Tagged: blogging

Case Study – Two political blog articles which went viral

One of the areas which interests me is how independent publishers can cut through to build an audience, or drive a story into the wider public arena. This is a cross-post from the Wardman Wire.

Two articles from the last month by the Heresiarch and Anna Raccoon form an interesting study in articles by political bloggers which gained widespread attention. Both of these pieces went viral via Twitter, rather than Facebook or any other social network.

Firstly, a piece, which caught the moment when the conviction of “Twitter Terrorist” Paul Chambers was confirmed. This piece achieved almost 1000 retweets.

This is the headline and abstract:

Heresy Corner: With the Conviction of Paul Chambers, it is now illegal to be English.

There is something deeply and shockingly offensive about the conviction of Paul Chambers for his Twitter joke, almost unbelievably reaffirmed today at the Crown Court in Doncaster. It goes beyond the normal anger anyone would feel at a blatant injustice, at a piece of prosecutorial and judicial overkill that sees the might of the state pitted against a harmless, unthreatening individual for no good reason.

Secondly, a piece from Anna Raccoon last week, about the case of Stephen Neary, who seems to have been caught up in a bureaucratic whirlpool through his autism:

The Orwellian Present – Never Mind the Future.

Steven Neary, Deprivation of Liberty Safeguards, Welfare Deputyships and The Court of Protection

These numbers of tweets are 50-100 times more than will be achieved by a reasonably well-received article. As a comparison the last 6 articles on the Heresy Corner homepage this morning are showing 3, 5, 4, 9, 40 and 2 retweets.

My observations:

1 – Both are non party-aligned writers embedded in the political blog niche, but also cover political questions from a position of non-political knowledge, with a degree of authority/respect which has come from their own work over two years or more.

2 – In these instances, both are amateur or professional subject specialists in the areas they cover here, and have an established readership who are able to give a boost to a piece in the social media nexus. As a comparison, in the world of Internet Consultancy much time (and money) is spent trying to build initial traction for articles and websites to give them a boost into wider internet prominence.

3 – The importance of “connectors”. Anna Raccoon’s piece received a significant boost from Charon QC, who provides an important hub-site in the legal niche – which of course is one place where a real difference can be made to Stephen Neary’s situation.

4 – The “edge of the political blogosphere” has become very important – both for specialist sites writing about political questions, and political blogs who “do more than politics”.

5 – These are two different types of article. The Heresy Corner summarised the online reaction to the “I’l blow you’re airport sky high” Twitter Joke Trial case at the right time to catch the Zeitgeist, while Anna Raccoon’s piece is a campaigning piece trying to direct attention to a particular case, in an area of society she has written about on perhaps a dozen occasions.

6 – Several legal commentators (eg Jack of Kent in addition to Charon) have pointed out (correctly) that for campaigning piece to convert attention into action, there needs to be more complete information about both sides of the story. A spotlight can be directed onto a perceived abuse, but there needs to be objective investigation afterwards.

That is a good distinction; but the rub is that officialdom can prevent both sides of the story being available to the public, and often only react to media spotlights – not to problems which they have not been embarrassed about.

7 – Neither of these bloggers are deeply embedded in the Facebook ecosystem, which is a distinct difference from some other mainly political sites, which report Facebook as a major source of traffic (example). I’ll write more on this another time, because I think it is important.

8 – During November, when the Paul Chambers piece was published, Heresy Corner jumped from 134 in the Wikio blog ranks to number 15 (illustrated). This was after changes which introduced a “Twitter” factor into the Wikio rankings. I’d suggest that this level of volatility may illustrate that they’ve overdone it.

Wrapping Up

The missing link for independent publishers is the ability to translate incisive observation or reporting into an effective influence.

I’ll return to that subject soon.

Can I ask a favour from brave souls who’ve reached the end of this article. I need a couple of dozen Facebook “Likes” for my own site’s new Facebook page to gain access to all features. You can “Like” me at the bottom of the rh sidebar here.

John Rentoul, Media Oops Number 1 : You cannot close the door once a blog post has bolted

John Rentoul of the Independent has the blog with the longest running single-blog meme in the known world. “Questions to which the answer is no” is now up to number 411 (“Will Barclays carry out its threat to leave UK?“),

I can’t compete with that, so I thought I’d start a list of Media Oops-es, i.e., cockups. This is all in the interest of media transparency, you understand. Shooting from the hip is just as big a problem for blogging journalists as it is for rednecks and Harriet Harman – though I suspect her invective was planned.

(Update: since this is about educating student journalists, I thought I would cross-post to the Online Journalism Blog in addition to the Wardman Wire).

The first one comes via Justin McKeating, who’s doing something slightly similar, though I suspect we’ll be tracking different bits of media silliness.

Rentoul came up with a slightly unflattering comparison:

A friend draws my attention to a resemblance I had not noticed.

Ed Miliband, he says, reminds him of Watto, the hovering, scuzzy garage owner on Tatooine who enslaves little boys in Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace, my favourite film of the six.

Miliband spoke in his speech to Labour conference of his being compared to “Wallace out of Wallace and Gromit” – although he department from the text issued, “I can see the resemblance”, to say: “I gather some people can see the resemblance.”

But I thought he looked more like Gromit – the dog who is cleverer than his master who expresses himself mainly by his eyebrows.

If he’d just left it there none of us would have made a fuss. But he thought better of it and deleted the piece. As Justin says:

It looks like the mighty John Rentoul thought better of comparing Ed Miliband to the Watto character from The Phantom Menace and pulled the post without comment. You now get a ‘page not found’ error when you click on the link. Particularly piquant was when Rentoul noted Watto is ‘scuzzy’ and ‘enslaves little boys’. And he deleted his tweet advertising his insightful blog post (we know it was there because somebody replied to it). What a shame, denying future students of journalism this exemplary example of the craft.

Who am I to deny an education to students of journalism? I love computer networks with memories; and also search engines with caches.

20101030-media-oops-john-rentoul-ed-milliband-watto

For the record, here’s the Milliman, who Rentoul (and everybody else) has previously compared to a panda:

q-photo-ed-miliband

The best bit is that the next Rentoul blog post was all about “tasteless metaphors“.

Pot. Kettle. White and black.

(Update: since this is about educating student journalists, I thought I would cross-post to the Online Journalism Blog).

My Henry Stewart talk about ‘Blogging, Twitter and Journalism’

I’ve recorded a 48 minute presentation covering ‘Blogging, Twitter and Journalism‘ for the Henry Stewart series of talks. It’s designed for journalism students and covers

  • How blogging differs from other journalism platforms;
  • Key developments in journalism blogging history;
  • What makes a successful blog
  • What is Twitter and how is it useful for journalists and publishers? and
  • Why RSS is central to blogging and Twitter and how it works

From a 15-year-old’s blog to MSM: Bleachgate and Miracle Mineral Solutions

Bleachgate - Rhys Morgan's video blog
Rhys Morgan's video blog on Bleachgate

Journalists wanting evidence of the value of blogs should take a look at the ‘Bleachgate’ story which has taken a month to filter up from 15-year-old Rhys Morgan’s blog post through other skeptic and science bloggers into The Guardian.

Rhys has Crohn’s Disease and was sceptical of the Miracle Mineral Solutions ‘treatment’ being plugged on a support forum that was also described by the FDA as industrial bleach. The forum didn’t like his scepticism, and banned him. He blogged about his concerns, and it went from there.

I can only hope that enough people link to The Guardian’s piece with the words Miracle Mineral Solutions to help raise awareness of the concerns. *Cough*.

AFTERTHOUGHT: What deserves particular attention is how the Guardian reporter Martin Robbins is responding to critical comments – providing further details of how the forum dealt with his approaches, and addressing conspiracy theorists. This is journalism that gets out there and engages with the issue rather than simply broadcasting. Wonderful.

Martin Robbins' replies to comment
Martin Robbins' replies to comment

Why was Simon Perry ejected from Newport coroner’s court?

Very odd scenes at the coroner’s court at Newport in the Isle of Wight, where VentnorBlog’s Simon Perry was ejected by the coroner’s officer – at first, according to Perry, on the grounds that he had suddenly ceased to be a journalist (VentnorBlog have a fine record of attending meetings and hearings), then as a member of the public on the grounds that the court was full; and finally, “Telling him that someone had offered to step out of the court to make a space for us, he said that would make no difference. Continue reading →

My Favourite UK Political Blogosphere Statistics in 2010 so far

During January and early February we have been subjected to a festival of political Satirical Statistics, as blogs reviewed 2009, Tweetminster reviewed political twitter, and commentators reviewed all of these numbers.

Most of it has been fluff and fury, but amongst the noise these are the statistics which I think are worth noting with care.

Labourlist’s lunchtime email newsletter goes to 3500 people:

3,500 people now subscribe to the LunchtimeList daily email update, which gives a quick but comprehensive overview of all the day’s news and views in the Labour Party

That’s after a year of solid plugging, and simply highlights how tough it can be to build email lists from scratch. In my opinion, a focus on email was one of the priorities that Derek Draper got right from day one on Labour List as it is still the most reliable way of building a community. Kudos to Alex Smith for publishing the email numbers; as far as I know no one else has done so and tend to just say ” we have thousands of subscribers”. Usually “thousands” can be taken to mean “two thousand and a bit”.

On an obliquely related note, I received my “free trial” to the Editorial Intelligence “Daily Digest” email today, and – bearing in mind that excellent free media summaries are available from several thinktanks (such as Reform and Ekklesia) and elsewhere – I don’t see that these are sustainable as a paid-for product, unless they facilitate real added value somewhere else in an integrated service (in EI’s case, this is the EI Club).

Comment summary may go (perhaps has gone already) the same way as much reporting and photography – it will slide down the value chain and will become an engagement (rather than value adding) tool.

Most of the traffic to Liberal Conspiracy comes from Comment is Free, Twitter and Facebook:

Most of our referrals now come from Twitter, Facebook and the Guardian website (primarily from CIF writers and commenters).

I’m still reflecting on this. Is this an illustration that Liberal Conspiracy is reaching into the wider media, or is it an indication that writers for Comment is Free can direct traffic to blogs when they try?

The online political niche has not grown *very* significantly in the UK.

In their recent report Tweetminster reported around a hundred thousand people following Members of Parliament on Twitter. That is not significantly different to the 50 to 100 thousand people following political blogs quoted to me in 2007 by people associated with the 18 Doughty Street project.

Anecdotal, but interesting. How will real political engagement be built?

Wrapping Up

I’d welcome further comments and insights.

The Press Complaints Commission consultation: respond by January 25th

The Press Complaints commission, which is the industry body which attempts to regulate the printed media, and now the corresponding websites, is engaged in a “Governance Review” – and is wanting responses by January 25th 2010.

The commission last had the attention of bloggers when a proposal was made by the PCC Chairman Baroness Buscombe that they should be regulated by the PCC. Unity, at Liberal Conspiracy, organised a response which drew expressions of support from perhaps 300 bloggers over the following 3 days.

At that point I also commented on some problems with the PCC itself :

Baroness Buscombe, the Press Complaints Commission and the Internet: Hard Questions

Firstly, the Chairman of the Press Complaints Commission is a position which surely depends on political and commercial neutrality. (Baroness Buscombe takes the Tory Whip in the Lords)

Secondly, despite the Chairman of the PCC clearly needing to be a neutral figure, Baroness Buscombe used her speech to the Society of Editors to make party political points.

Thirdly, the PCC’s level of knowledge and understanding about the Internet is open to question; they appear not to understand News Headline Aggregators.

Fourthly, the PCC needs to defend vigorous investigative journalism. The Baroness – as current Chairman and a Peer herself – has suggested that the Lords should not be subjected to the same scrutiny as the Commons has been in the last 12 months.

Tim Ireland has been organising an excellent response , based around these five specific proposals:

SUGGESTION ONE: Like-for-like placement of retractions, corrections and apologies in print and online (as standard).

SUGGESTION TWO: Original or redirected URLs for retractions, corrections & apologies online (as standard).

SUGGESTION THREE: The current Code contains no reference to headlines, and this loophole should be closed immediately.

SUGGESTION FOUR: Sources to be credited unless they do not wish to be credited or require anonymity/protection.

SUGGESTION FIVE: A longer and more interactive consultation period for open discussion of more fundamental issues.

And he has done an excellent (and noisy) video involving space invaders, which you can see here .

The PCC has a special website set up, from where you can send your submission.

The closing date is January 25th 2010.

Baroness Buscombe, the Press Complaints Commission and the Internet: Hard Questions

Baroness Buscombe, the Chairman of the Press Complaints Commission, gave a speech this week to the Society of Editors, followed by some comments to Ian Burrell of the Independent about a desire to “regulate the blogosphere “.

The Baroness has taken several steps backwards from her previous statements to Mr Burrell, and has attempted to emphasise that any proposals would be “voluntary”.

I am sceptical as to whether this is a true change of mind, or a simply more nuanced journey aiming for the same destination by a more circuitous, and perhaps better hidden, route. Ian Burrell has pointed out that he had a direct interview with her for 40 minutes, so making that mistake would not be easy. However, that has been addressed elsewhere by perhaps hundreds of people, with a vigorous collective letter from hundreds of bloggers.

For me, in addition to the “will we … won’t we … will we … won’t we … regulate the bloggers” game of Hokey-Cokey, this affair has highlighted a number of problems with both the Press Complaints commission, and perhaps with Baroness Buscombe herself.

Firstly, the Chairman of the Press Complaints Commission is a position which surely depends on political and commercial neutrality. Perhaps it can only be compared to that of Speaker of the House of Commons. How is it possible for a Peer who takes the whip for a political party to be neutral?

Secondly, despite the Chairman of the PCC clearly needing to be a neutral figure, Baroness Buscombe used her speech to the Society of Editors to make party political points.

Thirdly, having read Baroness Buscombe’s speech to the Society of Editors, I think that her, and the PCC’s, level of knowledge and understanding about the Internet is open to question.

And finally, Baroness Buscombe applauds the aggressive media investigations of the House of Commons, and MPs’ Expenses, yet suggests that they need to lay off the House of Lords – where she is a member; this at a time when the finanical skeletons have begun to emerge, creaking, from their Lordships’ cupboards into the light of day. That is a double standard.

Let me illustrate this with a few extracts.

Political Neutrality

Baroness Buscombe opens with a recounting of her experience as a Shadow Minister fighting the current Labour administration, including:

Of course the fact that unfortunately we do have such a dysfunctional democracy – particularly given the House of Commons appears almost entirely to have forgotten what they are there for – means it is vital that the press is free to investigate and probe and tell it like it is.

You can rightly feel proud that, from unraveling the government’s misleading spinning of intelligence in the Iraq War to exposing uncensored details of MPs’ expenses, the British press has filled the democratic deficit in recent years.

Does this partisan accusation, whether true or not, have any place in a speech by the person who is ultimately responsible for determining the accuracy or otherwise of such claims made by newspapers?

And why has she not, at the very least, resigned the Conservative whip?

Understanding the Internet

Baroness Buscombe, on news aggregators and search engines:

Together the press, all commercial broadcasters, film, book publishing and music industries must now work together to find a new business model with the Search Engines. The latter, the aggregators, think it is ok to enjoy the use of all your valuable intellectual property and ad revenues for little or no return.

This statement is simply untrue. Major aggregators do *not* use *all* of the intellectual property of newspapers and media. Google, which is attacked by the Baroness in the following paragraph, runs the Google News service.

Google News takes 1) a headline, and 2) up to around 155 characters of text.

It must be very depressing for journalists who spend a whole week creating a 5000-word article to realise that only the first 2 lines and the subeditor headline are of any value !

Further, Google offers a complete opt-out service, either from having articles included in the site’s cache, or from having a site indexed altogether. I use it myself on the Wardman Wire to prevent caching, since I have taken the trouble to invest in a high-quality server and want the visitors to come to my site rather than read the Google cache.

If services such as Google News are covering content from newspapers and the media, it is simply because those newspapers have made a decision to allow Google to do so.

The issue of aggregators and search engines, and their impact on the revenues of newspapers, has been one of the very highest priorities of the industry for months, and it is worrying that the head of the PCC hasn’t got to grips with the basic concepts involved after 6 months with the organisation (Wikipedia quotes her start date as April 2009).

Leave their Lordships Alone

Baroness Buscombe on the Commons, and the importance of vigorous scrutiny:

I know that this is not a popular message with many of my fellow Parliamentarians, some of whom are bruised by recent coverage, but we must consider the MPs’ expenses furore as a whole, and not focus on individual injustices.

What is the main lesson to be learned?

Surely, it is that the absence of scrutiny in the first place allowed a culture of abuse to flourish. If trust in politics is at a low ebb, it is because there has been too little freedom to shine a light on politicians’ activities, not too much.

However, about 4 paragraphs later the tone of Baroness Buscombe’s speech changes:

Which leads me to the House of Lords. I may be partisan, but is it really in anyone’s interests for the media to be party to the undermining of our Second Chamber – one of the few platforms in this country where people can stand up and say what they believe without fear or favour?

This is astonishing at a time when the light of day is at last shining on abuses of the Expenses system in the Upper Chamber. This is not a good recommendation for a Press Regulator who is trying to declare her support for strong investigation by journalists.

And that letter …

The letter should should still be signed by as wide a range of bloggers as possible, because – even if we take Baroness Buscombe’s new position as being the real one – the PCC and the Baroness clearly need someone to explain to them how the Internet works.

Wrapping Up

You can find the letter and the argument behind it, and sign up, here at Liberal Conspiracy .

Before signing, I’d encourage readers to read the whole speech and judge my comments in their full context.

At present this riposte has been driven largely by bloggers in the political niche; I’d particularly encourage bloggers in the media and journalism areas to offer their support.

But the bloggers who I really want to sign up are those for either the Society of Editors, or the Press Complaints Commission.

Unfortunately, neither of them has a blogger. Perhaps that would be a good first step to find out more about the internet before Baroness Buscombe makes another speech.

They presumably already have an insight into how quickly the online community can react when necessary.

Further Coverage

  1. Mark Pack has a slightly less pointed critique of Baroness Buscombe’s speech.
  2. Roy Greenslade has three articles about the “blog regulation” incident.
  3. The Heresiarch has a different angle entitled “Bloggers Repel Boarders“. Ooh-arr, me hearties.
  4. Liberal Conspiracy has the “Unity letter“.

Local Blog impact on Local Democracy: Somerton Town Council

Local Bloggers are beginning to produce a few good examples of effective scrutiny of Local Councils. In this piece David Keen, who is a Vicar in Yeovil and writes regularly for my Wardman Wire political site, gives an account of a local controversy in the Somerset town of Somerton, which has lead to a number of resignations from the Town Council.

Further, some national commentators are beginning to notice that local blogs have a place in building a better political culture in the UK.

Over to David …

Blogging, Volunteers, and Local Democracy

Somerton is about 12 miles north of Yeovil, nice little place, with plenty of character, and some good local churches. Last week most of the town council walked out. Why? Initial reports suggested that it was all the work of one lone local blog (Muck & Brass), and that they’d got fed up with his criticism of the council.

Some of the reportage:

  1. Newsnight (starts about 19min in, will expire in a couple of days). Slightly patronising. The clip is reproduced on Michael Cricks blog in Youtube format, and above.
  2. Western Gazette (local paper). Love the ‘internet blogger’. Didn’t realise there were other sorts ;-)
  3. BBC , which cuts and pastes from the Gazette.
  4. The Mail.
  5. The Times.

Continue reading →

Asian Correspondent taps into region’s blogosphere to fill foreign newshole

James Craven believes that instructive blogging should be paid. That was part of his inspiration behind leaving a job as CEO of a successful B2B media company and launching Asian Correspondent, a news site intended to report and aggregate news and information from the continent.

“I think that the blogosphere is one of the most important things to happen in media in the last thirty years. And I think it’s a real game changer. That said, the biggest problem with it is that it is quite difficult to navigate and find content. There’s enormous opportunity in working hard to find like-minded writers that have synergy, and to create channels that allow readers to find the sort of information they’re looking for globally,” he says.

To achieve this, Craven and his team hand picked thirty-five bloggers spanning thirteen different Asian countries after a careful survey of the region’s blogosphere, based on quality of reporting, relevance and popularity.

Craven admits that while he has the utmost respect for sites like the Huffington Post, which have been able to generate so much influence and traffic in less time than it took the New York Times, he does not agree with the idea of paying little or no monetary rewards to writers who contribute time and effort, not to mention page views and unique visitors to such sites. “It’s highway robbery!” he says.

So, it may come as a surprise that Asian Correspondent, the first such undertaking for Craven’s Hybrid News Limited, is being hailed as a HuffPo for Asia. However, the motivations are somewhat similar. Craven hopes to capitalize on the inarguable talent that lies in the blogosphere, and also tap into the mobilizing power of the Internet that is so exclusive to blogs and citizen media.

“It struck me that recent events such as the Obama election, the UK PM scandal and the Afghan elections were huge media moments, driven by citizen reports,” says Craven. “It also struck me that some of the audiences individual bloggers were building completely blew away anything that could be done cost effectively in print.”

That doesn’t mean the site will merely harbor a collection of views and opinions from people around Asia. Bloggers, who are paid a set monthly fee, will provide commentary, opinion and fact-based reporting.

Sometimes, bloggers are in a better position to cover a story than traditional journalists, says Craven. This is especially true with declining revenues that are unable to sustain foreign bureaus and international correspondents in western countries such as the US and UK.

Craven cites the example of the Philippines-based blogger who covered the recent devastating floods in the region for Asian Correspondent. “In the case of Paul Farol in Manila, a couple weeks ago, when the floods lapped his door, he was in the perfect position in terms of content, photography and video to cover that story.” In addition, there are advantages to being a native in narrating such an experience. The mainstream media is often unable to empathize with locals, or see a story in the same way as residents.

But do readers in other countries want to read that story about floods happening thousands of miles away? Craven believes that there is an appetite for these subjects; the key is targeting the right people. Seeding such articles with groups that would be interested, such as, say, the Filipino American Chamber of Commerce, would increase impact and interest.

“We’re interested in digital PR and traditional marketing, which would introduce [such] stories as they break to the large Filipino community in America and obviously target the Philippines as well.”

The same is true of advertising, according to Craven. Context-based ads are the answer for revenue generation. Advertisers such as Exxon Mobil and BMW don’t believe that aligning their message with gossip news will help them sell their products. “If you can create that context and advertisers can see that their buyers are reading your paper, then it’s not just about millions of hits. It’s about the right hits and that’s what we’re doing with Asian Correspondent.” The site is already approaching advertising agencies to purchase media campaigns that go directly to readers, and has a couple of partnerships.

Craven is confident that there is money to be made online with stories that don’t necessarily involve Britney Spears. No conversation about journalism is complete, of course, without invoking Spears, or the kind of reporting she represents: universally rejected by the mainstream media, and yet, attractive in its ability to generate traffic, page views, and hence, revenue.

Craven worries that many news sites that start out with high ambitions of delivering quality news content often degenerate into celebrity gossip portals. Asian Correspondent does not plan to go that route, he insists. “It doesn’t have to be the most popular or most commercial story or angle to still be a real business. I think we have to make sure that our business looks for opportunities to report on stories that aren’t being covered by anybody else.”

With a home page that showcases stories as wide-ranging as a standoff between Tasmanian timber workers and environmentalists, the banning of fake Twitter accounts in India,  and the Afghan elections, that is exactly what the site is trying to do. News reports from bloggers are supplemented with AP news wire from the region. Citizen journalists are also  encouraged to post their stories, and there is plenty of room for multimedia reporting and citizen videos.

Editors are based in Chang Mai, Hyderabad and Brisbane, and the site attracted over 140,000 unique visitors within the first six days of launching its beta version. If the model is successful, there is a plan to expand to other countries and continents.

“I call the company hybrid because I feel that my business model is a combination of all the fantastic elements of investigative journalism and foreign correspondence, but also through model delivery platforms.”

The past few years have seen a slew of news sites aimed at deploying citizen journalists and bloggers to fill a newshole in international reporting. How successful any such site will be depends on quality content and a viable business model.

Asian Correspondent seems to have the right ideas. If it can attract the right audience and advertisers, it could be well on its way to being a comprehensive source for Asian news.