Category Archives: online journalism

Online journalism and the promises of new technology PART 4: Interactivity

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This post is cross-published from my new journalism/new media-blog. Previous posts in this series:

In the fourth part of this series I will take a closer look at the research on interactivity  in online journalism and to what degree this asset of new technology has been and is utilized.

Content analysis studies

As with hypertext, the research on interactivity in online journalism is dominated by content analysis, even though a greater body of this research also relies on surveys and interviews with journalists. Kenny et al. (2000) concluded that only 10 percent of the online newspapers in their study offered “many opportunities for interpersonal communication” and noted that little had changed since the introduction of Videotex 25 years earlier: “Videotex wanted to electronically push news into people’s homes, and so do today’s online papers”. Continue reading →

The News Diamond reimagined as ‘The Digital News Lifecycle’

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Digital news lifecycle

Here’s a wonderful reimagining of the News Diamond from the first part of my Model for a 21st Century Newsroom. Gaurav Mishra’s diagram (shown above) takes my rhombus (shown below) and plots it against two axes. It’s rather lovely.

Helpfully, however, Mishra takes the concept forward a little. As he explains:

“my “news lifecycle” is different from Paul Bradshaw’s “news diamond” in two ways –

“1. Paul’s “news diamond” looks at news from a news organization’s perspective, whereas my “news lifecycle” acknowledges that the boundaries between news creators, news curators and news consumers have blurred beyond recognition.

“2. Paul does not make the distinction between unplanned breaking news events (like accidents and terrorist attacks) and planned live coverage of events (like the Super Bowl or the US presidential inauguration). Paul’s “news diamond” and my “news lifecycle” models are much more valid for unplanned breaking news events.”

It’s fair to say that my diamond does take the perspective of a news organisation – that’s who it was aimed at. But I’m not sure that that means it doesn’t acknowledge the blurring of boundaries.

Anyway, Mishra poses some questions:

  1. How do we increase the number and variety of sources in the process of creating, curating and consuming news?
  2. How do we separate signal from noise during each stage of the news lifecycle?
  3. How do we contract the “alert” to “analysis” stages of the news lifecycle, in order to get better signal to noise ratio sooner in the cycle?
  4. How to we expand the “conversation” to “customization” stages of the news lifecycle, in order to maximize the returns from the content we have created?
  5. How do we expand the requisite participatory media ecosystem so that exceptions to this news lifecycle (like the information void in the Israel-Hamas Gaza conflict or the Russia-Georgia Otessia conflict) become increasingly rare?

I’d be very interested in any responses.

In the meantime, here’s those original diagrams for your conceptual enjoyment…

news diamond

As it happens, the diamond was just another way of showing the following flow diagram from the same post, so now I have 3 diagrams to refer to…

model for a 21st century newsroom

JEEcamp 2010: Interview with Paul Bradshaw of Online Journalism Blog. By Matt Wardman

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q-logo-jeecampPaul Bradshaw has run a conference “Journalism, Enterprise and Entrepreneurship” for independent and mainstream journalists interested in “making a living from journalism in the era of free information”.

In this interview, Paul explains to Matt Wardman what the aims and achievements of JEEcamp have been, and reflects on how his own blogging activities over 6 years has opened up opportunities for him personally.

An experiment tonight in joining up politics #onlinepolitics

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Tonight I’m doing an experiment to create a conversation about politics across several different niches, with the idea of trying to broaden political debate.

My aim is to help pull together different aspects of politics and media – including campaigning, technology skills, scrutiny, how to report to a high standard, and local reporting – as a way of helping build participation online.

That’s a big subject, so I’m starting with one aspect that I can grab hold of and which should be of wide interest – making some income from political or other blogs – and a twitter chat on the hashtag #onlinepolitics from 9pm to 10pm, which will be captured on my blog using Cover It Live.

There is an introductory article for this chat published earlier today here, as a “starter for ten”.

Anyone is welcome to watch or join in.

I am @mattwardman on twitter.

Crowdsourcing an investigation: interview with The Faster Times' Nathan Hegedus

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The Faster Times have been experimenting with crowdsourcing as with their users they investigate the backgrounds of own brand foods (that is, foods which are sold under the brand of a supermarket, e.g. ‘Tesco cornflakes’). I spoke to Nathan Hegedus who is overseeing the investigation:

Listen!

Do users really want to pay for separate Times and Sunday Times sites?

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The Times and Sunday Times have launched their new paywalled sites at  http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/news/ and http://www.thesundaytimes.co.uk/sto/. But while the sites have some good features, which I was shown at a preview last night, I still can’t work out why users would want to pay for two different websites covering the same subjects …

What’s on offer?

The plan is to replace the current site – timesonline.co.uk – with two new sites, one for The Times and one for The Sunday Times. £2 a week (or £1 for an individual day) buys you access to both sites. There isn’t an option to get just one site.

The Times proposition

The Times won’t try to be a news wire – it’ll be offering fewer stories on its home page than most online newspapers with the aim being to enhance those stories.

Without the need to chase search engine traffic or page views for advertisers, the idea of covering fewer stories but in a better way sounds appealing.

Some articles, for instance, will have information graphic and tabs to let you explore the history and different aspects of the story without leaving the page. This package of content is brilliant – it works much better as an experience than lists of related articles or auto-generated tag pages.

The Sunday Times proposition

The Sunday Times site will look very different to the Times’s. It will have the sections people know from the paper. So, news, sport and  business – but also culture, style, travel, In Gear and the magazine.

The site won’t be updated much during the week – though the aim is still for it to function as a 7-days-a-week site.

But instead of trying to compete with the Times sites for news, it will offer readers the ability to browse and explore Sunday’s content over the week, concentrating on galleries, videos and interactive graphics.

Why two websites?

The decision to replace the current timesonline.co.uk site with two brands and two websites – thetimes.co.uk and thesundaytimes.co.uk – has obviously meant some thinking about how they work together.

They seem clear enough that they are two products – a daily news site and a site that you’re meant to browse all week. But it was interesting that the reasons they talked about for this were the different editorial teams, the “different but overlapping audiences”, the different values of the newspapers, and the different reasons why people buy the Sunday paper vs the weekday paper. Continue reading →

Zoe Margolis wins Libel Damages for a headline on her own article

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The Daily Telegraph reported on Saturday that Zoe Margolis, who as Abby Lee wrote the “Girl with a One-Track Mind” sex blog and book, will receive damages from the Independent on Sunday over a headline attached to an article she had written herself. I can only find a printed version of the article:

Her Lawyer, Lucy Moorman, told the High Court in London that on March 7th the newspaper published an article by Miss Margolis, who writes under the pen name Abby Lee, but added to it was the headline, “I was a hooker who became an agony aunt”.

Miss Moorman said: “This headline was written by the newspaper not by the claimant.” The headline featured in the newspaper and on the website, she said.

The hearing was on Friday, and documented that a settlement had been reached:

On 7th March 2010, The Independent on Sunday newspaper seriously defamed Ms. Margolis by referring to her as a “hooker” in the title of an article that she wrote for them, published in both the paper and online editions.

The resulting effect of this libel was immeasurable, and Ms. Margolis was forced to issue legal proceedings against Independent News & Media Ltd.

These proceedings have now come to a conclusion and substantial damages have been offered to Ms. Margolis for the distress and impact to her reputation, both personal and professional, that this libel caused.

There will be a statement read in open court in a hearing tomorrow, Friday 21st May 2010 at 10.30am, court 13 at the Royal Courts of Justice, The Strand, London.

Ms. Margolis will be available for interview or comment following the hearing.

So far I have seen no report in the Independent. I assume that this will be coming soon.

The original report is here. There are a couple of interesting points:

An action has been pursued and damages have been paid by the Newspaper despite a correction and apology having been published within a week.

I find it slightly difficult to fathom what happened with the process of writing and checking the headline on the original piece. Perhaps the mention of “Belle de Jour, the blogging London call girl” in the second paragraph of the text, before the author herself was mentioned by name, had some effect.

The full LibDem-Conservative coalition agreement

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The coalition has published the full document defining their Programme for Government today. It covers policy areas not included in the initial document, but there are also many policies from the initial document not mentioned which will just be “read through”.

These are the sections which mention the media:

Section 7: Culture, Olympics, Media and Sport

  1. We will maintain the independence of the BBC, and give the National Audit Office full access to the BBC’s accounts to ensure transparency.
  2. We will enable partnerships between local newspapers, radio and television stations to promote a strong and diverse local media industry.
  3. We will cut red tape to encourage the performance of more live music.
  4. We will introduce measures to ensure the rapid roll-out of superfast broadband across the country.We will ensure that BT and other infrastructure providers allow the use of their assets to deliver such broadband, and we will seek to introduce superfast broadband in remote areas at the same time as in more populated areas. If necessary, we will consider using the part of the TV licence fee that is supporting the digital switchover to fund broadband in areas that the market alone will not reach.

And the media overseas (Section 18: International Development):

  1. We will use the aid budget to support the development of local democratic institutions, civil society groups, the media and enterprise; and support efforts to tackle corruption.

Here is the full document as a PDF.

Lib Con Coalition Programme for Government

Dealing with live data and sentiment analysis: Q&A with The Guardian's Martyn Inglis

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As part of the research for my book on online journalism, I interviewed Martyn Inglis about The Guardian’s Blairometer, which measured a live stream of data from Twitter as Tony Blair appeared before the Chilcot inquiry. I’m reproducing it in full here, with permission:

How did you prepare for dealing with live data and sentiment analysis?

I think it was important to be aware of our limitations. We can process a limited amount of data – due to Twitter quotas and so on. This is not a definitive sample. Once we accept that (a) we are not going to rank every tweet and (b) this is therefore going to be a limited exercise it frees us to make concessions that provide an easier technology solution.

Sentiment analysis is hard programatically, given the short time span of the event in which we can do this manually. We had an interface view onto incoming tweets which we had pulled from a twitter search. This allows us to be really accurate in our assessment. This does not work over a long period of time – the Chilcot inquiry is one thing, you couldn’t do it for an event lasting a week or so on. Continue reading →

Online journalism and the promises of new technology PART 3: Hypertext

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This post is cross-published from my new journalism/new media-blog. Previous posts in this series:

In the third part of this series I will take a closer look at the research on hypertext in online journalism and to what degree this asset of new technology has been and is utilized in online journalism. The general assumption of researchers interested in hypertextual online journalism is that if hypertext is used innovatively it would provide a range of advantages over print journalism: Continue reading →