This month’s Carnival of Journalism asks what journalists want for Christmas from programmers, and vice versa. Here’s my take.

Programmers and developers have already given journalists enough presents to last a century of Christmases. Programmers created content management systems and blogging platforms; they wrapped up networks of contacts in social networks, and parcelled up fast-moving updates on Twitter and SMS. They tied media in ribbons of metadata, making it easier to verify. They digitised content, making it possible to mix it with other content.

But I think it’s time for journalists to start giving back.

All of these gifts have made it easier for journalists to report stories. But that’s only part of publishing.

Technology’s place in journalism

Traditionally, journalism’s technology came after the story: sub-editors or designers laid the story out in the way they judged to be the most effective; printers gave it physical form; and distributors made sure it reached people.

Each stage in that process considers the next person. The inverted pyramid, for example, helps subs trim copy to fit available space. Subs talk to printers. Printers work with distributors. Processes are designed to reduce friction. The journalist’s work – whether they realise it or not – is a compromise reached over decades between different parties. An exchange of gifts, if you like.

But when it comes to publishing online, there’s been very little Christmas spirit.

Stories as a vehicle

Stories help us connect with current issues; they act as a vehicle for information that allows us to participate in society, whether that’s politically, socially, or economically.

The job of a journalist is to find stories in current events.

But those stories do not have to be told in one particular way. And if we were to try to tell them in some different ways (adding important metadata; publishing raw data; linking to supporting material; flagging false information), we could be giving a gift much desired by developers.

Here are some things that they could do with that gift – it is, if you like, my own fantasy Christmas list:

• Mark up factually false or misleading statements made by individuals or organisations, and highlight any instances of that statement in new coverage.
• Automatically update old ‘facts’ in the light of new information – and allow people to receive updates when those facts change.
• Link physical spaces to the past, present and future story of that space.
• Add contextual information on any individual mentioned in a story, for example a politician who receives payment from a particular industry
• Relate a story to the individual reading it
• Give users critical information about the source of particular information – beyond “Pictures from YouTube”
• Generate a hyperlinked sentiment analysis of coverage of politicians and corporations to complement factual data such as voting records.

They’re just ideas – and will remain so as long as journalists assume they’re only writing for newspapers, and newspaper readers.

The newspaper is a tool: a way for groups of people to exchange information. In the 19th century those groups might have been political activists, or merchants who needed to know the latest trading conditions.

The web is a tool too – a different tool. We can use it to ask information to come to us, or to seek out supplementary information; we can use it to draw connections; and we can act on what we find in the same space. Stories need to adapt to the possibilities of the new tool they sit in.

This year, put a developer on your Christmas list. It’s the gift that keeps on giving.

PHP Freelancer

I’ve been meaning to write a post for some time breaking down all the habits and hacks I’ve acquired over the years – so this month’s Carnival of Journalism question on ‘Hacking your journalism workflow’ gave me the perfect nudge.

Picking those habits apart is akin to an act of archaeology. What might on the surface look very complicated is simply the accumulation of small acts over several years. Those acts range from the habits themselves to creating simple shortcuts and automated systems, and learning from experience. So that’s how I’ve broken it down:

1. Shortcuts

Shortcuts are such a basic part of my way of working that it’s easy to forget they’re there: bookmarks in the browser bar, for example. Or using the Chrome browser because its address bar also acts as a search bar for previous pages.

I realise I use Twitter lists as a shortcut of sorts – to zoom in on particular groups of people I’m interested in at a particular time, such as experts in a particular area, or a group of people I’m working with. Likewise, I use folders in Google Reader to periodically check on a particular field – such as data journalism – or group – such as UK journalists.

Getting more specific, when it comes to data journalism tasks I rely on a whole range of tools and shortcuts for cleaning and interrogating datasets: the =TRANSPOSE formula, for example, will swap a spreadsheet’s rows and columns; =VLOOKUP will copy across data from matching cells; and the free tool Google Refine will quickly identify similar entries (which may have been misspelled).

On my desktop I rely on plugins for Firefox and Chrome such as Firebug (check a page’s HTML), OutWit Hub (scrape a page), TinEye (check if an image has been used elsewhere), ErrorZilla (check for cached and older versions of a webpage), and Easy YouTube Downloader (download YouTube videos). Links to these and other useful plugins can be found at http://delicious.com/paulb/firefox

But the most frequently used shortcuts are the bookmarklets that are installed on my mobile phone browser – ‘Read Later’ (Instapaper); ‘Bookmark on Delicious’; ‘Tweet with Echofon’; ‘save on Springpad’ or Evernote; and ‘Blog on Tumblr’. These are made even more powerful through automation.

2. Automation

RSS can be a hugely useful technology when it comes to saving time and automating processes – and Delicious is the king of useful RSS feeds in this respect.

If I want to tweet a useful link as well as bookmark it, for example, I simply add the tag ‘t’ – the RSS feed for which is automatically tweeted to my account by Twitterfeed. If I want to tweet it using the @helpmeinvestig8 account I add the tag ‘hmitwt’. Webpages which I think might be useful to students on the MA in Television and Interactive Content I tag ‘tvi’ – this not only sends them to the @bcumedia_matvic account but also to an email newsletter that students receive (I use Feedburner for this). If I wanted to I could set up a Tumblr blog to automatically pull items from the RSS feed for a particular tag, too. And all of this is triggered by one click, and one tag.

The process works the other way: Packrati.us will bookmark any link you tweet in your Delicious account. And Trunk.ly automatically archives both your Delicious bookmarks and tweeted links, providing a backup search engine.

IFTTT (IF This Then That) is a new service which promises some amazing possibilities for automating processes between (currently) 32 different services, including Delicious, Google Reader, stock performances, times and dates, emails, phone calls and any RSS feed. I’ve been using it to bookmark anything I share on Google Reader, but I’m on the lookout for other uses.

For other tasks the Firefox plugin iMacros can automate web-based actions so you don’t have to repeat them, while Automator on the Mac will do the same for computer-based actions. For links to these and IFTTT see http://www.delicious.com/paulb/automation+tools

3. Habits

For all the above it is ultimately up to you to set balls in motion, and here I think establishing habits is key. In particular, bookmarking is one habit that I find saves me more time than anything else.

Every morning I check my RSS feeds and bookmark items I think may be useful in future. Bookmarking and tagging them builds a resource that I can look to whenever I need to solve a problem, help someone, or write something quickly. So if I decide to write something on data visualisation, I already have an archive of pre-filtered material to refer to. If I need data on health, I already have several health datasets that I’ve bookmarked and tagged. And if I have a Yahoo! Pipes-related problem, I can check my bookmarks first.

Delicious is the main place that I do this – but it’s no longer the only one. My Tumblr blog is essentially a place where I bookmark multimedia and quotes – so if I need some multimedia or a choice quote, that’s where I look first.

And blogging itself is a great habit to have: it makes me remember things better, provides a space where I can re-find them, and helps me (or others) identify gaps.

4. Discipline

The final journalism hack is my most recent one – and I think something that more and more online journalists are learning too as they hit information fatigue. It’s self-discipline.

With so many sources of information, so many things to tweet, blog and bookmark, it’s easy to lose a morning in following links, tweets and feeds, and replying to emails. Having a clear idea of what you need to achieve on a particular day, and sometimes switching off other signals in order to complete it, is a hard skill to build – but an important one.

And so I try to only check email three times per day (start, midday and end). At the end of the day emails that require more time to respond go into my ‘Starred items’, and I check those and respond if I can first thing the next day.

I set limits on the time I spend checking RSS feeds, and on the number of blog posts I write.

I email longer webpages, reports and documents to my Kindle address to be read when I’m travelling.

I use the Springpad app to create ‘To Do’ items that I schedule for future days, taking them out of my head so I can focus on the here and now. And at the start of every day I go through these so that nothing is missed.

Then, I make time to switch off, to remove the phone from my hand, the laptop from my desk (it is set to switch itself off at a particular time every night), and sleep.

PHP Freelancer

This month’s Carnival of Journalism is about “driving innovation” – in the wake of the end of the Knight Foundation’s News Challenge five year run, among other things. Here’s my take:

Driving innovation needs to be quick

Any innovative idea needs to be able to deploy and iterate quickly – and any scheme to fund innovation needs to support that.

Having been through the Knight News Challenge three times, and reached the final shortlist twice, I was struck each time by how much changed in the online world between the initial submission and final award: If an internet year is worth 4.7 normal years, this process was taking over 3 ‘years’ in internet time. So much changed during that period that by the time I had reached the second or third stage, I wanted to re-write the whole thing.

In contrast, when I entered Channel 4′s 4iP fund (far from perfect, but certainly faster), the time from application to approval was swift. This allowed us to spend a few months working with the funders in addressing the issues the project raised (in Help Me Investigate’s case, largely legal ones) and still being able to start work before the Knight awards had even been shortlisted.

Why the difference? Perhaps because of the next point.

Innovation thrives on limitations

One of the reasons the internet has been so disruptive is that it has lowered the barriers to entry. Multinational media organisations have thrown millions at their own solutions, and yet most of them fail. One of the problems that funds such as Knight’s and Channel 4′s aim to solve is of access to funds – but those funds don’t have to be large.

The median value of a News Challenge award has ranged from $200,000 to $326,000 during its four years of existence, and I suspect one of the problems with Channel 4′s 4iP fund was that its £50m pot was based on television-scale budgets.

You don’t need a large amount of money to innovate online, and the best research and development comes after launch, because you can see how users are using it, and what they tell you they want it to do, or indeed what they build themselves for you.

So instead of funding to the hilt a dozen or so ideas that have to jump through several on-paper hoops to prove their theoretical viability, I would suggest this: spread small amounts of innovation funding wider across 100 pilot projects, and see how they jump through real-life hoops instead.

Projects that jump through those hoops could perhaps then apply to a second fund specifically aimed at the separate problem of scalability. I can speak from experience that running a pilot project gives you a much stronger sense of what you’ll need to do to scale up, than doing the same exercise on paper.

This second fund could even provide rapid access to servers or customer support staff or legal advice while the application is being considered (otherwise the customer experience becomes so bad that by the time funds are released, the project has no users left).

Separating funding innovation from funding scaling allows you to first fund projects that take bigger risks, and generate a bigger pool of innovators with experience of launching and managing an innovative product. And that leads on to the third point:

Support innovation, not projects

Every fund that I’ve been involved in neglected what could have been potentially their biggest value: the process itself of vetting applications and monitoring progress.

(It’s also the biggest source of resentment: there will always be accusations that funds are given to the ‘in-crowd’)

“Driving innovation” should go beyond “funding innovative projects”. Simply opening up the application process so that everyone can see how ideas develop – and what the ‘experts’ think about the detail of proposals – can help contribute to a culture of innovation. Seeing other great ideas being developed makes people feel a whole lot more innovative – and produce better ideas – than getting an opaque email saying “Proposal not accepted” and seeing a disappointing-on-the-surface winners’ list 5 months later.

For the funders this represents a lot of admin, but tough: that’s their job. And there are creative possibilities here: when you move the focus from funding innovative projects to supporting innovation you can start to broaden the focus towards building a network of innovators and aspiring innovators, towards creating a supportive ecology. That also spreads the costs, lowers risk, and increases benefits.

Ultimately, just as networked models are allowing us to revisit ways of doing things without physical limitations, the funding process should reflect that change too. It should be quicker, smaller scale, and more transparent.

PHP Freelancer

This post forms part of the Carnival of Journalism, whose theme this month is universities’ roles in their local community.

In traditional journalism the concept of community is a broad one, typically used when the speaker really means ‘audience’, or ‘market’.

In a networked age, however, a community is an asset: it is a much more significant source of information than in other media; an active producer of content; and, perhaps most importantly, at the heart of any online distribution system.

You can see this at work in some of the most successful content startups of the internet era – Boing Boing, The Huffington Post, Slashdot – and even in mainstream outlets such as The Guardian, with, for example, its productive community around the Data Blog.

Any fledgling online journalism operation which is not based on a distinct community is, to my thinking, simply inefficient – and any journalism course that features an online element should be built on communities – should be linking in to the communities that surround it.

Teaching community-driven journalism

My own experience is that leaving the walls of academia behind and hosting classes wherever the community meets can make an enormous difference. In my MA in Online Journalism at Birmingham City University, for example, the very first week is not about newsgathering or blogging or anything to do with content: it’s about community, and identifying which one the students are going to serve.

To that end students spend their induction week attending the local Social Media Cafe, meeting local bloggers and understanding that particular community (one of whom this year suggested the idea that led to Birmingham Budget Cuts). We hold open classes in a city centre coffee shop so that people from Birmingham can drop in: when we talked about online journalism and the law, there were bloggers, former newspaper editors, and a photographer whose contributions turned the event into something unlike anything you’d see in a classroom.

And students are sent out to explore the community as part of learning about blogging, or encouraged to base themselves physically in the communities they serve. Andy Brightwell and Jon Hickman’s hyperlocal Grounds blog is a good example, run out of another city centre coffee shop in their patch.

In my online journalism classes at City University in London, meanwhile (which are sadly too big to fit in a coffee shop) I ask students to put together a community strategy as one of their two assignments. The idea is to get them to think about how they can produce better journalism – that is also more widely read – by thinking explicitly about how to involve a community in its production.

Community isn’t a postcode

But I’ve also come to believe that we should be as flexible as possible about what we mean by community. The traditional approach has been to assign students to geographical patches – a relic of the commercial imperatives behind print production. Some courses are adapting this to smaller, hyperlocal, patches for their online assessment to keep up with contemporary developments. This is great – but I think it risks missing something else.

One moment that brought this home to me was when – in that very first week – I asked the students what they thought made a community. The response that stuck in my mind most was Alex Gamela‘s: “An enemy”. It illustrates how communities are created by so many things other than location (You could also add “a cause”, “a shared experience”, “a profession”, “a hobby” and others which are listed and explored in the Community part of the BASIC Principles of Online Journalism).

As journalism departments we are particularly weak in seeing community in those terms. One of the reasons Birmingham Budget Cuts is such a great example of community-driven journalism is that it addresses a community of various types: one of location, of profession, and of shared experience and – for the thousands facing redundancy – cause too. It is not your typical hyperlocal blog, but who would argue it does not have a strong proposition at its core?

There’s a further step, too, which requires particular boldness on the part of journalism schools, and innovativeness in assessment methods: we need to be prepared for students to create sites where they don’t create any journalism themselves at all. Instead, they facilitate its production, and host the platform that enables it to happen. In online journalism we might call this a community manager role – which will raise the inevitable questions of ‘Is It Journalism?’ But in traditional journalism, with the journalism being produced by reporters, a very similar role would simply be called being an editor.

PS: I spoke about this theme in Amsterdam last September as part of a presentation on ‘A Journalism Curriculum for the 21st Century’ at the PICNIC festival, organised by the European Journalism Centre. This is embedded below:

Slides can be found below:

PHP Freelancer

Gather round, gather round for this month’s Carnival of Journalism, which addresses the timely question of ‘How do you financially support journalism online?’. I’ll be updating this post as the carnival performers put on their outsized business heads and add their peacock-like contributions.

• First up in the parade is the glamorously ruffled Dave Cohn, who addresses the merits of community funded journalism with his post;
• Following him is the dame Jack Lail, who notes how the rules for staffing levels are changing – and that while there are rules of thumb for print operations, no one seems to have worked out what the economics are when you publish online-only.
• While the rainbow-coloured Charlie Beckett points out Frederick Filou‘s reasons why 2009 could be a good year for the news media.
• The resplendent Wendy Withers offers the following advice to both freelancers and news organisations: diversify
• Ryan Sholin, wearing the feathers of Invisible Inkling, comes up with 3 obvious ways to support online journalism;
• and the masked Bryan Murley points out that “there are no new business models for news … The only possible models are these: advertiser-supported and reader-supported (through subscriptions or donations).” The key, he says, is to get out of the neglect that has brought news organisations to this point in the first place.

• Jason_Cobb @paulbradshaw No established model can work. Which is the beauty of it all. Time to start again at grass roots with info as base, not profit
  
• nmcintosh @paulbradshaw Advertising. Subscription. Not charity. Revenue’s not the problem
• Paul0Evans1 @paulbradshaw Recognise that it’s not *that* expensive to publicly subsidise & the mood on this stuff is changing http://tinyurl.com/8yymcs
• BostinBloke @paulbradshaw advertising….premium subsciption service…membership discounts
• matthewbennett @paulbradshaw Subscribe to an individual journalist: top quality individual journalist blogs with premium content section
• benkunz @paulbradshaw Business model for journalism: Turn 1 major city paper in each U.S. region into a nonprofit. Done.
• NigelBarlow @paulbradshaw I still think that there is a case for puuting a paywall around quality content
• wcochran @paulbradshaw: Subscribers have to take a bigger share of cost. Good news: online news costs less.

I’ve also started a video conversation on Seesmic on the subject – embedded below – on which I’d welcome your thoughts.

PHP Freelancer

This month’s Carnival of Journalism looks forward to new media developments in the coming year. Here are my no doubt misguided and naive predictions:

2009 will not be the year of the mobile web

Every year we make end of year predictions that the coming year will finally see the mobile web hit the mainstream. In many ways, it already has. But any expectations of there being some significant spread in 2009 will be scuppered by the credit crunch: users will be increasingly reluctant to spend money on a smart phone as the purse strings tighten. We’re not all going to be carrying around iPhones.

On the plus side, as a result of that slowdown we can expect mobile service providers to become more competitive in their data rates and packages, so that those who do have smart phones will have more reason to take out a mobile web package.

We can also expect to see increasing numbers of retailers offering free wifi to attract customers, as Pret A Manger have done, or government investment in wifi clouds to stimulate growth. So those who do access the web on the move – not just mobile phones but laptops and ipods – could start to do so more.

2009 will not be the year of the semantic web

The semantic web holds enormous promise for journalism, but it’s still early days and even the best products are far from mass market. I don’t expect that to change any time soon. However…

In 2009 Google will look more vulnerable than ever

Google has been fiddling with its successful formula, trying to keep users within its verticals and getting greedy for user data. It is weakest on local search and semantic search and both those areas should see a lot of development in 2009. In 2010, however, Google will probably simply buy the best competitors.

2009 will see social media getting lean – and mean

Social media startups who do not want to join Pownce on the scrapheap will stop developing extra features, trim others, and focus on their core business. Oh, and they’ll be under increasing pressure to actually start coming up with business models too, which means more advertising (if they can sell it), more e-commerce, and less stuff for free. All of which will mean less innovation, fewer users and startups without deep pockets joining Pownce on the scrapheap.

2009 will see a lot of thinking and little action

All those redundant journalists, publishers, developers, and estate agents will have plenty of time to reflect on how their industries are changing, to play around with online tools, meet people online and offline, and come up with ideas on where to go next.

They’ll be doing this in an environment where funds are beginning to appear that enable them to act on those. In the UK at least there is £1billion from NESTA, £50m from 4iP, £1m from the Scottish government and various other pots of money aimed at maintaining economic growth.

So by 2010, when the bids have been put in, funds released, and pilots completed, we should see some very interesting new media indeed.

PHP Freelancer

Amidst the recent furore over Max Gogarty’s unblog-like/allegedly nepotistic travel blog entry on the Guardian website, a phrase caught my eye: Director of Digital Content Emily Bell’s reference to their “duty of care” to blogger Max.

It particularly interested me because I had a similar experience recently with a student blogger, who was on the receiving end of ferocious (and partly justified) criticism on an Australian alpha blog.

What was my duty of care to her?

On the one hand, it seemed, was an editorial role: to help guide her in responding to and managing the responses. I suggested splitting them into the constructive, the witty, and the insulting. To then dismiss the insulting ones, and write up a blog post compiling the best of the rest and admitting (as she did) that her original post was ill-informed or at least ambiguously phrased – this to be the first stage in a meaningful and hopefully constructive dialogue.

On the other hand was a pastoral role: to help her to deal with the emotional impact of such criticism. Thankfully she took it relatively well, and not too personally, even though some of the insults were personal. Various tactics were discussed for dealing with the responses, in terms of framing them more positively (as an opportunity rather than a threat) and in terms of taking emotional control.

The two roles mirrored the tension between serving both readers and writers, particularly when bloggers are not directly employed or paid by the news organisation.

So I’d like to ask you about your organisation:

Do you have a formal duty of care or contract drawn up with bloggers?

When a blog post goes viral like this, what procedures are put into place (e.g. increased monitoring of comments, informing or discussing with the blogger, dealing with comments off-site etc.)?

What would your advice be to bloggers caught up in a similar situation?

What would your advice be to publishers?

Anything else you could add would also, of course, be wonderful.

This blog post is part of the March Carnival of Journalism, this month hosted by Journerdism. 

PHP Freelancer

This post is part of a ‘blog carnival’. Read more at CarnivalOfJournalism.com. The story so far (in updates of 140 characters or less):

1. I set up a Twitter account, toy with it for a few minutes, then ignore it.
2. Months later, I return to my Twitter account to cover the Future of Newspapers conference – a perfect use for the technology.
3. Following a tip from Martin Stabe, I use Twitterfeed to push my blog’s posts – and, equally importantly, comments – to my Twitter page, in the process probably doubling the total amount of ‘tweets’ overnight.
4. At the same time, Martin comes at it from a different angle, and pushes his Twitter posts to his blog.
5. Realise I am guilty of ‘Twitter-shovelware’
6. Feel privately chuffed at inventing the phrase ‘Twitter-shovelware‘
7. Think of a better use for Twitterfeed, and create a new Twitter account for my del.icio.us bookmarks tagged ‘onlinejournalism’. It already has an RSS feed, but feeding it to Twitter allows people to receive it on their mobiles or as a ‘river’ on their Twitter page.
8. Realise I will probably annoy people who have to delete ten texts every day I do some bookmarking.
9. Getting even more carried away, I realise I can also use Twitterfeed to create an aggregation of the 70+ online journalism-related RSS feeds I subscribe to.
10. Decide to use Yahoo! Pipes as part of this, which has been on my ‘To Do’ list since May.
11. Discover that Yahoo! Pipes not only generates an RSS feed, but also options for mobile and email alerts.
12. But the process of setting up those alerts is not as usable as Twitter, so set up the Twitter ojblogaggregator account anyway (there are only around 20 feeds included so far, but will continue to add more as I iron out bugs).
13. Also discover three other ‘online journalism’ Pipes, one of which has been created by a former student. Feel proud.
14. Then realise he never finished it. Feel proud regardless.
15. Also realise I can use ‘View Source’ to build on the work of the other OJ aggregator – and that anyone can do the same to build on mine.
16. Result!

PHP Freelancer