Online Journalism Blog

The BBC’s User Generated Content (UGC) Hub does not further meaningful civil participation in the news, and the routine inclusion of UGC does not significantly alter news selection criteria or editorial values. So concludes Jackie Harrison’s study on audience contributions and gatekeeping practices at the BBC.

The study found many of the previous barriers to news selection have been removed or are not applicable to UGC.

“User generated content has been absorbed into BBC newsroom practices and is now routinely considered as an aspect of, or dimension to, many stories. In this sense the traditional barriers which formed the gatekeeping criteria of the 1990s have been altered forever.”

Harrison sees the changes to selection criteria as a real and worrying threat to quality and standards at the public broadcaster. Her study raises interesting questions about the value of UGC and how it should be measured. She fears the growing tendency to utilise audience content, often for convenience, risks an increase in “soft news” at the expense of quality journalism, and worse, the degradation of public knowledge.

Harrison does not see the hub as progressing civil debate or public engagement on a meaningful level, and she anticipates future use of UGC may grow more opportunistic. This is obviously at odds with the active debate and participation the hub set out to foster, and which has dominated previous ideals of audience participation.

Selection and moderation

In an earlier study, Harrison looked at what caused some stories to be used by the BBC and others to be rejected. Here she reinvestigates these reasons in the context of UGC, finding that in many cases UGC can, if not make these previous concerns irrelevant, make the case for automatic rejection less compelling.

While the hub is subject to resource-intensive moderation and methodical processes to ascertain UGC authenticity and quality it is, like all news organisations, still learning how to most effectively utilise audience participation.

There are growing and unresolved tensions for journalists in balancing the BBC’s traditional journalistic standards while fostering open communication, promoting free speech, and at the same time protecting the site and the audience against possible offence.

Inevitably, this gives rise to judgement calls which are necessarily subjective.

Harris suggests two questions then arise from this:

• Does UGC reflect public opinion and
  
• two, are they simply generating noise…of little value, and,
• is it a public service broadcaster’s job to provide a platform for all sorts of views including unpalatable or unpleasant ‘‘non-majoritarian’’ comment and, if it is not, why not?

BBC journalists told Harrison, “The difficulty with opening up the floodgates to participation is that ‘the full spectrum” of opinions must be considered to further the aims of the ‘global conversation’.”

Should we be concerned, as Harrison seems to be, that material gathered at the hub is not always deemed of particular quality? Or does the value, as Stuart Purvis suggests, lie in the telling, the fact that new and possibly previously unheard voices are given a platform?

We are right to expect quality content from the public broadcaster, but opinions on what that means differ widely.

This can be seen in the debate between Paul Bradshaw and his students, and the BBC staff regarding UGC content and external links. It seems while hub head Matthew Eltringham spoke about the relevance of content, what he was really talking about was quality content. If the BBC opened up linking to contributors’ sites, would it have to do it for all contributors, and what kinds of complications would this pose?

The future of UGC

Perhaps we should not be viewing the growing tendency for “soft journalism” through UGC as a degradation in quality, but part of the evolution of the BBC. Unless of course, it does come at the cost of investigative, serious journalism, which clearly the BBC has a mandate to invest in.

Harrison rightly points out the hub is only one part of the newsroom, but a part that is increasingly relied upon as an additional source of information, shared between departments at the BBC.

What the study doesn’t address is how successful the UGC hub has been in engaging people who have previously not interacted with the BBC, or who have not taken part in public debate in general. I suspect it is unlikely to have encouraged society’s voiceless. We must assume at the least, that people taking part have access to technology, which is of course, one of the major difficulties of the idea of the new electronic, egalitarian public sphere.

The hub does represent a deliberate and conscious effort to seek audience interaction and better serve the public interest, though what this will mean for the BBC, and for the public, in the long-term is still unclear.

It will be interesting to see how the hub develops and where UGC can go. Is Harrison right in predicting it will grow more meaningless or, more drastically, has meaningful civil engagement in the news already met its untimely death, as Steve Borris declared?

Stefan Mey from Berlin talks to Julian Assange, the spokesperson of the whistleblower platform Wikileaks.org. The interview took place during the 26th Chaos Communication Congress where Assange and his German colleague Daniel Schmitt gave a lecture on the current state and the future of Wikileaks.

Julian Assange (photo: flickr.com by Esthr, cc-by-nc-2.0)

At the moment Wikileaks.org has an unusual appearance. The website is locked down in order to generate money. The locking-down of the website was first planned until Jan 6, then Jan 11 and now it has been announced that it will last “until at least Jan 18”. How did you decide in favor of this tough step?

In part, this is a desire for us to to enforce self-discipline. It is for us a way to ensure that everyone who is involved stops normal work and actually spends time raising revenue. That’s hard for us, because we promise our sources that we will do something about their situation.

So, you strike?

Yes, it’s similar to what unions do when they go on strike. They remind people that their labour has value by withdrawing supply entirely. We give free and important information to the world every day. But when the supply is infinite in the sense that everyone is able to download what we publish, the perceived value starts to reduce down to zero. So by withdrawing supply and making our supply to zero, people start to once again perceive the value of what we are doing.

Do you urgently need money?

We have lots of very significant upcoming releases, significant in terms of bandwidth, but even more significant in terms of amount of labour they will require to process and in terms of legal attacks we will get. So we need to be in a stronger position before we can publish the material. [Read more]

We’re all being told that mobile is the next big thing for news, but what does it mean to have a good mobile news application?

Just as an online news site is a lot more than a newspaper online, a mobile news application is a lot more than news stories on a small screen. The better iPhone news apps integrate multimedia, social features, personalization, and push notifications.

Not all apps get even the basics right. But a few are pushing the boundaries of what mobile news can be, with innovative new features such as info-graphic displays of hot stories, or integrated playlists for multimedia.

Here is my roundup of 14 iPhone news offerings. I’ve included many of the major publishers, some lesser known applications, and a few duds for comparison.

NYTimes
The New York Times Company
Free

The New York Times iPhone application

The Times doesn’t do anything new with this application, but they do everything fairly well.

The app is designed around a vertical list stories, with a headline, lede, and photo thumbnail for each. Stories are organized into standard news sections, plus the alway interesting “Most Popular.”   Banner ads sometimes appear at the bottom, plus occasional interstitial ads when appear when you select a story.

The focus of the news is of course American. There’s no personalization of news content based either on interest or location, which may well prove to be a standard feature for mobile news applications. Fortunately, the app includes a search function, though it only seems to go a few days back.

Downloaded articles are available when the device is offline, which is a useful feature. Favorites stories can be saved, or shared via email, text message, Twitter, and Facebook.

The UI has a few quirks. The “downloading news” progress bar is expected, but the sometimes equally long “processing news” phase makes me wonder what the app is doing. The photos in a story very sensibly download after the text, but the scroll position jumps when the photo appears,which is hugely annoying.

There’s little innovation or differentiation here, but the experience is smooth.

[Read more]

Next Thursday is the news:rewired event at City University London, which is being put on by the good people at journalism.co.uk. I’ll be on hand as a delegate.

All of the bases will be covered, it seems: Multimedia, social media, hyperlocal, crowdsourcing, datamashups, and news business models.

[Read more]

The Sun is running a despicable campaign against Gordon Brown. But I’ve analysed the comments on its website – and readers disagree with its stance by a ratio of more than 3 to 2 (on top of which, there are now accusations that the Sun is censoring pro-Brown comments).

The paper has exploited the grief of Jacqui Janes over her son Jamie’s death in Afghanistan to attack the PM – because his handwritten letter of condolence was supposedly disrespectful due to sloppy writing and (disputed) spelling errors.

It’s loathsome journalism that ignores the effect of his disability (the PM is blind in one eye).

And it seems Sun readers are mostly on the Prime Minister’s side.

Of the 100+ comments on the story (don’t worry, I’ve nofollowed those links) when I checked, 111 expressed a view for or against Jacqui Janes or Gordon Brown (the rest commented on other issues or corrected people’s spelling errors). Of these:

• 42 were anti Gordon or pro the Sun’s stance.
• 69 were pro Gordon or anti the Sun’s stance.

So that’s more than 60% who don’t agree with the Sun, and less than 40% who do.

Sample comments from those who agree with the Sun’s stance

Some comments from those opposing it

Conclusion

The Sun is channeling this woman’s grief into a personal attack on the Prime Minister.

It’s refusing to make allowances for his disability (maybe we could next attack the war wounded for being workshy benefit scroungers?).

And it’s facilitating her breaking data protection laws by releasing a recording of a private phone call.

The whole thing is sickening – let’s hope that observing its readers’ reactions will lead to an end to this (not that this happened in the Jan Moir case) – and preferably prosecution of the Sun over the data protection offence. What’s more, Daily Mail readers are pro Brown, too. The Sun has got this badly wrong.

The Guardian has changed its user-generated comment system – moving from a client-side system to a server-side one. (This story was first published here, where you can read a bit more of the background.)

With the old system, once you loaded a story, some javascript would go off and look up readers’ comments and display them. This wasn’t terribly accessible – if you couldn’t or didn’t run javascript, you couldn’t see the comments.

It was also bad for SEO, as search engines couldn’t run the javascript (so couldn’t see the comments). And if your mobile didn’t run javascript (like mine), you couldn’t read the comments either.

With the new system, the comments are just part of the web page, like all the rest of the text.

This is a great change by the Guardian, and not before time. Google has already started to index the text of comments, as this search for some text I left as a comment once shows.

If you notice any problems, they’ve asked you to point them out.

Following last week’s Question Time, the BBC’s Have Your Say forum was red hot with sympathy for old Nick.

This led to some soul searching in the media, and across the social sphere. To what extent can we say that this mass-protest; much of which condemned the ‘bullying’ of a panellist rather than openly endorsing his party’s policies, fairly reflects public opinion? Are we looking at an orchestrated online campaign?

Without access to HYS log data, it is very hard to say. And even with an extensive list of IP addresses, and a breakdown of traffic by source, the free availability of anonymous proxies and easy-to-set-up email and social network accounts will always leave breathing space for a well-regimented astroturfing campaign.

So how can we shed light on covert political campaigns online? Any group who have been infiltrated in the past will be ultra security-conscious �" so events last week may be untraceable to outsiders. Other groups may not be as well organised �" so here are some pointers.

 Language

Spreading an effective mass-campaign across a forum or social network requires speed. People who work quickly don’t have time to spell-check, or type accurately. But hunting out spelling errors won’t help you unearth a conspiracy here.

Typos are a different matter �" if you spot regularly occurring mis-types, this could suggest a common origin.

Punctuation and the use of capital letters can also slow the process of rapid posting. Conversely, evidence of the sporadic and distinctive use of upper-case shouting (within ordinary text), can also be indicative of a single personality expressed across multiple accounts.

“Phrase searching” excerpts from suspicious sentences can provide a simple way of tracking down duplicate content across the web. This can be useful where people are trolling across different forums (which might, in this case, include a perceived spike in support on the Sky News forums). But testing an adequate number of sentences can be time consuming.

Alternatively, there are a few freely available services out there intended to detect plagiarism, which can be used to track duplicate posting across parts of the web.

However, it is likely that well organised and long-term campaigns will already have organised participants into cells who are responsible for trolling particular domains, thus lending uniqueness and authenticity to their posting. Such decisions will most likely take place offline, or at least via encrypted communications �" which some groups are known to use.

Getting back to the analysis of output, it is possible to mine large volumes of text (i.e. a large number of posts in one domain), via software such as Analysts Notebook. This could certainly help establish grammatical trends, and those phrases which are hard for the human eye to spot systematically. But this software is far too expensive for most media organisations.

Linking

In the unlikely event that a covert campaign to influence public opinion is discussed openly on the web, there are a number of places to check for mobilisation, and linking.

A search of Omgili (covering keywords, or URLs) will highlight any attempts on public discussion boards to mobilise on a given subject and/or target (though this is of little use for private boards).

Alternatively, Yahoo’s site explorer can be used to eke out all the inbound links to any page across the web. This source gives an insight into just how skewed political opinion on the web can be. If you search for Ron Paul’s Campaign for Liberty you will find it has over 600,000 inbound links, by comparison with the Republican National Committee which has just over 220,000. You might wonder which party’s representative came runner up at the last presidential election on this analysis.

For the social web, bit.ly’s search option allows you either to search for linking by keyword or by URL. When the results come back, check Info for a particular entry, then select View all from the Conversations option to track the development of conversation around the page in question, and tease out other associated links and trends.

Lost in hyperspace

Sometimes the most obvious indication that something’s going on is when that thing’s not going on somewhere you’d expect it to. The relative inactivity on Thursday night from those who publicise their affiliations (a bio: search in Tweepz will help here) is noteworthy.

On the eve of the greatest public exposure in the party’s history, some might question where were the pro- trending topics �" there were no shortage of anti- topics that night. A cynic might suggest that mobilising on Twitter, where real identities often crowd out fakes, is not the ideal medium for pushing an unpopular agenda.

Dummy accounts represent a different challenge. Forum owners can easily keep track on accounts which spark unerringly to life when a particular issue comes along which fits with a particular agenda. But the surfer can replicate this too – IceRocket’s Twitter search tab allows you to browse vital statistics �" including tweet count �" which can be indicative of a dummy account (as can long periods of inactivity between non-specific tweeting, and proactive tweets).

A trawl through the names posted on forums may highlight a number of plausible but bogus identities (see 192.com for domestic names, or Infobel for international ones), which should arouse suspicion. The age-range option in 192 can be especially useful in analysing Facebook accounts. Where you see a profile picture of someone in their twenties, if everyone by that name on the electoral roll is over 40, something is surely up.

Likewise one or two people finders, such as 123people or Yasni, when used in conjunction with 192, can highlight anomalies between real and online identities.

When browsing through the real names posted on a forum, if you can’t find names who elsewhere publicly declare their affiliations, especially in relation to a contentious issue, then alarm bells may start ringing.

But then, where a campaign groups’ leadership encourage members to hide their true identity in public, it’s little wonder conspiracy abounds. Such advice accommodates a reactive approach to online campaigning, away from the direct expression of party support, and towards (for example) outrage at a perceived injustice. Yet the absence of significant online connections between a party and its activists would indicate that this type of strategy is working perhaps a little too well.

Linking and transparency in online politics

Groups who seek to hide their true colours online can come embarrassingly undone if they aren’t careful. The link can cut a swathe through façade �" it can bring transparency to our politics, as well as to our journalism.

For this reason the Identify Firefox extension can bring insight. This plugin reads links on social network and blog profiles tagged rel=”me” (more information on the plugin can be found on Read Write Web). Use the keyword combination Ctr+i on any public profile to bring back other social networks and blogs which also link to these web sources.

Try it out on a couple of prominent public profiles �" you may be surprised (or possibly appalled) at what you find.

Investigative journalism �" accept no substitute

While conventional online research techniques offer options in terms of digging out evidence, there remains no substitute for good old fashioned investigative journalism.

With this in mind, a first port of call for guidance on approaching online groups for any investigator should be the internet research clinic.

If you want to skip the background, go to the next subheading

Last week the BBC Education website published a piece about a report into the use of technology by schoolchildren: “Tech addiction ‘harms learning’”:

“Technology addiction among young people is having a disruptive effect on their learning, researchers have warned,” the intro led, before describing the results of the study. No one other than the study authors was quoted.

But GP and Clinial Lecturer AnneMarie Cunningham, hearing of the report on Twitter, felt the headline and content of the article didn’t match up: “The headline suggests a causal relationship which a cross-sectional study could not establish, but the body of the text doesn’t really support any relationship between addiction and learning”, she wrote, and she started digging:

“It … was clear that none of the authors had an education background. The 2 main authors, Nadia and Andrew Kakabadse, have a blog showcasing their many interests but education doesn’t feature amongst them. They descibe themselves as “experts in top team and board consulting, training and development”.”

AnneMarie bought the report for $24.99 – the only way to read it – and started reading. This is what she found: [Read more]

National UK newspapers had 1,471,936 Twitter followers at the start of September – up 213,892 or 17% on August 1 (when they had 1,258,044 followers).

You can see the September figures (orignally posted here) below or here.

I have more Twitter statistics here.

One rap against citizen journalism is that there is always a possibility that it isn’t accurate or credible. Unmonitored, unmoderated blogs can get it wrong. Well, so can traditional journalists, but with blogs, it’s harder to hold someone accountable, and erroneous information is that much trickier to retract.

Would it help then, to look for ideas in a field where inaccuracy is barely tolerated, if at all? The media should be able to tap into crowd wisdom for credible content if, as Dan Schultz notes, “members of the scientific community, a professional group that arguably maintains higher standards for verification than journalism, are trying to harness the crowd in the same way that we are.”

Citizen science has been effectively used in one main way �" collection of data, which is then used by scientists for contextualization, analysis and consolidation with experiments and previous scientific literature.

Be it recording the dates of Spring’s first lilac blossoms, or counting the number of eggs in bird nests, citizens are contributing in meaningful ways, so scientists can then then use this for more specialized tasks, like assessing the information thus obtained to study the impact of global warming or the influence of human activity on wildlife.

Perhaps, the closest counterpart to this use in journalism is something akin to WNYC’s crowdsourced project to track price gouging in New York City or the Shropshire Star’s map of fuel prices. In both these exercises, citizens were not expected to do much more than report their daily observations.

Since scientific research usually requires a high level of education and training, the tasks get divided neatly between professionals and dabblers. As Schultz points out, in the case of science, “professionals have bigger and better things to do; it doesn’t make sense for a PhD to use a million-dollar telescope to look at something that a hobbyist could view using a thousand-dollar one, especially when there is so much of the universe left to unlock.”

This is not to say that such a clear definition would not work for journalism. In fact, citizen journalism pioneer Jay Rosen has often said that division of labor is essential for crowdsourced journalism projects. In WNYC’s case, citizens were responsible for collecting information that was put together in a story. In more complex investigative projects, the public is given the task of perusing documents, as is happening with The Guardian’s investigation of the MP’s expenses scandal.

Another idea would be to outsource so-called “fluff” journalism to the public (self plug warning). Many sites are already implementing this, by allowing citizens to post blogs and articles on lifestyle and recreational topics. Schulz suggests hyperlocal content as one such department where citizens can often do a good, if not better, job than reporters.

One of the main problems is that unlike scientists, journalists–irrationally or not–are in constant fear of being replaced by amateurs. Hence, they seem more hesitant to solicit citizen help. The fact that journalists are losing jobs, however, has more to do with the lack of revenue-generating mechanisms on the Internet than it has to do with bloggers posting content online. In fact, by recruiting audiences to act as eyes and ears for news organizations, the latter would actually save costs and be able to divert resources toward more specialized reporting.

Secondly, in the case of scientific crowdsourcing or citizen science, there is a distinct classification of contributors and their scope of contribution–as identified by what professionals, amateurs and citizens can do. This leads to a clear division of labor, which is not quite possible in journalism, at least in the way it is being practiced right now. While there is no doubt that journalism needs a special set of skills and training, it’s not rocket science, quite literally.

Amateurs contribute toward citizen science in significant ways by performing unspecialized tasks. In the case of bloggers, on the other hand, short of traveling to a war zone (with some exceptions) they are pretty much doing�"or attempting to do–what professional journalists routinely do.

The solution is not to curb bloggers and independent journalists, however. It is to produce the sort of in-depth, high-quality journalism that makes newsroom journalism “special.” In order to have clear-cut division of labor, professionals merely have to offer a product that makes use of the creativity and resources that are available to them. And in the process, they can implement projects that involve the lay public so the latter can do what they do best.