper-tape rolls) and churned out fast-drying galleys on thick paper. Many print shops of the time existed, like those used by both my high school and college papers, as small offices carved out of much-larger spaces that had been used for the hot-type machinery. Often, the big old rooms were dark and still littered with debris — linotype detritus, boxes of metal slugs. The homes for the cold-type machines were comparative oases, well-lit and air-conditioned to keep the expensive new equipment happy.

This technological transition seemed momentous for the newspaper industry at the time; it rendered an entire tradition of printing skills obsolete and led to wrenching labor battles. But of course it was only a preface.

sc00b5af28I was cleaning out my garage recently, combing through some old files, and stumbled on a research paper I wrote in 1981 as a senior in college. The title was “The Electronic Newsroom and the Video Display Terminal.” I was writing about the moment that the digital transition rolled out from the back shop to engulf the newsroom, as — almost overnight — the typewriters were put out to pasture and a generation of journalists learned to love cut/paste and the “delete” key. What would that mean for the future of news?

The paper isn’t a big deal; it was written for a course I’d taken mostly for its reputation as an easy way for humanities types like me to fulfill the science requirement. But I’d spent enough time as both a student journalist and a computer enthusiast to know that the changes taking place wouldn’t stop at the newsroom door. Here’s what I wrote:

In trailblazing information delivery uses for electronic technology, the newspapers have in a way introduced a Trojan horse into their midst: for in the coming decades newspapers may well find themselves supplanted by a combination of home video terminals, central information computers, and entrepreneurs in specialized information delivery systems.

Let’s see: “Home video terminals”? Check: that would be your PC. “Central information computers”? Check: the vast network of web servers that feed you your Google, YouTube and so on. “Entrepreneurs in specialized information delivery systems”? That would be your blogging multitude.

I make no claim for great prescience — quite the reverse. I was a college kid who had no particular inside knowledge or knack for future-gazing. Even so, it wasn’t hard to see where things were leading.

I’ll think of my little paper every time I hear news execs making the excuse that “no one could see” how things were going to play out between print and the online world. If a kid could see it nearly 30 years ago, maybe they should have tried a little harder.

Carr on reporting and roach motels

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Simon Dumenco of Advertising Age interviewed David Carr of the New York Times. They’re friends, so the interview has a little bit of a smarmy feel. But it’s worth reading for a couple of passages. Carr recently came out with a book of autobiographical reporting on his own violent, addiction-riddled past. He offered this comment about what it was like for him to be covered by other journalists:

Carr: There are two kinds of reporters that I experienced. One was people that just showed up, asked a lot of questions, wrote down what I said, and then went and wrote a story about my answers and what they knew. And then there was another version of reporter that showed up, made a speech about what my book was about, made a number of assumptions about why I wrote it, asked me a few questions and then went and wrote what they thought. And I’ve always, I think, had tendencies toward the second kind of reporter. The people who just came and asked questions, their stories were 10 times better, and I gotta say that had a profound effect on me. I don’t need to make a speech before I start in on a story. I don’t need to explain what I think. I need to find out what the other person knows and then write it up. I need to show more curiosity about the matter at hand, and less authority.

There are several ways to read this passage. One is to think, right, the reporter with the agenda or the angle is never going to give you as open-minded or responsive a reading of reality than the reporter who just opens his eyes and ears. And you can’t really argue with that. Another reading is to notice that the moment the reporter becomes a subject (with a book to promote), he suddenly sees the value of the reporter-as-stenographer and discounts the journalism of perspective and interpretation and challenge.

Of course, it’s also possible that Carr is simply saying, “I’ve always been too interested in impressing my interviewees with how smart I am. Now I know why that’s a bad reporting technique.” And that is something we can all learn from.

Here is the other comment from Carr worth thinking about: He’s lamenting how quickly the pay scale for even the more successful New York journalists has plummeted, and then notes:

I feel as if media has become a kind of reverse roach motel, in that once you’re out, you’re probably not coming back in.

I read that and blinked at first — was this a misprint? The doors of today’s media world are wide open; it costs virtually nothing to publish yourself. There is more creation of media — more publishing of words, images, and video — than at any time before in human history. The roaches aren’t leaving the motel, never to return; it’s more like, the entire world has become a roach colony. We’re all roaches now! (Please note I am not addressing the question of roach quality here, simply the matter of roach identity.)

Then I realized, oh — when Carr says “media,” he isn’t thinking, “people publishing stuff for others to read.” He’s thinking, “the New York media business that I cover and am a part of.” When he says “media,” he means “well-paying media jobs” in a community where, apparently, a dollar a word is not enough to make ends meet.

That’s understandable, but it’s a habit we might as well break. Because we have no choice. “Media” as an industry providing a professional paycheck is rapidly becoming unmoored from “media” as a description of a human activity. It’s a disruptive transition, and it carries curses and blessings, and it’s going to keep on providing us with these moments of misunderstanding, these eye-blinkers.

Carr: What if the combination of secular and cyclical change that we have — what if this is normal? What if all the money that was sloshing around was in fact from the housing bubble, from easy credit, and that credit does not return? I think that’s a much more difficult and scary problem. I haven’t seen the money coming back yet.

Dumenco: Yeah, I don’t think it’s coming back.

I’m afraid I’m with Dumenco on that. And yes, it’s “scary,” but only in the way any economic disruption is — from the collapse of Wall Street to the imploding auto industry. Any time large numbers of jobs vanish it’s a “scary problem.” But in this vast, roachy media realm that’s emerging, at least journalists are much better positioned than, say, auto workers to find new opportunities.