Whether you need an image for your blog post, a soundtrack to your video or that YouTube clip for your documentary, if you’re dealing with multimedia it’s likely you’ll end up using – or wanting to use – someone else’s work as part of your own.

Here are some basic tips on finding and using multimedia across the web in a way that won’t (hopefully) land you in hot water.

The public domain myth

One of the mistakes that has repeatedly landed journalists and their employers in trouble is confusion over the term “public domain“.

Public domain has two possible meanings. In copyright terms, public domain refers to work whose copyright has expired, meaning that anyone can use it without having to ask the copyright holder. Disney – a fierce lobbyist itself for extending copyright – has used ‘public domain’ material as the basis for most of its cartoons, from the work of the Grimm Brothers to a host of other fairy tales, myths and legends.

But sometimes you will hear journalists talk about something being “in the public domain“, in other words ‘public’. For instance, when the Irish Daily Mail published photos of an air traffic controller from her website, they defended the decision on the grounds that the image was “in the public domain”.

But this is not the same.

For example, pretty much every piece of media, almost by definition, is “in the public domain”. Newspapers and magazines sit on the newsstands; television and radio reports are broadcast on huge city centre screens and speakers.

But if you take that content and reproduce it in its entirety without permission, you are breaking copyright law.

It seems odd that media organisations so used to protecting their own, very public, content, should think that another person’s photo, or video, or report, should be fair game because it is “in the public domain”. But they do.

If you want public domain (in the sense of ‘copyright expired’) content, there are some useful sources. The Public Domain Review, for example, publishes a range of public domain work and has this guide to finding them. And Angela Grant writes here about finding public domain video, among other things (note that Angela refers to US law, not that of other countries).

But never assume something is public domain because it is “in public”.

One point to make: while an image, story, or composition may be out of copyright, its performance, re-design or re-telling may not.

Just ask Disney.

Creative Commons – making UGC copyright explicit

If you’re dealing with content that’s been published on a platform like Flickr or YouTube, you may be able to find out the copyright status of that content relatively easily.

Both allow users to easily establish copyright through the Creative Commons licence. You can either look for that licence in the relevant part of the page hosting the content.

On YouTube it is under the video:

On Flickr this is on the right hand side under License:

Make sure you click on that licence to find out what terms it requires.

Creative Commons, for example, has a number of elements:

• Whether the material can be used only in noncommercial contexts, or for commercial use as well
• Whether the material can be adapted and changed, or must be left unchanged
• Whether you must use the same CC licence if you use this material (e.g. you cannot use a noncommercial licence but then allow your work to be used commercially)
• Whether you must attribute the work (this is where many people breach the licence)

If you’re unsure of where your work fits against those criteria (for example, whether it’s considered as “commercial”), then approach the copyright holder for clarity. Remember that the CC licence is only a default position, and can be negotiated. Also, if you cannot get any response and decide to publish anyway, your attempts to contact the copyright holder will be important if there are any legal proceedings.

If you want others to publish their content under a CC licence, it helps if you publish at least some of your own work under a CC licence too. Indeed, if it contains other CC material, their licences may require you to.

Embedding versus re-broadcasting

If the media is hosted on a platform like YouTube, you may be able to embed it on a webpage without seeking permission at all: if the creator* has enabled embedding then they would have little argument in suing for breach of copyright because a) by enabling embedding they have given an ‘implied’ right; and b) they could stop you publishing it instantly by disabling embedding. Also, your embedding of their media would not lead to any loss of revenue (as advertising is embedded too), so it is unlikely that there would be any damages to sue for.

*note: this does not apply to video created by other people and uploaded by someone other than the copyright holder.

Reality bites

Of course, it’s one thing to talk about the strict legal position, and another to talk about what actually happens. Journalists regularly publish content that breaks the law – but make a judgement about the likelihood of ending up in court over that. For example, I can say that the Queen is corrupt (a defamatory statement) and be almost certain that the Queen is not going to sue me (because she has a history of not doing so).

Media lawyers are not just there to advise publishers on their strict legal position, but on the balance of risk involved, and how to reduce those risks. While you cannot always avoid risks, you can avoid them in simple ways:

• Always try to establish the copyright situation regarding any media you use: who holds the copyright (there may be more than one copyright owner: for example, performer and composer), and what are the terms of the licence?
• Try to contact the copyright holder if you’re in any doubt – even if you can’t contact them your efforts to do so will help you if you do end up in court.
• Always attribute authorship and link to the source (this can be done in title credits, captions and/or links on the host webpage). Copyright claims normally revolve around loss of earnings: anything that may have contributed to that (i.e. not linking to the source) will likely add to damages.

For more on these issues, and for related tools and links, see my bookmarks at http://delicious.com/paulb/creativecommons

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“Don’t work for free,” they were saying at the So You Want To Be A Journalist conference yesterday. “It’s fear, not freedom, that drives creators to succumb,” argued Jonathan Tasini in the Guardian.

The advice is understandable. But it’s also easy to say when you’re not an aspiring journalist competing against hundreds of others for entry level jobs.

The fact is that people do work for free to get a foot in the door, or experience, or both – and that many employers exploit that.

The fact is that this leads to a media industry which does not represent the diversity of its readers, viewers and users.

When opportunities are limited to those who can support themselves for months without a wage in an expensive city, to those who can fund degrees and postgraduate courses to boot, we end up with a journalism which is for the people but not of the people.

But telling people not to work for free won’t change that unless it offers an alternative opportunity.

“The only profession”?

Jonathan Tasini claimed that:

“We are the only profession I know of who work for free. No coal miner, nurse, shipyard worker, accountant, or any other person with bills to pay works for free.”

He’s not looking very far. Musicians work for free. Artists work for free. Designers work for free. Sadly or encouragingly, depending on your point of view, journalism is becoming more like those professions.

They work for free because it makes them better musicians, artists and designers. They work for free because they enjoy getting better at what they do. Sometimes they work for free because it makes the world a better place. Journalists (including many of the investigative journalists on the final panel yesterday who do work on their own time) share all of these motivations. But the key difference is this: when they work for free they typically choose who they work for.

And here’s where I add a big practical “unless” to the “Don’t work for free” argument:

Don’t work for free unless it’s adding to your value in the market

I agree with Tasini that I wouldn’t work for HuffPo for free, because the value to me would be negligible. But that doesn’t mean that all ‘free work’ doesn’t have value.

Aspiring journalists now need to make the same business decisions as publishers do – because we are all publishers now. They need to ask: will investing my resources in this piece of work make me more valuable in my market?

That includes the skills learned, contacts made, and experience gained. But it also includes the effect of working on the market itself: for instance, working for free for a publisher might contribute to depressing wage levels and reduce full time opportunities.

I considered this carefully when designing the work placement element of my MA in Online Journalism, ‘Labs’. This is explicitly not an experience where the student sits at a desk doing someone else’s work (most have already worked as journalists); it is designed as a consultancy relationship with an industry client, focused on an identified industry problem, so that the client benefits from the unique knowledge and experience of the student, and the student benefits from time, space, and access to develop much-needed knowledge.

If addressing that problem increases the client’s future capacity, that will lead to more work. Simply making more content for free wouldn’t help the industry employ more people.

Like so much else in the media industry, the internet has changed the market for internships and work experience, and as a result they should be considered carefully: for the first time, they are not the only options.

If you want to get into a journalism job you can add to your value by being your own publisher, and you can do so without having to spend your own money to work in someone else’s office doing the jobs that no one else wants to do. That is what one group of students did with Wannabehacks (currently on its second round of editors after the first round all landed jobs); that is what Josh Halliday and Dave Lee did before landing jobs straight out of university, at The Guardian and BBC.

When magazine publishers like Future and Reed Business Information are hiring from – and acquiring – specialist blogs and online communities, the canny move is not to spend your own money on months of fetching coffee, but on becoming your ideal employer’s competition.

It’s a big step to take: internships at least provide that tangible hope that you will strike lucky, and the illusion of working as a journalist. Doing it yourself means taking on more responsibility and initiative, and trusting more in your own ability to improve. But those are the qualities employers – or owners – are looking for.

This isn’t a post saying that blogs are going to solve everyone’s problems. Internships will still work for those with the resources and contacts to pursue them. But they shouldn’t be the only route – and encouraging people to think critically about the options open to them is better than shutting them off entirely.

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Cross-posted from XCity Magazine

The future of journalism, according to The Guardian’s ’3 Little Pigs’ film, is “open journalism”. Users are becoming part of every element of news production. The newsroom no longer has walls.

If that is going to happen then journalists need to huff, and puff, and blow down three particular houses of our own: our preconceptions around the sources that we use online; around why people contribute to the news process; and about how we protect our sources.

The house of straw: the myth of democratisation

It’s well documented that not everyone has access to the web, and that that access is unequally distributed according to age, class, and various other factors. Even among those who have access, some are more vocal, more literate, and generally busier than others.

At a basic level, even when we seek out voices, we narrow the possible ‘sample’ of voices by relying on particular channels: we prefer Twitter over Facebook, Facebook over forums, and forums over Flickr groups. So as our processes rely more on these platforms we need to make sure that we challenge those habits (picking up the phone doesn’t solve things: not everyone has a listed landline either) and make ourselves as accessible as possible across numerous platforms too.

More importantly, perhaps, we need to monitor the ways that social media platforms can – and are – effectively censored by authorities and organisations in the UK. Those wanting to find critical voices on the day of the royal wedding, for example, would have found a surprising lack of them on Facebook, where 50 legal activist pages, including UK Uncut, had been shut down in the run up to the May Day bank holiday. The map, as they say, is not the territory.

The house of sticks: giving users the tools

It’s good to see that we’re moving beyond the ‘build it and they shall come’ mentality of publishing; the assumption of the gate keeper that we don’t need to give people a reason to contribute. In an open journalism system we’re no longer gatekeepers, and we need to give people the means, motive and opportunity to come to us – or for us to go to them.

We need to give our sources as many reasons as possible to participate in ‘open journalism’ – whether that is freedom of information (FOI), open data, acknowledgement, or picking up the batons that they hand on.

In some cases that will involve lobbying for a retention or extension of laws such as the FOI Act, or for release of publicly-funded data, as The Guardian has with Charles Arthur’s Free Our Data campaign. Or for more protection of whistleblowers.

More broadly, we should be concerned with legal developments that make it easy for organisations or public authorities to prevent the publication of information they do not like. Some recent examples include the use of harassment law, Section 127 of the Communications Act, the Anti-Terrorism Act (see this recent decision and video), copyright laws, and so on.

The house of bricks: protecting sources at every point of contact

One of the reasons for Wikileaks’ success was the way it solved a security problem between sources and journalists. Part of that was technical, but part also legal: when the Wall Street Journal and Al Jazeera launched their own Wikileaks clones, commentators pointed out that not only did they both have security weaknesses, but that that they would still be no match for requests from government agencies:

“Despite promising anonymity, security and confidentiality, [Al Jazeera's service] can “share personally identifiable information in response to a law enforcement agency’s request, or where we believe it is necessary.” [WSJ's] SafeHouse’s terms of service reserve the right “to disclose any information about you to law enforcement authorities” without notice, then goes even further, reserving the right to disclose information to any “requesting third party,” not only to comply with the law but also to “protect the property or rights of Dow Jones or any affiliated companies” or to “safeguard the interests of others.” As one commentator put it bluntly, this is“insanely broad.” Neither SafeHouse or AJTU bother telling users how they determine when they’ll disclose information, or who’s in charge of the decision.”

Providing a secure facility for passing on leaked documents is just the most obvious aspect of the contact between journalists and sources, but with so much of that contact taking place digitally, journalists will need to understand the data trail that is being laid by both parties.

Brian McDermott, for example, writes about how facial recognition technology “might be driving some sources away” from the news. In 2010 Google’s CEO, Eric Schmidt, was quoted saying:

“Show us 14 photos of yourself, and we can identify who you are. You think you don’t have 14 photos of yourself on the Internet? You’ve got Facebook photos!”

Even bloggers are vulnerable. Previously on OJB I blogged about the sad case of Nightjack, a police blogger outed by The Times. Their report, it now turns out, relied on the hacking of Nightjack’s email account, while Belle de Jour and Girl With A One Track Mind say they were also hacked. Hacking from a different source appears to have been used against journalists in Tunisia.

For journalists working in an ‘open’ system this is problematic: trust is our bargaining chip. Local journalists understand this when they see their national counterparts parachuting into an area and acting unethically, giving their profession a bad name without having to stick around to take the consequences.

Nowadays a journalist or brand using questionable methods to get their story will find those methods associated with their name on Google.

We can give users the means, but without trust they have no motive to choose that particular journalist to work with.

In timely fashion, Cleland Thom offers a checklist of 10 ways for journalists to protect online sources. What’s notable from this generally very useful list is the ‘horse has already bolted’ reaction to some of the points.

• Is it possible for us to cover a patch without ‘friending’, following or connecting to anyone who might potentially leak a story to us at some point?
• Even the first tip – to use direct messaging instead of public messaging – has a vulnerability: if the person registered with the service using their work email, then a DM will show up in the work’s email inbox.
• Operating from an assumption that we will already be connected to potential sources, how can we protect them?

Thom covers a lot of the ground already: don’t talk about who you’re meeting; assume all your electronic communication is or will be made public. But perhaps there’s an educational role here as well. When we do meet a contact in person, ask which email account their Twitter DMs go to; ask if their mobile phone is owned by their employers; and make sure no one is taking pictures for their Facebook account. If we have to make a call, to use Skype, and tell the other person to delete their call log.

Increasingly, police will not need to ask journalists for their sources: interception of communications; approaches to web hosts and ISPs; and a quiet word with the social media platform hosts are all now options.

As users become more savvy to the vulnerabilities of living in public, we’ll have to up our game with our new ‘open’ colleagues if we are going to earn their trust.

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Late last year I was asked to put together some presentations giving advice on verifying information, finding people and stories online, ethics, and news values. These were translated by Anas Qtiesh into Arabic as part of CheckDesk, a project to support Middle East citizen journalists created by Meedan at Birmingham City University.

The materials are collected at ArabCitizenMedia.org. I’ve linked to each presentation above.

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The following is taken from the law chapter of The Online Journalism Handbook. The book blog and Facebook page contain updates and additions – those specifically on law can be found here.

Harassment

The Protection From Harrassment Act 1997 is occasionally used to prevent journalists on reporting on particular individuals. Specifically, any conduct which amounts to harassment of someone can be considered to a criminal act, for which the victim can seek an injunction (followed by arrest if broken) or damages.

One example of a blogger’s experience is illustrative of the way the act can be used with regard to online journalism, even if no case reaches court.

In January 2010 the Seismic Shock blog published a post linking an Anglican reverend with holocaust denial and antisemitism. The reverend complained of harassment to his local police force – Surrey Police – who passed on the complaint to the police force covering the blogger’s district: Yorkshire Police. Yorkshire Police visited the blogger and suggested he remove his blog.

The blogger, feeling intimidated, complied.

It was only when the reverend threatened another blogger (who had linked to the same evidence), boasting of his previous success (and falsely claiming that Seismic Shock had received a caution), that the Seismic Shock blogger talked publicly about what had happened and the story received national attention (Cellan-Jones, 2010).

Defences to a charge of harassment include if you were undertaking actions for the purpose of preventing or detecting crime, or that your conduct was “reasonable” in the particular circumstances.

The fewer the incidents, and the more spaced out the instances of those, the weaker the case.

If you have complied with an internal code of conduct with regard to privacy and fairness this will also help you.

A further consideration with regard to harassment is if someone claims that they are being harassed on your website. While they can report the harasser to the police, they might also expect you to take action under the Equality Act 2010 if the harassment is sexual in nature or based on gender, sexuality, disability, age, pregnancy, race or religion.

This legislation is useful to refer to if you wish to remove content that might be considered harassment, or bar a contributor for such behaviour. As always, clear terms and conditions outlining unacceptable behaviour that would result in such actions will strengthen your position.

Data Protection

If you gathering user information in any way – for example, requiring users to register to comment, upload material or to access your site, or ‘crowdsourcing’ details which include personal information – then you will need to be aware of the Data Protection Act.

The Data Protection Act 1998 stipulates how you should process any personal information you handle, and gives individuals powers to request access to information held about them. It requires that you use information “fairly and lawfully” and only for the purposes for which it is gathered, and only for as long as it is needed; that you store it securely and do not transfer it outside the EU (unless you ensure adequate protection); that you keep it accurate and up to date where necessary; and that you provide avenues for users to access their personal data if they require it.

In practical terms this means that when you gather information you should be clear about what it is to be used for and how the user can gain access to information held about them.

You should only provide access to user databases or spreadsheets containing personal details to members of staff who need that access to do what you said would be done with that information.

Importantly, the Act contains an exemption for information held only for ‘journalistic, literary or artistic’ purposes, which applies before first publication and if the publisher believes that publication would be in the public interest.

If these conditions are met then the data must only be held securely and you are exempt from the other requirements.

This is clearly important because otherwise the subject of a secret investigation could request any information that is held about them.

More information and advice about data protection can be found on the Information Commissioner’s Office website.

Hate speech laws

A number of laws forbid expression of ‘hate speech’ online in the UK. The Public Order Act 1986, the Racial and Religious Hatred Act 2006 and the Criminal Justice and Immigration Act 2008 cover, respectively, stirring up racial hatred (which can be based on nationality, colour, and ethnic origins); stirring up religious hatred; and inciting hatred on the basis of sexual orientation. If material is published on your site comes under any of these categories you should inform the contributor of the legal basis under which you are removing them.

Incitement and offensive communications

In addition to the hate speech laws covered in the Online Journalism Handbook, there are three other laws that are increasingly coming into play with relation to comments posted by website users.

The law on incitement – now “encouraging or assisting a crime” under the Serious Crime Act 2007 covers acts where individuals incite others to commit illegal acts. It was used in a number of cases surrounding the UK riots where defendants were accused of encouraging disorder using social networks such as Facebook, with two men in particular receiving a sentence of 4 years in prison as a result.

Student Liam Stacey was charged under a second act – the Crime and Disorder Act 1998 – which covers incitement to ethnic or racial hatred, after making racist remarks on Twitter in the aftermath of the collapse of Bolton Wanderers footballer Fabrice Muamba. He was sentenced to 56 days in prison.

The Communications Act 2003, specifically Section 127 – covers “grossly offensive” messages, a term broad enough to include a worrying range of discussion for publishers.

A number of Twitter users have been prosecuted under the act for offensive messages sent to footballers.

It was also used to prosecute Azhar Ahmed for the following statement, also on Facebook:

“People gassin about the deaths of soldiers! What about the innocent familys who have been brutally killed.. The women who have been raped.. The children who have been sliced up..! Your enemy’s were the Taliban not innocent harmless familys. All soldiers should DIE & go to HELL! THE LOWLIFE F*****N SCUM! gotta problem go cry at your soliders grave & wish him hell because that where he is going..”

The contentious issue here is who decides what is offensive. As Fahad Ansari explains:

“The test for “grossly offensive” is whether or not the message would cause gross offence to those to whom it relates, who need not be the recipients.”

Normally these laws are used to charge individuals, but publishers and journalists should also be aware of the potential for them to be used to request users’ details – including sources. If they have been warned about such content and have not removed it, there may also be legal consequences. These are as yet largely unexplored, although the case of News Ltd in Australia – found to have breached racial discrimination laws in publishing moderated comments – is illustrative.

The lawyer Charles Russell deconstructs a series of cases relating to that act here, including the ‘Twitter Joke Trial’.

Stalking

Bloggerheads’ Tim Ireland writes about his experiences of accusations of ‘stalking’ by one MP after he wrote about evidence surrounding the investigation into her expenses claims. The series is worth reading as an illustration of how social media is bending the boundaries of the physical and digital worlds:

“Chris Paul blogged about Nadine Dorries. Dorries reported him to police as a stalker.

“Ms Humphreycushion tweeted about Nadine Dorries. Dorries reported her to police as a stalker.

“I blogged and tweeted about Nadine Dorries. I also attended a public meeting I was invited to. Dorries reported me to police as a stalker.

“Linda Jack ran against Nadine Dorries in an election. Dorries reported her to police as a stalker.“

Tim has used the Data Protection Act particularly well to obtain the original complaints made against him, although:

“Even when I submitted a subject access request to her office legally compelling her to reveal what she claims are my emails, she refused to cooperate (!) in defiance of the Information Commissioner’s Office and the Data Protection Act.”

Do you know of any other examples of stalking laws being used in relation to journalism?

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Note: for those coming from Poynter’s summary of part of this post, the phrase ‘don’t have to be trained’ has an ambiguity that could be misunderstood. I’ve expanded on the relevant section to clarify.

Another set of answers to another set of questions (FAQs). These are posed by a UK university student:

How would you define the blogosphere?

The blogosphere is, technically, all blogs – but those don’t often have much connection to each other. I think it’s better to talk of many ‘blogospheres’ around different topics, e.g. the political blogosphere and so on.

The term has become more problematic as the blog form has spread beyond pure blog platforms: for example, social networks give users blogging functionality (e.g. status updates); Twitter is a microblogging platform; and photo, video and audio sharing sites add a multimedia dimension.

It’s probably more useful simply to talk about a community of interest rather than a blogosphere.

What about the issue of the blogosphere being accurate and pursuing the truth, as contrary to ‘proper’ journalism there is no regulation and no rules?

It’s a false comparison, in all sorts of ways. Firstly. the blogosphere is defined by platform, whereas journalism is defined by form. You can’t say blogging is or is not journalism, any more than you can say printing is or is not journalism.

Secondly, it’s a selective definition. There is plenty of journalism which is unregulated (not every publisher is a member of the PCC) and plenty of blogging which is ‘regulated’, either formally (bloggers adhering to a code of conduct, or being members of the NUJ or similar) but, more often, informally (being ‘regulated’/held to account by users).

Ultimately, bloggers and journalists both have to follow ‘rules’, most notably the laws that apply to us all. The internet is not a lawless wild west. Bloggers and journalists also have to follow the rules of society – norms and values which, if transgressed, lead to social exclusion. Many bloggers seek to hold journalists to account in ways that they see regulators failing at, so the argument can be made both ways: are journalists, driven by commercial demands, more likely to publish false or inaccurate information than bloggers who do not have the same demands? The truth is that both commercial and amateur journalism is subject to positive and negative forces in that respect.

This post on blogging vs journalism ethics has more.

To what extent are people more easily deceived by what is read on blogs and is it possible to stop false information from spreading?

Again, there is a problem here with treating ‘blogs’ in general, just as there is in treating the media in general. Journalists are among the least trusted professions – in general – but dig deeper and you find that BBC journalists have much more trust, and tabloid ones less. The Daily Star is trusted less than Twitter (a stupid comparison, but illustrative nonetheless), but The Times is trusted more than many other publications.

So, people are ‘more easily deceived’ by what is credible. They make judgements on a variety of criteria: the brand, the journalist, the context, and particularly the information itself. This applies whether the story is on a blog or a mainstream media outlet.

I’d love to see some research which explores what role the platform has in that mix when applied to specific content (e.g. show people the same content on different platforms and look at differing trust levels, then change the author, etc. to see how much impact that has), rather than research which simply asks people ‘How much do you trust blogs/newspapers/etc?’

Is it possible to stop false information from spreading? It is certainly possible to seek to spread the true story, and social media helps with this – again, whether it comes from blogs or the press (witness the various Twitter uproars over misleading media coverage). When shutting down social media was mooted after the UK riots the emergency services objected because they said social media allowed them to debunk rumours much faster than would otherwise be possible – which I think is illustrative.

We also have to acknowledge that false information is spread by traditional news organisations as well, and blogs have played an important role in tackling this too.

How can blogs actively promote truthful news/stories when contrary to media outlets, the bloggers are not necessarily trained?

There’s an assumption that all journalists are “trained”. They’re not. Many journalists have not been to any sort of journalism school, and some don’t receive in-house training.

Likewise, many bloggers have studied journalism or media, or done journalism or media production training courses.

We should also remember that journalism training is a relatively modern thing – for a long time most journalists entered the profession without training, and some great journalism has been produced by ‘untrained’ journalists.

There’s the suggestion here that people need require training in order to tell the truth. They don’t, of course. People, by and large, tell the truth. There’s a certain egotism to journalists who feel that their trade somehow has a monopoly on truth-telling.

In practical terms, journalism training largely takes truth-telling for granted as something that has been learned many years previously (if it hasn’t then that is addressed in informal and formal feedback).

Journalism training consists, if we’re honest I think, of taking ‘the truth’ – which can be complex, boring, and confusing, and showing how to turn that into a story – simple, interesting (through, for example, focusing on a ‘conflict’, even where that may not be as important as portrayed) and clear. Or, even before then, of which parts of ‘the truth’ to seek out to optimise your chances of getting ‘the story’ quickest.

As journalists we know that the truth is often more complicated than we represent it, so we cannot accuse bloggers of being generically unreliable without acknowledging that our own methods have flaws too.

We also know that any truth that we present is always partial – subject to the limitations of what information we could gather in the time available to us. Official statements and data go unchallenged; we run out of time to find an appropriate ‘victim’ – or we generalise from the same one that everyone else did. When the news agenda moves on, journalists don’t always return to check what else we know. Bloggers, at least, can be less concerned with the news agenda (but they can’t always get an official reaction).

The opportunity in online journalism – whether by professionals or amateurs – is to better represent that complexity, through linking to more detail (full interviews or raw footage, original documents, complete data) or providing for interactivity (how the story affects their postcode, family, or school; experiencing how a process works)

I’d also be interested to see how news consumers’ judgment of ‘truthfulness’ evolves with the medium. Will we attribute more credibility to a story if there are links to source material? Will we be more sceptical if comments are turned off? If we correct content rather than treat it as static? Bloggers tend to be better at all the above – journalists need to catch up.

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The Guardian has been talking about being ‘of the web’ rather than ‘on the web’ for some years now, with a “federated” (as some staff call it) approach to publishing which often involves either selling advertising across, or pulling in content from, other sites (disclosure: this is one of them). Its Open Platform is a technical expression of the same idea, allowing others to build things with its content – which can then take advertising with it. And its successful Facebook app shows its ability to adopt any platform that works.

Now it has announced a partnership with arts organisations – and YouTube – that demonstrates a further development of this approach. 

It’s a recognition that it’s not just media organisations that are now in the content business (witness Manchester City’s policy of recruiting digital heads from press and TV) – and a news publisher’s role has to be re-assessed in that context (better to be partners than competitors, perhaps?).

Here is a list of what’s going to be produced as a result:

• Glyndebourne: live-streaming five operas, as well as “recordings to accompany two other productions this season [...] Each opera will be available to view again on the Guardian’s website, and each will be accompanied by a series of podcasts and videos as well as related editorial, blogs, picture galleries and live chat with the Guardian’s expert team of critics.
• Royal Opera House with YouTube: streaming “a full day of rehearsals from The Royal Ballet from the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden, featuring live streams of two ballets currently in development”
• The Young Vic: “working with them to develop an exclusive short film starring Patrick Stewart”
• The Roundhouse:  live streaming Cirkus Cirkör Undermän
• Artangel: streaming “intimate live performances and recorded podcasts by a number of renowned artists”

Naturally, acting as a platform for third party content raises the question of how this affects editorial integrity. In the announcement Stephen Folwell, Business Director, Multimedia and Brand Extensions, Guardian News & Media, mentions “the diverse [multimedia*] packages we can offer other potential partners.” But it wouldn’t be the first time a news organisation has had to manage this tension, as I coincidentally blogged about in my previous post - it’s just the old problem in a new suit.

Meanwhile, in the same newspaper, art critic Jonathan Jones writes about how his role changed as readers became content producers too.

*Clarification from a GNM spokesperson, who adds: “We also offer sponsorship opportunities around multimedia content”

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There’s a wonderfully written post on Sean Blanda’s blog about fixing entrepreneurial journalism courses. Unusually, the post demonstrates a particularly acute understanding of the dynamics involved in teaching (Lesson One, based on my experience of teaching ‘strategic learners’, strikes me as a particularly effective tactic*, while Lesson Two addresses the most common problem in students’ ideas: vagueness, or ‘mass marketism’).

But it also reminded me of a conversation I had recently about journalism students’ reactions to being taught entrepreneurialism – and the one lesson that’s missing from Sean’s list.

It’s this lesson: “Why?”

Here’s the thing: journalism students – and I hope I’ll be forgiven for generalising horribly here – often have quite a conservative perspective of the profession. For example: despite print journalism bleeding jobs and online publishing being one of the biggest areas of growth, you wouldn’t know that by looking at the application numbers for the courses leading to each industry.

The majority of students still want to be print or broadcast journalists – even while most of them get all their news online and most people in the industry are having to adapt to multiplatform roles. And unfamiliar roles like community management take a great deal of explaination and justification.

Teaching entrepreneurial journalism, it seems, generates the same reaction. Many students struggle to connect with it on an emotional level, or, more often, worry about its impact on editorial independence.

So somewhere between lessons one and seven – probably quite early on – I’d add another: ‘Saying No‘

Saying No

This lesson would deal directly with negotiating the tension between short- and longer-term commercial demands; how to maintain good relationships while also maintaining a professional distance.

You’ll notice that I avoid using the terms ‘ethics’ or ‘editorial independence’ or other normative terms. Because, frankly, that language isn’t going to get you anywhere in an argument with an investor or publisher. And it will make that week’s class stick out as somehow ‘academic’ and unrelated to the core of entrepreneurship.

Ultimately, of course, it is about ethics and independence – but specifically why those ethics and that independence have evolved in traditional journalism, and how we have those arguments in the profession.

Ideally it would involve a case study or two of people who have found themselves in those positions of having to explain to an advertiser or client why we are not going to do what they want. I don’t think you’ll have to look far to find those. Every editor, publisher, and ad sales director deals with these every month.

Here are some starters: we say no to that advertiser because it will undermine our brand and reduce our audience, which the advertiser themselves does not want. We say no to that client’s demands because other clients will stop dealing with us if we don’t treat them all the same. We say no because we will end up in court (even if that’s not always true). We say no because our boss won’t agree to it (even if we don’t have to ask). We say no because the costs would outweigh the benefits.

What else should be in that lesson – and are there others?

*The idea of grading students *entirely* based on profits – or even revenue – is of course unworkable (universities could not accredit any course module based on this measurement), inappropriate (it’s not teaching the level of critical thought that a postgrad course should), and unrealistic within the timescale of study. Most new businesses don’t make money for their first couple of years, and under those criteria some of the biggest companies of the internet age would get an ‘F’ (and the biggest failures would get an ‘A’)But the principle of a small element based on this to get students’ minds focused and reward those who make a successful start, is a good one.

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Over the weekend Fleet Street Blues has had a bee in its bonnet about the “pretence” of data journalism and Saturday’s Guardian front page: “Half UK’s young black men out of work“.

This, says FSB, is a lie that demonstrates the ”pretence” that “‘crunching the numbers’ is somehow an an abstract, scientific, mathematical task”.

There are two problems with this: the first is that I’ve never heard a data journalist make this claim; and the second is that the ‘lie’ does not come from a data journalist (they generally don’t write headlines). It is, in short, a straw man.

The story itself is, however, perfectly valid. While FSB points to the exclusion of students, for example, The Guardian’s story mentions that early on.

It’s fair to say that those who are economically inactive should not be included in unemployment figures. Indeed, the Datablog post which expands on the data does a very good job in explaining how that activity is mentioned:

“Youth unemployment figures are always slightly odd, and as with many things in life, it’s students that get the blame.

“Students can be counted in three different ways: a full-time student doing an evening job in a bar counts as employed. A student who wants bar work but can’t get it is unemployed. A full-time student who’s not topping up his income with a job (and isn’t trying to) is economically inactive.”

Fleet Street Blues uses the raw data published by the Datablog to highlight a number of other ways of interpreting the data, all of which are interesting – and in fact, I’ll probably use them in future as an example of how the same data can tell many different stories.

More than one story

But again, this proves nothing about the ‘pretence’ of data journalism. All it proves is that there is more than one story to be found in a dataset, and that journalists will pick the one that is most newsworthy for their particular market.

In fact, not only journalists, but politicians, PR staff, marketers, scientists, lobbyists and anyone else who wants to tell a story.

It’s because of this that data journalism is not something which should be snootily written off as a “fad”. Data is important. Journalists need to be able to interrogate it and find the stories that are not being told.

That is exactly what The Guardian have done. Yes, the headline could be more accurate* – but how many times has a headline writer omitted key details due to the limitations of space (on every type of story)? And yes, as one FSB commenter points out, the inclusion of whole numbers would have added further context.

But the irony is that it’s precisely because The Guardian isn’t trying to pretend to be ‘The Only Truth’ that FSB and its commenter can interrogate the data, and that the reader can understand the subtleties in how data is gathered and classified.

If there is a pretence about data journalism, it is a wider one: a  belief in society that somehow numbers equate to truth. A belief which is exploited by politicians but which is coming – and should come – under increasing scrutiny from journalists. (The story, for example, began as a column by a Labour politician in The Guardian, fact-checked by Channel 4 News, and followed up by The Guardian’s journalists)

The more good data journalism we have, the less that anyone – including journalists – can pretend to the idea of a “scientific” process.

*(Notably, the online version includes a second headline which is clearer: “Unemployment rate for black 16 to 24-year-olds available for work now double that for white counterparts, ONS data shows”)

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Posted in full over on the Online Journalism Handbook blog is a summary of a recent judgement in the Court of Justice, which suggests the idea of ‘database copyright’ has to involve creativity and originality – important for those involved in data journalism who are either seeking to establish copyright over their work, or understand the situation regarding the copyright of databases they are using.

Here’s a key quote:

“criterion of originality is satisfied when, through the selection or arrangement of the data which it contains, its author expresses his creative ability in an original manner by making free and creative choices […] and thus stamps his ‘personal touch’”. Therefore, the Court continues, the criterion is “not satisfied when the setting up of the database is dictated by technical considerations, rules or constraints which leave no room for creative freedom”.

More over there

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