Whether you need an image for your blog post, a soundtrack to your video or that YouTube clip for your documentary, if you’re dealing with multimedia it’s likely you’ll end up using – or wanting to use – someone else’s work as part of your own.

Here are some basic tips on finding and using multimedia across the web in a way that won’t (hopefully) land you in hot water.

The public domain myth

One of the mistakes that has repeatedly landed journalists and their employers in trouble is confusion over the term “public domain“.

Public domain has two possible meanings. In copyright terms, public domain refers to work whose copyright has expired, meaning that anyone can use it without having to ask the copyright holder. Disney – a fierce lobbyist itself for extending copyright – has used ‘public domain’ material as the basis for most of its cartoons, from the work of the Grimm Brothers to a host of other fairy tales, myths and legends.

But sometimes you will hear journalists talk about something being “in the public domain“, in other words ‘public’. For instance, when the Irish Daily Mail published photos of an air traffic controller from her website, they defended the decision on the grounds that the image was “in the public domain”.

But this is not the same.

For example, pretty much every piece of media, almost by definition, is “in the public domain”. Newspapers and magazines sit on the newsstands; television and radio reports are broadcast on huge city centre screens and speakers.

But if you take that content and reproduce it in its entirety without permission, you are breaking copyright law.

It seems odd that media organisations so used to protecting their own, very public, content, should think that another person’s photo, or video, or report, should be fair game because it is “in the public domain”. But they do.

If you want public domain (in the sense of ‘copyright expired’) content, there are some useful sources. The Public Domain Review, for example, publishes a range of public domain work and has this guide to finding them. And Angela Grant writes here about finding public domain video, among other things (note that Angela refers to US law, not that of other countries).

But never assume something is public domain because it is “in public”.

One point to make: while an image, story, or composition may be out of copyright, its performance, re-design or re-telling may not.

Just ask Disney.

Creative Commons – making UGC copyright explicit

If you’re dealing with content that’s been published on a platform like Flickr or YouTube, you may be able to find out the copyright status of that content relatively easily.

Both allow users to easily establish copyright through the Creative Commons licence. You can either look for that licence in the relevant part of the page hosting the content.

On YouTube it is under the video:

On Flickr this is on the right hand side under License:

Make sure you click on that licence to find out what terms it requires.

Creative Commons, for example, has a number of elements:

• Whether the material can be used only in noncommercial contexts, or for commercial use as well
• Whether the material can be adapted and changed, or must be left unchanged
• Whether you must use the same CC licence if you use this material (e.g. you cannot use a noncommercial licence but then allow your work to be used commercially)
• Whether you must attribute the work (this is where many people breach the licence)

If you’re unsure of where your work fits against those criteria (for example, whether it’s considered as “commercial”), then approach the copyright holder for clarity. Remember that the CC licence is only a default position, and can be negotiated. Also, if you cannot get any response and decide to publish anyway, your attempts to contact the copyright holder will be important if there are any legal proceedings.

If you want others to publish their content under a CC licence, it helps if you publish at least some of your own work under a CC licence too. Indeed, if it contains other CC material, their licences may require you to.

Embedding versus re-broadcasting

If the media is hosted on a platform like YouTube, you may be able to embed it on a webpage without seeking permission at all: if the creator* has enabled embedding then they would have little argument in suing for breach of copyright because a) by enabling embedding they have given an ‘implied’ right; and b) they could stop you publishing it instantly by disabling embedding. Also, your embedding of their media would not lead to any loss of revenue (as advertising is embedded too), so it is unlikely that there would be any damages to sue for.

*note: this does not apply to video created by other people and uploaded by someone other than the copyright holder.

Reality bites

Of course, it’s one thing to talk about the strict legal position, and another to talk about what actually happens. Journalists regularly publish content that breaks the law – but make a judgement about the likelihood of ending up in court over that. For example, I can say that the Queen is corrupt (a defamatory statement) and be almost certain that the Queen is not going to sue me (because she has a history of not doing so).

Media lawyers are not just there to advise publishers on their strict legal position, but on the balance of risk involved, and how to reduce those risks. While you cannot always avoid risks, you can avoid them in simple ways:

• Always try to establish the copyright situation regarding any media you use: who holds the copyright (there may be more than one copyright owner: for example, performer and composer), and what are the terms of the licence?
• Try to contact the copyright holder if you’re in any doubt – even if you can’t contact them your efforts to do so will help you if you do end up in court.
• Always attribute authorship and link to the source (this can be done in title credits, captions and/or links on the host webpage). Copyright claims normally revolve around loss of earnings: anything that may have contributed to that (i.e. not linking to the source) will likely add to damages.

For more on these issues, and for related tools and links, see my bookmarks at http://delicious.com/paulb/creativecommons

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This is the second of a three-part guest post by Paul Lewis that originally appeared in the book Investigative Journalism: Dead or Alive? You can read the first part here.

The investigation into Tomlinson’s death began in the hours after his death on 1 April 2009, and culminated, six days later, in the release of video footage showing how he had been struck with a baton and pushed to the ground by a Metropolitan police officer, Simon Harwood. The footage, shot by an American businessman, was accompanied by around twenty detailed witness accounts and photographs of the newspaper seller’s last moments alive and successfully disproved the police’s explanation of the death.

The result was a criminal investigation, a national review of policing, multiple parliamentary inquiries and, by May 2011, an inquest at which a jury concluded Tomlinson had been “unlawfully killed”. At the time of writing, Harwood, who was on the Met’s elite Territorial Support Group, was awaiting trial for manslaughter.

In media studies, the case was viewed as a landmark moment for so-called “citizen journalism”. Sociologists Greer and Laughlin argue the Tomlinson story revealed a changing narrative, in which the powerful – in this case, the police – lost their status of “primary definers” of a controversial event.

Significantly, it was the citizen journalist and news media perspective, rather than the police perspective, that was assimilated into and validated by the official investigations and reports. Ultimately, it was this perspective that determined “what the story was”, structured the reporting of “what had happened and why” and drove further journalistic investigation and criticism of the Metropolitan Police Services.

The initial account of Tomlinson’s death put out by police was that he died of a heart attack while walking home from work in the vicinity of the protests, and that protesters were partly to blame for impeding medics from delivering life-saving treatment. Neither of these claims were true, but they fed into coverage that was favourable to police.

A public relations drive by the Met and City of London police was bolstered by “off the record” briefings to reporters that suggested – also wrongly – that Tomlinson’s family were not surprised by his death and upset by internet speculation it could be suspicious. These briefings contributed to a broader media narrative that endorsed police and criticised protesters.

How the police account left so many questions unanswered

The morning after father of nine died, the newspaper he had been selling outside Monument tube station, the Evening Standard, carried the headline: “Police pelted with bricks as they help dying man.” But it was plain to us, even at an early stage, that there could be more to the story. The overlydefensive police public relations campaign gave the impression there was something to hide. Embedded in the small-print of press releases, there were clues – such as the Independent Police Complaints Commission’s notification of the death – that left unanswered questions.

Most obviously, anyone who had ventured near to the protests near the Bank of England on the evening Tomlinson died would have known he collapsed in the midst of violent clashes with police. It seemed implausible, even unlikely, that the death of a bystander would not have been connected in some way to the violence. But pursuing this hunch was not easy, given the paucity of reliable information being released by police, who at times actively discouraged us from investigating the case.

All that was known about Tomlinson in the 48 hours after his death was that he had been wearing a Millwall football t-shirt. That, though, was enough to begin pursuing two separate lines of inquiry. One involved old school “shoe leather”; trawling through notepads to identify anyone who may have been in the area, or know someone who was, who could identify Tomlinson from press photographs of him lying unconscious on the ground.

That yielded one useful eye-witness, with photographic evidence of Tomlinson alive, with images of him walking in apparent distress, and lying at the feet of riot police 100 yards from where he would eventually collapse. Why was Tomlinson on the ground twice, in the space of just a few minutes? And if those photographs of the father of nine stumbling near police officers, moments before his death, were put online, would anyone make the connection?

Becoming part of a virtual G20 crowd

The answer was yes, as a direct result of the second line of inquiry: by open sharing information online, both through internet stories and Twitter, we became part of a virtual G20 crowd that had coalesced online to question the circumstances of his death. In this environment, valuable contributions to the debate, which were more sceptical in tone than those adopted by other media organisations, worked like online magnets for those who doubted the official version of events. Twitter proved crucial to sharing information with the network of individuals who had begun investigating the death of their own accord.

I had signed-up to the social media website two days before the protest, and became fascinated with the pattern of movement of “newsworthy” tweets. For example, a YouTube video uploaded by two protesters who did not see the assault on Tomlinson, but did witness his collapse minutes later and strongly disputed police claims that officers treating him were attacked with bottles, was recommended to me within seconds of being uploaded. Minutes later, Twitter investigators had identified the protesters in the film and, shortly after that, found their contact details.

Similarly, those concerned to document Tomlinson’s last moments alive, including associates of the anarchist police-monitoring group Fitwatch, were using the internet to organise.

Through Twitter I discovered there were Flickr albums with hundreds of photographs of the vicinity of this death, and dissemination of blog-posts that speculated on how he may have died. None of these images of course could be taken at face value, but they often contained clues, and where necessary the crowd helped locate, and contact, the photographer.

Journalists often mistakenly assume they can harness the wisdom of an online crowd by commanding its direction of travel. On the contrary, in digital journalism, memes (namely, concepts that spread via the internet) take their own shape organically, and often react with hostility to anyone who overtly seeks to control their direction. This is particularly the case with the protest community, which often mistrusts the so-called mainstream media. Hence it was incumbent on me, the journalist, to join the wider crowd on an equal playing-field, and share as much information as I was using as the investigation progressed.

Establishing authenticity and context

There were times, of course, when we had to hold back important material; we resisted publishing images of Tomlinson at the feet of riot police for four days, in order to establish properly their authenticity and context.

Internet contact usually does not suffice for verification, and so I regularly met with sources. I asked the most important witnesses to meet me at the scene of Tomlinson’s death, near the Bank of England, to walk and talk me through what they had seen. We only published images and video that we had retrieved directly from the source and later verified.

A different standard applies to sharing images already released on Twitter, where journalists such as National Public Radio’s Andy Carvin in the US have proven the benefits from sharing information already in the public domain to establish its significance and provenance. The break, though, as with most scoops, was partly the result of good luck, but not unrelated to the fact that our journalism had acquired credibility in the online crowd.

Chris La Jaunie, an investment fund manager, who had recorded the crucial footage of Harwood pushing Tomlinson on a digital camera, had become part of that crowd too, having spent days monitoring coverage on the internet from his office in New York. He knew the footage he had was potentially explosive. The options available to Mr La Jaunie were limited. Fearing a police cover-up, he did not trust handing over the footage. An alternative would have been to release the video onto YouTube, where would it lack context, might go unnoticed for days and even then could not have been reliably verified.

He said he chose to contact me after coming to the conclusion that ours was the news organisation which had most effectively interrogated the police version of events. It was more than a year later that my colleague Matthew Taylor and I began inquiring into the death of Mubenga. By then we had recognised the potential reach of Twitter for investigative journalism and our decision to openly investigate the death of the Angolan failed asylum seeker was a deliberate one.

Not all investigations are suited to transparent digging, and, indeed, many stories still demand top secrecy. This has been true for the three outstanding UK investigations of our times: the Telegraph’s MPs’ expenses scandal and, at the Guardian, the investigations into files obtained by WikiLeaks and phone-hacking by the News of the World. However, Tomlinson had shown that open investigations can succeed, and there were parallels with the death of Mubenga.

In the third and final part, published tomorrow, Lewis explains how he used Twitter to pursue that investigation into the death of Jimmy Mubenga, and the crucial role of verification.

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The images above are from Jamie Keiles‘ blog, the ‘Seventeen Magazine Project‘ – “an attempt to spend one month living according to the gospel of Seventeen Magazine.”

The Flickr pool is here. Wonderful idea.

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Don’t worry, I’ll get over this Twitter thing very soon, but for now I want to address all of the ill informed coverage that stifles use of Twitter because it can’t see beyond a) celebrities using it and b) the Facebook-style status update thing.

If you’re struggling to think of what to talk about on Twitter, here are some suggestions:

1. What you are doing right now – clearly the most obvious one, and the easiest one, but also the least interesting. Let’s move on…
2. What you will be doing later - more useful, as people may be interested in the results, or want to meet where you’re going.
3. A useful link you’ve found – easy and useful. If others find it useful they might pass it on, introducing you to more followers. Which brings us on to…
4. Retweet something interesting someone else has tweeted – again, pretty easy – and in fact many Twitter clients like Tweetdeck and Twhirl allow you to retweet with one click. The more people you follow, by the way, the more likely you are to come across something useful.
5. Something you’ve done – many people use Twitter as a way to alert people to their latest blog post. You can even automate this with an RSS-to-Twitter service like Twitterfeed or Pingvine.
6. Something you’ve seen – upload your pictures to Flickr and post a link, or use a service like Twitpic which will do it for you. If you have Shozu on your phone that will allow you to upload images directly from it to Twitpic.
7. A message to someone else on Twitter – Twitter is a social medium, not a broadcast one, so conversation is part of the deal. To talk to someone just put @ in front of their name (e.g. @paulbradshaw) and they will be able to see it when they click on @replies on the right column of Twitter (if they use a client like Tweetdeck they will get an audio alert).
8. A quote - by someone else, or one of your own
9. A question - this is where it gets really useful. Twitter allows you to put a question out to everyone who follows you – meaning access to a wealth of experience and knowledge. You may get the right answer – you may get a range of interesting answers. You can also ask people to retweet it in the hope of finding the person who can answer it best.
10. A call for assistance - equally, Twitter is a great organising tool. Arrange a meetup, a demonstration, a protest (real or virtual) by tweeting what you want to do, and asking followers to pass it on.

One great thing about Twitter – and this is why it is so useful for student journalists – is that after a while it trains you to look for interesting things around you (and think how you can communicate that in 140 chars). Those who write off the minutiae of Twitter need to realise: it’s the writer who makes it interesting.

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I’ve just been casting my eye over the Magazine Production work of two groups of second year students on the journalism degree I teach on. In addition to design and subbing, they were assessed on ‘web strategy’ – in other words, how they approached distribution online.

To give this a little context: early in the module ideas for magazines had to be pitched to the student union for financial backing in a Dragons’ Den-style competition (where among other things they had to address web strategy and business model). One idea per class ‘won’, which the whole class then had to work together to produce.

The winning ideas were: Nu Life – a magazine aimed at international students; and Skint - a money-saving guide with a particular focus on food. This is what they did…

The social network as web hub

Both groups created a Ning social network as the hub of their activity. Nu Life‘s pulled RSS feeds from the magazine blog and from local news services, in addition to having blog posts on the Ning itself, hosting images, originally produced video, an event, and forums.

Skint pulled just one RSS feed – from BBC Entertainment – but also had an on-site blog, images, video, forums and groups. There was an intelligent use of ‘Featured Users’ on the users page as well as the opportunity for users to embed their own ‘badge’ (widget) declaring their membership.

Facebook was used by both groups too – Nu Life‘s attracted 159 members, and included images, discussion and video (this time found on YouTube rather than produced by themselves). The number of members was most likely due to the fact that group creator Isabel Fernandes engaged in discussions in relevant groups elsewhere on the site, and created a Nu Life group on hi5 - a social network popular in Portuguese-speaking countries.

Skint had a clever groups strategy, creating a number of subject-specific Facebook groups such as ‘Travel’, ‘Food’, ‘Sport’ etc. which all had members in addition to the main Skint group, which had 82 members. Why clever? Better search engine optimised and easier to send targeted messages. Kim Gammon also created a group with great viral potential: Skint Magazine: Spot The Drunk (Four Four Two magazine’s Weekend Wonders sister site is a similar community-driven idea)

Skint also used MySpace – only gathering a measly 4 friends.

Apart from Isabel, generally the Facebook strategy seemed to be ‘Send out invites to all my friends’ rather than any coherent attempt to generate discussion and activity, while the Ning strategy seemed to be gather all the distributed content in one place and kick off discussions among themselves. The expectation was that readers would simply come to them. As for going to the reader… No.

Blogging – FAIL

While both magazines used blogs they both did so badly. Skint’s editor’s blog (which didn’t seem to be plugged into the Ning site) had 3 posts, written in a breezy columnist style, with not a single link or tag. The first post’s sign-off: “That’s all from me right now, enjoy your read” summed it up. Translation: “I’ve done my job, now I’m off while you passively consume my content.”

Nu Life’s blog had more posts but was a transparent cut-and-paste shovelware job – to the extent that the formatting from Word made the posts look ugly and inconsistent (tip: learn to use WordPress’ remove formatting button).

There was some attempt at engagement, but this was in the ‘Have Your Say’ vein of “So… what helped YOU decide to study abroad? Share your thoughts here!” Again, no links in posts but at least they had some in the outside column.

Video, photos, music and social bookmarking

A small group of students were asked to explore video for Nu Life – these were posted on the magazine’s Ning-based social network, along with images. Sadly they didn’t appear to cross-post on the likes of Flickr or YouTube, or engage in conversation on those sites.

Skint had their own YouTube channel which not only included their own videos (student Stacey Spencer managed to create 3) but also those that they have ‘favourited’, adding extra value. They also had a Last.fm page, but the creator couldn’t get beyond simply adding his own music (the Ning site creator Adam Stewart had a better idea, embedding tracks such as ‘Money Money Money’… you get the idea). One student had the right idea in creating a poll on fan network Fanpop – but then neglected to mention or link back to the magazine site.

One student created a Flickr account for the magazine. The images were few (and probably copyright-infringing) but importantly, she joined and contributed to a number of Flickr groups such as Supermarket UK and Student Life. Sadly, her contributions had the typical arrogance of journalists: “Battle of the supermarkets is an article that will be featuring in the next issue of Skint magazine! Your photos are really helpful!” Thanks, now what have you done for us lately?

A member of the Nu Life team was assigned social bookmarking and quickly learned that while Delicious had its uses, Digg was much more useful in creating a social experience with the target audience – but rather than create a useful resource for that audience and build it slowly, he ‘friended’ 100 users on one day and bookmarked a handful of sites. A better strategy would have the numbers the other way around. There were 2 Digg accounts for Skint magazine, but neither thought to make any friends.

Don’t advertise – socialise

Clearly, I was disappointed. As I’ve said before, anyone who thinks young people are automatically switched on and into social media underestimates just what a conservative bunch young people are. More than one spoke of how they needed to ‘advertise’ the site more, and indeed some students created flyers and posters that they distributed – not a bad thing, but not an education in online distribution either.

They treated the websites as destinations, not platforms. They focused on creating content, not conversations. And (apart from those named here) they stayed within their own circle of friends rather than reaching out to create new relationships with people and communities online – indeed, the fact that there was a Ning site as well as a Facebook group seemed to allow them to think they were ‘branching out’ by moving/linking from one to the other.

That’s understandable: most took the path of least resistance, holing up and making ‘stuff’; operating within their safety zones and relying on existing production paradigms.

In other words, they’re not doing anything that most of the magazine industry itself isn’t doing at the moment.

The real paradigm shift was this: they were being assessed on their ability to make new friends

What teaching experience does that? It’s no surprise most of them didn’t get it.

Ultimately this was not an ‘online journalism’ module – this was about magazine design and sub-editing (including search engine optimisation), with only two sessions on web strategy (and look at the cover designs above – the design skills were great).

Their critical evaluations suggested that they understood in principle where they had gone wrong – and that’s the point of these exercises: to try something, make mistakes, and work out how to do it better. Most of these people will be starting my Online Journalism classes next week – ten full-on weeks immersed in newsgathering and production online – and I’m looking forward to seeing if they can put that learning into practice. I’ve already changed some of the assessment of that module based on what I learned from this.

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Last week I was at a magazine publishers talking about social media platforms, when it was put to me that the platform I was talking about was “mainly used by Valley types”, and why should journalists invest time in a platform when the majority of readers of more conservative titles don’t use it?

It’s a recurring question – so much so that I have decided to present my answer here. I’d welcome any additions.

You can put it where you want

The flexibility of RSS means that just because you are on Twitter/Facebook/Flickr/YouTube/blogs, doesn’t mean your reader has to be. Twitter may be mainly used by Valley types, but you can put it on your site in minutes with a widget, creating an easy way to keep your site (and your readers) frequently updated.

The BBC have done this successfully many times with sporting events. But you can also aggregate feeds together, as I did earlier this year with Environmental News Online, so you could see ‘What our reporters are doing right now’. Dynamic content and a stronger reader relationship for the effort of an occasional text message from a reporter.

Advertisers want your social media-using readers

Just because a minority of readers use social media doesn’t mean they’re not important. Recently Universal McCann released a report on the rise of “a new breed of super influencers” that has been created by social media tools.

These people tend to be influential over a range of around a dozen categories (e.g. food, drink, music, fashion). And they are “much more likely to be motivated by overt commercial messaging [and] celebrity endorsements”. Sounds like a great pitch to advertisers…

Oh, and another of those things they influence people on? What magazine to buy or website to visit.

They’re not “geeks” – they’re early adopters

Five years ago people who downloaded mp3s were seen as geeky. Now it’s a mainstream activity, and expected to make up the majority of record sales within a further five years.

Twitter has only been going for two years; YouTube is 3 years old and Flickr 4. MySpace is 5. blogging services like Blogger.com are still not even a decade old.

Do I need to labour the point?

Distribution has always been about getting your content to where the reader is. Guess where they are now?

And if they’re not there already…

Teach them how to fish…

Finally, just because some people aren’t using social media now, doesn’t mean they won’t in the future. Publishers seem to have a mental block on the possibility of taking an active role in people’s use of social media – for no reason: this is a two-way medium now.

There’s no reason why you can’:

• create a Flickr group and show readers how to join Flickr in order to join in;
• set up a YouTube channel and invite them to post to it;
• encourage them to tweet from their mobile phone.

After all, aren’t you about bringing benefits to the readers?

Not only that, but if users learned how to social network/blog/twitter/upload images/video through you, they’re more likely to build some sort of relationship and user loyalty with what you’re doing.

If they learn from someone else, well, you’ve missed a golden opportunity.

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In the final parts of this series I look at two concepts that have become increasingly central to online journalism in the post-Web 2.0 era: community and conversation. I look at why journalists need to understand how both have changed, how they are linked, and how to embrace them in your work processes.

Conversation and community have always been the lifeblood of journalism. Good journalism has always sought to serve a community; commercially, journalism has always needed large or affluent communities to support it. And good journalism – whether informative or sensationalist – has always generated conversation.

Now, in a hyperlinked world, community and conversation are more important than ever.

But they have also changed.

The community is now the media

The bar has been raised.

In a networked world the faceless, passive, amorphous masses of print and broadcast journalism are an anachronism. Journalists can no longer stand outside communities supplying them with information. Communities can supply themselves – and each other – thank you very much:

• When your former audience has the same tools as you to publish, publishing isn’t your unique selling point.
• When they have access to the same information, newsgathering isn’t your unique selling point.
• And when they can pass on news at the click of a button, even distribution isn’t your unique selling point.

When your community has this much power (if this is the Green Ink Brigade they have undergone significant rearmament), you are best advised to stop trying to beat them, and start learning how to join them – or at least form a peaceful alliance.

Journalists need communities more than ever before – not just as buyers, but as active contributors, moderators, and editors: a 21st century ‘news organisation’ doesn’t have walls; it has networks. And persuading users to join your network is one of the biggest challenges facing journalists. For some online journalists, it is becoming the core of their job.

“Community organising IS media”

David Cohn puts it this way:

“It’s often said that the job description for journalists are changing and that part of the new job is ‘community manager’ – sometimes called the ‘network weaver.’

“What they do is organize communities – and while it might not FEEL like media, it is. We may not call them “journalists” but they are helping to inform citizens so they can make decisions in a healthy democracy. They collect, filter and distribute information. Sounds like journalism to me.”

But it’s far from easy, and requires a change of focus.

While news organisations have lost their monopolies on publishing, information and distribution, journalists can still contribute to a community on a number of important fronts:

• Time: whereas most users can only contribute to a community in their spare time, a professional journalist employed as a community manager is paid to do the job full time, has more time for ‘social grooming’, and can break Dunbar’s limit on group size. In the 1-9-90 rule, journalists can be part of the 1% who are heavy contributors (the other 9% are occasional contributors, and the final 90% do not contribute).
• Experience: for the same reason, journalists – particularly those who move into community management – are likely to have more experience of organising, motivating, and communicating with people (if they haven’t, they need to start building it).
• An eye across a number of sectors: journalists cannot always compete on expertise – they are generally paid to be ‘jacks of all trades’, generalists who can move from motoring to business news – but this has its advantages in having contacts across sectors and sometimes seeing the bigger picture.
• Financial support: it can be tempting to believe that ‘if you build it, they will come’, to trust in throwing money at technology to serve up a platform that will attract users. But it’s not that simple. A recent study found that despite 6% of commercially built online communities having over $1 million spent on them, “A disturbingly high number of these sites fail.” Why? “Businesses launching online communities repeat a series of blunders. First, they have a tendency to get seduced by bells and whistles and blow their online-community budget on technology. Businesses [should] spend resources identifying and reaching out to potential community members instead of investing in software that makes predictions, or even social-networking technology.”
• A brand: think of it as the big 19th century statue in the city centre: not useful in itself, but an obvious landmark to congregate around. News websites have the advantage of thousands of existing users, and so don’t have to build from scratch. But the brand can be as much of a handicap as an advantage. It means users come with a number of preconceptions about your motivations (commercial; mercenary), previous bad experiences, and expectations (what’s in it for me?). These all need to be addressed very early on.

Plug these into community management and there is the potential for success – but this is only part of the picture. Another part is a change in how we see community in the first place.

When is a community a community?

Too often community is used as a synonym for ‘market’. A community of “middle aged upper class readers in Newstown” is not a community: that’s a demographic. “First time dads in Newsdistrict” are more likely to be a community. Indeed, so is “first time dads”, and that’s why magazines seem to have an easier time of this, focusing as they do on:

• Communities based on shared passions or hobbies
• Communities based on shared beliefs
• Communities based on shared employment

But with the web we can go further still:

• Communities based on shared history (e.g. school, event)
• Communities based on shared problem
• Communities based on shared cause

These markets were too small and/or too volatile previously to support a publication – now that’s no longer the case. The costs of publishing online are so low, and the lead-in times so instant, that it has become incredibly easy to set up a publication aimed at a community almost as quickly as that community forms – or even before.

In comparison, the idea of setting up a publication to serve ‘news’ to people living within a 50-mile radius becomes unsustainably generic in an online environment: the individual communities that make up that market can be picked off one by one.

So. All that talk about “serving the community”? Now journalists need to prove they mean it. Through providing information, yes – but also support, tools and platforms, something that Flickr, Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and YouTube woke up to long ago.

Whatever you do, you need to start by joining a community’s conversations.

Read part two: Conversations on Thursday.

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Allison White has written this wonderful roundup of last week’s news for the OJB. But now she’s got a job. Persuade her to do this again in the comments…

Google

-Announced no desire to create content and will respect copyright.

It added face-blur technology to its Street View mapping serivce to protect privacy. Also speculation from Groves Media on whether this technology is more of a threat to civil liberties than CCTV.

Microsoft

-Looking to limit the kinds of computers that can use their low-cost OS, making them poor computers even if they could be better and still be as cheap.

-The Microsoft/Yahoo struggle is still ongoing – rumor has it that Carl Ichan is buying up stocks in Yahoo to replace board members
who will sell to Microsoft. Seems he is replacing board members but his plans are not evident

Twitter

-Poynter did a good roundup of the Twitter coverage of the Chinese earthquake. Also gave news of situation and stories in Burma.

-Twitterfone is a new app for mobiles that allows users to call and leave a voice message, which is translated to text and then posted on Twitter. Has issues like knowing how to end the call.

-Funny meme on Twitter is finishing this sentence: “When Obama wins, …” Mine was “When Obama wins, college will be free and pizza will be subsidized”

Tech

-AP trying to get a button on the iPhone

-Effort underway to make clickstream tracking opt-in only in US. Marketers say it will be the death of their industry, but will most likely be like opting out of telemarketers.

-RIAA and MPAA still insist on using DRM on content bought to limit customer .Microsoft may also be planning to use a copyright ‘cop’ on the Zune for NBC. EA backs down on using DRM after user outcry at the idea

-Wikipedia to become a print edition, some debate about if the authors should get paid but Techdirt says it is non-controversial and they should not be paid.

-The FBI backs off of the Internet Archive – they wanted records of who used it now journalists can rest more at ease

-In the case against Ray Niro, writer of Troll Tracker blog, tried to prove he was not a “real” journalist and could not claim rights as one because he wasn’t trained, was bias and that he was a corporate mouthpiece. Defense took apart the claim of what it really means to be a journalist.

Nimbuzz moving in on Skype’s territory by making an app for both mobile and PC

Comcast bought Plaxo Inc., the social networking site. It turns online address books into online networks.

Other

Bush gave his first online interview Tuesday

Adrian Monck moved to WordPress http://adrianmonck.com/

Social

Quarter of social net users are using their mobiles to be social online in the UK.

Social Networks boom in Europe, projected to reach 107.4 million people in 2012. UK expected to be largest with 27.1 million projected.

How marketers are using social media and how often

Employers continue to ban Facebook and other social media sites at work without recognizing the possible benefits from these sites.

A new social site for health issues is iMedix, and although in beta is pretty poor in the community department. The people on it now are rather ‘happy-go-lucky’ as is some of the content which may not be appropriate for the kind of users it wants to attract (people with health problems)

-Social Networking Sites are now allowing people to basically export their data to other sites: MySpace with a few other partnered sites, Facebook to anyone, and Google to anyone. Although Facebook is closing access to journalists and is looking to take off its 5000 friends limit.

Web

Two sites, Newstrust and Newscred, have set up a system to rate the credibility of Web sites. Buzz Machine says it won’t work because there is just too much bad stuff and too easily discredited good stuff.

LiveNewsCamera.com allows viewers to see the news as it’s happening, uncut. Pope speeches, Iraqi parliament hearings, and the like.

PRWeb now allows users to search for their press releases, although this may bring fewer balanced results in a search

Harry McCracken from PC World has left to start his own tech web site.

A lot of talk going on about Seesmic: consensus seems to be that it is rough now with great potential and it is hard to imbed on some sites.

MSNBC has created a new widget to scroll news and also two games to see main news headlines. Not sure if they’re effective, but they’re trying

Media

Time Warner may be looking to unload that do not transfer well to web (i.e. Coffee table mags)

Using video to truly enhance a story – not having it be a stand alone piece but a short snipit filled with things print can’t show, like emotion.

The BBC will be using the Parliamentary channel coverage to instead cover the Olympics

From Thoughts of Nigel: 3 ways China should handle Western media – give access to reporters, don’t freak out on negative coverage, and work on building a worldwide reputation

ReinventingClassifieds.com is looking to create a new business model to keep the classified section alive

Dutch free dailies are increasing circulation and so are free Italian papers

Irish paper group, River Media, appears to be in trouble and is looking for $16 million in help.

Guatemalan journalist, Jorge Merida Perez, shot dead in his home. He worked for the Prensa Libre.

From Adam Tinworth: The possibility of journalists being paid for increasing defined traffic online is being looked at, although still skeptically

The Liverpool Daily Post liveblogged the making of the paper Tuesday

The INMA drops “newspaper” from their title and adds “newsmedia”

Cablevision buys Newsweek over Rupert Murdoch, but it is also speculated Murdoch might end up with it in a few years anyways

Upcoming book Super Media has some chapters free online and discusses how journalism can save itself and the world through network journalism

Daily Mail site just pulled Flickr photos to write an article about fat pets without asking permission or attributing credit.

Boston NOW closed

Andy Bull writes on the blandness of sports journalism with the double speak and untruthfulness of players, teams and journalists

Wall Street Journal hires on chief technology officer, Sarabjit “Ruby” Walia

But London Evening just cut their media reporter, which is just the beginning of changes there they stated

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Just when I thought I’d put the 21st century newsroom to bed, along comes a further brainwave about conceptualising newsgathering in an online environment (the area I covered in part 2: Distributed Journalism). It seems to me that the first stage for any journalist or budding journalist lies along two paths: subscribing to a reliable collection of RSS feeds (and email alerts); and exploring a collection of networks. The first part is passive; the latter, more active. So I’ve called it, tongue-in-cheek, “Passive-Aggressive Newsgathering”. But if that sounds too Woody Allen for you, you could call it “Aggregating-Networking Newsgathering”.

Not quite as catchy, though, is it?

Note: an edited version of this was published in Journalism.co.uk as How to: use RSS and social media for newsgathering

As you can see from the diagram above, each RSS element has a social equivalent. Here’s the detail:

Blog and site feeds/Social RSS readers

This is a basic requirement for any journalist: know the news sources – mainstream and blogs – in your specialist areas, and subscribe to their RSS feed using any of the many RSS readers out there. The result should be a one-stop page that you check into every morning that aggregates any new stories since you last checked. You may want to develop further strategies, such as folders for different areas, or for feeds that you check every day, every week, or less often.

But some RSS readers do more than just allow you to subscribe to feeds – they have social elements. Google Reader, for example, will “recommend” feeds you might be interested in (in a panel on the right of the screen), based on the feeds you already subscribe to (and what their subscribers also read). Bloglines, in addition, allows you to click on any of your feeds and see others who subscribe to that feed – and what other feeds they subscribe to (see image below – although this feature doesn’t appear to be included in their latest beta). Other readers will have similar functions (if they don’t, consider switching reader – you can export your subs across very easily). This is a great way to find new sources of news and information.

Twitter and Twitter tools

Microblogging service Twitter is a particularly up-to-the-minute source of news – again, with RSS feeds you can subscribe to, as well as mobile notifications. Twitter is by nature social – you choose to ‘follow’ someone’s ‘tweets’ (updates); and people choose to follow you. You can see who someone is following, and who is following you. There are also tools like Twubble, which will recommend twitterers based on your friends, and Twits Like Me, which recommends twitterers based on interest. These can lead to useful contacts and sources of news you might not otherwise have come across.

A good way to find Twitterers in your area is to look for links on their blogs and article pages, while Twitter is searchable too. But that’s just the start. You can search Twitter itself for specific people, but if you’re covering a local patch, Twitterlocal allows you to subscribe to an RSS feed of tweets within a certain geographical radius, while specialist reporters should subscribe to results of relevant keyword searches using Tweetscan. If you know an event is coming up that is likely to spark protest (e.g. the running of the Olympic torch) then it’s a good idea to set up this feed in advance.

Bookmarking site feeds, networks and tags

Bookmarking sites like Delicious, Digg and Reddit (plus all of these) are a goldmine of information and leads. As well as being searchable, most offer RSS feeds of individual tags, contributors (anyone who uses the site to bookmark webpages), and networks (collections of contributors). At the very least, a journalist should be subscribing to feeds of keywords in their area (e.g. this is the feed for the tag ‘social bookmarking’), and if possible, prolific bookmarkers interested in the same topics (here is the feed for my bookmarks) or networks of bookmarkers (here’s mine).

But to do the latter, journalists need to use the sites themselves – the more active you are, the more you will get out. Every time you bookmark a webpage, you can see who else has bookmarked it (see image below). You can see who bookmarked it first (and is therefore potentially the quickest source). You can see their comments, and the tags they use. You can see what else they’re bookmarking. And you can add them to your network so you’re kept up to date on what they’re bookmarking generally.

All of this can generate more useful contacts (the bookmarkers), more sources of news, and more understanding of your area.

Facebook feeds/Social networks

Journalism is all about contacts. Social networks are a fantastic way of finding and managing them, whether those are existing contacts, contacts of contacts (which you can now see), or members of relevant interest groups (the Online Journalism Blog Facebook group is one you may consider joining ). You may want to join more than one social network: Facebook is a good catchall, but LinkedIn is good for more professional networking, while there may be specific ‘beat’ networks you can join – such as for doctors. Alternatively, you can create your own using Ning.

One great feature of Facebook is its feeds, which include Friends Status Updates and Friends Posted Items (both in the lower right corner). Again, subscribe.

Google Alerts/’similar pages’

Google’s whole success is built on social media: its rankings are calculated (in part) from how many people link to a site. But it’s worth exploring other features too. Every result from a search, for example, will include a link to ‘similar pages’. This is a great way of refining your search. Similarly, the advanced search feature includes the ability to search for pages that link to a particular website.

Meanwhile, it’s basic journalism practice now to set up email alerts for particular search terms. You can do this through Google Alerts – the default setting is ‘Comprehensive’, but it’s better to use the drop-down menu to select the more specific ‘News’, ‘Groups’ or ‘Blogs’. Alternatively, any search done through Google News or Google Blog Search or Google Groups will give you the option to sign up to email alerts or, for the first two, an RSS feed.

Flickr feeds, tags and clusters

For anyone who needs images or needs to talk to photographers, Flickr allows you to subscribe to feeds by individual photographers, or to particular tags (you’ll find them at the bottom of each page).

But the site’s real strength is its social features. A simple search will bring you simple results – but click on any tag in those results, and you’ll be presented with a tag cluster (see image below). This draws on user behaviour to suggest other tags you might be interested in, as well as omitting irrelevant results. You can click through to results from the cluster, generate another cluster from another tag, or go to results from an individual tag. From there you can rank results based on recency or – another social feature – “most interesting”.

And of course you can see a tag cloud of the most popular tags at the moment – a good way of getting a feel for the zeitgeist.

If you’re more interested in people than pictures, clicking on any photographer’s profile will allow you to see their ‘contacts’ and groups, while you can browse profiles based on interests and other biographical information (you can also search groups and people).

YouTube feeds/related videos

Like Flickr, YouTube is a social beast. Click on any video and you’ll be presented with related videos; click on any user page and you can see who they subscribe to. You can rank results by how users have rated it, or how many times it’s been viewed. And you can click on a video’s tags to browse through content that way. The site also hosts a number of groups under the Community tab.

In addition the site offers numerous feeds – a list of the main ones, plus instructions on how to create feeds for individual users or tags, can be found here.

Technorati feeds, fans and tags

You’ll see the orange RSS icon throughout Technorati – you can subscribe to headlines and ‘rising posts and stories’, and filter by ‘attention’. You can subscribe to results from a particular search, or a specific tag (a motoring correspondent, for instance, might subscribe to search results for “Longbridge plant”, or the tag ‘Ford’). You can even subscribe to blog reactions to a particular site.

Equally impressive are the social features. Search results are presented with recommended tags you might also want to click on; blogs and posts are ranked by ‘authority’ (numbers of reactions); and you can see which Technorati members have declared themselves a ‘fan’ of a blog – then browse through the other blogs they’ve ‘faved’.

And like Flickr, you can get a flavour of “what’s percolating in blogs now”.

LibraryThing feeds and tags

Finally, it’s worth noting the social and RSS features of books community LibraryThing. As well as the traditional author and title fields, the search facility allows you to search by tags, members, groups and talk messages. You can then subscribe to a feed of results for that search, or to a feed for a particular member, group or tag.

It’ll come as no surprise that the site also offers related tags and members whenever any search is made, while the site’s groups offers one way to find leads and contributors.

coComment feeds, groups and tags

coComment is a service which tracks your comments for you, so people can subscribe to a feed of comments you make on other sites, or communicate with you directly. This has obvious applications for journalists – if you find someone in your ‘beat’ who is a good source of leads, you’re going to be interested in their comments, and what they’re commenting on. If they’re a member of coComment, you can subscribe to their feed. If not, a flattering email suggesting they check it out might be required…

Aside from the feeds there are plenty of social elements at coComment – you can browse tags, look at popular ‘conversations’, join groups, or browse commenters themselves.

Some journalists might think it’s too early for coComment to be useful to them – at first glance, most ‘conversations’ appear to be in the technological sphere – but getting in there early and spreading the word could give you a significant advantage as the technology spreads.

All this, however, is only laying the foundations for having your ‘ear to the ground’ – saving yourself time through use of RSS, and generating contacts and engendering serendipity through social media.

No doubt I’ve omitted some RSS and social service-providing sites (for example, other RSS readers, while a social podcasting service must be out there) – and overlooked some tricks on the above sites. I’d love to know your recommendations and tips.

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Flickr has announced it will now be hosting video – with a maximum length of 90 seconds. The idea is that these are “long photos”, “capturing slices of life to share”

I’m not sure what the implications are for journalism or journalists (note the distinction). Could we see a July 7 moment, but with short video? Will it be easier for users to upload video to Flickr from their mobiles than it is to upload to YouTube? Can we expect better composed video on Flickr because it comes from a community of photographers? (If that matters to you)

I don’t know, which is why I’m calling for your comments and thoughts on this.

Read what the Twittersphere is saying about the change here

Read more OJB posts about Flickr

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