The complicated case of the (now not) anonymous police blogger, The Times, and ‘public interest’

19 Replies

Widely lauded anonymous police blogger NightJack has had his identity revealed after The Times took the affair to court.

It’s a cloudy affair. The Times’ angle is that media correspondent Patrick Foster wanted to ‘out’ someone he felt “was revealing confidential details about cases, some involving sex offences against children, that could be traced back to genuine prosecutions” as well as offering “advice to people who found themselves the subject of a police investigation.”

NightJack’s case for preventing the publication of his name was that he would be (and indeed has already been) punished by his superiors.

Mr Justice Eady didn’t buy that, saying: “I do not accept that it is part of the court’s function to protect police officers who are, or think they may be, acting in breach of police discipline regulations from coming to the attention of their superiors.”

The Times also reports him as saying “that even if the blogger could have claimed he had a right to anonymity, the judge would have ruled against him on public interest grounds.”

Hugh Tomlinson, QC, for the blogger, had argued that “thousands of regular bloggers who communicate nowadays via the internet under a cloak of anonymity would be horrified to think that the law would do nothing to protect their anonymity of someone carried out the necessary detective work and sought to unmask them”.

The judge said … the blogger needed to show that he had a legally enforceable right to maintain anonymity in the absence of a genuine breach of confidence, by suppressing the fruits of detective work such as that carried out by Mr Foster.

But Mr Justice Eady said that the mere fact that the blogger wanted to remain anonymous did not mean that he had a “reasonable expectation” of doing so; or that The Times was under an enforceable obligation to him to maintain that anonymity.

There are so many elements to this case it’s difficult to pick them apart.

On the one hand we have a blog which is potentially, in some circumstances, in contempt of court, written by a policeman who is, strictly speaking, breaking his obligations under the “statutory code governing police behaviour and general public law duty”. That’s The Times’ ‘public interest’, or at least the case that they made (The Times have history here – it would have been interesting to have seen the public interest argument for publishing the name of Girl With A One Track Mind).
On the other we have someone’s privacy.
But the 3rd point – and it’s interesting that this doesn’t seem to have been used as a defence – is that this is a ruling that has enormous implications for whistleblowers and people blogging ‘on the ground’. That’s someone else’s ‘public interest’.

And that last element is the saddest for me.

With the disappearance of NightJack (his blog has already been deleted*), we lose one more ‘voice on the ground’. While The Times focused on the letter of the law that was being broken, the broader public interest of letting public servants voice their…

“frustrations with … attempts at the reform of policing which, he says, has turned officers from “approachable neighbourhood figures into neon-clad stormtroopers.””

…has been ignored.

It is difficult enough to get soldiers to blog, for people to get a genuine feel for the experiences of NHS workers, civil servants and teachers.

And it just got harder.

UPDATE: Curiously, The Times appear to have prevented their reporter from speaking about the issue on Radio 5.

UPDATE 2: A couple of Times journalists have gone on the record with their feelings about the affair.

UPDATE 3: NightJack himself has written a piece in The Times on the story behind the case. Anonymong describes it as “reminiscent of a communist show trial where the accused is allowed to publicly confess their sins and misdemeanors.” But the comments tell a very different story of support.

UPDATE 4: I’ve written a guide to anonymity for bloggers.

UPDATE 5: Via Anonymong: “as noted by Anna Raccoon there is now some precedent for investigating and publishing identifying material relating to a serving police office as prohibited by the counter terrorism act 2008.”

UPDATE 6: As you’d expect, someone has dug into Patrick Foster’s past and come up with some dirt of their own.

UPDATE 7: Fellow public service blogger and ambulance driver Tom Reynolds gives his views on the case. Chicken Yoghurt gives his on the media’s use of anonymous sources. David MacLean responds: “Of course journalists rely on anonymous sources, but if a rival national newspaper found out who was tipping off a competitor, they’d more than likely expose them if the resulting story would be of interest to the public.”. Emily Bell highlights the raft of furious comments on The Times’ Crime Central blog. Gary Andrews gives his take. And Journalism.co.uk round up some more besides.

UPDATE 8 [Jan 24 2012] It seems that Nightjack’s email was hacked in order to get that story.

(h/t Girlonetrack) *Thanks to Martin in the comments: if you type “site:nightjack.wordpress.com” into Google, the pages appear to be cached. Don’t know how long that will last though.

An open letter to Tim Berners-Lee about open government

4 Replies

Following the tone set so succinctly by Glyn Moody, I thought I would add my own thoughts on what Sir Tim should say to the government when he bends their ear on transparency.

Firstly, I would second everything that Glyn says.

But I’m going to be cynical and strategic, and urge Sir Tim to emphasise the importance of open data on a couple of areas that are close to the government’s hearts.

1. Stimulating growth in the economy.

You could compare a genuinely significant release of public data to an economic stimulus.

Like cutting VAT, only cheaper.

At minimal cost you could have a new raw material that startups and established media organisations alike could create new value out of. Some of those would create commercial implications far exceeding any revenue generated within government (as research recently suggested in relation to the comparably valuable Ordnance Survey data).

Repeat after me: jobs and money, jobs and money.

2. Efficiencies and passing on costs in the public sector

Samuel Butler’s Erewhon puts it particularly well:

You will sooner gain your end by “appealing to men’s pockets, in which they have generally something of their own, than to their heads, which contain for the most part little but borrowed or stolen property”

Public sector spending is going to drop whichever party is in power. Let’s play to that.

By opening up public data the government will effectively be able to pass on some development costs to willing volunteers who mash up the data in their own ways. The difference is that people will do this to their own agendas and for their own benefit.

But more importantly, the results of this experimentation – if supported and encouraged – should produce work that makes it more efficient to interact with public data and therefore public bodies. If I can use a slider to find out which schools are within 3 miles, that saves 20 minutes of someone answering a phonecall in the local education department. If I can have a Facebook app which tells other users how much money alcohol abuse is costing my local hospital, it might save the NHS a bob or two. You get the picture.

Oh yes, and it’s important for democracy, civic engagement and digital literacy

The limited data that’s available in the UK is an embarrassment. Imagine what MySociety could do with what’s available in the US.

Likewise, for all the talk of transparency, the recent announcement that Cabinet Papers and information relating to the Royal Family would be exempt from the Freedom of Information act is a backward step. Heather Brooke’s concerns proved right.

The cynic in me sees the appointment of Berners-Lee as an action intended to generate the illusion of movement – “We’re working on it”. But the Freedom of Information act is possibly the most positive contribution the Labour government has made to this country’s political health since it came to power, and not to follow through on promises made would be an enormous political mistake.

So I will add one request to my advice above: I would stress that any discussion of transparency acknowledges the importance of requiring any organisation using public funds to make their data public too. So much public work is outsourced to the private sector that it is particularly difficult to see whether public money is spent responsibly.

More at Podnosh, BBC, Emma Mulqueeny, Simon Dickson and Amused Cynicism.

Every news organisation should have a Datastore

8 Replies

You may know about The Guardian’s Datastore: a compilation of “publicly-available data for you to use free” that’s been around for a few months now. You know the sort of thing: university tables; MPs’ expenses; tax paid by the FTSE 100.

It has already produced some great work from what I once described as the “Technician” variant of distributed journalism.

But a column by Charles Arthur recently was the first example I’ve seen of Datastore being used for, well, more ordinary data – the sort of information journalists deal with every week. Here’s how it appeared in print:

“I dug up the figures from the UK music industry: the British record industry’s trade association (the BPI), and the UK games industry (via its trade body, Elspa) as well as the DVD industry (through the UK Film Council and the British Video Association). The results are over on the Guardian Data Store (http://bit.ly/data01), because they are the sort of numbers that should be available to everyone to chew over.

“What did I find? Total spending has grown – but music spending is being squeezed. The games industry – hardware and software – has grown from £1.4bn in 1999 (the year Napster started, and the music business stood rabbit-transfixed) to £4.04bn in 2008. That’s 12% annual compound growth. You’d kill for an endowment like that. Even DVD sales and rental take a £2.5bn bite out of consumers’ available funds, double that of 1999.

“So the music industry’s deadliest enemy isn’t filesharing – it’s the likes of Nintendo, Microsoft and Sony, and a zillion games publishers.”

That link (which frustratingly isn’t active in the online article) takes you to a Datablog post by Arthur which in turn links to a rather simple spreadsheet.

And it’s the simplicity that I think is important.

It’s one thing to link to huge datasets that benefit from lots of eyeballs looking for stories, or perming the data in different ways.

But it’s something else to link to the more everyday figures journalists deal with; to show your sums, in short.

Is this a natural extension of the blogging culture of linking to your sources? I think it is. And the more journalists get used to publishing their work on the likes of Google Spreadsheets, the better journalism we will get.

So why aren’t more journalists doing it? And why aren’t more news organisations providing a place for them to do it? Or are they? I’d love to know of any other individual or organisational examples.

I smell a government rat in my news

4 Replies

As traditional media outlets close down, the relative importance of non-market players becomes more important.

Governments around the world were quick to see the opportunities for their news agencies. From Xinhua (China) to ITAR-TASS (Russia), from AFP (half of its budget comes from state subscriptions) to Voice of America, governments are trying to shape the world’s public opinion.

The coverage of Gaza by Al Jazeera is a case in point. They produced quality journalism no other outlet could dream of. Now, viewers should keep in mind that money for such newsgathering comes straight from the pocket of the Emir of Qatar. Believe me, I’m sure Al Jazeera’s journalists keep that in mind too.

To help you measure the amount of government-funded journalism, I built this little app, I smell a government rat in my news. Just type in any query and you’ll see the share of articles produced with state funds. Continue reading →

Interactive presentation tool Flowgram to close (some suggested alternatives)

3 Replies

It seems the recession has bitten Flowgram before it even got into its stride. The service, which allowed you to record notes and audio narration on top of webpages and other material, had obvious applications for journalism (slideshows, tutorials, blogging, training etc.), but it seems we’ll have to look elsewhere.

An email from the service says:

“Today is a sad day for us. We have decided to terminate the Flowgram service as of the end of the month (June 30th, 2009). The service received excellent reviews and had an enthusiastic core user base. However, we were not able to demonstrate (especially in these economic times) that Flowgrams would ever be prevalent enough for us to adequately monetize the business, either though ads or subscriptions. This is obviously very disappointing, but building the Flowgram platform was a lot of fun, and it was wonderful to see how many of you used our tool to express yourselves in a deep and meaningful way.

“Although you won’t be able to play your Flowgrams after the end of the month, you can export them to video by clicking “share” from the website or “more sharing options” from the Flowgram player and scrolling down to the export to video section. It is very important, if you wish to keep your content, that you export to video and download the video by the end of the month. Please let us know at support@flowgram.com if you have any difficulties doing this.”

Alternative services

There isn’t any service I can think of that allows you to narrate live webpages in the same way. Diigo does allow you to bookmark and annotate webpages (and export to Delicious), and there are screencasting tools like GoView, Jing and Screentoaster. Then there are webconferencing tools, some of which allow you to record what you’re doing on screen.

But if you can think of any specific tools, or have had good or bad experiences with some (most of the above I haven’t tried), let me know.

Making money from content online – presentation

24 Replies

Here’s a presentation I made yesterday at the Fazeley Digital event. It’s intentionally provocative – and I’m sure you’re intelligent enough to read the real points I’m making here. Anyway, comments welcome.

Making Money from content online

View more OpenOffice presentations from Paul Bradshaw.

Foreign reporting in the digital age

12 Replies

There is very little that qualifies as better foreign reporting than a story by a Robert Kaplan or a Dan McDougall. It’s not a 2-minute soundbite from a television camera on broadcast news or a ten-thousandth reiteration of an Associated Press story. It’s hardcore investigative journalism that usually comes after months if not years of living in a region, interacting with its denizens, and observing livelihoods.

Unfortunately, in a flailing journalism world, where international bureaus are far from cost effective for major news organizations and foreign correspondents are fast becoming their most dispensable employees, this breed of reporters is dwindling.

The good news – if there was ever one in journalism these days – is that new media is taking up the slack. There is a whole new host of Web sites that are dedicating themselves to reporting major issues from different parts of the world; many of these sites are implementing innovative ways to gather information from around the globe, and are forming robust online communities while they’re at it. Continue reading →

In defence of paywalls (a thought experiment)

Turning around a tanker

If you work in a news organisation this is the institutional position: your whole structure is built around selling and distributing 2 things: advertising; and platforms filled with content (newspapers).

Now, when the first (and main) revenue stream goes, what do you do? Do you take a long-view gamble on something that requires you to restructure the culture of your organisation? Or do you go with route of trying, somehow, to get people to pay for content alone?

Seen alone, that may look like a flawed strategy. Your product is perishable, the customers have already paid for the platform, and you don’t control the distribution.

But the people you have to convince in your organisation believe their work is worth paying for. Do you lose time and money convincing them otherwise, or do you move fast because time isn’t something you have to spend?

Do you come up with an idea that requires investment and change – which also takes time – or do you come up with one which adjusts the existing model cheaply – and quickly – and is more likely to bring in some money, even if not at the levels which might secure the long-term future of the organisation?

Do you come up with an idea that looks to protect what revenues you have?

When you’re driving a tanker and you see a big rock ahead – do you ask everyone on the ship to rebuild it as an aeroplane? Or do you start steering away in the hope that your part of the tanker will somehow avoid the worst?

Sometimes we need to make mistakes twice. Sometimes things change enough to make it work second time round. Sometimes it’s in the execution and not the concept. And sometimes things need to get worse before they get better.

What happens next

I can see a number of things happening as a result of news organisations charging for content:

First, it will put organisations like the BBC, NPR, ProPublica and (to a lesser extent) Guardian in a strong position to claim they are providing a public service and appeal for, retain, or increase, public and donor funding. Among all of the mercenary rhetoric it’s worth remembering that news has a civic and democratic value as well as a commercial one.
Second, it will strengthen the ability of any organisation that has free content to attract larger visitor numbers and therefore higher advertising revenue. In effect, the paywalled news organisations will be giving up on at least part of their advertising, which will actually make it easier for other news organisations to make advertising viable.
(And yes, paywalls may well be the final nail in the coffin for some companies – it’s fair to say that advertising revenue is now so thinly spread that it will not support the number of media outlets it once did. Let’s not extend that misery. Some news organisations have already lost.)
Third, it should put pressure on paywalled news organisations to create unique, valuable content that people are willing to pay for. That’s a very different dynamic to filling column inches with a roundup of what’s happened in the past 24 hours. And it’s a very different commercial context to the one that led to only 12% of stories in the quality press being generated by reporters.
Fourth, it will most likely force news organisations to look beyond content alone and towards providing services like those that have given some creative news organisations profit margins of nearly 30 percent.
Fifth, for that reason we might discover some models that actually work. And we’ll discover which ones don’t. It’s never as simple as ‘Paywalls don’t work’. History may suggest it’s not a gamble that’s likely to pay off, but there may still be a black swan out there.
And finally, it will clear the way for independent media companies and startups to do more with their own content and services, and more agile business models. They will have the luxury of starting from scratch, without debts to service, stakeholders to satisfy, or cultures to rebuild.

So when the alternative is a slow, passive agonising death, let’s stop fussing about hypotheticals and let the Great Paywall Experiment begin.

How the web changed the economics of news – in all media

62 Replies

UPDATE (Oct 9 2012): Following the reviews of a collection of journalism students, as well as other topical events, I’ve written a follow-up piece here.

Listening to news executives talk about micropayments, Kindles, public subsidies, micropayments, collusion, blocking Google and anything else that might save their businesses, it occurs to me that they may have missed some developments in, ah, well, the past ten years. For those and anyone else who is interested, I offer the following primer on how things have changed.

Any attempt to create a viable news operation needs to recognise and take advantage of these changes. I will probably have missed some – I’m hoping you can add them.

UPDATE: Jay Rosen suggests reading this post alongside this one by David Sull: “newspapers are essentially a logistics business that happens to employ journalists”. He’s right – it makes some great points.

1. Atomisation of news consumption

In the physical world news came as a generic package. You had your politics with your sport; finance news next to film reviews. You might buy a paper for one match report. No longer.

It’s probably no coincidence that majority news consumption recently shifted from regular consumption to sporadic ‘grazing‘.

2. Measurability of users

If you placed an ad on page 3 in a newspaper with a circulation of 100,000 or a broadcast watched by 5million, you didn’t think about the readers who only bought that paper for the sport; or the viewers who popped out to put the kettle on – and that’s before we talk about circulation figures inflated by the assumption that every paper was read by 3 or 4 people.

Online you know exactly how many have looked at a specific page. Not only that, you know exactly how many have clicked on an ad. And you know exactly how many made a purchase (etc.) as a result.

There’s more: you know what page the user was coming from and went to; you know what search terms they were using; you know what country they are in, how high spec their computer; and depending on how much data they’re provided, a whole lot more besides.

There are two huge implications of this measurability (which many advertisers are only just waking up to).

Firstly, advertisers expect more. Online, advertising has moved from a print/broadcast model of paying per thousand viewers (CPM) to paying per thousand clicks (CPC) to paying per action – i.e. purchases, etc. (CPA).

Secondly, it means that editors and managers now know in much more detail not only what readers actually read – but what they want to read (what they are searching for). My name’s Britney Spears, by the way.

3. Mutually conflicting business models

In print you could have your cover price and your ads; online, any paywall means vastly reduced readership because you are cutting out distribution channels – not just Google, but the readers themselves who would otherwise pass it on, link to it and blog about it. You either square that circle, or look for other revenue streams.

4. Reduced cost of newsgathering and production

The technologies were dropping in price long before the internet – satellite technologies , desktop publishing. But the web – and now mobile – technology has reduced the cost of newsgathering, production and distribution to almost nil. And new tools are being made all the time that reduce the cost in time even further. When publishing is as easy as making a phonecall, that causes problems for any business that has to maintain or pay debts on costly legacy production systems.

UPDATE: Robert Brand takes me to task on this one in the comments but also on his blog, where I have responded in more detail.

5. End of scarcity of time and space

Sometimes people need reminding of the basic laws of supply and demand. From a limited availability of journalism to more than you can ever read, any attempt to ‘sell content’ must come up against this basic problem.

6. Devaluation of certain types of journalism

If a reader wants a book review most will go to Amazon. Music? Your social networks, Last.fm, iTunes or MySpace. Sport – any forum. Anyone producing journalism in those or similar areas faces a real issue.

7. The end of monopolies

Just as the scarcity of space has been broken; the scarcity of distribution networks has been blown apart. To distribute information in a pre-web era required significant investment. To distribute information in the web era requires an email account or a mobile phone. Social networks are more powerful and efficient than delivery vans, and you don’t need to sell a certain amount of information to make them viable.

Oh yes, and that makes news even more perishable than it was before.

Meanwhile, the monopoly on advertising has gone. Where before an advertiser might have had a choice between you and a local freesheet, now they can choose from dozens of local media outlets, national directories, international outlets, search engines, social networks, or spending money on becoming media producers themselves. This competition has driven the cost down and innovation up. What have you done to stay competitive?

8. Cutting out middlemen

Because anyone can publish and anyone can distribute, retailers can talk to customers directly. If Threshers can release a money off voucher directly to customers and it become wildly (too) successful, why should they advertise in a newspaper or magazine? If councils can publish news on their own website, or indeed publish and distribute their own publications, why should they publish announcements in a newspaper? If Coca-Cola can create a ‘brand experience’ on its website, and gather consumer data at the same time, why should they limit themselves to 30 seconds in the middle of Britain’s Got Talent?

9. Creating new monopolies

Google rules this space, not you. Amazon rules this space. iTunes rules this space. eBay rules this space. Facebook rules this space. Craigslist rules this space. If you want to thrive in the new environments you have to understand the contexts within which users operate. Search Engine Optimisation is one aspect of that. Social Media Marketing should be another. Understand how one website’s domination of a particular space of the web impacts on your strategies, and acknowledge you no longer control your own destiny. Yep, Google stole the delivery trucks and Amazon stole the newsstand. Oh, and you gave away a whole lot more too.

10. Digitisation and convergence

When everything is digital, new things become possible. Audio, video, text, photography, animation – all becomes 1 and 0. You need to understand the efficiencies that makes possible, from broadcasting live from your mobile phone to releasing images on a Creative Commons licence or publishing raw data to allow users to add value through mashups. The value of your organisation lies not just within its walls but beyond them too.

11. The rise of the PR industry

The PR industry is often overlooked as an economic influence on the news industry. Its first influence lies in the way it has provided cheap copy for news organisations, meaning an increased reliance by news organisations on fake events, reports and releases. This will become increasingly problematic as the PR industry starts to cut out the middleman and appeal directly to audiences.

Secondly, the PR industry has an enormous effect on recruitment and retaining of talent in the news industry. In short, news organisations have become a training ground for the PR industry. Journalists who cannot live on newspaper wages have been leaving for PR for some time now, meaning increased costs of training and recruitment (partly because there are few older journalists able to train informally). Furthermore, good graduates of journalism schools are often recruited by PR even before they enter the news industry, meaning the news industry has a problem attracting the very brains that could save them.

12. A new currency

Oh yes, and that money thing? It has competition. The rise of social capital is a key development that must be considered. Anyone who thinks nonprofessional media is not important because it doesn’t have a ‘brand’ or because people will lose interest, doesn’t understand the dynamics of social capital. Many people read blogs and other UGC because they trust the person, not the ‘brand’; many people self-publish because of the benefits in terms of reputation, knowledge and connections. And many people link to news articles or contribute user generated content because a journalist invested social capital in their communities, or an organisation built a platform that helped users create it.

That’s it. Unless you can come up with some more…?

What’s been happening with Help Me Investigate

12 Replies

It’s finally been announced that my project Help Me Investigate is being funded by 4iP and Screen West Midlands.

Help Me Investigate (HMI) is a platform for crowdsourcing investigative journalism. It allows anyone to submit a question they want to investigate – “How much does my hospital make from parking charges?” “What happened to the money that was allocated to my local area?” “Why was that supermarket allowed to be built opposite another supermarket?” …

But more importantly, it then enables users to mobilise support behind that question; and to pursue it.

HMI attempts to address the biggest issue facing journalism: how do we save the good stuff? The persistent slow-brewed journalism that was previously subsidised (if you were lucky) by more commercially friendly instant journalism, but which stands to lose most as commercial content becomes disaggregated and reaggregated, and audiences and their activity measurable.

How do you support Slow Journalism?

Help Me Investigate is an attempt to use the qualities of the web to pursue investigative journalism. There are various aspects to this (which I’ll be exploring, along with others, in the Help Me Investigate blog), but fundamentally it comes down to this:

The web allows you to ‘atomise’ processes – break them down into their constituent parts. The site breaks apart investigative – often campaigning – journalism allowing users to contribute in specific and different ways. This is not citizen journalism – it is micro-volunteering.
Investigative journalism is about more than just ‘telling a story’; it is about enlightening, empowering and making a positive difference. And the web offers enormous potential here – but users must be involved in the process and have ownership of the agenda.
The web is more tool than destination – successful business models rest on creating a platform
Likewise, the web is more of a communication medium than a storytelling one; therefore, we are focusing on communication and community rather than stories; process, rather than product.
We are also focused on making the process itself rewarding, not just the end result. Journalism is a by-product.
Online, failure is cheap; unlike a traditional news organisation, HMI doesn’t need the majority of investigations to ‘succeed’; in fact, failure is built into the design as a necessary ingredient of the site’s overall success. If you want to budget for it, put it under ‘training’ and ‘R&D’.
Do what you do best and link to the rest: the site is networked – we’re not trying to be or host all things but will be pointing elsewhere more often than not

I could go on, and I will in the blog. But I think those points are core. I don’t expect this project will have all the answers, but I think we are asking the right questions, at the right time.

Now, it’s worth pointing out that the idea of ‘investigative journalism’ covered here is a broad one – indeed, we have no idea of predicting what questions will be pursued: the agenda will be determined almost entirely by users (including journalists) and topics could range from the very personal, hyperlocal to more national questions. That alternative to a mainstream editorial agenda will be interesting in itself: how many questions will we get that newspapers would find unappealing?

So what’s happening now?

We’re building a very rough and ready frame within which users can play. How that develops depends in large part on what the users need to do – we’ll be doing much of the development as it is being used.

Already a handful of people have used the site in its closed test form, and in the following weeks quite a few more will start to go through it. Then the site will be opened in a semi-closed beta.

To begin with we’re focusing our personal efforts on Birmingham, although people elsewhere will be able to use the site.

The site is being built by Webby Award-winning developer Stef Lewandowski, while the community side of things is headed up by Nick Booth. Both have been crucial contributors to the development of HMI. Joining us behind the site are community support Paul Henderson and investigative journalist Heather Brooke, author of the wonderful guide to FOI Your Right To Know. They will be suggesting and supporting activities to users who submit or join investigations on the site.

It’s taken 18 months to get to this point, and the hard work starts now. If you want to be involved in any capacity let me know.

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.