As part of an ongoing series on recent graduates who have gone into online journalism, Dave Lee talks about how he won a BBC job straight from university, what it involves, and what skills he feels online journalists need today.

I got my job as a result – delightfully! – of having a well-known blog. Well, that is, well-known in the sense it was read by the right people. My path to the BBC began with a work placement at Press Gazette – an opportunity I wouldn’t have got had it not been for the blog. In fact, I recall Patrick Smith literally putting it in those terms – saying that they’d never normally take an undergrad without NUJ qualifications – but they’d seen my blog and liked what I was doing.

I met Martin Stabe there, and worked closely with him on a couple of projects – including the Student Journalism Blog on their site.

Martin knew Nick Reynolds – social media executive at the BBC – and when he heard a blogger was needed for the BBC Internet Blog, my name was passed on. That door into the BBC then made it much easier to progress upwards to the newsroom.

My job is to write news and features for BBC News Online, based on output from the BBC World Service.

There wasn’t much in my course [at Lincoln University] which directly relates to the skills I use now – much has been learnt on the job – but there is a certain level of law knowledge, ethics and general good practice that has proved to be invaluable – and that came from my studies.

Of course, it’s always worth stressing that my blog was able to succeed because of my flexibility to write about my studies and people met via work at my university. So while studying didn’t perhaps give me the practical skills for my day-to-day job, it certainly has helped me be a good journalist in other, less measurable ways.

It’s hard to predict how my job will develop in the future. Within the BBC, it’s pretty crucial when making sure we share our best stuff – it’s not good having two sets of BBC journos (or more…) running after the same stories and sources. Jobs like mine help solve that situation.

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I’ve written a piece in the latest Press Gazette about the need to “take down the walls, stop mystifying investigative journalism and include readers in the process, starting now.” Sadly, they’ve pigeonholed it as being about “blog investigations”. Never mind: you can read it here.

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I’ve written before on just how important geotagging will be in preparing for a mobile future – well, now that mobile future is here:

“Apple’s newly unveiled second-generation iPhone includes a news service from the Associated Press which provides stories tailored to an individual user’s location.

“The application uses the phone’s in-built GPS (global positioning system) and serves stories based on the user’s immediate area.”

Now, what’s your excuse?

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This was originally published in Press Gazette as Del.icio.us social bookmarking explained and Need some background info? Just follow the electronic trail.

How journalists can use web bookmarking services to manage, find and publish documents.

Every newspaper has a library, and most journalists have kept some sort of cuttings file for reference. But what if you could search that cuttings file like you search Google? What if you could find similar articles and documents? What if you could let your readers see your raw material?

That’s what online bookmarking – or ‘social bookmarking‘ – tools allow you to do. And they have enormous potential for journalists.

There are a number of social bookmarking services. Del.icio.us is best known and most widely used and supported. For this reason this article will focus mostly on Del.icio.us.

Managing cuttings

The most basic function of bookmarking services is allowing you to effectively manage ‘cuttings’, i.e. online reports, webpages, and articles.

When you register at Del.icio.us you can add buttons to your browser. The next time you’re on a webpage that you think you might want to refer to later, click on that ‘add to del.icio.us’ button to bookmark it. You’ll be given some extra options before you save – and this is where it gets really useful.

The first option is to add ‘notes’. This is a useful place to copy a key quote to, or your own remarks. The second option is to add ‘tags’, i.e. categories, key words, people, etc. The great thing is that this can go in as many categories as you want. So you might tag something with ‘health’, ‘NHS’, ‘report’, and ‘experts’ – or ‘localhistory’, ‘birmingham’ and ‘industry’, for example.

These tags will then be listed on the right hand side of your Del.icio.us page so you can instantly access anything with a particular tag.

Finding new leads and information

Once you start bookmarking webpages, it gets interesting. The ‘social’ bit of social bookmarking is that you can see anything tagged ‘NHS’ by anyone else, helping you to spot leads or information you would otherwise have missed.

You can also see who bookmarked the same webpages as you (it will say ‘saved by 23 other people’, for instance, underneath), and what else they have bookmarked.

And if you are interested in the sorts of things a particular user is bookmarking, once you’re on their page you can click ‘add X to my network’ to do just that – your page will then contain a link to ‘your network’ which will show anything bookmarked by those users. Regularly checking this can keep you up to date on your chosen field, as well as proving new leads. Consider them your researchers, or tipsters.

Publishing

Some have called it ‘link journalism’ – the very act of gathering sources as an act of journalism itself. Others point to the way the internet can make journalism more transparent: no longer is there a restriction on space or time – readers can, if they wish, click through to full documents, reports and archive material. Or video, audio and images. Or online tools and services.

Social bookmarking sites make it easy to make your raw material available. At its most basic you can include a link at the bottom of your article to your Del.icio.us page – which is what Jo Ind at the Birmingham Post does with her health articles (del.icio.us/birminghampost), or Radio 4′s iPM. You could link to subcategories (my bookmarks on social bookmarking are at http://del.icio.us/paulb/socialbookmarking, for instance). While the article remains the same, the links are continually updated, by you.

But you can also use Del.icio.us’ built in RSS feeds to automatically publish bookmarked articles on your article webpages (or indeed anywhere you wish), as The Guardian’s Jemima Kiss does with her ‘PDA Newsbucket’, and many blogs do with a simple sidebar widget.

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Over at Press Gazette you’ll find my latest article on using social bookmarking for journalism – split into three areas: managing cuttings; sourcing information; and publishing. Let me know if you have any personal experiences with bookmarking services – are there better services than Delicious?

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I was due to take part in the 9th Journalism Leaders Forum next Tuesday, but sadly have had to pull out. I’m especially gutted because Chris Anderson, editor of Wired magazine and author of “The Long Tail“, will be there via video link. Another time perhaps…

If you want to see Chris and the other guests (Anton Grutzmacher of Hitwise, Peter Kirwan of the Press Gazette’s Media Money and Rick Waghorn of www.myfootballwriter.com) talking about “the vexed question of generating viable revenue streams from digital publishing and the future of the media.” email DJWilliams1@uclan.ac.uk. More details at www.journalismleadersforum.blogspot.com

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A few weeks ago I wrote an 800-word piece for UK Press Gazette on how journalism has changed in the past decade. My original draft was almost 1200 words – here then is the original ‘Blogger’s Cut’ for your delectation…

The past decade has seen more change in the craft of journalism than perhaps any other. Some of the changes have erupted into the mainstream; others have nibbled at the edges. Paul Bradshaw counts the ways…

From a lecture to a conversation

Perhaps the biggest and most widely publicised change in journalism has been the increasing involvement of – and expectation of involvement by – the readers/audience. Yes, readers had always written letters, and occasionally phoned in tips, but the last ten years have seen the relationship between publisher and reader turn into something else entirely.

You could say it started with the accessibility of email, coupled with the less passive nature of the internet in general, as readers, listeners and watchers became “users”. But the change really gained momentum with…

The rise of the amateur

The blogs of September 11; the camcorder images from the Asian tsunami; the mobile phone images of July 7; the Facebook pages of Virginia Tech. If you needed to read about any of these major events, you could do so – if you wished – without opening a newspaper or watching TV.

The spread of cheap camcorders and video- and photo-enabled mobile phones, coupled with blogs and the viral distribution of the internet made publishers realise they were not only competing with each other, but with the readers themselves. And when a big story broke in public, they needed to be in a position to harvest what became known as “user generated content”. Thankfully the NUJ’s suggestion of “witness contributions” didn’t catch on…

Everyone’s a paperboy/girl now

If a newspaper didn’t reach a particular newsagent, or viewers in the Cumbria region were experiencing difficulties, that simply wasn’t a journalist’s problem. Online, however, distribution has become part of a journalist’s job description, whether they realise it or not.

From your Facebook profile to the way you respond to comments on your blog, a journalist’s activity online has formed a key element in any news organisation’s distribution (although few have yet realised this). Meanwhile, newspaper webpages have come out in a rash of ‘Digg/Blog this’ buttons, and Facebook applications from the likes of the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal have demonstrated how important it’s become for newspapers to be where the reader is, rather than the other way around.

Just a click away

Amidst all the Web 2.0 hype it’s easy to forget the fundamental characteristic of news in the online era: everything is connected; and the reader is only a click or a search away from something else. This has created major opportunities and challenges for journalists.

On the one hand, journalists can now link to full documents, previous reports, and unedited material. On the other, so can the readers. Material culled from wire copy is more easily spotted; and, as Dan Rather discovered, holes in your story can be quickly highlighted.

And while doorstepping used to be between you and the Dear Departed’s family, its digital equivalent is so much more public. The game has been raised – but have news organisations responded?

Really Simple Syndication

RSS is one of the most underestimated innovations in journalism. At it’s most basic level it means journalists can subscribe to a range of RSS feeds in one RSS reader – and therefore not have to keep checking back to dozens of original websites for updates. But the more people play with the technology, the more is being achieved.

For one thing, RSS enables very specific consumption: readers can now subscribe to just one section of a newspaper – or even one writer. In the Sun’s case, they can subscribe to search results. In terms of production, RSS enables different bits of news to be aggregated: pick a source, any source, and mash it up into a single feed. It works for Google News, why shouldn’t it work again?

Mapping

2007 saw some real experimentation with mapping in UK newspapers: the Manchester Evening News mapped fatal shootings in Manchester, the Grantham Journal

tracked a “killer heron” and the Lancashire Evening Post mapped roadworks and speed cameras. The Shropshire Star used it to map fuel prices.

But 2008 should mark the year mapping and geotagging gets serious. Leading the pack are Archant, with their much-awaited geotag-based website relaunches. Journalists, says Web Editor James Goffin, can now draw on a map when they submit a story, or supply postcodes. He argues it will “make for a better archive and make reporters’ lives easier in handling cuttings and follow ups.” The Telegraph launched the first stage of their dynamic Flash-based political map of Britain, while the BBC are using similar technologies for their proposed local website plans, which looks likely to further increase the pressures on regional publishers.

Hyperlocal, international

The internet has released news organisations from the limitations of physical distribution and broadcast – to the extent that news organisations have seen a new market for their old print products.

The Guardian, emboldened by statistics about website visitors, took its step across the Atlantic in 2003; The Times followed in 2006, and the BBC announced plans to sell advertising on its international site last year. And figures released last month showed visitors from outside the UK outnumbering the domestic audience for the BBC, The Guardian, The Telegraph, The Times and The Daily Mail.

Conversely, “hyperlocal” has entered the nomenclature of the news executive. Trinity Mirror’s Teesside Gazette’s experiments with hyperlocal, postcode-based news led to print equivalents, and likely extension to the group’s other newspapers.

Databases

The biggest untapped potential in journalism online is that of databases. So far we’ve seen some impressive demonstrations: ChicagoCrime.org famously drew information from a crime database onto a map of the area – and was followed by similar efforts at the LA Times and Washington Post (who added house sales and schools); The Herald Tribune, meanwhile, used databases in their coverage of how complaints against teachers were handled - readers could drill down to data in a specific school.

In the UK it’s The Telegraph leading the way, with football coverage that pulls up player statistics to rival ProZone, an A levels results map, and a recently unveiled political map that presents information on how local services ratings have improved or declined. Developments such as these have generated debate about whether journalists should be taught how to program. The conclusion seemed to be that it was easier to teach programmers how to do journalism.

Measurability

Most read, most commented, most emailed. Hits, pageviews and unique visitors. If you felt your editor’s news sense was as bad as his fashion sense, the measurability of the web gave you valuable ammunition; but if you thought Performance Related Pay was bad, you ain’t seen nothing yet.

Multimedia

If the pen is mightier than the sword, what does that make a microphone, camcorder and laptop… in a wifi hotspot? Newspapers dabbled in podcasts in 2005, before really mucking in 2006 when video took off and print journalists started worrying for the first time about tea staining their teeth. Now print journalists are learning about white balance, and broadcast journalists are learning about local news. And everyone is waiting for an almighty fight.

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The past decade has seen more change in the craft of journalism than perhaps any other. Some of the changes have erupted into the mainstream; others have nibbled at the edges. Over at the Press Gazette website I count the ways…

PS: I’ll be publishing the ‘blogger’s cut’ with 400 extra words in a week or so.

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Here’s the second report I wrote for Press Gazette from the Future of Newspapers conference last week. The version which appeared in Press Gazette is here; the original is below:  

Former Guardian editor Peter Preston has said that owners who are “giving up the ghost” must take some responsibility for the decline of newspapers.

Preston, speaking at the Future of Newspapers conference in Cardiff, said: “The internet may be the deliverer of the coup de grace but it is not to blame for the decline of newspapers.”

Instead, he blamed “inertia, fatalism, and cost-cutting,” combined with social changes.

“The risk is that we spend so much time discussing the dangers and not lifting our eyes to see round the corner. There’s a danger in introversion. Introversion means we don’t notice the world changing around us until it’s too late. Introversion means a fatal lack of communication in a communications business, and a refusal to make fresh connections or form new alliances. Introversion is a kind of stasis.”

Newspapers like the London Evening News and Star were killed off long before the rise of the internet, he said, by changes in society ranging from the changing nature of city centres and declining use of public transport, to people no longer working set hours and working from home.

“The reasons for buying hugely diminished. Life changed but the newspapers didn’t.”

Now, following a ‘golden era’ where “The only thing better than buying a newspaper was selling one,” profits are falling and newspaper chains are struggling to sell off their titles.

“In terms of profits, they’ve lost their allure; and in terms of influence many owners now shun the limelight. It’s neither a particularly glamorous nor lucrative game.”

The entry of freesheets into the market has also been a major factor in declining print circulations, he said.
“The London Paper is causing problems to the Sun; London Lite is causing problems to the Mail. Each is depressing profits on the house that publishes it.

“What kind of introversion commits editors to these prospects? Have evening newspapers fought back with investment? Did the Evening Standard set up satellites? London is the size of Austria, remember.”
Newspapers should be addressing the challenges head-on, he said. “The more tracks you’ve made in addressing the future, the more chance of success. But don’t believe you’ve ‘done it’ and stop.

“You are as good as your last idea or implementation, and others can have a good idea.

“The difficulty is seeing where the technology is going to be in ten years time. At the moment most current vision is about where the internet is, and where print is – but both are uncertain. I can rap about what the internet might be like in ten years’ time – but I have no idea what ownership ten years in the future might be. It may be smaller chains, and more local chains.”

A lack of effective strategies is compounded, Preston argues, by a lack of quality in management. “You need to get good people in journalism – and that’s difficult when you’re asking graduates to work for two years on £13,500. You have to think about how you attract not just good quality journalists but good quality managers for the next twenty to thirty years.”

But at the same time, Preston said, “If we wanted a good story to tell, we could have one. If circulations of free papers were counted, there would be no decline at all. There has been a 2.3 percent rise in the circulations of newspapers globally in the last year; revenues are up 3.7%. Circulations are up 12% if you include free papers.”

“It’s a fantastically interesting time to be involved in the news industry.”

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[Keyword: journalism, online journalism]. What’s happened to the Press Gazette /discuss section? I was just about to comment on the latest piece in the print paper (‘Mainstream media must show respect for the new kid on the blog’) only to find the link at Press Gazette now goes straight to the AOL homepage.

So, no copying and pasting, no linking, and because I have other stories to blog (and a bathroom to strip) Press Gazette (and AOL) lose the opportunity to get a few more hits.

The piece in a nutshell focuses on Daily Mail columnist Keith Waterhouse’s “distaste for bloggers” but that this changes “when it comes to photo bloggers. Citizen journalism suddenly becomes worthwhile, even respectable, if the blogger has a camera.”

Interestingly, given that the issue was debated at yesterday’s Citizen Journalism conference, Waterhouse is quoted as saying

“This Damascus U-turn took place in the aftermath of Saddam Hussein’s
execution, when the pictures began to come in.

“You will recall that the reports originally had it that the death sentence was carried out with as much decorum and dignity as such gruesome rituals allow.

“No Western reporters were present – the BBC’s John Simpson was asked along to the necktie party by the Iraqi leader himself, but was turned away.

“The bloggers were there, though, armed with picture-snatching mobile phone cameras. The official photo coverage, taken to convince the world that the monster had indeed paid the price, were grisly enough.

“The bloggers’ contribution – grabbed at the gallows either by a mini-mob of gleeful Shia interlopers or by the condemned prisoner’s guards themselves – shocked all right-thinking people.”

Thankfully, because Waterhouse’s piece is available online, I can quote at length.

Well, you may not be able to discuss it at Press Gazette, but feel free to discuss it here.

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Paul Bradshaw lectures on the Journalism degree at UCE Birmingham media department. He writes a number of blogs including the Online Journalism Blog, Interactive PR and Web and New Media

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