Online Journalism Blog

On Thursday I’ll be hosting Birmingham’s first ‘Data Coffee’. Guests include The Times’ Jonny Richards, Talis’ Zach Beauvais and a whole bunch of MA Online Journalism students.

There’s no agenda for the day – just turn up with questions and we’ll pick each other’s brains. I’m bringing my Mac and an intense desire to get to grips with Python.

It’s at Coffee Lounge on Navigation Street (free wifi). We’ll start to gather around 10 with the bulk of the day taking place from 12 onwards.

Today I’m trying an experiment with a group of students on my undergraduate Online Journalism module – a ‘Social Media Treasure Hunt’ on their patch: Birmingham.

The students are all reporters who will, next week, be reporting for the environmental news website Birmingham Recycled. Last week they set up their systems – RSS reader, Delicious, and Twitter – and this week they are setting up their blogs. They’ve already had the lecture about the theory – now comes the practice. But instead of the usual workshop-in-a-computer-room, I’m taking them into their community.

This year I’ve made a significant change to how I teach blogging. The focus is explicitly on social capital, and ideas of sharing their processes. So here’s what I wanted to do:

• Get them meeting people in person rather than virtually – a much more effective way of building social capital
• Get them away from a desk. It seems to me that most people approach online journalism as a deskbound job – actually, it opens up enormous opportunities for production on the move: moblogging, liveblogging, photoblogging (one student has already tried all 3 in one go).
• Get them to open their eyes, ears and noses. These students have spent 18 months learning how to be journalists – looking for angles, structuring a story. Now I’m asking them to unlearn some of that when they approach a blog: put out unfinished material; observations; raw material. Sharing – not processing. That can be a hard habit to get into.

Oh, and of course I want to make it fun and engaging. So…

The Social Media Treasure Hunt

At 9am this morning a group of around 15* 7 students will gather at Coffee Lounge in Birmingham city centre. They all have phones with web packages and/or laptops with wifi. I will make sure they are all set up with a blog, and are able to post to it from their phone or laptop.

They will then be given, in pairs:

• A map of wifi coverage in Birmingham
• A name
• The rules of the game

The rules of the game

1. You have been given the name of a person with a social media presence in Birmingham (e.g. blogs, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, Facebook etc.).
2. You must find a way to contact that person, and arrange to meet them as soon as possible, today.
3. When you meet them, you must find out about them – then ask them to name another person in Birmingham that they think it would be useful for you (as an environmental reporter) to meet. (If you are unable to meet any person, contact @paulbradshaw for a new name)
4. From the beginning of this process you must keep your eyes, ears and noses alert – and comment on what you see/hear/smell…
5. …As you travel, you must generate as much content as possible on social media – tweet; take and upload pictures; bookmark webpages; record or stream video or audio; and of course: write blog posts containing all of the above. The purpose of this hunt is to share as much as possible – experiences, insights, opinions, questions – so that others can get to know the city – and you – through your senses.
6. Tag everything that you do #bsmth (Birmingham Social Media Treasure Hunt) – and follow all the other material using that tag.
7. You cannot ‘hunt’ a person who is already being – or has been – hunted by someone else.
8. Points are awarded as follows:
   1. 100 points for meeting someone named;
   2. 50 points for meeting and finding out about someone else;
   3. 20 points for every blog post;
   4. 5 points for every other piece of valid* social media generated.
   5. *Material generated to ‘game’ the contest (e.g. flooding with meaningless material) will not be counted

Winners will receive a prize of non-monetary value…

So that’s the Social Media Treasure Hunt – I’ll blog about the results in due course. Meanwhile, you can of course follow the tag on social media…

*UPDATE: We had a couple inches of snow overnight, which disrupted transport (yeah, I know – just a couple of inches) and prevented around half of the students from taking part, so I adapted by starting a second meme, #snowbrum, for those who were housebound. This was overseen by Birmingham Recycled’s editor, Natalie Adcock, and I’ll blog about that in due course too.

Yesterday I hosted a session on law for my MA Online Journalism students, which I thought I would embed below.

Some background: I teach all my sessions in a coffee shop in central Birmingham – anyone can drop in. This week I specifically invited local bloggers, and so the shape of the presentation was very much flavoured by contributions from The Lichfield Blog’s Philip John; Nick Booth from Podnosh and BeVocal; Talk About Local’s Nicky Getgood; Hannah Waldram of the Bournville Village Blog; Gavin Wray, Matthew Mark, and Mike Rawlins of Stoke’s Pits N Pots. The editor of the Birmingham Post Marc Reeves also came for an hour to share his own experiences in the regional press.

Two things occurred to me during the process of preparation and delivery of the session. The first is that law in this context is much broader: as well as the classic areas for journalists such as defamation, you have to take into account online publishing issues such as terms and conditions, data protection and user generated content.

Secondly, I’ve long been an advocate of conversational teaching styles (one of the reasons I teach in a coffee lounge) and this was a great example of that in practice. The presentation below is just a series of signposts – the actual session lasted 4 hours and included various tangents (some of which I’ve incorporated into this published version). Experiences in the group of students and guests ranged across broadcasting, print, photography, online publishing, academic study, and international law, and I came out of the session having learned a lot too.

I hope you can add some more points, examples, or anything I’ve missed. Here it is:

It’s finally been announced that my project Help Me Investigate is being funded by 4iP and Screen West Midlands.

Help Me Investigate (HMI) is a platform for crowdsourcing investigative journalism. It allows anyone to submit a question they want to investigate – “How much does my hospital make from parking charges?” “What happened to the money that was allocated to my local area?” “Why was that supermarket allowed to be built opposite another supermarket?” …

But more importantly, it then enables users to mobilise support behind that question; and to pursue it.

HMI attempts to address the biggest issue facing journalism: how do we save the good stuff? The persistent slow-brewed journalism that was previously subsidised (if you were lucky) by more commercially friendly instant journalism, but which stands to lose most as commercial content becomes disaggregated and reaggregated, and audiences and their activity measurable.

How do you support Slow Journalism?

Help Me Investigate is an attempt to use the qualities of the web to pursue investigative journalism. There are various aspects to this (which I’ll be exploring, along with others, in the Help Me Investigate blog), but fundamentally it comes down to this:

• The web allows you to ‘atomise’ processes – break them down into their constituent parts. The site breaks apart investigative – often campaigning – journalism allowing users to contribute in specific and different ways. This is not citizen journalism – it is micro-volunteering.
• Investigative journalism is about more than just ‘telling a story’; it is about enlightening, empowering and making a positive difference. And the web offers enormous potential here – but users must be involved in the process and have ownership of the agenda.
• The web is more tool than destination – successful business models rest on creating a platform
• Likewise, the web is more of a communication medium than a storytelling one; therefore, we are focusing on communication and community rather than stories; process, rather than product.
• We are also focused on making the process itself rewarding, not just the end result. Journalism is a by-product.
• Online, failure is cheap; unlike a traditional news organisation, HMI doesn’t need the majority of investigations to ’succeed’; in fact, failure is built into the design as a necessary ingredient of the site’s overall success. If you want to budget for it, put it under ‘training’ and ‘R&D’.
• Do what you do best and link to the rest: the site is networked – we’re not trying to be or host all things but will be pointing elsewhere more often than not

I could go on, and I will in the blog. But I think those points are core. I don’t expect this project will have all the answers, but I think we are asking the right questions, at the right time.

Now, it’s worth pointing out that the idea of ‘investigative journalism’ covered here is a broad one – indeed, we have no idea of predicting what questions will be pursued: the agenda will be determined almost entirely by users (including journalists) and topics could range from the very personal, hyperlocal to more national questions. That alternative to a mainstream editorial agenda will be interesting in itself: how many questions will we get that newspapers would find unappealing?

So what’s happening now?

We’re building a very rough and ready frame within which users can play. How that develops depends in large part on what the users need to do – we’ll be doing much of the development as it is being used.

Already a handful of people have used the site in its closed test form, and in the following weeks quite a few more will start to go through it. Then the site will be opened in a semi-closed beta.

To begin with we’re focusing our personal efforts on Birmingham, although people elsewhere will be able to use the site.

The site is being built by Webby Award-winning developer Stef Lewandowski, while the community side of things is headed up by Nick Booth. Both have been crucial contributors to the development of HMI. Joining us behind the site are community support Paul Henderson and investigative journalist Heather Brooke, author of the wonderful guide to FOI Your Right To Know. They will be suggesting and supporting activities to users who submit or join investigations on the site.

It’s taken 18 months to get to this point, and the hard work starts now. If you want to be involved in any capacity let me know.

3 weeks ago my class of online journalism students were introduced to the website they were going to be working on: BirminghamRecycled.co.uk – environmental news for Birmingham and the West Midlands.

The site has been built by final year journalism degree student Kasper Sorensen, who studied the online journalism module last year.

In building and running the service Kasper has done a number of clever, networked things I thought I should highlight. They include:

• Creating a Delicious network for the site – every journalist in the team has a Delicious account; this gathers together all of the useful webpages that journalists are bookmarking
• Tweetgrid of all journalists’ tweets - again, every journalist has a Twitter account. This pulls them all together.
• Twitter account @bhamrecycled
• Kasper sent the whole team an OPML file of subscriptions to RSS feeds of searches for every Midlands area and environmentally related keywords. In other words, journalists could import this into their Google Reader and at a stroke be monitoring any mention of certain key words (e.g. ‘pollution’, ‘recycling’) in Birmingham areas.
• He also shared a Google calendar of relevant events

The site itself is clever too.

• The About page has a list of all contributing journalists with individual RSS feeds.
• In addition, each author has a link to their own profile page which not only displays their articles but pulls Twitter tweets, Delicious bookmarks and blog posts.

Kasper wanted to explicitly follow a Mashable-style model rather than a traditional news service: he felt an overly formal appearance would undermine his attempts to build a community around the site.

And community is key. When unveiling the site to the journalists Kasper made the following presentation – a wonderful distillation of how journalists need to approach news in a networked world:

It being a blogging conference and all, I’m sure there’ll be more than enough coverage of this weekend’s WordCamp UK in Birmingham. However, if you’re following it I’ll still be twittering my impressions and thoughts (most likely via Twitterfone) at twitter.com/paulbradshaw

WordCamp UK* is being hosted in Birmingham this year. I’ll be there, mostly ignoring the rather too formal conference-style structure and instead using it as an excuse to meet people I should really meet more often.

If you’re around that weekend (19th/20th July), let me know (direct or @message on Twitter is best, or comment below). It would be great to have a beer or a coffee. [Read more]

On the evening of Thursday May 29th I’ll be at ‘Power Your Business with Web 2.0′, on a discussion panel. That’s at the Technology Innovation Centre in Birmingham B4 7XG from 6pm till 10pm. Email creative.networks@tic.ac.uk or register online at www.creativenetworksonline.com

On Friday June 13th I’ll be in London at the Investigative Journalism Goes Global conference at Westminster University. The day will include the official launch of the second edition of the book Investigative Journalism, for which I’ve written a chapter on ‘Investigative Journalism and Blogs‘. I’ll be on a panel discussing “What is the point of investigative journalism in the online media world?”

That’s the question Birmingham Post reporter Joanna Geary has been asking herself, and has come up with the following rather lovely graphic:

Clickon the image for a larger, more readable version – you’ll see she’s looking for availability of email contacts, use of things like maps, blogs, bookmarking, video (is that interactive? Or multimedia?), email newsletters, mobile alerts, RSS, podcasts, chats, forums – and Twitter: “I know it’s not yet a mass communication device but I think it’s a good indicator of those who are thinking about the development of the market” [Read more]