Cabinet forum on local news: Lots of Qs looking for As
Some notes from this week’s discussion at the cabinet forum debate and dinner. It was an event with unusual format and, by way of explanation, the agreed rules around covering it are that all debates can be blogged, tweeted etc. without individual quotes being attributed to individual people.
In a variation of Chatham House rules, those present can also be identified and it was refreshing to see such a cross-section of voices represented at sessions hosted, by culture minister Sion Simon.
Newspaper reps including myself and The Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger able to sit around the same table as bloggers such as Jeff Jarvis via skype, hyperlocal activists including co-chair William Perrin, industry analysts, civil servants, broadcasters, commentators, people with experience of the local news landscape both in the UK and US.
I make no apology that what I’ve noted here are things of specific interest to me, and are in no way an attempt to provide the definitive low-down of the event.
Others have broadened the experience further and there’s links here. These are my notes while on the train north with the addition of this excellent set of slides from industry analysts Enders.
• What do we call these people? I’ve blogged on this issue before and it keeps being raised at the sort of events I attend. Because someone wants to engage with a news investigation, write a blog or post about a community event doesn’t necessarily mean they want to be a ‘citizen journalist’. Some do of course, but many are simply using the wonderful tools at their disposal as a means to another end – better community, organise an event, change the world or whatever. Do they even need a specific pigeon-hole to fit into? Can they just be people? Engaged citizens? Is the publication part of their output really the most important element in what they do?
• How do large institutions, such as the government or a major broadcaster, ensure these hyperlocal voices are heard? At present there’s no association, guild, group, etc. to represent their widely differing interests. Should there be one, and if there was, how could it be constituted to be truly representative and inclusive? What a challenge that would be, but without it, some of the proposals in this area such as IFNCs risk becoming a non-inclusive consolidation of giants.
• Who should be treated as a journalist? Relates again to the first point but, for those people who do want to be treated as journalists, how do they get access to sources of information? This issue has already seen some plainly daft responses such as councils providing different tables in the same council chamber etc. I always go back to my first Penguin Book of Journalism here which carries wise words for the reporter starting out reminding them that they have all the rights and responsibilities of a citizen. No more, no less. Access is an area where any journalist with legal/public administration training could assist by helping challenge the petty bureaucracies in town halls. But that raises the point again – does training make a ‘proper’ journalist if so what’s the qualification? Or is it experience – if so which institutions count and how long does it have to be to qualify? Or is it an NUJ card?- so are we back to the closed shop? Does it require being employed by a publication registered as a newspaper? Well that’s plainly not sustainable. As journalists we’re not exactly being very transparent with this are we?
• Who will report from the council chambers and courts if local newspapers close or retract so much that staff are unable to fulfil this function? And there lies the BIG question. What will be the long-term impact on democracy? Will councils use that situation as justification for uncritical publications extolling the virtues of their services? People at the forum and generally, in my experience, seem to agree this sort of reporting is a Good Thing. But what’s it going to take to ensure that continues – just how Good a Thing is it? Subsidy? Tax-breaks? Platform agnostic service provision to all as outlined by PA at the Digital Editors’ Network later in the day? This is such a huge issue for the minister to wrestle with……any thoughts, contributions welcome.
links for 2009-10-28
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because everyone likes a list, I’ve created this follow up post almost one year on. By no means is it exhaustive and it’s very likely I have missed some people out (I mean, really, it’d be quite difficult to find every UK journo given Twitter’s so mainstream these days).
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n this article, I’ve pulled together resources, tips and advice that can help you identify influential bloggers and other social media users and develop strategies to engage your targeted influencers in ways that will help you achieve your objectives. I’ve included a special section on Blogger outreach and relations as well. Finally, there’s a section on tools and lists to help you in your efforts.
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Well we could resign ourselves to adding them to the list of pages that we bookmark and visit. A bit like those regular calls we make to keep our contacts book fresh; no bad thing. But another solution is to use on of the many RSS services on the web to ‘scrape’ the page for content and convert it in to a feed.
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The Scottish Press as it stands is contracting in numbers. They have decided they can no longer justify the headcount which once ensured there was a district office north, east, south and west.
At least, not when the internet means they can have a freelance or citizen journalist deliver pretty much the same story at a fraction of the cost.
All this leaves a vacuum.
Maybe, just maybe, such a co-operative could be just the thing to fill it.
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Whether it's uploading photos and videos of my travels or tweeting about burning tacos in the kitchen, I know how my gadgets work and have developed a workflow that suits me by learning through playing. You'll be more agile as a mobile journalist if you know your way around the tools and the technology. The last thing you want to do on a breaking story is to be learning how to use your phone on the run.
Social media apps and content sharing platforms
If your media organisation issues you with a smart phone and has innovative "Q" type tech boffins who have developed systems for you to upload your materials direct from the field with one push of a button, great – you're lucky. But if you're working independently, you'll need to harness social media apps and platforms for sharing content that are free or low cost. So along with launching your own blog, some of these web and phone apps/clients would be a good starting point to explore.
links for 2009-10-27
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Every six months, the Audit Bureau of Circulations releases data about newspapers and how many people subscribe to them. And then everyone writes a story about how some newspapers declined some amount over the year previous. Well, that's no way to look at data! It's confusing—and it obscures larger trends. So we've taken chunks of data for the major newspapers, going back to 1990, and graphed it, so you can see what's actually happened to newspaper circulation.
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Whilst pulling together resources for video (I’m expecting the students to do a lot of reading around the basic technical stuff) I came across the Flip video spotlight site.
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Adding reporters' e-mail addresses at the bottom of stories responds to frequent reader exasperation over not knowing how to contact Post journalists. But already, several readers have complained to me that reporters haven't responded to their e-mails. It's a chronic problem in newsrooms. Many busy reporters are overwhelmed by e-mails. But too many simply refuse, or are too lazy, to respond. With newspaper survival at stake, that's suicidal.
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There are some tools to help you learn what people are saying about your brand:
• Cymfony is very good to search what people say about your brand.
• ViralTracker is for tracking the viral spreading of video.
• Delicious is good to find the tags of your brands.
• Tweetdeck allows you to have a quick view of what is going on in Twitter on an individual level.
• TweetFunnel allows multiple users to manage a simple Twitter account.
• Tweetmeme tracks the links that were spread around Twitter.
• Twitterfall is good to follow a certain topic. It is set up on the huge screen in the Daily Telegraph's office now. -
With the help of people on Twitter, I’ve compiled the 10 alternative rules for covering magistrates courts – the things anyone, hyperlocal journalist or rookie reporter should find helpful in the quest to get the most out of court
links for 2009-10-26
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companies need to identify their conversationalists – and all have them already – and use them as their social media first line, as it were.
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the report found that while bloggers read other blogs they do not consider them a substitute for other news sources and the majority do not consider online media more important than traditional media. However, 31% don’t think newspapers will survive the next ten years.
links for 2009-10-24
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Blogging used to be a peripheral personal web activity – something you’d never tell people – but as the internet has become an important (dominant, even?) part of everyday life, blogging has developed from being a personal narrative towards being an important way to communicate with the world (wide web).
links for 2009-10-23
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"Museum curators and print journalists have a lot in common, in that it is their skills that turn an amount of information into something worth giving a damn about."
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He understands that information is a conversation. He does not produce an article but more a process.
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This feels like some kind of emergency, and it is not clear to me that our legislators recognize that. The first instinct of journalists is to reject any kind of subsidy. I can well believe that instinct is more pronounced in the U.S. than in Europe. But print is declining faster than digital—particularly in a recession—can compensate for. There are things that societies need—including systematic coverage of public authorities—that new digital initiatives cannot yet adequately provide.
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This handbook is not intended as a collection of “rules”. Beyond the obvious, such as the cardinal sin of plagiarism, the dishonesty of fabrication or the immorality of bribe-taking, journalism is a profession that has to be governed by ethical guiding principles rather than by rigid rules. The former liberate, and lead to better journalism. The latter constrain, and restrict our ability to operate. What follows is an attempt to map out those principles, as guidance to taking decisions and adopting behaviours that are in the best interests of Reuters, our shareholders, our customers, our contacts, our readers and our profession.
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Mr. Downie and Mr. Schudson came up with six recommendations, which include tinkering with the tax structure to accommodate nonprofit status for news-gathering organizations, persuading philanthropic foundations to fill the funding gap in more permanent ways, involving universities in news gathering, and opening up databases to make them more useful for both pro and pro-am efforts.
links for 2009-10-19
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By bringing a contributing audience into our site and asking them to help us – using maps and images being added alongside observations and comments – the 'journalist as gatekeeper' would have been truly defunct.
Study to look at life after newspaper layoffs
It’s the story we are all more than familiar with, but is it the whole story? Newspapers layoffs have all too quickly become part of the fabric of life in regional journalism this year but what happens next is barely recorded.
Now academics at UCLAN and staff at journalism.co.uk are going to address this by carrying out a survey of laid-off journalists. Posting at the journalismleaders blog , Francois Nel explains that the online survey is looking for volunteers and that information received is confidential:
“We want to know how about your experiences of being laid off and how you have adapted in your personal and professional life since leaving the newspaper. We’re also considering the gap in knowledge and experience you have left behind.”
The survey takes about 10 mins to complete and can be accessed here.
Beatblogging – what is it?
There’s been some interesting reaction to the job advertisements put out this week by The Guardian for the project I’m involved in.
Beatblogger isn’t a job title used much here in the UK as yet, and it’s prompted some common questions in the comments section of the initial news story about Guardian local, and elsewhere, which I thought I’d pick up here.
In addition, any potential applicants are invited to put their questions during a forum I’m taking part in about developing journalism roles which will be held next Thursday, October 22 between 1pm and 4pm at http://careers.guardian.co.uk/forums
Back to those points;
* Firstly, pay.
Although it’s normal practice for The Guardian not to state pay grades in its job ads (in common with many other news organisations), these are full-time paid positions.
* Are these bloggers, journalists?
All Media Scotland was one of those which asked if the term “beatblogger” was a new word for journalist. This is a role which has specific attributes and skills used to create a beat blog, a good definition of which is provided here by New York’s Prof Jay Rosen an extract from which states:
“Content-wise, a beat blog presents a regular flow of reporting and commentary in a focused area the beat covers; it provides links and online resources in that area, and it tracks the subject over time.”
For anyone interested in the specifics of what will be entailed, there’s detailed descriptions at the links at the bottom of the ads – this is the one for the Cardiff post, but the descriptions for Leeds and Edinburgh are just the same.
* What about experience?
This job could well appeal to experienced reporters with great contacts from traditional backgrounds but is just as likely to attract people who’ve set up community websites or blogs and have a passion for their locality. Rather than be too prescriptive about background, we’re asking people to demonstrate why they believe they would be successful in the role and how they feel equipped to cover the city.
Any potential applicants with further questions can log on to the forum debate next Thursday, October 22 between 1pm and 4pm at http://careers.guardian.co.uk/forums and it would be great to hear from any beatbloggers out there who want to share their experiences or offer any advice to potential applicants.
links for 2009-10-15
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I've also learned why sites that we're calling "hyperlocal" are difficult, and why I failed to get the site to grow the way I hoped it would. Permalink to this paragraph
I thought we could apply the same approach that worked in bootstrapping weblogs, RSS and podcasting for a local site. One or two people start writing about their personal experiences. A small audience develops. Debates, discussions follow. More perspectives. At every step you invite people to participate. You always ask for the people who used to be called the audience to become full participants. That's how the idea scales. As I said, it worked for blogging and related technologies. Permalink to this paragraph
Instead, what happened at InBerkeley.com is that the people thought we were running a news organization, and they did stories the way reporters do them. That can't possibly work, imho — for the same reason the news industry is in crisis. Permalink to this paragraph
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As a public interest service, I am including links below to any articles and resources I come across relating to the press gag injunction made by Carter Ruck in the interests of their client, Trafigura.
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But what about the 55% who said no? The BBC says they will try to 'redeploy' them where possible, but if that fails they will be made redundant when the move finally happens.
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Successful organisations will be willing to empower their audiences to contribute, to
create and to share media. Will cede power to audiences to gain engagement and respect.
They will be willing to let other voices to be heard. They will learn how to protect brand
integrity whilst entrusting their brand to others.
To a degree everyone is doing this, but the greatest success will come when an audience, long
treated with an oligipolist’s disdain, is treated with real respect and the contribution is seen
as a valued contribution. The simple fact is that young audiences – the future of every media
organisation, including the ABC – have the tools and now the experience and the expectation
to create and share media. -
All editorial content produced by journalists on its 12 papers will be automatically plotted on a Google map alongside advertising from that area.
The company believes the system is the first of its kind in the UK.
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News-papers need to identify their true jobs — corruption watchdog? community calendar? — and innovate around them.
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