05.06.10
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Digital brain drain at British newspapers

Emily Bell left for the Guardian to become the director of a new centre for digital journalism at Columbia University, and let me congratulate her on the opportunity. Simon Waldman, described as the Guardian Media Group digital strategy chief by the Media Guardian, is leaving to join the DVD by mail service LoveFilm.

Now at the Telegraph, the Media Guardian is reporting that Will Lewis has been forced out over a disagreement with the publisher on the newspaper’s direction. What is shocking is that Lewis had just launched a new internal digital incubator just last November, the so-called Euston Project. He was named Journalist of the Year in March for the Telegraph’s scoop on the MPs’ expenses scandal last year.

My former colleague Roy Greenslade has details. It appears that Lewis wanted the Euston Project to be a standalone business and the publisher disagreed.

05.06.10
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Further thoughts on the effects of air travel disruption

A couple of weeks ago I surmised that the travel disruption caused by the eruption of Icelandic volcano Eyjafjallajökull might force businesses to rethink how they manage their long-distance relationships. It might, I posited, force businesses to be more open to teleworking, teleconferencing and the use of social media for geographically dispersed teams.

Eyjafjallajökull is showing no signs of stopping. A reduced ash plume combined with favourable winds and a change in the aviation industry’s policy towards acceptable ash levels allowed air travel to restart, but the last couple of days have seen Ireland and Scotland forced to close airports due to renewed ash threat. The volcano became “more explosive” with a higher, denser ash column that was swept towards Ireland and Scotland by a southeasterly wind.

I think it’s reasonable to say that we may see further disruption in the UK and across Europe as this eruption continues, so it seems like a good time to remake the point: Start planning now for your business to be affected by further flight bans, especially as the holiday season creeps towards us, increasing the risk that staff may be able to get out of the country but unable to get home. Start introducing collaborative technology now. Don’t wait for disaster to strike, but get your staff up to speed with new tools whilst you still have the luxury of not being in the middle of a crisis.

Harold Jarche points out that working online is different, and it takes some getting used to:

[I]t’s not about the technology. The real issue is getting people used to working at a distance. For instance, everything has to be transparent for collaborative work to be effective online. Using wikis or Google Documents means that everyone can see what the others have contributed. There is no place to hide.

And Ethan Zuckerman makes a great point that we don’t notice how much we rely on our infrastructure until it has gone. I like Ethan’s definition of ‘infrastructure’:

Infrastructure is the stuff we ignore until it breaks. Then it’s the stuff we’re stunned to discover we’re dependent on.

He then goes on to point out how ridiculous our dependence on air travel has become, to the point where we expect to be able to fly in, do a 20 minute conference presentation and fly home again. I’ve even done that in one single day, and it’s not fun. But, Ethan says:

It’s possible that Eyjafjallajökull could change this. If a 24 hour trip to London has a significant risk of becoming a 5 day trip to London, the calculus changes. As much as frequent travellers gripe about delays and cancellations, they’re pretty infrequent, and mass delays like the ones currently being experienced are downright rare. If they become commonplace, I personally would expect to say no to travel lots more often and do a lot more appearances via Skype and videoconferencing.

From meetings to conferences to team-building events, unreliable air travel changes how we think about long-distance travel. It should also change how we think about working over long distances, and, thence, how we work with the people who sit right next to us.

And for anyone who thinks that this is all a big fuss over nothing, here are a couple of thoughts:

Firstly, when Eyjafjallajökull erupted in December 1821, she did so in fits and starts, with two weeks of activity followed by nothing until June 1822 when she erupted again. Ash fell intermittently for months and activity continued into 1823. In June of 1823, Katla, her neighbour, erupts for four weeks. We are likely to see lulls in activity from Eyjafjallajökull, but we shouldn’t interpret that to mean that the threat is over.

Secondly, by implementing social media, encouraging collaboration and discouraging unnecessary travel your business will become more efficient, more effective and will waste less money on travel. Even if Eyjafjallajökull stops erupting, you’ll still be better off for having prioritised better collaboration practices.

05.05.10
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How to start a movement

Brilliant video here from Derek Sivers, who discusses with real insight what would otherwise have just been an amusing video of a guy dancing.

This makes me think a couple of disparate thoughts:

1. Nurture your early community members: They are the ones who will bring in new people to your community.

2. That explains why the early social media leaders are mainly now eclipsed by followers: later followers don’t follow the leaders, they follow the early followers. That says something strange about human nature, but I’m not quite sure what!

Hat tip to Johnnie Moore.

05.04.10
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Involving your community

I just spent five or so minutes reading Randall Munroe’s fascinating blog entry about the colour survey he recently ran. Randall writes and draws XKCD, “A webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language,” which is a pretty popular amongst geeks.

XKCD’s popularity gave Randall a rather large pool of people to draw upon for his survey: In the end, “over five million colors were named across 222,500 user sessions.” That’s not bad going and certainly produced some interesting data to chew over. I rather liked this chart of dominant colour names:

Randall’s survey is a great reminder that your community, whether internal or external, are an amazing source of information that you can easily tap into. Services like Poll Daddy or Survey Monkey let you ask questions of your community, through which you could potentially be learning a lot about your business, your community’s needs, topics of interest… possible areas of enquiry are limited only by your imagination.

Well, in truth, you are limited by your imagination, your relationship with your community, and its size. There’s no getting away from the fact that if you have a tiny community, you won’t get a big enough response for the results of your survey to be meaningful. Equally, if your relationship with your community is poor, they won’t feel inclined to take the time to answer your questions. But if your survey answers questions they have themselves, taps into a vein of curiosity or, as in the case of Randall’s colour survey, provides a novel way of procrastinating, then you are much more likely to see success.

It’s worth having a think before you put any survey together on how best to do it. You have to get it right first time, because you can’t run the same survey twice and expect people to engage the second time round. I have learnt the hard way that you can read and read and read your questions over and over, and there will still be errors. So make sure you have time to do some test runs with friends and colleagues so that you can locate and fix errors. I’d also say that it’s important to understand how you’re going to analyse the answers before you formulate the questions. Services like Survey Monkey allow you to automatically create graphs to visualise your data, but if you get your questions wrong, the graphs won’t save you.

There’s so much potential for businesses who enter into dialogue with their customers and staff, and surveys/polls are just one way to realise some of that value. It just surprises me that more businesses aren’t nurturing their communities and collaborating with them to gather useful information that both parties can then benefit from.

05.01.10
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links for 2010-05-01

04.30.10
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links for 2010-04-30

  • Coders meet journalists; journalists meet coders | Journalism.co.uk Editors' Blog
    Judith Towend at journalism.co.uk talks about Ruby in the Pub, a meeting of developers and journalists. "The evening was also a meeting of cultures; as journalists explained their various work brick walls and developers explained the differences between various coding languages and platforms." It's really important for journalists and developers to work together. I've spent a lot of my career with feet in both camps, being a working journalist while testing new technology on the fly. It has been a rare position. There are misunderstandings in both camps, but hopefully, this type of cultural exchange can change that.

    Most useful for me was hearing about the projects developers are implementing in their respective organisations and the tools they are using.

    (tags: journalism coding programming ruby careers london)
  • Tim Ferriss: 7 Great Principles for Dealing with Haters
    Kevin: As a journalist, I found that engaging users around journalism was as much of an art as a science. It took an understanding on how online communities operate that isn't always intuitive or easily explained, especially to those not familiar with online community dynamics. I'm not sure that I agree with all of these points, especially the issue about being effective and having 95% of people hating you. I think that it confuses and inadequately explains what it means to be effective and what it means to have impact. However, there is a lot of good food for thought.
    (tags: communication psychology socialmedia advice blog management community engagement strategy)
  • The Huffington Post Starts To Give Out Badges To Readers
    Kevin: The Huffington Post takes another step in its journey to become a social media site by adding badges. It's really a recognition of the different roles that users play on the site, and it adds yet another bit of social functionality that if common on social networking sites. However, the focus of the HuffPo's social functionality is definitely around the concept of interaction around media as the social objects.
    (tags: socialmedia badges foursquare huffingtonpost engagement)
  • Does new media require new journalism ethics? | Reportr.net
    Kevin: A good brief overview from my former colleague Alf Hermida about whether some of the new foundation-funded journalism institutions in the US need new ethics. I think this is more about new institutions than the traditional definition of new media. However, it's a good look at whether new rules should apply in terms of transparency for these foundation-funded organisations and other new kinds of journalism organisations as they are launched.
    (tags: journalism ethics transparency foundations funding)
04.30.10
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Five counterintuitive rules for building community

“Communities aren’t built through grand visions,” says Julian Dobson his a great post about community building. A grand vision is nice ‘n all, but it takes action to build a community and there’s a skill in knowing which actions are the right ones. Julian runs through a list of five, and I think all of them are applicable to business communities as much as third sector communities. For example:

2. If you want to be a leader, start by serving.

Creating community, by definition, isn’t about ego. There’s no room for celebrities. Leaders prove their worth by mucking in and helping out. You win respect by being ready to serve. If you’re out to make a name for yourself, why should anyone trust you?

If you want to start a brand community or an internal community of interest, think about how you would engage with it and what you could do for others in that community. How would you serve others?

Julian’s post is very thought provoking, even more so when you put it in the context of enterprise community building.

04.29.10
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A game of email

Johnny Holland Stephen Anderson discusses in some considerable detail how it might be possible to add game-like behaviours to email to help people be more effective and achieve Inbox Zero more easily. It’s a very interesting post and I’d love someone to go ahead and build an email client that takes these ideas on board. I think it would be fascinating to see how we might remake our relationship to one of the most pervasive communications medium of the modern world.

But Holland Anderson doesn’t even mention the most important problem: That we send far too much unnecessary email for reasons which are emotional rather than logical. Encouraging people to process their email more effectively is only half the battle. We need to remove as much content as possible from the email system, especially newsletters, notices, FYIs and other forms of occupational spam. We need to empower people not to cover their ass, not to CC their entire department, and not to get sucked into endless and pointless – but very polite – conversations by email.

Until we learn to send less email, learning how to process it is only going to give us a false sense of success and may even encourage us to, well, send more email.

04.28.10
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links for 2010-04-28

  • Fitz & Jen: Top 25 Daily Circulation Newspapers
    Kevin: Apart from The Wall Street Journal which managed to eke out a small 0.5% increase in circulation in the last six months. The decline, for some titles precipitous, in newspaper circulation continues. LA Times, -14.74%; Washington Post -13.06%; Dallas Morning News -21.47%; and the San Diego Union-Tribune -22.68%. Ouch. Some newspaper groups are returning to profitability. The deep cuts have reduced their cost base, but without a stop to these circulation losses, they will need to do something else.
    (tags: US newspaper circulation economics)
  • Roy Greenslade: Official opening for Bureau of Investigative Journalism | Media | guardian.co.uk
    Kevin: Roy gives a good overview of the newly formed Bureau of Investigative Journalism here in the UK. "(Editor Iain) Overton stressed that there would be no political agenda. The bureau's main focus would be on scrutinising government and big business. So it's a high-minded exercise that emulates the pioneering ProPublica initiative in the US."
    (tags: investigative journalism non-profit ProPublic UK)
  • Remix the News: what news can learn from Last.fm and Pandora
    Kevin: While I think there are parallels between how the music and the news industry have responded to the disruptive affect of the internet on their businesses, I think there are important differences in terms of how to support their businesses going forward. One simple difference is that I listen to a song over and over if I like it. Breaking news has a very, very short shelf life. That being said, I do agree whole heartedly with one of the central tenets of this post that the news industry needs to sort its metadata out. This is a fundamental platform issue in terms of digital journalism and should be seen as an important area where the industry can and is cooperating on. The major agencies support NewsML for instance. However, too much of the news and information produced by news organisations is still unstructured and of less use than it should be for the digital age.
    (tags: news journalism metadata semanticweb web3.0)
  • Steve Rosenbaum: Is "Everyone" the Media now?
    Kevin: "(Clay) Shirky say find filters – or else." Skip down to the lower third and look at the issues around curation, frustration about search and algorithms.
    (tags: content algorithms curation web3.0 information)