Category Archives: online journalism

TV station forces blogger to withdraw criticism of its coverage

Statement on Chetan Kunte

Here’s a clever move:

Indian TV station NDTV, and specifically broadcaster Barkha Dutt, is criticised for coverage of the Mumbai attacks. As Gaurav Mishra describes it:
“Bloggers were scathing in their criticism of Barkha Dutt’s sensationalistic coverage of the 11/26 Mumbai terror attack, accusing her of broadcasting sensitive information about the position of hostages and security troops, sensationalizing the news coverage, and being borderline hysterical, in general. The National Security Guard, the Naval Chief, and the Information & Broadcasting Ministry had also criticized Indian news television coverage of the crisis. This groundswell of criticism prompted mainstream media to join in (The Hindu, The Indian Express) and forced Barkha Dutt and NDTV to go on the defensive (LiveMint).”
Amid this “groundswell of opinion”, NDTV appears to threaten one of those critics – the blogger Chetan Kunte – with legal action.
Kunte pulls his blog post and replaces it with a retraction statement (image above) that sounds as if it’s been dictated by someone else’s lawyers.
Indian blogosphere erupts in outrage, and either links to a Google cache of that withdrawn blog post, or republishes it entirely. Not to mention critically discussing the TV station’s coverage once again.

Lesson to news organisations: your viewers are your distributors now. Suing them is not good management. Nor is it good for freedom of speech – something you might find useful yourselves in the future.

BBC creates transfer gossip widget – of other people’s football news

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The BBC are trialling a new widget of gossip leading up to the transfer deadline. “The system uses web search technology to identify content from other sports news websites that is similar to the content on the BBC Football Gossip Page.”

The move not only demonstrates a commitment by the BBC to ‘sharing the love’ in linking more to external sides (something the BBC Trust asked them to do back in June), but also cleverly distributes their own brand – and content (the top link on the widget? ‘Latest BBC football gossip’) by including buttons for you to embed the widget on your Facebook, hi5 or Orkut page, WordPress or Blogger blog, or Google homepage.

I’m not able to tell, however, whether the ‘Google juice’ denied in similar experiments is still denied by this. As it’s a widget, and therefore ‘pulled’ from elsewhere, I’m guessing not. But I’m sure those news sites won’t complain about the traffic they receive.

Indeed, it demonstrates once again that linking to other sites is generally a far more savvy move than not linking at all.

Guardian hire YouTube makeup star Lauren Luke

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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.

Speaking in Norway this week (say Hi)

10 Twitter users that every journalism student should follow?

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UPDATE: From the comments: similar lists now available for Norway and Sweden.

I will soon begin teaching my annual module in Online Journalism and one of the first things I get the students to do is set up a Twitter account. It’s often a struggle to demonstrate the usefulness of Twitter, so this time around, in addition to following each other, I’m going to give them 10 people to start following from the off. This is the list I’ve come up with – would welcome your suggestions for others:

@davelee – former journalism student and excellent blogger who landed a plum job at the BBC after graduating. Get the point?
@channel4news – example of how a news organisation can use Twitter in a personal, conversational way, rather than simply republishing its RSS feed (see also: @r4news, @mashable) Continue reading →

Speaking at the Perugia International Journalism Festival 2009

When Journalists Blog: How It Changes What They Do

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I’ve already blogged about the survey I did of 200 blogging journalists and recorded five podcasts, but if you want the version I wrote for the latest edition of Nieman Reports, you can now read it here.

Do you limit the number of people you follow on Twitter? And to how many?

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Just to clarify: I have no objection to anyone having personal limits on the number of people they follow on Twitter – only imposing that on others. Here are some of the many reasons people set limits. I’d love to know yours. Continue reading →

How do you ‘follow’ 2500 people on Twitter?

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OK, I’ve had enough. That’s it. I’ve had enough of people suggesting we should all have limits on the number of people followed on Twitter. The tweet that did it? Peter King, who suggested “Twitter should cap how many people you can follow at 10% of the # of people following you. Put a premium on the # you follow.” and “Twitter needs to be a place for leaders to lead. Otherwise we’ll cancel each other out.”

Yeah, that’s what we need: more leaders. And forcing people to broadcast to an audience before they can listen to anyone.

Many people have a ‘quality not quantity’ strategy with Twitter where they restrict themselves to following a certain number of Twitterers. But by using certain tools and adopting a certain mindset, I think you can have both quality and quantity. So here’s how I ‘follow’ 2,500 people on Twitter: Continue reading →

‘Journalists: learn to code’ says Guardian’s Arthur

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Charles Arthur of The Guardian makes his point pretty plain: “If I had one piece of advice to a journalist starting out now, it would be: learn to code”

“Let’s be clear that I’m not saying “code” as in “get deep into C++ or Java” … I mean it in the sense of having a nodding acquaintance with methods of programming, and perhaps a few languages, so that when something comes along where you’ll need, say, to transform data from one form to another, you can. Or where you need to make your own life easier by automating some process or other.

” … None of which is saying you shouldn’t be talking to your sources, and questioning what you’re told, and trying to find other means of finding stuff out from people. But nowadays, computers are a sort of primary source too. You’ve got to learn to interrogate them effectively – and quote them meaningfully – too.”

Amen to that.

Online Journalism Blog

Comment, analysis and links covering online journalism and online news, citizen journalism, blogging, vlogging, photoblogging, podcasts, vodcasts, interactive storytelling, publishing, Computer Assisted Reporting, User Generated Content, searching and all things internet.