Here’s the 7th lesson from my year 2 undergraduate module in Online Journalism, where I look at a range of examples of mapping in journalism, as well as the broader idea of image maps (the rest of the series can be found here):
Local Bloggers are beginning to produce a few good examples of effective scrutiny of Local Councils. In this piece David Keen, who is a Vicar in Yeovil and writes regularly for my Wardman Wire political site, gives an account of a local controversy in the Somerset town of Somerton, which has lead to a number of resignations from the Town Council.
Further, some national commentators are beginning to notice that local blogs have a place in building a better political culture in the UK.
Over to David …
Somerton is about 12 miles north of Yeovil, nice little place, with plenty of character, and some good local churches. Last week most of the town council walked out. Why? Initial reports suggested that it was all the work of one lone local blog (Muck & Brass), and that they’d got fed up with his criticism of the council.
Some of the reportage:
I recently heard a newspaper chief editor say something quite shocking. I attended a meeting arranged by the Norwegian consortium New Media Network where the chief editor of the second biggest national tabloid in Norway, Dagbladet, was to give a speech. And believe it or not, chief editor of Dagbladet, Anne Aasheim, said: “I have been a media executive for 20 years now and I must say; it’s more fun today than ever before!”
More fun today than ever before? Everybody at the meeting knew that Dagbladet has suffered massive losses in recent years – much more than their competitor VG, which is the flagship of Schibsted, one of Europe’s most successful and innovative newspaper publishers, according to The New York Times. Dagbladet is probably the newspaper that has suffered the most in the Norwegian newspaper market in recent years. What could possibly be fun about that? Was Anne Aasheim joking?
Anne Aasheim wasn’t joking. She soon explained what she meant: “When the crisis becomes big enough you no longer just mend things. Your tear everything apart and then you re-construct it. We are now searching for the power to do disruptive innovation. It’s going to be a cut-throat competition to have the greatest power of innovation.”
Then she smiled before exclaiming: “And we are gonna win that competition!”
I thought this was an interesting argument – especially since I have conducted much research in the Dagbladet newsroom during the last four years. Dagbladet is one of those newspapers that always wants to be the first mover. When new technology comes around Dagbladet jumps on it. Dagbladet was the first Norwegian newspaper to launch an online edition, it implemented bloging as the first online newspaper in Scandinavia, etc, etc. Dagbladet’s position in the shadow of the bigger and more successful newspaper VG has forced it to push for innovative initiatives.
The key question for Dagbladet and any other firm that push for successful innovations, is of course: How do you know if a innovative initiative will be a success? I shall not claim that I have the answer to that question (if I did, I would probably be very rich man). However, I have done some research in order to pinpoint the factors that influence processes of innovation in newsrooms. In an article in the current issue of the journal Journalism Studies I argue that there are five factors that affect whether an innovation is diffused successfully or not in an online newsroom:
These factors derive from an ethnographic case study of a process of innovation in dagbladet.no – the online edition of Dagbladet. The findings of this case study are compared to all other research on innovations (or lack of innovations) in online newspapers. This body of research consist of – among many other studies – the research done by Pablo Boczkowsi in his book Digitizing the News: Innovation in Online Newspapers; David Domingo’ Ph.D-thesis Inventing online journalism: Development of the Internet as a news medium in four Catalan newsrooms (which can be downloaded here); Lucy Küng’s When Innovation Fails to Disrupt. A Multi-lens Investigation of Succesfull Incumbment Respons to Technological Disconuity: The Launch of BBC News Online; and Jody Brannon’s quite old, but still very interesting Ph.D.-thesis Maximizing the medium: assessing impediments to performing multimedia journalism at three news web sites (parts of it available on here website).
One last point: Innovation and crisis tend to go hand in hand. Businesses, organisations and nation states alike have always pushed for innovations in times of crisis. There are two reasons for this assumed causal link between recession and innovation, according to an article by Geroski and Walters published in The Economic Journal. First, in times of recession the value of existing rents usually falls, thus making it more attractive for firms to implement new products and processes that hopefully will yield higher returns. Second, to invest in innovations requires a firm to divert resources from activity/production to product development. Such a diversion of resources is more likely to be feasible when the current production is less profitable, e.g. in times of recession.
No wonder why the chief editor of Dagbladet, Anne Aasheim, was so enthusiastic about the opportunities for disruptive innovation…
The Guardian has changed its user-generated comment system – moving from a client-side system to a server-side one. (This story was first published here, where you can read a bit more of the background.)
With the old system, once you loaded a story, some javascript would go off and look up readers’ comments and display them. This wasn’t terribly accessible – if you couldn’t or didn’t run javascript, you couldn’t see the comments.
It was also bad for SEO, as search engines couldn’t run the javascript (so couldn’t see the comments). And if your mobile didn’t run javascript (like mine), you couldn’t read the comments either.
With the new system, the comments are just part of the web page, like all the rest of the text.
This is a great change by the Guardian, and not before time. Google has already started to index the text of comments, as this search for some text I left as a comment once shows.
If you notice any problems, they’ve asked you to point them out.
If you want to ascribe something importance you traditionally don’t put the word ‘sub’ before it. The immediate message sent by the Broadcasting Sub-Committee’s report on Welsh newspapers is that the subject is not very important. Furthermore, asking the Broadcasting Sub-Committee to report on Welsh newspapers is the political equivalent of asking a veterinary surgeon to replace an elderly relative’s hip.
Today, Assembly members will discuss the report, and Assembly time will be largely wasted in the process. It is a document that contributes very little to the overall debate about the future of Welsh newspapers. This is primarily because any report that attempts to deal with the decline of newspapers but discounts the opportunities of new media so casually is largely useless. It’s like trying to explain to someone how to grow an apple tree, without ever mentioning seeds. You can do it, but chances are it won’t make an ounce of sense.
The headline recommendation of this report would be nothing short of catastrophic for the future of the Welsh media if the UK government were to implement it:
Recommendation 1: The Welsh Assembly Government should make representations to the UK Government seeking assurances that cross-media rules are relaxed to allow the exploration of new partnerships.
The Welsh media is, and has always been, structurally weak. This weakness has been significantly increased by the dominance of media monopolies in Wales. This, in turn, has had a detrimental effect on plurality in the Welsh media and has been a plague on diversity of press opinion. It also means that when one organisation is failing, lots of newspaper outlets suffer.
The Broadcasting Sub-Committee’s recommendation is that rules that restrict media organisations from venturing into other marketplaces, like TV and radio, should be relaxed. This is a truly astonishing recommendation. The desperate problems the newspaper industry in Wales faces have come about, in part, because of monopolies. This report is seeking to extend the power of these monopolies. This is presumably so that they can then ruin broadcast news in Wales as well.
This recommendation is in many ways what we should expect from a report that consulted so widely with local newspaper owners, but never sought to ask them how they thought they might be culpable in the demise of their own titles. It is to be expected that they would ask for more power to branch out into other media and then set about squeezing every last penny from it, with little or no regard for the public service they should provide. What is also striking about this report is that Bob Franklin, an informed commentator and media expert, appears to have been largely ignored.
Franklin, quite rightly points out in the report that cross-media ownership rules are already dangerously close to collapsing in on themselves because media organisations so readily ignore them. He states:
‘…banks are suggesting to media companies that they ignore existing competition regulations which they see as primitive and as not suitable for the digital age because monopolies are understood within geographical boundaries…I think that big financial institutions are recommending a sort of ‘gung-ho’ challenge to existing regulation along the lines of ‘see what they do, call their bluff.’
The report cites the IWA in response: ‘There is something to be said for enabling some of the strengths of newspapers such as the Western Mail and Daily Post to be used to strengthen news coverage on commercial radio.’
Well, there you go then. The problems that the Welsh newspaper industry is facing could be solved by putting Western Mail content and/or journalists on commercial radio stations. Despite using this strange defence against Franklin’s concerns the report then does something very odd. It makes a recommendation that seems directly opposed to the previous one. Recommendation two states that:
The Welsh Assembly Government should make representations to the UK Government seeking assurances that any move to relax regulations relating to cross-media ownership should be accompanied by measures to protect plurality of local media.
This is directly contradictory. It is not possible to maintain plurality in local or regional media when you are reducing the strength of cross-media ownership rules. You either do one or the other, you can’t do both. You either defend the plurality of media or you allow large media groups to own more than one type of outlet.
When AM Huw Lewis made his announcement about the possibility of local newspapers having a stake in digital news channels, it was welcomed as an interesting idea by many. Commentators, on the whole, failed to understand that having more media outlets doesn’t necessarily increase the plurality of perspectives. The Broadcasting Sub-Committee has made the same mistake. Plurality in the media needs to be plurality of opinion, and the recommendation of this report would put that at risk by creating more media outlets that are saying the same thing.
Another of the recommendations in this report is about improving government support for newspaper groups. This, as a suggestion, has two fundamental faults. Firstly, the independence of media from government is vital in any democracy, and cannot be guaranteed if media producers have to apply for government grants. Secondly, and perhaps most importantly, large media corporations in Wales bear a heavy responsibility for the problems the Welsh media is now facing. Giving them a bail out is no better than bailing out bankers. And, of course, as with the bankers there is no guarantee they won’t just screw it all up again.
Despite all of this, there are some good points made in the report. The recommendation that there should be a review of the provision of publicly funded training courses for journalists is an excellent idea. The report also supports the idea of a Welsh Media Commission and/or a forum for discussing the newspaper and broadcasting industry in Wales. This is an important idea which, should it come to fruition, would at least ensure major media issues don’t get swept under the carpet.
However, overall, it says little that is useful. This report ultimately fails because it talks about rescuing organisations that are dangerously out of step and out of touch with developments in their own industry. From Murdoch down, the media world is attempting to come to terms with an enormous shift in an industry that has been largely unthreatened for the best part of 300 years. New media is growing in strength, and the Assembly needs to spend some serious time looking forward towards it, and not just backwards to print.
It would, of course, be remiss to ignore the problems with new media. There are certainly plenty of them. Many popular news websites, for instance, still rely on the prestige and content of the print publications that they are associated with. Online news still only reaches certain social strata, with a large number of those on the breadline not bothering with internet access. Standards in online journalism, with a few exceptions, are often no better than those on local newspapers, with reporters relying on material that is secondary sourced, and rarely bothering to pick up the phone. As much as web 2.0 has contributed in terms of interactivity, an awful lot of user generated content is just rubbish, produced by hobbyists both unpaid and untrained.
These are big problems, but they are not insurmountable, and they are also not the reason this particular report dismisses new media so easily. The report brushes aside any future model of new/old media interaction because it is unable to envisage how this would be cost effective. This is in the main because the majority of newspapers still derive all their profits from the print side. The low value that advertisers ascribe to online placements means that news websites cannot survive by them alone. In short, because it might eat into the enormous profits these corporations, it’s not worth investigating.
There are a number of potential business models for online newspapers. There is the one that argues for subscription-based access to websites. This is, despite what Rupert Murdoch might think, an absolute non-starter. Recent analysis by Media Week showed that in a survey of 2,000 customers, nine out of 10 of them wouldn’t pay for web news.
Another popular model is one based upon using the brand of the newspaper to sell advertising space, cars, houses, upmarket holidays and lonely hearts services. The problem with this last suggestion is that it ignores the fact that the public reputation of many local or regional newspapers is extremely poor these days. Would you use a dating service advertised in your local rag? This approach may work with large national newspaper websites but it isn’t going to work in a local setting.
These difficulties combined allow this report to discount new media solutions with a frightening degree of casualness. They state:
‘The internet seems to be a difficult issue to address for newspaper groups and we did not receive any conclusive evidence from witnesses that it would be able to provide a financially sustainable and complementary medium to newspapers.’
This is difficult to swallow.
The truth about online business models for news websites is that a combination of subscription, newspaper brand endorsement and a savvy approach to advertising will be the model of the future. Large newspaper groups will inevitably adopt these strategies for local news websites and they will, eventually, make money. The trouble is that it will never make them enough money. The reason it will never make them enough money is that they can never make enough money. They are driven entirely and remorselessly towards ever greater profit. This is the difference between putting your readers first, and putting profit first.
Maybe we should be asking ourselves if we want these monoliths to continue running the local media for profit. Perhaps it would be better to have organisations whose bottom line is not the bottom line; who are doing it because they believe in the importance and values of local news, and not in how much revenue they can squeeze out of the punters.
This is why this report is such a massive failure. Of course, WAG needs to show willing in terms of the newspaper industry, and job losses are a real concern, but it also needs to start looking forward. And, most importantly, it shouldn’t be stepping in with recommendations to save organisations that have already failed by relaxing rules that are there to protect our media from being destroyed wholesale. Local newspaper owners have a public duty and they should not neglect that. If they do, they should not be surprised if they become obsolete.
On the whole people do not become journalists for the money. In fact, you would be mad to. Most do it because of – dare I say it? – higher values. The abandonment of those higher values in favour of profit chasing has done irreversible harm to our old media, and it should not be allowed to happen again in this new era.
The question of whether these bloated, faceless, mass-media corporations, are the ones who should be spearheading the future of local news is, to put it politely, a no-brainer. They shouldn’t be allowed anywhere near it. Key in the online news-environment, as anyone who has ever spent a day knocking about it will tell you, is quality. The degradation of local news, by owners who have neglected and battered their own titles year in and year out with cutbacks and a desperate drive for ever greater profits, demonstrates just how unfit these companies are to take new local journalism forward.
Hopefully in today’s debate someone will talk about the importance of new media and Assembly investment in the future of new media in Wales. Though it is doubtful they will.
It is time, therefore, that a grass-roots movement of journalists with a hyper-local approach had a go at cracking this. It’s also time the Assembly recognised the opportunity and thought about ways of encouraging it.
We should stop looking to those who ruined our local media last time to fix it temporarily, only to go and ruin it again. They have had their chance and they’ve made their money. It’s now somebody else’s turn.
****
Rob Williams is a digital sub-editor at The Independent Online.
He is the author of The Mabiblogion a blog about Welsh Media and Politics
Article first published at waleshome.org
English national newspaper Twitter accounts continue to grow – but at an ever slower rate, according to the latest figures for the 130 accounts I’m tracking:
These 130 accounts had 1,801,811 followers on November 2nd, up by 137,568 from 1,664,243 on October 1. Of that increase, 95,007 (or 69%) was for the @guardiantech account (which benefits from being on Twitter’s suggested user list).
(NB the Telegraph has renamed its @TelegraphScienc account, so this month I’ve restated October’s figures to be for 130 accounts – I thought it had deleted it when I downloaded the latest figures.).
The biggest mover was @MirrorFootball, up 11 places to 81st (from 455 to 809 followers), suggesting the Mirror is finally making some use of Twitter (most of its other accounts are near the bottom – and only appear to have moved up a place due to the demise of the Telegraph’s Science account).
The full spreadsheet is here or you can see the iframe below.
On Monday I attended The Big Debate, an event organised by Birmingham City University with The NEC Group and the Birmingham Post that tasked itself with the question “Can the Midlands’ creative industries revolutionise the UK economy?”
The question itself became less interesting to me than the reaction to the debate from the social media scene in Birmingham. That Twitter stream of reaction is stored for posterity here, and to me the themes running through it appeared to run along the lines of ‘Same old stuff’; ‘Stop talking about it and just do it already’; and ‘You don’t get it’.
I’ve experienced the same frustration myself at many media conferences. As Pete Ashton put it so well: JFDI.
But this was not a media conference: it was a conference for the people in industry who don’t get it, who can’t do it already, and to whom this is still very new stuff indeed.
Listen, for example, to Thomas Dillon the “Chairman of Creative Advantage Fund, Europe’s first public venture capital fund for the creative industries,” as he says that “one of my proudest achievements was when The Pirate Bay defendents were convicted in April this year”.
As we say on the Internet: WTF?
Then look, for example, at one of the list of actions that came out of the conference itself: ‘more networking events please’.
“More?” We can’t move for meetups and unconferences in this city. Or is that just us?
The Big Debate was about moving people out of their comfort zones and mixing them up with people from other fields – and maybe exposing parts of the region’s creative industry that we aren’t used to seeing, like the Jewellery Quarter, like the industries where Facebook is banned at work.
So yes, there are people in this region who do think that the 3 Strikes concept is a good one; and clearly there are people who are not so plugged in as to be spoilt for choice when it comes to choosing which social media networking event to attend that week.
There are also, I discovered, people who feel excluded from the ‘Birmingham clique’.
And there are people in the room who have not read We Think. And there are people who think social media is a “channel” to sell things. (And if the history of Web 1.0 is any guide, it may well become that).
So getting them to listen to Charles Leadbeater (who, by the way, was a great speaker and a credit to the ambition of the organisers) say that they should make Birmingham “a home for pirates” is important.
Likewise, understanding why they might disagree with Leadbeater is important too, because if you want to persuade these people to do the right things to support creative media, then you have to make the most effective argument, which means listening.
Ultimately the whole event is an exercise of power. Use your vote – have a voice – because if you don’t, and let ignorance exercise power unchallenged, then you can’t complain when the other side does something you don’t like.
Because ultimately action will come out of The Big Debate – glacier-like, not at the pace we would like, but hopefully in the right direction. The results of the conversations, I’m told, will be used with external funding agencies to review priorities moving forward; within Birmingham City University to inform what it does; it will be used with research centres; and with meetings with Birmingham City Council.
The organisers could have been better at communicating all of this – it wasn’t clear during the event – but there it is.
Likewise, the event could have been more porous: have a Twitterfall on the big screen so those participating from afar could do so genuinely. Use facilitators to show the people on the tables who don’t use Twitter how it can be genuinely conversational and productive rather than just another channel or waste of time. Have a genuinely conversational web presence.
(That said, I got to speak to people who weren’t on Twitter, which is always useful. And a physical meeting space can be just as levelling as social media, when done right.)
That’s all for next year. For now, we throw in our opinions, and we wait for the lumbering behemoths to squint and read what has been written, and then we go off and JFDI anyway.
UPDATE: Dave Harte has written a wonderful post busting the myths propagated at the event (I particularly like no.2).
I’ve been meaning to blog for a while now about 2 excellent books I’ve read this year about communities online, both of which are pretty much essential reading for anyone involved in community management.
The first is Andrew Lih’s book The Wikipedia Revolution. Lih is for me the world’s leading academic on Wikipedia, not least because he’s been a participant in Wikipedia himself and has a great understanding of how the community works from the inside.
The book charts how the community has evolved from one that was maintained by personal connections to a whole stratified society of rules, roles, technologies and norms.
Particularly key are the sections on the development of the ‘Spanish Fork‘ (the mere mention of a commercial version of Wikipedia led to members of their Spanish site effectively leaving in protest and setting up their own encyclopedia) and Chapter 5: The Piranha Effect, which I gave to my MA Online Journalism students as one of their first readings.
The book also deals with trolls, vandalism (the Siegenthaler incident) and censorship.
The second great book is from experienced community manager Angela Connor: 18 Rules of Community Engagement (also available as an e-book). This is a great complement to Lih’s as this comes from a very different, practical, angle drawing not just on her own knowledge but those of readers of her blog. In fact, it’s a very bloggy book generally.
Connor emphasises the need to invest lots of time in any community developing relationships, making connections and fostering relationships. She looks at the importance of content (of the right type) and questions, of rules and culture, egos and compliments, influence and complaints.
It’s a breezy book that doesn’t impose one solution on every problem but frequently returns to the fact that every community is different, and so even common problems like trolls and spamming will have different solutions. That said, there are plenty of experiences offered.
These are probably the best 2 books I’ve read on online communities – but if you’ve read something good in the area, please let me know.
James Craven believes that instructive blogging should be paid. That was part of his inspiration behind leaving a job as CEO of a successful B2B media company and launching Asian Correspondent, a news site intended to report and aggregate news and information from the continent.
“I think that the blogosphere is one of the most important things to happen in media in the last thirty years. And I think it’s a real game changer. That said, the biggest problem with it is that it is quite difficult to navigate and find content. There’s enormous opportunity in working hard to find like-minded writers that have synergy, and to create channels that allow readers to find the sort of information they’re looking for globally,” he says.
To achieve this, Craven and his team hand picked thirty-five bloggers spanning thirteen different Asian countries after a careful survey of the region’s blogosphere, based on quality of reporting, relevance and popularity.
Craven admits that while he has the utmost respect for sites like the Huffington Post, which have been able to generate so much influence and traffic in less time than it took the New York Times, he does not agree with the idea of paying little or no monetary rewards to writers who contribute time and effort, not to mention page views and unique visitors to such sites. “It’s highway robbery!” he says.
So, it may come as a surprise that Asian Correspondent, the first such undertaking for Craven’s Hybrid News Limited, is being hailed as a HuffPo for Asia. However, the motivations are somewhat similar. Craven hopes to capitalize on the inarguable talent that lies in the blogosphere, and also tap into the mobilizing power of the Internet that is so exclusive to blogs and citizen media.
“It struck me that recent events such as the Obama election, the UK PM scandal and the Afghan elections were huge media moments, driven by citizen reports,” says Craven. “It also struck me that some of the audiences individual bloggers were building completely blew away anything that could be done cost effectively in print.”
That doesn’t mean the site will merely harbor a collection of views and opinions from people around Asia. Bloggers, who are paid a set monthly fee, will provide commentary, opinion and fact-based reporting.
Sometimes, bloggers are in a better position to cover a story than traditional journalists, says Craven. This is especially true with declining revenues that are unable to sustain foreign bureaus and international correspondents in western countries such as the US and UK.
Craven cites the example of the Philippines-based blogger who covered the recent devastating floods in the region for Asian Correspondent. “In the case of Paul Farol in Manila, a couple weeks ago, when the floods lapped his door, he was in the perfect position in terms of content, photography and video to cover that story.” In addition, there are advantages to being a native in narrating such an experience. The mainstream media is often unable to empathize with locals, or see a story in the same way as residents.
But do readers in other countries want to read that story about floods happening thousands of miles away? Craven believes that there is an appetite for these subjects; the key is targeting the right people. Seeding such articles with groups that would be interested, such as, say, the Filipino American Chamber of Commerce, would increase impact and interest.
“We’re interested in digital PR and traditional marketing, which would introduce [such] stories as they break to the large Filipino community in America and obviously target the Philippines as well.”
The same is true of advertising, according to Craven. Context-based ads are the answer for revenue generation. Advertisers such as Exxon Mobil and BMW don’t believe that aligning their message with gossip news will help them sell their products. “If you can create that context and advertisers can see that their buyers are reading your paper, then it’s not just about millions of hits. It’s about the right hits and that’s what we’re doing with Asian Correspondent.” The site is already approaching advertising agencies to purchase media campaigns that go directly to readers, and has a couple of partnerships.
Craven is confident that there is money to be made online with stories that don’t necessarily involve Britney Spears. No conversation about journalism is complete, of course, without invoking Spears, or the kind of reporting she represents: universally rejected by the mainstream media, and yet, attractive in its ability to generate traffic, page views, and hence, revenue.
Craven worries that many news sites that start out with high ambitions of delivering quality news content often degenerate into celebrity gossip portals. Asian Correspondent does not plan to go that route, he insists. “It doesn’t have to be the most popular or most commercial story or angle to still be a real business. I think we have to make sure that our business looks for opportunities to report on stories that aren’t being covered by anybody else.”
With a home page that showcases stories as wide-ranging as a standoff between Tasmanian timber workers and environmentalists, the banning of fake Twitter accounts in India, and the Afghan elections, that is exactly what the site is trying to do. News reports from bloggers are supplemented with AP news wire from the region. Citizen journalists are also encouraged to post their stories, and there is plenty of room for multimedia reporting and citizen videos.
Editors are based in Chang Mai, Hyderabad and Brisbane, and the site attracted over 140,000 unique visitors within the first six days of launching its beta version. If the model is successful, there is a plan to expand to other countries and continents.
“I call the company hybrid because I feel that my business model is a combination of all the fantastic elements of investigative journalism and foreign correspondence, but also through model delivery platforms.”
The past few years have seen a slew of news sites aimed at deploying citizen journalists and bloggers to fill a newshole in international reporting. How successful any such site will be depends on quality content and a viable business model.
Asian Correspondent seems to have the right ideas. If it can attract the right audience and advertisers, it could be well on its way to being a comprehensive source for Asian news.
Online Journalism Blog 