On Thursday I’ll be hosting Birmingham’s first ‘Data Coffee’. Guests include The Times’ Jonny Richards, Talis’ Zach Beauvais and a whole bunch of MA Online Journalism students.
There’s no agenda for the day – just turn up with questions and we’ll pick each other’s brains. I’m bringing my Mac and an intense desire to get to grips with Python.
It’s at Coffee Lounge on Navigation Street (free wifi). We’ll start to gather around 10 with the bulk of the day taking place from 12 onwards.
The first study (PDF) of magazines and their various approaches to websites, undertaken by Columbia Journalism Review, found publishers are still trying to work out how best to utilise the online medium.
There is no general standard or guidelines for magazine websites and little discussion between industry leaders as to how they should most effectively be approached.
Following the responses to the multiple choice questionnaire and the following open-ended questions –
– the researchers called for a collective, informed and contemporary approach to magazine websites with professional body support.
The findings were separated into the following 6 categories: Continue reading
The Hull Daily Mail’s article accusing a hyperlocal competitor of having a ‘porn business’ has been misfiring spectacularly over the past 24 hours.
The article ‘reveals’ that the founder of HU17.net has designed sites for the porn industry.
At the time of writing it has over 300 comments overwhelmingly critical of what is variously described as a “smear campaign”, “set up” and “character assassination” by HDM.
Some point to the hypocrisy of the attack from a newspaper which recently launched a campaign to back local businesses, while others point out that the newspaper has previously published glowing articles about a local sex shop.
A distinction is also drawn by some commenters between operating a ‘porn business’ and building websites for companies who then use them to publish porn. (I wonder if they’ve investigated their own printers to see if they are running a ‘porn business’?)
And many, of course, point out that the newspaper itself is happy to provide a platform for sex industry advertising in its own pages.
A commenter on Hold The Front Page remarks:
“Maybe some proper journalist should ring up the ad booking services at all Northcliffe titles and ask to place ad for personal services. Perhaps ask those who take the calls if they beleive that some of the girls who advertise are working girls. Ask for some anecdotal tales of girls canceling their adverts one week in 4 … I beleive there might be a story there worthy of a DPS in the the Mail on Sunday !”
That comment is particularly salient when reading the Hull Daily Mail’s justification for running the story:
“What Mr Smith has done is not illegal, but it is certainly not consistent with publishing a responsible local website carrying reports, pictures and videos of community events and activities, many featuring children. It is in the public interest that people know the truth about the man behind HU17.net”
Replace ‘Mr Smith’ with ‘the Hull Daily Mail’ and you get an idea where the backlash is coming from.
The comments spill over onto a response on HU17.net itself, which the publicity has clearly brought to a wider audience locally.
One comment suggests that ads for escort adverts are being removed from the Hull Daily Mail website as they are being highlighed in the comments – certainly there are a lot of dead links, which seems odd given that the Classifieds have a whole section devoted to ‘Escort Agencies’ (image above).
Whatever you feel about the story, the comments across both sites provide a real insight into how people perceive their local paper and the attempts of hyperlocal publishers to run a business and serve a specific community.
More coverage at Journalism.co.uk and The Register. And Journopig’s post pulls out some of the unnecessary and unsupported paedophile-innuendo running through the story.
That’s the question posed by Rednelly, with this screengrab:
Curious. Anyone at the BBC got any idea?
The New York Times has combined visualisation with audio to produce a fascinating piece of work on the differences between gold winning times and runners-up across a number of Winter Olympics events. It’s a particularly creative approach to the challenge of communicating a relatively abstract story: what separates gold and silver. Well worth a look.
h/t Pete Ashton
…are doomed to repeat it. Jim Killock, executive director of the Open Rights Group on the revisions to Clause 17 of the Digital Economy Bill:
“Individuals and small businesses would be open to massive ‘copyright attacks’ that could shut them down, just by the threat of action.”
“This is exactly how libel law works today: suppressing free speech by the unwarranted threat of legal action. The expense and the threat are enough to create a ‘chilling effect’.”
There’s a fascinating study on newspaper bias by University of Chicago professors Matthew Gentzkow and Jesse Shapiro which identifies the political bias of particular newspapers based on the frequency with which certain phrases appear.
The professors then correlate that placement with the political leanings of the newspaper’s own markets, and find
“That the most important variable is the political orientation of people living within the paper’s market. For example, the higher the vote share received by Bush in 2004 in the newspaper’s market (horizontal axis below), the higher the Gentzkow-Shapiro measure of conservative slant (vertical axis).”
Interestingly, ownership is found to be statistically insignificant once those other factors are accounted for.
James Hamilton, blogging about the study, asks:
“How slant gets implemented at the ground level by individual reporters. My guess is that most reporters know that they are introducing some slant in the way they’ve chosen to frame and report a story, but are unaware of the full extent to which they do so because they are underestimating the degree to which the other sources from which they get their information and beliefs have all been doing a similar filtering. The result is social networks that don’t recognize that they have developed a groupthink that is not centered on the truth.” [my emphasis]
In other words, the ‘echo chamber’ argument (academics would call it a discourse) that we’ve heard made so many times about the internet.
It’s nice to be reminded that social networks are not an invention of the web, but rather the other way around.
h/t Azeem Azhar
In reporting yesterday on the linkspam story covered here last week (*cough*), The Guardian appeared to have opened something of a can of worms, with commenters quickly pointing out that The Guardian itself is publishing text ads without ‘nofollow’ tags.
Media hypocrisy? Almost. The newspaper’s SEO expert Paul Roach eventually chipped in to clarify:
“We are in the process of updating our no follows across the whole of the site. The links you mention are do follow at the moment, but have only been so for a short period of time. Our policy of using no follow is for all commercial links and UGC, and we’re aware that the no follow tag isn’t on the links you mention. It will be added to those links very soon.”
The comment thread as a whole is worth reading for an insight into the difficulties of this area. Sarah Hartley mentioned a recent meeting of the Digital Editors’ Network where:
“A few regional and local newspapers had already been approached by advertisers keen to benefit from the page rank such bona fide websites earn.
“The general feeling at the meeting was that this would be a move which, would not only be detrimental to the organsations’ page rank, but could also compromise, or at lease confuse, the difference between editorial and commercial content.”
And Martin Belam and others pointed out that Google’s own guidelines appear to be rather inconsistent on the matter (although their actions, it has to be said, are less ambiguous).
The sad fact is that many publishers are not in a position to take any judgement at all – it’s short term money or bust – and they’re willing to risk the PageRank penalty and resultant drop is ad revenue in the longer term.
(h/t to Malcolm Coles for pointing me to the comment thread early on)
The following post originally appeared on PhotoActive, but had to be taken down when the site host HostPapa complained about the traffic. I’ve offered to host it here.
With photographers about to lose copyright protection on their images, and the Government to curb their rights to take pictures in public, Philip Dunn looks more closely at these outrageous proposals and how they will affect you.
Photographers to lose copyright protection of their work
This startling and outrageous proposal will become UK law if The Digital Economy Bill currently being pushed through Parliament is passed. This Bill is sponsored by the unelected Government Minister, Lord Mandelson.
Let’s look at the way this law will affect your copyright:
The idea that the author of a photograph has total rights over his or her own work – as laid out in International Law and The Copyright Act of 1988 – will be utterly ignored. If future, if you wish to retain any control over your work, you will have to register that work (and each version of it) with a new agency yet to be set up.
Details about how this agency will be set up – and what fees will be charged for each registration – have been kept deliberated vague in Lord Mandelson’s Bill. If ever there was a licence to print money, this is it. You will pay.
If they are not registered with this quango agency, your images can be plundered and used anywhere, by anyone – on the understanding that the thief makes a very minimal effort to find you – the author of the image.
Currently, International Law, through the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works, recognises the ownership rights of the creator of the ‘property’. This enables image owners to control how their work is used, and whether it is used at all.
International Law will be ignored by the British Government and this new Act will overturn more than 150 years of UK copyright law.
If ever there was a massive step forward to a police state and suppression of information, this is it. Most of this thieves’ charter is not even going through Parliament as primary legislation. The Digital Economy bill Section 42 sections 16a, 16b, 16c enable ad hoc regulation by Mandelson’s office without further legislation. None of that will never be voted on.
A couple weeks ago I took a group of students away from the classroom for an experiment in teaching blogging and social capital – the Birmingham Social Media Treasure Hunt.
After a quick briefing and some pointers on using Posterous and Twitter from a mobile phone, the students fanned out across the city, finding people with a social media presence, talking to them, and blogging, tweeting and audiobooing all the while. The idea was to get them to stop thinking about ‘the story’, start building social capital, and think of online journalism as something that can take place away from a desk.
Now some time has passed I wanted to share how the experiment went and how the students found it.
In short: it worked. Continue reading
Online Journalism Blog 