In the second part of this five-part series, I explore how adaptability has not only become a key quality for the journalist – but for the information they deal with on a daily basis too. This will form part of a forthcoming book on online journalism – comments very much invited.

The adaptable journalist

A key skill for any journalist in the new media age, whatever medium they’re working in, is adaptability. The age of the journalist who only writes text, or who only records video, or audio, is passing. Today, the newspaper and magazine, the television and the radio programme all have an accompanying website. And that website is, increasingly, filled with a whole range of media, which could include any of the following:

• (Hyper)Text
• Audio
• Video
• Still images
• Audio slideshows
• Animation
• Flash interactivity
• Database-driven elements
• Blogs
• Microblogging/Text/email alerts (Twitter)
• Community elements – forums, wikis, social networking, polls, surveys
• Live chats
• Mapping
• Mashups

This does not mean that the online journalist has to be an expert in all of these fields, but they should have media literacy in as many of these fields as possible: in other words, a good online journalist should be able to see a story and think:

• ‘That story would have real impact on video’;
• or: ‘A Flash interactive could explain this better than anything else’;
• or ‘This story would benefit from me linking to the original reports and some blog commentary’;
• or ‘Involving the community in this story would really engage, and hopefully bring out some great leads’.

The person who eventually films the video, or creates the Flash element, may be someone else, particularly as news organisations begin to understand that no single journalist can do all these things, or identify individuals and teams who produce the podcast, the video packages, or the Flash interactives, or who manage the community elements. But the ideas should come from every member connected with the online newsroom. And ideas always come first.

Skills come after, but the online journalist should have laid some foundations in a range of areas.

• They should be able to write well, succinctly, and quickly – for more than one medium, if possible.
• They should be able to find accurate information and reliable sources online and offline, quickly, and they should have a collection of RSS feeds keeping them in touch with their area.
• They should understand some basic principles of video, audio and still images.
• They should have played with editing software.
• They should have played around with examples of journalistic interactivity and web-based databases.
• They should understand online communities like Facebook, Flickr, YouTube or their own sector of the blogosphere – if possible, they should already be a productive member of one.

Some of these foundations only require some very light background reading, some just involve exploring good examples of online journalism, or tinkering on free software. The one area that does need time, attention and practice, are the core skills of newsgathering and news production.

The adaptable content

It is not only the journalist who benefits from being adaptable. In the new media age, information needs to be adaptable as well.

Adrian Holovaty, in his article ‘A fundamental way newspaper sites need to change‘, points out that much of what journalists gather is structured information that has the potential to be repurposed by either the reader or another journalist – his examples include:

• “An obituary is about a person, involves dates and funeral homes.
• “A wedding announcement is about a couple, with a wedding date, engagement date, bride hometown, groom hometown and various other happy, flowery pieces of information.
• “A birth has parents, a child (or children) and a date.
• “A college graduate has a home state, a home town, a degree, a major and graduation year.
• “Every Senate, House and Governor race in the U.S. has location, analysis, demographic information, previous election results, campaign-finance information and more.
• “Every known detainee at Guantanamo Bay has an approximate age, birthplace, formal charges and more.”

Once this information is made adaptable – for example, by inclusion in a database – it can be presented in a range of ways. A level results can be plotted on a map, for instance; sports stats can be displayed graphically; news can be displayed specific to the reader’s own location; or journalists can check to see how many crimes have occurred around a certain location.

The first way an online journalist should be making information adaptable is to tag it. For newsgathering, a social bookmarking site like del.icio.us is essential. These allow you to ‘bookmark’ any online source with a series of tags, enabling them to be quickly found when required (and that’s not touching on the ‘social’ element, which allows you to see who else has bookmarked the same page, and what else they are bookmarking, which can lead to some useful leads).

For news publishing, blogging services like WordPress and Blogger have a tagging (or ‘keywords’) facility built in; so do photo-sharing site Flickr and video-sharing site YouTube. And newspapers like the Liverpool Daily Post and Echo are starting to incorporate tagging in all stories.

You might also be working with a content management system that allows metatagging or mapping. These amount to the same thing: information about the story.

Beyond tagging there are a number of other ways to make information adaptable. Databases and spreadsheets are obvious ways. Managing the information on a big story using a spreadsheet can prove useful if you need to make that information public at some point, or need to hand it over to someone else who can work magic with it. In general, it’s just good practice that makes your life easier.

RSS is another way to make information adaptable. If your stories, a subject section or a search is available as a feed others can more easily combine it with other tools (e.g. mapping), aggregate it, filter it and do other things with it.

And of course the simple act of making your content downloadable or embeddable makes it more adaptable. The choice to stream video, for example, prevents users from doing potentially interesting things with it. Allowing a full download – even in different formats – opens up potential for all sorts of creativity from users and other journalists. All of which, ultimately, should drive more people back to your site and your stories.

Part three: S is for Scannability can be found here.

Over at BBC Radio 4′s iPM website there’s an interesting experiment going on – and some good examples of my 21st century newsroom ideas in practice.

1. Firstly, their ‘Rough Notes’ blog is a good example of the ‘draft’ stage of my News Diamond, with members of the team talking about what they’re working on (and comments facility for people to suggest stories – some very good ideas there, BTW). Also, posts labelled ‘In Production‘ allow you to see the work so far, while you can comment on the current running orders.
2. Secondly, they have a Flickr page where users can upload images. Distributed Journalism, perhaps? Well, more like simple community.
3. Thirdly, and perhaps best of all, they’ve made their del.ico.us account public, so readers can see what they’re reading. That’ll be the ‘What’ of my Five Ws and a H, then.

The blurb, BTW, is: “We’ll source what we do through the best blogs, passionate ‘ear catching’ online debate as well as comments and recommendations of others. So what ends up on air will be shaped by listeners and bloggers.”

If you have ten minutes today, click along to Katine: it starts with a village. With this project The Guardian is doing something very special indeed with crowdsourcing, interactive storytelling, and journalism itself.

Launched over the weekend, Katine appears to be a new approach to “the annual appeal to focus attention on worthwhile causes during the pre-Christmas giving season”. Editor Alan Rusbridger explains:

“Would it be possible to find a way of dramatising an issue so that it held attention beyond Christmas, even for as long as three years? Of connecting the ideas, goodwill, resources and expert knowledge of 15 million readers around the world and focusing them on one problem? Would it be possible to do all this in a way which avoided the classic trap of creating a temporary oasis in a desert? Of doing something both sustainable and replicable? Could there be a model for using web-based technologies – and the power to link and harness people – that could be developed by other western communities, whether businesses, schools or towns? “

Rusbridger identifies three things that a newspaper/website can do as part of this. The first and third are familiar: raising awareness and therefore increasing pressure; and reporting, contextualising, and analysing. But it’s the second thing that is significant, innovative, and worth watching:

“it can involve a huge community of readers and web-users around the world and find ways of linking them in to what we’re doing. We’ll need money obviously. But, just as importantly we need advice and involvement. Among our readers are water engineers, doctors, solar energy experts, businessmen and women, teachers, nurses, farmers. We absolutely don’t need a stampede of volunteers, but we would like a technical know-how bank of people who are prepared to offer time and advice. We’ll let you know how to get involved as we go.”

In other words, crowdsourcing – but not crowdsourcing as seen so far in newspapers, where the focus is on asking readers to help gather or analyse information for a story: this is crowdsourcing to help address the actual issues identified by the story.

Even more creditable, this is a story which does not normally make the pages of most newspapers, as Rusbridger notes:

“Most western journalists periodically scratch their heads about how to keep some subjects fresh, including poverty and climate change. The big picture is known; the facts change little from day to day. Such subjects are at once the biggest news of our times – and not news at all.”

The website itself – http://www.guardian.co.uk/katine – is impressive, with a virtual village, short films by the GuardianFilms arm, audio, and a number of blogs “where Guardian writers and film-makers, Amref staff and, eventually, the people of Katine, will write about their experience of the project. It will also be a place for debate about the wider development issues Katine raises“. (Interestingly, there is also a clear attempt to paint a fuller picture of Katine than just ‘suffering Africans’, with pieces on local music and style).

The Guardian are making a habit of thinking outside the box with technology and editorial: Islamophonic and Many Questions were refreshing takes on podcasting; and commentisfree did the same for blogging; but Katine, for me, has the potential to be a truly international experiment in taking crowdsourcing to a new level.

But here are my caveats:

• There is currently no clear link to this promising crowdsourcing element. If you’re going to announce it, allow people to at least sign up for an email alert to tell them when the facility is up and running. Don’t say “We’ll let you know how to get involved as we go” on the expectation that your readers will keep checking back to the website like a faithful dog.
• On a related note, although the site as a whole has an RSS feed, the interactive map promises to be updated as the project goes on, but asks readers to “please visit now and come back every week or two to follow the updates and get to know your favorite characters, places and stories.” This may be a weakness of Flash, but some creative thinking would surely prevent the need for people to set themselves a reminder.

• A Twitter/mobile alert would be good to keep the issue on people’s agenda.
• Finally, some lovely video but it’s not embeddable. If one aim is to raise awareness, then you should be allowing people to place your video on their blogs.

Of course I only say these things because I want this project to succeed. If this doesn’t give you faith in the power of journalism, nothing does.

If you want to see the future of UK journalism, it’s often best to look at America. So it’s interesting to see the following statistic to come from research by David Wendelken:

“even the smallest commercial newspapers, with 10,000 readers or fewer, are looking for reporting candidates with experience writing for the Web and uploading stories to the Internet, according to a survey of newspaper managing editors conducted by Wendelken and Toni B. Mehling of James Madison University. Of nine respondents in the “large daily newspaper” category (those with a circulation of 44,000 and above), eight required reporters to have skills in capturing audio while four required audio editing skills. Five required reporters to have skills in capturing video, while one required video editing expertise. Major newspapers, said Wendelken, “are looking at reporters to do these things from the start.”

And the problem isn’t just those who think teaching journalists Dreamweaver is ‘online journalism’. It’s students’ own dated conceptions of the journalism industry:

“A lot of college students select their medium in high school. When they come onto campus, they’re already a TV person or a radio person or a newspaper person,” said Wendelken.

“I’m a print journalist,” he continued, imitating the attitude of many aspiring journalists. “Why do I need to learn video?” 

Of course we’ve had people like Trinity Mirror’s Head of Multimedia saying they want people who know their RSS from their elbow* for months now, but this is the first survey with some concrete figures from people on the ground. It underlines the fact that journalism courses shouldn’t be teaching online journalism as an additional ‘option’ any more. An understanding of new media has become essential.

*The first and last time I will use that hackneyed phrase. Honest.

Press Gazette reports on the BBC using Google Maps to organise flood reports:

“After a few hours of work on his laptop, [broadcast journalist Oliver] Williams had created an interactive map plotting audio files of BBC Radio Berkshire reports — along with pictures and YouTube videos being sent in by the public — to the locations around the county that they referred to. Over the following days, BBC Berkshire journalists were able to add additional reports to the map as the story continued, including new flood warnings as they came in to the newsroom.”

If you’re one of the many journalism graduates wandering the jobs pages this summer, here’s my Five-Step Plan® to getting a job in journalism

1. Get a job, it doesn’t matter what. Nothing makes a person employable like being already employed. Plus you now have an employer’s reference. You’ll be making new contacts and learning new things, giving you more to talk about on the CV/interview. If you can get a job in the area you want to write about, even better: even if it’s something as prosaic as working in Next because you want to be a fashion journo. You’ll be surprised how much knowledge you pick up. Once you have the job, try to shape it so you can gain as much useful experience as possible: suggest an internal newsletter you could write, or contribute to the company website.
2. Get a blog – no, don’t stop reading. This is not about online journalism. A blog helps you achieve a number of things regardless of whether you ever want to publish online professionally:
   • Practice makes perfect: writing regularly for a blog helps you hone and improve your journalistic style (note: that’s journalistic style, not diary style. Your journalist’s blog should be a series of articles, interviews etc. in your area of interest, not what you did on your summer holidays)
   • Ready-made portfolio: writing regularly for a blog gives you a wealth of material to show to potential employers. You should of course also include any material you have had published elsewhere. Include it on your CV so they can browse through it in deciding to give you an interview.
   • Proof of commitment: if you’re committed enough to write a blog regularly, to get out there and find out what’s happening in your specialist area, that proves you’re more committed than most job applicants.
   • Exposure: at this point, whether or not anyone reads your blog is not the primary goal, but if you do it well, you can build a reputation, and two things can happen: a) when you’re at the interview, the editor says “I’m a reader of your blog”; and b) freelance jobs will come to you. Note: this often takes years, and is often connected with the next step.
3. Get involved in the area you want to report on: firstly, know where to get grassroots news in your area, so build up a first class favourites folder/Bloglines account of the best bloggers and news sources. Secondly, comment on those blogs and sites, and engage in the debates. Thirdly, conduct your own interviews for your own blog, online and offline. And finally, get away from your computer and do things: attend events, do courses, arrange a day in a relevant company. All of this proves your commitment, builds your reputation, and gives you a contacts book to die for.
4. Get a good mobile phone – that is, one that takes pictures, video and audio. Download some free editing software like Windows Movie Maker and Audacity, and play around with it. Upload some video or audio to to your blog, YouTube or Switchpod. Quality will come with time, but the primary point here is to prove that you have some multimedia experience. Journalists are increasingly expected to know how to produce audio and video as well as text, and this is another way of putting you ahead of the competition. You will also need it for step 5:
5. Get an eye for news: don’t wait to join a news organisation to become a journalist. As you do your job, as you walk the streets, as you read the newspapers and browse the messageboards, keep your news sense about you: is something happening that is newsworthy? Record it with your phone and send it to a relevant news organisation. Has someone said something that is newsworthy? Highlight it on your blog. Is there a national story that you could put a specialist or local angle to? Write it up.
   This is the most fundamental of skills for a journalist, whether in news or features. It is the one thing employers will be looking for. If you can tell them you filmed the floods on your phone or spotted a good lead on a forum, it proves you’re always ‘on’.

According to Holdthefrontpage.co.uk Trinity Mirror is to upgrade its sites with “breaking news, video, audio, blogs and user-generated content.”

This includes a training programme with “a series of week-long video journalism courses and a series of one-day multimedia workshops, which will be attended by more than 70 journalists in the North West region before being rolled out across the division.”

I’m still scooping my jaw from the floor after looking at the Herald-Tribune’s Flash interactive on how complaints about teachers are handled. Not only does this use Flash cleverly – particularly to illustrate the complex process through which complaints go (now try doing that in print), along with audio clips – but it’s integrated with a database so you can search by district and school, keyword, or even map, a great example of database-driven journalism. From Journalistopia:

“It took the Herald-Tribune 14 months and repeated threats of legal action to obtain the database under Florida’s public records law.

“Even then, some information turned out to be so inaccurate that the Herald-Tribune decided to create its own version, reviewing 30,000 pages of administrative documents to build a database […]”

Inspirational.

The other week I gave students a brief overview of principles of recording audio for the web. One of these was ‘emotive audio’, so in order that students had something to edit in the second part of the class, I gave students 20 minutes to ask a stranger a question designed to elicit an emotive response, such as “What was your most embarrassing moment?” (recorded by Anna Jones) or “Can you describe the last dream you had?” (Sarah Gee,  and also Shemaine Rose). Some wimped out of the emotive questions, including Hannah Watson, who instead asked “What is your favourite animal/vegetable?” – dull replies, but she gets credit for asking one respondent to make a lion noise – and the other to make a sweetcorn noise…

A good example of audio being published online as part of journalistic transparency comes from The Guardian‘s Peter Mandelson-criticises-Blair piece:

“The Guardian believes it reported his remarks about the prime minister accurately and fairly. But in order to give readers the opportunity to judge the issue for themselves, we have published the relevant, lengthy section of the interview.”