image from Tom Callow's Wall blog

When Laura Kuenssberg announced she was leaving the BBC for ITV, much was made of what might happen to her Twitter account. Was @BBCLauraK owned by her employer? (After all, it was branded as such, promoted on TV, and tweets were ‘processed’ by BBC producers). Or should Laura be able to take it with her? (After all, it was Laura that people were following, rather than a generic BBC political news feed).

The implications for the ‘journalist as brand‘ meme were well explored too, while newly empowered journalists may have been concerned to read that companies are inserting social media clauses into contracts:

“To keep hold of the good will created by a brand personality. Recruiters, for example, are often required to hand over their LinkedIn accounts upon leaving, so their contacts remain with the employer.”

Amidst all the speculation, Tom Callow stood out in offering some hard facts:

“When she had earlier tweeted the details of a new separate ITV account to her then 59,000 followers, only around 1,000 of them started following the new account.”

This sounds compelling until you remember that tweets are only seen for a relatively brief period of time by those followers who happen to be watching at that moment, and that a significant proportion of followers of celebrity/high profile accounts are likely to be idle or spam.

Still, it also highlights the fundamental weakness in all the debates about who ‘owns’ a Twitter account. One very important party is not being represented: the users.

Much of the commentary on Laura Kuenssberg’s move treated her 60,000 followers as an “audience”. But of course, they are not: they are users.

Some will be personal acquaintances; some will be fans of the BBC’s political coverage; and yes, some will be spam accounts or accounts set up by curious BBC viewers who forgot their password the next day. Some will follow her to ITV, some will follow her replacement at the BBC, and some never worked out how to click ‘unfollow’. (Kuenssberg’s successor - @BBCNormanS – had 5,824 followers after she tweeted a link, according to Paul Gregory, which means that only around 10% of her followers read either of those tweets and acted on them.)

Whether an employer claims ownership of a social media account or not, they cannot ‘own’ the relationship between users and that account. And there will be as many relationships as users. Some passive; some collaborative; some neglected; some exploitative.

It is those relationships that we should be concerned with developing, not the small print of an employee’s contract.

I’m always interested in the new jobs that are being created to deal with the rise of the web and social media. So when I had the opportunity I asked Ben Ayers, Social Media Manager for ITV.com, what his job involves. Here’s his reply:

“I manage social media for ITV.com but also oversee social media strategy for ITV as a whole, working closely with colleagues in marketing and sometimes third parties like agencies and production companies who create content for us.

“Over the last couple of years I have eased ITV towards a semi-coordinated social media strategy – both on and off ITV.com – developing communities and engagement around programme brands.

“This has worked really effectively for the likes of the X Factor and I’m A Celebrity and to some extent our ‘evergreen’ programmes like soaps and daytime shows This Morning and Loose Women. I also work with my editorial colleagues to try new ‘social’ features around programmes. Most recently I have been working with ITV news to make our election coverage as engaging as possible.

“Although I work within the ITV.com team, I also work closely with colleagues in marketing, PR and sales. I manage community on ITV.com and have been working on the implementation and adoption of a new community platform introduced at the end of last year. I also oversee moderation and chair the ITV digital group that includes colleagues from PR and marketing.

“I was a journalist on local newspapers in the South before going into PR, starting at Comic Relief. I have worked in communications at the BBC, Science Museum and more latterly ITV. I moved from programme publicity at ITV to manage PR for ITV’s website. It was from there that I moved into social media activity for the website. In the first year the focus was on traffic generation using social media channels but increasingly it’s about community and engagement.”

I also asked what were the 3 most important lessons he has learned in the job:

1. “The devil’s in the detail – although it can be a bore, reading the small print is actually very worthwhile
2. “Don’t be afraid to try new stuff – in the UK we are too hard on ‘failure’. There’s a different culture in other countries like the US and we can learn from that.
3. “It’s really not all about traffic.”

Has online journalism become ordinary? Are the approaches starting to standardise? Little has stood out in the online journalism coverage of this election – the innovation of previous years has been replaced by consolidation.

Here are a few observations on how the media approached their online coverage:

Interactive graphics and databases

Just as the swingometer has come to characterise televised election coverage, the election map has become synonymous with online coverage. From the BBC and ITV to the Independent, Times and Guardian, everyone had their red, blue and orange pixels at the ready.

The more adventurous integrated swingometers into their maps, included calculators and search fields. The Telegraph’s was powerful; the Guardian’s integrated well with third-party tools such as The Straight Choice and Democracy Club. Sky went for style, with a handful of visualisations from poll results and timelines to historical results to how the House will fill up. But across the newspapers and broadcasters this was the same as in previous elections, only better and more widespread.

Blogs, liveblogs and microblogs

News websites were riddled with blogs, liveblogs, and more blogs, with CoverItLive used widely. Journalists seem more comfortable with the rough nature of blogging now, which suits the patchiness of election coverage well.

User comments were also much better integrated than in the past, while many included the ability to share on Twitter or Facebook.

Twitter itself was a natural feature in many places, done without fuss. The Sun featured a widget on their homepage; most others promoted specific election and correspondent feeds somewhere. The Mirror’s morning-after angle predictably looked at how the celebrities tweeted the election. And for all the trumpeting that this was turning out to be a TV election rather than a new media election, Twitter and Facebook played important roles as complements to the television coverage, forming part of the reaction measured by ITV; being drawn upon for questions on Channel 4 news; occasionally driving or puncturing the news agenda, as with #nickcleggsfault. It sometimes felt as if the print media were being cut out of the conversation.

Video

We’re now at a stage where experiments have been completed, problems solved, and online video is normal. The BBC live streamed their coverage onto their at-a-glance live coverage; as did ITV. The Mirror embedded video reports on its homepage; The Guardian had its own video but also embedded BBC coverage; The Sun embedded live Sky coverage. And Sky itself had a gallery of video highlights.

What was perhaps most surprising is that the election didn’t have a ‘YouTube moment’ – or perhaps it did, but I missed it.

That’s it?

Media organisations had had years to polish up their skills on all the above, and the result was professional, successful, and useful. Unlike previous elections, there seemed little to get really excited about, however.

One thing that was apparent was how news organisations appeared to be softening in their attitudes to the rest of the web: embedding video from and linking to competitors; pulling feeds from civic websites; working with users.

Some things did catch my eye, though. ITV’s integration of Facebook into its election page looked particularly interesting, allowing users to watch online and chat online, rather than having the TV on. The Times’ last-minute election chartporn showed just how far visualisation could go if pushed. And The Guardian’s #ukvote experiment and how others used its politics API showed where collaboration could be taken.

The most fascinating experiments came from outside of the mainstream media: DemocracyClub and YourNextMP did a fantastic job in mobilising people to identify and interrogate their candidates. Vote for a Change calculated if your vote could contribute to a hung parliament; My Gay Vote showed how parties had voted on LGBT issues; PoliticsPosters gave you a customised window poster based on your postcode; Election Champion crowdsourced where parties were spending money on billboards; and Vote Power Index highlighted the weaknesses of our voting system by telling you how much your vote was actually worth. Hyperlocal blogs came to the fore. And while most people overlooked the council elections, Open Election Data sought to make those more transparent. In fact the biggest missed opportunity was the council elections.

Did anything catch your eye particularly about election coverage online?

Finally, here’s Martin Belam’s excellent timeline of the ‘digital election’:

As part of a group response to  the government‘s inquiry into the future of local and regional media, Adrian Monck looks at the implications of BBC partnerships with regional media. Blog comments will be submitted to the inquiry as well. If you wish to add a blog post to the submission please add a link to one of the OJB posts – a linkback will be added at the end.

A long time ago, I wrote the plan to run ITV News in London (replacing LNN), modelled on the operating structure for Five News. It involved reformatting shows and cutting staffing to the bare minimum required to get on air.

Nothing wrong with that. It was a more efficient use of resources.

But it wasn’t really designed to involve the process you and I would know asjournalism. It was intended to produce a happy simulation of a television news broadcast to a standard adequate enough to satisfy regulators.

Five News shared resources – as did the new ITV London when it started – with the rest of ITN. The biggest and most expensive of these resources were the satellite trucks and needless to say, the deployment of said trucks went to the people paying the most money - ITV’s national news and Channel 4 News.

The editorial decision-making process played second-fiddle to the negotiation and horse-trading around satellite dishes, technicians’ overtime and working hours without which stories and guests (even cheaper!) couldn’t make it on air.

Now I love television news, but it’s an impressionistic not an informative medium. Its poetry is images not ad-libbed studio conversations. ITV’s regional news programmes, produced from studio hubs often far removed from the politically and geographically diverse areas they serve, and manufactured to a process I had a hand in shaping have – by force of that process – become hybrid forms of factual entertainment.

And there’s nothing wrong with that. But ITV regional news in its current emaciated form is not really worth saving as an instrument of public service news information. So why have the BBC and ITV signed a memorandum of understanding to share resources?

Well, the BBC is desperate to use partnership as a line of defence against the predations of Channel 4 and others who might question the casuistry that sees its populist and entertaining mainstream TV programmes labelled as ‘public service’. Partnership proposals beat budget cuts. The BBC shows willing. Refusal to partner looks churlish.

But in the case of ITV’s regional news, partnership simply sustains something that neither the market, nor the term ‘public service’ really support.

One BBC regional news head lamented to me recently that no one covered court cases in his area – not the local papers, not ITV, not the agencies – no one. He also pointed out that he could have used his multimedia newsroom to produce hyperlocal sites, and even newspaper copy – but he wasn’t allowed to, because the local newspaper lobby had weighed in to point out that he would drive them out of business.

It’s easy to feel sympathy for both sides. The commercial local news media and the BBC regional journalists who just want to do a better job.

But they’re not really the issue.

The issue is bigger and it affects all of us, not simply journalists. It’s about the collapse of plurality of media provision and how we adjust to that. Because plurality has collapsed.

And the BBC can’t take its place, and the partnerships the BBC offers are simply life support machines for local news companies caught in a downward spiral of cost-cutting, audience decline, and share price collapse.

Allowing the BBC in to hyperlocal would have killed those companies quicker. Partnership will ease their dying. Yet the question of how (or if ) we use public money to inform citizens about the governance and the good times in their localities in a way that isn’t simply puff and spin goes unasked. And the political and popular will to address it is almost entirely absent.

So expect partnerships – or rather forced marriages – with all the happiness associated with relationships born of expediency…

[This post can also be seen on Adrian's blog]

Two approaches to reporting on war have crossed my virtual desk recently. First, a broadcast journalist at ITV News told me about their video blogs from Afghanistan – embedded below:

[blip.tv ?posts_id=729959&dest=-1]

Second, Reuters send me a press release about ‘Bearing Witness, “a unique multimedia package and online documentary to mark 5 years of reporting war in Iraq”
Watch the video. Then, go to http://iraq.reuters.com/

Spot the difference?

For years journalists accused blogs of being indulgent navel-gazing ego-trips. The ITV News video blog from Afghanistan doesn’t do anything to challenge that myth, with little insight, reflection or indeed seriousness. The feeling, as I tweeted at the time, is of a lads’ jolly. Put another way, the film uses the narrative of a ‘behind-the-scenes’ promo, as if this is indeed only a “theatre” of war, where the stars remark on the quality of the catering and the sets.

Oliver Luft at Journalism.co.uk went further:

“Three things stand out: First, it’s just like a traditional piece of broadcast news, presenter driven, sets constructed and people artificially placed to interview. Second, if there is a war about, it seems a very jolly one – no blood and guts, not too much slumming it for the ITV boys. Third, there seems to be millions of them out there, using a tonne of kit. Why not just send a reporter with a lightweight camera and a laptop?”

The Reuters piece, on the other hand, tells a very different story.

“Covering news in hostile places is a worthwhile thing,” says former Iraq bureau chief Andrew Marshall at the start. “It can bring about change, it can inform the world, and it is worth us risking our lives.”

Video, audio slideshows, maps, timelines and links are combined to provide a reflective and informative angle on the conflict. This genuinely is ‘behind the scenes’ – the dangers faced by journalists, what they do and why they do it.

And importantly, it goes some way to address the cynicism of viewers who believe journalists are only there for the scoop and the status.

Now obviously the video blog and the multimedia interactive are different mediums with very different investments of time and money. But the reflectiveness of the Reuters piece could have just as easily been done with a video blog.

Instead, ITV have gone for entertainment over insight – which is understandable: that’s what ITV News is known for, what the audience has perhaps come to expect. This is blog-as-diary rather than blog-as-journalism.

But while hearing producer Matt Williams talk about the “fun” of being a fellow soldier with Prince Harry may be entertaining on a personal level, it may also damage the journalistic reputation of ITV News when viewers ask, understandably: “Where is your critical distance?” Or: “It’s not ‘fun’ for my brother on the front line”.

Put another way: imagine that these were on the journalist’s own personal site, or Facebook page, and a viewer came across them. What would they think about the journalist?

In both these examples of online journalism the implicit question is ‘Why are we doing this?’ The answers provided by the two pieces could hardly be more different.

ITV News are to “air citizen reporters’ videos”, according to The Guardian. ‘Uploaded’ (oh dear.) will “allow members of the public to post video clips on the Uploaded website via mobile phone or webcam, responding to a daily “debate of the day” set by ITV News.”

Yep, it’s the old ‘charitable gesture’ approach to citizen journalism. ITV choose the topic, choose the responses, and, by the sounds of things, even choose the correspondents (“a national network of citizen correspondents,” says the article, which also mentions 100 people who have “signed up”).

ITV news editor, Deborah Turness is quoted as saying: “news has remained a one-way street in a two-way world.” But the two-way system of ‘Uploaded’ has one very large lane for ITV, and one very narrow one for its audience.

“Sometimes the media is guilty of underestimating the audience,” she continues. “People do have really interesting and relevant things to say and Uploaded will give us real diversity of opinion and experience.”

How diverse? 

“The Uploaded segment within the news bulletins is likely to be about 60 seconds.”

Ah, that diverse. Great. Another citizen journalism ghetto.

So here’s my suggestion: Stop recycling old formats for new media. Stop treating the audience’s contribution like an ‘And Finally’ section. Start understanding how interactivity works: it’s about giving control to the user. Giving control over subject matter. Giving control over time. Giving control over ranking. I’m not suggesting getting rid of editorial roles entirely, but if you’re going to do something like this, for God’s sake do it properly.

I’m inclined to agree with Jeff Jarvis, who said of the CNN-YouTube election debate experiment:

TV doesn’t know how to have a conversation. TV knows how to perform. The event’s moderator, CNN’s Anderson Cooper, behaved almost apologetically about the intrusion of these real people, who speak without benefit of make-up.

‘Uploaded’ is not citizen journalism. It’s a vox pops without having to pay professional camerapeople.

Ian Reeves’ second vlog builds on the quality of the first, inevitably moving from the general to the specific, with a fantastic dry sense of humour that makes it all very entertaining. His USP is his ability to capture online video and showcase it – this week it’s the Telegraph’s Business Report (boring but sells advertising), ITV’s surprisingly good online local TV offering, and the US web video awards (but is Being A Black Man video, or flash interactivity that happens to have video embedded?).

Congratulations Ian, your vlog is one of the few pieces of online video I thoroughly enjoy watching.