Nestle’s social media car crash over Greenpeace’s Kit Kat video continues – this time on its Facebook fan page. Background here. Follow-up to my previous video above.

In it Steve not only invites comments on how their linking policy should develop, but also gives a valuable insight into the guidance distributed within the corporation, which includes the following:

• Related links matter: They are part of the value you add to your story – take them seriously and do them well; always provide the link to the source of your story when you can; if you mention or quote other publications, newspapers, websites – link to them; you can, where appropriate, deep-link; that is, link to the specific, relevant page of a website.
• Where we have previously copied PDFs (for full versions of official reports and documents, for example) and put them on our own servers, we should now consider in each case whether to simply link to PDFs in their native location – with the proviso that if it’s likely to be a popular story, we may need to let the site know of possible increased demand.

“On linking to science papers in particular,” Steve continues,

“we don’t currently have a specific policy, but the simplest principle would seem to be that we should find and provide the most relevant and useful links at time of writing, wherever they are – whether it’s an abstract of a scientific paper, the paper itself, or a journal.

“There is some devil in the detail as far as this goes, though. First and foremost, we’re often reporting a story before the full paper has been published, so there may not yet be a full document to link to; some journals are subscription-only; some have web addresses which might expire.”

The post ends with a series of specific questions about how the BBC should link, from what types of links are most valuable, to where they should be placed, to what they should do about linking to scientific papers and information behind paywalls.

The comments so far are worth reading too, raising as they do recurring issues around ethics (do you link to a far-right political party?) and, in one case, seeing linking as part of “this internal destruction of the BBC, linking out shouldn’t be featured at all”.

It’s a debate worth having, and Steve and the BBC deserve credit for engaging in it.

VIV Mag Motion Cover – iPad Demo from Alexx Henry on Vimeo.

The bit of spectacular video above is doing the rounds as I type – a mock-up/demo of how a “motion magazine cover” might work on an iPad.

It’s lovely. But pointless.

What does it prove? It proves that magazines could do spectacular things with the iPad. It is, essentially, an advert masquerading as a magazine cover.

But then, magazine covers have always been adverts for their contents – and it’s a curiously old-media approach to focus so much energy on the front cover when, online, the majority of users typically never touch your homepage (will the iPad change that? I’m sceptical).

In fact, I wonder if a user on the bus would grow impatient with such an overblown introduction to their magazine.

It reminds me of those Flash-heavy ’splash pages‘ that websites used to employ to impress users – but which ultimately ended up frustrating them.

So it’s lovely, but it doesn’t solve any fundamental problems publishing faces right now. The iPad ain’t no silver bullet: the old problems haven’t gone away - an oversupply of information, oversupply of ad space, and a proliferation of alternatives to spend our entertainment budget on.

If anything, the iPad is a silver bullet to the head: with Apple keeping hold of user data, and insisting on the lion’s share of cover sale revenue, publishers are not going to be queueing up to join their gated paradise.

“Acting as curators, selecting and presenting content taken deep in the immense and self-expanding vaults of the internet,” explains Nicolas, “the Owni team links to the best and does the rest.”

I asked Nicolas 2 simple questions on his work at Owni. Here are his responses:

What are you trying to do?

What we do is datajournalism. We want to use the whole power of online and computer technologies to bring journalism to a new height, to a whole new playing field. The definition remains vague because so little has been made until now, but we don’t want to limit ourselves to slideshows, online TV or even database journalism.

Take the video game industry, for instance. In the late 1970’s, a personal computer could be used to play Pong clones or text-based games. Since then, a number of genres have flourished, taking action games to 3D, building an ever-more intelligent AI for strategy games, etc. In the age of the social web, games were quick to use Facebook and even Twitter.

Take the news industry. In the late 1970’s, you could read news articles on your terminal. In the early 2010’s you can, well… read articles online! How innovative is that? (I’m not overlooking the innovations you’ll be quick to think of, but the fact remains that most online news content are articles.)

We want to enhance information with the power of computers and the web. Through software, databases, visualizations, social apps, games, whatever, we want to experiment with news in ways traditional and online media haven’t done yet.

What have you achieved?

We started to get serious about this in February, when I joined the mother company (22mars) full-time. In just a month, we have completed 2 projects

The first one, dubbed Photoshop Busters (see it here), gives users digital forensics tools to assess the authenticity of an image. It was made as a widget for one of our partners, LesInrocks.com.

More importantly, we made a Facebook app, Where do I vote? There, users can find their polling station and their friends’ for the upcoming regional election in France.

It might sound underwhelming, but it required finding and locating the addresses of more than 35,000 polling stations.

On top of convincing a reluctant administration to hand over their files, we set up a large crowdsourcing effort to convert the documents from badly scanned PDFs to computer-readable data. More than 7,000 addresses have been treated that way.

Dozens of other ideas are in the works. Within Owni.fr, we want to keep the ratio of developers/non-developers to 1, so as to be able to go from idea to product very quickly. I code most of my ideas myself, relying on the team for help, ideas and design.

In the coming months, we’ll expand our datajournalism activities to include another designer, a journalist and a statistician. Expect more cool stuff from Owni.fr.

Background;

Transcript:

Nestle staffer 1: “Greenpeace have done a viral video attacking our sourcing policy. I do so hope people don’t pass it on and it becomes a huge viral hit.”

Nestle staffer 2: “Yes. I know what will stop people passing it around and it becoming a huge viral hit: get YouTube to take it down for alleged copyright infringement.”

Nestle staffer 1: “Yes, that will definitely stop people passing it around and it becoming a huge viral hit. That is a good idea and I hope you get all the credit for that.”

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?

This was the final session in my undergraduate Online Journalism module (the other classes can be found here), taught last May. It’s a relatively brief presentation, just covering some of the possibilities of mashups and RSS, and some tools. The majority of the class is taken up with students using Yahoo! Pipes to aggregate a number of feeds.

I didn’t know how students would cope with Yahoo! Pipes but, surprisingly, every one completed the task.

As a side note, this year I kicked off the module with students setting up Twitter, Delicious and Google Reader – and synchronising them, so the RSS feed from one could update another (e.g. bookmarks being published to Twitter). This seems to have built a stronger understanding of RSS in the group, which they are able to apply elsewhere (they also have widgets on their blogs pulling the RSS feeds from Twitter & Delicious; and their profile page on the news website – built by Kasper Sorensen – pulls the latest updates from their Twitter, Delicious and blog feeds).

A highlight of my recent visit with MA Online Journalism students to the BBC’s user generated content hub was the opportunity to ask this question posed by Andy Mabbett via Twitter: ‘Why don’t you link back to people if they send a picture in?’ (audio embedded above and here).

The UGC Hub’s head, Matthew Eltringham, gave this response:

“We credit their picture … we absolutely embrace the principle of linking on and through. I think the question would be – if Andy sends in a picture because he happened to witness a particular event, how relevant is the rest of his content to the audience. I think we’d have to take a view on that.”

It was a highlight because something clicked in my head at this point. You see, we’d spent some of the previous conversation talking about how the UGC hub verifies the reliability of user generated content, and it struck me that this view of the link as content could risk missing a key aspect of linking: context.

In an online environment one of the biggest signals in how we build a picture of the trustworthiness of someone or something is the links surrounding it. Who is that person friends with? What does this website link to? Who gathers here? What do they say? What else does this person do? What is their background, their interests, their beliefs?

All of this is invaluable context to us as users, not just the BBC.

While we increasingly talk about the role of publishers as curators of content [caveat], we should perhaps start thinking about how publishers are also curators of context.

Curators of context

And on this front, the corporation appears to have an enormous culture shift on its hands – a shift that it has been pushing in public for years, with varying degrees of success in different parts of the organisation.

BBC Radio, and many BBC TV programmes, for example, use users’ pictures and tweets and link and credit as a matter of course, while some parts of BBC News do link directly to research papers.

Yesterday I blogged about the frustration of Ben Goldacre at the refusal of parts of the BBC News website to deep link to scientific journal articles. In the comments to Ben’s post, ‘Gimpy’ says that the journalist quoted by Goldacre told him in “early 2008″ that linking was “something which must be reviewed”.

In May 2008 the BBC Trust said linking needed major improvements, and in October 2008 the Head of Multimedia said linking to external websites was a vital part of its future.

And this month, the corporation’s latest strategic review pledges:

“to “turn the site into a window on the web” by providing at least one external link on every page and doubling monthly ‘click-throughs’ to external sites: “making the best of what is available elsewhere online an integral part of the BBC’s offer to audiences”.”

Most recently, this week the BBC’s announcement of 25% cuts to its online spend motivated Erik Huggers to make this statement at a DTG conference:

“Why can’t we find a way to take all that traffic and help share it with other public service broadcasters and with other public bodies so that if our boat rises on the tide, everyone’s boat rises on the tide?

“Rather than trying to keep all that traffic inside the BBC’s domain we’re going to link out very aggressively and help other organisations pull their way up on the back of the investments that the BBC has made in this area.”

To be fair, unlike other media organisations, at least the BBC is talking about doing something about linking (and if you want to nag them, here’s their latest consultation).

But please, enough talk already. Auntie, give us the context.

UPDATE: More on the content vs context debate from Kevin Anderson.

UPDATE 2: The BBC have started a debate on the issue on their Editors’ Blog

The journalist and photographer Javier Bauluz is the only Spanish winner of the Pullitzer. He has published a preview of his next project, focused on journalism and human rights, at periodismohumano.com.

“The responsibility of the crisis: the greed of a few and the lack of controls from whom should control them, the representatives of the people and the toxic journalism that reports the reality only in terms of the media corporations’ political and economic interest”.

Such is Bauluz’s view of the current media crisis.

He then describes a picture well-known to anyone who has ever worked in big media: “There are more and more tired journalists, many hostages in their newsrooms, doing and saying what they’re told”.

With this perspective in mind, Bauluz thinks that the only solution to reconstruct journalism is for groups of colleagues to get together and organise online, supported by citizens, foundations and philanthropists. So we can say that non-profit journalism is not only an American or English idea.

“First it was an option, now it’s a need,” argues the Pulitzer prizewinner.

Using the Wordpress platform (and its open source benefits), periodismohumano.com will see daylight in the following weeks with the Universal Declaration of Human Right as their only flag and with all content available in all possible formats:

“If you want to save whales, you’re a member of Greenpeace; if you want doctors in Somalia, you’re a member of Doctors Without Borders; if you want quality information, you’re a member of Periodismo Humano (Human Journalism)”.

“Monsieur le journaliste? Votre interview avec le ministre est a deux heure.”

Mister journalist? Your interview with the minister is at two. Thank you, I say to the lady on the phone. Finally I managed to arrange an interview with a minister in Rwanda.

Some hours later I set up my tripod and camera, and start asking my questions. There I am with a small digital camera – and myself only. The minister is told that I am a correspondent for Dutch national television – normally the type of media you would expect to come with a camera man, reporter and a boom operator for the sound. The very kind and distinguished minister doesn’t give a wink about my solitary presence, and comments profoundly on the issues I raise.

Just because he’s used to it.

Before 2000 I was the typical television reporter coming with a crew. When the small digital cameras entered the market I took the challenge to do it on my own. As early video journalists we for some reason were forced into an innovative and creative approach. We had to do something different to the traditional crews, and so we did.

That was before I moved to Africa.

Here I saw that almost every television person is a video journalist. Most local television channels cannot afford full crews, and they depend on one-man-bands. No need to come up with other approaches or styles of storytelling. The video journalists bring news just as the traditional crews do.

The camera which is still mostly in use is the good old Sony PD150 or 170. However over the last years there has been a slight shift towards lower end HDV cameras, although they will be switched to DV or DVCAM and 4:3 aspect.

Here we’re talking about major national channels, because there is also a group of other video journalists carrying older and smaller cameras. These VJ’s are freelancers for the local channels or stringers for BBC or CNN. They really know their stuff, make reasonable shots, and know which questions to ask.

Being a VJ is about logistics.

In many African countries you have to a be a video journalist to move around. In remote areas it’s difficult to travel with a full crew, or you have to rent an expensive 4×4. A VJ can hop in local transport, or even board humanitarian or military flights taking the last and only, lucky-for-you, seat.

There are so many times it happened to me like that, and on arrival you’d discover that none of the traditional crews had made it there. That’s of course best, and it happens often.

It’s the same with borders. A video journalist can easily cross since the camera will be stowed away in your backpack, and no customs officer will bother. No need to fill out temporary import forms, or to pay deposits. They just consider you a tourist.

Being a VJ is about press freedom.

In several countries in Africa the press is free, as long as it doesn’t criticize the government or other big entities too openly.

It means that when things get dirty, it will become difficult for journalists to get there.

The fun part about it is that you will not openly be denied access. They let you go through friendly but lenghty accrediation procedures. If you get accredited at last, the event you were looking for will be long gone. Most journalists by then will have moved to other things to report on, and that’s what they’re aiming at.

Still, in the end your accreditation will only be a piece of paper, or a stamp. On the way you will find roadblocks manned by police officers who of course never heard of it, and can only let you pass after paying a hefty bribe.

The video journalist would be long back from shooting that same event, by being one of the passengers on local transport.

Being a VJ in Africa is about being able to report on matters you think are important.

http://videojournalist.nl