There should be a footnote to this National Union of Journalists recruitment poster. Join the union unless you are one of those

“self-serving bloggers who don’t really want to be in a union ‘cos it doesn’t have that ‘I’m a digital revolutionary and I’m out there, doing it’ vibe”

This is a line from Gary Herman on NUJ New Media Industrial Council site. I’d leave a comment, but alas, there are none. Have they ever heard the old adage, when you’re in a hole stop digging? Hey guys, if you want to create an ‘us versus them’ line in the sand, congratulations, you’ve succeeded. And the ‘them’ isn’t The Man in management. There is obviously no room in your union for a “brain dead digital enthusiast” like me. (Just to be fair, lest I’m accused of taking the quote out of context. The full sentence is: “Redundancies at AoL should give the most brain dead digital enthusiast pause for thought.”) And right before that, Herman takes a most unprofessional jab at Roy Greenslade:

At the very best, people like Roy Greenslade who huff and puff and storm out of the union are behaving precipitately. At worst, they’re trying to put the boot in. Probably, they’re just a bit dim.

I’m not anti-union. But how am I supposed to interpret such statements? It doesn’t fill me with the warm feelings of union solidarity. “Sorry, but you’re a bit dim comrade?” Is that the message you really wish to convey? Herman rails away against PR and blogs in his piece, but I’m going to give a piece of advice that I never thought I’d suggest to anyone: The NUJ really needs to work on its PR in terms of courting new media journalists.

Emotive and irresponsible attacks such as those in Herman’s piece have muddled the NUJ’s core argument of maintaining journalistic quality and integrity under challenges not from the internet but from economic pressures of changing business models. We all agree that journalists should be ethical, our journalism of the highest possible quality and that our journalism should serve the public good. I have forgone lucrative opportunities in for-profit journalism and consulting because I believe in the mission of public service journalism and its place in a democratic society. We agree that journalists should be compensated for their work. We are not in disagreement over these points, and I – as a digital enthusiast – am not the enemy.

As for the NUJ, I’m moving on. Jeff Jarvis is right:

It’s a mistake, I think, to let the curmudgeons set the agenda and, for that matter, get the attention. It doesn’t move us forward.

I’ve got plenty of colleagues and collaborators to work with to create the future of journalism. I’m part of the new collective and have been for a long time. Online journalist since 1996 and damn proud of it.

Both of us feel so strongly about the National Union of Journalists’ recent statements about Web 2.0 and new media that we felt we had to challenge them. Although we’re breaking the ‘don’t feed the trolls’ rule, we felt these issues are too important to the future of journalism to be left unexamined.

In this post, we want to challenge Donnacha DeLong’s piece WEB 2.0 IS RUBBISH in the Journalist, the union’s magazine. The article is a one-sided polemic which not only mischaracterises Web 2.0 but also misrepresents the way that journalists and editors think about collaborating with their readers.

The article begins with the subhead: “Webfolk call the burgeoning interactive use of the internet ‘Web 2.0’.” “Webfolk”? That’s as dismissive and belittling as “boffins” or “nerds”, but at least it sets one’s expectations pretty accurately for the rest of the article. Whilst DeLong mentions in passing the fact that the web is “full of opportunities”, he chooses to focus only on what he sees as the “dangers”. This is unsurprising. Between us, we’ve come across this The peril! The peril!” attitude from many and various sources, online and in person, but it’s not a constructive attitude for the NUJ – or DeLong as its representative – to take.

DeLong’s first error is to oversimplistically equate Web 2.0 with “participation and feedback from our ‘users’.” As the Telegreph’s Shane Richmond says in the comments on a Jeff Jarvis post, this is no more than a convenient strawman to attack. As we have long argued here at Strange Attractor, Web 2.0 is far more than asking people “tell us what you reckon“. Rather, it creates an opportunity for journalists to find not just eyewitnesses, but also expertise from what Jay Rosen calls “the people formerly known as the audience”. Any journalist worth his or her salt should be interested in talking to people that witnessed or who can shed real light on news events, and should be willing to go beyond the limits of their own address book – Web 2.0 enables that in a way we’ve never seen before.

Web 2.0 is also about mass collaboration, such as sifting through documents or carrying out research. After another Church of Journalism troll wrote a poorly researched and argued piece in the Los Angeles Times recently, Jay Rosen wrote a piece about the journalism that bloggers actually do. This is about networked investigation and research, not just soliciting feedback and opinion. In the UK, Ben Goldacre who writes the blog Bad Science and a column in The Guardian of the same name, asked his readers to file FOIA requests with Durham Council to get information about fish oil “trials”.

Then there are the database-driven online projects that these new technologies enable. Take a look at the Washington Post’s election coverage. You can see all of the candidates campaign appearances in a Google Maps mashup and even download their calendar. Both are great resources not only for the public but also internally for the Post’s own journalists.

And, of course, the journalistic benefits of Web 2.0 are not just about reader-facing stuff. Tools such as RSS, Google Alerts and social bookmarking help journalists efficiently gather and organise lots of sources of information when doing research. We often hear about how as a society we are overloaded with information, but these tools provide a way to sift through a mass of data to find what we need. Any journalist not using RSS and social bookmarking on a day-to-day basis is making life unnecessarily hard for themselves.

Having thus mischaracterised Web 2.0, DeLong then goes on to claim that it is “seen as replacing traditional media.” By who, exactly? Now, a good blogger would give examples, but we’re expected to take DeLong’s word for it. Obviously it’s difficult to include links in a magazine article, which DeLong’s piece originally was, but there is no reason not to provide sources on his blog post. The irony, of course, is that this is the exact sort of cut-and-paste from print to web behaviour that the NUJ complains about in its report on mulitmedia working. (Note: We haven’t seen the original report yet, so we will comment fully on that later, when we have.)

But neither of us can think of any traditional news organisation with a strategy – stated or otherwise – of replacing all their journalists with content sourced from the internet and/or their readers. And the discussion about the dissolution of the mainstream media in favour of 100% citizen journalism was had in (and outside, but mainly in) the blogosphere at least three years ago.

Then DeLong digs up the old chestnut that journalists alone can produce “truly authoritative content”, a claim that is patently untrue. Suffice it to say that long before we were even talking about Web 2.0, Dan Gillmor understood that his readers in Silicon Valley had expert knowledge that he could tap into to make his journalism better. There are thousands of experts out there – lawyers, professors, professionals – who are writing about their field in an accessible and interesting manner.

DeLong then says:

They have the ability to produce content that informs and fulfil an essential part of democracy – the widespread dissemination of information that allows the public to question those in charge.

This is over-egging the pudding somewhat. The good journalist does this, but many who should, don’t. We too often see press releases and wire copy republished with nary a challenge to the party line. Sometimes it’s only the dogged persistence of activists and experts – some of whom are bloggers, many of whom are not – who fact check, challenge and publicise inaccuracies that results in a more accurate story being told.

And the training that DeLong puts such stock in is rather a red herring too. Many excellent journalists come from non-journalism backgrounds, but bring expertise in specialist areas such as science, business, technology and the arts, to name a few. And many poor journalists went to J-school. Setting up journalists, collectively, as some sort of bastion of democracy and truth is rather an exaggeration.

Journalists aren’t the only people who can contribute to democracy. Where would journalists have been without pictures from “witness contributors” – to use the NUJ’s phrase – when covering the recent crackdown in Burma?

Much of this unnecessary angst about the threat of citizen journalism and Web 2.0 – and the deification of journalists that accompanies it – comes from the misperception that everyone wants to be a journalist. Only a tiny percentage of bloggers have any desire to go into journalism, and they would have made moves to enter their chosen profession with or without Web 2.0. But the vast majority of people who provide eyewitness reports of an event are there only through luck (good or bad), and expert bloggers are expert because they have years of experience behind them. Neither groups has any interest in changing careers.

DeLong goes on:

The media are not perfect. More often than not, they focus on issues the public is interested in rather than those that are truly in the public interest. But those who argue that Web 2.0 is the future want to throw out the baby with the bathwater.

The imperfections and exemplars of the media are entirely irrelevant to whether or not Web 2.0 has a part to play in the media’s future. More importantly, the media has to realise that it has no choice: It must embrace the internet, including Web 2.0, because the audience is already there and advertisers are moving there quickly.

The mainstream media is not leading the charge to the internet, it is following along behind its audience, laggardly, sullenly and defensively. Many journalists have spent ten years dismissing the internet as a fad and an inferior medium. They are equally dismissive of Web 2.0 without even knowing what it means. DeLong says on the NUJ New Media’s blog, “So there we go – a nice big debate about the issues”, but he has done nothing to move the debate forward and nothing to help of inform NUJ members. Instead, he has engaged in more scare-mongering about the threat of the internet and simplistically focused on perceived, but illusory, dangers to journalism.

Both of us embraced the internet because of the opportunities it presents. It’s the world’s greatest story-telling medium, bringing together the strengths of text, audio, video and interaction. The internet as a communications tool can help journalists tap sources like never before, making their stories richer and more balanced. Why wouldn’t journalists take advantage of the internet?

Yes, the job is changing, and we as journalists need to change with it. The internet may be posing a threat to the business model that support journalism, and it’s understandable that this causes anxiety. But misrepresenting the reality of that change won’t make it go away.

Canyon County Fire by respres on Flickr, Creative Commons, Some Rights Reserved

I was looking through my feeds and found this on Mashable: This Disaster Will Be Twitterized. Mark Hopkins recalls how more than 10 years ago, he aggregated all of the coverage of the Oklahoma City bombing on his Angelfire page. His page was listed prominently on the Yahoo page showing coverage of the tragedy.

Mark fast-forwarded to the present day and watched the California wildfires unfold in Flickr, Twitter and a number of other Web 2.0 sites. And he makes this observation:

Any news channel or show on the TV is prominently featuring this disaster in varying degrees of detail, but if you reside outside of Southern California, what exactly are you going to learn from the national news reports that will be useful to you in a situation like this? CNN isn’t going to point you to the ten mile long Google Map mashup that shows where the fires are. MSNBC isn’t going to aggregate the links for you.

The question for any news organisation is why not? This isn’t rocket science. There are no technical hurdles to doing this if you have even a half-way decent CMS, and it’s dead easy if you’ve got some blogging software. If part of news organisations’ job is to be a trusted guide, why are so many blind to the aggregating this content and helping their audience navigate it?

Chris Vallance and Rhod Sharp had a couple of great interviews on the BBC’s Pods and Blogs last night. (Note: I used to help Chris and Rhod with the programme, and Chris will be the best man at my wedding.) But I’m still baffled why web aggregation during breaking news with follow up interviews still are the exception not the norm. There are all of these people living through a news event making themselves known through blog posts, photo sharing sites, social networking sites and more, and yet we’re still telling the story through wire copy, agency video and stills. It’s yet another missed opportunity by doing what we do the same way we’ve always done it. Editorial innovation can happen while meeting the demands of breaking news.

This week, staff and managers of the BBC News website will gather in what friends and former colleagues have described as both a birthday party and a wake. The BBC News Website will celebrate its 10th anniversary just as it is about to cease as a separate news operation.

I won’t pretend that this post isn’t personal. I joined the Guardian a year ago, but for eight years before that, I worked for the BBC. I joined BBC News Online in October 1998 as the first online reporter outside of the UK. For most of that eight years, I worked for the BBC News website, or BBC News Online as it was called before management felt that it could use a rebranding.

A few weeks ago, I read “BBC News Interactive will be ‘an empty shell’ in two years” by Jemima Kiss on Guardian Blogs with a heavy heart (disclaimer: I’m now the Blogs editor at the Guardian).

She quoted BBC News Interactive chief Pete Clifton, who said:

If you come up to the seventh floor in two years, it will just be an empty shell, hopefully.

Hopefully? I can’t see my former online colleagues being filled with hope. Despite his talk about the online staff joining the radio and TV staff to “make the best platform for our journalism”, it’s hard to see this as anything but happy talk. While Pete was at AOP, I was having dinner with a friend and former colleague, and he confirmed that Pete was basically managing himself out of a job. He’s not the first manager at the BBC to do this over the last few years, but Jemima put it well when she said:

It sounded like news interactive is about to evaporate, to disappear into the ether like it never existed – as if online news does not deserve, demand or need its own dedicated department. Surely integration isn’t as brutal or as straightforward that?

This isn’t integration. This is the systematic dismantling and destruction of a site and a staff that has helped lead the way in online and interactive journalism.

Yes, the site will survive, and I’m sure that remaining staff will soldier on. But the online managers and editors, who have built up so much experience over the last decade, face an uncertain future. The problem is that, inside the BBC, the News website simply does not have the political capital to withstand the powerful managers in TV. Everyone inside Television Centre knows the pecking order. Radio is the poor cousin to TV, and online is the poorer cousin to radio.

Case in point, I was told by another former BBC employee that she recently asked someone still there what would happen for the News site and its staff. The response?

They will do what they’re told.

The arrogance, the shear arrogance. And it’s all too believable.

Integration

Integration should be greater than the sum of its parts, bringing together the combined audio, video and interactive talents of the BBC. When I was there, I knew that to achieve the kind of multimedia storytelling that I wanted, I could learn much from my radio and television colleagues. And through the camaraderie and shared sense of purpose, we achieved great things in Washington and at the BBC News website.

Nick Newman came up with the great idea to turn over the election coverage agenda to our users back in 2000, and Tom Carver and I flew, both literally and figuratively, across the US in an Election Challenge. We covered 6,500 miles in 6 days using web conferencing gear, a mini-DV cam and a portable sat dish to webcast once a day, answering questions posed by visitors to the website. In the wake of the 11 September 2001 attacks, I travelled to New York three months, six months and one year after, marking the dates with text and video storytelling with correspondent Peter Gould and Simon Oldfield, Sarah Dale and Nick Buckley from the News website. And on the suggestion (and later great encouragement) of Steve Herrmann, I blogged during the last US presidential election, again taking interactive journalism a step further. And the news website has done so much more in pioneering multimedia newsgathering, including their laptop link-ups, Joseph Winter’s great work in Africa, just to mention a few projects.

At the BBC’s Washington bureau, we did feel almost like Greg Dyke’s “One BBC”, although we would get the most ridiculous duplication-of-effort requests from London. At the time I left Washington, we had more than 30 requests for President Bush and his cabinet from the various ‘flagship’ programmes at the BBC. One senior aide on Capitol Hill once quipped to a BBC producer that with so many flagships there mustn’t be any room for other ships in the BBC armada. But we did do integrated journalism in Washington. I covered the Microsoft anti-trust trial for online, radio and TV as I did the Millennium Bug, although I spent much of the night doing two-ways and finding new ways to say “nothing much to report”. But it was this that made the BBC both a great place and a great place to work.

The BBC News website Washington job was one of the best jobs at the site, and I look back fondly on those days. But when I tried to take my new media skills to other areas of the BBC, they were neither used nor rewarded, rather I was criticised for my lack of TV or radio skills.

In the year before I left, many of my colleagues both inside and outside the BBC tried to talk me out of it. Why would I want to leave the BBC? I told them simply that in four of the last 5 years, 2003-2007, the budget for the News website had been cut. In 2003, BBC management tried to cut the site’s budget by 25%, but only managed 18%. I took a year off to do a video journalism attachment in Washington, not knowing if I would have a job to come back to. The cuts in 2003, reportedly at the suggestion of the highest levels of BBC New Media management, came because “Friends Reunited runs on 6 people, why does the News website need a few hundred?” With budget cuts for the foreseeable future at BBC News, how could I stay? My pay wasn’t keeping up with housing inflation in Washington and there were no opportunities for me. The pioneering work that we had once done was no longer possible with the budget cuts.

I would love to think that, under an integrated news operation, the BBC News presence would flourish online, but knowing the way the BBC works, I can’t realistically see that happening. The BBC’s internal politics are so poisonous that some of its flagship programmes are at open warfare with one another, calling up Sky to offer their guests instead of sharing them with their BBC colleagues. That was why Greg Dyke’s “One BBC” was the punch-line of a joke in the Washington bureau. I can’t see how this will suddenly change overnight, especially in light of the scrabble over resources as these cuts bite deep. Politics is the allocation of resources, and one surefire way to ratchet up the political battles at the BBC is to make the pie that everyone fights over just that much smaller.

Real leadership at the corporation, which it does have, should put a stop to the petty battles of managers and remind them that the real competition is at Sky or CNN, not down the hall. But that is not the atmosphere at the Pit of Vipers, as one friend and former colleague refers to Television Centre. I’m not sure that anyone could pull the BBC together. As anyone who has worked there knows, it’s not one corporation but rather a thousand fiefdoms.

Brain Drain

Now, I fear, through this arrogance and so many missteps, big and small, the BBC will see what started as a trickle become a flood. In February 2006, I told a BBC executive who I count as a good friend that I was seeing a brain drain. The number of digital natives leaving the BBC, not only in News but across the organisation, I feared would leave the BBC incapable of realising its digital ambitions. He had seen it before he said, as had I. During the dot.com boom, many of my colleagues the News website left for lucrative (albeit often short-lived) jobs in the booming sites of the late 1990s. But this more recent brain drain was different. I saw people leaving not because there was silly money to be made but because they were frustrated. They felt throttled and hemmed in by bureaucracy, infighting, regulation and technical bottlenecks, especially after the forced sale of BBC Technology to Siemens. (For those not familiar with the sale, the BBC had reached its borrowing limits. The government wouldn’t increase the limit so the BBC needed to sell something, fast. When I left, the annual service contract for an iPaq handheld computer was three times the high street value of the device itself, and if I recall correctly, that didn’t even include the data charges.)

Now with this forced integration of radio, TV and online news, I fear that they will lose – or, at best, relegate to the sidelines – the online management, editors and journalists who have built a world class online news service. Done wrong, this could be a huge step backward for the BBC, back to the bad old days of ‘shovelware‘ and simple re-purposing.

I worked side by side with so many respected journalists there, and I really felt pride in what we were doing. As I said, I know that they will meet this challenge as best they can. They have spent five years miraculously finding ways to do more with less. Now, they will have no choice but to do less with less.

Jack Lail said former newspaper editor and Silicon Valley CEO Alan Mutter definitely hit an ‘organisational nerve‘ with his post about the ‘Brain Drain‘ happening in journalism. The post was hard hitting, quoting from a number of anonymous digital savvy journalists in their 20s and 30s looking for their exit at their newspapers and possibly out of the media full stop. Alan writes:

But the young net natives, for the most part, rank too low in the organizations that employ them to be invited to the pivotal discussions determining the stratgeic initiatives that could help their employers sustain their franchises.

This is one post where you need to read the comments, like this one:

The large MSM paper I work for has had virtually 100% turnover in it’s online operations in the last 18 months. I’m not talking about the Podunk Daily News either, you’d know the name. … I just don’t understand it, there are people in the mix who really are trying to save this industry but who are battling of all things, this industry.

This comment pained me:

I have reporting experience and two journalism degrees, but I frequently have dinosaur reporters and editors treat me like IT support staff and dismiss my ideas because I’m not “one of them”.

For many journalists, ‘real’ journalism is still about the format, not the content. It’s as if their words, which they wrote on a computer, were somehow less important because they never quite made it off of a computer. Hopefully, when confronted by their own argument, these journalists will see how paper thin it is. Somehow I doubt it because they’ve held to this line for most of the 10 years I’ve been an online journalist, but one can hope for some sort of poetic justice. If they learn some HTML, maybe they’ll find work in the future.

And this isn’t necessarily about age or experience. This isn’t just fresh out of college grads with, as one blogger said some outsized sense of entitlement. One commenter is leaving a major newspaper’s online wing after seven years. That’s a lot of experience lost.

Patrick Beeson, a web project manager for the E.W. Scripps Interactive Newspaper Group in Knoxville, Tennessee, called the post “among the most revealing portrayals of what’s wrong in most newspapers. Namely, legacy newsfolk not allowing for often-younger journo-technologists to play a guiding role in that paper’s strategy going forward.” This isn’t about turning your newsroom over to your youngest staff, but it is about having the humility and the vision to know what you don’t know.

As Alan says, some of this is about territory and turf, short-sighted management more concerned about owning the change than achieving change. And I’ve spoken to a lot of online news veterans who also struggle with the transition as the flat, collaborative environments of their newsroom meets the rigid hierarchies in traditional newsrooms. Integration isn’t the problem. It’s the terms of that integration. As Jack said, “This may be just a part of the difficult transition of organizations cemented in their ways.” This is an organisational issue as much, if not more, than a generational one.

Journalism professor Mindy McAdams points to a great post by young journalist, Meranda Watling, who gives her experience of being involved in discussions about new products “that there is no way in hell would float with my peers.” (Great blog Meranda. Nice design, and I do hope you do that education Tumblog.)

Mindy’s post is titled “We need a tourniquet”, and she said Alan is:

…talking about a legion of Merandas who are giving up and leaving because it’s so obvious to them that management has no clue what readers want or respect. The comments back him up, again and again. (That persistent sound you hear is our lifeblood leaking out.)

This post has kicked off a great conversation in the online journalism community, a community I’m proud to be a part of. It’s worth looking through the trackbacks to Alan’s post.

But to quote Rob Curley, this isn’t about skillset, it’s about mindset. It’s not about age or experience. I’ve spoken to some journalism school grads who talk as if it’s the 1940s, not the 21st Century, and I’ve worked with seasoned journalists who humble me with their digital knowledge and foresight and remind me that I have a lot to learn, like Steve Yelvington.

Steve and I shared dinner and drinks in Kuala Lumpur earlier this summer after we finished three days of workshops on citizen journalism with Peter Ong and Robb Montgomery, and he told me about coding a Usenet news reader for the Atari ST in the mid-1980s. Steve’s a pioneer. Steve knows his technology and his journalism. He had this to say about Alan’s post:

We are at a critical turning point for American newspapers. We can’t afford to drive away our smartest and most creative voices. The Internet not a publishing system, a Web site is not just another channel, and digitizing the thing we’ve been doing for the last century is not going to work. We need to think new thoughts, and pushing new thinkers out the door is a fatal mistake.

Most of us are just impatient for the future that we know is there to be grasped. But we won’t wait forever. If the industry can’t or won’t do it, we’ll do it on our own.

Technorati Tags: change, digital native

One of my favourite podcasts is NPR’s On the Media. It’s a great mix of meta coverage about media and the business of media as well as reviews of international media. For instance, they often have the blogger Mark Lynch of Abu Aardvark giving Arabic-language media reviews. They had a great piece this week about Cambodia trying to convince sceptical youth that the Khmer Rouge really did commit such horrific acts.

This past week, they also had a great interview with nytimes.com general manager Vivian Schiller about the death of TimesSelect. She does a good job explaining why the New York Times tore down the pay wall, and it was refreshing to hear someone in commercial media talk about ‘the public domain’ as a reason for opening the Times’ archive before 1922.

…in fact, 1851 to 1922, which has got a lot of cool stuff, including coverage of the Civil War and the Titanic, is now available for free because it belongs to the public. It’s the public domain.

Why did they take down the pay wall? In the long term, the single-digit growth from subscription revenue was outstripped by the growth from advertising. The comment that really stood out in my mind though was when she was asked whether they were worried about losing paying subscribers by having a totally free site (apart from the archives from 1922 to 1987). She said (my emphasis):

Well, yes, and there may be some that do that. But you know what? We can’t force behavior on people. We have to provide our content in the way that consumers want it, and if we lose a newspaper subscription, then so be it. But you can’t force change. You can’t work against the tide.

You can’t force behaviours on people. You have to learn how your readers/viewers/listeners behave and how they want their news, information, conversation and community. Follow their lead so you can keep supporting, as Ms Schiller puts it, the social mission of journalism.

Technorati Tags: businessmodels, journalism, media 2.0