Here’s the second report I wrote for Press Gazette from the Future of Newspapers conference last week. The version which appeared in Press Gazette is here; the original is below:
Former Guardian editor Peter Preston has said that owners who are “giving up the ghost” must take some responsibility for the decline of newspapers. Continue reading
The following was written for Press Gazette last week – in between the last presentation on Thursday and a drinks evening. The edited (and probably better) version that appeared in print is here. The original draft which led with Jane Singer’s paper is below:
The future of news is more free newspapers, more ‘viewspapers’ – and less money, according to a leading academic. Continue reading
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. Continue reading
On Thursday I’ll be presenting my paper on wiki journalism at the Future of Newspapers conference in Cardiff. As previously reported, the full paper is available as a wiki online for anyone to add to or edit. You can also download a PDF of the ‘official’ version.
Based on a review of a number of case studies, and some literature on wikis, the paper proposes a taxonomy of wiki journalism, and outlines the opportunities and weaknesses of the form. The following is the edited highlights: Continue reading
“Next Monday appears to be the date for former Star Tribune editor and publisher Joel Kramer to reveal his plans for the launch of a professionally edited and reported online newspaper.”
“USA Today is plunging into a hot new Internet technology, offering its online users the ability to install “widgets” on their blogs and personal Web pages that contain news updates and other information from the newspaper.”
“Celebrity glossy wunderkind OK! magazine relaunched its Web site today with an Escalade’s worth of features—“web exclusive, continuously updated breaking news, celebrity updates, photo galleries, videos, reviews, blogs and numerous interactive features…”
“On Web sites such as Style.com, consumers can see looks from September’s shows an hour after they are premiered on the runway. Followers don’t have to have some high-ranking editor in New York to tell them what was hot or not. They can see and decide for…”
Blog your initial brainstorming. Blog your research. Blog your interactions.
Conversational Journalism: Credibility Gained or Status Lost?
In a sense, clinging to objectivity as an achievable goal denies our humanity. That puts us in awkward situations almost daily. And don’t think our audiences and communities don’t recognize that. Often, they’re laughing at us for it.
to onlinejournalism ethics transparency community conversation objectivity …
After so long watching The Guardian take all the plaudits, The Telegraph website is starting to show some real innovation of its own. Following last week’s football Flash stat attack, Marcus Warren posts about their mashup/database-driven A level coverage including a league table of schools’ performance updated in real time “(almost)”. And a map of schools who have sent in results “with links back to their position in our list.” (shown above)
Steve Yelvington writes a well constructed piece on the evolution of local newspapers: why they never really were that local in the first place, and why they need to rethink that. Continue reading
The latest batch of statistics from the Center for Media Research includes some interesting findings on media consumption. Firstly: readers/viewers apparently have an A-level-essay approach to news: ‘compare and contrast’:
“respondents reported using many of those brands daily or, in the case of Internet news sites, many times a day. The reasons given for visiting a number of sources included “every news event has at least two sides,” to “get all the facts,” to “form my own opinion,” or to find specific types of content, such as local news.”
Secondly, the internet is the second “most useful” medium, after television – 8% ahead of newspapers.
There’s some cute categorisation of news consumers based on motivation: “citizen readers,” “news lovers,” and “digital cynics” make up a combined 75%, with the other quarter consisting of “traditionalists”, “headliners”, “uninvolved”, and “few main sources” (not quite so catchy, that one). Click the link for more pigeonholing.
If you want to see the future of UK journalism, it’s often best to look at America. So it’s interesting to see the following statistic to come from research by David Wendelken:
“even the smallest commercial newspapers, with 10,000 readers or fewer, are looking for reporting candidates with experience writing for the Web and uploading stories to the Internet, according to a survey of newspaper managing editors conducted by Wendelken and Toni B. Mehling of James Madison University. Of nine respondents in the “large daily newspaper” category (those with a circulation of 44,000 and above), eight required reporters to have skills in capturing audio while four required audio editing skills. Five required reporters to have skills in capturing video, while one required video editing expertise. Major newspapers, said Wendelken, “are looking at reporters to do these things from the start.”
And the problem isn’t just those who think teaching journalists Dreamweaver is ‘online journalism’. It’s students’ own dated conceptions of the journalism industry:
“A lot of college students select their medium in high school. When they come onto campus, they’re already a TV person or a radio person or a newspaper person,” said Wendelken.
“I’m a print journalist,” he continued, imitating the attitude of many aspiring journalists. “Why do I need to learn video?”
Of course we’ve had people like Trinity Mirror’s Head of Multimedia saying they want people who know their RSS from their elbow* for months now, but this is the first survey with some concrete figures from people on the ground. It underlines the fact that journalism courses shouldn’t be teaching online journalism as an additional ‘option’ any more. An understanding of new media has become essential.
*The first and last time I will use that hackneyed phrase. Honest.
I was speaking at an event last week on social networking when a fellow panellist made the point that Facebook was, in many ways, an operating system, and that we may in years to come think it archaic that Windows/Mac OS didn’t know who our friends were, interests, feeds, etc.
Now South Africa’s Mail and Guardian shows a glimpse of the future on that platform: an application to let Facebook users add their headlines to their profiles. Of course, an RSS feed might do the same thing, but this makes it easier.
In other FJ (that’s Facebook Journalism) news: Reportr.net on Using Facebook profiles as a source for stories (and the ethics of exposing the voting intentions of the 17-year-old daughter of a presidential candidate):
“Part of the issue is what Danah Boyd has called intended audiences. When someone posts information on a social networking site, they may not intend for the material to be consumed beyond the intended audience of their friends.”
Online Journalism Blog 