Category Archives: Media 2.0

10.23.07
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When trusted guides don’t guide

Canyon Country Fire by respres

Canyon County Fire by respres on Flickr, Creative Commons, Some Rights Reserved

I was looking through my feeds and found this on Mashable: This Disaster Will Be Twitterized. Mark Hopkins recalls how more than 10 years ago, he aggregated all of the coverage of the Oklahoma City bombing on his Angelfire page. His page was listed prominently on the Yahoo page showing coverage of the tragedy.

Mark fast-forwarded to the present day and watched the California wildfires unfold in Flickr, Twitter and a number of other Web 2.0 sites. And he makes this observation:

Any news channel or show on the TV is prominently featuring this disaster in varying degrees of detail, but if you reside outside of Southern California, what exactly are you going to learn from the national news reports that will be useful to you in a situation like this? CNN isn’t going to point you to the ten mile long Google Map mashup that shows where the fires are. MSNBC isn’t going to aggregate the links for you.

The question for any news organisation is why not? This isn’t rocket science. There are no technical hurdles to doing this if you have even a half-way decent CMS, and it’s dead easy if you’ve got some blogging software. If part of news organisations’ job is to be a trusted guide, why are so many blind to the aggregating this content and helping their audience navigate it?

Chris Vallance and Rhod Sharp had a couple of great interviews on the BBC’s Pods and Blogs last night. (Note: I used to help Chris and Rhod with the programme, and Chris will be the best man at my wedding.) But I’m still baffled why web aggregation during breaking news with follow up interviews still are the exception not the norm. There are all of these people living through a news event making themselves known through blog posts, photo sharing sites, social networking sites and more, and yet we’re still telling the story through wire copy, agency video and stills. It’s yet another missed opportunity by doing what we do the same way we’ve always done it. Editorial innovation can happen while meeting the demands of breaking news.

10.16.07
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The passing of BBC News Interactive and integration

This week, staff and managers of the BBC News website will gather in what friends and former colleagues have described as both a birthday party and a wake. The BBC News Website will celebrate its 10th anniversary just as it is about to cease as a separate news operation.

I won’t pretend that this post isn’t personal. I joined the Guardian a year ago, but for eight years before that, I worked for the BBC. I joined BBC News Online in October 1998 as the first online reporter outside of the UK. For most of that eight years, I worked for the BBC News website, or BBC News Online as it was called before management felt that it could use a rebranding.

A few weeks ago, I read “BBC News Interactive will be ‘an empty shell’ in two years” by Jemima Kiss on Guardian Blogs with a heavy heart (disclaimer: I’m now the Blogs editor at the Guardian).

She quoted BBC News Interactive chief Pete Clifton, who said:

If you come up to the seventh floor in two years, it will just be an empty shell, hopefully.

Hopefully? I can’t see my former online colleagues being filled with hope. Despite his talk about the online staff joining the radio and TV staff to “make the best platform for our journalism”, it’s hard to see this as anything but happy talk. While Pete was at AOP, I was having dinner with a friend and former colleague, and he confirmed that Pete was basically managing himself out of a job. He’s not the first manager at the BBC to do this over the last few years, but Jemima put it well when she said:

It sounded like news interactive is about to evaporate, to disappear into the ether like it never existed – as if online news does not deserve, demand or need its own dedicated department. Surely integration isn’t as brutal or as straightforward that?

This isn’t integration. This is the systematic dismantling and destruction of a site and a staff that has helped lead the way in online and interactive journalism.

Yes, the site will survive, and I’m sure that remaining staff will soldier on. But the online managers and editors, who have built up so much experience over the last decade, face an uncertain future. The problem is that, inside the BBC, the News website simply does not have the political capital to withstand the powerful managers in TV. Everyone inside Television Centre knows the pecking order. Radio is the poor cousin to TV, and online is the poorer cousin to radio.

Case in point, I was told by another former BBC employee that she recently asked someone still there what would happen for the News site and its staff. The response?

They will do what they’re told.

The arrogance, the shear arrogance. And it’s all too believable.

Integration

Integration should be greater than the sum of its parts, bringing together the combined audio, video and interactive talents of the BBC. When I was there, I knew that to achieve the kind of multimedia storytelling that I wanted, I could learn much from my radio and television colleagues. And through the camaraderie and shared sense of purpose, we achieved great things in Washington and at the BBC News website.

Nick Newman came up with the great idea to turn over the election coverage agenda to our users back in 2000, and Tom Carver and I flew, both literally and figuratively, across the US in an Election Challenge. We covered 6,500 miles in 6 days using web conferencing gear, a mini-DV cam and a portable sat dish to webcast once a day, answering questions posed by visitors to the website. In the wake of the 11 September 2001 attacks, I travelled to New York three months, six months and one year after, marking the dates with text and video storytelling with correspondent Peter Gould and Simon Oldfield, Sarah Dale and Nick Buckley from the News website. And on the suggestion (and later great encouragement) of Steve Herrmann, I blogged during the last US presidential election, again taking interactive journalism a step further. And the news website has done so much more in pioneering multimedia newsgathering, including their laptop link-ups, Joseph Winter’s great work in Africa, just to mention a few projects.

At the BBC’s Washington bureau, we did feel almost like Greg Dyke’s “One BBC”, although we would get the most ridiculous duplication-of-effort requests from London. At the time I left Washington, we had more than 30 requests for President Bush and his cabinet from the various ‘flagship’ programmes at the BBC. One senior aide on Capitol Hill once quipped to a BBC producer that with so many flagships there mustn’t be any room for other ships in the BBC armada. But we did do integrated journalism in Washington. I covered the Microsoft anti-trust trial for online, radio and TV as I did the Millennium Bug, although I spent much of the night doing two-ways and finding new ways to say “nothing much to report”. But it was this that made the BBC both a great place and a great place to work.

The BBC News website Washington job was one of the best jobs at the site, and I look back fondly on those days. But when I tried to take my new media skills to other areas of the BBC, they were neither used nor rewarded, rather I was criticised for my lack of TV or radio skills.

In the year before I left, many of my colleagues both inside and outside the BBC tried to talk me out of it. Why would I want to leave the BBC? I told them simply that in four of the last 5 years, 2003-2007, the budget for the News website had been cut. In 2003, BBC management tried to cut the site’s budget by 25%, but only managed 18%. I took a year off to do a video journalism attachment in Washington, not knowing if I would have a job to come back to. The cuts in 2003, reportedly at the suggestion of the highest levels of BBC New Media management, came because “Friends Reunited runs on 6 people, why does the News website need a few hundred?” With budget cuts for the foreseeable future at BBC News, how could I stay? My pay wasn’t keeping up with housing inflation in Washington and there were no opportunities for me. The pioneering work that we had once done was no longer possible with the budget cuts.

I would love to think that, under an integrated news operation, the BBC News presence would flourish online, but knowing the way the BBC works, I can’t realistically see that happening. The BBC’s internal politics are so poisonous that some of its flagship programmes are at open warfare with one another, calling up Sky to offer their guests instead of sharing them with their BBC colleagues. That was why Greg Dyke’s “One BBC” was the punch-line of a joke in the Washington bureau. I can’t see how this will suddenly change overnight, especially in light of the scrabble over resources as these cuts bite deep. Politics is the allocation of resources, and one surefire way to ratchet up the political battles at the BBC is to make the pie that everyone fights over just that much smaller.

Real leadership at the corporation, which it does have, should put a stop to the petty battles of managers and remind them that the real competition is at Sky or CNN, not down the hall. But that is not the atmosphere at the Pit of Vipers, as one friend and former colleague refers to Television Centre. I’m not sure that anyone could pull the BBC together. As anyone who has worked there knows, it’s not one corporation but rather a thousand fiefdoms.

Brain Drain

Now, I fear, through this arrogance and so many missteps, big and small, the BBC will see what started as a trickle become a flood. In February 2006, I told a BBC executive who I count as a good friend that I was seeing a brain drain. The number of digital natives leaving the BBC, not only in News but across the organisation, I feared would leave the BBC incapable of realising its digital ambitions. He had seen it before he said, as had I. During the dot.com boom, many of my colleagues the News website left for lucrative (albeit often short-lived) jobs in the booming sites of the late 1990s. But this more recent brain drain was different. I saw people leaving not because there was silly money to be made but because they were frustrated. They felt throttled and hemmed in by bureaucracy, infighting, regulation and technical bottlenecks, especially after the forced sale of BBC Technology to Siemens. (For those not familiar with the sale, the BBC had reached its borrowing limits. The government wouldn’t increase the limit so the BBC needed to sell something, fast. When I left, the annual service contract for an iPaq handheld computer was three times the high street value of the device itself, and if I recall correctly, that didn’t even include the data charges.)

Now with this forced integration of radio, TV and online news, I fear that they will lose – or, at best, relegate to the sidelines – the online management, editors and journalists who have built a world class online news service. Done wrong, this could be a huge step backward for the BBC, back to the bad old days of ‘shovelware‘ and simple re-purposing.

I worked side by side with so many respected journalists there, and I really felt pride in what we were doing. As I said, I know that they will meet this challenge as best they can. They have spent five years miraculously finding ways to do more with less. Now, they will have no choice but to do less with less.

10.14.07
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Duty to buy a newspaper?

Roy Peter Clark at Poynter certainly has kicked off an interesting discussion with a column on the journalism centre’s website in a call to journalists to dig into their pockets and buy the newspaper. His full argument is worth a read, but the essence is:

I owe it to hard-working journalists everywhere — and to the future of journalism — to read them. It’s no longer a choice. It’s a duty.

And here’s why: There is one overriding question about the future of journalism that no one can yet answer: How will we pay for it? Who will pay for good reporters and editors? Who will pay to station them in statehouses, or send them to cover wars and disasters? Who will finance important investigations in support of the public’s health and safety?

Poynter has done a great service in collecting some of the blog posts that comment on the column. I’m not going to take aim at the original column. There are plenty of people who have done that.

My information diet

I’ll be honest. I can’t remember the last time I actually bought a physical newspaper. I get them from time to time on flights and at hotels, but the last time I put down money and bought a newspaper. I’d have to think hard about that. I think I bought a Guardian right before I joined the newspaper.

But I’m drowning in information. If this diet were food, I’d be the size of a small block of flats. Super-size me. I actually have to do a lot just to filter and sift the massive amount of information available. I’m constantly looking for signal in the noise. No one news source does it for me, and I compare a lot of news sources because they all have a point of view.

Before I leave the door, I have Sky News and BBC Breakfast on the laptop TV, more for background noise than information to be honest, although it’s good to know what the domestic (read British) media and press are exercised about today. I can’t filter TV news so I don’t ‘use’ it much. It’s too time consuming for what I get out of it. To be brutally honest, sometimes I get so pissed off at TV news for wasting my time I flip the channel to Everybody Loves Raymond. The BBC TV news podcast isn’t updated until I’m at work or else I’d just watch that and skip the fluff. If there is a good piece of video, I’ll see it. If a politician or presenter says something of note, I’ll see it repeated a million times during the day or in the papers.

Now, on my half hour commute in the morning before I hit the Tube, I listen to the NYTimes Front Page podcast and the hourly NPR news update downloaded to my iPod via iTunes. I just can’t find a good top of the hour headlines podcast in the UK. I haven’t checked the BBC lately. I wish they would produce a World Service headlines podcast. If I have time, I also listen to podcasts from On the Media, the Economist, the BBC’s Pods and Blogs (which I used to contribute to) and This American Life (although Suw and I usually listen to that together over breakfast on the weekend).

On the Tube, I usually skim stories from four newspapers: The New York Times, the Washington Post, the International Herald-Tribune and the Guardian. If I see something I need to read, I’ll mentally bookmark it for when I get to work. I also check on the headlines the BBC News website and do a quick check on CNET and Wired. I’ve been doing this for years on my Palm handheld using a service called Avantgo. The screen is great, and I don’t really have this fetish about paper. It’s just information, and it’s easier to organise this way. And it’s much easier to deal with on the Tube. I also have an RSS reader on my Palm, QuickNews, which I wish was better. That gives me headlines from Marketwatch and a half dozen blogs.

Most everyone else on the Tube reads the Metro free-sheet. I don’t. It’s just a rehash of what I’ve already seen on Sky and the BBC, and unlike most everyone else, I’m not interested in celebrity news. Besides, I never have to go looking for celebrity gossip. It’s everywhere. I also have an environmental issue with all of those free-sheets. What a waste.

When I get to work, I fire up my RSS reader, NetNewsWire, and look through the blogs and traditional news sources. I check Popurls.com to get a quick filter of social news sites, video sites and aggregators. I usually have NPR on in the background and give a quick check to NBC’s evening news via iTunes. I get e-mail newsletters from the Washington Post – my old hometown paper – and the NYTimes. I also get an e-mail from NewsTrust and SimplyHeadlines.com, aggregators of different sorts. I also get a morning e-mail from Global Voices giving a great roundup of global blog buzz. Friends are always sending me links via Del.icio.us, mostly to do with new media journalism, and I get things passed along directly via IM.

A former colleague at the BBC said that someday everyone will consume their news like me. I’m not so sure. Very few people actively seek out as much information as I do. I don’t extrapolate my own behaviour too much. I am a very wired news junkie. It’s my job to know what’s going on. But there are a lot of people doing one or more of the above.

But as some people in the Poynter discussion have pointed out, lack of information is not my problem. Lack of time and a limit to the amount of attention I have is more of a problem. I still don’t think this is an issue that most journalists have grokked. There’s who, what, where, when and why, but too many journalists don’t seem to think they need to explain to readers, viewers, listeners: Why should I care?

Relevance

Again, this is one of the posts where the comments are worth reading. Steve Yelvington in his post, A troll in scholar’s clothing, echoes one of the sentiments in the post which is that news has to be relevant to consumers, the audience in order for them to buy it. Steve says:

Quit blaming the Internet. There’s nothing wrong with paper. It’s your journalism that isn’t relevant. … We’re not going to get meaningful content and services from journalists who spend their time reading each other and sniffing around each other’s scents like a pack of dogs.

Don’t compare your journalism with that of another newspaper. Compare it with the needs of the community.

Amen brother. As Steve has often pointed out, newspaper audiences (in the US), have been declining since the 1970s, when the Internet was still in the lab.

I love the depth of the style of journalism that newspapers have traditionally done. That’s not to say that television is not capable of it. TV documentary units in Britain and long ago (and long since dead) in the US have produced some excellent journalism. But now, what is the business model for this content? What pays for this relatively expensive work? That’s the crux of the original post.

For a number of reasons, most people aren’t like me. They don’t see the reason in their busy lives to seek out news and information like I do. I grew up with newspapers and watching the evening news every night with my parents. I knew that to make economic, political and any of a number of other everyday decisions, I needed quality information. But I am in the minority, and as long as I am in the minority, newspapers and the kind of journalism that they represent will be in decline in the developed world.

I think the issue of relevance is at the heart of newspapers decline. Why should most people care about news? Journalists take it for granted, but I fear that it’s only occasionally obvious for our audiences.

When I was back in Washington this March, I struck up a conversation about world affairs with an IMF employee on the Metro. She got off a couple of stops before me, and an African-American man had overheard us and came up to me after she got off. It was after the wobble in Chinese markets had sent stocks swooning the world over. He wondered how something in China could affect the US economy because suddenly it had affected him. I had to get off at the next stop and didn’t have time to say that the Chinese and Japanese held a majority of the United States’ foreign debt. Anything that impacted the appetite for the debt would hit the US, possibly hard. And that’s just one link between the two countries. China and the US need each other economically for a myriad of reasons. China has its own finely tuned balancing act in terms of growth, inflation, internal stability, resources and the environment.

The man on the Metro represents, to me, a failure of journalism. It was a failure by journalists to explain to everyone in our communities why the story was important. Until our journalism really is essential to people’s lives and we make that case, newspapers will get crowded out by a dizzying array of information and, yes, entertainment choices.

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10.10.07
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‘A nerve has been hit’

Jack Lail said former newspaper editor and Silicon Valley CEO Alan Mutter definitely hit an ‘organisational nerve‘ with his post about the ‘Brain Drain‘ happening in journalism. The post was hard hitting, quoting from a number of anonymous digital savvy journalists in their 20s and 30s looking for their exit at their newspapers and possibly out of the media full stop. Alan writes:

But the young net natives, for the most part, rank too low in the organizations that employ them to be invited to the pivotal discussions determining the stratgeic initiatives that could help their employers sustain their franchises.

This is one post where you need to read the comments, like this one:

The large MSM paper I work for has had virtually 100% turnover in it’s online operations in the last 18 months. I’m not talking about the Podunk Daily News either, you’d know the name. … I just don’t understand it, there are people in the mix who really are trying to save this industry but who are battling of all things, this industry.

This comment pained me:

I have reporting experience and two journalism degrees, but I frequently have dinosaur reporters and editors treat me like IT support staff and dismiss my ideas because I’m not “one of them”.

For many journalists, ‘real’ journalism is still about the format, not the content. It’s as if their words, which they wrote on a computer, were somehow less important because they never quite made it off of a computer. Hopefully, when confronted by their own argument, these journalists will see how paper thin it is. Somehow I doubt it because they’ve held to this line for most of the 10 years I’ve been an online journalist, but one can hope for some sort of poetic justice. If they learn some HTML, maybe they’ll find work in the future.

And this isn’t necessarily about age or experience. This isn’t just fresh out of college grads with, as one blogger said some outsized sense of entitlement. One commenter is leaving a major newspaper’s online wing after seven years. That’s a lot of experience lost.

Patrick Beeson, a web project manager for the E.W. Scripps Interactive Newspaper Group in Knoxville, Tennessee, called the post “among the most revealing portrayals of what’s wrong in most newspapers. Namely, legacy newsfolk not allowing for often-younger journo-technologists to play a guiding role in that paper’s strategy going forward.” This isn’t about turning your newsroom over to your youngest staff, but it is about having the humility and the vision to know what you don’t know.

As Alan says, some of this is about territory and turf, short-sighted management more concerned about owning the change than achieving change. And I’ve spoken to a lot of online news veterans who also struggle with the transition as the flat, collaborative environments of their newsroom meets the rigid hierarchies in traditional newsrooms. Integration isn’t the problem. It’s the terms of that integration. As Jack said, “This may be just a part of the difficult transition of organizations cemented in their ways.” This is an organisational issue as much, if not more, than a generational one.

Journalism professor Mindy McAdams points to a great post by young journalist, Meranda Watling, who gives her experience of being involved in discussions about new products “that there is no way in hell would float with my peers.” (Great blog Meranda. Nice design, and I do hope you do that education Tumblog.)

Mindy’s post is titled “We need a tourniquet”, and she said Alan is:

…talking about a legion of Merandas who are giving up and leaving because it’s so obvious to them that management has no clue what readers want or respect. The comments back him up, again and again. (That persistent sound you hear is our lifeblood leaking out.)

This post has kicked off a great conversation in the online journalism community, a community I’m proud to be a part of. It’s worth looking through the trackbacks to Alan’s post.

But to quote Rob Curley, this isn’t about skillset, it’s about mindset. It’s not about age or experience. I’ve spoken to some journalism school grads who talk as if it’s the 1940s, not the 21st Century, and I’ve worked with seasoned journalists who humble me with their digital knowledge and foresight and remind me that I have a lot to learn, like Steve Yelvington.

Steve and I shared dinner and drinks in Kuala Lumpur earlier this summer after we finished three days of workshops on citizen journalism with Peter Ong and Robb Montgomery, and he told me about coding a Usenet news reader for the Atari ST in the mid-1980s. Steve’s a pioneer. Steve knows his technology and his journalism. He had this to say about Alan’s post:

We are at a critical turning point for American newspapers. We can’t afford to drive away our smartest and most creative voices. The Internet not a publishing system, a Web site is not just another channel, and digitizing the thing we’ve been doing for the last century is not going to work. We need to think new thoughts, and pushing new thinkers out the door is a fatal mistake.

Most of us are just impatient for the future that we know is there to be grasped. But we won’t wait forever. If the industry can’t or won’t do it, we’ll do it on our own.

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09.26.07
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PPA: Rise of the Super Editor

A last minute invite has me on a panel at the Periodical Publishers Association half day conference: The Rise of the Super Editor. It’s largely about talking the range of skills required of a editors in the digital converged age. We’re all being asked to do from producing and editing text content now to producing podcasts and designing websites and now web services. What skills are needed?

“Magazine” editor in a digital age

Jonah Bloom of Advertising Age (USA) kicked things off. He started off just publishing magazines. They publish a ‘newspaper’, e-mail newsletters as well as produce a couple of conferences a year.

We don’t have a magazine at the centre of our business model. We have a consumer at the centre of our business model.

The major difference in the US was the pace of broadband adoption. The first thing that had to happen was that the print publication had to evolve. The first change was a major exclusive on an advertising takeover. They felt they could hold the story until Monday, but someone else broke it on the web before them. It was a bit of a turning point. Frankly, nothing holds. The news will break on the web. The print product had to evolve to become useful to readers in ways than just telling them what they didn’t know. The print product had to go behind and beyond the news, do more service journalism. They had to do more investigative journalism.

They have just under 1,000 blogs in their space. Many of them live off of the content that they produce, which was a slight annoyance. That is one of the threats. (I might disagree with that as a threat.)

He also wanted to talk about the opportunities. They have risen from about 100,000 registered web users to more than 700,000 from Q4 2004 to Q3 2007.

You can ‘slice and dice’ your audience. Ad Age has been able to tailor their content to niches in their audience. They could re-purpose their content their content for their media, magazine or digital communities.

You can hear your readers. Your connection to your readers 10 years ago was when you and your publisher came up with a survey and asked them if your content was ‘useful, very useful or very, very useful’. Now, you can see from statistics, polls and interactive features what people are reading and thinking. They harvest comments on their pieces for new stories. He gave the example of a feature on ‘How would you fix The Gap?’.

They transformed their letter pages, Adages, into a blog. Their ad critic, Bob Garfield, has his own blog, and they are even blogging about the 2008 presidential campaign. They have two blogs created by their readers, a small agency blog and also a blog about multicultural issues.

Five or 10 years ago, it would have been scary to send people to other sources or your competitors. Now, we link out. We try to put ourselves at the centre of the community. They have a list of the best ad sites based on Google and Technorati ranking.

They allow people to share their stories through Google reader, Netvibes, Bloglines and other sites. They built a Facebook widget.

They have three types of video. They set up a video studio in a ‘broom closet’ and spent $20,000 for a two-camera setup. They do event coverage in their space. Editing the video from a two-day conference into three minutes is truly a challenge.

Multi-tasking

I wasn’t planning to blog this conference, but this is an excellent snapshot into the reality that we as journalists and editors confront every day. I went to school to become a print journalist, and as I’ve often said, the only digital offering when I was at university (graduated mid-year 1993) was a computer-assisted reporting class. I learned web skills, audio and simple video editing all on the job. Most of this, I just picked up on my own. I took the initiative. The BBC does have a relatively good professional development programme, but for many smaller and less well funded (it was well funded when I was there) organisations, training is out of self initiative not necessarily out of structured programmes.

To journalism students, I say that you should prepare for a lifetime of learning, and your job will change over time. The entire industry is in state of flux, and you will be called on to fill a variety of roles.

The same goes for journalists. I don’t really understand journalists who want to freeze their jobs in amber and pine for some glory days of being able to focus on one task. That’s just not been my experience professionally. I’ve always had to multi-task as a journalist even when my only job was print reporter.

I’ve always been excited about multi-media story telling, and I’ve tried to learn lessons from the great print journalists, photographers, video editors and camera men and women and radio journalists I’ve worked with. I took the initiative because I was interested in doing it.

Ryan Sholin gathered up a good list of skills for new media journalism. I think for editors and journalists, it’s always been about knowing the art of the possible. Ask yourself:

  • What is the story?
  • What are the elements?
  • What format – text, audio, video, and interactive – is the best way to tell the different elements of that story?
  • Longer term, how do I put the technology in place to take advantage of digital opportunities?

And digital allows us to not just tell the story and leave it, but tell the breaking story and build on it.

And one final point, as Jonah Bloom said during a Q&A:

If you think that you just want to be a print writer and write 2,000 words, you can still do that. But you better be damn good at it.

Not everyone has to be all things to all digital editors, but the industry really needs digital natives to serve increasingly digital audiences.

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09.25.07
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Death of TimesSelect: You can’t control your readers

One of my favourite podcasts is NPR’s On the Media. It’s a great mix of meta coverage about media and the business of media as well as reviews of international media. For instance, they often have the blogger Mark Lynch of Abu Aardvark giving Arabic-language media reviews. They had a great piece this week about Cambodia trying to convince sceptical youth that the Khmer Rouge really did commit such horrific acts.

This past week, they also had a great interview with nytimes.com general manager Vivian Schiller about the death of TimesSelect. She does a good job explaining why the New York Times tore down the pay wall, and it was refreshing to hear someone in commercial media talk about ‘the public domain’ as a reason for opening the Times’ archive before 1922.

…in fact, 1851 to 1922, which has got a lot of cool stuff, including coverage of the Civil War and the Titanic, is now available for free because it belongs to the public. It’s the public domain.

Why did they take down the pay wall? In the long term, the single-digit growth from subscription revenue was outstripped by the growth from advertising. The comment that really stood out in my mind though was when she was asked whether they were worried about losing paying subscribers by having a totally free site (apart from the archives from 1922 to 1987). She said (my emphasis):

Well, yes, and there may be some that do that. But you know what? We can’t force behavior on people. We have to provide our content in the way that consumers want it, and if we lose a newspaper subscription, then so be it. But you can’t force change. You can’t work against the tide.

You can’t force behaviours on people. You have to learn how your readers/viewers/listeners behave and how they want their news, information, conversation and community. Follow their lead so you can keep supporting, as Ms Schiller puts it, the social mission of journalism.

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09.24.07
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Abusing goodwill

I like to think that the world is based on goodwill. People are, generally speaking, nice and, by default, they will respect and help others. Certainly humans are fundamentally and inescapably social creatures that need each other on a minute-by-minute and day-to-day basis, and I think that being nice is one of the attributes that which fuels the reciprocation that makes helping someone else ultimately worth it for us ourselves.

I also think that the social web is an expression of the niceness that lubricates society. All the mores that have built up around blogging and wikis and sharing and Creative Commons are based on being nice: if you quote someone’s blog, it’s being nice to credit them; Wikipedia encourages everyone to be nice to newbies; sharing anything with strangers is an act of niceness in itself; and Creative Commons licences are predicated on the idea that people will be nice and respect them.

Whilst niceness isn’t universal – there are people who aren’t nice – it is a desirable attribute, so much so that niceness is taught and enforced from birth. I doubt there’s anyone reading this who wasn’t told as a child to “be nice” or to “play nicely”. Nice is good. We need nice.

This might explain why I get so cross when I come across examples of people, or especially businesses, not playing nice. But thanks to the internet, we now get to call out companies who, whilst sticking to the letter of the law (or Creative Commons licence), are flagrantly abusing its spirit.

First up, Virgin Mobile Australia. They found a photo of two American girls on Flickr, and decided to use part of it on billboard and online ads, with the taglines “Dump your pen friend” and “Free text virgin to virgin”. Alison Chang was the girl featured, and her family is now suing, saying that the ad “caused their teenage daughter grief and humiliation”, and listing both Virgin Mobile and Creative Commons as defendants.

The photo in question was shared on Flickr using an attribution licence, meaning that technically, it could be used by any company for commercial purposes without requiring permission from the photographer (although the licence has now been changed to “all rights reserved”). But there are legal issues around this use, because, despite the liberal reuse licence that was used, Australia requires model release forms to be signed before an image can be used in an advert. The original photo is still on Flickr, as is a photo of the billboard ad.

But what really stings about this is that it’s just not nice. Whether or not the CC licence allowed for commercial reuse, what Virgin Mobile and their PR companies – Host and The Glue Society, according to blog, Duncan’s Print – did was really unpleasant. There was absolutely no reason why they couldn’t have used stock photos for any ads that needed to feature people, but instead they whipped free photos off Flickr without giving a moment’s thought to the impact it might have. And Virgin Mobile Pty Ltd.’s response is absolutely disgraceful. The AP quotes them as saying:

Virgin Mobile Pty Ltd., the Australian company, released a statement saying the use of the photo is lawful and fits with Virgin’s image.

“The images have been featured within the positive spirit of the Creative Commons Agreement, a legal framework voluntarily chosen by the photographers,” the statement said. “It allows for their photographs to be used for a variety of purposes, including commercial activities.”

The “positive spirit” of Creative Commons is about constructive reuse, and this cocky attitude that they can take someone’s image and insult them publicly in the name of advertising is repulsive. Virgin and its PR company might not have broken the letter of copyright law, but they certainly showed no thought or consideration for Alison Chang.This sort of behaviour is just not nice, and Virgin should be castigated for it.
Now, on to Jo Jo, whose story is much more straightforward. Jo Jo writes about and photographs food on her blog Eat2Love, the trouble is, journalists keep lifting her ideas – both in terms of the things that she writes about and the way that she styles the food she photographs. Whilst this has been going on, according to her, since January, the straw that broke the camels back for her was seeing photographs that looked very much like hers on the cover of Gourmet magazine. And it’s not just Gourmet. In an email to me a couple of days ago, Jo Jo names another two publications and talks of a “major” website that poached her work.

Again, the journalists, photographers and editors who are lifing ideas from Jo Jo aren’t breaking the law. You cannot copyright ideas, and I think that’s a damn good thing, otherwise nothing would ever progress, but regularly poaching someone’s ideas without ever acknowledging how heavily your work is influenced by them, or without building something original on top of their idea, isn’t a very nice thing to do. Journalists and photographers get paid for their creativity, and nicking someone else’s is a cheap shot.

I know people who would probably respond to this by saying “Well, tough – that’s how it goes when you put your stuff online for free, and you just have to suck it up,” but the sad thing is that it forces a binary decision to be made. Either Jo Jo puts up with being constantly ripped off, or she stops blogging. She decided to at the very least cut back on blogging – she’s written just two posts in the last two months, and has removed much of her archive:

90 % of the articles on this blog have been removed from view. what you are viewing are my write-ups of a few food events, and some restaurants.

I think that’s a real shame.

I have real sympathy for Jo Jo. I remember when I was a budding music journalist trying to get a commission from a very high-profile glossy music magazine. I was asked to fax them five different feature ideas, which I did. I was fobbed off by the editor with some feeble excuse as to why my ideas were no good, only to see a few months later one of them written up by someone else. Could I prove that it was my idea? No, I couldn’t, but it was distinctive enough that it pretty clearly was my idea. And that was really galling – I felt like I’d been played for a fool, and it was this sort of shitty behaviour that, along with the shitty pay, drove me away from music journalism.

Now, I think there’s a different thing going on when people release under Creative Commons, and make the choice to let others reuse their work, or when you can see a professional benefit from seeing your stuff redistributed by other people. But one of the main tenets of Creative Commons is attribution, saying where you got stuff from. When someone poaches ideas and doesn’t admit that they weren’t being original, that’s unacceptable.

The flip side is that it’s easier and easier to find out who is ripping whom off, and who’s not playing nice. Companies are going to have to learn that it’s just not worth their while being the schoolground shark that tricks the other kids out of their pocket money, because they are going to get found out. Even monkeys have a sense of what is fair play, and in the blogosphere, this innate sense is getting honed to a sharp point.

So my advice to any business intending to take advantage of all that lovely free content out there? Play nice.

09.24.07
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We’re back

Ypsilon Mountain in Rocky Mountain National Park

We meant to leave an ‘out of office’ post while Suw and I were visiting the United States for the first half of September. It was strictly pleasure and no business trip so we actually left the computers behind. Yes, we went unplugged for a couple of weeks.

We spent the first week near Chicago where I grew up, and the last week and a half, we spent in Colorado. Suw joined me for my annual week in the wilderness walk. We hiked up to Lawn Lake in Rocky Mountain National Park and then up to Ypsilon Lake. The weather was beautiful with some storms rolling in just as we went out. The nights were crisp without being too cold, and the rain helped cut through some haze, and unfortunately, some pollution that had been obscuring the views.

But we’re back and plugged back in for a the busy autumn ahead. Blog on.

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08.28.07
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Trying to fit a square ‘news peg’ into a round hole

Today, l received a call from a BBC producer – I’ll leave out which BBC outlet – who wanted to discuss a story on the next generation internet. It was loosely based on an Associated Press story that Japan was going to fund research for new network technology to “replace the Internet to tackle growing quality and security problems”. The producer said that the US Congress had so far not funded such research, and that Japan was the first government to fund the research for what she initially called ‘Internet 2’.

I said, no it isn’t. The Internet 2 project in the United States has been up and running since the mid-90s. She countered that Japan was the first government to fund such a project. No, it isn’t. The NSF in the US and CERN in Europe have been funding similar work for years. And last I looked, the NSF was a US government agency so to say that the US Congress hadn’t allocated specific funding might be true, but to say that no such government funding exists in the US is false.

The AP article itself – at least the one that I found on the International Herald Tribune site – was really poorly written with some basic factual errors, but all it would have taken was a quick Google on ‘internet 2’ or ‘next generation internet’ to uncover a number of such projects, either proposed or already in place. CERN built the first intercontinental 10-Gigabet ethernet WAN in 2005. And really, some would say that the next generation internet is already being deployed in the form of IPv6. The Chinese CERN has been touting their IPv6 project since 2004. And the project that Japan is talking about sounds eerily familiar to the Global Environment for Networking Investigations initiative announced in 2005 and again funded by the NSF.

After a while, the producer admitted that she didn’t know about all of these things and didn’t know much about the story, but just wanted to have a discussion about what the next generation internet might look like for consumers.

This happens in tech news all the time: A story comes up which is not news to anyone in the industry, but is news to a producer with no background in tech. That’s fair enough. It’s a specialist subject and it can take time for stories to acquire interest to the non-tech literate, but what really put me off taking part is that the producer had done so little preparation apart from reading a really brief AP story.

The problem is that this isn’t isolated to technology coverage. I know that as a journalist, we’re mostly generalists and are called on to report on a wide range of topics. But a quick internet search and some basic research can give most journalists what they need, and it would have most likely made this producer aware that there was ‘no there, there’. It was a flimsy ‘news peg’ based on a lot of inaccurate information.

In the end, I declined to take part in the dicussion. It made me really uncomfortable that although her facts were wrong, that she still wanted to run with the segment. I know she’s got 24 hours to fill, but this is a point of ethics. No journalist should be setting up a piece based on a flimsy premise or, worse, false information.

These kind of false discussions happen quite often. As a matter of fact, I am tired of the media being a controversy-creation industry. Suw and I have written about it in terms of technology or science coverage, but this also happens in social and current affairs journalism. But hey, why let the facts stand in the way of a good story?

08.27.07
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TV is from Mars, the Internet is from Venus

After a day at Un-festival, attendees reported back to the main festival about the discussions and demonstrations. Suw moderated the panel.

Paul Cleghorn: Tape it off the Internet (TIOTI)

Chris Jackson: freelance broadcast tech and strategy consultant, Simsocast.com

Rosie Brown: TV producer (didn’t quite catch all that Rosie does)

Hannu Rajaniemi, with ThinkTank Mathematics

Ian Forrester: BBC Backstage

Suw kicked off the discuss by asking Paul about Tape it off the Internet.

Paul Cleghorn: TIOTI uses a traditional EPG feed for core meta-data (from Tribune), but they cross reference this information with places where people can download these shows. They are looking to make this (information about the programmes) extendable by allowing users to edit it. People can add to the limited programme listings.

Suw: You are pulling in a lot of sources of data. This isn’t just licenced data.

Paul: We’re going into various commercial services and TV websites. We connect that up with general information about the TV show. We’re hoping that to structure that into an open data source.

Paul talked yesterday about creating their own micro-format for television data.

Chris Jackson: You can turn it on or you can choose actively to see a show. You had to do quite a lot of searching. Now we have many other opportunities. Who should own the data? The broadcasters? The broadcaster or the content creator should put this out. The BBC has put out some data. It would be good if there was something like a wikipedia.

Suw: What are the benefits to programme makers?

Chris Jackson: Television has always been open.It’s important to keep it open. That is the best chance for them to get an audience. Most broadcasters don’t allow you to use that information unless you pay them or their agents. There are tremendous beneifts about getting people to watch your show.

Suw: What about the social tools around TV scheduling?

Paul: When it comes to broadcasters mixing it up with the community, you have people doing fan sites. People want to do this. Broadcasters might not. But you see the power of communities around programmes.

(He gave the example of Lost.)

Hannu: There is a huge opportunity to create recommendation engines.

Chris: There are people who like the Amazon system of last.fm system. But there are also great systems to build to see what your friends are watching. It’s an easy way to watch what your friends are watching.

(Last year at IBC, I saw a mockup by a major set-top box maker that showed a proof of concept allowing people to navigate through related material being broadcast at that moment or in the near future, material recorded on the hard disc of the set top box and also see what their friends are watching. This is an idea that will be part of mainstream technology in the near future.)

Suw: I want to talk about Zattoo. They are rebroadcasting live broadcast streams online. They are broadcasting live streams over the internet. It’s more interesting for what they can’t do than what they do. We are seeing a chilling effect by the licencing machine. Rosie, do you agree?

Rosie:We all know that there are a lot of people out there who are breaking the rules.

Ian: The quesitons to Zattoo were very telling. Can you time shift? No. Well, there are a lot of services that allow you to time shift.

Chris: There are quite a few contradictions with licencing. With a little playing, you could archive all of primetime video broadcast for a month on less than a $1000 worth of hard drive. With the iPlayer, you are limited. When you record over the air, you have a lot fewer restrictions than if you use the broadcasters’ download player.

Suw: You can see it as a threat or an opportunity. How do we communicate from the technology community to the broadcasting community that this is not a threat but an opportunity.

Ian: That’s why we’re sitting here. I would like to sit down for an hour with broadcasters.Her’s the legal way, here’s the illegal way. But how do you communicate the opportunity without talking to people?

Rosie: The broadcast community is a creative opportunities. They are probably not interested in the technology. But there are stories that can be told in new ways that are so exciting. If you aren’t reaching out and grabbing with this both hands, then you are mad.

Suw: In the podcast, people talked about how immersive, but Zattoo said that people want to watch video while they are doing other things. It’s very easy to get caught up that there is one way that people watch TV. There is a broader perspective than that.

Chris: I think that games are in between TV and the computer. You don’t want to come home after a long day at work and play on computer.

Suw: This brings us to the alternate reality games of Licorice Film called Meigeist. There were blogs, videos on YouTube. They branched out from online into SMS. The characters would ring some of the players. There were events where players could meet actors in character.

Rosie: What fascinated me about that was that people didn’t need to get involved but they could. It was designed to work on the internet, video over the internet, and other platforms. It was designed to do all of those things. It was not TV taken onto the internet.

Hannu: We’re bringing new levels of location awareness into mobile games, experiences with lost bring lots of interactivity. It is not just TV repackaged into other forms. If TV does have a future, it about increasing levels of interaction.

They briefly discussed the nature of the shared experience of television and then quickly turned to the reduced costs of experimentation.

Rosie: We don’t have to wait for 6m pounds and see what happens in a year. We can do something by next year. You can take continual feedback. You don’t have to take big risks.

Ian: I recently talked to someone who spent 650,000 pounds 125,000 pounds on a trailer, and put it up on the internet and wondered why no one was watching. That was a huge risk to take. CORRECTION from Ian: It was 125,000 pounds 🙂 650,000 would just be stupid 🙂 (What do people normally pay for a TV or film trailer?)

Paul: For a long time TV was the most efficient way to deliver an audience to advertisers. Now, you can do it much more efficiently on the internet.

Chris: I think there needs to be a bit of a disclaimer. Great TV content still costs a lot.

Suw: We are used to think about thinking of an audience in terms of quantity, not in terms of quality.

(She talked about the blog Treonaut that focused on the Palm Treo attracted a lot of people interested in the smart phone, and Palm and third party companies developing software, peripherals and accessories for the Treo knew to advertise there to reach Treo users.)

Hannu: To bring the nature of mathematics and social networks, there are key nodes in the community. There are key hubs in any community that drive the whole community forward.

Ian: There is this trend of giving bloggers a product. People who write that blog are the centre of this huge community.

Suw: What was the one highlight?

Ian: Hard. TIOTI. Following TIOTI for a while. To see how far it comes, to see legal and illegal content in the same place is amazing.

Paul: It’s not illegal in some countries.

Paul: The highlight for me was Trusted Places and the amateur videos.

Chris: I was interested in the range of expertise.

Rosie: I was struck by the gulf between the broadcast industry and the technology people. I was hoping that events like it could bridge the chasm. I was excited about the level of engagement. People didn’t just sit there. I think that every project there got moved on. It was so fast and so exciting.

From audience: There are two parallel culture. The higher you up in TV organisations, fewer geeks. People who barely can do email. TV is a lot more competitive. Internet is a lot more collaborative. You’re going to have to go to them. It could lead to a new era of cyber-docs (documentaries) or cyber-dramas. There is an embarrassment about their lack of knowledge.

They are at the heart of 360 degree commissioning. There needs to be a convergence.

Ian: This is the very first time that we ever did this event. It is our first step. Our thoughts about next year.

Deborah Forrest with Studio Scotland: Looking around to see if any channel controllers are her. I hope not. I was Rights Lab in London recently. We had Bebo, Google and AOL, and the very last session, controllers. Didn’t have a Scooby(clue).

If we had a quarter million hits at sites at one time, the hosting, downloading versus streaming. Commercial aspect, we hate to bring it into this. But how do you pay for it? Streaming versus hosting. Some of programmes, some exposes, when exposed to larger audience, there would be a lot of reaction. What is the implication of a whole load of hits at one time?

Paul: This is a hard sell. But once something is broadcast, it is on the intenet. Maybe you should put it up there.

We are keen that people get paid. We’re not a bunch of pirates.

Audience: Once ship the bits. the physics of that work very nicely. Counterintuitive unless you live in that world.

Kojo, design director at ITN: The problems we are facing are culture. There is a technical culture you are coming from. TV coming from creative culture. You guys are trying to get the broadcasters attention. You communicate in a very technical way. It might be frightening. They are not technically minded. You were talking about business models. They are in business of making programmes and in the business of making money.

I have Two things say: 1) Next year, involve the broadcasters. 2) Add a production thing for this. It would be helpful to have demonstrations so that we can see what you are talking about.

Brian Butterworth, UKfree.tv: I take issue, saying geeks aren’t creative. We are really creative.

Rosie: That’s why we’re changing the world.

Paul Barossa, man in the audience: I run a music production company but have a background in psychology. The meaning of communication is the response you get. You have to look at another angle. You have to look at way that you are communicating the message.

Mike Butcher: MediaBites.com. I went to the TV Un-festival. Word that dare not speak its name: Facebook. Geeky and trivial but indicative of social networking going mainstream. When my mom asks me what it is about, I know that it is something different in ways that maybe blogging isn’t. Should broadcasters create their own networks or plug into networks?

Chris: Facebook takes things one step more. When you sign up apps, it tells you friends who have signed up before for that app.



The Gulf: Cultural, technical, political

That was about the end of the discussion. But Suw and I have witnessed the cultural chasm that both the Un-festival participants perceived as well as the festival participants at other conferences. We saw it at the Guardian Changing Media when it seemed that the executives were talking about media in a completely different way than we experienced it using a mix of traditional media and the internet. We saw it in how the media executives talked about brand in a way that was completely foreign, alien and alienating to us.

I don’t think that the gap can be put down to the differences in a technical culture versus a creative culture. I do think that there is something in the difference between the ‘sit back’ culture of television and the ‘sit forward’ culture of the internet.

In the end, I think one of the things that came out of the festival session was the lack of knowledge of the internet at senior levels of television companies, and more than that, I keep going back to something that Steve Yelvington said about newspaper companies that the people with the most internet experience have the least political capital in their organisations. Much of this is cultural, but it is also political both in terms of within the industry but also within the organisations. A friend of mine once said of the major broadcaster that he worked for: “There are managers who don’t want to create the future, they just want to control it.”

It took 30 years of circulation declines for US newspapers before those declines seriously threatened their business. It will take more pain before major broadcasters feel the need for change. As was said during the session, television has been the most efficient way to deliver eyeballs to advertisers, but now the internet is challenging that. It’s best for broadcasters to experiment now – especially with the cost of experimentation decreasing. It is far better to change while you have the resources to manage that change rather than delay and have change forced upon you.