Robert Niles has a must-read post on the Online Journalism Review about the role that journalists should play in terms of interactivity and community on their sites. Online communities need leadership: Will journalists provide it, or will someone else? he writes: …writing in any interactive environment is an act of leadership. Your words, your tone and your style not only… Read more →
As I said in my last post about Twitter’s lack of a business model, I’ve been doing some research lately for a think tank. My research has basically consisted of three things: Looking back on the media coverage of an event that happened in early 2010 Looking back at the way bloggers reacted to said event And having a quick… Read more →
I remember four years ago, when Twitter was still a blossoming new service, the outages that they used to suffer. Within just a few weeks of joining, I realised what a great tool it was and how important it was to me. Like many others who endured ongoing disruptions to Twitter’s service, I publicly stated I was willing to pay…. Read more →
As I said in my previous post, my good friend Adam Tinworth has highlighted a comment on the Fleet Street Blues blog. I’ll highlight a slightly different part of the comment: It turns out, however, that the new skills are a piece of piss (particularly with current web technology), and promoting a yarn via Google, Facebook, Twitter etc is, in… Read more →
Adam Tinworth has highlighted a comment on Fleet Street Blues that sees social media as “an administrative task” rather than a journalistic one and says that editors want to hire “web monkeys” because they are cheaper than real journalists. This commenter wouldn’t be the first person to mistake social media journalism for nothing more than a promotional function best left… Read more →
I have to say that I’m a bit baffled by a $975,000 grant from the Knight Foundation to the Bay Citizen and the Texas Tribune, two very well funded non-profit news organisations in the US. The goal is to create a nimble open-source content management system. I guess WordPress or Drupal, just to name two open-source content management systems, didn’t… Read more →
Rebuilding Journalism: Winning the battle for attention View more documents from Kevin Anderson Last week, I had the honour to return to Sydney Australia for Digital Directions 11, a digital media conference sponsored by Fairfax Media and organised by the ever-wonderful XMediaLab team. I focused on the theme of the attention economy. It’s not a new idea. Umair Haque was… Read more →
Cross posted from FindingAda. As announced on the front page of the Ada Lovelace Day site a few weeks ago, the date of this year’s Ada Lovelace Day has moved to Friday 7 October 2011. Please put it in your diary! I didn’t take the decision to change the date lightly. We’ve had two years of ALD being in March,… Read more →
Josh Hatch, until recently an interactive director at USAToday.com and now with the Sunlight Foundation, talked about how the organisation loves data. The transparency organisation uses data to show context and relationships. He highlighted how much money Google gave to candidates. Sunlight’s Influence Explorer showed that contributions from the organisation’s employees, their family members, and its political action committee went… Read more →
I’m in Sydney to speak at Digital Directions 11. I’ll post my talk to Slide Share in a bit. The conference is hosted by Fairfax, and yesterday, we got a look at their digital business. There are a lot of news and media organisations that have built credible digital offerings over the last decade without building sustainable digital businesses. Fairfax… Read more →
Suw is one of the UK’s social media pioneers. With over a decade of social media experience, Suw has helped clients worldwide use social tools for collaboration and communication internally and to build customer relationships externally. She has a comprehensive understanding of strategy, implementation and social functionality design (building social interaction into the heart of a website or application).
She writes regularly for Forbes.com on publishing, self-publishing, crowdfunding and alternative business models for authors.
Suw is herself a self-published author. Her first novella, Argleton, was described as "an absorbing and satisfying story" and comes "highly recommended, especially if you like maps or are a computer geek". She is currently finishing up her second novella which will be out early summer 2013.
Chocolate and Vodka is her personal blog where she writes about writing and any $random_subjects that catch her eye. And yes, she's married to Kevin.
Kevin Anderson is the editor of the Media Development Investment Fund's Knowledge Bridge site and newsletter. The Media Development Loan Fund invests in independent news organisations in emerging democracies, and the Knowledge Bridge project is designed to help these news organisations make the digital transition.
Kevin brings almost 20 years of journalism experience to his work. Since 1996, he has been focused on digital journalism, working for a wide range of news organisations. He brings a depth of experience in reporting, editing and digital development to his work. In 1998, he joined the BBC and became their first online journalist based outside of the UK, covering the US for its award winning news website. After coming to the UK in 2005, he developed a blogging strategy for BBC news, helped launch a programme on the BBC's 5Live covering weblogs and podcasts and was on the team that launched the interactive radio programme World Have Your Say on the BBC World Service.
From 2006 to 2010, he worked at The Guardian as its first blogs editor and then as its digital research editor. As digital research editor, he was responsible for monitoring key developments in digital media and evaluating their value to Guardian journalists and our audiences. From 2010 until he joined MDLF in 2012, he worked as a freelance journalist and with Suw as a digital media consultant and digital journalism training working with news organisations including Al Jazeera, Reed Business Information, Czech TV and CNN.
