Interested in observation, and particularly extreme weather such as torrential rain, storms.

Morning of 16 Oct 1987, Great Storm in SE England, have weather records for that day, coloured by pressure. Low pressure – storminess. Can we understand its dynamics, can we predict it? Take observations and model them.

Previous big storm was 1703, so if we’re interested in climatology of storms, we need 100s years of records, and need them for everywhere in the world. Europe is well represented, but, say, Antarctica is not. Even in 1987, we didn’t have good records for there.

1918, rather badly observed period of time. People were distracted from weather observations (!).

This is the problem we’re trying to solve. We need more weather observations from 1918. Easy part of the problem: Public Records Office has a tremendous amount of info in their archive. Weather data potentially available if we can extract data.

Ship’s log of HMS Invincible, covers 1914 – 1915. Records actions each hour, and takes weather observations every 4 hours, six per day. Full weather obs. World’s collective archives have millions of these observations, and they are tremendously useful.

Started photographing the logbooks, 250k images. Tried OCR, doesn’t work. Using citizen science project to solve this problem.

Working with the people at Zooniverse, collaborating with them for 5 months. Funded by JISC.

At the moment developing the systems, Old Weather won’t be live for another month. You can pick a ship, join the crew of that ship and start to extract that information from its logbook: date, location, weather information. Doing some beta tests at the moment, hope that in a few weeks time it’ll be launched as a real project.

There is other information in these log books that might be of more interest to others. Expecting to find a lot of this sort of data, e.g. Invincible on 8 Dec 1914, at 5am it was engaged with Battle of the Falkland Islands.

Mostly, don’t know what is in these log books, so need to find out.

[I'm personally very excited about this project as I'm working with the Zooniverse chaps on a small part of it, so very please to see it's close to launch!]

Where’s George? is a project tracking one dollar notes in the US. Put a stamp on the note, and log it on the website. Creates link between the two places where the not was logged. Provides a lot of data about how money moves around the US, therefore data about how people move around the US.

Administrative system of US: Divisions contain States contain Counties. Spatially compact hierarchical structure historically evolved with geographic determinants.

Human mobility – are these divisions spatially compact, determined by geography? How much geography is encoded in the network of money movements?

Can make groups of counties, run algorithms to test the strength of borders between devisions/states/counties. Shows Mississippi River is a strong border, as is Colorado/Ohio border.

Compare to epidemiology, SIR model – susceptible, infectious, recovered, i.e. what happens when an infectious person meets a susceptible person, etc. No spatial element in this model. When modelled, see a wave of infection moving through the world.

But modern transportation, aviation, changes it. Incorporate that, creates new model of spread of disease worldwide, e.g. SARS. Modelling based on country doesn’t provide enough granularity. Using Where’s George? data, can see how people move around the US.

No dataset like WG. Local travel data and aviation data, but doesn’t show full picture.

Nw model for Swine Flu, combine WG data with for spread, and show where possible flu hotspots might be, e.g. LA, Dallas, Miami, Chicago, NY areas.

Can look at multiscale mobility and local mobility, they show very different spreads of disease.

Some more live blogging from the Al Jazeera Unplugged conference. Previous caveats apply. I am sure that there are grammatical errors. I have tried to be true to the essence of the comments.

Mohamed Nanabhay talked about what is news. He first quoted the legendary editor CP Scott of The Guardian that “Comment is free, but facts are sacred.” EH Carr, the historian, said that facts do not stand on their own. They are called upon to tell a story.

How do we constitute news in this online world? When we look at news, what impact is the internet having? What is a news story? Fundamentally, it’s news because we say it’s news.

Over the last 10 years, we are seeing a shift in our industry. Now that we have the internet, everyone has a voice. We need to ask ourselves, how has this changed? Has writing news, setting the agenda changed?

In 2006, Rupert Murdoch said that the power has moved from away from the press, the media elite, the establishment. “Now, it’s the people who are taking control,” Murdoch said. Mohamed said that this was a utopian view. Murdoch bought MySpace based on this thinking. He thought that Murdoch’s view has probably changed. In November 2009, Murdoch said, “People reading news for free on the web, that’s got to change…” Mohamed said that the editors are taking over again.

As news organisations, we can’t do everything anymore. That’s not viable anymore, he said. Quoting Jeff Jarvis, you have to focus on what you do best and partner with your audience to do the rest. (At the conference, Al Jazeera announced an initiative to provide support such as cameras for people to do their own footage.)

He talked about Al Jazeera decision to use Creative Commons. Wikipedia, film makers, music video producers, artists, students, indy media, activists and video games makers were all using the video.

Every form of media that you can think of used this footage. It spread across the internet. It was quite powerful. People decided to use it in ways that we never thought possible.

Once you remove barriers, you see this creative expression flourish. It enhanced our distribution and reputation. It did provide financial benefits to Al Jazeera. It helped empower the community, which is quite important in the Arab world. They hope it will inspire the next generation of journalists and documentary film makers. It showed respect their audience, Mohamed said. They also wanted to challenge their competitors.

What we really do is constitute and reconstitute culture and knowledge. This is how culture diffuses, how it is created. If you look at culture in the Middle East, people travel through it. People move. People interact. There is no such thing as a stagnant culture. In this globalised world where everyone interacts with each other, the act of this spreading culture is important, he said.

Al Jazeera took this open posture. They put their content on YouTube while other broadcasters were taking their content off of YouTube. These audiences are on YouTube. Audiences (often young people) saw Al Jazeera content, many who had never seen this before. They spread our content on their blogs or Facebook. Some might become loyal readers or viewers.

For many news and media businesses to survive the recession and thrive after it has ended, they will have to adapt to the economics of abundance. It’s something that I’ve written about before, and Clay Shirky continues to make some of the most cogent comments about the economics of abundance and what many have been calling the attention economy for the last few years. From a keynote at the National Federation of Advanced Information Services, Clay says:

Abundance breaks more things than scarcity does. Society knows how to react to scarcity.

Ann Michael at Scholarly Kitchen blog (which is now in my RSS feeds) for the Society of Scholarly Publishing also quotes Clay as saying:

It’s easy to say “preserve the best of the old and combine it with the best of the new,” but in revolution, the best of the new is incompatible with the best of the old. It’s about doing things a whole new way.

I have struggled with this tension ever since I became a digital journalist in 1996. I knew that the internet would radically disrupt journalism the first time I first used a web browser at a student computer lab at the University of Illinois in August 1993.

However, I have always, always advocated and hoped for a transition that would wed the best of the old with the opportunities provided by the new. As I often say, I’m a very traditional journalist in terms of standards and ethics who uses cutting edge tools. However, it’s clear that many news organisations don’t have the resources anymore even to make strategic decisions about keeping the best of the old and combining it with the best of the new. Tough decisions will need to be made about what they stop doing. It’s sadly, no longer an option to continue doing everything they did in the past.

What is rare in a ‘world of cheap perfect copies’?

As Adam Tinworth said recently, publishers don’t have a great track record of adapting to this disruptive development:

We, as an industry, botched the transition online. We treated the internet as, at best, the poor cousin of the print title, to be filled with the left-overs from the established product and, at worst, a mere marketing device. Then, when the invention of the single most efficient information distribution mechanism mankind has yet come up with transformed our industry and its economics, we descended into panic.

How did print botch the transition online? It wasn’t for lack of trying. Steve Yelvington, someone I consider both a friend and mentor, was one of the few people who can say he was there at the beginning in terms of the internet and print, working on digital projects in the early 1990s. In his post, “Early to the game but late to learn how to play“, he makes a key observation:

The future gets created by individuals full of fire and passion, not institutions.

Clay supports Steve’s view and experience. It wasn’t that print publishers didn’t see this coming. They tried a number of plans. Clay said:

The curious thing about the various plans hatched in the ’90s is that they were, at base, all the same plan: “Here’s how we’re going to preserve the old forms of organization in a world of cheap perfect copies!”

The focus on preserving the legacy institution continues, and if you look at most of the paid content strategies, they are largely based on monetising current activities and content. About the only exception to this is recent attempts to sell iPhone apps and apps and content for the iPad, Kindle and new media slates. However, in terms of the web, most of the talk is about different ways to get people to pay for existing content created using existing forms of organisation and existing methods of newsgathering.

The problem that Clay is pointing out is that the economics of content have shifted. What will people pay for? Journalists will instantly say distinctive writing. Most journalists think their writing distinctive, but let’s be honest and even slightly logical here. If everything is distinctive, it’s no longer distinctive is it? Distinctive writing will only work for a very small group of writers. Thinking we can all be distinctive writers is like every 5-a-side footie player thinking he or she can play in the World Cup.

To pay for great reporting and great writing and the social mission of journalism, we’re going to have to think beyond the story in the digital age. We’re going to have to think about services that deliver value to audiences. In a world of content with “more alternatives than the human brain can process” as Steve puts it, suddenly intelligent, social filters become important and useful. People now pay for ‘filters’ that distill the vast amount of information produced everyday or every week into something human scale, for instance magazines like The Week. Smart, social filters can do better.

As I was writing this, I have found an example of people ready to pay for a deeper connection to those they trust. I grew up west of Chicago, and I grew up watching the At the Movies, hosted by Chicago film critics Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert. They were famous for their thumbs up or thumbs down movie reviews. Roger Ebert has just launched a club in which he offers some extras to his loyal fans, including special private discussions, advance ticket sales to his Ebertfest and a meet-and-greet at the festival with club members. They are only charging $5 a year. Read the comments. For everyone who thinks the web is full of nothing but venom, read those comments. Granted, he is a cancer survivor who lost his voice four years ago and just had an emotional appearance on the Oprah Winfrey show, but here is someone who has created a community.

Distilled insight, intelligence and connection. Content may not be rare in a ‘world of cheap perfect copies’, but these things still are. People will support organisations that deliver this. That’s where I see my future in journalism.

FOR HIRE: That was the subject line of an email that I sent to Neil McIntosh, then of the Guardian, in the summer of 2006. I had met Neil at the Web+10 conference at the Poynter Institute in the US in 2005 before I came to London, and the email was a long shot. I wanted to stay in the UK with my then girlfriend, now wife, Suw, and my options were running out at the BBC. I had managed to extend my temporary assignment in London once, but now we were bracing for my return to the US to my old post, Washington correspondent of BBCNews.com. We expected to be separated by an ocean for months. Fortunately, that’s not what happened. A few days later I met with Emily Bell and, after what can be described more as a meeting of the minds than a job interview, I had an offer.

Now, three and a half years later, I’m joining many of my colleagues in accepting another offer from the Guardian, voluntary redundancy. My last day is 31 March. I don’t have a new position confirmed at this point, although Suw and I have a number of exciting possibilities. Like my colleague Bobbie Johnson, I’ve picked up a bit “entrepreneurial zeal” not only from the technology pioneers that I’ve covered, but also from the journalism pioneers that I’ve worked with both at the BBC and the Guardian. Suw and I want to continue to push the boundaries in our fields and we’re both open to new opportunities. If you’ve got a cutting edge journalism or social media project, get in touch.

It’s been a real honour to work at the Guardian and I’m grateful to everyone who helped me. We’ve achieved a lot in the past three and a half years, although it felt like we were always impatient to do more.

Despite the wrenching changes in journalism right now, I’m optimistic. Suw and I are excited about writing the next chapter of our careers. For me, I’m hoping it will be one that helps journalism make the transition to the future. I have almost 15 years of experience in digital, multi-platform journalism, both in strategy, implementation and just doing it, and I’m thrilled by some of the options that Suw and I have before us at the moment. Nothing is settled, though, so I’m still open to offers, as well as being available for short-term writing and freelancing. If you’ve got something exciting in the works and need one of the most experienced hands in digital journalism, get in touch.

If you have any hope of solving a problem, you better have a clear sense of what the problem is and what causes it. Listening to the paid content debates in the newspaper industry, the debate has become polarised and filled with assumptions and assertions rather than clear-headed thinking informed by research and data.

One assertion that I’d like to challenge right up front is the oft repeated claim that no one makes money with digital content. In the late 90s, I often heard editors say, “The internet is great, but no one has figured out how to make money with it.” The dot.com crash only reinforced this view. However, internet use continued to grow through the crash. Advertising shifted online, especially after Google introduced its search-based advertising model. Within a year or two after the crash, many large news sites like the New York Times and the Washington Post were making money. A 2008 study in the US by Borrell Associates found almost all of 3,100 news websites surveyed were profitable.

The Great Recession has hit both the print and digital businesses of the newspaper industry with a vengeance putting tremendous pressure on newspapers. As I’ve said, the economic crisis has reopened divisive debates between the print and digital sides of the newspaper business. To get through this crisis and rebuild sustainable businesses that support professional journalism, we’ve got to get real about the economic reality we face, not just in the depths of this recession but after it ends.

Steve Yelvington has more experience with digital journalism than many people have in journalism full stop. He fights bluster with data and even a graph. Most news websites exhibit a long tail with a hump, he writes.

Most of those visitors come once or twice, probably following a link
from a search engine or another website. They’re looking for something
very specific. They find it (or not) and leave.

Then the number drops like a rock. Hardly anybody comes five times in a month.

But over on the right side you have an interesting little lump.

That lump is your loyalists. You’re going to have a hard time getting people to pay who come via a search engine, look at a page and leave. However, your loyalists see value in what you do and might be willing to pay. Working to convert more users to loyalists and giving your loyalists some way to pay for the content they value might be a revenue model that begins to add a revenue stream in addition to business cycle sensitive advertising.

Steve argues for a sophisticated model that leaves visitors who only look at one or two pages “unmolested” but asks those who view several pages to register with the site. News group McClatchy used this model, and the FT uses this model as well.

Determining how many pages people should see before registering and paying and what to charge are unknowns, but with a flexible system with graduated fees and clear benefits, this is a much more sophisticated model than some of the absolutist, binary solutions being thrown around.

Rewarding and building loyalty

I think that loyal readers should be rewarded, and I believe that they will reward publications they value with not only their traffic but also their monetary support. I think that newspapers could do much more to convert some passing traffic to more loyal readers, but it’s going to take better design and more engagement from journalists, which I know will be difficult with slimmer staffs. Not all journalists want to engage with readers, but I think that those who do and do it well should be encouraged and supported.

To successful deal with the problems that we’re facing during the recession and will be facing once growth returns, we need more data, more research, more experimentation and more sophistication in our discussions about business models. There is no silver bullet, no one solution that will save journalism. We’re going to have to try a number of things and a number of ways to earn money to support professional journalism. However, one of the first steps we need to take is to get past these lazy assertions and out-dated assumptions about the business. Lots of the conventional wisdom is based in the print-digital culture wars in newspaper newsrooms, and it’s in desperate need of updating.

Cuts at the Washington Post, primarily on the web and multimedia side according to the Politico, have brought into public a discussion that usually happens in newsrooms and mostly after hours amongst journalists. It has also exposed the depth of the division between digital and print journalists that has existed to varying degrees for most of my career.

Matthew Ingram, blogger and communities editor at The Globe and Mail in Toronto, discusses some of the specific issues at the Washington Post, but he is right in pointing out that the web-versus-print culture clash is anything but isolated to the Post:

(This kind of us-vs-them animosity) may have been amplified at the Post by the company’s physical and corporate structure (and there has been speculation that Web staff were let go because otherwise they would have had to be unionized), but you can bet this same battle is going on at virtually every major newspaper in North America. Why? Because they are caught between two worlds.

This isn’t isolated to North America. I’ve seen it across Europe, Australia and the parts of Asia I’ve visited.

To see this animosity in its full froth, just check out the comments on the report on the cuts at Washington indy, The City Paper. A commenter only identified as Sideshow Mel says:

For many years, The Post’s website was doing nothing more than posting the print articles, and hosting some online chats. But the web operation has this huge, spacious office to place things on the Internet, while the much-despised MSM reporters and editors were crammed together into an old, crappy space while actually doing the business of obtaining information and writing it. “the most productive and innovative employees,” don’t make me piss my pants. …

Jim Brady, former executive editor of WashingtonPost.com, does not truck with such comments, writing:

It’s the attitude of Stone Age commenters like these that still pervades far too many print newsrooms. Instead of attempting to adapt to what is clearly a digital future, they complain about the world collapsing around them, yet demean anyone who tries to do anything differently.

As he points out, Travis Fox, who won the first national Emmy for video journalism on the web, and fellow award-winning video journalist Pierre Kattar are reportedly two of those cut. On Twitter, Jim and Ken Sands, the executive editor for innovation at Congressional Quarterly, had a exchange that is another indication of how digital editors feel about this conflict.

jimbradysp: The most frustrating thing is that Web staffers go to work at newspapers b/c they want to help them find the way to the future…

jimbradysp: And, yet, once there, they find themselves ridiculed and demeaned by those they’re trying to help. Too much insecurity, I guess.

kensands: @jimbradysp Yes, insecurity. Find fault with anything new (blogs, twitter, etc.) instead of looking for ways it might improve journalism.

Derek Willis, a database journalist and developer formerly at the Washington Post and now with the New York Times, adds details to the internal battle that broke out when he wanted to make the switch from the paper to the website. I met Derek in the spring of 2007 as he was trying to make the transition. I wasn’t aware of the challenges he was facing in making it (Derek’s emphasis, not mine):

In a very real way, my transition was held up – I (jokingly at first, and then angrily) referred to it as a filibuster or a senatorial hold – by a few people at the paper. These people, most of whom no longer occupy the positions they held then, are not stupid. They are among the smartest folks I’ve ever worked with, and I have a high regard for their journalistic abilities. But the thinking that caused the editor of the paper to become involved in whether a mid-level staffer moved to the website was, in essence, this: this is a bad idea, because it will hurt the paper. My ego might like to think that this was really true, but I think the reality is that these people could not compare the value of my work for the website to the paper because they did not understand what it is I wanted to do.

Read Derek’s post, especially if you believe yourself to be on the print side of this divide. Derek wishes that he had done more to bridge the divide between the paper and the website.

The dangers of this continued conflict

I’m highlighting this discussion because I know it’s not isolated to the Washington Post. A couple of years ago, I thought this discussion was dying out. Digital revenues were growing by double digits at many news organisations, although in real terms revenue from print still made up the bulk of the revenues. Despite a firmly entrenched belief amongst print journalists, the digital side of many news organisations were generating profits by the early part of this decade, although again, they were small relative to the profits from the print business. Sadly the Great Recession has re-opened the discussion and amplified professional divisions as job security has ended for print and digital journalists.

In 2005, I went to the Web+10 Conference at the Poynter Institute with my manager at the time, Steve Herrmann of the BBC News website. It was an honour to spend time with digital pioneers from the US and elsewhere. In 2005, these pioneers were already asking this question: How do we create digital businesses to support quality journalism? It’s worth reading Howard Finberg’s summary of the conference:

During the next 10 years, will the economic underpinnings of the current media business collapse? What business models will support quality journalism? Is the idealism and democratic value of journalism under duress?

This was early 2005 before the industry in the US entered its current crisis. Some of the best digital minds in the industry saw the coming collapse of the business model. We weren’t dancing on grave of print. We have the same goal as print advocates and most of us, being so close to the digital business, saw 2009 coming years ago. (Few of us probably foresaw the ferocity of this recession, although Dan Gillmor blogged often about the housing bubble and bemoaned the lack of coverage of it.)

We have to end this culture war and remember that we share a common goal. Suw and I see this in a lot of industries, not just journalism. People see digital strategies as mostly about technology, but often, the biggest obstacles are cultural and territorial. Change challenges existing empires (and emperors) in organisations. Organisations without a sense of shared vision will tear themselves apart as managers compete against each other for scarce resources rather than the real competition outside of their organisation. This is not to argue for change for the sake of change. But the world has changed and we have to adapt if we hope to have thriving journalism businesses in the future that support quality reporting.

What’s at stake? I agree with Steve Buttry when he says that the ‘web-first’ wars are in many ways fighting the last war. I thought we had put this web war behind us in journalism but if we continue to fight it, we will only increase the number of casualties.

• Marshall Kirkpatrick, Technology Journalist » If You Think RSS is Dead Then That’s Your Loss and It’s a Big One
  Kevin: Marshall Kirkpatrick of ReadWriteWeb – the best site for coverage of internet developments – writes of why people are wrong to abandon RSS. More importantly, he pulls back the curtain on how his team at RWW keep on top of the latest developments on the web.

  "I will tell you that I no longer use Google Reader or Netvibes. Instead, I use open source software on our own servers that is more customizable, more reliable and more efficient.

  Our team scans over thousands of company RSS feeds each morning for updates (what news writer wouldn’t do that?) and we use an open source customizable meme-tracker to make sure we haven’t missed anything important. We use open source RSS parsing software to set up a dashboard tracking all our competitors’ feeds, we use an RSS to IM alert system to get some feeds sent to us right away and at least some of us use Gmail Webclips for another layer of ambient feed tracking."

  (tags: RSS aggregation news opensource twitter google)
• Sentiment Analysis Takes the Pulse of the Internet – NYTimes.com
  Kevin: "The universe of reviews, ratings and recommendations online open a tantalizing window on the collective consciousness."
  (tags: nytimes search semanticweb)

Today, I had a Twitter discussion with Kevin Garber, an “African entrepreneur in Australia and founder and CEO of spellr.us” an online spellcheck service. As with Twitter conversations, this is actually from two threads that take some joining. It began based on one my response to journalism professor and blogger Jay Rosen who said:

My testimony would have been: No government funding for news; culture war yahoos in Congress will just Mapplethorpe it http://tr.im/kDIb

Jay was linking to a US Senate committee meeting about The Future of Journalism. Jay is referring to the battle over funding for the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) in the US over support of exhibitions of homoerotic photos by Robert Mapplethorpe. The NEA became a key front in the US Culture Wars.

Journalists in the US who look to the BBC model for funding journalism or want their own government bailout would be wise to remember the Culture Wars. They’ve loved covering it, but if they took state funding, they wouldn’t be just be covering it, they would become embroiled in it, even more than they already are. As I said to Jay on Twitter, “People in US arguing for gov’t support for newspapers forget what a political football arts or public broadcast funding is.”

Kevin said:

the key question is are newspapers a public good that can’t be addressed via normal supply/demand mechanisms …

To which I replied: “No, the question is about about journalism not about newspapers. Public funding for journalism is not a panacea. (says as ex-BBC)”.

I’ll agree with Kevin who said in a follow up comment that “smart capitalism doesn’t rely on mkt for everything”, but I’m not sure that the market is failing in terms of support for professional journalism. Rather, I think we’re in the midst of changing business models and that the dominant print model has given way to a multi-platform model with much greater diversity of revenue streams than the recession sensitive over-reliance on advertising. Newspaper and broadcast journalism are capital-intensive, industrial businesses that rely on advertising rates that were under threat before the recession and are unsustainable during the recession. The market has been sending clear signals to newspapers for 30 years that their business model was under threat, and those trends have only accelerated in the last five years. However, the Great Recession is a rupture in business as usual. Assumptions, business projections and companies are now being swept away as this credit bubble bursts.

Now, like the banking and auto industry, the newspaper industry is looking for a solution, and many journalists share Kevin Garber’s view that newspaper journalism is such an important public good that it merits public funds. You hear it when journalists argue that they play a role essential to democracy.

Even non-journalists make this argument. Suw was at Social Web Foo Camp recently at O’Reilly HQ in California, and she said that many people during a “design the future newspaper” pointed to the BBC as the model that could save journalism. Public service broadcasting is a funding model for journalism, but even in the UK, it hasn’t been extended to newspapers. And I doubt it will be. I think journalists also need to realise that such a model probably couldn’t roll back the job cuts that are hitting US newspapers. This shouldn’t be seen as some full employment act for journalists. Also, let’s get real. As an American, I think it’s safe to say that we would have to be living in some Star Trek-variety parallel universe to even contemplate significant public support in the US for a $200-plus annual licence fee payment to watch live broadcast television (either other-the-air or down a cable of some description). It ain’t gonna happen. Seriously. Also, while many other state broadcasters benefit from a licence fee, the UK is unique in the level of funding, and I think a poll of senior executives at the BBC would find most of them preparing for a dramatically reduced level of public funding in the future.

But apart from the political feasibility of a publicly funded journalism institution at the level of the BBC, let’s take a look at some of the cons stemming from public funding. And I say this coming from the point of view of having worked for Auntie for eight years. I love the BBC, and I was very proud to work there. However, public funding doesn’t come without its downsides (and strings attached, just ask the banks or Chrysler for that matter).

1. What one administration giveth, another can taketh away. And the cuts might even come from an administration that you think will like you. Bill Clinton didn’t really like the press when he left, and Labour, while it might seem would have much more kinship with the BBC and public broadcasting, has not exactly been a supporter of the BBC. Just ask Director General Mark Thompson who thought he was going to get a much more generous licence fee settlement than he got.
2. Your commercial competitors will spill tankers of ink, pay lobbyists and rant endlessly on air (cough, Fox News) to make sure that your funding will be as low as possible. Just ask the Corporation for Public Broadcasting in the US. (Maybe you should take a page out of NPR’s books and start subscription drives.)
3. You’ll have to subject new ideas to a ‘public value test‘ and make sure that it doesn’t distort the commercial market. In other words, you can be successful, but not too successful.
4. Public funding won’t insulate you from job cuts. As I said, I worked for the BBC for eight years. There were cuts four out of the eight years I worked there. One year, the cuts were 18%, which was a blessing because the Head of New Media at the time, Ashley Highfield, had asked for 25%. And the cuts continue. This year, they are looking to find £400m of savings.

There are pros, of course, and the BBC is a great journalistic institution. But it’s not in the ruddy health that most American journalists assume it is. Like much of the media, it reached a high water mark in the early part of this decade, and it’s now swimming against the tide. This is not to say that public funding shouldn’t play a role in journalism, but it already does in the US in the form of NPR and public television. Also, based on the experience of Sweden, state support might help for while, but it’s not a long-term solution.

I’ll be interested to see what if anything comes out of the US Senate hearings today, but if it’s government support you want, be careful what you wish for.

UPDATE: A timely example of what I’m getting at. If journalists are anxious over a sense of powerlessness from market forces, it’s no different when the government can change your budget by fiat. See: (Conservative Party leader) Cameron to force vote to halt increase in BBC licence fee. He might not get his way now, but he might when he’s prime minister.

I originally was just going to add Chris Applegate’s discussion of trolling and griefing at Social Media Camp London last weekend (we didn’t manage to make it) into our delicious links for the day, but then I realised that Chris has highlighted a really important issue.

The social sophistication of trolls completely out-strips the social thinking behind most news sites. As a journalist who hears a lot of complaints from other editors about trolling, I can honestly say if 4Chan turned their attention to a major news website, it would be trivial to socially disrupt it. Actually, 4Chan has already done this, gaming the Time magazine most influential person poll.

The Internet has different rules. The folks at Time just learned about it in a very amusing way, as their third annual poll for the world’s most influential person was topped by moot A.K.A. Christopher Poole, founder of the legendary memebreeding forum 4chan.

The fact that it’s so easy is probably one of the reasons that really good trolls don’t bother playing silly buggers with news sites. It’s like shooting fish in a barrel.

Chris says, quite rightly:

The barrier between ‘real’ and ‘virtual’ has come down, and what happens online can now very easily spill over into offline. There is no inherent morality within Web 2.0 – tools can be used for good or evil. Trolls are now their own separate problem within themselves – they allow efforts to be distributed to many human actors over a variety of technologies, and collectivised to any particular end, over a mere matter of minutes, hours, days or months. It’s a different problem from spam (mainly bots) or hacking (mainly individuals or small groups) and as the social web gets ever more ubiquitous and less distinct from the ‘real’ world, it’s only going to be more of a concern. Successfully fighting against them is a distinct concern – but at the same time let’s not get obsessed by it; letting it stifle innovation would mean the trolls truly have won.

Anyone who has worked with social media on a news site knows that trolling isn’t a new problem. As soon as you have a forum, as sites that I worked on in the 1990s did, you will have people who enjoy poking at the other users. But there are just some folks who have a passion for more than mischief.

However, although we’ve increased the number of interactive features on our sites, news organisations mostly have failed to increase the emotional and social intelligence of their strategies. Some of this is an over-emphasis on technical solutions to what are largely social problems. Certainly, bad technology can make your job harder, but technology can only go so far in solving social issues.

A lot of the problems come from strategies that make perfect sense in the era of broadcast mass media but don’t make sense in terms of social media. And when I say broadcast, I mean uni-directional media, including print, not simply television or radio. Mass media constantly competes for attention, often by trying to shout over each other. Editors wanted to be talked about, and a lot of the strategies seem solely designed to outrage, upset or simply piss people off. Some mass media strategies aren’t social strategies. They are anti-social strategies. Journalists give sources a right to respond, but now the audience has a right to respond too. If we whip an audience into a mob, the result is predictable.

Social media journalism is about working in constructive ways with the audience to provide something of value both to the news organisation but more importantly to our co-collaborators in the audience. We have new opportunities to help people make sense of the world and make decisions in democratic socieities. If the only value that news organisations provide in terms of social media is an opportunity for people to vent their rage, that’s not a winning startegy. It’s a strategy that deserves to fail.