Category Archives: online journalism

Is Ice Cream Strawberry? Part 4: Human Capital

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This is the fourth part of my inaugural lecture at City University London, ‘Is Ice Cream Strawberry?’. You can find part one here, part two here, and part three here.

Human capital

So here’s person number 4: Gary Becker, a Nobel prize-winning economist.

Fifty years ago he used the phrase ‘human capital’ to refer to the economic value that companies should ascribe to their employees.

These days, of course, it is common sense to invest time in recruiting, training and retaining good employees. But at the time employees were seen as a cost.

We need a similar change in the way we see our readers – not as a cost on our time but as a valuable part of our operations that we should invest in recruiting, developing and retaining. Continue reading →

Is Ice Cream Strawberry? Part 3: The production line has been replaced by a network

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This is the third part of my inaugural lecture at City University London, ‘Is Ice Cream Strawberry?’. You can find part one here, and part two here.

The production line has been replaced by a network

The problem is that most media organisations still think they are manufacturing cars, and they still see journalists as part of an internal production line.

Even the most progressive simply expect existing staff to become multiskilled multiplatform journalists, doing more work – but still on the same production line.

But we can redraw that diagram of the overlapping of newsgathering, production and distribution as a network diagram. And the problem with the production line approach becomes more apparent.

NewsDigitisation3

The news industry is caught trying to straddle the gap between the physical, and the digital. Continue reading →

Is Ice Cream Strawberry? Part 2: Cars, roads and picnics

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This is the second part of my inaugural lecture at City University London, ‘Is Ice Cream Strawberry?’. The first part can be found here.

Cars, roads and picnics

Throughout the 20th century there were two ways of getting big things done – and a third way of getting small things done. Clay Shirky sums these up very succinctly in terms of how people organise car production, road building, and picnics.

If you want to organise the production of cars, you use market systems. If you want to organise the construction of roads, you use central, state systems of funding – because there is a benefit to all. And if you want to organise a picnic, well, you use social systems.

In the media industry these three line up neatly with print, broadcast and online production.

The newspaper industry grew up in spite of government regulation.

The broadcast industry grew up thanks to government regulation.

And online media grew up while the government wasn’t looking. Continue reading →

Is Ice Cream Strawberry? Part 1

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The following is the first part of my inaugural lecture at City University London, ‘Is Ice Cream Strawberry?’. The total runs to 3,000 words so I’ve split it and adapted it for online reading.

The myth of journalism and the telegraph

Samuel Morse was a portrait painter. And he invented the telegraph. The telegraph is probably one of the most mythologised technologies in journalism. The story goes that the telegraph changed journalism during the US Civil War – because telegraph operators had to get the key facts of the story in at the top in case the telegraph line failed or were cut. This in turn led to the objective, inverted pyramid style of journalism that relied on facts rather than opinion.

This story, however, is a myth. Continue reading →

Objectivity has changed – why hasn’t journalism?

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The following is cross-posted from a guest post I wrote for Wannabe Hacks.

Objectivity is one of the key pillars of journalistic identity: it is one of the ways in which we identify ourselves as a profession. But for the past decade it has been subject to increasing criticism from those (and I include myself here) who suggest that sustaining the appearance of objectivity is unfeasible and unsustainable, and that transparency is a much more realistic aim.

Recently I’ve been revisiting some of the research on journalistic objectivity for my inaugural lecture at City University. But as I only mention objectivity once in that lecture, I thought it was worth fleshing out the issue further.

Things change

One of the reasons why I think studying journalism is so important at the moment is that the profession is rooted in a series of practices and beliefs that have specific historical roots – and things change. Continue reading →

Leaks on demand – how the Wikileaks cables are being used

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From a leak to a flood

Image by markhillary on Flickr

I’m probably not the only person to notice a curious development in how the Wikileaks material is being used in the press recently. From The Guardian and The Telegraph to The New York Times and The Washington Post, the news agenda is dictating the leaks, rather than the other way around.

It’s fascinating because we are used to seeing leaks as precious journalistic material that forms the basis of some of our best reporting. But the sheer volume of Wikileaks material – the vast majority of which still remains out of the public domain – has turned that on its head, with newsrooms asking: “Do the leaks say anything on Libya/Tunisia/Egypt?”

When they started dealing with Wikileaks data some newsrooms built customised databases to allow them to quickly find relevant documents. Recent events have proved that – not to mention the recruitment of staff who can quickly interrogate that data – to be very wise.

Signals of churnalism?

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Journalism warning labels

Journalism warning labels by Tom Scott

On Friday I had quite a bit of fun with Churnalism.com, a new site from the Media Standards Trust which allows you to test how much of a particular press release has been reproduced verbatim by media outlets.

The site has an API, which got me thinking whether you might be able to ‘mash’ it with an RSS feed from Google News to check particular types of articles – and what ‘signals’ you might use to choose those articles.

I started with that classic PR trick: the survey. A search on Google News for “a survey * found” (the * is a wildcard, meaning it can be anything) brings some interesting results to start investigating.

Jon Bounds added a favourite of his: “hailed a success”.

And then it continued: Continue reading →

Mobile journalism: Section 44 is dead – long live Section 43

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One of the pictures the student was taking at the time he was stopped by plain-clothes officers

An image taken by the student when he was stopped by plain-clothes officers

Section 44 of the Terrorism Act 2000 was an ongoing problem for photographers and journalists using mobile phones who would find themselves stopped, searched, and sometimes arrested by police. After ongoing pressure and a judgement in the European Court of Human Rights, the section was finally suspended last July.

Now Amateur Photographer reports on the Metropolitan Police defending officers’ decision to stop and search a student for merely taking photographs near a school (the image above was being taken when he was approached by police). The search was done under Section 43, which “can only be enforced if a police officer ‘reasonably suspects’ a person to be a terrorist.”

Meanwhile, police are seeking new powers to replace those given under Section 44.

If you use mobile technology in your journalism, it’s worth keeping the stop and search bust card about you.

h/t Ewen Rankin

Help Me Investigate is now open source

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I have now released the source code behind Help Me Investigate, meaning others can adapt it, install it, and add to it if they wish to create their own crowdsourcing platform or support the idea behind it.

This follows the announcement 2 weeks ago on the Help Me Investigate blog (more coverage on Journalism.co.uk and Editors Weblog),

The code is available on GitHub, here.

Collaborators wanted

I’m looking for collaborators and coders to update the code to Rails 3, write documentation to help users install it, improve the code/test, or even be the project manager for this project.

Over the past 18 months the site has surpassed my expectations. It’s engaged hundreds of people in investigations, furthered understanding and awareness of crowdsourcing, and been runner-up for Multimedia Publisher of the Year. In the process it attracted attention from around the world – people wanting to investigate everything from drug running in Mexico to corruption in South Africa.

Having the code on one site meant we couldn’t help those people: making it open source opens up the possibility, but it needs other people to help make that a reality.

If you know anyone who might be able to help, please shoot them a link. Or email me at paul(at)helpmeinvestigate.com

Many thanks to Chris Taggart and Josh Hart for their help with moving the code across.

Councils should allow public meetings to be recorded, says Pickles

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A welcome window of clarity on the issue of whether bloggers can record public council meetings today: Local Government Secretary Eric Pickles has weighed in to say that public meetings should be open to bloggers and that they should “routinely allow online filming of public discussions as part of increasing their transparency”

It’s an issue that I’ve been investigating for a while on Help Me Investigate: while some councils actively stream their own meetings, and others allow members of the public to do the same, some councils explicitly forbid recording, others allow audio but require mayoral permission for video, and a few have conducted ‘investigations’ of citizens for daring to record public proceedings (and councillors), or ejected them from the room (see video above).

Pickles’ guidance – and the accompanying letter sent to all councils – provides useful material to show uncooperative councils.

The letter calls on councils to give “credible community or ‘hyper-local’ bloggers and online broadcasters the same routine access to council meetings as the traditional accredited media have”

It also reassures councils that “giving greater access will not contradict data protection law requirements”. This is a key part, as data protection is often used as an excuse to prevent filming. The Help Me Investigate investigation revealed a worrying ignorance regarding data protection laws by councils even in formal internal reports. Other areas, including privacy, copyright, defamation and “procedural matters” are covered in this blog post rounding up some of the investigation’s findings.

Other material that bloggers may find useful are mentioned in Pickles’ announcement. They include The Public Bodies (Admission to Meetings) Act 1960; The Local Government Act of 1972 and The Local Government (Access to Information) Act 1985.

I’m working on producing a cribsheet for bloggers wanting to record their local council’s public meetings. If you want to help, please leave a comment or subscribe to the investigation blog.

UPDATE: Philip John is compiling a list of who’s doing what in terms of recording, streaming, tweeting and liveblogging council meetings.