Five take-aways from the #solomoDEN event
Data visualisation of New York's 311 service showing city's concerns by the hour
The #solomoDEN event in Salford Quays was an opportunity to hear about projects, research and initiatives in the area of social-local-mobile journalism.
I attended to talk about a GMG project I’m involved with called n0tice.com which has these ideas at its heart to produce an online/mobile noticeboard (and if anyone would like an invite please drop your email here or via the comments below).
Here’s my pick of the other talks;
1. World Newsmedia Innovation Study.
There’s a lot of information in these 130 pages, 100 data sets compiled by 500 respondents in 11 languages. The aspect that caught my eye was the plans that news organisations have around developing new businesses and this mysterious finding: “While mobile phones, e-readers and social media remain the top propescts in 2011, responses show that managers are generally less enthusiastic about these opportunities than in 2010.” The full report is being being available to download at the website.
2. Help me Investigate networks.
The collaborative website that helps people investigate issues of shared concern has recently refined the proposition into various strands including health, welfare and education.
Currently Paul is calling on interested bloggers to get involved in a Help Me Investigate health project looking at some of the data on GP surgeries’ patient list numbers. More on that here: http://helpmeinvestigate.com/health/
3. Sky in Tyne and Wear.
It was fascinating to hear from Simon Bucks about the video journalism experiment going on in the north east. The unease from local newspaper editors in the room was palpable as he described how a team of 13 journalists including nine dedicated video journalists were starting work in a patch chosen for its sporting enthusiasim and clear sense of self-identity.
“Newspapers are doing very little video… we are occupying a new space” -Simon Bucks on @skytyneandwear #SoLoMoDEN
— Robin Morley (@mrrobinmorley) February 23, 2012
As well as the original content that large team is producing, the broadcaster is also encouraging submitted video and self-serve events listings in the locality. One to watch.
4. Launch of Media and Digital Enterprise (Made).
The UK Winner of last year’s Google IPI award for news innovation was officially launched in a low key event at the end of the main sessions. Any budding news entrepreneur looking to develop a business involving data journalism should find this music to their ears – mentoring, software and support on offer. Simply add your details to the form before March 31 [Disclosure: I am involved in delivering some of the training support].
5. Open data cities
A typically barnstorming finale from Greg Hadfield inspired the audience into thinking about data and the role of local journalists in not just acquiring data for stories but being the facilitators for city-level conversations. A whole new way of interacting with the citizens formally known as readers.
.@GregHadfield If local media wants to put itself back at centre of the community it needs to lead the call for open local data #solomoden
— John Thompson (@johncthompson) February 23, 2012
It was not just a great talk, it was a rallying cry to those of us who value data journalism to think about how we can collaborate to make such things happen. Anyone?
* There’s also more information at this live blog by Daniel Bentley and this blog post from Caroline Beavon. Feel free to drop any other links to coverage in the comments below.
Digital Editors’ Network: Data special today
Today’s meeting of digital editors from across the country is a special event to discuss various issues around open data and is being held at the offices of North West Vision and Media in MediaCityUK, Salford.
A live blog has been set up via CoveritLive which you can see updated here as the event gets underway from 1pm.
The progamme is detailed here.
The hashtag for the event is #dendatameet
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.
Digg it like The Telegraph for news success
Digg – a sometimes fun, but essentially useless, way to spike your site with foreign traffic or an essential tool for SEO? North Yorkshire based search expert Patrick Altoft urged journalists to think again about the American giant during a session on integrating social media into news operations at yesterday’s Digital Editor’s Network.
Patrick has often been faced with the argument that there’s little point for newspaper editors in working to get their content on the front page of Digg to receive a flood of traffic which can not be monetised with local advertisers in the UK but he put forward a different way of looking at it.
“A lot of newspaper editors believe there’s no real value in Digg because they are foreigners, they are not even going to see the ads and most people from Digg leave within three seconds.
“The key thing to remember is that you will, on average, get 300 links every day – that’s a lot of links to get every month”.
Yes it’s all about link love.
The hundreds of links which succeeding in Digg will create, will boost search engine positioning and could ultimately result in that audience which can be monetised hitting your site. And he revealed how The Telegraph is putting Digg right at the heart of its strategy to build audience by having an SEO expert working alongside journalists in the newsroom – even before the story is created – and ensuring every possible optimisation before it’s published and that all important one-hit-only Google spidering takes place.
“The Telegraph has SEO and social media people in the newsroom. There needs to be somebody involved from the social media team before the content is created, research exactly what people are talking about. After creation, it’s back to the SEO team to find out whether it’s been optimised.”
And promotion of the story after publication is also vital, he said. “Journalists at The Telegraph are encouraged to submit stories to Digg. “How many journalists, after the story is written, work on promoting that story? This is where bloggers are different.” He recommends setting up an automated promotion network which involves TSS, Twitter, email subscriptions and Google news pings within 30mins of publication to get the first-mover advantage on any story.
It was a fascinating and useful presentation for anyone concerned with gaining social media relevance in a news org and the full slide set is here and you can Digg this here.
Digital Editors Network
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Of course, Digg isn’t the only game in town and earlier in the afternoon those attending the sesssion At UCLAN in Preston heard how another mighty player, The Guardian, is reaping success with Twitter.
Robin Goard from Hitwise told the group that 54% of Twitter traffic is going downstream to what it classified as media sites – news, entertainments, blogs etc.
And The Guardian was winning out with not just the home page featuring in the top statistics, but also the technology and comment is free sections where personality journalists such as Charles Arthur and Jemima Kiss were credited with developing the networks to drive traffic.
Re-defining the role of the journalist
When Jane Singer stood up in front of last week’s Digital Editor’s Network and suggested that reporters stopped doing some of their current routine bread-and-butter work and handed that responsibility over to others, there was a palpable wall of cynicism from some quarters.
Allowing users to contribute routine community information? Publishing the police force crime releases ‘in the raw’? Letting companies post the press releases of their activity? Whatever next!
Yes, the bright-eyed academic had just put the elephant in the room.
Ms Singer went on to say that, in these times of limited newsroom staff resources, perhaps the journalists’ job was no longer to simply provide information or facts – after all a whole raft of people are perfectly capable of doing that – think community group leader, marketing manager, head teacher or publicly paid press officers in councils or the emergency services.
She wanted to see journalists freed up to do the things users don’t have “the time, talent or training to do: investigate, analyze, contextualize, and explain.
“Their primary role is no longer to provide information but to help people make sense of it” she said.
It’s certainly an appealing argument – no more tedious press release rewrites and the opportunity to get out of the office again. Hurrah! Who wouldn’t want that?
As Ms Singer put so well; “Pursuing the stories behind the information and telling those stories well, whatever the medium……isn’t that the real job of the journalist?”
So where’s the rub?
The debate seemed to reveal that some didn’t feel there would be same quality of information if it wasn’t worked into traditional article form and some felt that the newsworthiness of a piece of information could only be properly assessed by a professional.
Listening to some of the points you could be mistaken into thinking that all of us in regional media are busy breaking stories of such importance to the nation that they couldn’t possible be dealt with by anyone else!
But, with a quick reality check, what would be wrong with a local events listings created by the organisers of those events? The appointments section of the business pages updated by companies themselves? A daily or weekly listing of “mis pers” provided and updated by the police? Planning applications uploaded by the council and geo-tagged onto a map?
Would the non-journalese language of the content undermine its usefulness/interest?
Personally I think that’s unlikely and, considering most of the items mentioned above are difficult to find (or absent) on most regional news sites, just having the content would be a good start to better community information provision.
These sort of objections to community collaboration really go to the heart of a larger issue – what is news and what is the role of the news organisation? Is it merely to present information which is likely to attract the widest and biggest possible audience (i.e. the old mass media model)?
I think not .
Surely our role as journalists is now to seek out information which is important to people’s lives and that might mean ”small” items having “big” significance for smaller groups or an individual.
Ms Singer’s thought-provoking presentation was a timely reminder of that shift in consumption with some provocative suggestions on what could be done to supply that demand.
* The discussion which rounded off the day at the Journalism Leader’s Forumalso turned, inevitably perhaps, onto the role of the journalist in today’s news organisations with The Guardian’s Kevin Anderson among others urging us to get out with our laptops are re-engage with the community.
Four legal dangers of links in articles and blogs
At this week’s DEN meeting, we were given a very informative legal briefing which ranged across the full spectrum of privacy, contempt, libel and community issues.
Too much to go through in full so I’ve picked out these points which are worth sharing with the online world.
(Please bear in mind I’m not a lawyer, so if in doubt, consult someone with the suitable qualifications! )
While ensuring plenty of links is an essential basic of online journalism, for both user experience and SEO, there are issues in linking to be aware of;
* A linking convention of opening in a new window will not save us if we do link to something defamatory or otherwise unlawful. Placing the link could (untested) be seen as us actively pushing the user towards the material.
This also applies if we link to material for which we don’t hold the copyright. Obvious example of this would be a youtube vide with music within it. Linking or embedding the video means we could be liable for copyright infringement even though it’s not a package we initiated.
* Linking to a foreign site or article could lead to a contravention of a British court order. An example was given of an American report of a court case which was published in ignorance of a court order issued in the UK banning publication. A British site picking it up or linking to it was unaware of the order and assumed publication was safe because it was already online. Dangerous assumption.
* Never link into the archive for active cases. This effectively makes the material “live” again so that, even if the background was only housed in the archive, it removes contempt of court protection available for archive material.
* Be aware that the material being linked to could change from something safe to something less savoury. I always give an example of a porn site setting up when I’m teaching on this point and so was surprised to hear that this was a real scenario recently. A link to what started life as a ladies underwear business changed to a porn site when the initial owner went bust (no pun intended!).
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