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Category Archives: online journalism
Google Latitude’s Location History provides more opportunities for mobile journalism
This was originally published in Poynter’s E-Media Tidbits last week
Google Latitude – a service that allows people to see where you are – has launched 2 new services – Location History and Location Alerts – that provide some interesting potential for mobile journalism.
Location History (shown above) allows you to “store, view, and manage your past Latitude locations. You can visualize your history on Google Maps and Earth or play back a recent trip in order.”
There are obvious possibilities here for then editing a map with editorial information – if you’re covering a parade, a marathon, or a demonstration you could edit placemarks to add relevant reports as you were posting them (or someone else with access to the account could from the newsroom).
Location Alerts is less obviously useful: this sends you a notification (by email and/or text) when you are near a friend’s location, although as Google explains, it’s a little more clever than that:
“Using your past location history, Location Alerts can recognize your regular, routine locations and not create alerts when you’re at places like home or work. Alerts will only be sent to you and any nearby friends when you’re either at an unusual place or at a routine place at an unusual time. Keep in mind that it may take up to a week to learn your “unusual” locations and start sending alerts.”
There is potential here for making serendipitous contact with readers or contacts, but until Latitude has widespread adoption (its biggest issue for me, and one that may never be resolved), it’s not likely to be useful in the immediate future.
The good thing about Latitude is you can enable it and disable it to suit you, and my own experience is that I only enable it when I want to meet someone using GPS on my phone. To sign up to Google Latitude user, go here. To enable the new features, go to google.com/latitude/apps.
Those are 2 uses I can think of, and I’ve yet to have a serious play – can you think of any others?
Presentation: Law for bloggers and journalists (UK)
Yesterday I hosted a session on law for my MA Online Journalism students, which I thought I would embed below.
Some background: I teach all my sessions in a coffee shop in central Birmingham – anyone can drop in. This week I specifically invited local bloggers, and so the shape of the presentation was very much flavoured by contributions from The Lichfield Blog‘s Philip John; Nick Booth from Podnosh and BeVocal; Talk About Local‘s Nicky Getgood; Hannah Waldram of the Bournville Village Blog; Gavin Wray, Matthew Mark, and Mike Rawlins of Stoke’s Pits N Pots. The editor of the Birmingham Post Marc Reeves also came for an hour to share his own experiences in the regional press.
Two things occurred to me during the process of preparation and delivery of the session. The first is that law in this context is much broader: as well as the classic areas for journalists such as defamation, you have to take into account online publishing issues such as terms and conditions, data protection and user generated content.
Secondly, I’ve long been an advocate of conversational teaching styles (one of the reasons I teach in a coffee lounge) and this was a great example of that in practice. The presentation below is just a series of signposts – the actual session lasted 4 hours and included various tangents (some of which I’ve incorporated into this published version). Experiences in the group of students and guests ranged across broadcasting, print, photography, online publishing, academic study, and international law, and I came out of the session having learned a lot too.
I hope you can add some more points, examples, or anything I’ve missed. Here it is:
Law for bloggers and journalists (UK)
View more presentations from Paul Bradshaw.
The fall of a news site: the Spanish case of Soitu.es
Like in the music or art fields, we, the Spanish-speaking people, allways look to the Anglo-American world to see what the new trends and innovation about digital journalism are (and laugh when Rupert Murdoch opens his mouth).
But now we can show our own example of a news site that tried to survive in this ecosystem and… died. But it’s all about trial and error!
I’m talking about Soitu.es, which closed its highly-regarded doors after 22 months of life. Of course, its demise had a strong impact in the blogosphere, its increasing traffic more than 10% in the last month.
This Spain-based news site was born in the wrong way, trying to show off with an enormous and fancy newsroom of almost 40 people, in times when the bet must be low-cost. The correct path is to start with a smaller staff and try to grow when the cash starts flowing in. Instead, Soitu.es made an alliance with the BBVA bank, that soon came to an end when they didn’t see the profitability, taking the whole project down with them. Its Director, Gumersindo Lafuente, blamed the financial crisis – as expected – after he spent money on their own CMS and ad server instead of using the great open source options available.
With this experience in mind, David De Ugarte came up with a few key points to make your news site a sure failure:
- Over-budget your project: There is nothing quite like having great amounts of money from the beginning to install in your team the habits that will make you fail, while the expectations of your investors remain high.
- Abandon your own speech about reality: Comment uncritically on all the fashionable stuff. Cut no ice. Don’t believe in anything and stand for anything and with a bit of luck they won’t remember anything you published.
- Don’t allow users to identify with you: people used to buy El País newspaper – or any newspaper, for that matter – as a militant action or a way of life. If you want to fail you can’t allow something like that to happen. Don’t let them associate you with something in particular and don’t make yourself specialist in anything.
- Have a “paper mindset”: pay columnists to write like they have been doing it all their lives without a single link for contextualization.
- Burn time and capital as fast as you can: organize conferences and invest while you can in nice headquarters with fancy furniture.
2 videos: How social media changed the journalist’s day; and making money from content
Here are 2 very interesting videos from a recent talk by Karl Schneider, Head of editorial development at B2B publisher Reed Business Information, at UCA Farnham. In the first Schneider takes a look at how the typical journalist’s day has changed – I particularly like the concept of previously only ‘20%’ of a journalist’s activity being visible, and 80% invisible, but that equation being reversed with the arrival of collaborative social media.
The journalist’s day from Stop.Frame on Vimeo.
In the second video Schneider likens online publishing to exhibitions and events, rather than traditional print and broadcasting models:
Can we make money from web content? from Stop.Frame on Vimeo.
Young people drying up like puddles on a sunny day: useful tools
There is a tool available to show graphically changes in population over time between 1992 and 2031.
The website provides an interactive map that graphically illustrates the extent to which age profile of the UK will change over the next few years. The mapping tool allows the user to select criteria for studying various age groups from UK level down to every local authority area. So, if you’d like to see what the age profile of your locality will look like in ten years’ time, this site can help. It is especially useful for local news bloggers.
To find out more, visithttp://www.statistics.gov.uk/ageingintheuk/agemap.html
If you set the age range to the 0-15’s, it’s like watching pools of water dry up on a sunny day, as the drought of young people spreads across the country. Or watch the progress of the over-65s (which I join just after the end of the period) as the map gradually darkens.
Hat-tip: St Aidan to Abbey Moor.
Let’s do something interesting with the OJB Facebook Group
The OJB Facebook Group is about to hit 1500 members, and yet we’ve never really done anything interesting with it. I’d like to change that.
I am advertising the position of OJB Facebook Group Manager. It has no pay, of course, but it does have potential for fun, and valuable experience.
For example, could we crowdsource something? Could we broaden the voices on OJB? Use apps and widgets creatively? Engage with the Wall and forums better? Something else? (setting up a Fan page?).
What would you do with a group of 1500 people? Send me a message on Facebook with your ideas and a link to your online presence, and then I’ll set up some online discussion to develop it further.
PS: As an equal opportunities non-employer, I’m particularly interested to hear from people outside of the Anglo-American world.
A glance at the magazine industry
I am speaking to the various digital heads at the major magazines for an overview of the industry as we approach 2010.
Emanuela Pignataro, head of Conde Nast Digital UK, spoke of relaunches and a new focus on social media.
What are you working on now?
We are focusing on the relaunch of CNTraveller.com – version two of this site is due to go live at the beginning of December with exciting new services. In addition we are looking ahead to early 2010 where we are working towards unveiling an evolution of the successful men’s quality lifestyle site, GQ.com.
What is the biggest challenge you are currently facing?
The ability to keep innovating and investing in spite of the current economic climate. We have shown consistent investment over the past two years – this year alone we have launched a brand new website – wired.co.uk, as well as relaunching CNTraveller next month, and we will be continuing this investment in order to ensure we stay ahead of the competition.
What do you hope to achieve in 2010?
A robust social media platform which can support our editorial content and increase user engagement
Model for a 21st Century Newsroom – in Spanish
In April Maxim Salomatin translated the Model for a 21st Century Newsroom series into Russian. Now Mauro Accurso has translated it into Spanish. All 6 parts, which make up around 10,000 or so words. It’s an incredible feat, and I’m enormously grateful.
So, here they are, part by part:
- Part 1: The News Diamond – http://tejiendo-redes.com/2009/09/02/el-diamante-de-noticias-modelo-para-la-redaccion-del-siglo-xx1-1ra-parte/
- Part 2: Distributed Journalism – http://tejiendo-redes.com/2009/09/07/periodismo-distribuido-modelo-para-la-redaccion-del-siglo-xxi-2da-parte/
- Part 3: 5 Ws and a H that should come after every story – http://tejiendo-redes.com/2009/09/21/6-preguntas-que-deberian-venir-despues-de-cada-noticia-modelo-para-la-redaccion-del-siglo-xxi-3ra-parte/
- Part 4: News distribution in a new media age – http://tejiendo-redes.com/2009/10/06/la-distribucion-de-las-noticias-en-un-mundo-de-nuevos-medios-modelo-para-la-redaccion-del-siglo-xxi-%e2%80%93-4ta-parte/
- Part 5: Making money from journalism online: new media business models – http://tejiendo-redes.com/2009/11/02/ganando-plata-con-el-periodismo-modelos-de-negocio-de-los-nuevos-medios-modelo-para-la-redaccion-del-siglo-xxi-5ta-parte/
- Part 6: New journalists for new information – http://tejiendo-redes.com/2009/11/11/nuevos-periodistas-para-un-nuevo-flujo-de-informacion-modelo-para-la-redaccion-del-siglo-xxi-%e2%80%93-6ta-parte/
(As an aside, The Spanish Press Association approached me last year for permission to translate it too but I’ve never seen it. Perhaps they got bored after part 1… or perhaps they’re just rude. Anyway, if you’ve seen it, let me know.)
Sun misjudges readers’ mood over Gordon Brown letter
The Sun is running a despicable campaign against Gordon Brown. But I’ve analysed the comments on its website – and readers disagree with its stance by a ratio of more than 3 to 2 (on top of which, there are now accusations that the Sun is censoring pro-Brown comments).
The paper has exploited the grief of Jacqui Janes over her son Jamie’s death in Afghanistan to attack the PM – because his handwritten letter of condolence was supposedly disrespectful due to sloppy writing and (disputed) spelling errors.
It’s loathsome journalism that ignores the effect of his disability (the PM is blind in one eye).
And it seems Sun readers are mostly on the Prime Minister’s side.
Of the 100+ comments on the story (don’t worry, I’ve nofollowed those links) when I checked, 111 expressed a view for or against Jacqui Janes or Gordon Brown (the rest commented on other issues or corrected people’s spelling errors). Of these:
- 42 were anti Gordon or pro the Sun’s stance.
- 69 were pro Gordon or anti the Sun’s stance.
So that’s more than 60% who don’t agree with the Sun, and less than 40% who do.
Sample comments from those who agree with the Sun’s stance
Some comments from those opposing it
Conclusion
The Sun is channeling this woman’s grief into a personal attack on the Prime Minister.
It’s refusing to make allowances for his disability (maybe we could next attack the war wounded for being workshy benefit scroungers?).
And it’s facilitating her breaking data protection laws by releasing a recording of a private phone call.
The whole thing is sickening – let’s hope that observing its readers’ reactions will lead to an end to this (not that this happened in the Jan Moir case) – and preferably prosecution of the Sun over the data protection offence. What’s more, Daily Mail readers are pro Brown, too. The Sun has got this badly wrong.
Online Journalism Blog 