The secret sauce of The Economist (and the BBC): Globalisation

As news publishers look for a remedy to their current ills, many look enviously to The Economist, and I have heard a few newspaper editors ask how they can become more like it. At the risk of sounding a bit brusque and I will admit in engaging in an imperfect analogy, national newspaper editors in the UK envying the success of The Economist is a lot like a local car mechanic coveting the business of Porsche. Both are in completely different businesses, serving completely different clientele. Porsche is the most profitable car company in the world. It enjoys 20.5% profit margins on its vehicles, selling exclusive luxury to well heeled buyers around the world. Newspaper groups used to enjoy profit margins like Porsche, but that’s largely a thing of the past.

However, it’s still worth considering why The Economist has navigated the challenges facing the media as well as it has. In a conversation with my former colleague Roy Greenslade, Andrew Rashbass, the chief executive of The Economist group, puts a lot down to luck, which I think is a bit of false modesty. The Economist’s circulation is up 3% against the backdrop of high single or low double digit circulation annual declines for national newspapers here in the UK (although monthly circulation declines for the quality dailies in the UK can be even worse). Listing a number of fortunate decisions and developments, Rashbass lists one that stands out to me: Globalisation.

Why is The Economist unique? It is one of the few publications that speaks intelligently about globalisation and helps its readers make sense of it. It also explains the appeal of the BBC in its international incarnation. I remember when I joined the BBC in 1998, and as a young reporter I could tell how broad, how global the perspective was of the people I was working with. Yes, The BBC had a British perspective, just as The Economist does, but while the accent was British, the experience and point of view was international. Speaking to a global audience intelligently and helping people make cross-border connections is something that few publications or broadcasters have achieved. Exposing people to international events isn’t enough, which is what most broadcasters and publishers do. What both the BBC and The Economist do is help put those events in an international context. Reading The Economist is like being shown a foreign city by someone who lives there.

Can a national newspaper do this? Maybe. However, it’s quite a pivot for a national newspaper, and I’m not entirely sure any national newspaper has the resources for it. Moreover, most UK national newspapers still don’t feel international to me. They still feel British in the way that CNN International still feels so very American to this American. To be honest, British newspaper coverage of Europe (apart from the FT) is laughably parochial and riddled with continental stereotypes and standard issue British Euro-sceptism. Beyond Europe, there are spots of brightness with the occasional good correspondent, but the coverage is not cohesive or coherent in the way The Economist is as an editorial package. The Economist’s success is definitely something to envy, but I think when it comes to a model for national UK newspapers to emulate, there are lessons and some opportunities. However, there is more that is different than is similar and applicable.

What to take away from Rashbass’ comments? He has a canny view of the differences between digital and print, which he characterises as lean forward and lean back. He also understands business. Greenslade ends his interview with Rashbass with this key business insight:

You always have to equate your model to the value you can extract compared to the cost of creating that value.

It’s not enough to believe you’re creating value, whether social or financial, you also have to have a way to extract value from it. That’s the challenge we’re facing in the news business now. The business model is broken, and the key innovation deficit is finding a way to extract enough value from what we create to support the cost of creating that value.

A journalist with much to be thankful for

As an American, Thanksgiving is one of my favourite holidays. In my family, we took the day quite literally as a time to pause and reflect on the things that we were thankful for over the last year. In 2008, I had an especially memorable Thanksgiving, taking Suw back to my home in the US to celebrate our marriage with my family. Early in the year, Suw and I committed to taking this day off to reflect back on all that we have had this year to be thankful for.

When I took voluntary redundancy (a buyout) from The Guardian at the end of March 2010, it was the first time since my first job out of university that I had left a job without another bigger, better job offer. I had a lot of options to explore, and the buyout gave me the chance to explore some of those options. It also gave me some time to recharge, which I needed. However, I’d be lying if I didn’t admit there were times I was anxious and times I was absolutely terrified.

I can’t say that things have gone according to plan, but fortunately, I couldn’t have planned it any better. Colleagues asked me as I left The Guardian what I planned on doing, and I joked that I was taking a global journalism tour. That was a reference to several speaking and training gigs that I had lined up immediately after I left, but I didn’t know how prescient that comment would be. Suw and I have worked with clients on five continents this year: Australia, Asia, Africa, Europe and North America. Just a few things that we’ve done this year:

  • We helped launch a new news website in India, Firstpost.com. It was an amazing experience with a great team at Network18, and we continue to work with them. Suw is consulting tech editor, and I’m writer-at-large.
  • Suw helped author a report for Chatham House high-impact, low-probability events. She looked specifically at the media’s response to the travel and transportation chaos caused by the Eyjafjallajökull volcano.
  • I’ve conducted training in digital and mobile journalism and social media for more than 400 Al Jazeera journalists across Al Jazeera English, Arabic, Balkans and Turk. It’s been great to work with Al Jazeera, especially during all of their excellent work covering the Arab Spring.
  • I spoke at a number of events including Digital Directions 2011 in Sydney hosted by Fairfax Media and organised by X Media Lab and News Rewired here in London.
  • I’ve done data journalism training with journalists from the BBC, CNN and other organisations through Journalism.co.uk as well as doing data journalism training for RBI in the UK and the US.
  • One of the most satisfying jobs, in a very satisfying year, was when I went to Tunisia and worked with journalists there ahead of their historic elections.

I’ve done training for the Norwegian institute of Journalism and also for Transitions Online, with journalists mostly in the former Soviet Republics. All told, I’ve probably done training with more than 800 journalists around the world this year. Thanks to everyone we worked with this year.

When people ask me what I’m up to now, I often joke that I do things to support my journalism habit. If I had to rely on freelance journalism, Suw and I would be eating pretty thin gruel, but I’ve had increasing opportunities not just to train people what I know but to get back to doing journalism. That has been satisfying as well. I still have that itch to scratch.

As I’ve travelled this year and seen the economic uncertainty build first hand, we feel very fortunate to be able to do such satisfying work. I just got back from Vilnius Lithuania where I worked with Belorussian journalists for Transitions Online. The journalists told me of the increasing repression they are facing, and it was great to work with them to use mobile tools that would allow them to continue to do their job despite threats from the authorities. It was especially satisfying to work with journalists covering the Arab Spring. I did some training for the Al Jazeera Training Centre with journalists from across the Middle East and north Africa. One Egyptian journalist told me of how people there had overcome their fear. It was something that I heard repeatedly from people enjoying their first taste of self-determination. Speaking with Tunisian journalists grappling with how to cover an election with 10,000 candidates, an election where the outcome wasn’t predetermined, was fascinating and inspiring.

It’s been a year of growth for me. It’s felt like getting a practical master’s degree. I’ve had to work hard to keep pace with all of the most recent developments in social media, mobile journalism tools and data journalism. I started doing data journalism in the mid-1990s in the US, but I hadn’t had much call to use it since then. I’ve really enjoyed not only dusting off those skills but building on them. I’ve learned more in the last year than I did in the previous five.

This has been a huge transition for me from stable, full-time work to working with Suw on our own. As I said, it was terrifying at times. It challenged my sense of professional confidence. When I left The Guardian last year, it was the first time since 1998 that I didn’t have a big international news organisation behind me. It was just me. When I started working for the BBC in 1998, it still seemed possible to find a job and keep that job for the rest of one’s life. However, since then, journalism has suffered the same disruption that most 20th Century industries did. There isn’t such a thing as a job for life. Journalism is going through a major disruption, and journalists’ lives are being disrupted by it.  Despite that, for the first time since I came to Britain in 2005, I feel like instead of dealing with disruption, Suw and I have actually been able to work towards our dreams. That indeed is something to be thankful for.

Journalism innovation for small towns and rural areas

As I sit in Vilnius Lithuania, the next to last stop on my 2011 journalism world tour, I was taken back to where my journalism career started: Hays Kansas I started my career as the regional reporter at a small town, 14,000 circulation newspaper, the Hays Daily News. The standard joke told by the locals was: It’s not the middle of no where but you can see it from here. My job was to cover 1100 square miles on northwest Kansas. I covered my first presidential election from Hays as local hero done good, Bob Dole, ran against Bill Clinton in 1996. Dole’s hometown of Russell Kansas was also the birthplace of another Republican candidate that year, Pennsylvania senator Arlen Specter, who also ran the nomination that year. Apart from that, I covered what most cub reporters at local newspapers do: School board meetings, the weather (think storm chasing in Tornado Alley), the odd agriculture story and a beloved Sunday feature called the Nor’wester.

It was a great place to start journalism, working with a curmudgeonly good hearted editor, Mike Corn, and an award winning team of photographers, Steve Hausler and Charlie Riedel. Charlie now travels the world for the Associated Press. It’s still the second greatest job I’ve ever had, second only to working for the BBC in Washington. My job meant something. Western Kansas was a place fighting off decline in the 1990s. It was still reeling from the farm crisis, and as its youth left because they had to find work and their way elsewhere, many of its small towns fought off extinction. When I first moved there, Mike used to quiz me on where these small towns were. Every once in a while with a glimmer in his eye, he would say: “Ha, got ya! Trick question. It’s a ghost town!” For these small towns, I was all they had when it came to news, and they thanked me for it. It was deeply satisfying work.

Hays was also a great place to start because when I worked there, it was very innovative for a small newspaper. I started in December 1994, and we all had Macs on our desks and a cutting edge production system. For a newspaper of that size, I’m pretty sure that was rare then. The paper went online in 1996, and I applied to become their first internet editor. It was definitely ahead of its time.

Hays is why I’ve always been interested in local news, now mostly talked about as hyperlocal. What took me back to Hays? The Colombia Journalism Review has an interesting collection of views about Modesto California and journalism. It’s a world away from Hays and ten times as large, but for Hays and a lot of even smaller communities, the issues of providing journalism to these places is even more challenging than when I was there, especially in my adopted home of England, where the crisis in local journalism is even more acute. Although I cringe a bit when I read the CJR piece and detect a whiff of big city condescension (I’ll always be a country boy), their larger point is right:

If the digital-news revolution is to truly serve a mass audience, beyond educated and reasonably affluent urbanites, we must account for Modesto; we must find ways for innovation to flourish in poor towns where, for so long, it has been allowed to die.

I guess broadly, it’s not just the dying of journalism in not just poor towns, but also small communities, that worries me but the existential threat to rural areas full stop both in the US and the UK. That’s another issue, but if you’re interested in local journalism, it’s well worth a read. I especially love Rusty Coats’ piece. I met Rusty in 2005 at Web+10 at Poynter, and his story and mine share a lot of similarities. I love this line:

Fledgling news websites have cropped up across the country, led by journalists who bleed local, sometimes down to the neighborhood.

Local journalism survives on the dedication of these journalists, like Mike Corn. When I pulled up the Hays Daily News website tonight, there was Mike’s name. He’s still in Hays. He has threatened to leave several times since I left in 1996, but he’s still there. You have to have that kind of dedication because it sure as hell doesn’t pay that well. I made $2000 less than a first year teacher when I started in Hays. I made ends meet by having no student debt and living very frugally. I drove a very used car that had no working air conditioning, something you miss when it’s 45 C (114 F) on a hot, dusty summer day in Kansas.

Sceptical optimism

Local news and information has always been a tough business, and the ongoing economic crises aren’t making that any easier. It is good to see a renewed vigour when it comes to local. John Paton, dubbed newspapers’ digital apostle by the New York Times this week, is pulling the industry forward, and his digital first strategy has been a clarion call to his editors and journalists, many who work at small newspapers. Steve Yelvington has long been a leader in digitally-led local journalism, and as Morris, the group he works for, moves digital close to its core, I’m sure we’ll see great things. I’m sure we’ll see new efforts in how communities cover themselves. For those of you working with such projects, it’s well worth reading the New Voices: What works report.

I continue to be sceptically optimistic about local journalism, more because I choose to be optimistic about small communities. Although I haven’t done truly local journalism for a long time, I remember all too well how hard it is and the dedication required. I remain slightly sceptical because I think a lot of the hype surrounding hyperlocal has needed tempering for a very long time, and I see a lot of hyperlocal projects make the same mistakes over and over and over again. Local journalism needs more of a rethink than national or international when it comes to remaking the business model. Thanks to CJR for trying to move this conversation a bit more front and centre.

Picking the right tool for the journalism job

If you’re not familiar with the monthly Carnival of Journalism, it’s worth knowing about because it plugs you into a conversation amongst other journalists. The topic for October’s Carnival was about how to choose the digital tools and platforms. (I’m just getting in under the wire, but my travel schedule and moving flat took up more time than we actually had.)

Dave Cohn aka digidave asked:

How do you decide to dedicate time to a new tool/platform/gadget? What is the process you go through mentally? And then later – how do you convince others to go through that process? And, last: How do you ensure that the tools you do adopt are used once the “newness” factor fades?

This really struck a cord with me. My last position at The Guardian was digital research editor. Don’t worry if you need an explanation of what the role was so did most of my colleagues, and I’m not entirely sure that we had the working definition hammered out before I left. Operationally, I moved from desk to desk on a several month basis and helped that desk with their digital projects. For instance, my last desk was politics to help them as they prepared for 2010 UK general election. My job was also to keep abreast of new digital developments and see how we could use them for The Guardian’s award-winning journalism.

Although the job was to be aware of digital tools and platforms, I always approached it in terms of editorial challenges that I needed to meet. The challenge might be to find simple mapping services that journalists could use without having to call on developers, whose time was in great demand, or it might be simple tools to analyse and visualise data. I almost always started out from the point of view of the editorial problem we were trying to solve rather than the tool or platform. Sure, sometimes when a platform got a lot of traction, I would try it out to see how we could engage the audience using that platform, but even then, I looked at things from the point of view of how what they could do for our journalists and our audience. Increasingly, as the cuts took hold at The Guardian, I also thought about the business side of the tools.

Simply put, I asked of tools and platforms:

  • Does it make a journalists job faster and easier?
  • Does it help us make money or save money?
  • Does it help bring audiences to our journalism or our journalism to audiences?
  • Does it allow us to tell stories better, more easily or more engagingly?
  • Does it build audience loyalty and keep people engaged with our journalism longer?

It’s a very similar checklist to Jack Lail’s. As he says, if the tools don’t meet strategic goals, “Learn to say “no” to the rest”. These were my criteria, my personal strategic goals, but it’s more important that the organisation has those goals in mind rather than a particular set of goals. For the next full-time job that I take (and I am starting to look for a more permanent home), I’m more than open to a different set of goals, but I think it’s important for organisations to have a set of criteria.

Moreover, we need metrics. We need to measure against these goals.

My former colleague at the BBC, Alf Hermida, flagged up the Forrester Research’s POST methodology to evaluate new technology. Broadly Alf says, and I agree:

The starting point for this discussion is the public, not the tools. Talking about tools is the last thing we should be doing.

I also think that sometimes it’s about the journalists, helping us cope with all of the demands of the job as staffs shrink. However, very few people in this world use a tool just to use a tool. They use a tool because it’s the best way to solve a problem or achieve a goal. It’s important to know all of the digital tools you can bring to bear on modern journalism problems, but it’s important to keep the goal in mind, lest we become tools of our tools.

Scientists should not be given the right to fact check the press

Last week, Dr Petroc Sumner, Dr Frederic Boy and Dr Chris Chambers, all from the School of Psychology at Cardiff University, argued in the Guardian that “Scientists should be allowed to check stories on their work before publication”. The only sensible and rational response to that is “No, they should not.”

Sumner, Boy and Chambers argue that scientists should be given veto because:

  1. Scientific papers are peer reviewed so have already been scrutinised by independent eyes, implying that journalists therefore don’t need to be themselves independent when reporting such papers.
  2. There are no political parties in science, ergo there can be no ‘conspiracies’
  3. Scientists have nothing to gain and a lot to loose from exaggerated claims in the press
  4. It’s the only way to ensure accuracy

What utter tosh.

There is no doubt at all that quite a bit of science journalism is appalling, riven by inaccuracies, biases and sometimes just complete twaddle. You only have to read Ben Goldacre’s Bad Science to see what a mess journalists get themselves into. The problem is that Sumner, Boy and Chambers are engaging in special pleading on the basis of four flawed premises:

Firstly, scientific papers may well get peer reviewed, but that doesn’t mean that they are correct, it simply means that they have been looked at by some other scientists who either can’t find or won’t find fault. Papers get retracted when problems come to light later on, so peer review is not a guarantee that a paper is correct.

Secondly, the idea that there are no lines to toe in science is utter bunkum. There may not be political parties but there certainly are scientific orthodoxies, and that means lines to toe. The fact that something has become orthodoxy does not, in and of itself, guarantee that it is correct. Prevailing theories do get overturned when new evidence comes to light and, whilst those who make extraordinary claims need extraordinary evidence to back them up, science has a rich history of exactly that.

Point three only needs to be answered with one word: Ego.

And point four shows a spectacular misunderstanding of the journalistic process and the factors that cause errors and misinformation to propagate. Let’s take a quick look at some of these (I’m sure there are more, please do add them in the comments!):

  1. Good journalists on tight deadlines have little time and few resources to do comprehensive reading and research on a story, so mistakes,  misunderstandings and inaccuracies can easily creep in to the work even of the most dedicated.
  2. University and research institution press releases, and sometimes even scientists themselves, can be misleading. Sometimes those inaccuracies are picked up by the journalist, sometimes they make it through to press.
  3. Some hacks and editors don’t actually give a shit whether something is accurate, they simply want a shocking or outrageous story that they think will get them lots of readers.
  4. Some hacks have financial relationships with the companies whose “science” they are writing about, destroying any vestiges of impartiality they might once have claimed.

Which of these scenarios would actually be helped by adding an extra layer of “fact checking” by scientists? In the first case, the journalist doesn’t have time/resource so the fact checking just isn’t going to happen. In the second, the fact checking would be undermined by the very people doing it as they would only propagate their own inaccuracies. And again, in the third and fourth scenarios, facts are irrelevant, so why would they get checked?

There are things that would help, however:

  1. Additional time and resources for science journalism and appropriate training . This is frankly never going to come from the news organisations themselves because they are all struggling to survive and science is seen all too often as a minority sport. It might be that a well-respected science communications charity or NGO could fund training for journalists wanting to cover science, e.g. in how to interpret papers and how to understand statistics. They would also need to fund the journalist’s actual work, ensuring that they had the time and resources required to do a good job.
  2. News organisations need to take complaints about inaccuracies more seriously. Even the so-called quality newspapers don’t always pay any attention to readers who point out problems in science stories. Often, then will officially stand by the most egregious bullshit because they’d rather not have to deal with the fact that they got it wrong.
  3. Some sort of standards commission with real power should hold all news organisations to account, forcing them to make corrections and imposing significant fines for the most egregious misbehaviour. I’d say “Maybe the PCC could do this sort of thing”, but they’re a spineless, toothless waste of time. If there was any censure at all of misinformation in the media, some of which is actively harmful to the reader’s health, maybe this conversation wouldn’t be dragging on and on for years, as it actually is.
  4. Oh, and here’s an innovative one: Maybe university press departments should stop sexing up press releases, liaise more tightly with their own scientists to get their facts right, and provide any relevant photos, graphs, graphics and data in reusable formats with a clear and concise explanation of what they illustrate. Of the press releases covering scientific topics that I’ve had to work from, none gave me even half of what I needed.
  5. Scientists should be responsive to press enquiries, and should prepare FAQs, lists of relevant links and re-usable quotes about their research up front. Their papers should be available, along with a proper bio and even photos, just in case. Whilst most of the scientists I’ve dealt with have been very responsive, none have sent me a link to a website with background info and relevant resources on it that I could use to quickly bring myself up to speed before asking them specific question. It would have saved everyone’s time if they had done that. (Plus it’d be a great thing for me to link to in my articles!)

Science journalism isn’t actually a collaboration between scientist and journalist, it’s a process of interpretation which depends on both sides being independent of the other.

So what would happen if Sumner, Boy and Chambers got their wish?

Well, where there’s orthodoxy there’s the opportunity for new ideas and voices to be suppressed when they come into conflict with established bodies. Although science is supposed to be immune to this, it does sometimes – thankfully rarely – happen. If there are no independent science journalists, there’s no opportunity for new voices and evidence to be heard.

When scientists get it wrong, which they do, we need science journalists like Goldacre need to be able to criticise their methodologies, assumptions and conclusions free from interference. If Goldacre had to pass everything he wrote past the people he was writing about, he would get almost nothing published.

In short, we would see the wholesale marginalisation of dissent, and not just dissent from the journalist, but from opposing scientific voices too. It would be, in short, a disaster for science and science communication.

(Hat tip: Glyn Mottershead.)

Visualisations aren’t the only end result of data journalism

My friend and former colleague Simon Rogers, editor of the Guardian’s Data blog, has posted a defence of the increasing use of data visualisation. I agree to a point, but I also think it’s really important to remember that visualisations are not the only product of data analysis. They can help readers see patterns in complex sets of data, but I also think that sometimes we’re missing other opportunities with data analysis by focusing on data visualisation. Sometimes, the result isn’t a visualisation but a key insight that underpins a story. I often worry about the problem of seeing a world as full of nails when you think all you have is a hammer. Sometimes, visualisations are just not the right end product of data journalism.

I’ve heard statisticians grumble about information being seen as simply beautiful instead of being, well, informational. Good data visualisations hit a middle way being being beautiful and simplifying complex concepts. I’ve heard designers grumble about data visualisations that aren’t beautiful, and they rail away against the lack of aesthetic of some of the publicly available tools. Sometimes people are using the wrong chart or visualisation to visualise their data. When it comes to charts, I often show this simple chart during training, which really breaks down what types of charts or visualisations are appropriate for what kind of data you’re working with.

I am always in favour of the democratisation of tools, but when it comes to digital story-telling, editors need to remember all of the techniques available and have a clear way of deciding which technique is appropriate.

Integrated newsrooms must remember print and digital are different products

I’ve seen integration happen as several newsrooms, and I was at The Guardian as it began integration.* Much of the integration since 2007 has been driven by economic concerns with little focus on products or even efficient newsroom workflow to serve those products. Alan Mutter, who writes the excellent blog Reflections of a Newsosaur, says that as Jill Abramson takes the reins at the New York Times she will have to choose between two irreconcilable paths.

She either will have to cannibalize the flagship print product to build the strongest possible digital franchise for the Times – OR – she will have to concentrate on sustaining the commercial strength of the print edition at the risk of channeling insufficient resources into assuring the strongest possible digital future for America’s newspaper of record. …

The problem for Abramson is that the print and digital media demand significantly differentiated products, which the Times has not been able to produce to date with even its enviable strength.

I think the New York Times has stepped up its game in this respect over the last two years. Andrew de Vigal has done an excellent job honing the multimedia work at the Times, bringing a coherence that has escaped many other newspapers. Aron Pilhofer, interactive news editor at the Times, has done some excellent work in terms of building great projects and doing great journalism with data.

However, I think that Alan hits the nail on the head. Integration makes sense, but it has to be seen in the context of serving different and differentiated journalism products across print and digital media. Torry Pedersen of Norway’s VG has one of the best ways of understanding this. At a conference in 2009, he put it this way:

He then compared newspapers and the web to a bottle of water and a waterfall.  The waterfall represented the web–continues flowing, raw, unlimited and in real time.  The bottled water represented newspapers–limited space, distilled, refined and bottled.

I think this is why The Atlantic and The Christian Science Monitor are navigating the changes in media successfully. They aren’t pitting print versus digital, but strengthening both print and digital products. In 2010, that allowed The Atlantic to turn a profit for the first time in a decade, and it built on that in 2011 even as many other publishers struggled. Yes, The Atlantic beefed up its web presence, but it also put a focus on writing talent. In 2011, it’s profits doubled in print, digital and events. It improved all of its businesses and even built new revenue streams.

More broadly though, one of the things that I see in terms of news organisations is that those who develop not only great journalism projects but also marketable journalism and information products are the ones best navigating the wrenching changes in the journalism business. This is a mix of transaction businesses, such as those at Fairfax in Australia or Schibsted’s digital classified business, Finn. Some of those transaction businesses might be built around data, especially business data. The products also usually include events such as conferences or dinners, cruises or talks with key journalists. As Suw and I build our little consultancy, the real gap in journalism businesses we see is not necessarily of editorial innovation but of product and revenue innovation.

* I get a sense that The Guardian is only now moving through the first process of integration as it unifies its ‘digital first’ strategy largely under the management of print editors.

9/11 memories: Finding my way back home

I’m not a big fan of anniversaries in journalism, and I especially feel this way about 11 September 2001.  As the Washington correspondent for the BBC News website then, we looked back at three months, six months and then one year. The entire year was dominated by looking back at that day. After 10 years, I can’t help but think back to that day.

Like most of my colleagues with the BBC in Washington, I found myself away from the city on the day. We were almost all on assignment or on holiday. My colleague Stephen Sackur was in central America. He and his crew had to drive all day and all night for three or four days, spending several hours in a huge queue at the Mexican border. Nick Bryant was in Seattle on holiday. When the story broke, he found a local television station and immediately started doing lives.

I was in London visiting face-to-face with my editors for the first time in more than a year. I was sitting in the Foyer, one of the BBC staff cafes, with my friend Tim Weber from our business team. UPDATE: Tim remembers the day:

https://twitter.com/#!/tim_weber/status/112871385919004672

We looked up and saw a sky scraper on fire. At first I thought it was in Asia, but then saw that it was the World Trade Center in New York. We rushed up to the newsroom. Soon after the second plane hit, and we started to think about whether I should go back to the US. What happened next still gives me chills. The BBC News channel cut to a different feed, and I could see the presenter pausing, listening in his earpiece. Before he spoke, I said to myself with the horror of recognition, “That’s not New York. That’s Washington. That’s our live position at the White House.” Over the next several minutes as we made plans for me to get back to the US, several rumours flashed over the wires of a car bomb outside the State Department and fires on the National Mall. All were false, but for a time, it seems like Washington and New York were descending into chaos.

When I saw the pictures of Washington, my first thought was about my girlfriend at the time, Linda. She worked for a defence contractor and was a civilian staff member for the Air Force Chief of Staff. She occasionally worked at the Pentagon. Fortunately, I was able to reach her via email and find out that she was OK. I found out later that she had actually been in a classified briefing about “future threats” in a a SCIF, a secure compartmented information facility, a shielded, secure conference room in Arglinton. Someone interrupted the briefing, came in, turned a TV on to CNN, which was showing the towers on fire and said curtly, “This is what we mean.”

I was already scrambling to get to Heathrow. I rushed out of the newsroom, my colleagues asking if my friends and family were OK. I’m still touched by the kindness of my colleagues that day. Back at my hotel, I threw my clothes in my suitcase and soon was in a mini-cab to Heathrow. My driver was Iranian, and we talked on the half hour drive to the airport. When he found out that I was American, he asked if everyone I knew was OK. I told him yes as far as I knew. He told me of how he left his country, and I could tell he was very conflicted. He felt caught between a home he loved but was forced to leave and the West which didn’t quite welcome him. It was the first of several times since then I have felt that conflict from people I met from the Middle East.

I arrived at Heathrow, and just as I ran to the United check-in, they shut the gate. The flight had been cancelled. I rang my editor only to find out that all flights to the US and Canada were cancelled. North American airspace was closed. Not only huge numbers of BBC journalists, but Sky and ITV crews as well as members of the British press were all heading up to Stansted. The plan at that time was unclear, the timing of what came next even less. I got money and quickly got into a black cab to take the long trip on the M25 and then on up to Stansted. About 10 minutes into the trip, the first tower fell. My eyes burned and welled up with tears.

I arrived in Stansted to see the assembled masses of the British press corps milling about, upset that they couldn’t leave immediately. If you want to see anxiety, pen a few hundred journalists up in an airport, unable to go anywhere, as one of the biggest stories of their lives is unfolding an ocean away. In what would become common the decade that followed, we were told that everything we carried on the plane as hand luggage had to be carried in see through bags.

I tried to call Linda but the circuits were overloaded to Washington. I found out later that she had walked all the way from Arlington, across the Key Bridge into Georgetown and up the hill to her apartment across from the National Cathedral. I managed to reach my parents to let them know I was OK. As my caged colleagues paced and plotted, I cobbled together a wireless data connection with a mobile phone (much harder to do in 2001 than in 2011) and got online to check email. My inbox was full of friends and family wondering if I was OK, where I was and if I had been anywhere near the Pentagon. As it became clear the wait would be longer, I called home. My father asked if Linda was OK. I said that I thought so because we had emailed shortly after the attacks, but that I couldn’t reach her now because all of the telephone circuits were overloaded. He broke down sobbing.

That was Tuesday night. We spent the next two nights sleeping in a nearby pub with rooms, waiting for the call that our flight was to take off. All of the British press corps were going to travel in a chartered short 747. For young reporters like myself, it was odd to see the high-powered stars of British television and press up close as they frantically waited for flight clearance, and we jokingly referred to the flight as the Ego Trip One.

We waited for two more tense days waiting for North American airspace to open. Thursday night, we finally took off for Montreal.  We arrived at about four in the morning, and I drove with four or five colleagues to Washington. As I wrote for the BBC:

Most of my colleagues drove from Canada to New York but I kept going to Washington, passing by Manhattan on the way.

Heavy rain had fallen the night before and the skies were grey. Rising up from lower Manhattan, smoke still billowed from the shattered skyline.

I arrived back in Washington just as people were observing a national day of mourning, and people had stepped out into the streets of the US capital, my home, with candles.

I rarely wrote first person pieces for the news website, but I wrote a piece about what it was like to come home. I had to clear my head before we set about covering the story, and we wouldn’t take a break for the next month and a half.

It is still the most emotional story that I have ever had to cover. I learned a lot of things in journalism school, but we never had a lesson in dealing with such a traumatic event. In December, we did a series of live web video programmes in New York. One of the webcasts was from the 29th floor of a building overlooking the still smouldering site where the Twin Towers stood. The eerily twisted columns rose from the pile of rubble. On the one year anniversary, I still remember that we had to comfort one of the people we interviewed who hadn’t been back since the day the planes hit. We had to comfort him as he had a panic attack.

The 11 September attacks were also one of those rare stories when my personal life intersected with a story. Linda told me of how a friend in the military who worked at the Pentagon had to go to 39 spouses and tell them that their husband or wife wouldn’t be coming home. I referred to Linda but not by name in the piece I wrote on coming back:

One friend has had nightmares every night since the attacks. On Friday, shortly after I returned, she told me that she had not yet cried – but she was waiting.

A few hours later, she could wait no longer, and she began to sob.

At the time, it didn’t feel right to bring her into the story. This was three years before I started blogging for the BBC, and I didn’t feel comfortable writing in the first person much less getting so personal. This story almost broke that line between my personal and professional, the feelings were so raw.

Now a decade later, part of me can’t believe that I’m not covering the story. Since I left The Guardian, it’s been good to start writing again, mostly for the site that Suw and I helped launch in India, FirstPost.com, but I do miss being a reporter in the field.

Beyond that, I can’t believe it’s been 10 years. So much has happened, but it feels right for me both personally and as a journalist to pause and remember the horrible events of that day. With all of the pain and sadness I witnessed on that day and in the following year, I feel fortunate that one of my lasting memories of that day was the kindness my colleagues showed me as I tried to make sure from afar that friends were safe. From now on, that’s how I will choose to remember the day, one of friendship in crisis.

CNN and Zite: What other tech companies have been bought by Big Media?

With the news that CNN has bought iPad news app Zite, I started thinking about what tech companies have been bought by media organisations. I could think of a couple off the top of my head including Newsvine and Everyblock by MSNBC, Reddit by Condé Nast and Blogrunner by the New York Times. If you think of any others, feel free to pop them in the form below. I’ll publish the list as soon as we get it into some shape.