Simple questions can create a great debate

Steve Peterson at The Bivings Report pointed out a post on National Public Radio’s The Bryant Park Project that posed a simple question: Who Are Ron Paul’s Supporters?

For those of you who don’t know, Ron Paul is a Representative from Texas running for president as a Republican, although he ran as a Libertarian in 1988. The political outsider broke a one-day fund-raising effort, pulling in US$6m on 16 December. The Republican establishment and the mainstream media are a bit baffled by his candidacy. However, listening to some of his political statements, he reminds me sometimes of Warren Beatty’s character Bulworth, a suicidally disillusioned liberal politician who becomes bluntly honest. (UPDATE: Just to clarify. Warren Beatty’s character was liberal. I didn’t mean to say that Ron Paul was liberal. Personally, I think his politics doesn’t fit tidily into the liberal-conservative spectrum.)

The response to the question was overwhelming, so much so that they had to shut off comments after 4,000 flooded in. The show’s producers called it Ron Paul-valanche. As I said to Steve via e-mail and he posted the Bivings’ blog:

I have often said to our journalists that only a fraction of our audience will respond to [a] traditional article, and often those responses won’t add much to the story. However, by guiding the discussion with a simple question or some framing of the debate or issue, I think participation not only increases but it’s also broader and more diverse.

Ron Paul’s supporters, well known for being vocal and very active online, swarmed the post, but answered the question in quite some detail, providing a great snap shot of the presidential candidate’s supporters. Personally, I wouldn’t be surprised if Representative Paul’s supporters have a Google alert-driven flashmob system set up that directs them to blog posts, videos and other discussions online to show their support.

But this is still an amazing response, and as I told Steve, they might be able to take this one step further. You could try to extract some of the information in the comments, probably by mining the underlying database that runs the blog. They could extract information such as age and location of the commenters in this thread to do some interesting mash-ups showing supporter distribution by age and state. It would provide some structure to that information and help to show patterns in it.

This idea is so simple. It is a great use of a programme blog. As I say to Guardian journalists, blog posts are great in framing a debate around a piece of traditional journalism or in reflecting a debate online or off-line. A traditional piece of reporting ties together as many threads as possible, but a great blog post teases out threads for a discussion.

This post asked a simple question and got a great response. To me, this post is an act of journalism, but instead of asking a handful of people on the street or over the phone a question, you’ve posed the question publicly and heard from thousands of people.

‘Working at the speed of news, not the speed of the press’

As I recently wrote, newspapers can break news again, but some journalists are resisting the shift. Here in the UK, there is a feeling amongst some that this would turn them into little more than ‘wire reporters’. Their words not mine. They think that breaking news has to be sensationalist, shoddy and often, wrong. But why?

Alan Mutter took Omaha World-Journal to task for its poor online coverage of a recent shooting at a shopping mall. Alan wrote:

Even though newspapers are no longer part of everyone’s daily information-consuming routine, they still rank among the first places many people will turn during a powerful and emotional event like the Omaha shootings. If the newspaper delivers a timely, compelling and sensitive report, it has a good chance of winning new fans and influencing advertisers to ship more dollars their way. When it fails, as Omaha.Com did, it reinforces the concept that newspapers are irrelevant has-beens.

But the comments demonstrate some of this bias against breaking news, even though Alan took care to say that the coverage should be sensitive.

Chuck Kershner, who says that he spent 25 years as a photo-journalist with Reuters and UPI and now publishes a weekly in New York, said:

However, to confuse a newspaper with a wannabe wire service version on the internet is I believe unfair if Omaha’s ‘core’ business is newspapering not interneting.

Surely, their core business is journalism, not interneting or newspapering? And also, doesn’t it make sense to grow your business by smart use of the internet as a publishing and participation medium, doing things you can’t do in print?

Chuck also asserts that the New York Times has suffered as a paper since its focus has shifted to the internet. Have I got news for you Chuck, their focus has shifted to the internet because their business is shifting to the internet. I met the publisher of the International Herald Tribune last year, and their strategy was to grow the online business as quickly as possible. If they have five to 10 years to make that happen, he said the New York Times was OK. If they only had three to five years to do that, well, they might just be out of the journalism business, not just the ‘newspapering’ business.

I can understand the bias against breaking news, especially in the US where on screen graphics shout BREAKING NEWS and television news, especially local TV, can be really poor. But instead of breaking news – a term which comes with baggage – think timely, accurate information, and I think it puts a different cast on things. And let’s be clear and get away from the binary thinking of breaking news versus in-depth investigations. The internet allows both immediacy and depth. Breaking news does not have to be exploitative or sensationalist. You don’t have to engage in ‘breaking rumour’, as some of my former colleagues at the BBC called it. Credibility is still our greatest asset.

From the negative to a positive example, Mindy McAdams pointed out a great piece from the Carol Goodhue, the readers’ representative at the San Diego Union-Tribune. In the piece, Gathering news not only for the next day but for now, she said other news organisations asked of their breaking news team: “How do so few do so much so quickly?” The answer is:

Team members confer with their editors frequently, but they often edit postings for each other, and they don’t wait for assignments or debate whether to head out for a promising story.

Karen Kucher, one of the original members of the team and an assistant editor, said, “Our default is supposed to be to go.” …

She and another team member, Angelica Martinez, both said they’re constantly educating sources accustomed to the slower pace of newspapers. Martinez said, “It’s not a 5 o’clock deadline, it’s now – right now.”

On top of that though, they challenge the tawdry image of breaking news.

(Editor Tom) Mallory said, “I’ve never experienced more gratitude from readers for anything we’ve done in journalism than for the simple postings on the news blog, three or four paragraphs at a time, of reliable, confirmed information, sortable by area.”

They also use their blogs to improve their journalism, scanning comments for follow up questions. This is a must read piece chock full of not only the how’s but also the why’s of creating a breaking news team.

Mindy was tipped off to the Union Tribune column by Michael Grant at the blog The Moderate Voice. He was gobsmacked that journalists would ask the question of how can so few do so much so fast. Michael says:

For 500 years, newspaper journalists had 24 hours to work with in any given news cycle, and it was unthinkable to expect them to do more. Morning papers had their staffs, and evening papers had their staffs. With all that time, it was reasonable that newspaper guys would forget exactly how fast journalism is designed to work. … To journalists now working for online news teams – the U-T’s was created in May, 2005 – it must be like a really cool rediscovery of their natural speed, and how easy it is to do journalism at 150 mph.

As a journalist, the possibility of doing journalism at 150 mph was one of the things that excited me about blogging and the technology that supports it. Granted, just as with a car, the margin for error is less the faster you go, but that is why you have editorial standards and process in place, and the Union-Tribune shows hows it’s done.

Blogging technology allows almost friction-less filing from the field. I’m pushing to use blogging APIs for remote access for our new CMS because it will ease publishing for field journalists and speed publishing for all of our journalists and we can use light-weight off-line blogging tools like Flock, MarsEdit or Ecto, which I’m using to write this.

Veron Strachen, a digital native and colleague of mine at the Guardian, said that in the past, newspaper journalists used to work at the speed of the press. The Guardian is moving to 24/7 working, which is a major shift. Now, with the internet as a global publishing platform, Veron said that we’ll be working not at the speed of the press, but at the speed of news.

CNET, Gamespot and Jeff Gerstmann: Controversy or conspiracy theory?

On Wednesday, I spotted a post from Michael O’Connor Clarke about Jeff Gerstmann, a games reviewer and Editorial Director at CNET‘s Gamespot, who appeared to have been fired for giving a bad review to Kane & Lynch. The game’s publishers, Eidos Interactive, had just bought hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of advertising on the site and the rumour was that they used the weight of that contract to force CNET to fire Gerstmann. It seems the news was broken in this Penny Arcade strip.

Here’s Gerstmann’s review:

The implications of this rumour are clear: If CNET is bowing to pressure from advertisers to ensure that their own games are favourable reviewed, then CNET’s games coverage becomes not worth the electricity that lights its pixels. Indeed, the suspicion that CNET can be bought immediately devalues all its reviews, across all sectors. If the PR, advertising and editorial departments submit to bullying from one vendor, then there’s no reason why they aren’t doing the same for other vendors. This is potentially very damaging for CNET as it destroys readers’ confidence that what they are getting is honest, unbiased opinion.

As Kotaku says:

As our tipster points out, if the rumor is true, it could point to a distressing precedent at Gamespot and parent company CNet. “As writers of what is supposed to be objective content, this is our worst nightmare coming to life,” wrote the tipster.

Our efforts to confirm the story with Gamespot haven’t proved successful. Our current requests with PR, Gerstmann and other CNet contacts have either gone unanswered or yielded a “no comment.”

But rather than address the rumours head-on, CNET shilly-shallied about:

CNET allowed hours to pass by as people continued to spread word of the firings, creating incensed users everywhere. They issued no formal statement and made no attempt to defuse the situation. Eventually, they came out with what I refer to as a “non-denial denial,” in which they made no reference to the controversial situation, resorting to generalized statements about how CNET is a bastion of “unbiased reviews.”

And the first formal response on Gamespot is a masterpiece of not really saying anything:

Due to legal constraints and the company policy of GameSpot parent CNET Networks, details of Gerstmann’s departure cannot be disclosed publicly. However, contrary to widespread and unproven reports, his exit was not a result of pressure from an advertiser.

“Neither CNET Networks nor GameSpot has ever allowed its advertising business to affect its editorial content,” said Greg Brannan, CNET Networks Entertainment’s vice president of programming. “The accusations in the media that it has done so are unsubstantiated and untrue. Jeff’s departure stemmed from internal reasons unrelated to any buyer of advertising on GameSpot.”

“Though he will be missed by his colleagues, Jeff’s leaving does not affect GameSpot’s core mission of delivering the most timely news, video content, in-depth previews, and unbiased reviews in games journalism,” said Ryan MacDonald, executive producer of GameSpot Live. “GameSpot is an institution, and its code of ethics and duty to its users remains unchanged.”

Whilst neither CNET nor Gerstmann were willing to discuss exactly what happened, Gerstmann was keen to play down the implications of his firing by telling MTV’s Multiplayer blog that there’s no reason for gamers to doubt Gamespot’s reviews.

Despite that, public opinion in the gaming world swung against CNET, despite the hints that Gerstmann’s firing may be nothing to do with Kane & Lynch, and more to do disagreements with (new) senior manager Josh Larson. If I may quote liberally from Kotaku:

Speaking with a Gamespot employee yesterday who asked not to be named for this story, we’ve learned that, despite the neutral nature of the Gamespot news item on the matter, the editorial staff is said to be “devastated, gutted and demoralized” over the removal of former editorial director Jeff Gerstmann. While the termination of Gerstmann, a respected fixture at Gamespot, was pitched to his remaining colleagues by management as a “mutual decision”, it was anything but, we’re told.

The confusion over the reasons for Gerstmann’s termination, compounded with a lack of transparency from management has created a feeling of “irreconcilable despair” that may eventually lead to an exodus of Gamespot editorial staffers. “Our credibility,” said the source, “is in ruins.” Over the course of the previous days, a “large number of Gamespot editors” have expressed their intentions to leave. Tales of emotionally deflated peers, with no will to remain at the site, were numerous.

Unless cooler heads prevail or concerns are addressed, Gamespot could see “mass resignations”, our source revealed.

Rank and file employees of the Gamespot organization are unaware of the real reasons behind Gerstmann’s termination. Our source admitted that Eidos was less than pleased with the review scores for Kane & Lynch: Dead Men, but the team has “dealt with plenty of unhappy publishers before.” Our contact stressed that “Money has never played a role in reviews before” and that “[Gamespot] has never altered a score.” No pressure from management or sales has been exercised to remove or alter content, the source reiterated.

However, the source did speculate that disagreements between Gertsmann and VP of games Josh Larson may have been the root cause of the former being terminated. Larson, successor to former editor in chief Greg Kasavin, was described as out of touch with the employees who report to him. The VP is the one allegedly responsible for telling Gamespot editorial staff that it was Gerstmann’s “tone” that was at the heart of his dismissal.

Then, on a Valleywag post disputing the theory that Gerstmann was fired for a bad review, someone who appears to be a Gamespot insider left a number of rather damning comments (again, summed up well by Kotaku):

No one wants to be named because no one wants to get fucking fired! This management team has shown what they’re willing to do. Jeff had ten years in and was fucking locked out of his office and told to leave the building.

What you might not be aware of is that GS is well known for appealing mostly to hardcore gamers. The mucky-mucks have been doing a lot of “brand research” over the last year or so and indicating that they want to reach out to more casual gamers. Our last executive editor, Greg Kasavin, left to go to EA, and he was replaced by a suit, Josh Larson, who had no editorial experience and was only involved on the business side of things. Over the last year there has been an increasing amount of pressure to allow the advertising teams to have more of a say in the editorial process; we’ve started having to give our sales team heads-ups when a game is getting a low score, for instance, so that they can let the advertisers know that before a review goes up. Other publishers have started giving us notes involving when our reviews can go up; if a game’s getting a 9 or above, it can go up early; if not, it’ll have to wait until after the game is on the shelves.

I was in the meeting where Josh Larson was trying to explain this firing and the guy had absolutely no response to any of the criticisms we were sending his way. He kept dodging the question, saying that there were “multiple instances of tone” in the reviews that he hadn’t been happy about, but that wasn’t Jeff’s problem since we all vet every review. He also implied that “AAA” titles deserved more attention when they were being reviewed, which sounded to all of us that he was implying that they should get higher scores, especially since those titles are usually more highly advertised on our site.

Gamespot insiders were clearly unhappy with what has happened.

Eventually, Gamespot management did address the issue, although they maintain they are legally unable to discuss why Gerstmann was fired, the categorically deny that it was because of pressure from Eidos.

Q: Was Jeff fired?
A: Jeff was terminated on November 28, 2007, following an internal review process by the managerial team to which he reported.

Q: Why was Jeff fired?
A: Legally, the exact reasons behind his dismissal cannot be revealed. However, they stemmed from issues unrelated to any publisher or advertiser; his departure was due purely for internal reasons.

[…]

Q: Was Eidos Interactive upset by the game’s review?
A: It has been confirmed that Eidos representatives expressed their displeasure to their appropriate contacts at GameSpot, but not to editorial directly. It was not the first time a publisher has voiced disappointment with a game review, and it won’t be the last. However, it is strict GameSpot policy never to let any such feelings result in a review score to be altered or a video review to be pulled.

Q: Did Eidos’ disappointment cause Jeff to be terminated?
A: Absolutely not.

Q: Did Eidos’ disappointment cause the alteration of the review text?
A: Absolutely not.

Q: Did Eidos’ disappointment lead to the video review being pulled down?
A: Absolutely not.

[…]

Q: Why didn’t GameSpot write about Jeff’s departure sooner?
A: Due to HR procedures and legal considerations, unauthorized CNET Networks and GameSpot employees are forbidden from commenting on the employment status of current and former employees. This practice has been in effect for years, and the CNET public-relations department stuck to that in the days following Jeff’s termination. However, the company is now making an exception due to the widespread misinformation that has spread since Jeff’s departure.

[…]

Q: GameSpot’s credibility has been called into question as a result of this incident. What is being done to repair and rebuild it?
A: This article is one of the first steps toward restoring users’ faith in GameSpot, and an internal review of the incident and controversy is under way. However, at no point in its history has GameSpot ever deviated from its review guidelines, which are publicly listed on the site. Great pains are taken to keep sales and editorial separated to prevent any impression of impropriety.

For years, GameSpot has been known for maintaining the highest ethical standards and having the most reliable and informative game reviews, previews, and news on the Web. The colleagues and friends that Jeff leaves behind here at GameSpot intend to keep it that way.

The problem is, the damage has been done. Whatever the reason for Gerstmann’s dismissal, the appalling way that CNET handled the crisis means that a lot of people now believe that the Chinese wall that separates advertising and editorial has been permanently damaged. That in and of itself means that both Gamespot’s and CNET’s credibility has been severely dented and if there’s one thing that a publisher cannot afford to do, it’s to appear even for a moment to be in the pockets of its advertisers. Readers want impartiality, honesty, transparency, and if they sniff a rat they’ll leave in droves.

CNET should never have fired Gerstmann without thoroughly thinking through the implications of such a precipitate dismissal. Doing so without a strategy in place for addressing the inevitable rumour that would follow was stupid and short-sighted. In any company, that sort of “marching off the premises” style of dismissal is bound to cause a rumpus, especially when the person being fired, as Gerstmann appears to have been, is much loved by their colleagues and readers, and has been there for so long. It shouldn’t have taken a genius to realise that there’d be a pretty strong reaction against it, and that some sort of thought should be given to how to address the rumours early on.

Whether Gerstmann was fired because of Larson, or Eidos, or something else, is almost irrelevant now. The conclusions one can draw are that either CNET’s in bed with its advertisers, or it’s being managed incompetently by someone prone to throwing hissy fits and firing people on the spot. If one were being generous, one might just put this down to an HR/PR fuck-up, but there is a valuable lesson to be learnt by every publisher and every company with externally-facing bloggers: Look before you fire.

Embracing the limitations and possibilities of the web

Mark Friesen at NewsDesigner.com pointed out a brilliant post by Khoi Vinh in August that I missed in my hundreds of feeds. Khoi is the design director at the New York Times and was writing about the differences between print and online design.

The original post was pitched at designers, but I think it’s equally important reading for editors, both in print and broadcast as they approach the web. It’s probably uncontroversial to say that editors get what they want, and sometimes coming to the web from another medium, they get something suited for print or television that is poorly suited for online audiences. It’s not unsurprising that TV sites still suffer an over-reliance on Flash because the animation reminds them of their home medium, and most print sites suffer from an altogether too literal translation from print to the web.

For designers, he suggests learning HTML and CSS before diving into Flash because:

(Flash) leads too easily to the assumption that a similar amount of authorial control can be exerted in online design as can be achieved offline — which is a fallacy.

Print editors do not realise that the level of control they exert on the printed page is almost impossible to exert on the web, and sometimes trying to exert that control gets in the way of thinking about the possibilities of the web as opposed to its limitations. It’s sad to say that in 2007, we’re still doing too much shoveling of content onto web sites and too little of creating content best suited for the web.

Khoi says it this way:

The prerequisite for doing something meaningful with any of these skills — HTML, CSS, Flash or whatever — is first embracing the medium as something different from print. Indeed, there’s no point in learning these skills unless as a print designer you’ve made a prior shift in your understanding of how design works in digital media. Specifically, come to grips with the fact that, on the Web, design is not a method for implementing narrative, as it is in print, but rather it’s a method for making behaviors possible.

Coming to the web, he says designers, and I would say, editors are too focused on fixing type faces, point sizes, while “ignoring usability and expediency”. The way that I put it is that most editors think the web is a magical place where Harry Potters wave their magic wands and anything is possible. It’s really a lot more like the Matrix, rules can be bent and some broken, but most of the time, it’s about being creative within those rules.

But there is one line that from Khoi’s post that stuck out. In the closing paragraph, he encourages designers to experiment “to begin understanding how a page is put together, how it is delivered to a browser, how it behaves and, crucially, how the designer’s intention maps to how it is used by real people.” We’re still making basic mistakes in building news sites, lessons that we learned in late 90s but might have been lost in the dot.com bust.

  • News sites should be designed around the information needs of your users not your desk structure, org chart or programme schedule.
  • Design is important, but we also need to consider information architecture. What’s that? Jesse James Garrett says: “Information Architecture: Stuctural design of the information space to facilitate intuitive access to content.”
  • Editors should sit in on a user-testing session. We build the sites and know them inside out. Our users don’t have that inside knowledge.

Sitting in on user-testing is humbling and enlightening. It starts to break down our own notions of how we use our sites and replaces them with how users navigate our sites or in many cases fail to find the information they want. It might even surprise editors about the kind of information readers want.

Khoi ends with another way of putting the importance of mindset as well as skillset:

Without that basic sense of curiosity, that insatiable desire to experiment and understand new ways of doing everything, the Web isn’t much fun at all, regardless of how much experience a designer has under her belt.

Curiosity and passion. The web isn’t print, and it isn’t television. It’s something different, and it’s an amazing, incomparable place to do journalism.

Technorati Tags: , ,

Reuters-Nokia Mobile Journalism Toolkit and mindset

Last night, Suw and I went to Reuters headquarters in Canary Wharf for an Online News Association event. Reuters was talking about its MJT – mobile journalism toolkit (they used to call it MoJo for mobile journalism but for some reason aren’t using the term any longer). Reuters partnered with Nokia to develop the toolkit after working with the handset maker on a mobile Flash-lite application to highlight their content on the N95. Nokia is trying to understand the needs of journalists in the field and how that might drive development of special applications for consumer-oriented mobile phones like the N95. Reuters is exploring what is possible with the current generation of phones (and networks) while doing some experimentation with what types of story-telling this might allow.

The basic toolkit includes:

  • a standard Nokia N95
  • a Nokia Bluetooth keyboard
  • a Sony digital mic with a bespoke adapter for the phone
  • a special tripod
  • a solar charger
  • a Power Monkey supplemental charger

They also have slightly modified the RSS output from the phone’s production app and WordPress’ RSS intake to allow for some additional RSS elements that Reuters needs in order to handle content correctly. Video is uploaded direct to their hosting service and text goes straight to the blog platform, and an editor is automatically alerted that content has been sent for review and publication. The material can then be published to various platforms.

The discussion was lead by Ilicco Elia, Mobile Product Manager Europe; alongside Mark Jones, Global Community Editor; Matt Cowan, European Technology, Media and Telecommunications Correspondent; and Nic Fulton, chief scientist for Reuters media. Ilicco gave an overview of how Reuters and Nokia decided to work together.

Nic said that they decided to work on multi-horizon strategy, looking at what they could do right now, what they could do in the near future and aspirational things they might want to do a lot further down the line. Right now, the N95 takes 5-megapixel stills, near DVD-quality video and works on 3.5G data and WiFi networks. But Ilicco is already looking to the future:

We see in five years, HD video, extremely powerful CPUs. You might say it’s a laptop, but it will still be a personal, mobile device.

They worked directly with Timo Koskinen, the project manager for Nokia’s research centre. Matt Cowan talked about his experience with the toolkit, showing video he shot of Vint Cerf at the Media Guardian’s Edinburgh TV festival. My colleague Jemima Kiss has an overview of the experiment and talked with Matt about the toolkit for the Guardian’s digital content blog.

Before joining Reuters, Matt worked for Canadian CTV covering California. There he did work shooting and editing his own pieces, so he had experience with multimedia reporting. Matt said that he fed back his experiences directly to Nokia. The phone is a bit difficult to hold steady, which isn’t surprising – it’s not like balancing a hefty traditional TV camera on your shoulder, which provides some stability.

I’ve experienced this same problem myself, first hand, doing a video journalism project for the BBC in 2003. I used a Sony PD150, a ‘pro-sumer’ digital video camera. Doing handheld work takes practice because the light camera is much easier to shake, despite built-in motion compensation.

Other downsides:

  • unreliability of 3G networks (Ilicco said they had spoken to Vodafone but didn’t seem very pleased with response)
  • battery life, although this improving
  • it takes six hours for the solar panel to recharge the phone
  • the brutal costs for data roaming charges

Matt talked later about this would allow journalists to develop relationships with the audience.

There were slightly predictable questions about quality. One of the journalists said “cutting quality is a fancy way of saying cutting corners”. One of the shots, an opportunity shot backstage at a New York fashion show was a bit jerky, and one person asked what the point of the video was.

What I really liked from the Reuters team was this spirit of experimentation. Matt said:

I don’t think that this will change everything overnight. It is an incredibly exciting tool. It will change how we report certain stories. … It’s not ‘I’m here in front of this building, and this happened 10 hours ago’. You have immediate interaction, an intimacy. You’re in the environment.

As Howard Owens recently said after widely circulated comments from Rob Curley about the difference between mindset and skillset, having the right skills doesn’t mean that someone is open to innovation and entrepreneurial ideas. Owens calls it the difference between a fixed mindset and a growth mindset.

The fixed mindset might say something like, “I got into this business to be a writer, not a videographer.” The growth mindset might say, “Video? Cool! Let me give it a try.”

And I think he puts the ‘quality’ debate in perspective:

You don’t make “quality” a religion and refuse to try new forms of reporting because it doesn’t immediately meet your quality standards. You are willing to try and fail, and keep trying until you get it right, and you don’t resent others doing the same.

There were some comments about how we would see “Bloggers doing this in a year’s time”, but as Suw said last night, bloggers have been doing this for years. I often say that keeping an eye on bloggers and other grassroots media is a good way to find inspiration for new ways to get the story. I still remember at the 2000 Democratic Convention in Los Angeles seeing an IndyMedia reporter  backing up as mounted police moved towards him. He has carrying a PowerBook with a webcam and an early wireless modem strapped on it, sending live video from the streets to the net.

But one thing that was refreshing was to hear Reuters talk about community and bloggers in such a positive way. Mark talked about Reuters’ community strategy:

My role as community editor to create a bit of identity around editorial talent and be more open to the audience. We also want to be open to the web including the the blogosphere and build networks around our journalistic expertise.

Reuters have their own blogs and their YouWitness user-submitted photo and story effort. They have invested in Pluck and its Blogburst aggregator service. They also partner with multi-lingual blog community Global Voices, including on their Reuters Africa project, and they have a carbon trading community.

And Matt said that he saw advances in mobile technology as an even bigger boon to bloggers. He knows the founder of eco-community TreeHugger who used to have to trek to internet cafes to feed his site but now can do it almost anywhere. Bloggers can “build a brand with their own thoughts.”

In 1999, I covered Hurricane Floyd as it made landfall in North Carolina for the BBC News website. I filed throughout the night, but after the storm passed, it knocked out electricity and phone lines throughout the eastern third of the state. I wasn’t able to file a number of pictures I had taken because I simply had no way to get them back to the back to base. Within months after the storm, I had a data cable for my mobile phone. As the mobile technology got better, I could do more in the field. In 2006, on a trip for the BBC’s World Have Your Say, I was able to use a 3G data card in the US to set up a mobile WiFi hotspot and keep us connected when standard communications channels failed.

Mobile technology lets journalists stay closer to the story and connected not only to our office but also to our audience. The news organisations that experiment now will be best placed to take advantage of the journalistic possibilities that ever-advancing mobile technology allows.

Tags: , , , , ,

Newspapers can break news again

Steve Outing highlighted on Poynter’s E-Media Tidbits how useful Twitter can be during breaking news. Sending out short burst updates during a breaking news event can keep journalists in the field and close to the story while quickly filing updates that can easily be pulled via RSS into your site. He wrote:

In the not-so-distant past, I would have urged you to create a breaking-news blog for your news site if any big story like those hit in your backyard. …That’s so 2004! You can still do it, and probably should. But the breaking-news blog is about to be supplanted (or perhaps supplemented is a better word) by the Twitter breaking-news feed.

I don’t think it’s an either/or proposition. Twitter can be a good resource to reach your audience via SMS and even desktop alerts if you encourage your subscribers to follow breaking news ‘tweets’ via applications like Twitterific. But you can easily pull that into a blog via an RSS feed, and really, in the age of networked journalism, it’s about your site being a hub in the network to disseminate news. Journalists back at base can tap into the network for leads, pictures and first person reports.

I’ll give you an example from last week when we looked out our window here on the fifth floor of the Guardian and saw black smoke billowing from somewhere in east London. Journalism.co.uk noted the pace of updates across several different sites and services, including Twitter, Flickr and the Guardian’s Newsblog:

The first tweet Journalism.co.uk saw on the fire came from the Guardian’s head of blogging Kevin Anderson shortly before 12:30pm. Anderson has also posted pictures to Flickr and at 12:45pm posted an entry on the events to his Guardian blog.

I also did a quick post here on Strange Attractor. A commenter from Washington DC found the post and said:

Greetings from Washington D.C. Getting reports here that it is an industrial site. Stock futures markets moving up after intial shock. Looks ugly but, industrial chemical fires usually are. Yours was the first blog I came across that had the story. Who needs cables news? Will be watching to see how story develops. Thanks for posting

BCP

http://beercanpolitics.blogspot..com

I was able to post faster and with more pictures and information than Sky and the BBC, which we were watching in the office. Flickr users noted that they were seeing more pictures on the site than on traditional news sites and TV channels. I also used Technorati to find video posted to YouTube before Sky had its helicopter on the scene. People were also posting links in the comments on the Guardian Newsblog.

Since the advent of radio and television, newspapers have been pushed out of the breaking news business. News is frozen at the time you have to go to press. Web-first has only slowly been embraced by newspapers and newspaper journalists.

I do sometimes find that newspaper journalists suddenly pushed into the 24/7 news cycle can feel that quality suffers as one daily deadline becomes a rolling deadline. But the internet does both immediacy as well as depth as Paul Bradshaw recently highlighted in the first of his 21st Century Journalism series of posts.

The strengths of the online medium are essentially twofold, and contradictory: speed, and depth.

And Paul’s ‘News Diamond’ shows how a story passes from speed to user control. It’s a great series of posts, and Paul’s thinking has brought together some brilliant ideas. Ideas that I’ll use the next time I’m blogging breaking news.

I was sitting in the office, which is a role for a networked journalist to play pulling together a news organisation’s own coverage while also aggregating the best of crowdsourced content. But I think there is also a role for field journalists to use Twitter, blogging software or other forms of flexible field filing to break news. Blogging was liberating for me as a journalist if for no other reason as a field journalist, it gave me a much easier way to file than using traditional content management systems that are made to work in the office but are unusable in the field. Until traditional CMSes provide that kind of flexibility, they will have significant drawbacks when compared to blogging platforms. But that’s another post for later.

Technorati Tags: , ,

The battle isn’t against technology but for relevance

This post has already been written once by Steve Yelvington, but after our recent Web 2.0 and journalism discussion, I thought the subject was worth revisiting.

In writing this, I’m not trivialising the economic anxiety that newspaper journalists are experiencing right now. I remember Dan Gillmor telling attendees at a Global Voices meeting in London in 2005 that, while some journalists were defensive about blogs and ‘citizen journalism’, people needed to understand that some of this grew out of the economic uncertainties and job insecurity journalists were facing. (Dan, I hope that’s a fair parahprase.) But I think it’s important to understand the nature of the problem.

Journalism and new media professor Mark Deuze left two lengthy comments on our Web 2.0 and journalism post painting a very grim picture of the journalism job market and challenging some of our optimism about digital journalism. In some ways, I’m sure that we’re coming from similar positions with a different emphasis, but I wanted to respond to some of the points he made because I think they’re important.

‘A long slide toward irrelevancy’

I think Mark conflated several issues. Suw and I outlined the journalistic opportunities that Web 2.0 provides, while he focused on economic pressures on journalists and recent journalism grads looking for work. As we said in our previous comment, newspaper journalists in developed countries (it needs to be said that newspaper readership is increasing in developing countries) should not blame the internet alone for what has been an ongoing trend in circulation declines.

The decline began in the 1970s, as Steve Yelvington pointed out, and this is part of a more pressing issue that journalists are ignoring, but which Merrill Brown pointed out in his 2005 study, Abandoning the News:

In short, the future of the U.S. news industry is seriously threatened by the seemingly irrevocable move by young people away from traditional sources of news.

Through Internet portal sites, handheld devices, blogs and instant messaging, we are accessing and processing information in ways that challenge the historic function of the news business and raise fundamental questions about the future of the news field.

Merrill found that young people aren’t engaging with the news when they have children and buy a house as they have in the past, despite the old adage that ‘youngsters’ would ‘grow into it’. They get more news from the Daily Show than from the nightly news or the daily paper.

Steve called it “… a long, slow slide toward irrelevancy through the loss of readership driven by generational change. … Even if the Internet had never happened, newspapers — especially big-city papers — have long been headed for a dangerous inflection point at which their market penetration would not be sufficient to sustain a mass-media business model.”

As Steve wrote in another post:

The core problem faced by newspapers is a loss of readers across the board. The General Social Survey has documented a decline in newspaper readership that’s pretty much a straight line going back to around 1970. It’s a problem of content relevancy in an increasingly rich media mix, and not specific to the emergence of the World Wide Web.

Employment trends

To quote Mark again: “Then you state: ‘Certainly, saying that journalism students will never get a full time or permanent job is an exaggeration.’ No, it is not an exaggeration, I’m afraid.” But he is both exaggerating and selectively quoting statistics to try and support his point of view.

I looked at some of the studies that Mark quoted, such as the Annual Surveys of Journalism and Mass Communication Graduate, which contradicts his presentation of a straight line decline (at least in the US) of journalism head count since 1992. As the surveys point out, the job market for graduates was the most favourable in 2000 before dropping off over the last seven years. But this was the summary of the most recent report, 2006, which discusses the job market in 2005:

  • Only 3.1% of the journalism and mass communication graduates in 2006 had no job interviews as they entered the market.
  • The percentage of 2006 journalism and mass communication bachelor’s degree recipients with at least one job offer on graduation was 76.2, comparable to the figure of a year earlier.
  • On October 31, 2006, 63.7% of the journalism and mass communication bachelor’s degree recipients from the past spring held a full-time job, and 11.9% had a part-time job. These figures are statistically comparable with the figures from a year earlier.

Now, I’m sure that the pay is horrible and the hours are punishing, but entry level journalism pay and hours have always been brutal. My first job at a newspaper in Kansas paid $2000 a year less than a first year teacher in the town where I worked. I most certainly worked between 41 and 50 hours, which the study said a quarter of grads did. (Having said that, during presidential election years working the BBC, there were times when I worked between 60 and 70 hours.) I was told at the time by more senior journalists in the industry that cub reporters always got paid peanuts. This is not a justification. I wish it wasn’t so, then and now. It’s difficult to attract talented, smart people when the pay and conditions can be so appalling.

I would say to journalism students that they need look to the future and not the past. There are many stories of new print grads actually being more conservative and less digitally savvy than newsroom veterans. I’ve said it before. Print journalism students need new heroes. Leveraging my digital skills for higher than average pay was one of the few strategies that seems to have worked in my career to earn a living wage.

Technology is not depopulating journalism

Mark said: “So yes, companies investing in technology play catch-up, but this at the same time depopulates the field of journalism.”

This a specious argument that basically draws a direct relationship between technology outlays by newspapers and job cuts. It is not as if newspapers are spending on work-saving technology just so that they can sack journalists. This is an argument from an industrial context, where assembly line robots have replaced human beings, but there isn’t that sort of one-to-one relationship between technology and work force in news organisations. Some organisations are outsourcing reporting, but the depopulation of newspaper newsrooms is more directly related to circulation and ad revenue declines. See the post by Steve Yelvington that I’ve linked to above for a number of reasons why ad spend has decreased, including loss of local department store advertising to be replaced by lower ad rate blow-ins, not to mention the impact that Craigslist has had on classified ad revenues in some markets.

Also, new roles and jobs are being created because of computers and the internet, such as ‘news technologist‘ roles and database-driven reporting and presentation. CAR (computer-assisted reporting) has grown essential in investigative journalism, and now, news organisations are finding innovative ways to present data and information directly to their readers. These ‘techni-torial’ jobs will increase as we need technically savvy journalists to report, produce and present news in ways that digitally savvy audiences want.

And as we said in our previous post, user-generated content is being used to supplement, not replace, the work of traditional journalists. Enlightened news organisations are using user-generated content in many forms to add to their reporting and, in local UGC plays, reconnect with their communities.

Digital Divide: The Wills and the Won’ts

As for Mark’s comments about the digital divide, without explaining what he means by the ‘digital divide’, it’s an almost meaningless term. It used to describe socio-economic disparities in access to the internet and other digital technology. But does Mark mean regular access to the internet? Does he mean use of a mobile phone? A recent Harris poll showed that 80% of Americans were finding some way to get online.

This study also found that the online population is beginning to mirror the general population, e.g. 13% of the online population was Hispanic, which is the same percentages of Hispanics in the general US population, so this is not necessarily differential rates of access based on income or race. Access to technology is increasingly more affordable. WalMart introduced a $200 Linux-based computer two weeks ago that has sold out of its initial production run of about 10,000.

If Mark is talking about access to internet in the US or Europe and comparing it internet access rates in the developing world, those figures aren’t relevant to this argument. But I’m not sure what he means or which study that he’s quoting. I tend to agree with digital education expert Ewan McIntosh, who said recently at a conference here in the UK, the digital divide isn’t so much about the haves versus the have-nots but the wills versus the won’ts.

People are turning to the internet for news

As for the assertion that people aren’t getting their news online. What’s the source for that? What formats do they find confusing? I’m genuinely curious, not simply challenging Mark. I know that some Guardian readers are confused by what a blog is, but that could just as easily be attributed to the journalists’ general unawareness and misuse of the term – often in the process of rubbishing blogs while ironically showing how ignorant they are of the subject.

In Europe, 62% of the online population is turning to online media versus traditional media. Granted, this is a sample of a sample, but it’s still showing a trend towards digital – especially if you consider digital mobile and not just via fixed internet access.

The New York Times said it recently when reviewing circulation figures: “More Readers Trading Newspapers for Web Sites.” Duncan Reily at TechCrunch put it this way:

The problem with newspapers isn’t the web alone, its excessive choice in a declining market. Newsprint has a future, but not in a cut throat marketplace that provides more choice than the market can consume.

New, hybrid models of journalism

Beyond that, I’d like to challenge the view that there is a binary opposition of print versus online. Look to MyMissourian and Bluffton Today to see what a hybrid online-to-print model can achieve. Clyde Bentley, news veteran and professor at the University of Missouri, said that print serves the masses but online services ‘the actives’. With MyMissourian, he’s not making people choose between print and online, but serving both constituencies.

And more from Steve Yelvington. In Bluffton, parent company Morris wasn’t just trying to undercut a paid competitor with a free-sheet: Their goal was to increase the social capital in their community. The result of this is that they don’t miss stories because their readers tip them off. The website and the paper add to community cohesion.

But running through Mark’s entire argument is a focus on headcount, jobs and pay without talking about the economic pressure on newspapers. Newspapers aren’t making the same money that they used to, particularly in the US, now that the monopolies that single titles had over specific geographic areas have been eroded. Something’s gotta give. Yes, it does mean job cuts, lower pay rises and some loss of benefits, but this isn’t simply about maintaining double digit profits or returning value to stockholders over maintaining staff numbers and benefits either. This is about the fundamental erosion of the business models that many newspapers are based on.

Journalists can be part of the solution

Mark also says: “I am pro-Web 2.0, excited about participatory media culture, and agree that journalism as a whole can benefit from all that this has to offer. But you can only expect reporters and editors to do so if they are supported in meaningful ways, if they are included in managerial strategies,”

I may not have surveyed hundreds of journalists as Mark has. I can only speak from my own experience, but many, if not most, journalists I know are resistant to change. They don’t want to be involved in managerial strategies and view change with scepticism, often bred from professionally cultivated cynicism.

I agree with Mark about support, and I try to offer as much support to my fellow journalists as possible, helping them to take advantage of the journalistic possibilities provided by these new technologies. However, I pick my battles. I don’t have time to convert the obstructionist sceptics in the industry. They are still spouting the same lines they did when I started working online 10 years ago, and I don’t see that changing or me changing them. Fortunately, I have colleagues who are curious and want to move forward.

Mark said, “if [reporters and editors] are empowered to innovate from the bottom-up – rather than being told to either adapt to the brand new 3-million dollar Content Management System or get out.”

You know, again, this is a nice line, but it doesn’t sync with working reality at The Guardian, the BBC – to name two news organisations that I have worked for – or other news organisations that I know of. Yes, we’re building a new CMS at the Guardian, but for a lot of shops, they are using open-source tools. Morris Digital uses Drupal. Reuters, the New York Times and CNN use WordPress, which is both free and open source, not a $3m content management system. WordPress and many of these open-source CMSes are far simpler than most newspaper CMSes I’ve used. And the job cuts simply aren’t decided by whether the journalist will get up to speed with a new CMS.

As a matter of fact, the cost of innovation is decreasing, especially for those news organisations smart enough to use any number of open source solutions available. That’s the real opportunity, but a missed opportunity for many outlets. They can reduce the cost of innovation and therefore experment more with less risk. Of course, innovation doesn’t mean focusing on the business at the cost of journalistic quality, but that’s a post for another day.

Technorati Tags: ,

Radio Lab Master Class

Kevin Marks turned Suw and me onto the excellent WNYC programme/podcast Radio Lab. The programme deals with scientific, bordering on, philosophical issues such as Time, Morality or the biggest of big questions: Who am I? Or more precisely asking, “How does the brain make me?”

In this episode, actually an extra while they work on season 4, they talk about the craft of making the soundscapes that they create for the show. They begin by playing a clip from the Musical Language show of developmental psychologist Anne Fernald talking about how mothers talk to their babies. She said, “Sound is like touch at a distance.” Listen to them play with the sound. For journalists not working with sound, this is an inspirational master class. Listen and learn.

Technorati Tags: , ,

Breaking news: Fire east of London



Photo: Fire east of London, by Kevin Anderson

Six fire engines to the scene east of London as huge plume of smoke billows over London.

Within minutes of the fire being reported, pictures were posted on Flickr and one blogger even posted a video. I’m following the news via Flickr and blogs through Technorati on the Guardian’s News blog.

Journalism.co.uk has a good roundup of the breaking news coverage of the fire via Twitter and blogs.

Technorati Tags: