Alessandra Bonomolo reports on an Italian experiment to involve readers in investigative journalism.

Whether investigative journalism should be considered “dead” or “alive”, it still proves to be a topical issue able to engage readers by only mentioning its name.

Italian Repubblica.it, the online edition of the daily la Repubblica, has launched an investigative reporting “on demand” initiative. After the first three releases, the idea seems to be succeeding, with thousands of readers responding.

Every month, the online community is asked to choose an issue for reporters to investigate, among an array of options – all related to the environment. “Environment is a strategic editorial issue for us”, says Giuseppe Smorto co-editor of Repubblica.it.

The shortlist of options is drawn up by Repubblica’s correspondents. Most of the issues strongly affect a specific geographical community. Others may include follow-ups on big events in the past, such as the Winter Olympics held in Turin in 2006.

Although they are not all “nationwide and very appealing topics”, Repubblica considers the initiative as part of “an investment in the relation with the readership”. As the investigations are expected to mostly interest local communities, the proximity factor appears to play its part in the initiative’s good response. But, according to Giuseppe Smorto, the editorial focus remains on the environmental aspects.

The readers’ investigations are published both as online articles and videos. Such coverage clearly increases the costs for the news organisation, but it is seen as “an effective way to diversify the product for its final use (computer, smartphone or tablet) in order to reach out to more people”.

Unlike other outlets, Repubblica.it is not engaging its readers in the investigation itself (for instance, by asking them for tips like the Washington Post). Rather, the “investigation on demand” project involves readers in the editorial process, by choosing the topic of the investigation.

This strategy echoes another initiative of the website. Every day, Repubblica Domani broadcasts the morning editorial meeting, opening to the public the doors of their newsroom.

“This is a most advanced form of interaction with the readership”, says the online co-editor. But having readers participating in the editorial process implies that journalists also make their own investigative process open to the public. Should the original hypothesis not be verified by the facts, the reader will see an unexpected conclusion. Potentially, they will even read an investigation with no case at all, which can lead to disappointment.

“This comes with the imperative of transparency and verification”, says environment correspondent Antonio Cianciullo. The newspaper’s investigation into a controversial pollution case concluded, for example, that measures have been eventually put in place and now the situation is under control.

Given the response with the environmental “on demand” investigations, Repubblica says the initiative may be replicated in other sectors.

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How good is this? While Murdoch and Sly complain about Google, The New York Times and Washington Post have been working with the search engine behemoth on a new form of online journalism. I’m still getting my head around the results, because the format is brimming with clever ideas. Here’s the obligatory cheesy video before I get my teeth into it:

So what’s so special about this? Firstly, it is built around the way people consume content online, as opposed to how they consumed it in print or broadcast. In other words, the unit of entry is the ‘topic’, not the ‘article’, ‘broadcast’ or ‘publication’. If you look at search behaviour, that’s often what people search for (and why Wikipedia is so popular).

But topic-based content is already creeping into news websites, largely for SEO reasons. This has a few more tricks up its sleeve.

One of my favourite features is the ‘conversations’ link in the top right corner. This takes you to a pop-up graphic/map of various comment threads from the website against particular themes. What’s particularly innovative is that this is embeddable – comments become distributable. This gives you more incentive to comment yourself (because you can embed the thread in your own online presence), and it also provides more opportunity for your content to be distributed and bring readers back to your site. And you can customise which elements of the conversation you embed. I’ve tested it at the end of this post. UPDATE: Neha Singh of Google tells me “The comments widget on the New York Times healthcare story was actually developed by the New York Times for their own site. You can see it here:
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2009/09/29/health/health-care-conversations.html”

Back on the main page the navigation on the left offers a useful breakdown of content: in addition to medium-based navigation such as images, video and graphics you can choose to look at the people involved; you can navigate by key quotes; and you can look at resources such as reports, blogs and interactives. My word, yes – it’s linking to the sources! (Although sadly not to any blogs outside the stable)

Again, hugely useful for that significant proportion of people who are searching for a particular piece of information on a topic (and therefore will stick around longer and return in future).

You can also choose to go to opinion or articles, or navigate by event.

You can reorder the content in reverse-chronological order, or choose to show ‘Most Important Only’.

There is an RSS feed and email updates on the topic.

And particularly clever is that it remembers what you’ve seen so that when you return new additions are highlighted and old content removed.

At this early stage the format is still rough around the edges: it’s not the most intuitive piece of interface design, bombarding you with information while some useful elements (such as conversation) are not particularly visible. It seems odd that there is only one RSS feed and email alert for the whole topic – it would be useful to have more specific feeds, for instance on new video only. And it’s actually less inviting in making you want to contribute comments or other material, partly because you’re too busy reeling from the sheer volume of information and possibilities.

Finally, the biggest – and killer – question for me is how much of the construction of the page is done automatically, and how much requires someone to input and connect data.

And of course, it doesn’t address the advertising problem (but there’s plenty of potential here for stickiness and engagement).

The New York Times reports that

“Josh Cohen, business product manager for Google News, said that if it worked well, Google would make the software available free to publishers to embed in their sites, much as those publishers can now use Google Maps and YouTube functions on their sites.”

Google’s blog, meanwhile, says the platform will be improved in the coming months:

“Over the coming months, we’ll refine Living Stories based on your feedback. We’re also looking to develop openly available tools that could aid news organizations in the creation of these pages or at least in some of the features. If you’re a news reader, we’d love to hear your thoughts. If you’re a news organization, we want to hear your comments on the Living Storyformat. If you decide to implement this on your site, we would love to hear about that too. At the very least, we hope this collaboration will kick off debate and encourage innovation in how people interact with news online.”

One to keep an eye on. Oh, and here’s that conversation embedded, just to see how it works:

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Much has been said about the Washington Post’s now-infamous incident with issuing restrictive social-media guidelines after Managing Editor Raju Narisetti expressed his not-so-subtle views on war spending and public-official term limits on his Twitter page. Narisetti’s own first reaction to the policy was another tweet: “For flagbearers of free speech, some newsroom execs have the weirdest double standards when it comes to censoring personal views.” He since retracted and shut down his Twitter page on account of “perception problems.”

The Post’s own media reporter Howard Kurtz poked fun at the incident with this tweet: “I will now hold forth only on the weather and dessert recipes.” He then gave a half-hearted, almost contrived endorsement to his organization’s policy, calling the furor surrounding the incident “much ado about nothing” while emphasizing that social media are important channels for communication with readers. The newspaper’s technology writer Rob Pegoraro was also quick to insist that journalistic interactions through social media are indispensable.

It is hard to deny the fact that opiners are neatly divided between journalists and news organizations–in other words—between those that use social media and those that want to regulate it.

The very essence of social media is that it offers readers a glimpse of the “person” behind the journalist. Citizen journalism pioneer Dan Gillmor looks at social networks as an opportunity for news organizations “to show readers that news is not a commodity produced by a faceless institution but a rich, collaborative process.”

For instance, Post political reporter Chris Cillizza, whose Twitter account, “The Fix” is named after his blog at the paper, entertains readers not only with snarky political comments but also by finding humor in life’s little trials, and his Twitter page has been surprisingly—and comfortingly—unhindered by all the drama. If his tweets were to trickle down to news article URLs in keeping with the Post’s new regulations, I wouldn’t follow him. It’s safe to say, neither would 14,540 others.

Despite these differences, even old-school news organizations agree that social media are important. But can managers, editors, reporters and readers agree on a social media policy? To that end, it would, perhaps, be helpful to analyze guidelines that have so far been proposed by different news organizations, and more importantly, how they have been received.

The policies

The Wall Street Journal laid down its own set of social-media regulations over the summer to much opposition.“Sharing your opinions,” the Journal said in an e-mail to staff members, “could open us to criticism that we have biases and could make a reporter ineligible to cover topics in the future for Dow Jones.” A tad more ridiculously, it continued, “Openly “friending” sources is akin to publicly publishing your Rolodex.”

Apart from confidential sources that any journalist would be expected to protect through sheer common sense, social media interactions with reporting contacts can only serve to enrich the exercise of newsgathering, and allow a more transparent process while at it.

Continuing in the same vein of going against the grain of journalistic transparency, the WSJ guidelines also insist that reporters not “detail how an article was reported, written or edited.” Social media guru Jeff Jarvis rightfully points out that these rules challenge the very idea of the collaborative nature of journalism that is promoted by online media.

The ability of a journalist to interact with his audience, be it by seeking story ideas, soliciting sources or sharing the newsgathering process is one of the main advantages of social media. Time’s James Poniewozik astutely calls blogs and social networks, the “DVD director’s cut with commentary.”

Perhaps, one of the most ridiculous of guidelines comes from the AP, which over the summer issued a set of rules, among them, asking employees to control not only what they said on social networks but also what their friends and acquaintances said: “It’s a good idea to monitor your profile page to make sure material posted by others doesn’t violate AP standards; any such material should be deleted.”

The AP’s rules came in the aftermath of one of its reporters posting a critical comment about the McClatchy newspaper chain on his Facebook profile. Mashable’s Ben Parr expressed rightful outrage at this, pointing to the ridiculousness of holding an employee accountable for another individual’s words.

Some guidelines, of course, are acceptable, though none seem to require much more than common sense and ethical awareness on the part of the reporter. For instance, the WSJ’s following rules:

• “Don’t recruit friends or family to promote or defend your work,” or
• “Don’t disparage the work of colleagues or competitors or aggressively promote your coverage.”

Also reasonable are rules curbing the sharing of confidential company information. “Posting material about the AP’s internal operations is prohibited on employees’ personal pages” is acceptable as a standard for all staff members at an organization, not exclusively for journalists.

This was one of the reasons why the NYT found itself in a tight corner earlier this summer, when its reporters tweeted about internal discussions at the paper. The Times’ social-media rules are actually more reasonable than most, merely asking reporters to avoid conflicts of interest, maintain political impartiality, and exercise good judgment.

But when a group of journalists decided to broadcast proceedings from an internal staff meeting, the Times decided to throw down the gauntlet. Craig Whitney, the standards editor, made a valid point: “When you’re in an internal meeting that is not public where you’re discussing policy, you would no more Twitter it than pick up the cell phone or call up one of your friends and say, ‘Hey you’ll never believe what (Executive Editor) Bill Keller just said!”

And while that is perfectly reasonable, Jennifer Lee, one of the tweeters from the meeting insisted that there is often something to be said for sharing internal information about your news organization with your audiences. For instance, her tweet about Times’ Pulitzer winners was not only acceptable, but also good for the paper, she said.

Are readers excited to learn these nuggets of information directly from journalists they follow? Sure, it’s certainly more personal than reading a press release. And when the news is about the organization itself, it is especially helpful to hear employees’ unfiltered opinions. If not for Twitter, I probably would have had no way of knowing what Howard Kurtz thought about the Post’s regulations.

Distinction between individual tweeters and institutional ones

Where the Times went a bit far in its regulation was Bill Keller’s insistence that tweeting policies should follow what was already being implemented with regard to what reporters say on television or speeches: anything said was representative of the entire institution. This seems reasonable till you consider that Twitter is a “personal-social” page. It is not like appearing on television to talk about your thoughts and viewpoints on an issue as a reporter from the NYT might be expected to on Meet the Press.

This sentence among the Post‘s guidelines, rings a similar tone: “Post journalists must recognize that any content associated with them in an online social network is, for practical purposes, the equivalent of what appears beneath their bylines in the newspaper or on our website.”

Along the same lines, Rob King, Editor in Chief of ESPN.com, called Twitter a “live microphone.” The site’s guidelines state that “editorial decision makers (such as reporters and writers) essentially represent ESPN in all social networks, and hence, should exercise appropriate judgment (this is as opposed to policies for the rest of ESPN’s staff who may extricate themselves from ESPN affiliation in personal blogs).

ESPN sparked its own controversy when it recently banned reporters from using Twitter for content not sanctioned by ESPN.com, and Mediaite actually questioned the use of the “live microphone” metaphor in an interview with ESPN spokesman Paul Melvin: “Does ESPN recognize the difference between a Twitter feed and a live microphone on television (which requires incredibly exclusive access as well as millions of dollars of broadcast infrastructure)?”

Melvin’s response: “The point here is that all of these media are public. Whether it is TV or radio or a blog, a column a tweet or any other publishing format, these are all public media. The words we use have impact, and we should be mindful of that.”

This is significant. What a journalist says in a tweet cannot be similar to what would appear under a byline or on live television or on radio. Social media don’t operate strictly within the sphere of the workplace. Social media are part of what journalists carry home with them; it is where they ought to be able to express views wholly unrestrained by the rigid rules of traditional journalism. It is also where they delight their readers with a goofy tale about their dog and the latest controversy unfolding on Capitol Hill with equal aplomb.

A distinction should be made (as is done in the business world) between “individual” tweeters, and tweeters who tweet “under the umbrella of an organization.” Corporate policies on social media separate the personal from the professional, and hence are less restrictive on an employee’s right to tweet or blog. By these standards, @washingtonpost would clearly cross the line by tweeting about enforcing a term limit on senators such as Mr. Byrd, but @rajunarisetti was entitled to his opinion. As individual tweeters, journalists should not “relinquish some of the personal privileges of private citizens,” as the Post guidelines require them to.

The BBC, perhaps comes closest to adopting this sort of hands-off approach to the use of “personal” social media by its reporters: “Many bloggers, particularly in technical areas, use their personal blogs to discuss their BBC work in ways that benefit the BBC, and add to the “industry conversation”.  This editorial guidance note is not intended to restrict this, as long as confidential information is not revealed.” In addition, it excludes “personal” blogs from the guidelines, as long as no affiliation to the BBC is mentioned, and even encourages employees to include a disclaimer.

Is unadulterated objectivity possible?

It does, however, specify that editorial staff “should not be seen to support any political party or cause.” It also warns employees to discuss “any potential conflicts of interest” with managers and editors. This is a common theme among regulations cited by all news organizations. Perhaps, if a reporter did not share on his social network opinions and viewpoints on subjects he was reporting on, that would be acceptable.

But then again, restricting specific types of content is a slippery slope. As Editor & Publisher editor Jennifer Saba questions,“Somebody could say, ‘Oh I really enjoy Mad Men,’ and if they cover TV, does that mean they are biased?”

Post ombudsman Andrew Alexander raises this very question in his piece: “Can a reporter who doesn’t cover sports tweet that a team’s owner is a tyrant? Should an editor in the Business section post a comment on her Facebook page that gun owners are paranoid?” I’m not sure if his question is rhetorical, but unfortunately for Saba, he fails to answer it. The New York Times, ever our reliable source for information, jumps in, however: “A City Hall reporter or a politics editor might be “friends” with several different City Council members as well as the Mayor, but not just with one of them. But a reporter or editor whose work has nothing to do with City Hall could be “friends” with people who work there with no conflict of interest.”

But then again, is unadulterated objectivity on a subject a journalist has studied closely, even possible? As James Poniewozik writes, “any person who immersed him or herself in a vital, contentious subject all day and formed no opinion about it whatsoever would be an idiot, and you do not want to get your news from idiots.” And if he does have an opinion, is it in keeping with journalism’s goals to shield it?

Not surprisingly, organizations that appear to be least restrictive of journalists’ use of social media are also the ones that have embraced social networks to effectively disseminate information, engage with the audience, and promote content, such as the BBC and the New York Times, and NPR, which is touted by many as the most effective user of social media, most notably, Mashable.

Alan Rusbridger, Editor-in-chief of the Guardian, another organization known for its utilization of social media tools for citizen journalism and crowdsourcing, has perhaps been most convincing in his ringing endorsement of journalists’ use of such networks to interact, engage and impart information. He has clearly stated on the site’s editorial pages that one of the advantages of Twitter is that it allows reporters to publish, unhindered by the confines of the newspaper and its Web site. This is also reinforced in the site’s social media statement, which promotes the idea of an open forum that promotes all forms of social networking interactions with readers.

Any set of reasonable rules for social media, then, are more common-sense parameters than anything else. And one would hope that journalists would be smart enough to not broadcast something on Twitter that would jeopardize their own credibility, alienate audiences, or embarrass their organizations.

As NYT’s David Carr writes “if you can’t trust the women and men who put out your newspaper to use their keyboards wisely regardless of platform, what are they doing working for you?”

[Part 2 will look at perspectives from history, such as the role of objectivity and the influence of technology on the changing rules of journalism]

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This week a new nail was driven into the coffin of the notion of journalistic objectivity. The culprit? The Washington Post’s leaked social media policy.

The policy is aimed at preserving the appearance of objectivity rather than its actual existence. It focuses on what journalists are perceived to be, rather than what they actually do.

And in doing so, it hits upon the very reason why their attempt is doomed from the start:

“Our online data trails reflect on our professional reputations and those of The Washington Post. Be sure that your pattern of use does not suggest, for example, that you are interested only in people with one particular view of a topic or issue.”

Our behaviour as journalists is now measurable. And measurability gives the lie to the pretence that journalists behave like scientists, impartially observing the petri dish of society.

That pretence has been crumbling for years. In 1976 the Glasgow Media Group‘s Bad News study demonstrated how TV news favoured powerful groups by measuring a number of factors in news coverage. Dozens of other studies have followed a similar vein, using the measurability of journalistic output as their barometer. Meanwhile, depending where you sit politically, you’ll find a right-wing or left-wing media conspiracy to believe in.

Objectivity was always a phantom conjured by publishers to appeal to maximum audiences and advertisers [see comments fleshing out objectivity as method vs style]. Regulators then helped by requiring objectivity to broadcast in a limited bandwidth spectrum. The first nail in its coffin came with the end of those limits. As Dan Gillmor explained in The End of Objectivity:

“Objectivity is a construct of recent times. One reason for its rise in the journalism sphere has been the consolidation of newspapers and television into monopolies and oligopolies in the past half-century. If one voice overwhelms all the others, there is a public interest in playing stories as straight as possible — not favoring one side over the other (or others, to be more precise, as there are rarely just two sides to any issue).

“There were good business reasons to be “objective,” too, not least that a newspaper didn’t want to make large parts of its community angry. And, no doubt, libel law has played a role, too. If a publication could say it “got both sides,” perhaps a libel plaintiff would have more trouble winning.”

It was also born from 19th century beliefs in the scientific method and the search for abstract ‘truth’. But society is not a petri dish; and journalists are no scientists: their methodologies are flawed by the need for narrative and the rhythm of the deadline. And most don’t understand scientific methods at all.

So when you can not only measure the lack of balance in journalistic output, but also the lack of balance in journalists’ behaviour and relationships online, the game is well and truly up.

Imagine you’re a trainee journalist who has grown up in a Web 2.0 world: a member of countless Facebook groups; signatory to a dozen online petitions; tagged in Flickr galleries of protests and rallies. Oh, and your profile tells us not only your gender, but your ethnicity, religion, relationship status and sexuality. Will an offer of a job on the Washington Post now come with the request that you cut all ties to your previous life and wipe all records of your former existence as you join the monastic seclusion of Journalistic Objectivity?

Yes, journalists have opinions. And friends. And they rely on easily accessible sources.

Well, hold the front page.

So there lies the problem - but also the solution. Transparency is hastening the demise of the already crumbling notion of journalistic objectivity; but it also represents the best hope for journalistic integrity – and ultimately, for many journalists that was what the pursuit of objectivity was about.

As David Weinberger argues:

“Transparency subsumes objectivity. Anyone who claims objectivity should be willing to back that assertion up by letting us look at sources, disagreements, and the personal assumptions and values supposedly bracketed out of the report.

“Objectivity without transparency increasingly will look like arrogance. And then foolishness. Why should we trust what one person — with the best of intentions — insists is true when we instead could have a web of evidence, ideas, and argument?”

So keep your social media profiles, and make yourself available to a thousand potential sources rather than relying on the dozen in your contacts book. Link to your raw material and let people comment on the holes in your narrative. Engage with online communities if you expect them to engage with you.And stop thinking about the PR of how you look and focus on the journalism of what you do.

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In another sign of their savvy web strategy, The Guardian have signed up YouTube makeup star Lauren Luke to write a column (with accompanying video) in the revamped Weekend section (they also just happened to run a full page story on Luke in Saturday’s paper.)

The importance of people like Lauren - a 27-year-old single mother who lives with her son, mum, sister and nieces - to online news distribution is made pretty clear by the following quote from the article:

“A brief BBC interview with Luke for a local Tyneside news programme has been seen by more than 2.2 million people, becoming one of the most viewed BBC clips on YouTube worldwide.”

And here it is:

I’ve written previously that if you want to get into journalism you should have a blog. I’d add to that: if you want your own column, you should build up a following on YouTube too. News organisations will increasingly not just be looking for people who know what they’re talking about, but how to distribute it effectively online.

Shame the video’s not embeddable though.

UPDATE (of sorts): As if to reinforce my point, the Washington Post “has appointed a new multimedia journalist as a result of his participation in a YouTube contest” – although this was a more traditional reporting job obtained through a YouTube journalism contest – Project:Report.

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Elections bring out the best in online journalism. News organisations have plenty of time to plan, there’s a global audience up for grabs, and the material lends itself to interactive treatment (voter opinions; candidates’ stances on various issues; statistics and databases; constant updates; personalisation).

Not only that, but the electorate is using the internet for election news more than any other medium apart from television (and here are some reasons why).

PaidContent has a good roundup of various UK editors’ views, and decides blogs, Twitter and data are the themes (more specifically, liveblogging and mapping).

Choice picks include the Telegraph teaming up with the New York Times and RealClearPolitics.com; the Independent teaming up with LiveJournal.; and MSN teaming up with Populus for a “wisdom-of-crowds” predictor. Sky’s interactive map is quite fun too.

Innovation in Newspapers has been running an ‘Election Journalism Caviar’ series, mainly focusing on the journalism itself, but interactive highlights include the New York Times’ Electopedia of candidates’ views and PolitiFact’s ‘Attack File’ scoring the attacks made on candidates.

Chrys Wu has an overview of where to follow the results live online:

“Editors at Yahoo News will be culling election-related photos from [Flickr] and posting them on yahoo.com and news.yahoo.com. Put the word “election” somewhere in the title, comment or tag to be part of the search.

“If you’re going to be out and about, bookmark the Online NewsHour’s mobile site. In addition to updates on the election, there’s a handy list of poll closing times and electoral votes.”

And Reuters has a piece on the use of user generated content:

“The New York Times is asking its Web site visitors to take pictures of their polling places and upload them … Nonprofit group Video the Vote plans to post up to 1,000 video reports, focusing on any problems at the polls … [and] Current TV … through a partnership with social networking sites Digg and Twitter will rely on Internet users to provide its news content. The channel’s TV screen will be a crowded and sometimes disconnected “dashboard” of text and video created or chosen by Internet users.”

Distributed journalism, personalisation, and maps

Current.tv, in fact, is “throwing a social media election party” across a number of platforms – the best example of distributed journalism I’ve so far seen – and also the most fun-sounding.

MSNBC’s results widget is another, more obvious, example.

Yahoo has its own flashy election page, with some interesting indicators, including ‘most blogged about’, and how many people are searching for each candidate. If you’ve read Click, you’ll know how important search patterns are. You can also ‘Create your own scenario’ – personalising the map which you can then email, compare or link to from your blog. (hat tip to Matthew Solle)

CNN also does personalisation with CNN YourRaces: a customisable tracking tool that allows you to follow selected races in real time. The service is also available via CNN’s mobile interface.

And I’ve already written about Google’s creep into content creation with its InQuotes project comparing candidates’ quotes on selected issues.

YouTube is doing Video Your Vote, with a map for navigation and colour coding including ‘Voter intimidation’ and ‘Registration problems’.

And two university students started Map the Candidates, which uses a Google Map to present information about candidates’ visits around the US, and is now hosted at Slate.

Map junkies can get more at 270towin.com (h/t Matthew Solle again) and data junkies can get a stronger fix at Perspctv (thanks EricScherer and Joeri Rodenburg).

Text junkies can get SMS updates from the BBC and the New York Times.

Twitter followers Matthew Bennett, John383 and 10000words also mentioned the Huffington Post, FiveThirtyEight.com, and The New York Times’ ‘Choosing a President’ video.

I’ve said elsewhere that 2004 was the blogged election, 2006 the YouTube election, and this year’s Super Tuesday was the mashup election, so what does that make the 2008 election?

The Twitter Election, if replies on Twitter are anything to go by. Building on its success during Super Tuesday, it has a dedicated Election 2008 site (if only it did the same for similar events outside the US), and has partnered with the likes of Current.tv and techPresident for their coverage, while dozens of organisations are using Twitter for their updates, including the Washington Post and TwitterVoteReport. Also watch out for lost of organisations using liveblogging tool CoverItLive, and a few, including St. Louis Post-Dispatch, using live mobile video streaming tools Qik and Bambuser.

Those are just some of the highlights I can find – I’m sure you have more (particularly from non-English language sources). What’s impressed you in the online coverage? What’s disappointed? 

UPDATE: Gabriela Zago adds: g1 (news portal from Globo) has several interesting infographs explaining the US elections, but they don’t seem to have done one especially for today. O Globo (from the same news organization) has 3 maps (they’re in the bottom of the screen). One of them has quotes from Brazilian people living in the US on what they think about the elections.

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

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

From a lecture to a conversation

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

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

The rise of the amateur

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

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

Everyone’s a paperboy/girl now

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

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

Just a click away

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

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

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

Really Simple Syndication

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

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

Mapping

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

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

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

Hyperlocal, international

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

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

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

Databases

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

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

Measurability

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

Multimedia

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

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The Washington Post have followed up their playful Facebook app Compass with the more functional newsTracker – and it’s very good indeed.

Not only can you specify which topics you want ‘fed’ to your page – but you can also include custom searches (which is why mine has no current matches – they’re very specific).

The ‘Hot News’ tag cloud is nice – but the ‘Friends’ Search Terms’ really takes advantage of the social element of Facebook technology – although it does raise possible privacy issues (Blog Friends does a similar thing very well).

Add the application here.

Read Rob Curley’s blog entry on the tool here.

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