Archive for the 'UGC' Category

How a musician and a Sikh TV channel dominated coverage of the Birmingham riots

It’s one thing to cover rioting on the doorstep of the national press – it’s quite another when squeezed regional newsrooms have to do the same. And as rioting in the UK spread from London to Birmingham and then other cities, some unlikely suspects showed how to cover a riot online even when you don’t have a newsroom. Dominating online
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Learning about community strategies: 10 lessons

Back in February I blogged about the process of teaching journalism students to think about working with communities. The results have been positive: even where the strategy itself wasn’t successful, the individuals have learned from its execution, its research, or both. And so, for those who were part of this process – and anyone else who’s interested – I thought
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FAQ: How can broadcasters benefit from online communities?

Here’s another set of questions I’m answering in public in case anyone wants to ask the same: How can broadcasters benefit from online communities? Online communities contain many individuals who will be able to contribute different kinds of value to news production. Most obviously, expertise, opinion, and eyewitness testimony. In addition, they will be able to more effectively distribute parts
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A course on verifying information

I’m holding a one-off training day in August on verifying information online and finding sources, in London at the Royal Society of Medicine. In the context of various straight men pretending to be gay women, it’s quite timely.  

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My online journalism book is now out

The Online Journalism Handbook, written with Liisa Rohumaa, has now been published. You can get it here. I’ve been blogging throughout the process of writing the book – particularly the chapters on data journalism, blogging and UGC – and you can still find those blog posts under the tag ‘Online Journalism Book‘. Other chapters cover interactivity, audio slideshows and podcasting,
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The Charlie Sheen Twitter intern hoax – how it could be avoided

Various parts of the media were hoaxed this week by Belfast student Jonny Campbell’s claim to have won a Twitter internship with Charlie Sheen. The hoax was well planned, and to be fair to the journalists, they did chase up documentation to confirm it. Where they made mistakes provides a good lesson in online verification. Where did the journalist go
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Should you ‘brand’ a hashtag?

Two experiments by news organisations with Twitter hashtags during today’s UK budget have raised an issue around ‘branding’ and how appropriate it is to social media. The BBC, it seems, is encouraging users to adopt the #BBCBudget hashtag to flag their tweets as part of the ‘national conversation’. Channel 4′s Faisal Islam, above, feels it’s a waste of 3 characters.
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Guest post: Do we need moderation guidelines for dealing with mental health issues?

Last month the Press Complaints Commission made a judgement in a case involving discriminatory comments on a newspaper article. The case highlighted the issue of journalism on mental health and how it is treated by publishers alongside similar considerations such as sexuality, gender, religion and ethnicity. The complaint also led to a change in The Guardian’s moderation rules. In a
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‘UGC’ and journalism: the Giffords shooting and Facebook page moderation

The Obama London blog has a post looking at the moderation of comments on Sarah Palin’s Facebook page (following the Giffords shooting) which raises a couple of key points for journalists dealing with user generated content. Editorially selected, not UGC The first point is that it can be easy to assume user generated content is an unadulterated reflection of one
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Internet use in the UK – implications from Ofcom’s research for publishers

UPDATE: The Office for National Statistics has also released some data on internet access which paints a more positive picture. Their data puts the numbers who haven’t been online at 18%. And 45% had accessed the web on the move . I’ve just been scanning through the internet section of Ofcom’s latest report on The Communications Market 2010. As always, it’s
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