While it’s one thing to understand interactive storytelling, community management, or the history of online journalism, the changes that are affecting journalism are wider than the industry itself. So although I’ve written previously on essential books about online journalism, I wanted to also compile a list of books which I think are essential for those wanting to gain an understanding of wider dynamics affecting the media industries and, by extension, journalism.

These are books that provide historical context to the hysteria surrounding technologies; that give an insight into the cultural movements changing society; that explore key philosophical issues such as privacy; or that explore the commercial dynamics driving change.

But they’re just my choices – please add your own.

1. The Master Switch – Tim Wu

The best mainstream history of media technologies I’ve certainly read (although Winston’s ‘Media, Technology and Society‘ is very good too, if a more academic read). Wu tells the story of how radio, film, television and other media technologies went through a consistent path from ‘democratised technologies’ to media monopolies.

It’s a salutary tale for those who think the internet is different. If it is, then it will need to avoid the mistakes made by regulators, legislators and inventors. And those who don’t learn from history…

2. The Information – James Gleick

An astonishing masterwork that begins with why African talking drums were so wordy (it’s all about redundancy), takes in genetics, code-breaking and quantum physics, and in the process draw some very useful lessons about the changing nature of communication and information that help you take a step back from our own assumptions.

3. The Pirate’s Dilemma – Matt Mason

This covers the histories that lie behind the rise of mashups, guerilla marketing, and other cultural movements. A valuable lesson on where to look for change, and how that movements themselves change as different groups adopt their ideas. The book is available as a free download at http://thepiratesdilemma.com/, as is Lawrence Lessig’s book exploring similar themes, Free Culture.

4. The Wealth of Networks – Yochai Benkler

Widely recognised as the most comprehensive book on network dynamics. Given that these are so integral to everything that takes place online, that makes this a pretty vital book. And this is not just about online networks: the book draws on research into real world networks and communities and where they succeed and fail – vital foundations for any online project.

5. The Spy in the Coffee Machine – O’Hara & Shadbolt

A compact exploration of privacy in the networked age, and how digital technologies are impacting on that. Particularly useful are the passages that explore different cultures’ attitudes to privacy, and the case studies that help the reader explore the ethical issues raised by recent developments and technological possibilities.

6. Search Engine Society – Alexander Halavais

Another compact book, this explores research around how people use search engines, including some types of behaviour that you would not otherwise think about, such as the importance of re-finding, and different types of search literacy. Useful in understanding how people navigate the virtual world.

7. Creative Disruption – Simon Waldman

Although there are many books exploring the successes of new digital businesses, Simon Waldman’s book attempts something much more difficult: looking at how established businesses have tried to adapt to survive in the midst of great change. The book is very well written and does a particularly good job of explaining the various elements that form the basis of any business’s competitive advantage; how the internet changes those; and methods that have been used to respond. It’s a welcome reminder that, like any business, publishing is not just about content, but advertising, distribution, manufacturing and numerous other factors too.

A good book on the legal or political history would be particularly welcome to add to the list – or just something very good that I’ve never heard of. What books would you add?

The Gymbl - makes your iPhone not quite a good phone or a good camera

Jon Hickman reviews iPhone tripod Gymbl Pro.

Jonathan Ive didn’t design my iPhone with a pistol grip. Instead of a hard, brittle feeling, bumpy, plastic case, Jonathan Ive fashioned a fetish object wrapped in perfectly smooth flat glass. Jonathan Ive did not design the Gymbl Pro, by Youbiq.

Would Jonathan Ive use a Gymbl Pro in pistol grip mode to shoot a video?

No, he wouldn’t. Jonathan Ive would use an iPhone 4 to grab short informal videos. If he was in the field and had a chance to grab an important interview with somebody, he’d not hesitate to use his iPhone 4 in the hand. Jony would know that informal handheld shooting would add a sense of urgency or intimicay to his media file – he’d say: “There’s no need for handheld slickness, we’re over that now”.

Would Jonathan Ive use Gymbl Pro in tripod mode to take a photo?

No, not until he’s tasked the iOS team with putting a self-timer into the camera – then he’d say, “Hey this is pretty cool for family portraits”.

Would Jonathan Ive use the Gymbl Pro’s adaptor, so that he can mount it to a professional tripod?

No, if Jonny was going to go to the trouble of lugging around a heavy Manfroto tripod, he’d be sure to take a D-SLR with him too – in for a penny in for a pound.

Would Jonathan Ive pay for the optional Gymbl Pro app?

No, Jonathan Ive wouldn’t pay an extra £1.99 for the Youbiq app. He’d wonder why he needs another cloud storage solution for photos, and he’d wonder why Youbiq didn’t think to offer this app (which does have a neat panorama stitching feature) for free as a promotional tool to drive sales of the Gymbl (after all, a tripod makes stitiching panorams much easier).

What would Jonathan Ive do if his phone went off with a Gymbl Pro attached?

He’d have to stop his film shoot to answer or reject the call. I imagine he’d find hitting the wake/sleep button to mute the ringer a little tricky due to the case thickness. He’d also find talking on the phone slightly tricky because his phone has grown a load of spiky metal.

In Summary

• What is it?
  • It’s a tripod system for an iPhone 4. You put your phone in a case, the case clips onto a mini tripod which also doubles as a pistol grip.
• Why would you use it?
  • To provide a comfortable grip for shooting longer videos, as a stand for face time calls, or to provide a tripod for photography and video. But really you’d use it because you’re a bit of a geek.
• Positives
  • Comfortable holding for longer shoots; pretty stable as a table-top tripod.
• Negatives
  • Seems pricey for what boils down to a gimmick; turns your phone into a camera, reducing ease of use as anything else other than a camera – so really you’d be better off with, you know, a camera.
• In a nutshell
  • Smartphones are great for production when you’re in a tight spot, cameras are great for producing something more polished – this gets lost somewhere in the middle.
• Price: $99.00
• Rating: 2/5

I’ve been writing about Yahoo! Pipes for some time, and am consistently surprised that there aren’t more books on the tool. Pipes Tutorial – an ebook currently priced at $14.95 – is clearly aiming to address that gap.

The book has a simple structure: it is, in a nutshell, a tour around the various ‘modules’ that you combine to make a pipe.

Some of these will pull information from elsewhere – RSS feeds, CSV spreadsheets, Flickr, Google Base, Yahoo! Local and Yahoo! Search, or entire webpages.

Some allow the user to input something themselves – for example, a search phrase, or a number to limit the type of results given.

And others do things with all the above – combining them, splitting them, filtering, converting, translating, counting, truncating, and so on.

When combined, this makes for some powerful possibilities – unfortunately, its one-dimensional structure means that this book doesn’t show enough of them.

Modules in isolation

While the book offers a good introduction into the functionality of the various parts of Yahoo! Pipes, it rarely demonstrates how those can be combined. Typically, tutorial books will take you through a project that utilises the power of the tools covered, but Pipes Tutorial lacks this vital element. Sometimes modules will be combined in the book but this is mainly done because that is the only way to show how a single module works, rather than for any broader pedagogical objective.

At other times a module is explained in isolation and it is not explained how the results might actually be used. The Fetch Page module, for example – which is extremely useful for scraping content from a webpage – is explained without reference to how to publish the results, only a passing mention that the reader will have to use ‘other modules’ to assign data to types, and that Regex will be needed to clean it up.

Regex itself – possibly one of the most useful parts of Yahoo! Pipes – is cursorily tackled, and the reader pointed to resources elsewhere. The same applies to YQL – the language that allows you to interrogate data sources. Likewise, the Web Service module which allows you to connect with an API, isn’t illustrated with any practical guidance on how to use it.

The book makes no mention of the ability to clone pipes published by others on Yahoo! Pipes, and misses a big opportunity to provide links to working pipes that the user can clone and play with themselves – or indeed any online support that I can see other than a blog that currently has 2 instructional posts.

Despite all the above omissions, the lack of similar books mean this is still a useful resource for aspiring data journalists. It provides an insight into the possibilities of Pipes, even if it doesn’t quite take you through how to exploit those.

PS: If you’ve read any other books on Yahoo! Pipes (including this one) let me know whether they’re any use.

In the week that a general election is called, Heather Brooke’s latest book couldn’t have been better timed. The Silent State is a staggeringly ambitious piece of work that pierces through the fog of the UK’s bureaucracies of power to show how they work, what is being hidden, and the inconsistencies underlying the way public money is spent.

Like her previous book, Your Right To Know, Brooke structures the book into chapters looking at different parts of the power system in the UK – making it a particularly usable reference work when you want to get your head around a particular aspect of our political systems.

Chapter by chapter

Chapter 1 lists the various databases that have been created to maintain information on citizens - paying particular focus to the little-publicised rack of databases holding subjective data on children. The story of how an old unpopular policy was rebranded to ride into existence on the back of the Victoria Climbie bandwagon is particularly illustrative of government’s hunger for data for data’s sake.

Picking up that thread further, Chapter 2 explores how much public money is spent on PR and how public servants are increasingly prevented from speaking directly to the media. It’s this trend which made The Times’ outing of police blogger Nightjack particularly loathsome and why we need to ensure we fight hard to protect those who provide an insight into their work on the ground.

Chapter 3 looks at how the misuse of statistics led to the independence of the head of the Office of National Statistics – but not the staff that he manages – and how the statistics given to the media can differ quite significantly to those provided when requested by a Select Committee (the lesson being that these can be useful sources to check). It’s a key chapter for anyone interested in the future of public data and data journalism.

Bureaucracy itself is the subject of the fourth chapter. Most of this is a plea for good bureaucracy and the end of unnamed sources, but there is still space for illustrative and useful anecdotes about acquiring information from the Ministry of Defence.

And in Chapter 5 we get a potted history of MySociety’s struggle to make politicians accountable for their votes, and an overview of how data gathered with public money – from The Royal Mail’s postcodes to Ordnance Survey – is sold back to the public at a monopolistic premium.

The justice system and the police are scrutinised in the 6th and 7th chapters – from the twisted logic that decreed audio recordings are more unreliable than written records to the criminalisation of complaint.

Then finally we end with a personal story in Chapter 8: a reflection on the MPs’ expenses saga that Brooke is best known for. You can understand the publishers – and indeed, many readers – wanting to read the story first-hand, but it’s also the least informative of all the chapters for journalists (which is a credit to all that Brooke has achieved on that front in wider society).

With a final ‘manifesto’ section Brooke summarises the main demands running across the book and leaves you ready to storm every institution in this country demanding change. It’s an experience reminiscent of finishing Franz Kafka’s The Trial – we have just been taken on a tour through the faceless, logic-deprived halls of power. And it’s a disconcerting, disorientating feeling.

Journalism 2.0

But this is not fiction. It is great journalism. And the victims caught in expensive paper trails and logical dead ends are real people.

Because although the book is designed to be dipped in as a reference work, it is also written as an eminently readable page-turner – indeed, the page-turning gets faster as the reader gets angrier. Throughout, Brooke illustrates her findings with anecdotes that not only put a human face on the victims of bureaucracy, but also pass on the valuable experience of those who have managed to get results.

For that reason, the book is not a pessimistic or sensationalist piece of writing. There is hope – and the likes of Brooke, and MySociety, and others in this book are testament to the fact that this can be changed.

The Silent State is journalism 2.0 at its best – not just exposing injustice and waste, but providing a platform for others to hold power to account. It’s not content for content’s sake, but a tool. I strongly recommend not just buying it – but using it. Because there’s some serious work to be done.

I’ve been meaning to blog for a while now about 2 excellent books I’ve read this year about communities online, both of which are pretty much essential reading for anyone involved in community management.

The first is Andrew Lih’s book The Wikipedia Revolution. Lih is for me the world’s leading academic on Wikipedia, not least because he’s been a participant in Wikipedia himself and has a great understanding of how the community works from the inside.

The book charts how the community has evolved from one that was maintained by personal connections to a whole stratified society of rules, roles, technologies and norms.

Particularly key are the sections on the development of the ‘Spanish Fork‘ (the mere mention of a commercial version of Wikipedia led to members of their Spanish site effectively leaving in protest and setting up their own encyclopedia) and Chapter 5: The Piranha Effect, which I gave to my MA Online Journalism students as one of their first readings.

The book also deals with trolls, vandalism (the Siegenthaler incident) and censorship.

The second great book is from experienced community manager Angela Connor: 18 Rules of Community Engagement (also available as an e-book). This is a great complement to Lih’s as this comes from a very different, practical, angle drawing not just on her own knowledge but those of readers of her blog. In fact, it’s a very bloggy book generally.

Connor emphasises the need to invest lots of time in any community developing relationships, making connections and fostering relationships. She looks at the importance of content (of the right type) and questions, of rules and culture, egos and compliments, influence and complaints.

It’s a breezy book that doesn’t impose one solution on every problem but frequently returns to the fact that every community is different, and so even common problems like trolls and spamming will have different solutions. That said, there are plenty of experiences offered.

These are probably the best 2 books I’ve read on online communities – but if you’ve read something good in the area, please let me know.

What could possibly be common between a detailed account of America’s historic role in Middle East peace and a story about urban acrobats leaping across buildings in London and Beirut? Perhaps, the way in which you choose to tell them.

Designed to look and read like a magazine, complete with the swishing sound that accompanies each turn of a fascinating page, the innovative young site Flyp media, which is being hailed as a “future media lab,” is attempting to straddle the boundaries between the old and the new, between print and celluloid, and between Web creation and journalism.

Videos, podcasts and interactive images are embedded on pages that could well be bound and dropped into your mailbox. It is as much the art of story telling as the story itself. “Flyp the magazine is really a proof-of-concept experiment in terms of multimedia story telling. It is not a product that we’re aimed at as much as the message and the form,” says Editor in Chief Jim Gaines.

Covering topics as wide-ranging as science, business, politics, the economy, and every day life, Flyp’s connecting thread is this very commitment to mixed-media reporting. The well-crafted semblance to print (what Gaines calls an “architectural vestige that is comforting in this transition period”) with its margins, page numbers and folio lines might seem excessive until you factor in the number of people that stay away from the Amazon Kindle because it doesn’t have the look and feel of paper.

What happens at Flyp is true convergence of media. “We start with everybody in the room – the videographers, the animators, the designers, the audio person, the editor, and the reporter and try to figure out what is the best combination of media to tell that particular story,” says Gaines. “The story is created in all media at once.”

Reason why a piece detailing the Afghan conflict doesn’t rely merely on text to illustrate Pakistan’s vital role in the forgotten war; the accompanying videos convey opinions from public officials and experts, and vivid pictures and infographics reinforce the facts. It is this same propensity to interactive technology that prompts Bernie Madoff to wink from the cover page of an in-depth article elucidating on his elaborate Ponzi scheme.

Could excessive use of multimedia, however, take away from the significance of the message it tries to deliver? Not when you can keep the medium and the message sufficiently discrete, says Gaines. “What’s good about multimedia is that we can allow people to do either one – we can run the material in layers as we did with the Madoff story.” Articles are available in text-only formats or as audio podcasts for as much the reader’s convenience as for Google’s ability to track them. Flyp may be slightly ahead of its time as search engines still have trouble keeping up with flash animation and rich media technology.

The upside of this same technology, of course, is reader interactivity. Interactivity at Flyp is more than a comments thread and a survey poll. Clickable tables, charts and graphics allow active interplay with the user, and quizzes and games supplement stories to keep the reader absorbed. Complex topics such as bioterrorism and astronomy are creatively explained through the use of schematics and animation. Little wonder then that the Flyp team insists on calling its creations “experiences,” as opposed to mere stories.

Few things do more justice to new media technology than personal narratives and citizen accounts, and Flyp taps into these formats well. Iraqi students talk about their experiences at US universities and laid-off Americans offer innovative ideas to network and market oneself in today’s economy, as you “leaf through pages” of the accompanying articles.

“Telling stories through the lens of a fellow human being’s life is always the best way to get something across,” says Gaines, who spent many years telling human-interest stories in traditional journalism, as former editor of Time, Life and People magazines. “When you can see someone talking about their pain or their experience or their joy or their sorrow, it makes video and audio so compelling as a method of storytelling.”

Gaines believes that magazines with healthy audiences and good advertising franchises need only to make a revolutionary transition in the method of telling a story. Many traditional organizations are not thinking creatively enough to get themselves out of trouble. “When you’re in the middle of a car accident and you see the crash coming, you can’t think of anything else, and I think there’s a metaphor there for where print finds itself at the moment,” he says.

Talking of the crisis, what about new media monetization? Despite partnerships with Fortune.com and Warner Music, Flyp Media hasn’t yet tried to monetize content, like hundreds of innovative new startups out there.

Gaines’ answer to that is not very different from his solution to creative news delivery: multimedia technology. It is in the best interest of advertisers to create rich media advertisements that audiences really want to engage with, he says. This would have another useful consequence: creating a new demand equation because there is only so much rich media that the traffic can bear. This would create less ad space, and hence, more revenue for target sites.

It is certainly tempting to embrace this as the new business model for journalism. But do time-starved readers who refuse to scroll through unforgiving columns of long text, and often satisfy themselves with summaries from their RSS feeds, be willing to watch a 3-minute commercial in addition to the video clip that was an integral part of the news story?

Just how limitless is this thirst for new media consumption? That is what remains to be answered, and Flyp Media comes as close to posing the question as anyone else.

Searching is the most popular activity online after email. It is the prism through which we experience a significant proportion of the world’s information – from news and information about our community, through to health information, commerce, and just about anything that has a presence online.

Search Engine Society takes a critical look at search engines, how they work, the techniques used to manipulate them – from gaining better rankings to censorship, and the implications for privacy and democracy.

Chapter one looks at the development and workings of search engines, from the once-essential directories of Yahoo! and the citation-based algorithms of Google that now dominate the search landscape, through to lesser-known players such as social bookmarking service Delicious which relies on user-generated ‘folksonomies’ to organise material, and specialised regional and ‘vertical’ search engines like the French language Voila or the genetic materials search engine The Bioinformatic Harvester. This is situated within a wider discussion of information retrieval histories from the Library of Babylon onwards – and touches on recent moves into geospatial, mobile, social and semantic search.

Balancing that focus on technology, the following chapter focuses on users, looking at how people search. Search behaviours vary widely between users and between searches – Halavais discusses research that showed how many users simply add ‘.com’ to a word as the start of their search, while others use a ‘shopping mall’ approach of going direct to the likes of Wikipedia and the Internet Movie Database (which also contain search facilities). Using a search engine, Halavais argues, is only one method of search, and search is “not only an iterative process, but one that is rarely linear and requires seeking out the concepts that surround a problem or question. In other words, the query and search strategy is likely to change as more information becomes available.”

Search as ‘re-finding’

Halavais also emphasises the importance of ‘re-finding’ – “not as a sub-set of finding, but the other way around” – indeed, this is the basis of social bookmarking services like Delicious and Digg that allow the user to store and label (‘tag’) webpages for later retrieval, as well as searching for webpages that have been given similar tags by other users.

Power law distribution patterns famously recur throughout the web and in the third chapter Halavais looks at how this affects search results. With Google’s rankings relying so strongly on how many links point to a particular page, it is important to look at how those links are distributed. The fact that highly linked pages are likely to attract ever more links – what Huberman calls “preferential attachment” – leads to the “chunky” nature of the web – in concrete terms the dominance of websites like those of the BBC and Guardian; a quality which, Halavais argues, Google’s PageRank technology ‘calcifies’.

But when Google tweaks its search engine algorithms to attempt to improve results, it can have enormous consequences for organisations dependent on their rankings in search results. Halavais uses the example of Skyfacet.com and Answers.com which saw sales and visits drop by 17% and 28% respectively when they dropped off the first page of related Google searches. It is as if someone moved your shop from the main high street to an industrial estate. In this context it is not surprising that search engine advertising accounts for the majority of online advertising spend.

Digital divides

Following up on those issues, the fourth chapter looks at implications for democracy on two sides: firstly, the division between winners and losers in the contest for public attention; and secondly, the division between skilled and unskilled users of search engines. Halavais is keen to highlight that division is nothing new:

“Current search engines, like communication technologies before them, contain both centralizing and diversifying potentials. These potentials affect the stories we tell ourselves as a society; and the way we produce knowledge and wisdom.”

In practice, these potentials are heavily weighted towards US sites:

“In the language of PageRank, US sites simply have more authority: more links leading to them … sites have existed longer in the United States, where much of the early growth of the internet occurred… Add to this the idea that early winners have a continuing advantage in attracting new links and traffic, and US dominance of search seems a foregone conclusion … the search engines do not merely reflect this authority, they help to reproduce it.”

Indeed, ranking systems that reinforce authority, says Halavais, are conservative in nature and comprise what Lewis Mumford, writing 40 years ago, called “authoritarian technics”.  But because of the unlimited size and reach of the internet compared to previous media technologies, it is not so simple:

“The current structure is a complex combination of a high degree of centralization at the macro-level, with a broad set of diverse divisions at the micro-level.”

Blogger as ‘search intellectual’

Interestingly, at this point Halavais introduces the blogger as a “search intellectual”, upsetting existing structures of authority on the web and acting as “a counterweight to the hegemonic culture of the search engines” in bringing otherwise overlooked material into the “circle of reputation and links that search engines tend to enforece”. The recent rise of Twitter in performing a similar role would be worth adding to that list.

Chapter 5 takes a broad look at censorship – “just another word for filtering” – while Chapter 6 looks at privacy – search engines as “databases of intentions” where even anonymised logs of what individuals are searching for can lead to people being identified. Chapter 7 revisits the rise of “sociable search” tools and folksonomy – where classification is created by a mass of users’ ‘tags’ rather than any centralised scheme, and ‘finding’ is a social act closely related to ‘sharing’.

The book closes with a roundup of the possibilities of future search and the factors that will influence that, from increasing digitisation of material to improved mapping and the possibilities of RFID tags (which makes objects a part of the web too). Semantic search – technology that understands the meaning of what you are searching for, or of relationships between objects – is the promise that lies forever ‘just over the horizon’, while sociable search offers a more likely immediate move.

As is natural, there are areas which have developed since this book was written and so are not tackled in depth – most notably real-time search. The rise of Twitter and the ability to search through what people are talking about ‘right now’ represents such serious competition to Google that it introduced the first major new features to its homepage in years. Wolfram Alpha – the “computational knowledge engine” that made newspaper front pages this year – is not even mentioned.

But those are incidental issues in what is an important book. Halavais manages to acknowledge the dominance of Google without being distracted by it, and gives due attention to non-Western tools and services not commonly seen as search tools. He avoids the pitfalls of technological determinism and manages to distinguish between top-down domination and bottom-up diversity. What emerges is a sophisticated picture of power in flux. “Search engines are interesting to the person who wants to understand the exercise of power in the information society,” Halavais writes in the his conclusion. “In an era in which knowledge is the only bankable commodity, search engines own the exchange floor.” The more readers understand this exchange floor, the better we can exchange and interrogate what information we possess.

A shorter version of this review will appear in Journalism

“This book is my manifesto for the media as a journalist but also as a citizen of the world. As a journalist you are constantly being told that the news media have enormous power to shape society and events, to change lives and history. So why are we so careless as a society about the future of journalism itself ?” [1]

This is how Charlie Beckett presents his book “SuperMedia: Saving Journalism So It Can Save The World” (Wiley-Blackwell, 2008), in which he tackles the main challenges to journalistic practice in our days, and its influence to maintain free and democratic societies .

Charlie Beckett is a journalist with a 20 yearscareer at the BBC and ITN, and he is also the founding Director of POLIS, a think tank about journalism and society at the London School of Economics. “SuperMedia” is a work that gathers and structures several streams of thought about the future of Journalism as a essential service to contemporary societies, and how the changes in the news industry, beyond inevitable, are necessary.

Alex Gamela posed a few questions to Charlie Beckett about his book (Portuguese version available here).

“I estimate that we have five years – perhaps ten – to save journalism so that journalism can save the world. “

So, why is journalism in danger? For Beckett, this is due to a “mixture of economic pressures, political repression ( [in] places like Africa, Russia etc) and the shift of people’s attention to new media alternatives”.

The traditional media have kept their relationship with the audience fairly unchanged in the past few decades, which seemed to work just fine, but with the coming of new technologies that relationship shifted, and the news industry seems to be having some difficulties adapting to the new circumstances.

I had to ask Charlie Beckett a question he himself raised in his book: “What is wrong with the media business?” “It is too formulaic, too closed, too limited.” In fact, the trouble and the fears are increasing in the “dead tree” industry: dropping profits, lower circulation, staff cuts, and the reluctance of many professionals to embrace the new ways of communication.

Despite all that, journalism’s job is still the same: to inform. And the flow of information in a free environment allows a better knowledge of what surrounds us, and a more effective interaction with it. But, for a long time, journalism took the part of the messenger that was never accounted for.

And what is its role nowadays?

“Journalism has many roles: entertainment, watchdog, informer, forum, economic medium and more. Societies with open and thriving news media seem to be richer and more well-adjusted.”.

At the heart of the news process are journalists, an ill-viewed class at the eyes of most citizens. Under such a pessimistic perspective on the function they perform, I asked if journalists had forgot about their responsibilities:

“Of course not”, says Beckett, “but a journalist’s priority is to do their job well. Wider responsibilities should be considered by the journalist and their organisations, but everyone will shape them differently. Networked journalism allows the public to help define and then share the responsibilities.”

Networked Journalism

Charlie Beckett spends a large part of his book talking about networked journalism. As he explained on BBC “Networked journalists share the news process with the audience right from the start: from information gathering to distribution, in active, participative way.”[2]

In a nutshell, Beckett described it to me as a “thorough-going change in journalism practice which challenges the basic assumptions of mainstream journalism. It synthesises the functions of editing, reporting and packaging with much public involvement throughout the process.”

As long as they have access to a computer or a cell phone, any member of the audience can collaborate with journalists as a citizen journalist, through wikis, blogs, or providing multimédia contents. Or they can just sit back and watch the results of this collaboration.

This implies new perspectives and an extension of the news agenda that expands with each participation. This synergy can rebuild public trust in journalism, and an increase of media companies’ knowledge about their audiences: “People are increasingly sceptical but that can be a good thing. Old Media didn’t take audience seriously because they never met them.”

But the participation of amateurs in the news process raises the content quality issue. For Charlie Beckett this does not apply: “There are vast amounts of rubbish on corporate media.”

Another one of the most discussed subjects on New Media is how they can generate revenue: “Much too big a question! If I knew the answer I would be very rich.”

We’ve been watching practical examples of this evolution: the celerity of how the Sichuan earthquake was reported on the web, the democratization of multimedia content, the development of social networks and virtual communities, etc. But more than a technological evolution, networked journalism is a philosophy: “(…)is a return to some of the oldest virtues of journalism: connecting with the world beyond the newsroom; listening to people; giving people a voice in the media; responding to what the public tells you in a dialogue. But it has the potential to go further than that in transforming the power relationship between media and the public and reformulating the means of journalistic production.”.[3]

The multiplication of ways to communicate means that there is a whole lot more information than ever before, where each individual can express himself according to his own agenda. I told Charlie Beckett that the media landscape looked like a broken mirror, with different platforms in different media, for fragmented audiences, using various applications. He replied: “What’s wrong with diversity and difference and distance? But generally more public participation allows greater voice and more connectivity.” Between people, and between audience and media companies. Are the new networked media outlets becoming the heart of communities? “Yes – but they might also be on the edges of communities or outside of them. NJ naturally works best when supported by groups of people but those communities might not be geographical.” The geography that we relate to now is the one of concepts, tastes, ideas.

In his book, Beckett extensively reports on how the networked media can influence the political conscience of citizens when mainstream media is alerted to subjects that usually would remain hidden under the stack of the news pile that fills newsrooms everyday. Networked journalism allows a reformulation of the news agenda, making way to news that are important to smaller communities, or society in general, but of which is disconnected for not being provided with information about that reality. The main example that Beckett uses is Africa: how can societies with few economical resources, educational and democratic deficits, and a low technology penetration rate can benefit from something like networked journalism? Africa does not have widespread internet network, but in most countries there are structures that enable a good cell coverage.

The participation of independent voices in the construction of a news image of Africa, created far from governmental pressures, may give us for sure more insightful perspectives than the ones provided by state media, or by correspondents that can’t reach everywhere. With the easiness of spreading information via mobile devices, Africa may become the perfect testing ground for networked journalism.

“It’s not the perfect testing ground. I said that it is the ultimate test, because so much old media has failed in Africa. Networked journalism offers a fresh opportunity that can be grounded in African’s own experience and expertise.”

But is this a path without risks? The power of networked journalism is to influence common people’s lives, but are there any dangers in this way of doing things?

“Who are the ‘common’ people? I honestly don’t see any real ‘dangers’ in new media trends that aren’t common to old media dangers. People will still be dishonest, biased and greedy online as well as offline, but I honestly don’t think that new media has any new threats compared to old mass media.”

Hyperjournalists

There are clear advantages in embracing new media: they’re cheap, fast, more effective, and their potential is almost infinite. Still, there is a lot of suspicion over them:

“People always resist change. New media means learning new tricks. Some jobs will go. And it challenges the assumptions of old journalism so some people will find that threatening.”

And what standard procedures journalists must follow in this brave new world? “There should be NO standard procedures. That is old thinking.” In “SuperMedia”, Beckett defends that versatility and the ability to adapt are the most important features for future communication professionals, not only to new Technologies and market characteristics, but also to their relationship with the users. The journalists of the future must know how to use social networks in their favour, create and package news in several formats, and know how to manage user contribution before, during and after publishing.

To Beckett, “Journalism likes to think it is a superhero when it is really Clark Kent.”[4]. A journalist’s superpowers are his ability to colaborate with the audience, but that doesn’t mean that his activity will become more precarious: “The journalist is just as needed because you need filters, editors, and packagers but they will have to become facilitators, connectors and enablers as well. It’s a more complex and interesting job and just as vital.”

Will the heightening of the complexity of journalistic activity make journalism more reliable, even better? Beckett believes that “it will be as reliable as the people who make it. ‘better’ is a very subjective word. But yes I think that public participation raises standards by increasing resources.”

Hyperjournalists training for Super Media reality should be “much more multi-skilled and work more on problem-solving to foster a craft of creative engagement with the public rather than spending months learning to copy journalists of the past.”

The problem is that the relationship of journalists with elements outside to newsrooms hasn’t been easy. Beckett wrote extensively about the journalists’ relationship with another emerging class, bloggers, that seem to be living above the rules imposed on journalists, and that rapidly won their way as information distributors. Have bloggers as many responsibilities as journalists nowadays, and should they have their own ethical code? Or will quality become the true regulator of their activity?

Beckett believes that bloggers don’t need an ethical code: “Most journalists ignore any codes they might have. The guarantee of quality or reliability is diversity, accountability and that comes with networked journalism.”

After all, we all can become journalists. As Beckett says, journalists are “people who report, analyse and comment on events and issues for other people to consume.” And it’s in the crossing of these relationships that Supermedia is created.

The SuperMedia Challenge

“Supermedia” is a networked book itself. Charlie Beckett resorted to the ideas by Paul Bradshaw, Jeff Jarvis, Jay Rosen and other new media thinkers – besides referring to other personalities that affected that reality to ground and develop his own concepts.

What comes out of it is a rather optimistic perspective (at least that is how it seems to me, despite the gloomy principle it stands on) that provides practical indications on how media, from corporate to personal, could and should develop. It’s a fundamental work in this period of transition and definition of what it is journalism, what is it good for and who is it good for.

Enriched with the author’s perspective about the social importance of media, it’s the perfect digest of several streams of thought on the ways industry and audiences should follow in the future. It’s not a complex book regarding concepts, but it is in the implications inferred, and i believe it will turn into an excellent guide for professionals and journalism students, to understand how we pass from a one way, corporate and limited communication, to another, networked, relational, costumized, communitary. And the questions raised in the book don’t have necessarily only one answer.

Above all, Beckett defends the increasingly mooted idea that the news is a service, not a product, therefore the public interest stands above all the rest. It’s a strange way to liberalize something that belongs to everyone, and that must serve the common welfare.

Like he says in his book, “journalism can be a greater force for good.” I asked him if that “mission, should we accept it”, is possible: “Of course anything is possible. But it is a choice. We get the media we create.”

You can buy “SuperMedia: Saving Journalism So It Can Save The World” here, or download the first three chapters from Polis website.