Journalism.co.uk have a list of this year’s “leading innovators in journalism and media”. I have some additions. You may too.

Nick Booth

I brought Nick in to work with me on Help Me Investigate, a project for which he doesn’t get nearly enough credit. It’s his understanding of and connections with local communities that lie behind most of the successful investigations on the site. In addition, Nick helped spread the idea of the social media surgery, where social media savvy citizens help others find their online voice. The idea has spread as far as Australia and Africa.

Matt Buck and Alex Hughes

Matt and Alex have been busily reinventing news cartoons for a digital age with a number of projects, including Drawnalism (event drawing), animated illustrations, and socially networked characters such as Tobias Grubbe.

Pete Cashmore

Mashable.

Tony Hirst

Tony has been blogging about mashups for longer than most at OUseful.info, providing essential help for journalists getting to grips with Yahoo! Pipes, Google spreadsheets, scraping, and – this week – Google App Inventor.

Adrian Holovaty and Simon Willison

I’m unfairly bunching these two together because they were responsible – with others – for the Django web framework, which has been the basis for some very important data journalism projects including The Guardian’s experiment in crowdsourcing analysis of MPs’ redacted expenses, and Holovaty’s Everyblock.

Philip John

Behind the Lichfield Blog but equally importantly, Journal Local, the platform for hyperlocal publishers which comes with a raft of useful plugins pre-installed, and he runs the West Midlands Future of News Group.

Christian Payne

Documentally has been innovating and experimenting with mobile journalism for years in the UK, with a relaxed-but-excitable on-screen/on-audio presence that suits the medium perfectly. And he really, really knows his kit.

Meg Pickard

Meg is an anthropologist by training, a perfect background for community management, especially when combined with blogging experience that pre-dates most of the UK. The practices she has established on the community management front at The Guardian’s online operations are an exemplar for any news organisation – and she takes lovely photos too.

Chris Taggart

Chris has been working so hard on open data in 2010 I expect steam to pour from the soles of his shoes every time I see him. His ambition to free up local government data is laudable and, until recently, unfashionable. And he deserves all the support and recognition he gets.

Rick Waghorn

One of the first regional newspaper reporters to take the payoff and try to go it alone online – first with his Norwich City website, then the MyFootballWriter network, and more recently with the Addiply self-serve ad platform. Rick is still adapting and innovating in 2010 with some promising plans in the pipeline.

I freely admit that these are based on my personal perspective and knowledge. And yes, lists are pointless, and linkbait.

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Information is changing. The news industry was born in a time of information scarcity – and any understanding of the laws of supply and demand will tell you that that made information valuable.

But the past 30 years have seen that the erosion of that scarcity. Not only have the barriers to publishing,  broadcast and distribution been lowered by desktop publishing, satellite and digital technologies, and the web – but a booming PR industry has grown up to provide these news organisations with ‘cheap’ news.

Information is changing. Increasingly, we are not seeking information out – instead, it finds us. The scarcity is not in information, but in our time to wade through it, make meaning of it, and act on it.

Information is changing, and so journalists must too. In the previous parts of this series I’ve looked at how the news process could change in a multiplatform environment; how to involve the former audience; what can now happen after a story is published; journalists and readers as distributors; and new media business models. In this part I want to look at personnel – and how we might move from a generic, hierarchy of ‘reporters’, ‘subs’ and ‘editors’ to a more horizontal structure of roles based on information types.

Quality versus quantity

The strategy of many news organisations so far has been to simply require existing journalists and editors to do more – to make videos and podcasts, take photos and write blogs; to scour social networks and forums and video sites; to encourage user generated content and audience participation. Some have created new positions for community editors, Flash developers and even ‘Data Delivery Editors‘, but those positions are still relatively rare – and the skillsets to do those jobs, even rarer.

I’ve identified 6 journalist roles based on 3 core types of information that I see journalists dealing with in a networked environment. Perhaps you can suggest other roles – or other types of information: This is by no means a complete list.

The 3 types of information:

• Feeds (RSS) – not just from news sites and blogs, but anywhere. This post on Passive Aggressive Newsgathering has more.
• Social networks – online and offline. You might have called them ‘contacts’ before, but the online element puts things on a different scale and footing. And here’s why: contacts should now be as likely to seek you out, as vice versa.
• Databases - publicly available, accessed through processes such as Freedom of Information requests, and built in-house.

The 6 new journalist roles:

The Aggregator-Sub

In the traditional newsroom, the sub sat between the journalist’s content and the reader. In the 21st century newsroom, this is inverted. In a world of information overload, those subbing skills take on a new role to collect feeds together (aggregating), identify the useful and relevant stuff (filtering), publish it (bookmark-blogging), identify legal issues and verify where necessary.

In other words, what many bloggers have been doing for years in providing a ‘pre-filtered web’ by highlighting the good stuff in their RSS feeds – and for this reason, the Aggregator-Sub may be an existing blogger employed part time or paid a syndication fee (presumably with some training in areas of concern such as law and house style).

The Aggregator-Sub could also perform an important role in the newsroom, highlighting useful leads for other journalists to pursue, or building widgets that present selected aggregations of feeds. A good example is Jemima Kiss’s Newsbucket.

The Mobile Journalist (MoJo)

As news organisations cut the budgets and focused on efficiencies, reporters found it harder and harder to justify time outside the office, becoming increasingly reliant on public relations and official sources in their pursuit of regular, reliable copy.

Ironically, one of the most positive developments of networked technologies is to enable journalists to leave the office while still being connected via mobile phone and 3G/wifi-enabled laptop.

The MoJo, then, is permanently ‘on the road’, Twittering as they go, streaming live video from their phone and posting raw audio from the field. They have a brief to dig out the people and stories that are offline – and give them an online presence. Reuters have experimented with this, as have Gannett, and Trinity Mirror are investing in N96s and wifi laptops for their Midlands reporters. As Chuck Myron says:

“It’s a smarter way of doing business. I’m in the field where stories are happening instead of sitting at my desk, waiting for a phone to ring. I don’t miss important calls, either, since I’ve got a cell phone that’s always in my pocket and not ringing away at my desk while I’m out of earshot at the copier. Technology has made people more mobile, and journalism has to react.”

The Data Miner

The investigative journalist of the 21st century is someone who can work with databases and spreadsheets, picking out interesting patterns, pushing the powerful for data, and having an understanding of the vagaries of statistics. Adrian Holovaty’s ChicagoCrime.org is the godfather of the form, while the New York Times recently launched its own Visualisation Lab. More recent examples include Stephen Grey, Heather Brooke, Louise Acford, and Dominic Casciani.

For an idea of the job spec, here is what the Chicago Tribune was asking of applicants, and here is what the Roanoke Times expected the person to do. For examples of database journalism in action, see my Delicious bookmarks on the topic.

The Multimedia Producer

For all the quality versus quantity arguments, there is nothing inherently wrong with some journalists becoming jacks of all trades (after all, that’s what they have had to be editorially). An understanding of how a story or issue can be explored on a range of media makes a significant difference in how you come up with story ideas and gather information.

The Multimedia Producer has this understanding, and most likely technical skills across audio, video and image production, blogging, using databases, mapping and mashups. They may not do all the work themselves – for example, working with Flash developers on database-driven interactives, or asking a MoJo to get a particular piece of video – but they can see the possibilities.

Here’s a job description from the Roanoke Times (again); another at The Day; and here’s an interview with Regina McCombs of the Star Tribune about her Multimedia Producer role.

The Networked Specialist

This is the specialist reporter for the 21st century: now it’s not just about knowing their subject area, and the big names, but also being visibly networked in that environment, blogging, vlogging, bookmarking and commenting across their specialist parts of the blogosphere.

The successful blogs – Mashable, TechCrunch, Daily Kos, Boing Boing, TPM – are past masters at this: not just reporting on what’s happening, but engaging, passing on, and acting as a crossroads of traffic.

Community Editor

I said earlier that the online element puts community contacts on a different scale and footing. Sources become collaborators, co-writers and distributors, and the Community Editor’s role is to manage that, building communities, helping start or fuel conversations, preventing them turning nasty, supporting users, inviting guidance and help, and assisting them in certain projects.

There are plenty of journalists performing a community editor role, including Shane Richmond at the Telegraph, Joanna Geary at the Birmingham Post and Mail and Andrew Rogers, head of UGC at Reed Business Information. I’ve been conducting a series of interviews asking community editors for their top three lessons.

The obligatory conceptual diagram

As you can see, the different roles relate to expertise in different types of information. Databases are used particularly by the Data Miner and the Multimedia Producer; feeds by all except the Data Miner (it’s not essential to what they do but could be fed into it, for example a Google Spreadsheet has an RSS feed); and social networks are important in the work of the Community Editor, Networked Specialist and MoJo.

But as always, this is a work in progress. What unusual jobs have you come across as news orgs move to new media? How is information changing, and how does that affect journalists’ roles?

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The best thing that I took from this week’s 2gether08 event was yesterday’s announcement by blogging MP Tom Watson and Ofcom’s blogging Tom Loosemore of Show Us a Better Way.

The site (also a blog – notice a pattern here?) is releasing a range of public data and inviting people to mash them up, or come up with ideas to do so. In their words:

The UK Government wants to hear your ideas for new products that could improve the way public information is communicated. The Power of Information Taskforce is running a competition on the Government’s behalf, and we have a £20,000 prize fund to develop the best ideas to the next level. You can see the type of thing we are are looking for here. 

To show they are serious, the Government is making available gigabytes of new or previously invisible public information especially for people to use in this competition.

While the US has a strong tradition of making public data available, which has enabled the likes of Adrian Holovaty to create pioneering mashups like ChicagoCrime.org and Everyblock, the UK’s public data has been much less open.

But that is changing. The Guardian’s ‘Free Our Data’ campaign has successfully heaped a lot of pressure on government to “Make taxpayers’ data available to them”, and when I was recently invited to take part in a government white paper workshop around “community empowerment”, I got the impression that I was knocking at a semi-open door when I said that public availability of data would be my number one priority (more on that workshop here).

Anyway, back to that new website. Murray Dick has already come up with some stonking ideas, and I would suggest every journalist in the country with any interest in the future of journalism should at the very least be watching this and thinking about the possibilities in their area. The Power of Information Task Force blog is well worth following for further examples internationally.

If you think FOI requests have transformed journalism in recent years, and the battle to retain those, think about this: if we don’t make the most of this opportunity, we’ll have no excuse when the government decides to withdraw the offer.

• Related links (via Nick Booth):

Bill Thompson

Justin Pickard: “This is what it’s all about”.

Shane McC: “Surely this can’t be government? But it is…Brilliant”

Guardian Tech: ” It would be fantastic if a Guardian Tech reader could win this”

Ideal Government: “we offered an OS map and a Google lava lamp”

Richard’s Kingdom: “what’s even better is that this competition is accompanied by a whole raft of new public APIs”

Ed Parsons: “I’m Impressed”

Skuds Sister: “I have more confidence in motivated geeks than in large companies”

Daveyp “does this mark a sea change”

Ideal Government: “Power of Information work is gathering pace and getting quite exciting”

Bob Piper: “My suggestion was going to be ‘Where’s my bloody post office gone’.”

Open: ” it behoves me to offer a little praise when they get things right”

100 ideas already Tom Watson: “we might have to find some more prizes.”

Personal Democracy: “Kudos to all!”

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Recently my attention has been drawn to the Dutch news website www.en.nl. Wilbert Baan, interaction designer for the Dutch newspaper de Volkskrant, told me he wants to see “what we can do with news, social networks, wikis and more.

“I think you might like the experiment we are doing,” he wrote.

And bloody hell was he right.

The first thing that strikes you about the site is the bar chart across the top of the page, replacing the traditional masthead. This is a newsriver:

Down the outside column is a list of articles from the past hour:

That’s culture shift number 1.

At the bottom of the page you will find recent images, social bookmark sites, most commented articles from the past 24 hours, most important and most viewed.

Culture shift number 2 is the list of incoming links to this article – something built into the very fabric of blogs (pingback) but so far either anathema to mainstream publishers (“send our readers elsewhere?”), or difficult with current content management systems.

And with one simple move the site demonstrates it’s part of the conversation.

The ‘most important’ list is also worth looking at. How did they decide what was “most important?” I asked.

“We are using around ten variables to decide what’s important news. The variables we’re using right now are pageviews, visits from external websites, unique referrers to an article, comments, votes (4 options) and the press agency urgency variable (3 options; normal, high, very high).

“By showing it next to the most viewed we can easily see how it works and adjust the settings to make it better. It’s not perfect yet, but it already works remarkably well.

“We could extend this even further (tags, edits, tag removals) or skip some. All the variables are connected to points, we can set a default amount of points to a variable and define or redefine the value for the website.

“We also made a tag sniffer at http://www.skitch.com/wilbertbaan/8733/en-tag-sniffing – it scans the text on certain names and auto tags the article.”

Wilbert’s next step is building a community that can contribute to make this website better with ideas or criticism. The newspaper is already conducting a conversation with readers on a NING social network where users can contribute new ideas and discuss the website (in Dutch), but clearly this is just the start.

“For example we could connect a popular social network to the website and use what your network reads to alter the presentation of the news. Or make section pages, or a frontpage?

And all this is possible because of a Holovaty-esque focus on the power of databases.

“The most important object is the database,” he writes on his blog. “We designed the database from a view that almost everything is possible with the data. We store a lot of information that might be valuable in the future. This allows us to experiment freely with the design and think up new features. The database is the most valuable asset of a news organization.”
And this means they can do “Almost everything. We can make mash-ups, feeds, aggregated pages. Hook in to social networks, extend the wiki functionality, and more. Technically everything is possible.”

Keep an eye on this one.

UPDATE: Wilbert writes: “We have added feeds for every tag, latest news and breaking news. We have also added a personal feed that can be created by selecting the tags you like or don’t like. Very rudimentary, but it is a first experiment with personalization (My feed: http://en.nl/en/my_rss.php?editorId=3) and you can take it anywhere you want.

“With these feeds we are encouraging developers to experiment with news sorting and make their own interface or mash-up.”

Read more posts about future newspapers here

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