Archive for September, 2007
A month ago, I used the Online Journalism Facebook Group to ask readers to suggest what areas they wanted covering, in an experiment with bottom-up editing (the forum for suggestions is still open by the way). Megan T suggested “Rethinking the production of newspapers”.
After researching, conceptualising and scribbling, I’ve come up with a number of models around the news process, newsgathering, interactivity and business models.
The following, then, is the first in a series of proposals for a ‘model for the 21st century newsroom’ (part two is now here). This is a converged newsroom which may produce material for print or broadcast or both, but definitely includes an online element. Here’s the diagram. The model is explained further below it
Building on the strengths of the medium
The strengths of the online medium are essentially twofold, and contradictory: speed, and depth.
New media technologies are able to publish news faster than the previous kings of speed: TV and radio. Think mobile and email updates. Think moblogs. Think Twitter.
At the same time, the unlimited space and time of the web, and its hypertextual and ‘pull’ properties, make it potentially deeper and broader than the previous kings of context and analysis: newspapers and magazines. Think Wikipedia’s coverage of Hurricane Katrina. Think the Daily Kos. Think hyperlocal websites. Think Chicagocrime.org.
The process model above proposes how a large news story might pass through a converged newsroom, from speed to depth, in the following steps:
- Alert: as soon as the journalist or editor is aware that a story is breaking, an alert is sent out. This might be from their mobile phone, Blackberry, or wifi laptop. Subscribers to text or email updates, a Twitter or Facebook feed, would be notified instantly. This shows you ‘own’ the story; it reinforces your reputation for being first with the big stories; and for the smaller stories, it can provide an opportunity to add personality to your coverage (the ‘what I’m doing now’ approach of Twitter). And it drives readers to your website, newspaper or broadcast.
- Draft: too rough for print or broadcast, but perfect for blogs. Backing up the alert, the draft report - like a wire report - gives initial names, places and details - and sources. It is updated as fresh details come in. The draft performs the important role of keeping the ‘Alert’ readers on your site, but it also serves to spread word through the blogosphere, bringing in more readers and helping your search engine ranking. Ideally it will also attract commenters and pingbacks which can add or correct details, or even provide new leads. Frequent updates - for instance linking to other coverage - help to prevent it getting knocked off the top of Google News (which looks for the most recently updated, not the first posted).
- Article/Package: in between the two extremes of speed and depth where online excels, traditional print and broadcast media have these strengths: their documentary nature, and the very limitations of their time and space. Their ability to document a ’snapshot’ - an interim definitive account: the 300-word article or 3-minute package - is key to traditional news media’s appeal. The editorial decision that this story was worth a spot is important when compared to the internet’s infinity. At this stage, the draft turns into a package with higher production values, and which could be online, in print, broadcast, or all of those. The timing may be dictated by print or broadcast processes.
- Context: back online, that infinite space has an important role to play in providing instant and extensive context: how many times has this happened? Where can I access previous reports? What does that concept mean? How does this scientific principle work? Where can I find more information about this person or organisation? Where can I go to for support or help? Hypertext is central here - the ability to link to a range of documents, organisations, and explanations - both from your own archive and from external providers - in a portal that provides an essential resource. The print or broadcast report may also draw on some of this context, but it should refer to the online resource for more.
- Analysis/Reflection: after the report, comes the analysis. For online this may mean gathering the almost instant reaction taking place in the blogosphere in general, on your own blogs and forums, and proactively from the informed and the affected. The person covering the story may reflect on the whole experience on their blog, while podcasts are great for staging discussion and debate. At some point print and broadcast will take one or more snapshots for their production cycles.
- Interactivity: interactivity requires investment and preparation, but can engage and inform the user in a way other media cannot, as well as providing a ‘long tail’ resource that generates repeat visits over a long timescale: a Flash interactive may take days to produce but can provide a compelling combination of hypertext, video, audio, animation and databases (they can also be dynamically updated); a forum can provide a place for people to gather and post experiences and information; a wiki can do the same but more effectively. Live chats can allow users direct access to newsmakers, journalists and experts.
- Customisation: the final stage should be automatic: the ability for users to customise information to their own needs. At its most basic this might be to subscribe to email, text or RSS updates of that particular story. More advanced services might include social recommendation (’Other people who read this story also read…‘) or database-driven journalism that allows users to drill down into the information: ‘What happened to that street?’; ‘How many cases were there in my postcode?’; ‘What does this tax mean for someone on my wage?’. This means production processes that integrate things like metatagging, and interfaces that can run off a database, and last but not least, a culture that thinks in terms of these possibilities.
That news process in action
Let’s take a typical mid-range news story: ‘public figure makes controversial statement’ to illustrate the process specifically:
- Alert: ‘Lord Smith: “stop ‘Mickey Mouse’ degrees”‘ - link to…
- Draft: gives more detail, and is open to comments and discussion, linking to other blogs. One commenter points out that Lord Smith studied English Literature. Journalist seeks ‘official’ comment to put in the…
- Article: two blog post comments incorporated into a version that goes in the printed newspaper.
- Context: best links taken from blog post comments, as well as full transcript of speech, audio and some mobile phone video taken by one attendee. Tags (’LordSmith’) used to link to ongoing coverage and provide an instant ‘portal’.
- Analysis: one particularly well informed blogger who linked to the Draft post is paid to write a longer piece for the paper. A commenter - an academic - is invited to a podcast discussion with Lord Smith.
- Interactivity: website visitors are invited to ‘attempt an essay question’ from a ‘Mickey Mouse’ degree, giving a real first-hand understanding of what is involved in the subject.
- Customisation: an RSS feed or email alert is available for any stories tagged ‘LordSmith’
The news diamond
This model can also be represented as an alternative to the inverted pyramid: a ‘news diamond’, if you like.
Just as the inverted pyramid was partly a result of the increasing role of the telegraph in the news industry, and dominant cultural ideas of empiricism and science, this news diamond attempts to illustrate the change from a 19th century product (the article) to a 21st century process: the iterative journalism of new media; the story that is forever ‘unfinished’. More than anything, it’s designed to challenge the dominance of the inverted pyramid, to illustrate its origins in the industrial era, and its shortcomings. And in the spirit of the ‘unfinished’, none of these models are final: please post a comment with your own contributions.
UPDATE: Part two of the model for the 21st century newsroom is now live.
September 17th, 2007
This week’s Press Gazette contains an article by yours truly on ‘How a blog can put you on the road to success’. Click away for more. The original version below includes hyperlinks.
Whatever medium you want to work in as a journalist, a blog has become an essential tool in finding work. From building your portfolio to building your contacts; from raising your game to raising yourself above the competition, a blog can develop a number of key skills.
Those who don’t have a blog at all risk being left out of the game. As The Guardian’s head of editorial development Neil McIntosh recently wrote: “If you enter the jobs market without one, no matter how good your degree, you’re increasingly likely to lose out to people who better present all they can do, and have the experience of creating and curating their own site.”
Having a regularly updated blog demonstrates a number of things to a potential employer. Firstly, it proves your commitment: if you’re dedicated enough to write often, to get out there and find out what’s happening in your sector, you’re already one step ahead of other applicants.
Secondly, a well-maintained blog should prove that you have good knowledge in your particular area, and useful contacts. You should use your blog to seek out leads and publish good stories. Many local and specialist bloggers have better reputations than their print or broadcast counterparts because they have spent time cultivating a good range of sources, and because they read and report on everything that happens in their sector.
But commitment and contacts are not enough on their own to land you your ideal journalism job. Skill is vital – and this is where a blog can make a crucial difference.
Writing regularly for a blog helps you hone and improve your journalistic style. It provides a space for you to develop your ‘voice’ that rewriting press releases, for instance, won’t. The competition is fierce: you must be faster than other bloggers when you have a lead, or have better informed analysis when you don’t; you must have great sources, and a strong relationship with your readers (which is often the same thing); and you must write compellingly, and often.
Note that I’m talking journalistic style here, not ‘diary style’. A journalist’s blog should not be ‘What I did on my summer holidays’: posting about how drunk you were or your embarrassing personal habits is not the way to impress potential employers.
A good journalist’s blog should appeal to a readership beyond your friends, and have a clear focus. Typical examples include the niche blog (for instance a local music blog), the reflective blog (details that didn’t make it into your print or broadcast stories), and the running story (e.g. trying a recipe for every vegetable from A to Z). If you want to cover more than one niche, or write more than one type, create more than one blog.
Whether or not anyone reads your blog is not the primary goal, but if you do it well, and if you do it often - and if you do it well, and often, for long enough - you can build a reputation, and surprising things can happen: freelance work can come to you; you can be contacted by a journalist looking for ‘expert’ opinion; or, best of all, you’ll be at that interview, and the editor turns to you and says: “I’ve read your blog. It’s very good.”
September 17th, 2007
The Future of Newspapers conference in Cardiff begins at 11.30am GMT with a plenary from former Guardian editor Peter Preston. I’ll be sending updates throughout the two days to my Twitter page - so if you like 140-character summaries of 8,000 word research papers sent to your mobile, sign up.
September 12th, 2007
For many years the Association for Journalism Education (AJE) has debated whether its institutions should boycott the NCTJ. And for many years the NCTJ has all but ignored it. At this year’s AJE AGM the issue cropped up once again.
The complaints are copious, and I won’t list them all here, but revolve around some core issues:
- an increasing lack of relevance of the NCTJ training to the modern news industry;
- lack of academic rigour;
- and a lack of representation on the NCTJ board of the higher education sector, the NCTJ’s biggest customer.
Earlier this year AJE Chairman Chris Frost listed these complaints in a lengthy letter to the NCTJ. The reply disconcertingly resembled the automatically generated missives you get when you complain to a pub chain, largely ignoring the issues Chris raised.
The problem for journalism departments in the AJE is that NCTJ accreditation is not about education, but marketing. And as the market for journalism courses expands, the NCTJ logo becomes an important way to quickly establish new courses and differentiate older courses from the increasing competition. Courses become afraid to break away for fear of the impact on applications, and the result is that the NCTJ exercises power without responsibility.
The NCTJ is a private and commercial organisation. Its latest move - to establish a ‘gold standard’ accreditation for courses with a 60% pass rate - raised hackles both for its stench of league tables, and for the possibility that it will become yet another way of raising money, like the ‘awards ceremonies’ which require you to shell out for your gold statuette.
Colleagues on recently NCTJ accredited courses tell me that their contacts with the NCTJ revolve entirely around gathering money. Many have had to run the NCTJ courses in parallel with a full degree course, as they are unable to justify how learning shorthand is equivalent to first year degree study. The journalism degree I teach on, at UCE, decided not to accredit many years ago in large part because of this problem. We arrange shorthand courses for journalism students separately rather than incorporating it formally, and not having to accredit means we were flexible enough to offer subjects (including the critical analysis integral to any degree level study) that the NCTJ, with its particularly local, print ideas of journalism training, balks at. But we’re lucky: we’ve been established long enough to build a reputation and healthy application numbers.
The need for an NCTJ ‘badge’ seems to be something of a self-perpetuating myth: regional press editors continue to say that they require it, despite evidence that half of the new journalists they take on don’t have NCTJ training. Students and parents turn up at open days asking about it, thinking the NCTJ is a pass into journalism. Who tells them this? Careers advisers?
Magazines, the national press, broadcasting and online news operations generally couldn’t give a stuff about NCTJ. In conversation, editors on local newspapers are increasingly dissatisfied with the quality of NCTJ-trained applicants, while at the same time becoming more interested in applicants with video and online skills.
Meanwhile, the lack of career structure in local papers means we need to be training our students for the second, fifth and tenth years of their careers, when (unless things change) they have left their local reporting days behind and where flexibility, creativity, entrepreneurial ability and intellectual rigour - not just shorthand or local government - will have proved central to career progression.
If the NCTJ continue to refuse to listen to - or represent - their customers, if they continue developing at a pace that makes glaciers look nimble, and if they continue to put income before education, they may find universities’ patience runs out very soon indeed.
UPDATE (Sep 21 07): The Press Gazette editor’s blog contains some interesting comments about the NCTJ:
“Having recently finished an NCTJ course in newspaper journalism, I wasn’t overly-impressed. Whilst the course was fast-track, it mostly consisted of going over past exams papers - something which I could have done in my own time and saved myself the £1000+ fee. Shorthand was the only real skill that was passed on. Thirteen people failed the news writing exam despite good portfolio grades (surely some kind of scandal?) Resits cost £30 a piece and the NCTJ refuse to let you see where you lost marks unless you furnish them with further cash for the privilege. There needs to be a thorough investigation into whether the NCTJ is offering value for money to journalism students.”
September 12th, 2007
On Thursday I’ll be presenting my paper on wiki journalism at the Future of Newspapers conference in Cardiff. As previously reported, the full paper is available as a wiki online for anyone to add to or edit. You can also download a PDF of the ‘official’ version.
Based on a review of a number of case studies, and some literature on wikis, the paper proposes a taxonomy of wiki journalism, and outlines the opportunities and weaknesses of the form. The following is the edited highlights:
A taxonomy of wiki journalism
There are key qualities that must be identified when examining the use of wikis in journalism:
- Whether the topic is defined by an editor, or a user
- Whether the first draft is produced by a journalist paid to do so, or by a user
- Whether the material could have been produced without using wiki technology
- Whether the timescale is finite (‘frozen’ for print publication), or infinite (ongoing)
- Whether the wiki draft is professionally edited further for ‘final’ publication (in contrast to those which are edited solely by users)
Based on variations in the above, we can identify five broad types of wiki journalism:
- ‘Second draft’ wikis: a ‘second stage’ piece of journalism, during which readers can edit an article produced in-house (Wired article, Esquire, LA Times wikitorial)
- Crowdsourcing wiki: a means of covering material which could not have been produced in-house (probably for logistical reasons), but which becomes possible through wiki technology (San Diego Tribune’s AmpliPedia; Wired How To Wiki)
- Supplementary wiki: a supplement to a piece of original journalism, an ‘add-on’: “A tab to a story that says: Create a wiki for related stories” (Francisco, 2006) (CNET’s India Tech Wiki; parts of the Wired How To Wiki)
- Open wiki: an open space, whose subject matter is decided by the user, and where material may be produced that would not otherwise have been commissioned (Wikinews)
- Logistical wiki: a wiki limited to in-house contributors which enables multiple authorship, and may also facilitate transparency, and/or an ongoing nature (Dewey Answers; N&Opedia)
This taxonomy can be mapped out as follows:
| |
User-defined topic? |
User-created draft? |
Impossible without wiki? |
Infinite? |
Unedited? |
| Second-draft |
NO |
NO |
NO |
NO |
NO |
| Crowdsourcing |
NO |
NO |
YES |
MAYBE |
NO |
| Supplementary |
NO |
YES |
YES |
YES |
YES |
| Open |
YES |
YES |
YES |
YES |
YES |
| Logistical |
YES |
YES |
YES |
MAYBE |
NO |
This taxonomy is not definitive, but indicative: it is possible, for example, to have a second-draft wiki that was ongoing (infinite), but the suggestion is that this would be atypical. The taxonomy aims to provide a conceptual framework through which to analyse examples of wiki journalism. It highlights the range of types of wiki journalism in their relation to ‘pure’ wiki-ness: Open wiki journalism, for example, has all the qualities that could be argued are inherent in the form; whereas Second-Draft wiki journalism has none. The taxonomy also highlights the closeness of certain types of wiki journalism: Second-Draft and Crowdsourcing types, for instance, are almost identical save for the fact that a piece of Second-Draft wiki journalism does not need the audience in the same way.
Strengths of wiki journalism
Wikis allow news operations to effectively cover issues on which there is a range of information so broad that it would be difficult, if not impossible, to summarise effectively in one article, or by one journalist, alone. Examples might include local transport problems, experiences of a large event such as a music festival or protest march, guides to local restaurants or shops, or advice.
Jay Rosen (2006) explains it as follows:
“A professional newsroom can’t easily do this kind of reporting; it’s a closed system. Because only the employees operate in it, there can be reliable controls. That’s the system’s strength. The weakness is the organization knows only what its own people know. Which wasn’t much of a weakness until the Internet made it possible for the people formerly known as the audience to realize their informational strengths.”
Internally, wikis also allow news operations to coordinate and manage a complex story which involves a number of contributors. News organisations interested in transparency might also publish the wiki ‘live’ as it develops, so readers can view as it develops, and look at previous versions, while the discussion space which accompanies each entry also has the potential to create a productive dialogue with users.
Wikis offer a way for news websites to increase their reach, while also increasing the time that users spend on their website, a key factor in attracting advertisers: user generated content has proved hugely successful in attracting readers, accounting for 60% of pageviews on some websites. When successful, a wiki can engender community. And a useful side-effect of community for a news organisation is reader loyalty.
Economically, wikis appear to offer the attractions of free “user generated” content, and, in the case of published articles, free subediting. But these attractions are misleading: the disadvantages of the form mean costs elsewhere, in maintenance and monitoring. Talking about wiki operations in general, Andrew Frank, a research director at technology consulting firm the Gartner Group, is quoted as suggesting (PDF) ”The assertion that these sites are cheap to run is questionable. For example, to sell a substantial amount of advertising, wiki sites might have to filter for objectionable content”. Jeff Howe also argues “Attempting to use crowdsourcing simply as a cost-saving measure [doesn’t work]. Communities must be cultivated, respected and deftly managed if they are to come together to create economic value. This takes talented staff, and a set of skills not taught in journalism or business schools.”
Weaknesses of wiki journalism
Shane Richmond identifies two obstacles that could slow down the adoption of wikis: inaccuracy and vandalism, “Particularly in the UK, where one libellous remark could lead to the publisher of the wiki being sued, rather than the author of the libel. Meanwhile, the question of authority is the biggest obstacle to acceptance by a mainstream audience.”
Vandalism, a problem known as ”trolling”, is a recurring issue in wiki technology. Wikis such as Wikipedia have generally taken a “soft security” approach, making damage easy to undo rather than attempting to prevent its occurence in the first place:
“When vandals learn than someone will repair their damage within minutes, and therefore prevent the damage from being visible to the world, the bad guys tend to give up and move along to more vulnerable places.” (Gillmor, 2004: 149)
The author of the Wired experiment also feels there is a need for an editorial presence, but for narrative reasons: “in storytelling, there’s still a place for a mediator who knows when to subsume a detail for the sake of the story, and is accustomed to balancing the competing claims and interests of companies and people represented in a story.”
A further complication for news organisations used to the deadlines and production cycles of print and broadcast is the long timescales involved in building a successful wiki and the communities needed to maintain it. Wikinews contributor Erik Moll notes the reduced incentive for readers to contribute to articles with a short shelf life: “Wikinews articles are short-lived, so there is a reduced feeling of contributing to a knowledge base that will last a lifetime”
Issues around authorship and remuneration also need addressing, although models do exist, including the Creative Commons initiative, and the system used by OhMyNews, which shares copyright and insists contributors disclose bank account details for payment.
Finally, one of the biggest disadvantages may be readers’ lack of awareness of what a wiki even is: only 2% of Internet users even know what a wiki is, although similar statistics were once applicable to blogs.
Conclusions
So far the most highly publicised experiments with the form (the ‘Wikitorial’; Wired’s wiki article; the Esquire Wikipedia article) have been of the ‘Second draft’ variety, relinquishing the least amount of control over content, and incorporating wiki technology into pre-existing work processes: the subject of the article is still chosen by editors, the first draft is written by a journalist, and only then does the wiki community take control, taking a role as a second journalist/editor in the process.
In these cases the article has also been ‘frozen’ at some point for publication, often only days after first being published online, something which could be seen as ‘unnatural’ for a wiki. Furthermore, freezing wikis reduces the opportunity to allow vandalism to be cleaned up over time, underexploits the ability to look at various ‘edits’ of an article/topic/event as it develops over a long period of time, and removes the opportunity to build an online community.
In contrast, outside of traditional news operations, Wikinews and Wikipedia have adopted an ‘Open’ model, relinquishing almost all control, with huge success for Wikipedia, but less for Wikinews, perhaps because of the inclusion of ’short-shelf-life’ material.
Timescale appears to be a key variable in the success of wiki journalism as, between these two types on the wiki journalism continuum, the most successful models of wiki journalism have involved subject matter with a long shelf life, that builds, and taps into, a community that is wiki-literate and willing to contribute.
Community
This community, and the management of community, are crucial to the shape that wiki journalism takes. But creating a community is difficult and, once created, that community may not act in ways the wiki owner wants them to:
“Real community is a self-creating thing, with some magic spark, easy to recognize after the fact but impossible to produce on demand, that draws people together. Once those people have formed a community, however, they will act in the interests of the community, even if those aren’t your interests. You need to be prepared for this. [T]hey may well treat you, the owner of the site, as an external perturbation. Another surprise is that they will treat growth as a perturbation as well, and they will spontaneously erect barriers to that growth if they feel threatened by it.[...] Many of the expectations you make about the size, composition, and behavior of audiences when you are in a broadcast mode are actually damaging to community growth. To create an environment conducive to real community, you will have to operate more like a gardener than an architect.” (Shirky, 2002)
But investment made in building this community can produce significant results. Scott B. Anderson, director of shared content for the Tribune Co.’s interactive unit, says “This is a way that a newspaper can let its audience take part in its core mission: investigation”, and there are increasing examples of ‘crowdsourcing’ methods, of which wikis are just one, being used to build journalism projects that would otherwise not have taken place.
This inevitably raises issues of access, and the proportion and type of user who will contribute to a wiki. Nielsen’s research on participation inequality found a ‘90-9-1′ rule whereby 90% of users are “lurkers” who do not contribute, 9% “contribute a little”, and 1% account for “almost all the action”, while McCawley (2007) notes: “there were more major contributors to the 1911 Britannica than there are to Wikipedia and the front page of Digg is controlled by fewer people than the front page of the New York Times.”
But Alex Bruns also argues that “In itself this does not undermine the project of open news any more than the fact that not everyone is a software programmer undermines the project of open source: even those who do not engage with the deliberations taking place within open news can still benefit from their outcomes as they emerge.” (2005: 74), while Pavlik asks: “Is the knowledge gap reason enough to resist the development and growth of online journalism? Definitely not. Although some segments of society are likely to benefit more rapidly than others, all groups will eventually gain. Moreover, even the classical media are subject to the same knowledge-gap effect [and] if anything, new media present a possible reversal of the knowledge gap by eliminating the barriers to entry into the journalism marketplace.” (2001: 144)
It could also be argued that the ‘90% lurkers’ statistic is misleading, focused as it is on any one site, where most people are going to be ‘passing through’. In contrast, when the focus moves to individual people, the figures change dramatically: a Pew study in 2003 found that 44% of adult American internet users had contributed content online (PDF). Even with 10% of users contributing, the case can be made that a local newspaper with 40,000 print readers would not have previously expected to tap into an army of around 4,000 contributors.
Even so, the skills to manage a community and give a ‘voice to the voiceless’ become important, and to that end an increasing number of news organisations are creating ‘Community Editor’ roles. The case of the BBC’s ‘user generated content’ unit is worth noting here: the team of over two dozen staff not only manages incoming contributions, but also looks to balance proactive voices by physically seeking out others who may not have access to communication technologies.
Blogs 2.0
The Telegraph are planning an internal wiki as a precursor to public experiments with the technology. The BBC has been using wikis internally for some time, particularly for product development and distributed team working within BBC Future Media & Technology, while a straw poll of senior media professionals shows enthusiasm about the potential of the technology in organisations including Channel 4, BSKYB, and FT.com.
Even of those opposed to, or unaware of, the use of wikis in journalism, Gahran notes that “Most [had] used, shared documents via services such as Google Docs or Zoho [...] Once they get used to the idea of collaborating on a document (any document, really) via the Web, wikis start to look more appealing and make more sense.”
A number of projects in 2007 indicate that we may be seeing a new stage in the evolution of wiki journalism. In terms of Rushkoff’s (PDF) three stages of development in the growth of participatory media - deconstruction of content, demystification of technology and finally do-it-yourself or participatory authorship - it could be suggested that some publications, in particular the San Diego Tribune AmpliPedia and Wired’s How-To Wiki, are emerging from the first stage of deconstruction of content and that, if wiki journalism is to become part of the online journalist’s toolbox, the next challenge is further demystification of wiki technology, with time and money invested in facilitating participation.
Wikis are blogs 2.0: like blogs, they provide an arena for readers to critique and correct, to self-publish, and to form communities. But while they share many characteristics with blogs and older technologies such as discussion forums, the significance of wikis lies in the way they move away from the linear call-response communication models that those technologies reflected. If blogs are a distributed discussion (PDF), then wikis offer a single place for that discussion to reach (ongoing) concensus.
The range of voices editing each other tends to result in a fact-based piece of work that represents the ‘Neutral Point Of View’ (NPOV) formalised by Wikipedia, and which, potentially, avoids some of the biases inherent in individual, commercial journalism. The networked nature of wiki technology allows for genuine collaboration and community, as well as holding enormous potential for transparency and a more impartial concensus. Whether this potential is realised depends on the investment and understanding that is brought to any wiki project.
In other words, wiki journalism will only flourish if as much time and care is invested in wikis as are invested in traditional journalism. Weaknesses such as vandalism and inaccuracy can be addressed if staff are assigned to monitor and facilitate the wiki - to prevent legal issues, to attract A-List contributors (and monitors), and build genuine online communities. This will involve a new skills set for those involved, and it will involve a fresh look at copyright, legal and ethical issues. Hardest of all, it will involve relinquishing control over what has traditionally been a news organisation’s biggest asset - content - in order to rebuild another that has recently been neglected: the community that may be key to journalism’s future both editorially and economically.
September 10th, 2007
As part of the Online Journalism Blog’s experiment in crowdsourcing, Online Journalism student Azeem Ahmad takes a look at the Association of Online Publishers nominees for the category of ‘Cross-Media’
Now in its fifth year, the Association of Online Publishers (AOP) has released its shortlist of contenders for its annual AOP awards. There are 16 categories in total, ranging from launches of new services, such as 4oD, and My Telegraph, to Podcasting and Digital Creativity.
My eye is on the ‘Cross-media project category’ however, as there are some very strong contenders in the eight that are short-listed.
BBC Sport has been nominated for its Ashes coverage of the 2006-2007 series. As one sided as it was, the way it was reported had a whole makeover from the previous years. Users were able to access an interactive and live, regularly updated scorecard, as well as live match commentary, and a constant flow of pictures and reaction from fans via its 606 message boards.
The BBC has also been nominated for its ‘Play it Again’ series which included a website and a six episode television series in which celebrities such as Frank Skinner and Bill Oddie learnt how to play instruments they used to play in their childhood again. The website also urged the public to attend live events held across the UK were music lessons were free.
Channel 4 has been nominated for its ‘Lost Experience – The Hanso Foundation’ website based on the popular US drama Lost. Whilst the website is simple now, featuring a letter from the leader of the foundation, I suspect it was nominated for features that were present earlier on in the year. The website gave fans of the series a chance to work out some of the enigmas from the popular television programme through a series of riddles. Successfully completing a riddle would unlock a few minutes of video – completing every riddle and putting all of the videos together would provide the most avid fan with a wealth of information.
The Guardian has been nominated for its BAE Files Investigaton which allows the reader full access to the files that David Leigh and Rob Evans have been working on for the Guardian for the previous four years. BAE, Europe’s biggest arms company, claims there is ‘no evidence’ that it has engaged in massive corruption to sell arms overseas. Leigh and Evans have published all of their investigation material online for viewers to judge for themselves if the company is corrupt.
Next nominee The Insider Business Club is an exclusive online club where executives and high ranking members of financial companies can have various ‘web-conferences’. The Business Club involves “teleconference meetings to promote interaction and knowledge sharing between finance directors, financial controllers and other senior finance staff, as well as the industry experts, suppliers and advisors on whom they rely”.
The Telegraph Media Group has been nominated for its website and coverage devoted to the 2007 Budget. The website is very neatly organised, with updated news stories and various sections that allow the reader to understand what the budget means for them individually rather than other news organisations’ coverage of the topic, which only covered local and national implications. There are also PDFs of various aspects of the budget so the reader has full access to details.
Times Media has been nominated for its series entitled ‘The Best of MBA’. This was a series of podcasts from ten of the world’s leading business thinkers. They provide insights into the latest thinking in economics, management, finance, strategy and marketing. The weekly series of lectures are available as a 30-minute podcast, in text online, and were also available in an abridged version in the newspaper itself.
Finally, Trinity Mirror has been nominated for its ‘Your Gazette Communities’ series of websites. These 20 mini-sites are filled with local news and pictures and presented in an extremely organised way. The main site which links to all 20 is constantly updated with the latest news from all 20 sites, but it would definitely benefit from the inclusion of RSS.
My Winner – Channel 4:
I may be somewhat biased as I am a big fan of Lost, but this award category – Cross Media Project – looks for use of a range of media, and this website utilised text, audio, video, and images extremely well, and deserves to win for that reason. The website had fans hooked, and was clever in the way it was organised. It was deliberately hard to navigate around the site and find various areas and whilst web guru Jakob Nielsen would not have been happy, fans certainly were. Channel 4 have done well to produce a high quality website about a US-produced drama, and deserve to win. I have a feeling however, that The Guardian may pip Channel 4, however.
The results of this category, and the other 15, will be announced on Wednesday 3rd October 2007, at the London Hilton Hotel.
To contribute your own assessment of the AOP award nominees, go to http://aopawards.pbwiki.com/ and follow the instructions.
September 7th, 2007
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“Next Monday appears to be the date for former Star Tribune editor and publisher Joel Kramer to reveal his plans for the launch of a professionally edited and reported online newspaper.”
to onlinejournalism independentjournalism
- Newspaper offer readers ‘Riddle’
A British indie feature is rewriting distribution rules by becoming the first to preem as a “covermount” DVD given away free with a newspaper.
to televisioninteractivity covermounts film dailymail
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“USA Today is plunging into a hot new Internet technology, offering its online users the ability to install “widgets” on their blogs and personal Web pages that contain news updates and other information from the newspaper.”
to onlinejournalism usatoday widgets blogs
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“Celebrity glossy wunderkind OK! magazine relaunched its Web site today with an Escalade’s worth of features—“web exclusive, continuously updated breaking news, celebrity updates, photo galleries, videos, reviews, blogs and numerous interactive features…”
to onlinejournalism newmediamagazines onlinevideo blogs galleries
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“On Web sites such as Style.com, consumers can see looks from September’s shows an hour after they are premiered on the runway. Followers don’t have to have some high-ranking editor in New York to tell them what was hot or not. They can see and decide for…”
to newmediamagazines onlinejournalism onlinevideo …
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Blog your initial brainstorming. Blog your research. Blog your interactions.
to blogs onlinejournalism … saved by 2 other people …
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Conversational Journalism: Credibility Gained or Status Lost?
In a sense, clinging to objectivity as an achievable goal denies our humanity. That puts us in awkward situations almost daily. And don’t think our audiences and communities don’t recognize that. Often, they’re laughing at us for it.
to onlinejournalism ethics transparency community conversation objectivity …
September 7th, 2007
As previously reported, I’ll be at the first European Bloggers (Un)Conference, in Amsterdam, on September 27-28. I’ve now set up a Facebook group and event if you want to sign up.
Attendees are listed on the unconference wiki and include Nicolas Ebnother of Internews, Oleksander Demchenko of the Ukrainian LiveJournal journalism community, Andrew Davies of the Greenpeace makingwaves blog, Vadim Sadonshoev, Irakli Jibladze of Steady State, Luca Conti, Abdul Gamid, Leila Tanayeva of New Eurasia, Mikhail Doroshevich of e-belarus, photoblogger Anush Babajanyan, Sami Ben Gharbia of Global Voices Advocacy, and Wybo Wiersma of OgOg. Guest speaker Evgeny Morozov of Transitions Online plans
“to talk about the East-West divide (not necessarily just on a European level) and how that’s reflected in the blogosphere: different needs vs different services vs different concerns vs different operating pressures. My broader research in this topic is how new media technologies that often originate in the West for often rather trivial purposes — think Twitter used to share what one had for dinner — are being used in the East for completely different (and I’d venture to say at the point of moralizing) more noble and society-changing purposes (think the use of Twitter by democracy activists in the Middle East to warn each other of upcoming arrests or office searches). So I’ll be playing around those themes, with a somewhat focus on blogs, but also looking at the whole new media spectrum.
I also asked Elisa Delaini, Associate Editor of the European Journalism Centre, some questions about the unconference. Here are her answers:
Q: How did the unconference come about?
The EJC was looking for a follow up to last year’s Innovation Journalism event we launched at Picnic06. We thought that it would have been useful to have a place where the best cases of the west could meet with the eastern bloggers. We believe Amsterdam is an excellent venue for international meetings, and is easy to get to, so we opened up the event for a larger group of people.
Q: Why an unconference?
Instead of having only people speaking in front of the audience, we thought that the audience and the participants themselves should contribute to the developments. Therefore the idea of the unconference,
an unformal meeting. The Ejc doesn’t claim to know any answers, and may not even be aware of the most pressing issues, bloggers are faced with, as opposed to some substantial knowledge the Ejc has concerning
journalism and journalists. Furthermore, we strongly believe in the “wisdom of the crowd” concept and believe that participants themselves will much better be able to define what should be on the agenda.
Q: How have you gone about inviting participants?
We have started to contact the Eastern bloggers first, as they are the ones less favoured to participate because of financial situations. We provided them with some support to be able to attend it. To invite them, we relied on the large network of Transitions Online. We are still inviting Western bloggers so that we can really have a face-to-face between East and West.
Q: What do you hope will come out of it?
Ideally we find some common ground between bloggers from east and west, and the dialogue we start at picnic can be continued in the future. The Ejc would like to initiate and enable a conversation between relevant “voices” from Europe and its neighbours.
Q: What do you hope will happen at the event?
People will meet, learn, have fun, meet again and discuss ideas and issues
Q: Anything else you can add?
Please sign up through our wiki and contribute on that with any ideas and suggestions!
September 7th, 2007
The UK Association of Online Publishers have announced the shortlist for the AOP Online Publishing Awards 2007. As an experiment in crowdsourcing, the Online Journalism Blog is asking you to help cover the nominations by looking at one (or more) of the nominated websites and writing what you think on a wiki.
Given the intelligence of OJB readers, the result should represent a good evaluation of the candidates, and online journalism in general. Even if you only publish a one-line description of the candidate this will make a difference. This might be considered Facebook Journalism experiment #3, given that this call was sent out to the Online Journalism Blog Facebook Group (please sign up if you haven’t already).
The wiki is at http://aopawards.pbwiki.com/ - full explanations on how to use it are on there.
UPDATE: Azeem Ahmad has covered the Cross-Media category - this will be posted on the blog tomorrow.
September 6th, 2007
Following my jaunt to Vienna earlier this year, I’ll be flying East again come September 27-28, to the first European Bloggers (Un)Conference, “East meets West”, in Amsterdam, September. Want to join me?
Here’s the blurb:
“The conference will allow bloggers from the European Union and its neighbour countries to meet, share ideas and discuss new media developments in their respective countries. The event will focus on issues common to bloggers and citizen journalists from East and West, as well as on vital differences.“The workshop will include a showcase of “best practices,” keynote speakers and chances for bloggers to meet face-to-face. We have four initial tracks:
• “Citizen Journalism: How and When It works”
• “Blogging in Dangerous Places: Security Issues”
• “Future of Media: Old vs. New”
• “Building Successful Web2.0 applications””
As it’s an ‘Unconference‘, I won’t be speaking formally as such, but more engaging in “hands-off moderation”, as one of the organisers writes.
“Our idea is to have a good bit of pre-conference communication being done on a Wiki — have people contribute agenda items, possible mini-presentations to the agenda pages of each track. Your role as a moderator would be to see that there is a minimum adherence to to the goals and objectives of each track rather than to streamline the discussion, which we definitely don’t want to do.”
“So the moderator would play a somewhat ice-breaking role at the beginning, help to establish some goals and priorities for the track, and then hopefully retreat to the retrenches and intervene only if there.”
The Unconference is part of the PICNIC conference, which is a major event in the new media calendar, so there are plenty of other events to peek in on too.
If you want to attend (it’s free), sign up at the bottom of the conference wiki. At the moment it’s very East-biased so more Westerners are needed.
And if you’re going to be at PICNIC anyway and want to meet up, let me know.
September 5th, 2007
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