The following is taken from the law chapter of The Online Journalism Handbook. The book blog and Facebook page contain updates and additions – those specifically on law can be found here.

Harassment

The Protection From Harrassment Act 1997 is occasionally used to prevent journalists on reporting on particular individuals. Specifically, any conduct which amounts to harassment of someone can be considered to a criminal act, for which the victim can seek an injunction (followed by arrest if broken) or damages.

One example of a blogger’s experience is illustrative of the way the act can be used with regard to online journalism, even if no case reaches court.

In January 2010 the Seismic Shock blog published a post linking an Anglican reverend with holocaust denial and antisemitism. The reverend complained of harassment to his local police force – Surrey Police – who passed on the complaint to the police force covering the blogger’s district: Yorkshire Police. Yorkshire Police visited the blogger and suggested he remove his blog.

The blogger, feeling intimidated, complied.

It was only when the reverend threatened another blogger (who had linked to the same evidence), boasting of his previous success (and falsely claiming that Seismic Shock had received a caution), that the Seismic Shock blogger talked publicly about what had happened and the story received national attention (Cellan-Jones, 2010).

Defences to a charge of harassment include if you were undertaking actions for the purpose of preventing or detecting crime, or that your conduct was “reasonable” in the particular circumstances.

The fewer the incidents, and the more spaced out the instances of those, the weaker the case.

If you have complied with an internal code of conduct with regard to privacy and fairness this will also help you.

A further consideration with regard to harassment is if someone claims that they are being harassed on your website. While they can report the harasser to the police, they might also expect you to take action under the Equality Act 2010 if the harassment is sexual in nature or based on gender, sexuality, disability, age, pregnancy, race or religion.

This legislation is useful to refer to if you wish to remove content that might be considered harassment, or bar a contributor for such behaviour. As always, clear terms and conditions outlining unacceptable behaviour that would result in such actions will strengthen your position.

Data Protection

If you gathering user information in any way – for example, requiring users to register to comment, upload material or to access your site, or ‘crowdsourcing’ details which include personal information – then you will need to be aware of the Data Protection Act.

The Data Protection Act 1998 stipulates how you should process any personal information you handle, and gives individuals powers to request access to information held about them. It requires that you use information “fairly and lawfully” and only for the purposes for which it is gathered, and only for as long as it is needed; that you store it securely and do not transfer it outside the EU (unless you ensure adequate protection); that you keep it accurate and up to date where necessary; and that you provide avenues for users to access their personal data if they require it.

In practical terms this means that when you gather information you should be clear about what it is to be used for and how the user can gain access to information held about them.

You should only provide access to user databases or spreadsheets containing personal details to members of staff who need that access to do what you said would be done with that information.

Importantly, the Act contains an exemption for information held only for ‘journalistic, literary or artistic’ purposes, which applies before first publication and if the publisher believes that publication would be in the public interest.

If these conditions are met then the data must only be held securely and you are exempt from the other requirements.

This is clearly important because otherwise the subject of a secret investigation could request any information that is held about them.

More information and advice about data protection can be found on the Information Commissioner’s Office website.

Hate speech laws

A number of laws forbid expression of ‘hate speech’ online in the UK. The Public Order Act 1986, the Racial and Religious Hatred Act 2006 and the Criminal Justice and Immigration Act 2008 cover, respectively, stirring up racial hatred (which can be based on nationality, colour, and ethnic origins); stirring up religious hatred; and inciting hatred on the basis of sexual orientation. If material is published on your site comes under any of these categories you should inform the contributor of the legal basis under which you are removing them.

Incitement and offensive communications

In addition to the hate speech laws covered in the Online Journalism Handbook, there are three other laws that are increasingly coming into play with relation to comments posted by website users.

The law on incitement – now “encouraging or assisting a crime” under the Serious Crime Act 2007 covers acts where individuals incite others to commit illegal acts. It was used in a number of cases surrounding the UK riots where defendants were accused of encouraging disorder using social networks such as Facebook, with two men in particular receiving a sentence of 4 years in prison as a result.

Student Liam Stacey was charged under a second act – the Crime and Disorder Act 1998 – which covers incitement to ethnic or racial hatred, after making racist remarks on Twitter in the aftermath of the collapse of Bolton Wanderers footballer Fabrice Muamba. He was sentenced to 56 days in prison.

The Communications Act 2003, specifically Section 127 – covers “grossly offensive” messages, a term broad enough to include a worrying range of discussion for publishers.

A number of Twitter users have been prosecuted under the act for offensive messages sent to footballers.

It was also used to prosecute Azhar Ahmed for the following statement, also on Facebook:

“People gassin about the deaths of soldiers! What about the innocent familys who have been brutally killed.. The women who have been raped.. The children who have been sliced up..! Your enemy’s were the Taliban not innocent harmless familys. All soldiers should DIE & go to HELL! THE LOWLIFE F*****N SCUM! gotta problem go cry at your soliders grave & wish him hell because that where he is going..”

The contentious issue here is who decides what is offensive. As Fahad Ansari explains:

“The test for “grossly offensive” is whether or not the message would cause gross offence to those to whom it relates, who need not be the recipients.”

Normally these laws are used to charge individuals, but publishers and journalists should also be aware of the potential for them to be used to request users’ details – including sources. If they have been warned about such content and have not removed it, there may also be legal consequences. These are as yet largely unexplored, although the case of News Ltd in Australia – found to have breached racial discrimination laws in publishing moderated comments – is illustrative.

The lawyer Charles Russell deconstructs a series of cases relating to that act here, including the ‘Twitter Joke Trial’.

Stalking

Bloggerheads’ Tim Ireland writes about his experiences of accusations of ‘stalking’ by one MP after he wrote about evidence surrounding the investigation into her expenses claims. The series is worth reading as an illustration of how social media is bending the boundaries of the physical and digital worlds:

“Chris Paul blogged about Nadine Dorries. Dorries reported him to police as a stalker.

“Ms Humphreycushion tweeted about Nadine Dorries. Dorries reported her to police as a stalker.

“I blogged and tweeted about Nadine Dorries. I also attended a public meeting I was invited to. Dorries reported me to police as a stalker.

“Linda Jack ran against Nadine Dorries in an election. Dorries reported her to police as a stalker.“

Tim has used the Data Protection Act particularly well to obtain the original complaints made against him, although:

“Even when I submitted a subject access request to her office legally compelling her to reveal what she claims are my emails, she refused to cooperate (!) in defiance of the Information Commissioner’s Office and the Data Protection Act.”

Do you know of any other examples of stalking laws being used in relation to journalism?

PHP Freelancer

Before the internet made it easier for advertisers to become publishers, they were already growing tired of the limitations (and inflated price) of traditional display advertising. In the magazine industry one of the big growth areas of the past 20 years was client publishing: helping – to varying degrees – companies create magazines which were then given or sold to customers, staff, members, or anyone interested in their field.

With some traditional advertising revenue streams dropping like a stone, newspapers belatedly started to see similar potential in their own markets. Trinity Mirror’s Media Wales are among a few newspaper publishers to sell video production services and the organisation has followed US newspapers in selling SEO services; while the FT followed Conde Nast when it recently bought an app production company.

While the execution varies, the idea behind it is consistent: this is no longer about selling content, or audiences, but expertise – and quite often expertise in distribution as much as in content production.

But the picture continues to change. And a new initiative from Facebook is worth watching closely in this regard:

“Facebook is encouraging advertisers to create ads based solely on the content they publish to their own Facebook pages

“… what Facebook really wants is for advertisers to spend time creating stuff that looks and acts just like the stuff Facebook users already like. (Worth noting that this is quite similar to Twitter’s ad strategy, which treats ads like tweets, and vice versa. Also worth noting: Just like Twitter’s ad strategy, this one should work very well on the limited real estate available on mobile phones.) It’s supposed to promote “earned” media — the industry’s name for promotion that fans/users/consumers end up doing for free, on their own.”

This is a natural extension of owning the platform. But whereas traditional publishers might try to sell users’ content (and, significantly, always feared Facebook staking a claim over their own), Facebook recognises that selling its distribution is the business they’re really in.

This starts to put Facebook in more direct competition with traditional media organisations, and has some significant potential implications:

• Firstly, it weakens publishers’ offerings on social media optimisation – they may have to advise clients to pay Facebook (and Twitter) as well as themselves.
• Secondly, it makes news organisations more direct competitors. In the same way that Apple initially blocked publishers from directing users to subscriptions outside apps, Facebook may see itself squaring up to media organisations.
• Finally, there’s always the chance that this will drive some advertisers out of the walled garden of Facebook and into the arms of the open web where they have more control. Maybe.

Whichever it is – and the whole project may fail to take off – publishers need to watch what Facebook is doing in this space, and adapt accordingly.

PHP Freelancer

Wonderful post by Tony Hirst in which he sort-of-coins* a lovely neologism in explaining how data can be “laundered”:

“The Deloitte report was used as evidence by Facebook to demonstrate a particular economic benefit made possible by Facebook’s activities. The consultancy firm’s caveats were ignored, (including the fact that the data may in part at least have come from Facebook itself), in reporting this claim.

“So: this is data laundering, right? We have some dodgy evidence, about which we’re biased, so we give it to an “independent” consultant who re-reports it, albeit with caveats, that we can then report, minus the caveats. Lovely, clean evidence. Our lobbyists can then go to a lazy policy researcher and take this scrubbed evidence, referencing it as finding in the Deloitte report, so that it can make its way into a policy briefing.”

So, perhaps we can now say “Follow the data” in the same way that we “Follow the money”?

*Although a search for “money laundering” generates thousands of results on Google, most of them seemingly influenced by serial neologist William Gibson‘s use of the term to refer to using illegally acquired data, I can’t find an example of it being used in the way that Tony means it.

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The following post was originally published by Gary Herman on the NUJ New Media blog. It’s reproduced here with permission.

Here at Newmedia Towers we are being swamped by events which at long last are demonstrating that the internet is really rather relevant to the whole debate about media ethics and privacy. So this is by way of a short and somewhat belated survey of the news tsunami – Google, Leveson, Twitter, ACTA, the EU and more.

When Camilla Wright, founder of celebrity gossip site Popbitch (which some years ago broke the news of Victoria Beckham’s pregnancy possibly before she even knew about it), testified before Leveson last week (26 January 2012) [Guardian liveblog; Wright's official written statement (PDF)] the world found out (if it could be bothered) how Popbitch is used by newspaper hacks to plant stories so that they can then be said to have appeared on the internet. Anyone remember the Drudge report, over a decade ago?

Wright, of course, made a somewhat lame excuse that Popbitch is a counterweight to gossip magazines which are full of stories placed by the PR industry.

But most interesting is the fact that Wright claimed that Popbitch is self-regulated and that it works.

Leveson pronounced that he is not sure there is ‘so much of a difference’ between what Popbitch does and what newspapers do – which is somehow off the point. Popbitch – like other websites – has a global reach by definition and Wright told the Inquiry that Popbitch tries to comply with local laws wherever it was available – claims also made more publicly by Google and Yahoo! when they have in the past given in to Chinese pressure to release data that actually or potentially incriminated users and, more recently, by Twitter when it announced its intention to regulate tweets on a country-by-country basis.

Trivia – like the stuff Popbitch trades – aside, the problem is real. A global medium will cross many jurisdictions and be accessible within many different cultures. What one country welcomes, another may ban. And who should judge the merits of each?

Confusing the internet with its applications

The Arab Spring showed us that social media – like mobile phones, CB radios, fly-posted silkscreen prints, cheap offset litho leaflets and political ballads before them – have the power to mobilise and focus dissent. Twitter’s announcement should have been expected – after all, tweeting was never intended to be part of the revolutionaries’ tool-kit.

There are already alternatives to Twitter – Vibe, Futubra, Plurk, Easy Chirp and Blackberry Messenger, of course – and the technology itself will not be restrained by the need to expand into new markets. People confuse the internet with its applications – a mistake often made by those authorities who seek to impose a duty to police content on those who convey it.

Missing the point again, Leveson asked whether it would be useful to have an external ombudsman to advise Popbitch on stories and observed that a common set of standards across newspapers and websites might also help.

While not dismissing the idea, Wright made the point that the internet made it easy for publications to bypass UK regulators.

This takes us right into the territory of Google, Facebook and the various attempts by US and international authorities to introduce regulation and impose duties on websites themselves to police them.

ACTA, SOPA and PIPA

The latest example is the Anti-Counterfeit Trade Agreement (ACTA) – a shadowy international treaty which, according to Google’s legal director, Daphne Keller, speaking over a year ago, has ‘metastasized’ from a proposal on border security and counterfeit goods to an international legal framework covering copyright and the internet.

According to a draft of ACTA, released for public scrutiny after pressure from the European Union, internet providers who disable access to pirated material and adopt a policy to counter unauthorized ‘transmission of materials protected by copyright’ will be protected against legal action.

Fair use rights would not be guaranteed under the terms of the agreement.

Many civil liberty groups have protested the process by which ACTA has been drafted as anti-democratic and ACTA’s provisions as draconian.

Google’s Keller described ACTA as looking ‘a lot like cultural imperialism’.

Google later became active in the successful fight against the US Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the related Protect Intellectual Proerty Act (PIPA), which contained similar provisions to ACTA.

Google has been remarkably quite on the Megaupload case, however. This saw the US take extraterritorial action against a Hong Kong-based company operating a number of websites accused of copyright infringement.

The arrest of all Megaupload’s executives and the closure of its sites may have the effect of erasing perfectly legitimate and legal data held on the company’s servers – something which would on the face of it be an infringement of the rights of Megaupload users who own the data.

Privacy

Meanwhile, Google – in its growing battle with Facebook – has announced its intention to introduce a single privacy regime for 60 or so of its websites and services which will allow the company to aggregate all the data on individual users the better to serve ads.

Facebook already does something similar, although the scope of its services is much, much narrower than Google’s.

Privacy is at the heart of the current action against Google by Max Mosley, who wants the company to take down all links to external websites from its search results if those sites cover the events at the heart of his successful libel suit against News International.

Mosley is suing Google in the UK, France and Germany, and Daphne Keller popped up at the Leveson Inquiry, together with David-John Collins, head of corporate communications and public affairs for Google UK, to answer questions about the company’s policies on regulation and privacy.

Once again, the argument regarding different jurisdictions and the difficulty of implementing a global policy was raised by Keller and Collins.

Asked about an on-the-record comment by former Google chief executive, Eric Schmidt, that ‘only miscreants worry about net privacy’, Collins responded that the comment was not representative of Google’s policy on privacy, which it takes ‘extremely seriously’.

There is, of course, an interesting disjuncture between Google’s theoretical view of privacy and its treatment of its users. When it comes to examples like Max Mosley, Google pointed out – quite properly – that it can’t police the internet, that it does operate across jurisdictions and that it does ensure that there are comprehensive if somewhat esoteric mechanisms for removing private data and links from the Google listings and caches.

Yet it argues that, if individuals choose to use Google, whatever data they volunteer to the company is fair game for Google – even where that data involves third persons who may not have assented to their details being known or when, as happened during the process of building Google’s StreetView application, the company collected private data from domestic wi-fi routers without the consent or knowledge of the householders.

Keller and Collins brought their double-act to the UK parliament a few days later when they appeared before the joint committee on privacy and injunctions, chaired by John Whittingdale MP.

When asked why Google did not simply ‘find and destroy’ all instances of the images and video that Max Mosley objected to, they repeated their common mantras – Google is not the internet, and neither can nor should control the websites its search results list.

Accused by committee member Lord MacWhinney of ‘ducking and diving’ and of former culture minister, Ben Bradshaw of being ‘totally unconvincing’, Keller noted that Google could in theory police the sites it indexed, but that ‘doing so is a bad idea’.

No apparatus disinterested and qualified enough

That seems indisputable – regulating the internet should not be the job of providers like Google, Facebook or Twitter. On the contrary, the providers are the ones to be regulated, and this should be the job of legislatures equipped (unlike the Whittingdale committee) with the appropriate level of understanding and coordinated at a global level.

The internet requires global oversight – but we have no apparatus that is disinterested and qualified enough to do the job.

A new front has been opened in this battle by the latest draft rules on data protection issued by Viviane Reding’s Justice Directorate at the European Commission on 25 January.

Reding is no friend of Google or the big social networks and is keen to draw them into a framework of legislation that will – should the rules pass into national legislation – be coordinated at EU level.

Reding’s big ideas include a ‘right to be forgotten’ which will apply to online data only and an extension of the scope of personal data to cover a user’s IP address. Confidentiality should be built-in to online systems according to the new rules – an idea called ‘privacy by design’.

These ideas are already drawing flak from corporates like Google who point out that the ‘right to be forgotten’ is something that the company already upholds as far as the data it holds is concerned.

Reding’s draft rules includes an obligation by so-called ‘data controllers’ such as Google to notify third parties when someone wishes their data to be removed, so that links and copies can also be removed.

Not surprisingly, Google objects to this requirement which, if not exactly a demand to police the internet, is at least a demand to ‘help the police with their enquiries’.

The problem will not go away: how do you make sure that a global medium protects privacy, removes defamation and respects copyright while preserving its potential to empower the oppressed and support freedom of speech everywhere?

Answers on a postcard, please.

PHP Freelancer

In this guest post, Damian Radcliffe highlights some recent developments in the intersection between hyper-local SoLoMo (social, location, mobile). His more detailed slides looking at 20 developments across the sector during the last two months of 2011 are cross-posted at the bottom of this article.

Facebook’s recent purchase of location-based service Gowalla (Slide 19 below,) suggests that the social network still thinks there is a future for this type of “check in” service. Touted as “the next big thing” ever since Foursquare launched at SXSW in 2009, to date Location Based Services (LBS) haven’t quite lived up to the hype.

Certainly there’s plenty of data to suggest that the public don’t quite share the enthusiasm of many Silicon Valley investors. Yet.

Part of their challenge is that not only is awareness of services relatively low – just 30% of respondents in a survey of 37,000 people by Forrester (Slide 27) – but their benefits are also not necessarily clearly understood.

In 2011, a study by youth marketing agency Dubit found about half of UK teenagers are not aware of location-based social networking services such as Foursquare and Facebook Places, with 58% of those who had heard of them saying they “do not see the point” of sharing geographic information.

Safety concerns may not be the primary concern of Dubit’s respondents, but as the “Please Rob Me” website says: “….on one end we’re leaving lights on when we’re going on a holiday, and on the other we’re telling everybody on the internet we’re not home… The danger is publicly telling people where you are. This is because it leaves one place you’re definitely not… home.”

Reinforcing this concern are several stories from both the UK and the US of insurers refusing to pay out after a domestic burglary, where victims have announced via social networks that they were away on holiday – or having a beer downtown.

For LBS to go truly mass market – and Forrester (see Slide 27) found that only 5% of mobile users were monthly LBS users – smartphone growth will be a key part of the puzzle. Recent Ofcom data reported that:

• Ownership nearly doubled in the UK between February 2010 and August 2011 (from 24% to 46%).
• 46% of UK internet users also used their phones to go online in October 2011.

For now at least, most of our location based activity would seem to be based on previous online behaviours. So, search continues to dominate.

Google in a recent blog post described local search ads as “so hot right now” (Slide 22, Sept-Oct 2011 update). The search giant launched hyper-local search ads a year ago, along with a “News Near You” feature in May 2011. (See: April-May 2011 update, Slide 27.)

Meanwhile, BIA/Kelsey forecast that local search advertising revenues in the US will increase from $5.1 billion in 2010 to $8.2 billion in 2015. Their figures suggest by 2015, 30% of search will be local.

The other notable growth area, location based mobile advertising, also offers a different slant on the typical “check in” service which Gowalla et al tend to specialise in. Borrell forerecasts this space will increase 66% in the US during 2012 (Slide 22).

The most high profile example of this service in the UK is O2 More, which triggers advertising or deals when a user passes through certain locations – offering a clear financial incentive for sharing your location.

Perhaps this – along with tailored news and information manifest in services such as News Near You, Postcode Gazette and India’s Taazza – is the way forward.

Jiepang, China’s leading Location-Based Social Mobile App, offered a recent example of how to do this. Late last year they partnered with Starbucks, offering users a virtual Starbucks badge if they “checked-in” at a Starbucks store in the Shanghai, Jiangsu and Zhejiang provinces. When the number of badges issued hit 20,000, all badge holders got a free festive upgrade to a larger cup size. When coupled with the ease of NFC technology deployed to allow users to “check in” then it’s easy to understand the consumer benefit of such a service.

Mine’s a venti gingerbread latte. No cream. Xièxiè.

PHP Freelancer

After discovering via Martin Hawksey that the recent (December, 2011) 2.5 release of Google Refine allows you to import JSON and XML feeds to bootstrap a new project, I wondered whether it would be able to pull in data from the Facebook API if I was logged in to Facebook (Google Refine does run in the browser after all…)

Looking through the Facebook API documentation whilst logged in to Facebook, it’s easy enough to find exemplar links to things like your friends list (https://graph.facebook.com/me/friends?access_token=A_LONG_JUMBLE_OF_LETTERS) or the list of likes someone has made (https://graph.facebook.com/me/likes?access_token=A_LONG_JUMBLE_OF_LETTERS); replacing me with the Facebook ID of one of your friends should pull down a list of their friends, or likes, etc.

(Note that validity of the access token is time limited, so you can’t grab a copy of the access token and hope to use the same one day after day.)

Grabbing the link to your friends on Facebook is simply a case of opening a new project, choosing to get the data from a Web Address, and then pasting in the friends list URL:

Click on next, and Google Refine will download the data, which you can then parse as a JSON file, and from which you can identify individual record types:

If you click the highlighted selection, you should see the data that will be used to create your project:

You can now click on Create Project to start working on the data – the first thing I do is tidy up the column names:

We can now work some magic – such as pulling in the Likes our friends have made. To do this, we need to create the URL for each friend’s Likes using their Facebook ID, and then pull the data down. We can use Google Refine to harvest this data for us by creating a new column containing the data pulled in from a URL built around the value of each cell in another column:

The Likes URL has the form https://graph.facebook.com/me/likes?access_token=A_LONG_JUMBLE_OF_LETTERS which we’ll tinker with as follows:

The throttle control tells Refine how often to make each call. I set this to 500ms (that is, half a second), so it takes a few minutes to pull in my couple of hundred or so friends (I don’t use Facebook a lot;-). I’m not sure what limit the Facebook API is happy with (if you hit it too fast (i.e. set the throttle time too low), you may find the Facebook API stops returning data to you for a cooling down period…)?

Having imported the data, you should find a new column:

At this point, it is possible to generate a new column from each of the records/Likes in the imported data… in theory (or maybe not..). I found this caused Refine to hang though, so instead I exprted the data using the default Templating… export format, which produces some sort of JSON output…

I then used this Python script to generate a two column data file where each row contained a (new) unique identifier for each friend and the name of one of their likes:

import simplejson,csv

writer=csv.writer(open('fbliketest.csv','wb+'),quoting=csv.QUOTE_ALL)

fn='my-fb-friends-likes.txt'

data = simplejson.load(open(fn,'r'))
id=0
for d in data['rows']:
	id=id+1
	#'interests' is the column name containing the Likes data
	interests=simplejson.loads(d['interests'])
	for i in interests['data']:
		print str(id),i['name'],i['category']
		writer.writerow([str(id),i['name'].encode('ascii','ignore')])

[I think this R script, in answer to a related @mhawksey Stack Overflow question, also does the trick: R: Building a list from matching values in a data.frame]

I could then import this data into Gephi and use it to generate a network diagram of what they commonly liked:

Rather than returning Likes, I could equally have pulled back lists of the movies, music or books they like, their own friends lists (permissions settings allowing), etc etc, and then generated friends’ interest maps on that basis.

[See also: Getting Started With The Gephi Network Visualisation App – My Facebook Network, Part I and how to visualise Google+ networks]

PS dropping out of Google Refine and into a Python script is a bit clunky, I have to admit. What would be nice would be to be able to do something like a “create new rows with new column from column” pattern that would let you set up an iterator through the contents of each of the cells in the column you want to generate the new column from, and for each pass of the iterator: 1) duplicate the original data row to create a new row; 2) add a new column; 3) populate the cell with the contents of the current iteration state. Or something like that…

PPS Related to the PS request, there is a sort of related feature in the 2.5 release of Google Refine that lets you merge data from across rows with a common key into a newly shaped data set: Key/value Columnize. Seeing this, it got me wondering what a fusion of Google Refine and RStudio might be like (or even just R support within Google Refine?)

PPPS this could be interesting – looks like you can test to see if a friendship exists given two Facebook user IDs.

Something interesting happened to journalism when it moved from print and broadcast to the web. Aspects of the process that we barely thought about started to be questioned: the ‘story’ itself seemed less than fundamental. Decisions that you didn’t need to make as a journalist – such as what medium you would use – were becoming part of the job.

In fact, a whole raft of new decisions now needed to be made.

For those launching a new online journalism project, these questions are now increasingly tackled with a content strategy, a phrase and approach which, it seems to me, began outside of the news industry (where the content strategy had been settled on so long ago that it became largely implicit) and has steadily been rediscovered by journalists and publishers.

‘Web first’, for example, is a content strategy; the Seattle Times’s decision to focus on creation, curation and community is a content strategy. Reed Business Information’s reshaping of its editorial structures is, in part, a content strategy:

Why does a journalist need a content strategy?

I’ve written previously about the style challenge facing journalists in a multi platform environment: where before a journalist had few decisions to make about how to treat a story (the medium was given, the formats limited, the story supreme), now it can be easy to let old habits restrict the power, quality and impact of reporting.

Below, I’ve tried to boil down these new decisions into 4 different types – and one overarching factor influencing them all. These are decisions that often have to be made quickly in the face of changing circumstances – I hope that fleshing them out in this way will help in making those decisions quicker and more effectively.

1. Format (“How?”)

We’re familiar with formats: the news in brief; the interview; the profile; the in-depth feature; and so on. They have their conventions and ingredients. If you’re writing a report you know that you will need a reaction quote, some context, and something to wrap it up (a quote; what happens next; etc.). If you’re doing an interview you’ll need to gather some colour about where it takes place, and how the interviewee reacts at various points.

Formats are often at their most powerful when they are subverted: a journalist who knows the format inside out can play with it, upsetting the reader’s expectations for the most impact. This is the tension between repetition and contrast that underlies not just journalism but good design, and even music.

As online journalism develops dozens of new formats have become available. Here are just a few:

• the liveblog;
• the audio slideshow;
• the interactive map;
• the app;
• the podcast;
• the explainer;
• the portal;
• the aggregator;
• the gallery

Formats are chosen because they suit the thing being covered, its position in the publisher’s news environment, and the resources of the publisher.

Historically, for example, when a story first broke for most publishers a simple report was the only realistic option. But after that, they might commission a profile, interview, or deeper feature or package – if the interest and the resources warranted that.

The subject matter would also be a factor. A broadcaster might be more inclined to commission a package on a story if colourful characters or locations were involved and were accessible. They might also send a presenter down for a two-way.

These factors still come into play now we have access to a much wider range of formats – but a wider understanding of those formats is also needed.

• Does the event take place over a geographical area, and users will want to see the movement or focus on a particular location? Then a map might be most appropriate.
• Are things changing so fast that a traditional ‘story’ format is going to be inadequate? Then a liveblog may work better.
• Is there a wealth of material out there being produced by witnesses? A gallery, portal or aggregator might all be good choices.
• Have you secured an interview with a key character, and a set of locations or items that tell their own story? Is it an ongoing or recurring story? An audio slideshow or video interview may be the most powerful choice of format.
• Are you on the scene and raw video of the event is going to have the most impact? Grab your phone and film – or stream.

2. Medium (“What?”)

Depending on what format has been chosen, the medium may be chosen for you too. But a podcast can be audio or video; a liveblog can involve text and multimedia; an app can be accessed on a phone, a webpage, a desktop widget, or Facebook.

This is not just about how you convey information about what’s going on (you’ll notice I avoid the use of ‘story’, as this is just one possible choice of format) but how the user accesses it and uses it.

A podcast may be accessed on the move; a Facebook app on mobile, in a social context; and so on. These are factors to consider as you produce your content.

3. Platform (“Where?”)

Likewise, the platforms where the content is to be distributed need careful consideration.

A liveblog’s reporting might be done through Twitter and aggregated on your own website. A map may be compiled in a Google spreadsheet but published through Google Maps and embedded on your blog.

An audioboo may have subscribers on iTunes or on the Audioboo app itself, and its autoposting feature may attract large numbers of listeners through Twitter.

Some call the choice of platform a choice of ‘channel’ but that does not do justice to the interactive and social nature of many of these platforms. Facebook or Twitter are not just channels for publishing live updates from a blog, but a place where people engage with you and with each other, exchanging information which can become part of your reporting (whether you want it to or not).

Your content strategy will need to take account of what happens on those platforms: which tweets are most retweeted or argued with; reacting to information posted in your blog or liveblog comments; and so on.

4. Scheduling (“When?”)

The choice of platform(s) will also influence your choice of timing. There will be different optimal times for publishing to Facebook, Twitter, email mailing lists, blogs, and websites.

There will also be optimal times for different formats (as the Washington Post found). A short news report may suit morning commuters; an audio slideshow or video may be best scheduled for the evening. Something humorous may play best on a Friday afternoon; something practical on a Wednesday afternoon once the user has moved past the early week slog.

This webcast on content strategy gives a particular insight into how they treat scheduling – not just across the day but across the week.

5. “Why?”

Print and broadcast rest on objectives so implicit that we barely think about them. The web, however, may have different objectives. Instead of attracting the widest numbers of readers, for example, we may want to engage users as much as possible.

That makes a big difference in any content strategy:

• The rapid rise of liveblogs and explainers as a format can be partly explained by their stickiness when compared to traditional news articles.
• Demand for video content has exceeded supply for some publishers because it is possible to embed advertising with content in a way which isn’t possible with text.
• Infographics have exploded as they lend themselves so well to viral distribution.

Distribution is often one answer to ‘why?’, and introduces two elements I haven’t mentioned so far: search engine optimisation and social media optimisation. Blogs as a platform and text as a medium are generally better optimised for search engines, for example. But video and images are better optimised for social network platforms such as Facebook and Twitter.

And the timing of publishing might be informed by analytics of what people are searching for, updating Facebook about, or tweeting about right now.

The objective(s), of course, should recur as a consideration throughout all the stages above. And some stages will have different objectives: for distribution, for editorial quality, and for engagement.

Just to confuse things further, the objectives themselves are likely to change as the business models around online and multiplatform publishing evolve.

If I’m going to sum up all of the above in one line, then, it’s this: “Take nothing for granted.”

I’m looking for examples of content strategies for future editions of the book – please let me know if you’d like yours to be featured.

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There’s a salient quote in Journalism.co.uk’s report on Facebook’s  ”new class of news apps” launched today:

“As we worked with different news organisations there were two camps: people that wanted to bring the social experience onto their sites, like Yahoo [News] and the Independent; and those that wanted the social news experience on Facebook, like Guardian, the Washington Post and the Daily,” director of Facebook’s platform partnerships Christian Hernandez told Journalism.co.uk.

So which is better? An initial play with the apps of The Independent and The Guardian appears to demonstrate the difference well. Here, for example, is the Facebook app widget as it appears on The Independent – or rather, as it almost appears: various other editorial and commercial choices push it onto the fold:

The Guardian app, meanwhile, hands over editorial control to the users in a customarily clean design:

But hold on, what’s this in my news/activity/information overload stream next to The Guardian’s article?

It appears that The Independent app takes the news to the users as well.

What’s happening here? Well, from a user perspective, unless you’re on the Guardian app page or The Independent, both apps work in exactly the same way: if a friend is reading an article on either, it will appear in your feed.

What’s the difference? In The Independent’s case, the friend has to be reading it on the site after having logged onto the Facebook app. In The Guardian’s case, they have to be reading it on the app page.

So in both cases, the publisher is asking the user to ‘come to us’. Whether the address begins with facebook.com or independent.co.uk – it’s still a click away.

Of course, that doesn’t mean that they’re not also taking the news to the users. Both have various Facebook pages which allow users to see stories directly in their news feed, and The Independent do this particularly well, as reported previously.

Both also have Like/Recommend buttons scattered liberally across their site.

So why install The Independent app? To see what your friends are reading while you’re on their site (if you scroll down a bit), and to reduce the effort needed to share what you’re reading.

Why install The Guardian app? This also reduces the effort needed to share your reading (both apps assume sharing by default), but also to get only the populist and socially-influenced view of the site.

In other words, they both actually do pretty much the same thing, with the key difference being that on The Independent, your Facebook friends’ reading is a small part of the editorial mix, and on The Guardian it is – along with the broader ‘most popular’ stories – the only part of the editorial mix. (If you want a different editorial mix, you can go to The Guardian’s website – but you’ll be missing the friends’ stream).

There’s a key extra ingredient here, too, however – and that’s the Facebook streams mentioned above. With The Guardian app I can see all the news my friends are reading, and access all the other Facebook functionality such as chat and messaging. And that make a big difference.

That said, I also feel ‘cut off’ from the wider, less popular, Guardian content and functionality on their app in a way that The Independent doesn’t suffer from.

So it comes down to what sort of editorial mix you want as a reader. And there may well be a place for both. But the news finds the users in the end, either way.

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Ofcom’s Damian Radcliffe produces a regular round-up of developments in hyperlocal publishing. In this guest post he cross-publishes his latest presentation for this summer, as well as the background to the reports.

Ofcom’s 2009 report on Local and Regional Media in the UK identified the increasing role that online hyperlocal media is playing in the local and regional media ecology.

New research in the report identified that

“One in five consumers claimed to use community websites at least monthly, and a third of these said they had increased their use of such websites over the past two years.”

That was two years ago, and since then, this nascent sector has continued to evolve, with the web continuing to offer a space and platform for community expression, engagement and empowerment.

The diversity of these offerings is manifest in the Hyperlocal Voices series found on this website, as well as Talk About Local’s Ten Questions feature, both of which speak to hyperlocal practitioners about their work.

For a wider view of developments in this sector, you may want to look at the bi-monthly series of slides I publish on SlideShare every two months.

Each set of slides typically outlines 20 recent hyperlocal developments; usually 10 from the UK and 10 from the US.

Topics in the current edition include Local TV, hyperlocal coverage of the recent England riots, the rise of location based deals and marketing, as well as the FCC’s report on The Information Needs of Communities.

Feedback and suggestions for future editions – including omissions from current slides – are actively welcomed.

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Over the weekend the BBC had to deal with the embarrassing ignorance of someone in their complaints department who appeared to believe that images shared on Twitter were “public domain” and “therefore … not subject to the same copyright laws” as material outside social networks.

A blog post, from online communities adviser Andy Mabbett, gathered thousands of pageviews in a matter of hours before the BBC’s Social Media Editor Chris Hamilton quickly responded:

“We make every effort to contact people, as copyright holders, who’ve taken photos we want to use in our coverage.

“In exceptional situations, ie a major news story, where there is a strong public interest in making a photo available to a wide audience, we may seek clearance after we’ve first used it.”

(Chris also published a blog post yesterday expanding on some of the issues, the comments on which are also worth reading)

The copyright issue – and the existence of a member of BBC staff who hadn’t read the Corporation’s own guidelines on the matter – was a distraction. What really rumbled through the 170+ comments – and indeed Andy’s original complaint – was the issue of attribution.

Why is it that news organisations still attribute images and video to the platforms they were hosted on?

The BBC – thanks to the UGC hub that Chris heads up – are actually better than most news organisations on this front. Channel 4 News can be seen broadcasting footage captioned “Video from YouTube”; newspapers and magazines will similarly occasionally credit images as being “from” Twitter or Facebook (or link to a research journal’s homepage rather than the research paper being reported on, as one commenter pointed out).

It already seems like a statement from a bygone era. Tom Morris, for example, argued:

“When someone calls you Crimewatch, you don’t thank BT or Vodafone or T-Mobile: not seeing the human at the end of the line, that’s the damn problem.”

Of course, the comment overlooks one of the characteristics of digital media: the ease of replication. Quite often an image or video will reach us through a dozen intermediaries: publishing and distribution overlap.

Coupled with the time pressures of newsrooms, this can lead journalists to use media without knowing their true authorship.

And there’s the problem.

While we may occasionally think that some stories are too important to waste time tracking down the copyright owner of images, the importance of identifying the provenance of those images – and of giving the viewer the critical context to make a judgement on it – are not trivial matters.

Just as we expect journalists to have a very good reason to use quotes without attribution, the same should apply to images and video.

Social networks can make attribution easier: during the Chinese earthquake, for example, I could trace the source of a tweet relatively easily. And there are a variety of other tools and techniques for tracing information online. The BBC, again, is actually very good at this.

But even when the source cannot be traced – and we are confident of the material’s validity – we need a better way of describing the source of that material, or the point at which the journalist came across the material: “Photo published on Twitter by Janet Jones”; “Video republished by youtube.com/anaconda” or even “attribution being sought”.

(Given that we are often publishing cross-platform a similar option may be to have a page which provides further information about the provenance of UGC material used on-air and in print, a sort of iReport in reverse)

A failure to do so betrays not just a lack of respect for the users of social media who created that media or brought it to our attention, but a lack of care in the process of journalism itself.

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