Delicious icon by Icon Shock

A few weeks back I wrote about my ‘network infrastructure’ – the combination of social networks, an RSS reader and social bookmarking that can underpin a person’s journalism work.

As I said there, the social bookmarking element is the one that people often fail to get, so I wanted to further illustrate how I use Delicious specifically, with a case study.

Here’s a post I wrote about how sentencing decisions were being covered around the UK riots. The ‘lead’ came through a social network, but if I was to write a post that was informed by more than what I could remember about sentencing, I needed some help.

Here’s where Delicious came in.

I looked to see what webpages I’d bookmarked on Delicious with the tag ‘courts’. This led me on to related tags like ‘courtreporting‘.

The results included:

• An article by Heather Brooke giving her personal experience of not being able to record her own hearing.
• A report on the launch of a new website by the Judiciary of Scotland, which I’d completely forgotten about. This also helped me avoid making the common mistake of tarring Scottish courts with the same brush as English ones.
• Various useful resources for courts data.
• Some context on the drop in court reporters at a regional level – but also some figures on the drop at a national level, which I hadn’t thought about.
• A specialist academic who has been researching court reporting.

And all this in the space of 10 minutes or so.

If you look at the resulting post you can see how the first pars are informed by what was coming into my RSS reader and social networks, but after that it’s largely bookmark-informed (as well as some additional research, including speaking to people). The copious links provide an additional level of utility (I hope) which online journalism can do particularly well.

Excerpt from the article - most of these links came from my Delicious bookmarks

All about preparation

You can see how building this resource over time can allow you to provide context to a story quicker, and more deeply, than if you had resorted to a quick search on Google.

In addition, it highlights a problem with search: you will largely only find what you’re looking for. Bookmarking on Delicious means you can spot related stories, issues and sources that you might not have thought about – and more importantly, that others might have overlooked too.

More from the PCC following yesterday’s Twitter ruling: new guidance on online corrections shows a surprising awareness of search engine optimisation techniques.

Among other points of the guidance are that:

The guidance addresses a recurring problem with news reports which are corrected after subs see sense – but whose HTML and URL continue to display information which could land the publisher in court – for example that shown in the image above (from here) and below, from this post.(Thanks to Martin Belam for finding the main image) – if you can recall the others, let me know.

UPDATE: Thanks to Malcolm Coles for pointing me to some prime candidates at the end of this Robots.txt file

UPDATE 2: Here’s another one from Malcolm: even newspapers who change their URL can still be found out.

As part of a group response to  the government‘s inquiry into the future of local and regional media, Paul Bradshaw looks at the role of local authorities in regional journalism. Blog comments will be submitted to the inquiry as well as the blog posts.

So. The Committee for Culture, Media and Sport want responses on “The appropriateness and effectiveness of print and electronic publishing initiatives undertaken directly by public sector bodies at the local level”

The question of what public sector bodies should be allowed to publish, how that affects local journalism, the local economy, and local democracy, is one of the most difficult to resolve – not least because it involves so many interconnected elements.

The first problem is that any discussion runs the risk of conflating a number of separate but interlinked elements:

• local councils and local democracy are not the same thing; 
• local newspapers and local journalism are also two different things.

Whatever model emerges must recognise that papers are not the only places where public discussion takes place, and print journalists are not the only people holding power to account.

We must not prop up newspapers at the expense of the opportunity to support other emerging forums of public engagement. Any question about the future of local media must acknowledge that ‘local media’ now includes any number of blogs, websites, forums, social networks and other, distributed, media. 

As local citizens increasingly receive their ‘news’ from those forms of media, and local journalists increasingly rely on those to understand the concerns of local people, the actions of public sector bodies need to be responsive and supportive of that.

The economic role

Equally, while newspapers have an important role to play in local economies, we should not ignore the growing number of independently owned local print and online publications that have the potential to provide another source of economic growth. 

In other words, just as local newspapers protested at the potential effect BBC Local might have on their markets, we should be aware of how support for local newspaper chains might undermine the efforts of less vocal, independent news operations.

Council newspapers

The same economic argument is used to criticise the increasing number of local authorities publishing newspapers of their own.

The Local Government Association recently released research claiming council magazines were “not a threat to local media” – a useful survey, but the way it is reported by the LGA demonstrates the dangers of allowing local authorities to report on their own activities.

The statistic “Almost 60 per cent of council publications contain 10 per cent or less of advertising” is framed as part of the case that local magazines are not a threat. A casual reader would swallow that. A critical writer would point out that this means a very significant 40% of council publications carry reasonably large amounts of advertising – and even those carrying less than 10% of advertising are still having an economic impact on local newspapers. Not mentioned is whether there is an increasing trend towards carrying more advertising, which anecdotally looks to be the case. 

The move into council newspapers is a move to cut out the middleman, with little obvious benefit for local citizens: for the reasons given above it is unlikely to be informing in any meaningful sense, and even less likely to hold its paymasters to account.

The financial implications are concerning: there is the drain on public funds of of publication and distribution. There is the negative economic impact of reallocating communications and marketing budgets that might otherwise go towards local media. If indeed “People deserve to know what their council tax is being spent on” then there should be restrictions on how council newspapers do that: just the facts, please. No spin, no adverts. They used to call them leaflets.

Rather than publishing pre-packaged, pre-selected information, one way local councils could make a major difference is through publishing information in formats that make it as easy as possible for users to build media of their own from, i.e. ‘mash up’. Examples of this would include:

• RSS feeds of newly published documents
• Documents ‘tagged’ with key names, places, organisations, etc.
• The ability for users to tag documents themselves
• The ability for users to comment on or annotate documents
• Full audio or video of council meetings, etc.
• Use of microformats
• Use of free platforms that support some of the above technologies, e.g. WordPress, Twitter, Delicious

For newspapers, this would provide an efficiency not just in newsgathering (a key way to help reporters find the information they need, quickly, to interrogate it and make connections), but also production and distribution (RSS feeds and tags, for example, can be easily filtered, aggregated and mashed up).

Equally, because this makes it easier for web users to interrogate information, it helps facilitate local amateur and startup media production, including those members of the local community that journalists are increasingly relying upon to do this work.

This is obviously not to say that anyone will be able to use the data in these ways, only that it makes it possible for a wider number of people than before to create media – and to distribute it. The nature of the web is such that it also becomes easier for a wider group of people to find out about that media, and to become engaged with local issues on a social level.

In fact, there’s already an open source platform available that local authorities could look at which releases information in this way – EveryBlock.

But this is not a technical solution to a social problem, but an organisational and cultural solution. It is about openness. 

Automate, aggregate and distribute

And if councils are serious about informing their citizens I think they could go further still. They could publish relevant stories alongside their council webpages. 

If a user is on the council website planning applications page, why not have a feed from local news websites and a selection of top local blogs that have relevant tags? That information is more than likely going to be more readable and informative than the council’s own version, so it is fulfilling the council’s own stated aim of ‘informing the public’ at no extra cost. It is also helping to distribute the news and drive traffic to local news websites (a virtual version of Craig McGill’s suggestion that binmen deliver the news), not to mention the possibility of newspapers selling advertising into those feeds. 

This needn’t be limited to the council website: local authorities distribute information electronically in all kinds of ways – emails to staff, information to bus stops, text messages, local digital TV – providing a future possibility of further automated distribution.

You then have a built-in incentive for local news organisations to cover local government (needless to say this should be enshrined somehow so that councils cannot hold news organisations to ransom).

Anyway, I’ve said enough. It’s a complex area – what should local authorities do?

There are billions of pages of unsorted and unclassified information online, which make up millions of terabytes of data with almost no organisation.  It is not necessarily true that some of this information is valuable whilst some is worthless, that’s just a judgement for who desires it.  At the moment, the most common way to access any information is through the hegemonic search engines which act as an entry point.

Yet, despite Google’s dominace of the market and culture, the methodology of search still isn’t satisfactory.  Leading technologists see the next stage of development coming, where computers will become capable of effectively analysing and understanding data rather than just presenting it to us.  Search engine optimisation will eventually be replaced by the ‘semantic web’.

Correctly tagging the mass of available data to provide a clear sense of meaning is the best way of achieving this according to Nova Spivack, founder of Twine, one of the leading sites in this field.  He says:

“This next generation is actually based on enriching the meaning, enriching the structure.  The reason we want to do this is so that software can understand the web like humans can understand the web. Because the semantic web is not for humans, it is for machines.”

Undertaking this task will revolutionise the way we utilise the internet, creating intelligent interaction and impacting on the way the web is perceived in popular culture. Vint Cerf, one of the driving forces behind the creation of the internet, says:

‘I don’t believe that we will see arising out of the current internet…conscious artificial intelligence, but we will probably see the system become easier to interact with – for example, voice interaction is becoming increasingly easy to accomplish. I’m almost certain you’ll see products emerging that will allow you to orally interact with the network – ask for something, demand something, or command something and have [it] happen.

“We may feel that this system is more intelligent because we are interacting with it in ways that don’t require us to point, click and type. The semantic web idea will make the internet seem more intelligent because we are extracting knowledge that other people put into it in a way that looks pretty intelligent.”

So the aim of the ‘semantic web’ is to allow data to be accessed and shared effectively by wider communities, yet processed automatically by computer.  In order for this to happen there needs to be a simple system to catagorise data so it can be easily located and organised.

Much progress has been made in this infrastructure, particularly in the development of the new languages – Resource Description Framework (RDF) and Web Ontology Language (OWL) – by the World Wide Web Consortium .  The languages are used to annotate code, representing ‘knowledge’ which will enable applications to use them more intelligently.

At the moment HTML is limited to describing static content, documents and the links between them. However RDF, OWL, and XML can describe arbitrary things such as people, events or objects.  It is layered on top of HTML and consists of a subject, a predicate, and an object. For example: “Jeremy Paxman” <subject> belongs to <predicate> journalists <object>.

These descriptions allow increased meaning behind the static content, demonstrating the structure of the knowledge behind it.  In this way a machine can process knowledge itself instead of text, using a process similar to human reasoning.  This should result in more meaningful results being returned in searches and perhaps even allow for increased automation when it comes to research by computers.

The success (or failure) of these experimental technologies will motivate further research and development, not only from within the industry but also academia.  It is certain their efforts will influence the future development of information technology.  In a further post I will explore the services currently being forged and in a final post on the ‘semantic web’ I will tackle the revolutionary uses this new technology has for journalism.

However the last word here must go to Tim Berners-Lee, the internet pioneer who says:

“A ‘semantic web’ has yet to emerge, but when it does, the day-to-day mechanisms of trade, bureaucracy and our daily lives will be handled by machines talking to machines. The ‘intelligent agents’ people have touted for ages will finally materialise.”

Will 2009 be the year news organisations finally went open? Barely a month after the New York Times allowed users to build on 28 years of content with its articles API (with immediate results), The Guardian is opening up over a million articles to developers for free as part of its own ‘Open Platform‘.

TechCrunch reports:

“The Guardian is effectively letting control of its content go in order to maximise its reach – and therefore the number of eyeballs that see its brand/content – across the Web.

“the API does not prevent developers from running “commercial applications” using the API – but I’d read the fine detail first. They do say: “You can display your own ads and keep your own revenue. We will require that you join our ad network in the future.”

“… The APIs feature ‘full fat’ feeds and other content including video, audio and photo galleries. You can combine free text search and combine tags to create feeds based on XML, JSON and Atom. 

“… Some early examples include Zemanta’s Guardian topic research demo. It’s a simple app that searches the vast database of Guardian articles via its API and then uses Zemanta’s API to get links to related concepts.

“There is also Content Tagger, an application to provide user-generated tagging on guardian.co.uk content. ApiMaps.org, built by Stamen Design, is designed to crowdsource geodata about Guardian articles. Cass Sculpture Foundation is using the Open Platform to insert lists of articles from the Guardian about its sculptors into their biography and home pages.

Expect more news organisations to follow suit.

Reuters recently published a report entitled: ‘What’s Happening to Our News: An investigation into the likely impact of the digital revolution on the economics of news publishing in the UK‘. In it author Andrew Currah provides an overview of the situation facing UK publishers, and 3 broad suggestions as to ways forward – namely, kitemarks, public support, and digital literacy education.

The kitemark idea seems to have stirred up the most fuss. In the first of a series of email exchanges I asked Currah how he saw this making any difference to consumption of newspapers, and how it could work in practice. This is his response:

Yes, the kitemark idea has triggered quite a response… Unfortunately, as the discussion online suggests, the term has implied to many a top-down, centralised system of certification which would lead to some form of
‘apartheid’ between bloggers and journalists.

That was certainly not our intended message. The report simply wanted to foreground the idea of digital labelling as a means of improving transparency in online news coverage.

All we meant by a kitemark was a symbol (expressed visually, and electronically as metadata) to convey to audiences, bloggers, journalists and others that a piece of news content had been intelligently labelled with relevant information and that it is open to derivative checking/use… similar in a sense to the Creative Commons ‘mark’ that travels with media content across the web.

Our report only touched upon this project of labelling, which the Media Standards Trust are busy working on. For a more detailed discussion, see the post by Martin Moore or read about the related efforts of http://www.newscredit.org

So, in summary, we are in favour of an open source, voluntary, bottom-up system of tagging NOT an archaic, top-down system of certification dividing amateurs and professionals. We did not envision participation in such an initiative as a precursor to public funding – though intelligent labelling and linking to external sites could, for example, be far more developed at the BBC.

In terms of value, by intelligently labelling the news all sorts of valuable derivative uses might be enabled (e.g. helping users to filter content by criteria or triangulate stories). It might also help to avoid the failures of purely algorithmic search approaches to news (e.g. the fiasco surrounding the publication of an outdated United Airlines story on Google News in August last year – triggered, in part, due to the lack of any embedded metadata about the story’s publication date):

Is this similar to the ideas that Tim Berners- Lee is working on in his Knight-funded project?

Yes – absolutely. This is something we only briefly touch in the report. We’re hoping to spend more time looking at this approach in follow-on research. I think the initiative being developed by Tim Berners-Lee and the Media Standards Trust has a great chance of improving transparency, especially when tagging and labelling technologies are seamlessly integrated into the workflow of the newsroom.

I can see how something around metadata could help users find original journalism, but how do you see this kitemark keeping journalism alive in a business sense?

Whether this would realistically boost the economics of news is difficult to answer. But on the basis of our research, it seems that a more transparent, systematic way of tagging the news could help publishers in a variety of ways…

For example, by developing a more comprehensive network of tags connecting stories, themes and content that might, in theory, keep people on a site for longer – in turn, strengthening ad revenues. It might also perpetuate the value and profile of a story long after it was published.

Metadata is also the key to techniques such as search engine optimisation, social media marketing, and the like, all of which are about attracting more attention around the content for longer. It would also provide a system for displaying stories in new formats, such as digital maps.

When or whether all of this will translate into enough ad revenues to keep publishers afloat is an open question; investing in the systems and training to make this archival linking possible is another hurdle.

An alternative approach might be to buck the trend towards free by introducing new forms of online paid subscription, to provide access to a premium, searchable and fully digitized archive of all back content. Metadata would also be a key step in that direction.

The discussion continues in the comments

NB: The Freeman’s Journal has an excellent critical overview of the report, with responses from Currah in the comments.

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.

Recently my attention has been drawn to the Dutch news website www.en.nl. Wilbert Baan, interaction designer for the Dutch newspaper de Volkskrant, told me he wants to see “what we can do with news, social networks, wikis and more.

“I think you might like the experiment we are doing,” he wrote.

And bloody hell was he right.

The first thing that strikes you about the site is the bar chart across the top of the page, replacing the traditional masthead. This is a newsriver:

Down the outside column is a list of articles from the past hour:

That’s culture shift number 1.

At the bottom of the page you will find recent images, social bookmark sites, most commented articles from the past 24 hours, most important and most viewed.

Culture shift number 2 is the list of incoming links to this article – something built into the very fabric of blogs (pingback) but so far either anathema to mainstream publishers (“send our readers elsewhere?”), or difficult with current content management systems.

And with one simple move the site demonstrates it’s part of the conversation.

The ‘most important’ list is also worth looking at. How did they decide what was “most important?” I asked.

“We are using around ten variables to decide what’s important news. The variables we’re using right now are pageviews, visits from external websites, unique referrers to an article, comments, votes (4 options) and the press agency urgency variable (3 options; normal, high, very high).

“By showing it next to the most viewed we can easily see how it works and adjust the settings to make it better. It’s not perfect yet, but it already works remarkably well.

“We could extend this even further (tags, edits, tag removals) or skip some. All the variables are connected to points, we can set a default amount of points to a variable and define or redefine the value for the website.

“We also made a tag sniffer at http://www.skitch.com/wilbertbaan/8733/en-tag-sniffing – it scans the text on certain names and auto tags the article.”

Wilbert’s next step is building a community that can contribute to make this website better with ideas or criticism. The newspaper is already conducting a conversation with readers on a NING social network where users can contribute new ideas and discuss the website (in Dutch), but clearly this is just the start.

“For example we could connect a popular social network to the website and use what your network reads to alter the presentation of the news. Or make section pages, or a frontpage?

And all this is possible because of a Holovaty-esque focus on the power of databases.

“The most important object is the database,” he writes on his blog. “We designed the database from a view that almost everything is possible with the data. We store a lot of information that might be valuable in the future. This allows us to experiment freely with the design and think up new features. The database is the most valuable asset of a news organization.”
And this means they can do “Almost everything. We can make mash-ups, feeds, aggregated pages. Hook in to social networks, extend the wiki functionality, and more. Technically everything is possible.”

Keep an eye on this one.

UPDATE: Wilbert writes: “We have added feeds for every tag, latest news and breaking news. We have also added a personal feed that can be created by selecting the tags you like or don’t like. Very rudimentary, but it is a first experiment with personalization (My feed: http://en.nl/en/my_rss.php?editorId=3) and you can take it anywhere you want.

“With these feeds we are encouraging developers to experiment with news sorting and make their own interface or mash-up.”

Read more posts about future newspapers here

The Guardian has brought its typical idiosyncratic approach to social bookmarking with the launch of ‘Clippings’. But for once I think they’ve missed the mark.

By clicking on the scissors icon () next to a story users can now ‘clip’ an article to their own account. They could do this before anyway – but importantly, the revamped service means they can see others’ saved stories and subscribe to a feed, or publish their own feed elsewhere.

These are welcome additions to an older service, but there are some glaring oversights.

Firstly, although the phrase ‘social bookmarking’ is not used, this is clearly an attempt at that, and it isn’t social. There is no way to discover other bookmarkers apart from, as Inside Guardian suggests, ‘guessing’ their name.

Equally, new articles are not suggested as a result of what you bookmark – although you can click on Guardian-defined categories to see the latest stories about ‘ITV’, for instance.

To add insult to injury if you want to import your old ‘saved stories’… you can’t. You have to visit every one, and clip it all over again. Nice.

Here we have a centralised service which requires you to be logged in and is generally controlled and defined by the publisher.

Why would I use it when I can’t use my own categories? When it doesn’t help me discover new things, or organise old ones in new ways? When I can only bookmark Guardian stories?

Where is the benefit?

So here are my suggestions.

Firstly, allow tagging and user categorisation. Make them into links so you can see what else is being tagged with the same. Allow people to discover each other through shared interests.

Secondly, create a widget/bookmark so people can clip material from – shock, horror – other sites.

But most important – and easy – is this: The fact that I can see Guardian Unlimited Editor-in-chief Emily Bell’s clippings is a massive draw (sadly, no clippings yet for Jemima Kiss).

But do they make this visible on Emily Bell’s articles? No.

Not even her profile includes a link.

What a missed opportunity.

Every Emily Bell story should include a link to ‘Emily Bell’s clippings’, it’s as simple as that. If I respect her work as a journalist, there’s a chance I’ll want to be reading what she reads. And that’s where The Guardian – and news organisations generally – have an advantage: the editorial angle; the brand; the relationship.

And what a great way to keep readers on your site.

More broadly, I’ve posted previously about the concept of letting readers see ‘What the journalist read to write this’ as part of the model for a 21st century newsroom. And Radio 4′s iPM del.ico.us account is a great example of this in practice. So I won’t repeat myself on that.

Having said all that, I’m guessing this is actually a stepping stone to The Guardian’s planned social networking service, where user profiles will link to their clippings pages and, I hope, allow for more serendipity and linkage.

In the meantime, however, here’s an opportunity to iron out those glaring problems first.

As you have probably worked out, this year’s Online Journalism students have been building up towards launching an environmental news website. This week the site went public, and I thought I’d take the opportunity to reflect on the lessons learned so far…

The Background

The site is the final year project of two final year journalism degree students – Azeem Ahmad and Rachael Wilson. The decision was made to launch an environmental site because of the increase of investment in this area from a number of news organisations, and also because of a local connection – more of which later.

Azeem is responsible for the more technical side of the site, which he has built from scratch using the open source content management software Joomla.

Azeem has been blogging his progress with the software, including the frightening experience of having the site hacked into by the creator of a theme Azeem installed.

Rachael has the responsibility for editorial, which means writing for the site herself, but more importantly managing 14 second year students on the Online Journalism module as they try to build a news site on a subject most have never written about. She’s also been blogging her experiences.

Week One: Choosing a name, assigning beats, making connections

After some cheesy brainstorming, the very literal name ‘Environmental News Online‘ was chosen for the site for the simple reasons of search engine optimisation and domain name availability. The abbreviation ‘ENO’ lent it more character.

In week one I introduced the principles of the ’21st century newsroom’ students would be working within.

The team of reporters were introduced to their editors and asked to pick their roles from a list. That meant correspondents for each continent, for particular sectors (e.g. business), and correspondents specifically for grassroots stories.

They were asked to sign up to Twitter and begin twittering what they did as they got to grips with their new role (it didn’t work straight away – more on that here – and here).

And they were introduced to RSS readers and social bookmarking as they began gathering leads and stories.

Week Two: blogs and slackers

The second week began with the first news conference, with all reporters in attendance and hosted by the two editors 30 minutes before the lesson was due to begin.

In the lesson, once they’d started to explore their areas they were asked to set up individual reporters’ blogs – but not before they brainstormed blogging ideas.

In retrospect this brainstorming has proved particularly fruitful, as students have been more creative in their blogging than in previous years, and a number of blogs have attracted comparatively significant audiences.

Equally significantly, students were strongly encouraged to comment on other blogs and engage with the blogosphere generally.

In the same week a system was introduced to tackle the problem that every lecturer (and most editors) has: team members who don’t pull their weight.

The system was the same as is used in most professional environments: if a team member did not pull their weight, they would at first receive a verbal warning, then a written warning, and finally be ‘sacked’. Sacking meant they would not have publishing rights on the website.

Reasons for warnings would include persistent lateness; absence without leave; and failure to meet deadlines. Warnings would be decided upon and issued by the editors, Azeem and Rachael.

Week Three: The content management system

With students getting to grips with Twitter, and blogging well too, the CMS was introduced. As the team began to use the freshly-built system it quickly became clear that tweaks were needed: Azeem added new navigation links to different news sections (Joomla is clearly intended for sites where ‘news’ is just one section of content among others), and the option for reporters to submit different story types up front.

Over the following week Azeem added a number of features to the site: comments were top of the list, along with the facility to email to a friend, and for reporters to tag the article. Social bookmarking features were also added.

Testing was too often overlooked, though – it was only through a user email that we realised the comments feature was not working for users. It was fixed thanks to online dialogue between Azeem and OJB contributor Alex Gamela.

Week Four: UGC and images

By week four some problems emerged: too many students had still not posted an item to the news site, despite some of them having suitable material already on their blog. There seemed to be a fear of publishing on the site what they were happy to publish on the blog.

Conversely, those who had published to the site had too often written in a style that was appropriate for a blog, but not for a news website, particularly in terms of opinion and subjectivity.

Inflexibility of style is a common problem for journalism students – so this became a good way to drive the point home when looking at the same story on different platforms.

A further interesting issue was the reporters’ leaning towards a ‘local’ angle, or assuming that the reader knew, for instance, that they were talking about Birmingham, UK and not Birmingham, Alabama. After years of writing local news, getting into thinking of international audiences was not proving easy.

This week also saw the first verbal warnings for not posting to the website or to the blogs. Attendance and punctuality, however, was excellent.

Meanwhile, students were learning about user generated content with not one but two guests from the news industry – Tim Hood of Yoosk and Jo Geary, who is managing a bloggers project at the Birmingham Post.

The class workshop was to not only browse Flickr for images to go with a news story of theirs, but also to approach the photographer to clear copyright and find out the story behind it. Once again, this was about engaging with the community, not just taking from them.

The week we chose to go public turned out to be a great one for our field: the Greenpeace airport protest opened the week; then came the earthquake which one student stayed up all night to report on; and finally more airport protestors climbed onto the roof of the Houses of Parliament.

In under four weeks from a standing start and with no prior experience in the field or with the technology, 16 students have produced the beginnings of a sound news operation across three platforms (Twitter, blogs and website) and three stages of the 21st century newsroom (alert, draft and article). It will be interesting to see what they do in the next few months as we tackle podcasting, video, interactivity and other ideas.