For the past 2 weeks BBC Have Your Say have been using Seesmic, Qik, Phreadz and 12seconds to invite viewer opinions. It’s clearly a slow learning process, as they try to crowbar broadcast styles into a more conversational medium. Here’s a recent post on Seesmic:

BBC Have Your Say – President Obama

Here they are on Phreadz:

On Qik:

And here’s their somewhat rushed post to 12seconds.tv (video is limited to 12 seconds):

BBC Have Your Say: A big thank you to everyone! on 12seconds.tv

The Qik channel seems to be the most effective, with some refreshingly rough material and a reasonable feeling of community. The Seesmic clip seems so staid, staged and scripted when placed in the informal and intimate context of that community, that it makes me think of 1950s news clips when seen from a modern perspective.

The main thing that occurred to me was: who were these people? (The correspondents never give their name, they are simply ‘BBC Have You Say’); why do they not respond to the conversation to help it go somewhere (because it’s not a conversation, it’s a vox pops).

I posted a response asking ‘BBC Have Your Say’ some questions of my own. I’ve yet to have a response.

Meanwhile, I posted a question to Seesmic on how people felt about organisations using Seesmic in this way. The conversation that resulted (below) threw up some interesting points – Miranda McCurlie’s view (reply #13) is particularly interesting:

Re: What do you think of broadcast orgs using Seesmic for vox pops?A few rambly scraps here … intimate, close-up presentation vs ‘objective’ perspective of current broadcast style. Individual vs corporate style?

What do you think of how news organisations use social video?

So I was speaking at Blog08 last Friday – here are my vlogged impressions upon my return…

…and here is a snippet of video to give you a taste of that A List Bloggers panel tackling, of all things, ‘Is blogging journalism?’ The American speaker is Loren Feldman – a reactionary trapped in a revolutionary’s body – the Brit is Pete Cashmore of Mashable.

Blog08 A List Bloggers panel from Paul Bradshaw on Vimeo.

Earlier Loren had delivered the second funniest speech of the day (the funniest being Hugh MacLeod of Gaping Void) – you can see Loren in full below. For all his contrariness, he has a valid point that “Facebook, Twitter and FriendFeed … are all services based on your fear”

…and finally, the day ended with vlogger Gabe Mac talking about, well, mostly himself. (The clip below gives you 5 seconds of it. For more see Marlooz’s video and pictures)

Overall, one of the best events of its type I’ve been to. Yes, the panel I was on was ridiculously rushed, and I was given an enormous picture of myself (presumably because that’s what every blogger wants?)…

…but it was a place for great conversations. And what more can you ask for than that?

Images by Dekker Floris and Anne Helmond. Click on images to see original.

I’ve been increasingly using Seesmic as a ‘pre-blogging’ tool. What does that mean? It means that I invite comments on a question before the blog post is even written. It means I do some of my research in public. It means that, in talking through an issue with my peers, I clarify what it is we’re really talking about in the first place.

Just as Twitter allows you to throw out a thought and get some quick responses, Seesmic does the same – but with the space and time for more depth and interaction. It is video microblogging – more instant, often, than blogging, and certainly (I would argue) more open: I find I get a richer response from a callout on Seesmic than the same on a blog post. If you want to place it within the 21st Century Newsroom’s ‘News Diamond’, Seesmic is the draft stage, with blogging moving into the package stage – or perhaps a ‘second draft’.

One of the reasons it works so well for this is that the hierarchy of post/comment is largely discarded. A user can feel relatively confident that their contribution will be noticed, and you feel a stronger relationship with the person videoblogging. Like Twitter, this is more conversation than publishing.

The results, then, can form the basis for a richer, more reflective piece of work that better reflects a range of opinion, or even consensus, than one person’s view.

In fact, one potentially useful way to use the service is as a form of ‘panel discussion’. This is what I’ve done with my current Seesmic discussion, where I’ve invited a number of virtual ‘panellists’ to contribute, but where anyone else can as well.

That in turn, you would hope, will attract further comments because of its quality – oh, and nothing attracts a crowd like a crowd.

And of course the video thread doesn’t close either. (I particularly like the way that, when embedded, the ‘conversation’ is listed underneath the main video).

What’s more, anyone can embed the video conversation, with any video contribution as the starting point, and invite comments and contributions – as David Cushman has with my latest discussion, which I invite you to take part in. Distributed journalism indeed.

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

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

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

Spot the difference?

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

Oliver Luft at Journalism.co.uk went further:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The adaptable journalist

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The adaptable content

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In the first part of a five-part series, I explore how and why a talent for brevity is one of the basic skills an online journalist needs – whether writing an article or employing multimedia. This will form part of a forthcoming book on online journalism – comments very much invited.

It shouldn’t have to be said that the web is different, but I’ll say it anyway: the web is different. It is not print, it is not television, it is not radio.

So why write content for the web in the same way that you might write for a newspaper or a news broadcast?

Organisations used to do this, and some still do. It was called ‘shovelware’, a process by which content created for another medium (generally print) was ‘shovelled’ onto the web with nary a care for whether that was appropriate or not.

It was not.

People read websites very differently to how they read newspapers, watch television or listen to radio. For a start, they read 25% slower than they do with print – this is because computer screens have a much lower resolution than print: 72 dots in every square inch compared to around 150-300 in newspapers and magazines (this may change, but usage patterns are likely to stay the same for some time yet).

As a result, you need to communicate your story in less time than you would in print. You need to develop brevity.

Forms of brevity

Brevity comes on a number of different levels. At the most obvious level, shorter articles tend to work better online because most people struggle to read long documents on screen, or find scrolling too much hassle if they’re looking for something specific or succinct.

This doesn’t mean you should write a 500-word snippet rather than the grand 3,000 word opus you were planning – but it does mean you should consider splitting that opus into smaller chunks (chunking): six 500 word sections, for example, each with a particular focus. You can always provide a link to a printable version of all the parts together.

That said, don’t split arbitrarily, or for the sake of it: every webpage is a potential entry point, and users need to be able to instantly orientate themselves.

More important than the length of the article overall, within the article itself, paragraphs should be succinct. Stick to one concept per paragraph. Once you’ve made your point, move on to the next par.

This may seem simplistic writing at first, but you soon become used to it. It’s how BBC reports are written online – see how effective it is.

Brevity in video and audio

Brevity is equally important when producing multimedia material. For the medium that brought us YouTube, anything over three minutes is too long.

One simple technical reason is bandwidth – even now that the majority of users are on broadband, a significant proportion remain on dial-up, including overseas users.

Even those on broadband will not want to wait for video or audio to download, or their connection to slow down while they do.

Once again, this does not necessarily mean editing your whole story down to three minutes; it means a chunking approach to multimedia: breaking it down into its constituent parts.

As Andy Dickinson explains it, this is a non-linear approach. Because unlike with TV or radio your user can enter the story at any point they choose: this might be the interview with the witness – or it might be, more specifically, the chunk where they describe what they saw. It might be raw footage of the aftermath. It might be the contextual information.

In short, you are released from the pressure of condensing everything to a three minute package (although you can do that as well), and instead provide readers with a range of paths to pursue.

Brevity works particularly well online because it allows for more effective distribution: others can link to the specific element they are commenting on, or even embed it on their site.

What’s more, it provides the raw material for further journalism: a user might decide to re-edit the material to provide a different narrative; or mash it up with maps or databases; or they might incorporate it into further investigation into a particular issue – all of which further distributes your good name, and provides further material for you to build on.

Part two: A is for Adaptability, can be found here.

I was asked by The Telegraph’s Shane Richmond to write a blog post ‘from the year 2020′. “OK,” I thought, “so what would a blog post look like in 13 years’ time?” Well, it would almost certainly be mobile, so I filmed it on my phone. Apple will probably be scraping the barrel of products they can ‘re-engineer’ by then, and… well, it’s all in the video. I was hoping to get some video comments too, so if you’re feeling creative, upload a response to YouTube and I’ll add it in…

TMZ and the New York Times are the latest news organisations to dip a toe in the world of multimedia commenting.

The NYT recently posted a video ‘letter to the editor’, while the TMZ.com blog is letting readers post audio comments, with video comments in the pipeline. They join the San Francisco Chronicle, who earlier in the year started podcasting voice messages from readers.

Meanwhile, This Is Me Reporting.com, launched this month, takes it a stage further – a whole site dedicated to reader comment and communication.

Examples include a man suggesting someone investigate the legal implications of eBay having access to PayPal’s customer data; a reader on the Madeleine McCann story; amateur footage of the aftermath of a plane crash; and Tim Berners-Lee explaining the importance of net neutrality.

Leanne McMahon from the site told me the people involved so far have either jumped ship from YouTube or are running videos on both: “We have a wide range of members at the moment from ‘Tom’ who is a psychologist to ‘TomLarkin’ who is a US marine.”

The site was set up to try to combat a perceived one-sidedness in professional journalism.

“We only get to see what the people who run these stations want us to see. You never hear the real story from real people, you never hear about anything good, you never see reports about ordinary people and their day to day lives. I hope this site will make this kind of news accessible.”

Key to the site is a personal relationship with site members: “We communicate frequently,” says Leanne, “and this brings a personal touch to the site.”

At the moment most content is in the channels for local, national and international news and opinion, while those for film, book and theatre reviews have no videos. There are also plans for a documentary photograph section.

UPDATE (Oct 18 2007): Take a look at Whistlebox for a tool for multimedia feedback (thanks to Bas Timmers)

The New York Post reports on a clever (and relatively inexpensive) device which allows videographers to film, edit and upload material without spending large amounts of time on a computer:

“The little spy-corder device, named Flip Video, is being billed as the first camcorder to upload directly to sites such as YouTube and Grouper – eliminating the step of putting video on a computer to edit before uploading.”

At $119 and $149 it’s clearly aimed at the consumer market, but the instant publishing element makes it an appealing buy for journalists, although it seems you still need to go onto a computer to ‘instantly’ upload to the web.

Here’s the press release.

The joys of pingback have led me to the News Videographer blog – and just in time for my lesson this afternoon in Flash video galleries: Video tips from award-winning videographers, summarised from NewsLab. My favourite tip:

“Don’t stop the action for the interview. “Go with the flow,” Tim says. “Try to ‘interview’ your subject while they’re doing what makes them comfortable, or doing what your story is really about.””