Category Archives: Community

03.22.07
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Guardian Changing Media Conference: Radio in a multiplatform world

Session Chair:

Matt Wells, media editor, Guardian News and Media

James Cridland, director of digital media, Virgin Radio

Chris Kimber, managing editor, BBC Audio and Music Interactive

Felix Miller, CEO, last.fm

Nathalie Schwartz, director of radio, Channel 4

James Cridland rolled out Virgin’s first such as their first in social networking. He said that there was a lot of doom mongering talk about radio, which was causing many in the advertising community to believe that hype. One in five people surfing the internet are also turning into radio. His internal theme is control and conversation. Control to reflect that today’s media consumer is used to controlling their environment in so many ways, whether control as in YouTube, iPod or SkyPlus Box (DVR). Conversation is another goal. Radio is a shared experience. A lot of people feel part of a community as a radio station listener. People say that I am a Guardian reader, a Radio 4 listener or a Heart listener. We need to give people a chance to have a conversation with us and with the brands that advertise on our station, as well as with themselves.

Chris Kimber, not having any advertises to worry about, I will say that radio has huge challenges going forward. We will see declining figures in live, linear listening in the next five years, both in BBC radio and commercial radio. Radio does need to re-invent itself. It needs to be multi-platform. It needs to be visual. People are beginning to expect more than an audio stream. It needs to be on-demand. We launched the audio player five years ago, and we launched podcasting before Virgin did. Radio has to be even more distinctive. That pressure is even greater than in the past. The importance of brands are really key, whether that is a radio station brand or a programme brand. The big challenge for all of us is how to engage the younger demographic.

Teenagers who spend all their time on YouTube and MySpace. Will they ever come back to radio?

Nathalie Schwartz believes that radio has competitive advantages when you get it right, which is why Channel 4 is bidding for a multiplex. User generated content in the terms of the phone in has been on radio for years. The future is digital. DAB radio sets will have a slideshow stream (My two cents: and the audio quality will get even more shit.) People can record streams. (My two cents: Until they are sued by the recording industry.)

Felix Miller, CEO of last.fm. Last.fm is a new type of music platform based on sharing. Every user can display what music they are listening to on their own page. These music profiles can be used to create collaborative filtering. You can generate recommendations, and out of these recommendations, you can create ‘radio stations.’ (It’s similar in concept to the Pandora service but instead of an automated system, it’s generated by the usage of Last.fm listeners.)

MW: Radio used to be the box, but now James and what everyone says, it’s more of a theory.

JC: The music jukebox will succeed, but I don’t listen to a lot of music on Radio 4. Maybe we’ve concentrated on music too much in the past. It used to be 10 great songs in a row. Maybe we should be concentrating on the bits between the songs. Oh, I just realisedd that the last 10 songs in a row was a Virgin Radio strapline.

NS: I suppose if I think what Capital was when it started in teh 1970s, it was innovative. It was all about community and conversation. They were celebrating their anniversary, and they interviewed the founder. They trained the presenters so that they talked with listeners not at them. Today’s definition of community may be an in-depth website with blogging that feeds into the radio. If you have a strong brand and a lot of loyalty and you can create compelling content, then you can succeed.

CK: I think that certainly the BBC and commercial radio that have quite a long way to go. Last.fm and Pandora’s daily reach way outstrips Virgin Radio websites reach.

JC: Can you compare it to a BBC station?

CK: Oddly, it only has Virgin Radio on the graph. It used to be about schedules, but in the future, you have to think about a programme as an idea.

FM: We have 50m unique visitors to the website.

JC: He quoted some figures that shows that radio listenership is still growing. Don’t be under any illusion that radio is stuffed and we should run to nearest lifeboat. The actual reality is that radio audiences aren’t erroding to a great degree.

CK: I don’t want to get into a stats war. With 15-24 year olds, the trend for the BBC and commercial radio is that the trend is down. If we’re losing young listeners at a young age, at what time do they come back? Or do they just continue with their habits in their teens and 20s.

NS: We will be aimed at extending the diversity of radio. The most worrying statistic is the BBC’s current market share. The BBC has 55% of the radio market share. Channel 4 and its partners must invest in serious programming. Speech, comedy, drama have not been traditionally done on commercial radio. 84% of those listening to speech radio is listening to the BBC. Perhaps reach has grown, but amongst 18-34 listening hours has dropped.

MW: You have a number of ideas on how to do that. You talked about adding pictures.

JC: Adding visuals to radio isn’t about making TV-lite, it’s about making rich radio. Every new platform, whether DAB, Freeview or Sky, we can put information related to music – pictures of bands, information on song.

FM: We should talk about what works. The point about the youngest audience is that they have niched. That is why they go to YouTube and Last.fm. How can I do my own media? Communities increase stickiness and market for audience. There is no reason for teenagers to switch on radio at some specific time of the day to listen to some specific DJ. We need to exploit medium that we have: The Internet. There is a lot we can do there. There is a lot of interactivity. Our audience has changed.

MW: Chris, you’re the doomsayer on the panel. Talk about works.

CK: To say why would a person want to turn a radio on misses what radio is. It is live. It is a communal experience. It’s the bit between the music.

I sort of threw a grenade at the panel. I don’t care about DJs to sift through music for me. Recommendations from my friends are much more important to me. I know their tastes. I’ve got a friend back in the States who has a great taste in music. I love going to his place and just listen to what’s on his playlist. After a couple of responses from the panel, I quickly realised that we don’t really save in the same world.

I think the Last.fm CEO lives in my world. It’s about niches and exploration, and I don’t hear that when I turn on the radio. I hear programmed playlists and sameness.

Suw said that the panel was obsessing about music. She said that is about much more than music. Through the internet and podcasts, she’s found things like This American Life and the Merlin Mann, three-minute podcasts about productivity. She said that there is an opportunity for nuance.

NS: Podcasting is just radio on demand she said and talked about a trial with WiFi and PlayStation Portable. She also took a swipe at the BBC and said that its programming haven’t really faced a competitive challenge and therefore weren’t remaining vital.

CK: We have 7.5m downloads of our podcasts. (MW: But that is just your radio material?) Yes, we can’t podcast unique material because of regulatory materials.

FM: He fielded a question about whether Last.fm would add podcasts. They might if there appears a demand for it.

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03.22.07
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Guardian Changing Media: Reuters looks at the changes for ‘old media’

Geert Linnebank, a senior advisor to CEO at Reuters, kicked off this summit looking back at how Reuters has kept at the cutting edge during its 155 years. In the 1850s, they used carrier pigeons to transfer stock market information because it was faster than steam trains. Carrier pigeons gave way to telegraph lines and then to an early ‘high-speed’ electronic network 30 years ago.

What are we scared of? Changes of demographics. Promiscuity. They jump from channel to channel. How do you build audiences around communities? Virtual worlds. He talked about Second Life and its explosive growth. They have bureau and a reporter in Second Life.

“There is also brand. How do you create and maintain brands in a digital age?” he asked.

How do earn revenue? How do you protect what’s yours? Intellectual property in a digital world? If you don’t reward content producers, the content will be of low quality and people will go elsewhere. He said that piracy was rife.

But the barriers of entry have changed. Only a few thousand dollars will set you up with the laptop and all you need to produce digital content. “The old value chain has been blown to pieces,” he said. Consumers are in control like never before. Google, Amazon, BT, Vodafone, eBays have created infrastructure to serve big but have also served to serve the small. All of those companies are searching for new users.

That model is different from just a few years when moguls controlled the entire chain from the reporters to the presses, from the studios to cinemas. They created high barriers to entry. There has been an explosion in content, there was the rise of the search engine that allows people to find that content.

The choke hold is over. Lots of players have control over parts of the value chain. He said:

No single company can do it all alone, and no company would want to do it all alone…. They need brutal honesty about what they do best. A focus on core competencies is essential.

There is a huge amount of competition in the entire value chain. If companies want to succeed in the new economy, they must partner. It is a different attitude. It is a respect for what others bring to the table, he said.

Get close to your customers. Partner. Use the best technology. There is a realisation that we need to partner, make the best with both the pro and amateur. They partnered with Dow Jones on distribution although they fiercely compete on content.

Last year, they partnered with Global Voices and funded an editor there. The benefits are mutual and growing. Reuters journalists get access to sources that would be inaccessible or hard to find. Global Voices are an integral part of the Africa site we launched a few weeks ago. At that launch, Global Voices co-founder Ethan Zuckerman talked about tensions in Zimbabwe weeks before those tensions came to a head. That informs Reuters journalism.

Trust, independence and impartiality will mark you out. Journalists are trained to sift through facts and provide context with bias or spin. Contributions bring immediacy. It can also bring deep knowledge. Most journalists are generalists. It can point to real interest, what people want to know about it.

It can also bring aggressive advocacy, at worst an incitement to violence. Editors will remain. Editors are no longer megaphones, but must facilitate. Editors must be candid about the process, more humble than loud predecessor. It doesn’t come naturally to people who grew up in the megaphone culture. But it is possibly a generational issue.

Journalists are good at holding those in power accountable, but they are not as good at holding up a mirror to themselves. Bloggers do tell us when we get it wrong. We ignore them at our peril. There is a role for editors. It is to makes sense of this almost infinite universe of information. We don’t have unlimited time to search for new information and content. Software tools are good, but people are still better. Good editors can be those brands.

He is optimistic about the challenges. The opportunity is to re-engage with audiences despite the hand-wringing. There is plenty of evidence to give rise to concern. Michael Grade of ITV said that news programming in its current form was unlikely to survive in current form without public subsidies. Traditional news programmers are starved as mass advertising switch to more targeted advertising. The PlayStation generation isn’t as interested in news.

Are journalists out of touch? When they read that house price have seen healthy increases, their readers who can’t afford houses must think the journalists are deluded. They try to win over audience with new designs and consumer guides to iPods. He focused on excellence, engagement and partnerships.

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03.18.07
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How much ‘lived experience’ does your news site cover?

News, Community, and Lived ExperienceOne of the most common mistakes that news organisations make when it comes to community is trying to build participation strategies around an extremely narrow, overly-professionalised definition of news. If you want to miss the opportunity with blogs and other forms of participation, go ahead and focus solely on news. You’ll be missing out on the vast majority of ‘lived experience’ as the Center for Citizen Media called it in a must-read report called “Frontiers of Innovation in Community Engagement“. I’ve been quiet this week because I’ve spent a lot of quality blogging time digesting the 66-pages in this report and the annual State of the News Media 2007 report, which if printed out would come to 600 pages.

In the Frontiers of Innovation report, Lisa Williams, with Dan Gillmor and Jane Mackay, have examined in detail both what works and the commonest mistakes and misconceptions made in building communities online. This paragraph and the graphic above just leapt off the screen at me.

Broadly speaking, the most successful sites are most effective at translating the lived experience of their community onto the web. But only a tiny fraction of lived experience is news. One way of looking at the process of wrapping an online community around a news organizationis that it’s an effort to dramatically broaden the range of lived experience represented by the news organization’s output – output that now includes content supplied by nonjournalists.

Too many times, news organisations look to participation to simply bolster the mainstream news agenda, not to broaden it. What stories are we missing? What part of the audience are we ignoring? Whose viewpoint are we ignoring?

I still remember last December when Clyde Bentley spoke about his MyMissourian.com project at a Journalism.co.uk event where I also spoke. Clyde said that his team had expected more discussion and stories about politics, especially during the US Midterms elections last year. As a matter of fact, he said:

You know what’s not popular? Politics. … Religion is far more popular than we predicted. And pictures of dogs, cats, even rats trump most copy.

Banal? Clyde even went on to say that journalists are rather poor judges of banality.

Sometime we get so close to the stories we cover that minutiae excite us a lot more than they should. I lived in and covered Washington for six years for the BBC, and I saw this happen in the Beltway bubble. Certainly, there are C-SPAN junkies that love to watch the minute-by-minute movements of the machinery of politics, but for every political news junkie, there are hundreds if not thousands of other people interested in a myriad of other things – minutiae by journalists’ standards but deeply important to them and their communities.

That’s where the bulk of the opportunity is for communities for news organisations wishing to launch community sites. It’s not all about hyper-local sites, although location is a good thing for people to coalesce around. But it will definitely require journalists to think outside of their own box if their community strategies are to succeed.

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03.11.07
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Online communities thrive offline

In the late 80s, friends of mine in Rockford Illinois, where I went to high school, used to meet up with friends they met on D-Dial, a BBS system. They got together for pizza, for bowling and for D&D. It was my first experience with any type of online community, and I remember playing around online in my buddy Chuck’s attic on his Commodore 64, chatting with people and downloading the Anarchist Cookbook so we could make our own fireworks (Well, that was the plan. We never quite found the right fertiliser, although I know we scared the bejeezus out of my girlfriend at the time as we drove around town listening to free jazz and dreamed out loud about the massive rockets we’d make.) My friends had been online for years, using the simple text-based systems that pre-dated widespread access to the internet outside of universities, scientific institutions and the military.

But even then, I knew that offline community was important to online communities. It’s a common misconception that people use online communities to replace or in lieu off face-to-face, ‘real’ community. I have always rejected that, and my online communities in Flickr and via blogs reinforce or support my offline social ties, especially having friends spread over a few continents.

That belief was reinforced Friday night as I attended the DCist’s “Exposed” photo exhibition. The Warehouse Gallery was filled overflowing with people, many of whom had name tags with their real names and their DCist user IDs. Thanks Kyle for the invitation. Congratulations to the DCist crew on such an astounding success.

02.22.07
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FOWA 07: Richard Moross & Stefan Magdalinski – How we Turn Virtual Stuff on the Web into Beautiful Things in the Real World

(MOO)

Loves print. Books, magazines, greeting cards. Who really Bluetooth’s their contact details to people? Internet is just the internet. You can’t touch it.

Moo is a new kind of business. New media is creating new kinds of content, communities. Can create, edit and publish our own stuff on the web, and it’s kinda good. Uploading terabytes every month, but it’s stuck up there. Only way to set it free is to print it.

How we turn virtual stuff on the web into beautiful things in the real world.

The challenges. Business started with one person, and it’s a printing business. 500 year old business model producing a product that’s 300 years old – business cards. How do you get someone to care or notice you? Challenge to stand out and build a remarkable company.

Do things that are different enough to be worth talking about. It’s all in the details.

If you look in the usual places you’ll get the usual people. Need to hire unusual people. Everyone hired was through friends of friends, not recruiters. Only one person, Berhane, in the company who isn’t a DJ. Reversed engineered their existing software in a weekend.

Products. The difference make all the difference.

Three steps:
– Look at the marketplace.
– Have a cup of tea.
– Do something completely different.

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12.06.06
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Journalism.co.uk: Readers’ Revolution panel on MyMissourian

UPDATED: On Monday evening, I had to rely on the wisdom of the crowds to help me find Skempton Hall at Imperial College and managed to be only slightly more than fashionably late – good for a party but maybe not so good for a panellist for a discussion. The topic was the Readers’ Revolution, various ways in which media consumers have also become media producers.

Clyde Bentley of the University of Missouri – who I had the pleasure of meeting at Poynter’s Web+10 last year, talked about the hybrid web-to-print MyMissourian project. And Robin Hamman, a friend and former colleague at the BBC, was speaking about his Manchester blog project (I’ll post about Robin’s presentation tomorrow). I talked about what I call newsgathering in the age of social networks and also ways in which the Guardian is moving community and participation from the edge to the centre of our digital strategy.

Clyde was already speaking when I arrived. After giving an overview of the University of Missouri School of Journalism and the Missouri Method, he talked about the media landscape that media organisation find themselves in. According to Netcraft, there are now 101,435,253 sites.

We’re fighting for attention.

Now, I hear media leaders say that this is why brand and quality are even more important in the age of the Attention Economy. I disagree. I think relevance trumps industry-defined measures of quality, but Clyde will touch on that.

Clyde may be a professor, but he understands the economics of media, which I think more journalism students need to get to grip with as they enter the job market (and it’s a tough market out there for new grads or even old hands). The most valuable voices in journalism today are passionate about journalism and realistic about the numbers.

Last month, I heard executives from the Washington Post and the New York Times talk about how they are focussed on growing their online businesses as quickly as possible to make up as revenue tails off from the print business. But the numbers, as they stand, are sobering. Online journalism is not enough to meet the shortfalls as newspaper
revenue falls. Clyde said:

The money isn’t there. Revenue is 5.41% , only about $1.9m for newspaper revenues online versus the print revenues. … Plot line of online revenue versus print
revenue doesn’t meet soon. We are not making enough money to turn off
the presses in my lifetime. We need an interim strategy.

UPDATE: I asked Clyde the source of those figures. Too many slides going by my sleep-addled brain at that point. The figures are from the Newspaper Association of America. It represents expenditures for online advertising in newspapers only. Clyde said: “Our initial research shows most of the overall online advertising is for messages that do not support editorial content — corporate sites, click-throughs from other commercial sites, free-standing ads, etc.” And there is not a major shift from print to online, yet. Clyde said that the shift was a bit more than 4% last year.

The citizen connection is about easy blogging and social networking. Clyde added: “Money is going online; it just isn’t going to support journalism.”

Initially, they drew a fiscal blank. How about a hybrid of citizen journalism and their own? “Web and print. Users with journalists. News and fun.”

MyMissourian.com was born. It is a site that anybody can participate in. It’s not hard news.

Inspiration came from OhMyNews, started by a radical leftist journalist. It has changed the face of Korea. Dean Mills, the dean of the prestigious school of journalism at the University of Missouri, recognised the potential and asked us to move quickly. MyMissourian.com was proposed in May 2004, and launched in October 2005.

It didn’t go over too well initially, Clyde said. Critics complained: “People are ripping you off. They are going to flood it with commercial messages.”

But they had done their research before launch. They wanted to give the voice to the voiceless, and allow non-journalists to set the agenda. And, they knew that they were going to make money.

They proposed to allow citizens to gather stuff online – photos and stories – and use that material in a print product to pay the bills.

All US newspapers have a TMC product, a total-market coverage product. With circulation dropping, they send TMC products free to non-subscribers. The vast majority, 88% of US newspapers, have a free product. Pre-print advertising, not classifieds, account for 25% of our revenue. But then there is driveway rot. Free-sheets sitting unread, rotting on the driveway. (Or tube-stop rot here in the UK with the blizzard of free newspapers.)

The print edition of MyMissourian launched in October 2005. It allowed them to use of the efficient advertising pattern of print. The print MyMissourian has Increased their readership by 28,000 households. They have 900 or writers who contribute to the site and, therefore, to the print edition. People are more interested in MyMissourian because they help create the site and the newspaper.

Is there a future for journalists? Yes, both professional and citizen journalists, but the job of professional journalists is changing, Clyde said. It is now more about guiding people to content and covering stories from a different way. Journalists should invite the public to the table.

Many editors are concerned about errors, credibility and libel. The arguments: How do you deal with issues of decency, commercialism, literacy and banality?

They looked for simple, logical solutions. As for banality, Clyde said, “Banality? Journalists are poor judgements of what or who is stupid.”

For the MyMissourian community, they laid down four simple rules:

  • No nudity
  • No profanity
  • No personal attacks
  • No attacks on the basis of race, religion, national origin or gender

The site meant the end of ‘no’ when it came to what they could cover. “We don’t say: ‘No won’t cover your event’, or ‘No, we can’t run your youth baseball story’,” he said.

The citizen journalists write about personal memories, faith of all kinds (“Journalists hate covering religion because it’s not matter of logic. It’s a matter of faith,” he said). We enlist senior photogs, older members of the community, and give them disposable cameras.

This is gut level journalism. Some people just want to share their recipe. They’re planning on releasing a cookbook just based on the recipes that people have shared.

You know what’s not popular? Politics. It’s less popular than Clyde and his colleagues had predicted. Religion
is far more popular than we predicted. And pictures of dogs, cats, even
rats trump most copy.

And the bottom line is that that it cost less than $1000 in new costs in a year and a half.

The cultural issues

Suw and I often say that the cultural issues are more challenging than the technical ones. And Clyde said that this has been hard on journalism students. “They want to write, not guide.”

Many of his students were at a loss at how to cover non-news topic like Little League. And I was fascinated when he said that few students are well prepared to work with the public. Journalists are basically shy people.

The lessons from their hybrid experiment:

  • Use citizen journalism to supplement not replace.
  • UGC isn’t free.
  • Online attracts the eager, but print serves the masses.
  • Give people what they want, when they want it and how they want it.
  • Get rid of preconceptions of what journalism is.
  • Every day people are better ‘journalists’ than you think.

Next, they want to integrate blogs with print.

It’s a very interesting model, and it’s the kind of creative, ‘hybrid’ thinking that is needed to reconnect journalism with readers, viewers and listeners. It reminds me of a talk I recently heard. We live in an ‘and’ world, not an ‘or’ world. Although I’m a strong advocate of online journalism, I recognise that strength lies in new combinations of the strengths of online and traditional media. Creative and organisational tensions will exist, but I’ve convinced it’s where the opportunities lie. The challenge is helping inspire the change.

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11.23.06
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PodCastConUK 2006: Podcasting and the Citizen Journalist

Neil McIntosh, Chris Vallance and Suw Charman sat on a panel last Saturday talking about citizen journalism and podcasting. Apart from knowing and liking everyone on the panel, I like how moderator John Buckley kept a tight lid on the prepared talks so that this was more of a conversation rather than the panel talking at the assembled podcasters.

Suw started off by burying the ‘us versus them’, journalists versus bloggers and podcasters old yarn. Suw and I are really tired about this false dichotomy. Instead, she tried to frame the question this way: “How can we support journalistic endeavours?”

She asked the audience: “Who here has never blogged a fact?” Only one hand went up in the back.

Chris added a great disclaimer saying that no one should ask him about BBC policy because in the BBC eco-system, “I am just above pond life.” Chris might be low in the BBC hierarchy, but he is doing some of the most forward-thinking work with citizen media anywhere in the BBC.

Chris and I helped launch the Pods and Blogs show on 5Live in April 2005, when I came to the UK to do some work on a blogging strategy for the BBC. I was in London, and Chris in LA. We worked together using e-mail, IM and Skype. He asked whether people would like to hear three pundits on the Iraq war or the voices of soldier-bloggers, Iraqi bloggers and others on the Iraq war, and said that that was where citizen journalism has an advantage over traditional radio – the opportunity for previously unheard voices to be able to tell their stories.

Chris said that podcasting had really opened his eyes to doing new things in radio. Knowing Chris, he’s both a great advocate for podcasting and new technology while also being a huge fan of traditional speech radio. He has seen how podcasting can open up a world of voices to improve traditional radio journalism. During the midterms, he put out a call for citizen journalists, and he
received not only text submissions for the blog but also audio clips,
one of which he played during the panel. He received the clip ahead of the US midterms from a podcaster that really demonstrated some of the divisions amongst US voters.

He rejected the ethos of crowdsourcing, saying that this isn’t about getting as much out of your audience as you can just to cut costs, but stressed that this was more about collaboration. Most of mainstream broadcasters are now frequently asking people what they think, but Chris said that this was only a small step. Podcasting allows a way for all these wonderful voices to be heard.

Chris stressed that this was a cultural shift for broadcasters more than anything and added that broadcasters needed to rethink their definition of news, making it more expansive than pundits and experts.

Neil, the head of editorial development at the Guardian, doesn’t really like the term citizen journalism, and he said that he felt a bit like an imposter being on the panel. He admitted that the Guardian news site is more interactive than Guardian podcasts. (That’s on my to do list when I get back from a couple of weeks of leave.) Neil said that citizen journalism was promoted by former journalists and academics who wanted to get on the conference circuit, and he said that while bloggers and podcasters pointed out things that journalism needed to do better, it was journalists’ responsibility to sort out these problems. He didn’t see citizen journalism as a solution to those problems.

The questions from the assembled podcasters began with one about fact-checking and the quality of information from citizen journalists, specifically about a rumour started by a podcaster that had been picked up by a tabloid. After a few questions from Neil, we found out the tabloid was The Sun, and that the podcaster in question was actually the guy who had asked the question. He made up a rumour about Doctor Who that a character was coming back.

Suw said that most media outlets are relying on a traditional paradigm of trust rooted in their brand. For instance, she said that the BBC rely on their brand, and say, “We are the BBC, and we have trust.” It’s led to arrogance, and it’s led to sloppiness like the podcaster described. She speaks to journalists in her role as executive director of the Open Rights Group, and after the article comes out, she sees her words quoted back to her incorrectly.

I would add that journalists worth their salt understand that they are only as good as their last story, and that credibility is something earned and all too easily lost these days. Over-reliance on trust in the brand of an organisation is an invitation to disaster. It can breed complacency amongst staff. Individual members of staff must understand that trust in the brand is everyone’s job.

As Suw often says: “Your brand won’t save you now.” And she questioned the question about fact-checking:

How can we progress citizen journalism when there is no fact-checking? …That’s the wrong question. How can we progress journalism and fact-checking?

Another question from the audience was about the changing relationship with the audience, a smart audience that can assess information in a very savvy way.

Neil said that it’s faintly depressing thing when you know a lot about an issue that you read an article that doesn’t quite get it right. And he said that even he has been misquoted in press trade publications.

Suw said that there are patches where the media has respect for their audience, but she said that many in the media treat their audience in the Points of View paradigm, a programme where Barry Took and then Ann Robinson would condescendingly read out letters from the audience, often attributed to Angry from Milton Keynes.

Many in the media believe that their audience is insane or only give feedback when they are pissed off. But that belief allows them to dismiss the views of their audience and keep the audience at arm’s length.

Chris said that comments and feedback have always been important to radio. He spoke to Dave Slusher of the Evil Genius Chronicles about the difference between traditional feedback and what goes on with podcasts. Dave felt that it was one of power. In the past, the radio presenters always came from a position of power relative to their audience, now there is equality between podcasters that allows them to have a genuine conversation.

Culturally, Suw said that this was about niche content, and she called on a re-definition of news. News is not all about current events. She wishes that there was better hyperlocal content.

I’m spotting a trend here. Both Chris and Suw have called for a redefinition of news. Chris wants to bring in other voices. Suw thinks that news is more than current affairs. I remember shortly before I left the BBC, one of our presenters had contacted a blogger in Indonesia about a ‘news’ story. The blogger said that no one in Indonesia was talking about that story that had gripped the international media. Everyone in Indonesia was actually talking about some popular song.

I often joke that the only people who are generally interested in news
are journalists and maybe politicians. Most people have a range of
interests and personal passions.

I wonder, in this post-scarcity age with respect to information, why the agenda can sometimes still be so narrow? We can cover so much more, and work with our audience to expand the agenda. But as the amount of information increases, we also need to develop much better tools to help people find their way through this information.  

Back to PodcastConUK and another question from the audience: If you listen to the comments, do you focus too much on a vocal minority? That’s a good question. Participation models usually show that only a fraction of our audience currently participate, although that participation occurs on several levels.

The conversation ended on democratisation of media, based on a question from Ewan Spence. Ewan said that we were in a golden age, a renaissance, but as we emerge from the industrial age, but “we are fucking it up”, screwing up the planet through our shortsighted ecological mismanagement. Suw commented that the one thing that was different now to past renaissances was that now we have democratised media, this is a renaissance of the people, not simply a change in power from one elite to another. And that it was this democratisation that gives her hope that we might help turn the tide.

The key thing, I think, is the change in culture and the change in relationship between journalists, podcasters and the people formerly known as the audience: More voices, a broader agenda and more collaboration.

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11.15.06
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Exploding the blog myth

I really shouldn’t take the piss out of a British media icon, but in this case, it’s just too inviting.

Jeff Jarvis pointed out something in the Indy, in which they asked a bunch of British media heavyweights about the future of newspapers. Jeff pointed to Piers Morgan as someone who gets it and to the BBC’s John Humphrys, presenter of the Today programme, as someone who doesn’t. Jeff pulls out this quote from Mr Humphrys’ statement on why he thought it was preposterous to conceive of a society that functioned without newspapers:

And sooner or later we will explode the blog myth. The idea that you can click on to a few dozen blogs and find out what’s going on in the world is nonsense. It’s fun but that’s all it is. …

OK, let me explode the blog myth, not the myth that Mr Humphrys thinks will be uncovered but the myth that he and several others propagate about blogs:

  1. Myth number one: Most bloggers write about news.
    As my friend Say Na in Nepal points out: 37% of American bloggers want to write about their lives and experiences, compared to 11% who write about politics. She’s writing about a Pew Internet and American Life study. The report says:

    Most bloggers say they cover a lot of different topics, but when asked to choose one main topic, 37% of bloggers cite “my life and experiences” as a primary topic of their blog. Politics and government ran a very distant second with 11% of bloggers citing those issues of public life as the main subject of their blog.

    …most bloggers are primarily interested in creative, personal expression – documenting individual experiences, sharing practical knowledge, or just keeping in touch with friends and family.

    The news media provides disproportionate coverage of political and news blogs because that’s what they are interested in. They cover news, not the intimate details of people’s lives.

  2. Myth number two: Bloggers just want to become journalists or pundits
    Again, as the study found out, most bloggers write for a small audience of their friends and family: “Most bloggers do not think of what they do as journalism.” They write for the pure love of self-expression, not for recognition or money. Mass media doesn’t really understand the motivation of most bloggers because they can’t understand publishing for a small audience for no money. (And in some ways, it’s one of the reasons why most mass media blogs suck. Most bloggers write about and are interested in their personal passions and interests, which is slightly anti-thetical to general interest publications like newspapers.)
  3. Myth number three: Blogging is all opinion
    This is such a common yarn, but unfortunately, this view itself turns out to be only uninformed opinion. First off, see myth one. Most people are just writing about their personal experiences. Of course it’s their opinions. That is totally the wrong yardstick with which to assess blogs.

    But more than that, it’s just flat out wrong. One of the blogs that I read when I want to know about what’s happening in the US Supreme Court is ScotusBlog, which is actually done by the Supreme Court practice of a law firm. It’s great niche coverage.

    Dr Jeffrey Lewis writes, along with a number of other experts, the very interesting Arms Control Wonk blog. NKZone is a great blog that provides some excellent coverage of North Korea including translations of North Korean defectors’ stories, which are common in the South Korean press but rarely translated into English. I’m sorry, but that’s coverage that’s hard to find in the mainstream media.

But really the biggest myth is that these shifts in media consumtion are all about blogs. Blogs are just one of the little pieces of social software that knit my life together. Flickr, instant messaging and Skype help too. I often say that my network is my filter, and whether it’s on friends’ blogs, via e-mail or via IM, I’m constantly getting a feed of information that is more relevant to my life than the crap that passes for ‘authoratative comment’ – as Simon Kelner Editor of The Independent called it. What a load of self-important tosh.

Mr Humphrys admits to ‘being an old fart’ and still loving his news in print. I’m sorry, news on paper, non-time shifted radio/TV and, to be perfectly honest, radio presenters like Mr Humphrys don’t really have much of a place in my information diet. By the time Mr Humphrys has let his first guest get a word in edge-wise, I’ve already skimmed a dozen feeds – some news, some blogs – in my RSS reader. On the Tube, I read through the headlines and some stories in the New York Times, The Christian Science Monitor, The Washington Post and The Guardian on AvantGo before I’ve gone three stops. Try struggling with all the print versions of those papers on the Tube, or better yet, try buying them at your local news stand in London.

Mr Humphrys might be suprised to find that for someone who reads and writes blogs, I value information over opinion. I agree with Kevin Marsh, editor of the BBC College of Journalism, that media opinion really has a shrinking market. I can think for myself, and I don’t need some celebrity commentator telling me what opinion I should have. Comment will be free; but information to help me make personal, professional or political decisions might be a going concern.

11.12.06
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Blogging isn’t a publishing strategy

It’s become a new mantra for me: Blogging isn’t a publishing strategy; it is a community strategy. That simple statement drives a lot of my thinking. I’ve always railed away against what we used to call ‘shovel-ware‘ back in the dot.com boom. It was simply shoveling your content onto the web. It was a stop-gap, not a strategy.

But I see the same mistake being replicated with blogging. Newspaper publishers and broadcasters often fall into the trap of trying to understand new media behaviour through old media paradigms. Podcasting becomes another distribution channel, and blogging becomes another publishing platform. Adding comments to the bottom of stories or columns is a step, but it’s missing the point. It’s treating blogging strictly as a publishing tool, not as part of a broader community strategy.

My question has been for 10 years: What can we do on the internet or other digital platforms that we can’t do in newspapers or on TV? What is the real opportunity here? Is it republishing more content that we already publish somewhere else?

I’m not saying that it’s a mistake to allow comments on the bottom of articles or columns. But that doesn’t change the fact that simply allowing comments on static content isn’t taking full advantage of blogging. It’s is treating blogging as a content-management system that allows comments. If that’s your goal, just adapt your content-management system to accept comments.

Recently, Shane Richmond of the Telegraph wrote: What is the point of newspaper blogs? in response to Andrew Grant-Adamson’s post, which questioned whether newspapers were blogging simply to get snaps from the kids (Bob Cauthorn was a little more adamant that newspapers needed to get a clue and stop blogging, which I disagree with). Andrew wondered if blogs were just content that got lost on the cutting room floor and didn’t make it into the paper.

I agree with much of what Shane wrote. My only quibble with Shane’s post is one of emphasis. I would move interactivity or engagement right up to the top. Yes, blogs allow us to focus on niches. Yes, websites in general and blog in particular promise a bottomless newshole that we can fill with additional content.

But it’s the engagement that really matters. And as Scoble says, from a business standpoint, an engaged audience is more valuable commercially than the drive-by surfers. It’s hard to measure, and Scoble rightly calls for a new metric. We used to call it stickiness, how much time people actually spend on your site. But this is even more than stickiness. This is about people actually doing something, not simply consuming content. I remember in BBC meetings about the blog pilot project, we decided that we wanted to measure how engaging or interactive blogs were. It was more than the number of comments or the traffic.

What happens when you view blogging as a community strategy rather than simply a publishing strategy?

  • Comments and other forms of participation are highlighted as well as the blog posts written by your own writers.
  • The site is designed to encourage participation on several levels.
  • The site is designed to allow like-minded participants to find each other.
  • The content must change to suit the nature of the site because its purpose has changed. What makes good content in a newspaper doesn’t necessarily make sense in a space created for participation.

That next-to-last point is key. Shoveling newspaper content onto the web was always a stop-gap, not a strategy, and it continues to be. For the last point, I leave it to Dan Gillmor who said this as he stepped aside from his citizen journalism/community project Bayosphere:

Tools matter, but they’re no substitute for community building. (This is a special skill that I’m only beginning to understand even now.)…

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10.06.06
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UK AOP: Awards and sessions I didn’t blog about

I’m still recovering from the Association of Online Publishers awards bash on Wednesday night, but Mark Sweney at Guardian’s (yes, my new keepers) Organ Grinder blog has a roundup of the award winners. Host Jimmy Carr was baffled by one winner: Nature’s Avian Flu Google Earth Mashup. Too bad he didn’t have a clue what a mashup was, and too bad that this is behind Nature’s pay wall. I’d love to have a play with it. But you can get a feel for it here at Declan Butler’s blog. Declan is a senior reporter at Nature and helped put the mashup together.

(Thanks Declan for the updated link!)

Congratulations to the CiF editorial team for their award and several honourable mentions. The team works hard to keep their rambunctious community happy. It’s a bit anarchic sometimes at CiF, but the commenters seem to like it that way. Well done, Georgina, Tom, Ben and Toby.

Jemima Kiss was there for PaidContent, and she has a nice write up with pictures of Tim O’Reilly’s session. You can see that brilliant IBM visualisation of a Wikipedia change log. She also wrote up the session about marketing to youth, or The Mystery of Teenage Boys. As Jemima says, “kids are watching less TV, spending loads of time online and on mobile and just love IM,” which are trends that pretty much everyone knows already. But there were interesting experiences given by panelists. I also liked how she wrote in the post about how social this generation are. They are just socialising in different ways.