Tag Archives: myspace

BASIC principles of online journalism: A is for Adaptability

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In the second part of this five-part series, I explore how adaptability has not only become a key quality for the journalist – but for the information they deal with on a daily basis too. This will form part of a forthcoming book on online journalism – comments very much invited.

The adaptable journalist

A key skill for any journalist in the new media age, whatever medium they’re working in, is adaptability. The age of the journalist who only writes text, or who only records video, or audio, is passing. Today, the newspaper and magazine, the television and the radio programme all have an accompanying website. And that website is, increasingly, filled with a whole range of media, which could include any of the following:

  • (Hyper)Text
  • Audio
  • Video
  • Still images
  • Audio slideshows
  • Animation
  • Flash interactivity
  • Database-driven elements
  • Blogs
  • Microblogging/Text/email alerts (Twitter)
  • Community elements – forums, wikis, social networking, polls, surveys
  • Live chats
  • Mapping
  • Mashups

This does not mean that the online journalist has to be an expert in all of these fields, but they should have media literacy in as many of these fields as possible: in other words, a good online journalist should be able to see a story and think:

  • ‘That story would have real impact on video’;
  • or: ‘A Flash interactive could explain this better than anything else’;
  • or ‘This story would benefit from me linking to the original reports and some blog commentary’;
  • or ‘Involving the community in this story would really engage, and hopefully bring out some great leads’. Continue reading →

Independent music magazine shows a web-savvy business model

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A former student of mine, Gareth Main, has launched his own magazine, and on the whole I’m pretty impressed with his business model and online approach. Bearded Magazine covers the independent music industry, is free and distributed through shops, and already has a website and (well designed) MySpace page. Users can subscribe to receive email updates, view online PDFs (with hyperlinks – although these could be better signposted), sign up to an RSS feed, talk on the forum, browse the photo gallery (by band, venue, category or photographer – nice touch), and listen to podcasts. The user can also order a physical copy of the mag through a Paypal link

Gareth takes up the story: Continue reading →

Speech to the 8th Vienna Globalisation Symposium

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Last week I was in Vienna speaking to the most diverse audience I’m ever likely to address: 120 or so people from organisations including the European Commission, Amnesty International, the European Space Agency, the United Nations, Princeton University and the World Trade Organisation, as well as students from universities in Serbia, Ukraine, Italy, Poland, Germany, Austria, and America.

They were there to attend the Vienna Globalisation Symposium, and I was speaking as part of the first panel, on ‘Web 2.0: The return of the internet’. The topic of the presentation was Blogs and journalism – click on the link for the Word document. It’s 15-20 minutes long. I may upload audio and/or video later.

Virginia Tech: more on that ethics question

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I’m still not entirely comfortable with the way blogs/MySpace have been raided by journalists, despite Tony Harcup’s ‘public domain’ defence in my earlier post. The BBC Manchester blog puts it well:

“I’m told by people with years of experience in news journalism that there is nothing at all unique about dozens, perhaps hundreds, of journalists working the phones, sending emails and doing whatever they can to secure stories from the victims of tragic incidents such as this. Nothing unique, that is, other than the fact that because many of those approaches, including a particularly unfortunate one asking the blogger to “shoot” the journalist an email, are, like the blog itself, published there in public for everyone to see. And guess what, just as some LiveJournal users were upset at the use of the post by the mainstream media, some journalists weren’t too happy when they saw that lots of blogs were now quoting them.

“Onemanandhisdog makes an interesting point about the public yet private nature of LiveJournal posts that, I think, is quite worthy of discussion here. He writes:

“”I can’t help wondering if the nature of Livejournal is partly behind the outrage….the characteristic of Livejournal that triggered the creation of this blog was its community nature. Its system of “friends” and the “friends page” means that most Livejournals are read through Livejournal – it’s for talking to a circle of friends, not to the world at large. Barging into that community and asking for comment feels not unlike barging into a pub and asking somebody for comments.”

“Now sure, journalism has a long and dishonourable tradition of doorstopping the victims of tragedies. But in the digital age, the communities around the victims have voices to express their outrage at the media’s behaviour – and that’s what we’re seeing here.”

“I think it’s a valid point. People can and do use LiveJournal, Myspace, MSN spaces and the dozens of other social networking sites to publish content online. But, for many of them, it’s likely they do so only with the intention of reaching an audience consisting of their friends.”

MySpace News is here – what a disappointment

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Well, it’s not the RSS killer app I was hoping for, but more more a Digg clone, according to Journalism.co.uk:

“MySpace News apes Google News by using a search algorithm to automatically aggregate stories from sources around the world, placing them in a plethora of niche categories and 25 overarching topics.

“Like social news bookmarking websites Digg and MySpace [sic], the news service allows users to vote stories up and down the news agenda. But unlike the one-million strong technology-focused site Digg, MySpace’s debutante does not yet enable users to add their own stories to the system – a feature that was expected, according to previous early reports.”

This lack of control could be the death of MySpace News. Sounds like they’re relying heavily on the fact they have such a massive user base, but that user base can easily go elsewhere for news…

Virginia Tech shooting: another citizen journalism milestone?

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Poynter Online has a mind-boggling roundup of how students at Virginia Tech have told their story through mobile video, blogs, and forums. Unlike previous user generated content milestones like 9/11 and the Asian tsunami, this story took place in the heart of the new media generation, and the resulting coverage is more comprehensive, more accessible, and takes in more new media forms, including social networking. “Look at this collection from CNN’s I-Report.,” urges Poynter:

“Students text messaged one another while hiding under desks. Read some of those messages here.

“Some students are gathering on Facebook. CollegeMedia.com has a collection of cell pictures taken by students. More than 150 tribute groups have formed on Facebook.

“Other students went right to their blogs and wrote about what they saw.”

As this generation ages it’s reasonable to expect such coverage to become the norm, and this presents two challenges for journalists: 1) the need to develop the awareness of, and skills to find, this material; 2) in the face of such comprehensive and accessible first-person reporting, the need to develop new roles, perhaps as gatewatchers, facilitators and filters rather than reporters.

Then there’s a third issue: ethics. When reporting on the MySpace and Facebook content of murdered students, how far can journalists go? Is it OK to quote dead students’ ‘About Me’ sections? Channel 5 did so last night, including one who was summed up by her favourite flavour of ice cream and the fact that her “favourite colour is blue”.

Tony Harcup, a writer on journalism ethics, told me “my gut reaction is that it is perfectly acceptable to quote from the About Me sections that people have placed in the public domain. It’s not as if a journalist has broken into a dead person’s house and stolen their private diary.” But when we live our lives in the public domain, do our virtual selves have different rights? I have no answers, I’m just posing the question.

UPDATE: Shane Richmond includes these points in his blog. He slightly misunderstands my second point above, and I’ve posted a comment clarifying this.

UPDATE 2 (Apr 21 07): I’ve posted a further post on the ethics issue.

Express relaunches online, Star to follow

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Express website 19 April 07Journalism.co.uk reports on the relaunch of the Express, with the Daily Star to follow, including:

  • “unique content and an archive which allows readers to search past stories and the community areas of the site.
  • “a string of blogs from its Sunday and Daily journalists.
  • “MYExpress facility that enables users to have their own space on the site. This area can be to personalised by filtering some content, such as weather and horoscopes, and uploading pictures. It will also be possible for users to browse through other users’ profiles.”
  • And “a deal had been done with a video supplier and that video and podcasts would be added to the mix in the coming weeks once the initial launch was completed.”

Sounds pretty good for a Desmond-owned publication (not difficult, admittedly), although in reality it’s a website that looks like it was created by someone who was once told what this web 2.0 thing is all about, but wasn’t really listening. Or, in other words, new media through an old media hack’s eyes.

The blogs are basically opinion columns (no links), I can’t find the “community areas”, and of course there’s no video yet. MYExpress is the most impressive – I can imagine Express readers too dazzled by MySpace social networking away with other Disgusteds, although there’s not much to it apart from a blogging service, personalised homepage and ability to search other profiles. Oh, and the online journalists are ghettoised in a separate team.

Anyway, welcome to the 21st century, Express.

MySpace News? Everyone else is doing it…

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Terry Heaton’s PoMo Blog is saying that MySpace has a news offering planned in the next few months “according to inside sources and the company’s own sales materials”:

  • “MySpace News takes News to a whole new level by dynamically aggregating real-time news and blogs from top sites around the Web
  • “Creates focused, topical news pages that users can interact and engage with throughout their day
  • “MySpace is making the news social, allowing users to:
    Rate and comment on every news item that comes through the system
    Submit stories they think are cool and even author pieces from their MySpace blog
  • “MySpace users previously had to leave the site to find comprehensive news, gossip, sporting news, etc. With MySpace News, we bring the news to them!

It will be interesting to see what MySpace can bring to the idea – it’s already been tried by The Sun (MySun) and, more recently, USAToday (as Heaton explains in his post), but it’s one thing for a news organisation to try social networking; quite another for a social networking company to try news. I’m hoping for intelligent agents that suggest RSS feeds, or automatically subscribe you to your friends’ blog feeds (I’ve never used the MySpace blog but that might persuade me otherwise), or their RSS feeds, in an Amazon ‘people who liked this also like this’ kind of way.

Given the critical mass of MySpace, could this be the tipping point (I hate that phrase) to bring RSS to the mainstream?

UPDATE: Matthew Ingram has posted his take on the announcement, with some interesting questions:

  • It “could give News Corp. lots of ideas about pushing its news content into such an aggregator, giving it priority of some kind, etc.”
  • “Will News Corp. use its MySpace News as a kind of jungle drum, to pick up stories that might be under the radar?” (my view: sadly, I don’t think so, as this assumes that News Corp. sees journalism as a priority, rather than making money)
  • “News Corp. is also trying to get other video content owners to bring their stuff to MySpace.”