Announcing JEEcamp09 – an unconference for journalism experimenters

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JEEcamp09

JEEcamp09

On Friday May 8 2009 I’ll be hosting JEEcamp09 – an unconference (or barcamp) for journalism experimenters.

Last year’s JEEcamp was great. This year we’re doing it all again, but with some cute ideas to stir things up.

These include: 

  • Open mic for business models for news: Attendees are invited to explain how they think news can support itself online. 5 min limit.
  • Speed networking: attendees get a minute each with a random other attendee to swap cards and explain what they do.
  • Musical chairs panel discussion: Begins as a standard panel discussion – but once a panel member has responded to a question, they are replaced by someone else in the ‘audience’, raffle-style.

And there will be other ideas as we go along. If you have any other ideas for stirring up the traditional format, I’d love to hear them.

The day will be opened by Kyle Macrae, the man behind one of the original new media journalism startups, Scoopt. That was sold to Getty in 2007, who closed it down last month. Kyle will be talking about his experiences of getting Scoopt off the ground, and why he thinks Getty failed to make it viable.

After that, the really interesting stuff is in the heads of the attendees, how we – and you – get it out. 

You can get tickets at http://jeecamp09.eventbrite.com/ – and add your comments below as to how you’d like this to pan out.

Quote Twitter conversations with QuoteURL (Something for the Weekend #15)

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Following on from the previous Something for the Weekend, Twickie, which allows you to collect responses to a question posted on Twitter, this tool allows you to present a conversation – with impressive control. 

QuoteURL allows you to drag and drop (or copy and paste) Twitter tweet URLs to reconstruct a conversation. Continue reading →

3 weeks in: launching a Midlands environmental news site

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3 weeks ago my class of online journalism students were introduced to the website they were going to be working on: BirminghamRecycled.co.uk – environmental news for Birmingham and the West Midlands.

The site has been built by final year journalism degree student Kasper Sorensen, who studied the online journalism module last year.

In building and running the service Kasper has done a number of clever, networked things I thought I should highlight. They include:

  • Creating a Delicious network for the site – every journalist in the team has a Delicious account; this gathers together all of the useful webpages that journalists are bookmarking
  • Tweetgrid of all journalists’ tweets – again, every journalist has a Twitter account. This pulls them all together.
  • Twitter account @bhamrecycled
  • Kasper sent the whole team an OPML file of subscriptions to RSS feeds of searches for every Midlands area and environmentally related keywords. In other words, journalists could import this into their Google Reader and at a stroke be monitoring any mention of certain key words (e.g. ‘pollution’, ‘recycling’) in Birmingham areas.
  • He also shared a Google calendar of relevant events

The site itself is clever too.

  • The About page has a list of all contributing journalists with individual RSS feeds.
  • In addition, each author has a link to their own profile page which not only displays their articles but pulls Twitter tweets, Delicious bookmarks and blog posts.

Kasper wanted to explicitly follow a Mashable-style model rather than a traditional news service: he felt an overly formal appearance would undermine his attempts to build a community around the site.

And community is key. When unveiling the site to the journalists Kasper made the following presentation – a wonderful distillation of how journalists need to approach news in a networked world:

Do Daily Express search suggestions reveal editorial agenda?

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Which comes first? A newspaper’s agenda or its readers’ interest in those subjects? The search suggestions at Express.co.uk give a revealing insight into either what its readers are searching for or what the Express wants them to be interested in.

The screenshot below, first published on this blog, is a photomontage of the search box on the Express site. Every time you reload the Express search page, a different ‘example search’ is shown. The list seems to suggest a certain editorial agenda …

Daily Express search suggestions

Daily Express search suggestions

Continue reading →

#CollegeJourn comes to Europe

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The widely respected #CollegeJourn is coming to Europe. #CollegeJourn was established as the real-time online discussion for members of the college journalism community in the US. But it runs in the early hours of Monday mornings, which often stops people from this side of the Atlantic attending.

So Sunderland journalism student Josh Halliday, editor for www.injournalism.co.uk, is launching a chat for Europe at a more amenable hour. #CollegeJourn Europe will launch this Sunday 22nd March at 8pm GMT.

Josh said: “It’s  a great chance for those in journalism education who are either worried or excited about the state of journalism today to come along and see what others think.”

If you want to share some ideas for the discussion in advance, you can send any topic suggestions towards the #collegejourn hashtag on Twitter, to Josh directly or the deceptively named @florida_mike. To read more about plans and topics that might come up then take a read over at Josh’s blog.

The mission of #CollegeJourn is to provide a meaningful and resourceful forum of conversation for college journalists. University journalists, journalism professors, and journalism professionals, are all welcome. Josh is hoping to attract some big names in j-education to the opening debate. The chat takes place in Meebo. Put it in your diary now, and spread the word.

External links: the 8 stages of linking out denial

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Do you have a link problem? You can handle linking. It’s just one post/article/page without a link. You can link whenever you want to. Or can you?

Where are you on this scale …? (Originally posted here.)

1 Don’t link to anyone

Link to other sites? But people will leave my site. They won’t click on my ads. They won’t read other pages. I’ll leak page rank. No way.

2 Add URLs but don’t make them hyperlinks

OK, that’s a bit ridiculous. If I’m talking about other organisations, I can’t pretend they don’t have a website. I know, I’ll put web addresses in. But i won’t make them hyperlinks. Brilliant, yes?

3 Add an ‘external links’ box

Even I’m finding that no hyperlink thing annoying when I go back to an old page and have to copy and paste the damn things.

I suppose I should have some links on my page. I’ll put them in a box. Over there (down a bit …). I’m going to use some sort of internal redirect or annoying javascript, though, to make sure I don’t pass any page rank. Mwah, hah hah.

4 Put some links in the copy

I don’t seem to be getting many inbound links. I guess I’m not playing fair. I know, I’ll sort out my workflow so that it’s possible to add links easily inside the actual copy. But I’m still not passing any pagerank. I’m going to put “rel=nofollow” on every link.

5 Give my users some google juice

Commenters seem thin on the ground. Maybe I’ll let them link to their own sites. I’ll use some annoying javascript to hide the links from google though. Most of my commenters are probably spammers, and I can’t trust them to police their own community, after all.

6 Link when I have to. And remove nofollow and any other annoying tricks

That seemed to make everyone happier. There are a few proper links on my pages. And people seem to want to link to me now that I’m playing fair with my links.

7 Acknowledge my sources

Oops. Spoke to soon. Been outed as pinching someone else’s idea and not attributing it. From now on, I’m going to make sure I always link to everyone I should.

8 Enlightenment: Make linking part & parcel of what I do

Internet. Inter as in inter-connected. Net as in network.

I get it now. I’m going to become a trusted source for information and advice, AND of what else people should read elsewhere on the internet. Blimey, more and more people are visiting my site and linking to it. Continue reading →