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Kevin: Using source material to back up a story. The Guardian (my employer) used an audio clip to back up a story about the England cricket team. Andrew also uses the interview of example of why live interviews are still important.
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Kevin: Andy points to big questions given to online newsroom leaders. Convincing print execs that the web is valid. Hyper-local news the saviour? News edited or filtered? What’s next?
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Kevin: I guess I’ve got my shopping list of good gear. Mindy writes up a great list of good gear for multimedia projects.
Monthly Archives: June 2007
links for 2007-06-08
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Suw: Greaty post on participation inequality and how it affected the Utah school vouchers bill.
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Suw: resources here for: human rights activists, broadcasters, technology developers, NGOs, consumer rights groups, journalists, policy makers, researchers etc
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Suw: I wish more conference organisers would pay attention to this
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Suw: Handle with care. Wikis can backfire badly if they aren’t set up and run well, they’re certainly not a quick or easy to way to build community.
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Suw: Knock-on effects – P2P ruins physical piracy… cheap, easy plentiful, legal downloads would seriously dent P2P numbers.
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Suw: Pandora’s using zipcode instead of IP address to filter. Wonder how many listeners they have in Beverley Hills and Schenectady. Copyright Review Board is doing very, very bad things though. 🙁
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Suw: Wasn’t able to watch the C4 story without the right plugin, but from what i heard about it, it seemed manufactured. Certainly the party was.
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Suw: Wireless power! My dreams will finally be fulfilled – no more searching for powerpoints at conferences. Mind you, it will send the anti-wifi crowd nuts.
Blogging is like sex
Hang on, this is a bit of a conceit, an extended metaphor. I’ve heard some suggestions such as from Scott Karp at Publishing 2.0 that all journalists should blog. Sure, I’d love more journalists to embrace blogging. I am after all the blogs editor at the Guardian. Scott’s post has some great suggestions and tips for journalists who want to blog, and it’s worth a read for curious journalists who need to be pointed in the right direction for technically how to blog.
But I’d have to disagree that this is like writing a column or that it should be a place to publish things that you can’t publish elsewhere. Too often, news organisations who blog are accused (sometimes accurately) of populating their blogs with content that doesn’t quite make it onto their main news site.
Rather I’d suggest, both in content, tone and approach, news or media organisations have to editorially make it clear that this place is different, this is where we discuss things. This is where we engage with our audience for a number of reasons including transparency, debate and discussion or for tapping the wisdom of the our communities.
Now, if this is a place for engagement, media have to ask themselves before throwing their writers into an engagement space whether their writers want to or are able to engage with members of the public. Over and over and over, media get caught up in this silly brand/celeb obsession and push their biggest names to blog when really it’s more about getting your passionate members of staff to blog. We’ve just launched a food blog, Word of Mouth, at the Guardian, and it’s doing a storm because we’ve got a lot of passionate ‘foodies’ on staff writing about what they love and enjoying the conversation with others who share their passion.
This is a special skill, and to be perfectly honest, there are some journalists who not only don’t want to engage but, frankly, should be kept at a very safe distance from any member of the public. Some journalists who blog for their publications I’ve begun to assign a ‘personal threat level’, akin to the US terrorism theat level. “Today, there is an elevated chance of said journalist attacking a commenter.” You’ve all heard about when communities attack, but what about when journalists attack? This is social media, and you’re going to need some social skills.
The bottom line is that blogging is like sex. You can’t fake it. You can’t fake passion. You can’t fake wanting to engage with the public. If you do, it will ultimately be an unsatisfying experience for both the blogger and their readers. Sure, for a while, the self-confident writer might sit back after crafting a lovely piece of prose and have some post-creative puffery, patting themselves on the back for their performance. But soon, they’ll find their blog is a very lonely place.
Technorati Tags: engagement, journalism, media 2.0, moderation
links for 2007-06-07
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Suw: This applies not just to lions attacking, but also to technological change, current ‘security threats’ that are destroying our rights, and, well, pretty much everything.
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Suw: Leisa Reichelt’s notes from her talk at Reboot. I really hope that a video comes to light eventually as I would love to see it.
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Suw: Old post from Feb 06 about the 1/10/100 rule of participation in Yahoo!
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Suw: Long post explaining participation inequality and what can be done about it.
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Suw: Google Street View. Mmmm lovely! Very much like Quakr, but with all the weight of Google behind it.
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Suw: Fabulous idea. But I wonder how many secrets get found and thrown away by the cleaners?
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Kevin: Q: Why are people turning away from newspapers? A: Because many think they are biased. “It was the third most popular reason cited by people as to why they didn’t read papers, from the online survey of 8,749 adults in seven countries”
WAN: Bias doesn’t sell
I was beginning to think I was in the minority in valuing relatively unadorned information over commentary and bloviation. I also chalked it up to the American tradition of newspaper journalism that I was trained in versus the British tradition. I’ve been told several times by Brits how bland American newspapers are. I had almost come to the conclusion that I was more interested in information over commentary because I’m a news junkie and, therefore, rather non-representative. Well, possibly not.
From Stephen Brook post over at the Guardian’s Organ Grinder blog:
Bias puts people off newspaper, was a finding of a Harris Interactive/Innovations/WAN poll release at the World Newspapers Congress and World Editors Forum today.
It was the third most popular reason cited by people as to why they didn’t read papers, from the online survey of 8,749 adults in seven countries, including the US, Britain, Spain and Australia.
Bias was cited as the most popular reason in Britain and Spain, and the third most popular in Australia.
That is one of the findings by a Harris Interactive/Innovations/WAN poll released at the World Newspapers Congress and World Editors Forum today. The online survey asked 8,749 readers in 7 countries, including the US, UK, Spain and Australia.
I give Stephen Brook points for his Heart of Darkness reference and also the admission that in British journalism, the loss of bias is perceived as descent into blandness.
But I wonder if the perception of blandness is about the journalist and not the audience.
It would also be interesting to know what people saw as bias. Is it something they don’t agree with, or the interjection of opinion by the journalist?
While I may be a minority in my interests, I don’t think I’m in the minority of being really busy. I just don’t have time to wade through a lot of flowery prose and commentary dressed up as journalism to get to the facts of the story. I just need good, solid information delivered clearly and concisely to make economic, political and other life decisions, and I don’t think I’m alone.
Blogging for Supernova
In May I announced that I was going to be blogging over on Conversation Hub, the Supernova conference blog, and whilst my schedule got in the way to start with, I think I’m now getting into the swing of things there. It’s always strange writing on a group blog with lots of people you don’t know, but it’s a good opportunity to read and respond to people I might otherwise not have come across. Here’s a summary of my posts so far:
- The multilingual web – I talk to Stephanie Booth about the difficulties of making the web mirror our real-world use of language.
- The unintentional social network – constructing social networks from publicly available data.
- Our old friend, the social network – We’ve always had social networks in business, just now they are explicit.
- Playing with numbers – Will the 1% Rule suffer the same fate as the Pareto Principle and end up overused, abused and misunderstood?
I’ll be blogging more on ConversationHub in the run up to Supernova, so do pop over there and take a look!
Amnesty-Observer Irrepressible.info Anniversary
I was at the one year anniversary of the Amnesty International-Observer Irrepressible.info campaign looking at challenges to the freedom of information on the internet. The event started with recorded statements by citizen journalism pioneer Dan Gillmor and Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia talking about some of challenges that Chinese Wikipedians face just to contribute to the community-created encyclopedia.
Some people think the internet is a bad idea. I think it’s a great idea, and we’re the people who are going to make it happen.
The next hour and a half had some gripping stories from bloggers and net activists from around the world talking about their struggles for freedom of expression
links for 2007-06-05
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Kevin: Geo-tagging is the key to local aggregation says Lisa Williams with Placeblogger. It’s going to take some help from bloggers, Flickr users, Twitterers, vloggers. But in that challenge is an opportunity for outreach.
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Kevin: Companies are moving out of Second Life and looking at creating their own virtual worlds for better security and more control. They also want to target users younger than SL’s average age of 30.
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Suw: The ultimate GTD site.
Free Tickets for Amnesty-Observer Event on Wednesday
It’s giveaway Monday on Strange Attractor. It’s been a year since Amnesty International and The Observer launched the Irrepressible campaign to highlight threats to freedom of expression on the internet. To mark the first anniversary, Amnesty and The Observer will be hosting an event this Wednesday. There is plenty more information on the Amnesty website. I’ll be talking briefly about the impact of blogs and citizen media on traditional journalism, but there is a great line-up of ‘Net activists from around the world:
- Martha Lane Fox – lastminute.com
- Clark Boyd – BBC
- Ron Deibert – Open Net Initiative
- Sami Ben Garbia – Tunisian cyber-dissident
- Josh Wolf – US cyber-dissident
- Morton Sklar –Yahoo! Court case
- Shava Nerad – The TOR Project
- Yan Sham-Shackleton – glutter.org
- Markus Beckedahl – netzpolitik.org
Jimmy Wales, Dan Gillmor, Cory Doctorow, Ethan Zuckerman, Richard Stallman and Yu Ling, wife of a Chinese cyber-dissident will also be contributing. The event is at 1830 this Wednesday 6 June, and it will be at the Human Rights Action Centre in London. Leave a comment if you want to come. You can get up to two tickets. Please leave your e-mail address when you comment so that Amnesty can send you an e-mail confirmation.
links for 2007-06-01
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Kevin: $75m for what? For the “2.3 million people who have filled out profiles at StumbleUpon”. … “a StumbleUpon search for “cars” could generate a list of Web pages that factor in a user’s income, age, gender, etc”