Online multimedia production has for a few years now come with the guidance to ‘chunk’ content: instead of producing linear content, as you would for a space in a linear broadcast schedule, you split your content into specific chunks of material that each tackles a different aspect of the issue or story being covered. Interfaces like these show the idea in practice best:

The concept is particularly well explained by Mindy McAdams (on text), and Andy Dickinson (on video, below):

“[T]ake an existing package and break it in to its key parts. Write a description of each chunk on to a card or post-it note. Lay them out in a line and then for each card add another for content you didn’t use at that point or expands on the content.

“Then try moving the content around in to sections that fit together. Pretty soon you will have the bare bones of a possible multimedia package.

Talking with some students recently about their own multimedia projects, however, I realised a weakness with the approach: we tend to assume that everyone comes to the story through the same interface.

And this is wrong.

While the practice of chunking multimedia was becoming semi-conventional, another convention was forming: every page is a homepage.

But in multimedia interactives, there’s only one homepage: the interface.

Rethinking the interface

When most multimedia interactives were Flash-based, this wasn’t a problem, because Flash doesn’t allow you to go ‘back’ or ‘forward’ between URLs so there was no need to consider the possibility of a user entering the interactive at different points (unless you split it into separate movies on different webpages). The whole movie sits on one URL, and you start at… the start.

With more and more interactive work using HTML5 or Javascript, however, that becomes a problem. Or rather: an opportunity.

As I’ve worked with students on investigations which were ’chunked’ into different elements (data; multimedia; explainers; case studies) I’ve noticed the same opportunity: each ‘chunk’ is its own homepage: a possible entry point for users into the investigation as a whole.

And that means being clear about the angle on each chunk – not just the product as a whole.

So if your multimedia interactive allows users to browse through a series of interviews, ask: what’s most newsworthy about each? What’s my headline to this, if I assume they haven’t seen any of the other related material? What other material might they want to see next? Will they want to share this individual element? Indeed, should it be published elsewhere too, if it isn’t already? How can it be best optimised for search engines?

In short, the interface is just our choice of arrangement for a set of multimedia elements. Our homepage: not, necessarily, everyone else’s.

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When we open-sourced the code for Help Me Investigate the plan was to move from a single site to a decentralised, networked structure. Now, thanks to Andy Dickinson, it has become even easier for anyone to host their own journalism crowdsourcing platform.

Since a conversation a couple of months ago, Andy has been tweaking a WordPress plugin that replicates the functionality of the previous Help Me Investigate site. It’s now ready for use.

The plugin adds an ‘Investigations’ page to your self-hosted WordPress blog which holds ‘sticky’ pages for any investigations you want to pursue, and allows you to break those down into distinct challenges that anyone can contribute to.

You can also add tags and grade progress, and limit access to make an investigation more private. Full functionality and limitations are listed on the plugin page.

(For more background on how the original Help Me Investigate site worked, see this About page.)

Original Help Me Investigate code also upgraded

Meanwhile, for organisations or groups with more technical resources Dave Goodchild has been upgrading the code for the original Help Me Investigate. This was originally written in Rails 2.3.2 but Dave has been upgrading it to more recent versions.

This code is more powerful than the plugin, but also more demanding technically. You can see – and help with – his latest upgrades at https://github.com/buddhamagnet/help_me_investigate

Help improve the plugin

Likewise, if you’re in the crowdsourcing spirit, Andy Dickinson is inviting people to help further develop the plugin.

Stay connected

Whether you use the plugin on your own blog or run the original Rails code on a news website – or want to help with either – please let me know: I’m happy to pass on my own experiences of running a crowdsourcing project, and as part of this move to a decentralised approach I’m compiling a list of investigations around the web so that people can more easily help – y’know – investigate…

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As part of an ongoing series on recent graduates who have gone into online journalism, online communities editor Ed Walker talks about what got him the job, what it involves, and what skills he feels online journalists need today.

I graduated from the University of Central Lancashire School of Journalism in 2007 with a BA (Hons) first-class in Journalism. I specialised in online journalism in my final year and was taught by the digital yoda that is Andy Dickinson.

As part of my degree I was taught how to do HTML/CSS, built websites from scratch, shot video, chopped up audio, used RSS feeds for newsgathering, wrote stories, blogged using WordPress, used content management systems and all that lovely stuff.

During the course it was obvious that you needed real experience – not just Microsoft Word-submitted stories to a lecturer – to get on in the industry. I started writing for my student paper, Pluto, as soon as I arrived – it was then in a monthly magazine format – and was part of the team that turned it into a fortnightly newspaper.

In 2005 we took the paper online for the first time with Pluto Online and I moved up to Assistant Editor before winning the election to become editor for a year.

We had some good splashes, with two stories going national, and we picked up two awards at the Press Gazette Student Journalism Awards 2008: the Scoop of the Year for an undercover investigation into an essay writing company run by a UCLan student; and one of our reporters picked up Student Reporter of the Year.

Experience

While studying I also did shifts for the Lancashire Evening Post as a reporter and got involved in the Johnston Press “Newsroom of the Future” project – shooting lots of video and audio for the website. I also had a really enjoyable placement and shifts with The Scotsman when Stewart Kirkpatrick, now of the Caledonian Mercury, was editor. This taught me a lot about how a national and regional operated in the same newsroom (standing me in good stead for my current role at Media Wales).

I also went to India for two and a half months to work for a publishing company, Explocity, on their range of magazines as a reporter and sub editor. Based in Bangalore, this was an eye-opening experience.

Finding a tough job market in the summer of 2008 I sold out and took a comms job at the university, but this involved managing the Students’ Union website and taught me a lot about content management, managing social media and databases/content management systems.

In January 2009 I started up a local news and community site for Preston, Blog Preston. This was partly to keep up some journalism experience and also to fill a void that was left by the Preston Citizen shutting down.

I used WordPress, built up contacts and stories started coming in. Local people found it a useful resource and we had great feedback and traffic figures. It’s still going now, I oversee some very talented student journalists at UCLan: Andy Halls, Joseph Stashko, Daniel Bentley and David Stubbings – who produce content and manage the site.

The Online Communities Editor role

As Online Communities Editor with Media Wales I took on the project of starting a community website for Cardiff (http://yourcardiff.walesonline.co.uk) under the main WalesOnline (http://www.walesonline.co.uk) site.

The Cardiff section on the WalesOnline site just saw content pumped through from the papers, so my role was to get under the skin of Cardiff, focus on community and council stories and attract guest bloggers to the site. I also manage the social media presences for yourCardiff and WalesOnline.

In the multimedia age I also write regularly for the South Wales Echo, and work on increasing reader interaction with stories in the paper and working on collaborative journalism projects like getting readers to submit their parking hotspots around the city. I can go from editing a Google map, to shooting video, to writing the splash, to editing a guest blog post all in the space of a few hours during any given day.

I like regional journalism. I like getting out into the community and reporting on stories that matter to them, so I’d definitely like to stay in regional journalism and move upwards.

Ideally I’d like to get involved in improving the quality of local newspaper websites, helping them connect with online communities and also getting better integration with the papers. There’s so much more that could be done and it’s an exciting time to be a journalist.

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As part of an ongoing series on recent graduates who have gone into online journalism, founder of Inside The M60 Nigel Barlow talks about what led him to launch his own news site, and where it might go next.

At the age of 43 I took the momentous decision to come out of finance and business and train to become a journalist starting a 3 year course at UCLAN.

I think I quickly realised that journalism was undergoing a massive change both in technology and in business and I quickly got into the conversation in my first year using blogging and then Twitter as well as attending as many journalism conferences in the flesh as possible.

For me the tools of new media, blogs, easy to use video, Twitter, RSS feeds etc. were a necessary tool for anyone wanting to break into journalism.

But more than that, it was changing the fundamentals of the economics of publishing and making me think that the route for me would be to go down the low cost route of setting up a niche site.

I have to say that apart from a few individuals on the UCLAN course (Andy [Dickinson] obviously) there was little encouragement to go down the route I have taken. The traditional paths into journalism were the ones that were being paraded and the use of new media, I have to say, was bolted on to courses rather than being the norm.

Very few of my fellow students blogged except when they had to for course work and Twitter was not used to any great extent.

When I graduated, the idea probably hadn’t still formed for Inside the M60 but my six months working at Innovation Manchester setting up their social media network opened my eyes to a lot of what was going on in Manchester which simply was not being reported (besides making loads of contacts).

I’d met Louise [Bolotin] through Twitter and then Social Media Cafe and coming back together from a journalism conference we decided that there was too much talking about journalism’s future and not enough action. We found that we had both been thinking about a news site for Manchester, maybe in slightly different ways.

I started to talk to a number of people in Manchester and in the industry about it and here we are today: still with a lot to do but excitingly building up a great brand in the city and ruffling the traditionalists’ feathers.

As to how it develops in the future: the project is already changing direction. I want to move away from the “hyperlocal” tag which seems to have so many connotations and instead, with the right amount of resource, I want to make Inside The M60 the news site for Manchester which will be sustainable as a low cost provider.

This may be pie in the sky at the moment but I’m ambitious

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UPDATE: From the comments: similar lists now available for Norway and Sweden.

I will soon begin teaching my annual module in Online Journalism and one of the first things I get the students to do is set up a Twitter account. It’s often a struggle to demonstrate the usefulness of Twitter, so this time around, in addition to following each other, I’m going to give them 10 people to start following from the off. This is the list I’ve come up with – would welcome your suggestions for others:

1. @davelee - former journalism student and excellent blogger who landed a plum job at the BBC after graduating. Get the point?
2. @channel4news - example of how a news organisation can use Twitter in a personal, conversational way, rather than simply republishing its RSS feed (see also: @r4news, @mashable)
3. @jemimakiss – likewise, example of a journalist using Twitter to involve readers in production, as well as just be a ‘real person’ (alternative: Mike Butcher).
4. @jayrosen_nyu – journalism professor at New York University with excellent links and analysis on the news industry and online journalism (see also: @jeffjarvis)
5. @digidickinson – Andy Dickinson, UK journalism lecturer and online video specialist. Ditto above. (alternative: @egrommet)
6. @bhampostjoanna – Jo Geary of the Birmingham Post & Mail, uses Twitter brilliantly, and is so switched on there’s a power surge every time she wakes up. (alternatives: Sarah Hartley and Alison Gow)
7. @shanerichmond – Communities Editor at The Telegraph, knows his onions. (alternative: Martin Stabe)
8. @documentally - vlogger, moblogger, social media man, has worked with Reuters and others
9. This is a local choice so you would probably have a local equivalent, but @peteashton founded local arts blog Created In Birmingham, which recently won Best UK Blog. Every journalism student should be following – and talking with – people like this in their area. One good place to find out is by searching twitter.grader.com for your area
10. Likewise, @tom_watson is a local MP, but is closely involved in campaigning for the release of government data to the public, and in the government’s digital communications generally. You may have a local or national equivalent.

Needless to say I’ll be suggesting they use services like Twellow, Twitterlocal and Twits Like Me to find other users in their ‘beat’, but I think it helps get someone into a conversation quicker if they can see what other people are talking about – and how.

Over to you – who would you recommend…?

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A couple months ago I installed a plugin on the blog that meant search engines would index links in comments: by default WordPress uses ‘nofollow‘ on comments to stop spammers abusing them to boost search engine rankings, but that prevents genuine commenters getting credit for their contributions.

One problem: as one commenter pointed out, the blog as a whole was set to ‘noindex-nofollow’ “which equals a no trespasing sign for search engines for ALL of the site’s links. It’s Google suicide.”

I added that problem to my vast to-do list, and moved on.

But that moved to the top of my to-do list recently when the BBC made a similar mistake with their linking mechanisms.

So I scoured this blog’s code to delete the meta tag nofollow reference – to no avail.

I called for help from Twitter followers, and got two very useful suggestions: Andy Dickinson found a plugin to alter the meta tags; and Gavin Wray pointed out the much simpler option: in the blog admin go to Settings > Privacy > and select make visible to search engines.

Invisible comments

But now I have a new problem. As Malcolm Coles pointed out in the comments, the commenting system IntenseDebate uses javascript, which means “the comments are invisible to search engines in any case because they now rely on javascript to be seen … (try looking at those pages with javascript off to see what I mean).”

This is not only a problem for this blog, but for any organisation which uses javascript for its comments system – including The Guardian, as Coles recently pointed out.

As I wrote this post, Malcolm emailed to tell me about a post he’d written about commenting systems and javascript generally. IntenseDebate had responded to say they were “rolling out a non-javascript-friendly version which will be visible to Google although it’s still in beta.”

So there’s hope yet, but I don’t like the accessibility issue at all, so should I switch back to standard comments?

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UPDATE (Aug 7 ’08): The Annual Survey of Journalism & Mass Communication Graduates suggests employment opportunities and salaries are not affected.

J-schools are generally set up to prepare students for the mainstream news industry: print and broadcasting, with a growing focus on those industries’ online arms. There’s just one small problem. That industry isn’t exactly splashing out on job ads at the moment…

The LA Times is cutting 150 editorial jobs and reducing pages by 15%; The Atlanta Journal-Constitution cutting nearly 200 jobs; the Wall Street Journal cutting 50 jobs; Thomson Reuters axing 140 jobs; in the UK Newsquest is outsourcing prepress work to India, while also cutting jobs in York and Brighton; Reed Business Information, Trinity Mirror and IPC are all putting a freeze on recruitment, with Trinity Mirror also cancelling its graduate training scheme and cutting subbing jobs. In the past two months almost 4,000 jobs have vanished at US newspapers (Mark Potts has this breakdown of June’s 1000 US redundancies). In the past ten years the number of journalists in the US is said to have gone down by 25%.

Given these depressing stats I’ve been conducting a form of open ‘panel discussion’ format via Seesmic with a number of journalists and academics, asking whether journalism schools ought to revisit their assumptions about graduate destinations – and therefore what they teach. The main thread is below.

The responses are worth browsing through. Here’s my attempt at a digest:

There is a general agreement that this is just the beginning of something very serious indeed. Alison Gow, a journalist at the Liverpool Post, described recent events as the “first rattle of pebbles before the avalanche that follows”; Kevin Anderson of The Guardian doesn’t think it’s unrealistic for me to talk about a ‘worst case scenario’ in three years’ time where many newspapers fail and recruitment is zero.

Kevin draws parallels with the downsizing of IT industry and a need for multiskilling – subbing, writing, etc. Jo Geary at the Birmingham Post says “students now shouldn’t be educated for media organisations as exist now” and that they should also be made aware that newspapers are not what they think they are. My experience with students supports this: they tend to come onto the degree with a rather outdated, ‘monomedium’ view of working in journalism.

There is a general desire for the news industry to start working harder to attract graduates who can help steer it through the coming shift. Andy Dickinson says the university system and students have been underwriting the training and development of the news industry for a long time. The industry needs to make it more attractive for students to make the financial sacrifice. That includes making it more exciting to work there and “not something out of the 1920s”. Alison Gow points out that journalism graduates will have the choice between having their own website and joining a newsgathering organisation, which gives them a stronger bargaining position and hopefully better salaries. As an industry we will need these people and will need to provide packages that make it an attractive place to work.

There is also a healthy journalistic scepticism about some of the figures: Jo Geary asks how many of the redundancies are production staff, and how many content creators. I wonder whether the oft-touted stat on the decline of American journalists is so severe because it only looks at the mainstream media and at those with the ‘journalist/reporter’ job title. Does it overlook a rise in the likes of community editors, content moderators, multimedia producers and web editors?

In the light of that, there are still jobs in the industry. Andy Dickinson makes the distinction between “training people that the news industry wants, and training people that the news industry needs.” Sarah Hartley of the Manchester Evening News points out that newspapers have multimedia arms, TV stations, and radio stations. “You should prepare students for news organisations, not newspapers. They should be flexible, able to work in different formats.” She notes the biggest shift in newsgathering and news production and that the role “may be more to curate or manage content created outside of the news organisation.”

Neil MacDonald at the Liverpool Post stirred things up by asking “Why would an aspiring journalist now do a journalism degree? The industry will have been transformed by the time you graduate. What can you learn in three years that you can’t in one?” Online journalist Patrick Thornton would not hire the majority of journalism graduates and said “Most J-schools are obsolete”. Journalism entrepreneur and founder of Spot.us David Cohn said that, while he doesn’t regret studying his Masters in journalism at Columbia, he wouldn’t do it now. “The job description is changing, but universities aren’t adapting to change the changing mindset and skillset.”

Andy Dickinson and I both shared the view that the old 12-week training course just will not suffice in the modern environment; that the news industry needs to get over its snobbery about journalism and media degree graduates who have studied the theory as well as the practice, because these are the people who can ‘think outside the box’ about the industry’s future.

The increasingly diverse nature of the journalism ‘job’ presents an increasing range of elements that need to be taught – and a decreasing amount of space to do so. In this context it’s about teaching ‘mindset, not skillset’, as Kevin Anderson, Mark Comerford, Andy Dickinson, David Cohn and others pointed out.

Kevin perhaps put it best when he said:

“So many journalists think ‘If I’m a good writer, that’s all I need’. That’s bullshit. There is an arrogance among journalists about the craft of writing. Journalism students will need more than the ability to craft a good sentence.”

It’s also about separating teaching journalism as a process from teaching it as a type of production, as Reed’s Adam Tinworth put it and JD Lasica. It’s a great point – but complicated by the question that in a new media age, are the two increasingly one and the same? (This very debate is an act of the journalism process being published).

There is a general view that entrepreneurial and business skills should be taught. Kevin Anderson points out that this is the biggest opportunity for journalists to build a business. David Cohn says this hasn’t happened “Partly because news organisations have a culture similar to the military, there’s a chain of command and no leeway to make your own decisions. Journalism schools are equally structured.” Anika says universities should show students how to better market themselves. Tom, a freelance journalist in China, thinks learning other languages will be increasingly important. JD Lasica thinks we need journalists who can reinvent the industry.

And Emap’s David Cushman emphasised the importance of teaching students how to build partnerships and added the observation that “everything is in beta now” – university courses should be no different.

The conversation remains open - I’d love to know your thoughts either via video on Seesmic or in the comments below. I’ll update this post as new replies come in. You can also find comments on blog posts by David Cushman and Andy Dickinson.

Note: Kevin Anderson posted via YouTube and so his replies (and mine to his) aren’t included in the thread above, so it’s embedded separately below:

UPDATE: JD Lasica has added his response, ‘The Great Decoupling‘ separately – also embedded below:

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In the first part of a five-part series, I explore how and why a talent for brevity is one of the basic skills an online journalist needs – whether writing an article or employing multimedia. This will form part of a forthcoming book on online journalism – comments very much invited.

It shouldn’t have to be said that the web is different, but I’ll say it anyway: the web is different. It is not print, it is not television, it is not radio.

So why write content for the web in the same way that you might write for a newspaper or a news broadcast?

Organisations used to do this, and some still do. It was called ‘shovelware’, a process by which content created for another medium (generally print) was ‘shovelled’ onto the web with nary a care for whether that was appropriate or not.

It was not.

People read websites very differently to how they read newspapers, watch television or listen to radio. For a start, they read 25% slower than they do with print – this is because computer screens have a much lower resolution than print: 72 dots in every square inch compared to around 150-300 in newspapers and magazines (this may change, but usage patterns are likely to stay the same for some time yet).

As a result, you need to communicate your story in less time than you would in print. You need to develop brevity.

Forms of brevity

Brevity comes on a number of different levels. At the most obvious level, shorter articles tend to work better online because most people struggle to read long documents on screen, or find scrolling too much hassle if they’re looking for something specific or succinct.

This doesn’t mean you should write a 500-word snippet rather than the grand 3,000 word opus you were planning – but it does mean you should consider splitting that opus into smaller chunks (chunking): six 500 word sections, for example, each with a particular focus. You can always provide a link to a printable version of all the parts together.

That said, don’t split arbitrarily, or for the sake of it: every webpage is a potential entry point, and users need to be able to instantly orientate themselves.

More important than the length of the article overall, within the article itself, paragraphs should be succinct. Stick to one concept per paragraph. Once you’ve made your point, move on to the next par.

This may seem simplistic writing at first, but you soon become used to it. It’s how BBC reports are written online – see how effective it is.

Brevity in video and audio

Brevity is equally important when producing multimedia material. For the medium that brought us YouTube, anything over three minutes is too long.

One simple technical reason is bandwidth – even now that the majority of users are on broadband, a significant proportion remain on dial-up, including overseas users.

Even those on broadband will not want to wait for video or audio to download, or their connection to slow down while they do.

Once again, this does not necessarily mean editing your whole story down to three minutes; it means a chunking approach to multimedia: breaking it down into its constituent parts.

As Andy Dickinson explains it, this is a non-linear approach. Because unlike with TV or radio your user can enter the story at any point they choose: this might be the interview with the witness – or it might be, more specifically, the chunk where they describe what they saw. It might be raw footage of the aftermath. It might be the contextual information.

In short, you are released from the pressure of condensing everything to a three minute package (although you can do that as well), and instead provide readers with a range of paths to pursue.

Brevity works particularly well online because it allows for more effective distribution: others can link to the specific element they are commenting on, or even embed it on their site.

What’s more, it provides the raw material for further journalism: a user might decide to re-edit the material to provide a different narrative; or mash it up with maps or databases; or they might incorporate it into further investigation into a particular issue – all of which further distributes your good name, and provides further material for you to build on.

Part two: A is for Adaptability, can be found here.

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Andy Dickinson is conducting a short survey to gather information about how video is produced in newspaper newsrooms and who does it. The results will be made available on his blog – www.andydickinson.net.

Sounds like a great idea – it’s a one-page job so quick to fill out. Fill out the survey here.

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