Category Archives: Journalism/PR

08.11.06
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Lebanese-Israeli conflict via mobile phones

Suw and I have been meaning to do a podcast, maybe a podcast over crepes in the morning. The Strange Attractor Crepe-cast. At any rate, fresh off our two-week European road trip, I decided to take the podcast plunge and have a chat with Eric Sundelof, who is just finishing a fellowship with the Reuters Digital Vision programme.

As he says on his site:

Cell phones today transmit audio, video, photographs and text. When combined with the proper web application, cell phones enable any citizen in any country of any background to publish information and share it with the world.

I talked to him about how he put this idea into practice to hear voices in Lebanon and Israel.

powered by ODEO

Download podcast here

Technical Notes: As Kevin Marks noted before, I originally didn’t enclose the audio download in the RSS feed. It was easily solved by linking to the file on Odeo and using Kevin’s rel=enclosure microformat. The directions are here.

For those of you who are interested, I used a very versatile Skype add-on called Pamela to record the interview with Erik. Pamela is like a Swiss Army knife add-on for Skype, allowing you to record both audio and video, upload it to remote servers and even generate RSS feeds from the uploads. I’m not using half of the functionality, but I have found it well worth the cost and use it often for work.

One note with Odeo’s upload service. I originally had saved my file as 64kbps at 22Khz. Odeo didn’t like that, nor did it seem terribly happy using. But when I resaved the file at 44Khz and uploaded it using Internet Explorer, it worked.

07.22.06
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Comment is Infrequent

The Guardian‘s Comment is Free site has been troubled again this week after they introduced a half hour waiting period in between comments. The accusation levelled at the commenters was that the discourse was not of a high enough standard and that a wait of half an hour would force people to calm down and think a bit harder before they posted. Thus, the assumption goes, would the conversation become more erudite, more intellectual, more stimulating.

Georgina Henry said, in her post Less is More:

[T]he sheer number of comments now coming in from individuals is making it harder to keep the quality of the debate high through post-moderation alone.

Aside from the persistent breaches of our talk policy a frequent cause of complaint is the pointless chatter that litters threads. Too many comments have nothing to do with the original post, or degenerate into back-and-forth slanging matches with others which just get in the way of reasoned argument and put off people who want to engage with the original piece.

[…] For those that want to cotinue to debate the issues raised by CiF bloggers, we’re proposing to introduce a comment frequency cap which will only allow individuals to comment once every half an hour. If it works it might make for more thoughtful contributions from those who tend to write before they think. If it doesn’t work – ie, if it simply dries up or drives away the best while leaving us with the worst – we’ll think again.

The majority of commenters were outraged at this arbitrary limitation of their freedom to post, and unsurprisingly so. They feel that it’s their site now, and that The Guardian has acted undemocratically and heavy-handedly. Commenter Sealion said:

Wow, what an atrocious idea. So what’s the problem? Cif has become increasingly popular and thats a problem for you? So you suggest that people don’t use your site, they go find another, or use a talkboard. Cif is a talkboard….did you really think it was a blog?

By your own admission, discussions have become better when the originator has come online to debate with the commentators. 1 post every 30 minutes? That’s altrui knackered then. And Sunny. In fact anyone who wants to get involved in a discussion is going to have to wait 30 minutes for a reponse from somebody they may have raised a point to, which is going to kill any debate stone dead, or persuade people to create multiple screen names to get around it and add chaos to confusion.

People will also write longer pieces because they have only one chance, and then they’ll probably go off and do something else because this isn’t much of a spectator sport.
Yes, it will probably get rid of a lot of abuse and pointless comments, the same as it will get rid of just about everything else. This will kill discussion, people will just post an essay length summary of their opinion and then leave.

Of course, it didn’t take commenters long – about 1 hour and 4 minutes – to figure out that The Guardian were using cookies to achieve their aim and that, by deleting the cookie one could post as much as one wanted.

But the reason people feel miffed is not just to do with their ability to post comments. Henry had posted previously that CiF had around 10,000 commenters, but only 100 people have posted over 207 comments each, with two having posted over 1,500 and one person approaching 2,500. This is a power-law distribution. Now, quantity is not the same as quality, but I would wager that if you plotted the quality of the comments, that too would follow a power law: the majority of users write perfectly acceptible comments and the name calling, ad hominem attacks and unpleasentness is committed by a small minority of users. Yet by imposing a half hour wait on every single user The Guardian are reacting disproportionately, as if the problem is widespread ‘bell-curve’ problem. It’s not, and the commenters know it. They feel as if they have been treated unjustly and that The Guardian has meted out an indiscriminate punishment to all without bothering to try and solve the problem posed by a minority.

After an evening of protest, Georgina Henry ceded some ground, and the system has changed so that the half hour wait is per article, not across the whole site. However, she doesn’t acknowledge that the commenters’ protests are in any way valid, and in my view fails to take in their points at all. She says:

Thank to the odd commenter who understands and supports what we’re trying to do. Just to reiterate, for the critics, there are other audiences that we’re trying to reach which this might help – they include the vast majority of people who read CiF but never comment; those who comment occasionally when they have something worthwhile to say; those who used to read us but are put off by the mindless irrelevant chatter that infects many of the threads and those who would like to engage with the original argument but have to scroll through too much rubbish before they do so.

How is this supposed to help? It’s natural that there should be a power-law of comment frequency amongst readers. I would expect nothing less – it’s how almost all these sorts of websites work. Lots of people read, some post once, and a tiny minority post frequently. This distribution is extremely common and well understood. Apart from, it seems, by Ms Henry.

There is no need to try to encourage those who don’t post to post by shutting up those who do post. Maybe the people who don’t post don’t post because they are happy just reading? Is there actually any evidence of droves of people put off by ‘mindless irrelevant chatter’? If that’s the reasoning behind limiting posting times, then I fear that there’ll be disappointment when the number of people posting doesn’t suddenly increase in leaps and bounds.

But there are a couple of themes here that CiF needs to understand. Firstly, ‘messy’ comments is not only inevitable, it can also be good. Euan Semple said:

We can tolerate a lot of apparent messiness and our ability and desire to make patterns allows us to get real value from it.

Dave Snowden was right when he said if you have a complex environment you need to have simple rules. Complex rules just result in a mess.

One mans rubbish is another man’s gold dust.

We can work together on complex activities with minimal directions.

The question is, what are the rules? Putting a wait time on posting is not a rule that is going to encourage less chaotic commenting, it’s just going to string it out over a longer period of time, and maybe destroy some valuable conversation that might have otherwise happened.

Perhaps, more important, is whether or not the original author actually takes part in the comments thread. Blogging, done well, is about a conversation, and on CiF, it seems that that conversation is rather one-sided: columnist opines; commenters comment. It that really any way to encourage an intelligent discourse?

What to do? The Guardian is – understandably – worried about not just quality of conversation, but also libel, defamation and other things that they might get sued for. This is serious shit – they cannot and should not allow libellous material on their site. They have to strike a balance between chilling out about the mess and ensuring that really nasty stuff gets dealt with.

But half hour waits will not appreciably help, especially if all it takes to sidestep the delay is to delete a cookie. Keeping the existing system will annoy people more than it will help. The Guardian will have to be more innovative than that.

Here’s a thought. How about learning from sites that face a similar problem. Slashdot is well known for having a rather low common denominator amongst the comments. Yet it’s still readable… So long as you know that you can filter out the rubbish by using the built in ratings system. Digg also uses a ratings system and comments with a low enough score are hidden from the casual reader: whilst they remain on the site, you have to unhide them to read them. Could the Guardian not improve on these systems?

It’s essential to remember that the problem is not really a technological one, but a social one. Comment ratings systems are only a tool to allow the community to look after itself, but the tool has to be well crafted in order for it to work.

Let’s consider a simple thumbs up/thumbs down system which the community can use to police itself. It can have a sliding scale of punishment, to allow for the varying severity of misdemeanours: -10 points, say, and your comment is hidden; -20 and you have to wait half an hour before your next comment is published; -50 and your comment is deleted. Extreme behaviour gets a ban.
The problem is, such systems can be gamed. Even if you have a system wherein you can only vote once for each comment, malicious behaviour from a minority can break the system. How could you combat this? Perhaps by using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk – send all comments to MTurk and pay an uninvolved strangers to answer the question “Is this comment abusive?”. I’m assuming that a combination of RSS and MTurk’s API would make it possible to integrate this seamlessly into the site so that you have an impartial input into whether or not comments are good or bad.

It’s possible to completely outsource comment moderation, but my personal feeling would be that it’s preferable to let the community have a stab at self-moderation first. The more people feel divorced from the way that a community is run, the less they care about it. I think this is why people react less well on threads where the author of the blog post doesn’t engage in the discussion, particularly when they don’t answer (reasonable) questions that are directly put to them. Taking the comment moderation and giving it to some third party, whether a room of moderators at The Guardian or an external moderation house, feels a bit like saying to the community ‘Right, you can’t be trusted’.

So I think there are a few things to pull out of all this:

  • The Guardian needs to chill out about comments. They’re not all going to be Nobel Prize winning essays, and some of them may go off topic. No big deal.
  • CiF bloggers need to interact more with the commenters and stop thinking of commenters as annoying, underemployed and overopinionated. Digs like “My guess from looking at the email addresses is that the list is overwhelmingly male” by Georgina Henry do not show much respect for the people who make CiF as vibrant as it is.
  • The Guardian needs to think about ways in which the community can self-moderate and use technology to facilitate that process, not try to use (shoddy) technological fixes to try and arbitrarily shut people up.

CiF could be a great site, but it needs some significant work and a change in attitude from the bloggers there in order to evolve from the ‘soap-box with hecklers’ model to a being a real blog.

And finally, thanks to tomper for this blog post’s title.

We’re off on holiday now for two weeks. I look forward to seeing if we’ve any comments when we get back…

07.17.06
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Technical and cultural issues for ‘Networked Journalism’ Part I

I guess I inadvertently coined a phrase last week when I thought out loud about ‘audience-driven journalism‘. Paul and Steve shortened it to ADJ in a few comments. I can see it now, as someone says that ADJ doesn’t stand for audience-driven journalism but attention-deficit journalism, journalism for the internet age. I think I’ll stick with Jeff Jarvis’ networked journalism instead.

Jeff meant it as a replacement for the term ‘citizen journalism’:

“Networked journalism” takes into account the collaborative nature of journalism now: professionals and amateurs working together to get the real story, linking to each other across brands and old boundaries to share facts, questions, answers, ideas, perspectives. It recognizes the complex relationships that will make news. And it focuses on the process more than the product.

Many of the terms being used to describe this new collaboration in journalism end up placing too much authority in one party or the other, whether professional journalists or so-called citizen journalists. As Jeff says, the term citizen journalism has created an artificial divide that has hampered collaboration between traditional journalists and the public. And in my article for Journalism.co.uk, I talk about how this collaboration is where the real opportunities lie.

Regardless of the terms, Paul and Steve raise some good issues, some cultural and some technical. Paul says in his comment:

You only engender trust with strict editorial control.

No. Our editorial standards give us some institutional cover when something goes wrong. But does that play into day-to-day decisions on whether our audiences trust us? No. Is it our objectivity? No. Bottom line is that our audiences trust us because on some level they agree with what we’re saying.

One of the reasons that I used to cite of why I’m proud to work for the BBC goes back to a New York Times article that I read after the Nato’s war against Serbia in 1999. Shortly after the war ended, I remember reading that Serbian citizens were in revolt against Milosevic, in particular members of the Serbian National Guard, if memory serves. Why did they revolt? I remember one of the Serbs being quoted as saying something like: “We see what is happening. We hear what they tell us on Serbian Radio, and we hear the BBC. We believe the BBC.”

Why? Was it our editorial standards? No, it was because what the BBC was reporting was more in line with what they saw. This is a pretty clear cut example. A lot of the ways that people determine whether to trust a media source is much more complex. That’s an entire post of itself, or probably a series of posts.

Also, I was always talking about a collaboration with the audience, not a pure ‘user-generated content’ proposition where people just send stuff in and journalists cherry pick what to publish. Jay Rosen has some great examples of networked journalism. But I think we’ve still got a lot of opportunities to explore when it comes to collaboration between journalists and the public.

You also said that I was using the world loyalty when I meant trust. Trust and loyalty are two different things. As Suw just said, trust means that you believe that I’m telling the truth, whereas loyalty in a media sense, means that you’ll keep listening, watching or reading my stuff. People are loyal to their media sources for different reasons.You may do that because you think I’m telling the truth, or you may just like the way I write or what I cover.

The biggest cultural leap that journalism must make is learning that our audience has a right of response, that publishing is the beginning, not the end point of our production process. This post is a case in point. I don’t necessarily agree with Paul’s comment, but I respect him enough to respond, and not just because I know Paul. It gives me a chance to refine my arguments and explore other threads. That is a huge cultural shift in how we journalists do our jobs, and it’s more of a challenge than the technical issues, which I’ll explore in the next post.

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07.03.06
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What would audience-driven journalism look like?

There has been an interesting discussion, both online and offline, about audience-driven journalism over the last few weeks. It’s one of the things that I’ve been thinking about for my journalism X-project.

Leonard Witt had some ideas about how the open-source movement could inspire a reinvention of journalism (podcast here – audio 4.7MB download). And Jay Rosen of PressThink wanted to kick-start some ideas at BloggerCon IV about what he called, the ‘users know more than we do‘ journalism.

I really liked Jay’s practical approach to it. He’s asking some of the right questions.

  • What kinds of stories can be usefully investigated using open source and collaborative methods?
  • Which user communities are good bets to be interested enough to make it happen?
  • What will it take to start running more trials that could yield compelling and publishable work?
  • What needs to be invented for this kind of journalism to flourish?

Like I said in my previous post, there are some projects and audiences for which this approach is best suited, and there are other stories where quite honestly, traditional methods of journalism and storytelling work just fine. Jay set up his post by having Ken Sands of the The Spokesman-Review in Spokane Washington guest blog.

We know there are local knowledge networks. Should we try to “tap into” them, or is it better to leave them alone until something happens to make partnership possible? Correspondents— we’re familiar with them. But we don’t know how to operate a vast and dispersed network of correspondents, linking hundreds or even thousands. Does anyone?

He has a few ideas: Local sports, transportation watch, weather watch. It’s all local. It’s about things people are passionate about in their own communities.

And I couldn’t agree with Ken more when he says that there’s no traction in the citizen journalism out of mainstream media outlets. Yes, as we’re about to look back a year after the July 7 bombings here in London, everyone remembers the iconic cameraphone pictures. But I think Ken is talking more about community around content rather than the flood of pictures we now get at the BBC during large news events in the UK. Is there a sense of community, a sense of participation in sending off cameraphone pics to large news organisations? I’m with Ken who points to Flickr, YouTube and MySpace.

Those sites work; the mainstream media versions—the industry calls it user-generated content—do not. Why?

I’m going to be doing some thinking out loud about these questions over the next couple of days. But one last thought before Suw and I shut the computers off for the night. We used to talk about broadcast networks, but the future is obviously in social networks. What is the role of the journalist in the age of social networks?

06.14.06
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Renaissance journalism

Last week, I took part in a chat amongst journalists, designers and progammers on an internal e-mail list about how we work together. It was touched off by the e-mail interview with Adrian Holovaty at the Online Journalism Review.

One of Adrian’s sage bits of advice:

It all starts with the people, really. If you want innovation, hire people who are capable of it. Hire people who know what’s possible.

He says hire programmers, which news organisations are doing. But even journalists – like myself – who can’t programme but still know what’s possible are important. I took one programming class, ever, and that was Pascal back in the late 80s. I dropped it after one semester when I realised that my brain just didn’t work that way.

Yet my journalism school specifically and my university – the University of Illinois – more generally prepared me well for what was to come. I learned about all aspects of journalism, including design. I got the basics, plus I did lunch with the developers who worked on Mosaic, so got an early introduction to the web. There are journalists who aren’t programmers who know what’s possible, and quite honestly we are just waiting to be unleashed so we can get on with it.

What’s holding us back? Lots. As journalists, we’re obsessed with today’s deadlines. But too often, that focus comes at the cost of innovation that, for most of the internet, happened a while ago. We haven’t burned the business cards as Jeff Jarvis suggested and are stuck with organisational structures that concentrate solely on putting out a daily newspaper or feeding the beast of the 24-hour broadcast news machine, but which aren’t flexible enough to free up innovators to work on other projects. In a world of Google and nimble start-ups, news organisations need to invest in a little R&D and give us room to experiment.

Instead, the hungry innovators get pigeonholed, even when our skill set defies categorisation. I’m a journalist, a blogger, a podcaster, a cameraman, a photographer, a hacker (albeit not a very good one). As my partner in podcasting, Ben Metcalfe, says, if I were a town, I’d be San Luis Obispo, halfway between the content capital of LA and the geek creativity crucible of Silicon Valley. Don’t try to shoehorn me into your org chart. You’re org chart is part of the problem. You’ll get less value from me in an old school position than you’ll get if you let me do what I love: Get up every morning, work like a dog and create a brand new medium.

I am passionate about journalism, and I’m passionate about what journalists, designers and programmers can achieve together when unleashed on this amazing canvas called the internet. I get excited thinking about what I can do with all of this new fangled mobile communications technology. How does that transform journalism? Live, immediate, raw, real. Must read, must see, must participate in, be a part of content. That’s what it does.

Second class citizens, still

And while you’re at it, as Adrian says, stop treating us geeks like the hired help. Adrian uses the term IT Monkey, I believe. New media isn’t new anymore. In the UK, online advertising spending surpassed radio in 2004, and it is expected to surpass national newspaper spending this year.

And notice this:

Excluding internet spending, total UK media advertising would be in recession with television, national and regional press all reporting revenue declines this year, it said.

This isn’t the lates 90s when people said of the web, “Show me the money”. The money is there. The audience is there. The news industry needs to shift its priorities both in hiring and spending.

How to change?

There are some small organisations like the Lawrence Journal World and Lawrence.com in Lawrence, Kansas (where Adrian Holovaty worked before joining the Washington Post), Nord Jyske in Denmark and many others, who understand multimedia, participatory media and are doing it really well. These are small shops where the editors, journos, developers, designers work together in a much more seemless and collaborative way.

But while Adrian is doing some great stuff when it comes to the innovative packaging and presentation of news at the Washington Post, what other possibilities are there? What could we achive when programmers, designers and programme makers work together during the whole process, rather than just the last few steps? Add in a little WiFi, 3G, radical in the field/on the ground newsgathering, and right away you’ve got a journalistic revolution.

I’d love the chance to focus on a single project, with the web at its heart and with on-demand audio and video. (No broadcast – broadcast would subsume this project. The media could be used on TV or radio, but it’s not a goal unto itself.) I’d work with a multi-skilled team with overlapping skills so they are literate in each others’ specialities and understand the challenges each will encounter. They would be the sort of people who understand that web isn’t just a publishing medium. Community and participation would be central to this project, both for promotion and co-creation. This is an X-project. A news incubator.

There are a couple of key issues that I need to think more about. Some stories would be perfect for this treatment, but not all. Some audiences would eat this up, but not all. We should focus on the right stories for the right audiences – you might call them ‘edge cases’ but perhaps ‘early adopters’ is a better way of thinking of them. IM, RSS, sharing. Mash ups. New news. News for the MySpace generation.

News has to evolve if it is to survive. And there are already journalists and geeks with mad ninja skills just waiting for a chance to show the world what can be done.

06.04.06
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Comment is F**ked

First off, I want to say that I really admire the ambition of the Guardian Unlimited’s Comment is Free. It is one of the boldest statements made by any media company that participation needs to be central to a radical revamp of traditional content strategies.

As Steve Yelvington said this week:

Editors, please listen. If you’re not rethinking your entire content strategy around participative principles, you’re placing your future at risk.

The Guardian seems to understand this need for participation to be integrated with its traditional content, but as with many media companies: “The future is here. It’s just not widely distributed yet.” It is, therfore, not hugely surprising to find that Comment is Free is having a few teething troubles. Ben Hammersley, European alpha geek and one of the people behind CiF, knew there would be risks:

Perhaps the most prominent liberal newspaper in the anglophone world, opening a weblog for comment and opinion, with free and open user commenting is, to put it mildly, asking for trouble. … This means that we have to employ a whole combination of technological and social countermeasures to make sure that the handful of trolls do not, as they say, ruin it for the rest of us. Frankly, it gives me the fear.

Ben was right to be concerned. Honestly, I wish there were a clearer headed assessment of the risks involved with blogging by media companies. Don’t get me wrong. I think that media companies should blog, but the risks aren’t as simple as they may appear and something on the scale of CiF is of course going to have problems. The Guardian appear to have focused mainly on the risks posed by commenters and have put a lot of energy into figuring out how they can have open comments without falling foul of UK libel law.

But people are people, and you are bound to get abusive, rude or irrelevant comments. Any publicly commentable website will reflect the cross-section of society that reads it, so it’s inevitable that some comments will not be as civil and insightful as we would prefer. Trolls happen.

Just this week, Engadget had to temporarily shut off its comments “because of the unacceptable level of noise / spam / junk / flaming / rudeness going on throughout our boards”.

Where the Guardian has fallen over is in their assessment of the risks posed by their choice of columnist to blog on CiF. Rather than thinking about who would make a really good blogger, they seem to have made the same mistake as the rest of the big media who have tried their hand at blogging: They’ve given their biggest names blogs, despite the fact that these people have no idea how to. Now a bit of a tiff has kicked off between the Guardian’s stable of columnists, the commenters on Comment is Free and the bloggers there. (Thanks to my colleague Nick Reynolds at the BBC who blogged about this internally and brought it to my attention.)

Catherine Bennett writes a column so full of uninformed generalisations about blogging in the UK, specifically political blogging, as to completely lack credibility. She seems to be trying to discredit the Euston Manifesto, a net-born political movement in the UK, by painting it as the creation of a sexually obsessed, semi-literate male-dominated blogging clique. I’ll leave it to you to follow the link to the Manifesto and draw your own conclusions.

Another Guardian columnist, Jackie Ashley, defends professional columnists, and says: “To those of you who think you know more than I do, I’m eager to hear the arguments: just don’t call me a fucking stupid cow.” Polly Toynbee asks commentors: “Who are you all? Why don’t you stop hiding behind your pseudonyms and tell us about yourselves?”

Ms Toynbee why don’t you step out from behind your byline and tell us a little about yourself instead of belittling us? It’s usually worked for me when trying to dampen an online flame war.

I’m sitting here reading her column, and I really don’t understand how she expected this to put out the fires. She asks for civility and for people to tell us who they are, but then she says of one of her anonymous detractors:

What do you do all day, MrPikeBishop, that you have time to spend your life on this site? I suppose the answer may be that you are a paraplegic typing with one toe and then I shall feel guilty at picking you out as one particular persecutor.

What do you expect when you respond to ad hominem attacks with patronising ad hominem attacks? Do you really see this as a solution? Are you treating your audience with the kind of respect that you for some reason think you deserve by default?

Ms Toynbee professes to answer her many e-mails, but I do get the sense that the Guardian’s columnists are simply not used to this kind of medium, they are not used to getting feedback in public where they can’t just hit ‘delete’ to get rid of a pesky critic.

Suw – who I should inform Ms Bennett is female and blogs, thank you very much – likened such old school thinking to this:

It’s like them walking into a pub, making their pronouncements and then walking out. Later, they are shocked to find out that everyone is calling them a wanker.

An interesting comment on CiF from altrui May 18, 2006 12:04 (I can’t link directly to the comment):

One observation – those who respond to commenters tend not to be abused so much. There is a certain accountability required among political commentators, just as there is for politicians. Until now, opinion formers have never really had to justify themselves. I can think of many of the commentariat who write provocative and incendiary pieces which cause no end of trouble, yet they carry on stoking up argument and division, without censure or even a requirement to explain themselves.

Two issues here: Columnists are not used to engaging in conversation with their readers; and the readers have had years to build up contempt of specific writers and are now being given the opportunity to revile them in public. A lethal combination of arrogance and pent-up frustration – no wonder CiF has soured. Question is, can the Guardian columnists learn from their mistakes and pull it back from the brink?

A few suggestions. Don’t treat your audience as the enemy. If you’re going to talk down to your audience, they are going to shout back. And quite honestly, I would say to any media organisation that your best columnists and commentators don’t necessarily make the best bloggers. Most media organisations thinkg blogging is simply snarky columns. Wrong, wrong and wrong.

It’s a distributed conversation. Ms Ashley says: “As with child bullies, I wonder if these anonymous commenters and correspondents would really be quite so “brave” if they were having a face to face conversation.” You’re right, and I am in no way defending some of the toxic comments that you’re receiving. But step back. Read your column as if it were one side of a conversation and think how you would respond.

Many columnists seem to use the British public school debating trick that really is a form of elitist trash-talking. Belittle your opponents as much as possible. Most will lose their heads, and therefore the argument. But, again, step back. Would you ever address someone face-to-face in the patronising manner of your columns and honestly expect anything approaching a civil response? It seems that your debating strategy has worked all too well, and your audience is so angry that they are responding merely with profanity and vitriol.

Again, having said all of that, I’m glad that the Guardian aren’t letting growing pains stop them. They are choosing one of their best CiF commenters to become a CiF blogger. Bravo.

05.31.06
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NowPublic NowFunded

I was the first person to blog about the launch of Michael Tippett’s participatory news network, NowPublic, which marries news stories from the media and public with “crowd-sourced” media such as photos and videos. I saw Michael demo NowPublic last February at the fabulous Northern Voice conference in Vancouver. Over a year later, just a few weeks ago, Michael, Kevin and I met up at a conference in London and had a really nice evening talking about everything, almost except NowPublic.

I’m delighted to announce that NowPublic has raised a healthy US$1.4 million in angel financing, lead by Brightspark Ventures. Congratulations to co-founders Michael, Leonard Brody and Michael Meyers and all the angels involved.

NowPublic met with early success when U2 played a ‘secret’ gig in New York. The photos posted on the site were fantastic – a realtime record of a gig posted without the aid of paid photographers or the traditional media. As an event of national and international interest to U2 fans, it was a bit of a no-brainer for people who were there to take and post photographs.

Since then, NowPublic has become one of the fastest growing news networks, with (and here I quote from the press release) “over 15,000 reporters in 130 countries and over 2 million unique visits a month. During Hurricane Katrina, NowPublic had more reporters in the affected area than most news organizations have on their entire staff.”

But what is news? We frequently thing of news as being events that have national or international importance, but much more news happens at a local or hyperlocal level and these are the types of events that we are less likely to share because they don’t ‘seem like news’ to us. We also tend to think of ‘news’ as being the same as ‘current events’, but in actual fact it spreads far wider than that, into technology, science, sports and beyond.

This is where NowPublic has huge potential – to be a repository of hyperlocal and focused news that is defined not by the sections in your newspaper or the packages on the 1 o’clock bulletin, but by the people who are involved or who witness what happened. We can make our own news – we just have to remember that what we are experiencing is newsworthy.

I myself have contributed to the site a paltry once, when I reported on a “five alarm” fire in San Francisco last July that happened just a few blocks away from where I was staying. I could have contributed more often, and one missed opportunity in particular springs to mind.

Kevin and I were walking to Holborn station in London, only to find that area sealed off. To find a tube station shut is not that big of a deal in London, but the fact that the surrounding roads were sealed off and the place was swarming with police was much more unusual. Had I had any presence of mind, (or a decent cameraphone), I would have taken some snaps, posted them on NowPublic and asked if anyone knew what had happened. Something patently had, but the traditional news outlets didn’t cover it, and the London Underground site never even mentioned the closure of the station. Yet there was news there – I could smell it. My curiosity nearly killed me.

But much participatory media happens at the behest of an authoritative source – XYZMediaCo requests photos of a specific event, or a news anchor invites people to text or email in questions. Under some circumstances – such as the London bombings or the Buncefield fire, the media can be inundated with images and reportage. But we, the public, frequently forget that smaller events are news too, and retraining us to think more critically about what is news is a hefty challenge I am sure that Michael will relish.

05.29.06
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How many news outlet staff actually read their own RSS feeds?

I don’t have a TV. I also don’t have a radio. I get my news the same way any self-respecting geek does, via the intarwebthingy. It used to be that I would pop along to news websites and see what was going on, but then Dave Winer invented RSS and that saved me all the fuss and bother of having to figure out whether a site had been updated or not by conveniently feeding new articles into my aggregator. Wonderful.

Blogs, you see, have been using RSS for almost as long as it and they have been around, because blog software is written by geeks, and geeks do like to save themselves some effort whenever they can. RSS was invented in 1997 when Winer created an XML syndication format for use on his blog. Now no self-respecting blog is without a feed. Yay us.

News outlets, on the other hand, suffer from Chronic 90s Web Buzzword Syndrome, which means that they are still thinking about ‘stickiness’ and ‘eyeballs’. I don’t know about you, but the thought of sticky eyeballs quite makes my stomach churn. However, they have – slowly, painfully, and with no small amount of looking over their shoulder to see if the Big Nasty Sticky Eyeball Eating Monster was creeping up behind them – adopted RSS. Despite the fact that bloggers saw RSS as a no-brainer, the media had to think long and hard before they committed to using a technology which made it easier for people to find out what they had published on their websites and which could, therefore, drive lots of traffic their way.

But they’ve got there. Sort of.

I’m glad that The Times, The Guardian, The Independent, the BBC et al are using RSS. I am, at heart, a lazy wossit, and I much prefer my news to come to me, rather than for me to have to go out and find it. However, I am afeared that the media has not quite paid enough attention to RSS, making the consumption of news via my aggregator a painful and unpleasant experience.

Firstly, no one seems to have figured out that when you change a story, the changes show up in some aggregators. I use NetNewsWire, and it’s set to show me the differences between old and new versions of an RSS feed. It’s true to say that sometimes NNW misinterprets what constitutes a change, but it also exposes all the real changes made to news stories.

The BBC seems to have the biggest problem with constantly changing RSS feeds. I brought this up once with a meeting of senior BBC news execs, and they failed to understand why this is a problem. It’s not just that it’s irritating – changing a story even a little bit causes it to be republished which then flags it up as ‘unread’ in my aggregator, even though I have actually read it. It’s also that changing stories after they have been published is unprofessional and damages the news source’s credibility. When I link to a news story, I want it to say the same thing next week as it said when I linked to it.

When I explained this to the BBC’s news execs, they cried in exasperation that they couldn’t possibly be expected to be right all the time, and where do you draw the line between a major update, which gives the story a new URL, and a minor update? Well, that is a good question. Another good question is, why do you even do minor updates? Perhaps better sub-editing, along with not rushing too fast to publish, would help get rid of the need for minor updates, and any major changes to the story are dealt with by a new article? Or perhaps there is an even better way to deal with additional facts coming in, such as saying ‘Update’ in the article, or some other methodology that I haven’t thought of that doesn’t screw with the integrity of the original.

To be fair, not all of the BBC’s RSS output is affected. Out of nearly 40 items from the BBC in my aggregator at the moment, five have changes. That’s only ~13%, which you might thing is negligible, but I think that figure should be zero.

You’ll also find, when you click through to the site, that the first paragraph is different from the excerpt that’s published in the RSS feed. Considering how concise some of these first paragraphs on the site are, it makes you wonder why the BBC are writing separate excerpts at all, and particularly makes me question why those excerpts get edited. Seems like make-work to me.

Here are a few examples from today, picked in sequence from headlines published around the 15:30 mark and including the copy from the website as well. I have replicated the additions (in italics) and the deletions (strikethrough) exactly as they show up in NetNewsWire, so you have to take into account its inherent over-enthusiasm for marking things as changed.

Virus-hit cruise firm apologises

Five hundred UK holidaymakers are sent home after their Hundreds of passengers whose cruise ship was detained because of holidays were ruined by a severe virus.virus outbreak are to be offered refunds.

Virus-hit cruise firm apologises

A travel company has apologised and offered a refund to hundreds of passengers whose cruise holidays were ruined by a virus outbreak.

US crash sparks Afghanistan riot

At least seven people are killed in the Afghan capital, Kabul, Violent disturbances rock Kabul after a deadly traffic accident involving a US convoy crashes, triggering a riot.military convoy.

US crash sparks Afghanistan riot

At least seven people have been killed in the Afghan capital Kabul after a traffic accident involving a US military convoy sparked mass rioting.

Race against time in Java quake

The United Nations warns that the task of bringing taking aid to the survivors of the earthquake in Indonesia is “enormous”.“enormous”, the United Nations warns.

Race against time in Java quake

The task of helping survivors of Saturday’s earthquake on the Indonesian island of Java is “a race against the clock”, the United Nations has warned.

Worse than the BBC is Google News. By it’s very nature, Google News is all about change, but by god that screws with your RSS feeds. Out of about 80 items, 68 had changes. Now, Google News aims to track news stories from multiple sources, so it is inevitable that their items should change frequently, but it makes it completely useless in an RSS aggregator, because every time I refresh, the items that I had read become marked as unread again because Google News have either done something as minor as changed the timestamp from “5 hours ago” to “6 hours ago”, which is not hugely useful, or added a new source, or substantively changed the copy.

This breaks Google News’ RSS feed in terms of usability. There’s just no way I can continue to have Google News in my RSS reader.

Now, what the BBC does get very right is its timestamps. Items published today have the time published as their timestamps, and items published yesterday and before have the date.

Would that The Times could learn that timestamps are important. Instead, RSS items from The Times are timestamped with the time that I refresh my aggregator, not the time that they are published. I have my news feeds grouped in one folder and I read them en masse. News is highly time-sensitive, and I want to read stuff as it comes in, so having an accurate timestamp is essential. The Times, however, hasn’t figured this out yet. Instead, I get a cluster of items grouped around a single timestamp, and when I refresh, I not only get new items, I get repeats of old items with the new ‘timestamp’. This is not helpful.

For example, I learnt that ‘3,000 UK troops are Awol since war began’ both at 11:09 and at 13:58; and that ‘Abbas threatens Hamas with referendum over blueprint’ both on 25th and 26th of May. These items are in the same feed, and appear to be identical, yet they are showing up twice.

The Guardian is pretty good, compared to The Times, Google News, and the BBC, in the way they treat RSS, as I would expect considering they have people like Neil McIntosh and Ben Hammersley to advise. They get timestamping right – the clusters of articles all being published at once is more to do with their editorial time-table than bugs in their RSS feed.

But there is still room for improvement. Whilst they do edit their RSS excerpts, sometimes just as pointlessly as the BBC, they do it a lot less often, so my main criticism would be that they are inconsistent in their excerpt writing habits. Some articles get a sentence, others get two bullet points; and sometimes the excerpt (and headline) is the same as on the site, and sometimes it isn’t. I have to say, I’d prefer a single sentence excerpt and headline which was the same as the site.

A few examples of what I mean.

Ghost ship washes up in Barbados

· 11 petrified corpses found in cabin· Letter left by dying man gives clue

After four months at sea, ghost ship with 11 petrified corpses washes up in Barbados

· Letter left by dying man gives clue to investigators

· Dozens of others thought to have perished en route

Climber left for dead rescued from Everest

A climber who was left for dead on Mount Everest has been found alive.

Climber left for dead rescued from Everest

· Team forced to leave Australian at 8,800 metres

· ‘I imagine you’re surprised to see me,’ he tells rescuer

Cage swaps Malibu for own desert island

Nicolas Cage has bought a 40-acre undeveloped island in the Bahamas for $3m (£1.6m)

Cage swaps Malibu for own desert island

Dan Glaister in Los Angeles

Monday May 29, 2006

The Guardian

Wherever you go, people stare at you. Paparazzi take pictures, fans ask for autographs, absolute strangers wonder aloud if they once met you at a party. For the hard-pressed celebrity there’s only one way to get away from it all: hide on your own desert island.

The surprise in all this is that the one newspaper who gets it spot on is The Independent. I really can’t fault their RSS feed at all. Timestamps are reliable, and again reveal their editorial timetable with many articles being published in the small hours and few being published during the day. Their excerpts vary in length, but some of the longer ones are more useful than those of other news outlets. Personally, I like longer excerpts because I would rather skim a two sentences that give me a better feel for whether I want to read the article than have just one short sentence that doesn’t tell me much.

Some examples, again with the copy from the RSS and the copy from the site:

British journalists killed in Iraq

Two British television journalists were killed in Iraq by a roadside bomb today.

British journalists killed in Iraq

PA

Published: 29 May 2006

Two British television journalists were killed in Iraq by a roadside bomb today.

Bush ‘planted fake news stories on American TV’

Federal authorities are actively investigating dozens of American television stations for broadcasting items produced by the Bush administration and major corporations, and passing them off as normal news. Some of the fake news segments talked up success in the war in Iraq, or promoted the companies’ products.

Bush ‘planted fake news stories on American TV’

By Andrew Buncombe in Washington

Published: 29 May 2006

Federal authorities are actively investigating dozens of American television stations for broadcasting items produced by the Bush administration and major corporations, and passing them off as normal news. Some of the fake news segments talked up success in the war in Iraq, or promoted the companies’ products.

Indonesia Earthquake: As a people, they already had little – now they are left with nothing

In the morning, Salim retrieved the lifeless body of his three-year-old son, Sihman, from the ruins of their brick and bamboo hut. In the afternoon, he buried him, digging the grave himself. As night fell, he searched through the rubble of his former home for scraps of food. “I have lost everything,” he said.

Indonesia Earthquake: As a people, they already had little – now they are left with nothing

By Kathy Marks in Bantul, Indonesia

Published: 29 May 2006

In the morning, Salim retrieved the lifeless body of his three-year-old son, Sihman, from the ruins of their brick and bamboo hut. In the afternoon, he buried him, digging the grave himself. As night fell, he searched through the rubble of his former home for scraps of food. “I “I have lost everything,” he said.

I like the fact that the RSS feed and the website copy are identical. To me, that’s ideal – what I see in RSS is what I get on the site. I also can’t see any evidence of changes, although I will say that this RSS feed is new in my aggregator so maybe this point will clarify itself over time.

Now, all this criticism may seem like pointless nit-picking. Perhaps some it is down to my inner editor screaming for consistency and my inner blogger begging for honesty, but certainly some of this has a direct impact on the usability of RSS feeds for the reading of news.

I want news. I have no problem with the idea of clicking on a link in my aggregator and reading the full article on the news outlet’s website – this is not a plea for full posts (although hell, that’d be great and if Corante can put advertising in their RSS feed, so can anyone, but that’s not the point I want to make).

It’s a plea for journalists and media IT staff to think a little harder about how news is being read these days. RSS is not a fad, and it’s not going to go away. It is going to flourish, with more and more people using it to get their news from many disparate sources. It is in your best interests to ensure that your RSS feeds work, that your editorial policies take into account the effect of new technology on the transparency of your medium, and that you strive at all times for honesty even if that means owning up to your updates (note, ‘update’ does not necessarily mean ‘mistake’).

Google News is revealing your reliance on syndicated content, and RSS is revealing your edits. If you want to remain credible, you must adapt. In an increasingly competitive world, where people choose which news sources to read not just based on content but also on usability and accessibility, can you really afford not to?

05.28.06
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Webinar: News as conversation

It was live from North London as I did a ‘webinar’ Tuesday night on the nitty gritty of how we do a global interactive radio programme five nights a week on the BBC World Service. Francois Nel from University of Central Lancashire invited me to take part in their Journalism Leaders Forum. You can watch the whole thing here.

First off, we try to eavesdrop on conversations around the world, virtually get a sense of what people are talking about in cafes and around water coolers the world over. What are the most viewed, most e-mailed stories on major news sites? What are bloggers talking about? We check Global Voices, the global blog network based out of Harvard. What are the stories coming picked up by BBC Monitoring, our global media monitoring department? We do a roundup on our blog and ask the audience what is important to them.

With the help of our audience, we settle on topics to discuss that day. We often post debates on the Have Your Say section of the BBC News Website. We use a discussion system based on Jive Software. People can not only comment, but also leave an e-mail address and phone number. Personal information apart from name and place don’t appear on the public site, but we can log in and see those contact details to invite people to join our on air discussion.

Our blog is beginning to gain some momentum. We’ve got on average four comments per post, and I’m really pleased on how the blog allows the conversations to continue long after our on air discussions finish. This is what I meant by saying that blogs can overcome the limits of linear media. We’ve only got one hour on air, but our audience can explore other threads of discussion online for weeks to come.

We’ve had some amazing conversations grow out of it. I remember recently when we had a south Asian sailor calling on a sat phone from a ship in the Molucca Straits talking to another Asian Muslim living in Stockholm being asked questions by a caller from Austin Texas in the United States about recent violent clashes between Hamas and Fatah factions in the West Bank and Gaza.

We’ve still got more to do. As I said on the webinar, we’re still building community around the programme. People often say that the BBC has a huge audience. Recent figures show the BBC World Service has 163 million listeners. But a sense of community is different from a large audience. Community is a sense of ownership, belonging and participation. The greater the community we build around the programme, the more the audience will feel a sense that this is their programme. As I’ve said before, building community around a global discussion programme is difficult. Community develops around several shared things, place or a shared passions or interests.

Another question asked was how to make money with blogs. Suw often says that she doesn’t make money with her blog but because of her blog. There is a lot of truth even for us in traditional media. I remember in the late 90s people in traditional media said that the web was great but there was no way to make money with it. Now, many media websites turn a profit, a profit not necessarily that is replacing revenue lost from their traditional business, but a profit. And I believe that blogs can renew our relationship with our audiences.

It’s not simply a commercial relationship. A lot of my colleagues ask me why I blog. I found that when I wrote the blog during the US elections in 2004 that it reminded me a lot of the relationship I had with my readers when I first started out in journalism as a local newspaper reporter. I was part of the communities that I wrote about in western Kansas. That was one of the things that made journalism a fulfilling job for me.

Even though in 2004, I was writing the blog for people all over the world, I felt I was writing for a community again, not just readers. I got more response from the blog I wrote than almost anything I have done for the BBC. I think there are a lot of opportunities for news organisations to embrace blogging to renew our relationship with our audiences. While I won’t outline a business model with facts and figures about a return on investment, I know that blogs can help us create compelling content. And that is the start for any media business model.

05.08.06
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I’m listening

I was at the WeMedia conference where Suw was an online curator. Our friend Kevin Marks thought her role was, “pointing out the old media dinosaurs in the museum”.

As Ian Forrester points out, my position here is pretty tricky and slightly dangerous. As I have said, I work for the BBC. I am on the BBC’s blog steering committee as one of the ‘bloggers’ who doesn’t represent one of the major divisions in the corporation. I don’t say that to say, look at how important I am. This is about telling you where I’m coming from. Transparency, which as Dan Gillmor told some folks at an internal BBC briefing, journalists need to do more often.

I’m also a journalist and have been in one way or another for more than 10 years now. I think that journalism is important in a Jeffersonian sense of the functioning of a democracy, but I don’t confuse the importance of what I do with any outsized sense of self-importance.

Dan said that while he wasn’t at WeMedia last Wednesday that his impression was that it was: “Journalists vs. Bloggers conversation No. 7396”. I’m going to stick my professional neck out and say that is the impression I also got from a lot of participants, including Rebecca MacKinnon and Dorian Benkoil, here at Corante.

Bloggers are bored with this false dichotomy, and as for this journalist, I am too. There are lots of opportunities for colloboration, and as for the bloggers that I know and work with, I’ve never found bloggers to be bullies. I found that my relationship with bloggers, citizen journalists and DIY, participatory media folk of all stripes is just like any relationship: Treat people with respect and professionalism and you get the same back in spades.