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Created by stvad on 28/10/2008
Last updated: 05/09/10 at 22:14
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One of the mistakes that people new to blogging often make is to write as if theyâre addressing a crowd. âHey everyone!â they shout. âCan any of you help with this?â
Speak to people who teach radio journalism, and youâll find similar experiences.
Radio and online journalism have this in common: they are typically consumed alone. We listen to the radio in the car, or while weâre painting. We may listen to it in the workplace â but unless it is something seminal, not crowded around the set. We read online news at our work terminal, or on our mobile phone or laptop. Itâs not a group activity. Television news is the only type we consume in groups, socially.
Or at least, thatâs what I thought until recently.
Because it occurs to me that there are some examples in online media when we are addressing a crowd.
Social media is the most obvious example: if you ask a question on Twitter, should you say âDo you know the answer to this question?â or âDoes anyone know the answer to this question?â
Although each user is sat at their computer or phone individually, they are also occupying a virtual social space, in which they are a group.
But isnât a blog comments thread a similar virtual social space? No.
The key to the issue is synchronicity: if people are occupying that space at the same time, then they can be addressed as a crowd. If it is asynchronous â people occupy the space at different times, and return to check communications â then that mode of address doesnât work.
Asynchronous communication is the dominant form of communication online: email, blogs, forums are all asynchronous. Live chat, some IM and some social media like Twitter tend to be more synchronous.
In those contexts then, is it okay to address people as a group? I think it is.
FROM THE COMMENTS: @Dubberâs further insights from radio add an extra dimension to this.
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/onlinejournalismblog/~3/ena25s7SrGw/
In this fifth and second to last part of this series Iâll review the research on how and to what degree multimedia is utilized in online journalism.
Previous parts of this series have focused on the revolution that never happened (part 1); how to define the three main assets of new technology to online journalism â interactivity, hypertext and multimedia (part 2); the research on the use of hypertext in online journalism (part 3); and the research on online journalism and interactivity (part4).
Content analysis studies
As with hypertext and interactivity, most studies of multimedia in online journalism rely on content analysis of websites. Tanjev Schultz (1999) found that only 16 percent of online newspapers in the US had multimedia applications in the late 1990s. Two more qualitative oriented content analysis studies revealed similar lack of multimedia (In the US, Canada and the Netherlands: Nicholas W. Jankowski and Martine van Selm (2000); In the US: Wendy Dibean and Bruce Garrison (2001) (only excerpt available for free)).
Jankowski and van Selm concluded that of all supposed added value facilities of online journalism multimedia âis perhaps the most underdevelopedâ (2000, p. 7). However, online news sites affiliated with TV stations were more prone to utilize multimedia according to the same study. Yet, in a more extensive investigation of TV broadcastersâ online news sites in the US (pdf available), Mary Jackson Pitts (2003, p. 5)Â lamented: â[t]he majority of stations provide text-only stories, thus failing to use the multimedia capabilities of the webâ.
In their extensive investigation of European online journalism, Richard van der Wurff and Lauf (Eds) (2005) found that print newspapers were as much about multimedia as online newspapers (this study is not available online). Thorsten Quandt (2008) (only abstract available for free)Â found that 84.5 percent of the 1600 stories he analyzed in 10 online news sites in the US, the UK, Germany, France and Russia were strictly text-based.
In Scandinavia, Martin Engebretsen (2006) (pdf available) found that online newspapers used a bit more multimedia, but still not more than found in previous studies in the US. Daniela V. Dimitrova and Matt Neznanskiâs (2006) study of the coverage of the Iraq war in 2003 in 17 online newspapers from the US and elsewhere showed no increase in the use of video and audio in the US newspapers compared to Tanjev Schultzâs study published seven years earlier. Furthermore, they found minimal difference between the international and the US online newspapers (slightly more use of multimedia in the US online newspapers). However, Jennifer D. Greer & Donica Mensing (2006) (book chapter partly available through Google books) found a significant increase in multimedia use during the same period (1997-2003) in their longitudinal study of online newspapers in the US.
Interviews and surveys
Studies relying on interviews and surveys with online journalists and editors reveal some of the possible reasons for the lack of multimedia in online journalism found in the content analysis studies. According to Michele Jackson and Nora Paul (1998) (the US) and Christoph Neuberger et al. (1998) (Germany) online journalists and editors had a positive attitude towards utilizing multimedia technology, but problems related to lack of staff, inadequate transmission capacity and other technical issues obstructed the materialization of multimedia content.
Later studies indicate that online journalists and editors downscale the value of multimedia content: Thorsten Quandt et al. (2006) (only abstract available for free) found that multimedia was considered to be the least important feature of web technology for online journalism. John OâSullivan (2005) found similar results in his qualitative interviews with Irish online journalists (only abstract available for free). Niel Thurman and Ben Lupton interviewed 10 senior editors and managers affiliated with British online news providers and found that the general sentiment was that âtext was still coreâ (2008, p. 15). However, in his PhD dissertation (which is not available online) Arne H. Krumsvik, in interviews with CNN and NRK (Norwegian public broadcaster) executives, found a much more positive attitude towards multimedia than towards interactivity and hypertext (2009, p. 145). And in a recent case study of multimedia content on the BBC online (only abstract available for free), Einar Thorsen concludes that video content has increased tremendously (Thorsen, 2010).
User studies
There are not many studies that investigate the usersâ attitudes towards multimedia news online. In an experimental study (pdf), S. Shyam Sundar (2000) found that those who read text-only versions of a story gained more insight into the topic of the story than those who read/viewed multimedia versions of the same story. Hans Beyers (2005) (pdf) found that only 26.4 of the Flemish online newspaper readers in his survey thought the added value of multimedia was an important reason to read online newspapers.
Multimedia summarized
To summarize the findings of the research on multimedia in online journalism deriving from the techno-approach, it seems that multimedia remains the least developed of the assets offered to journalism by Internet technology. Online journalism is mostly about producing, distributing and consuming written text in various forms, even though some recent studies describe an increase in the use of especially video. This falls in line with the general increase in online video watching described in a recent Pew Internet report. However, it seems that online news sites are struggling to cope with multimedia.
In the last part of this series I will conclude on what we might learn from the research on the utilization of hypertext, interactivity and multimedia in online journalism. Might their be other ways of understanding the development of online journalism then through the lens of technological innovation?
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A few months ago I was asked what sort of mobile phone I would recommend for a journalism student. Knowing how tight student budgets are, and that any choice should have as much of an eye on the future as on the present, I recommended getting an Android phone.
The reasoning went like this: iPhones are great at certain things, and currently benefit from a wider range of applications than other mobile phones. But the contracts are expensive, the battery life poor, and Appleâs closed system problematic, for reasons Iâll expand on in a moment.
Currently, BlackBerry smartphones (apparently you canât say âBlackBerriesâ) and high-end Nokias are probably the most popular phones for journalists. Both have excellent battery life and BlackBerry smartphones (yes, it gets annoying after the first time) have a particular strength in the way their email works.
But these are also expensive, and Symbian (the operating system for most high end Nokias) does not have a long term future, while its replacement, Maemo, has yet to build a present.
Which brings us to Android â the âGoogleâ phone â and the most affordable option for the student journalist looking at a multiplatform future.
With Google behind the technology, Android phones have excellent email integration â not quite as strong as a BlackBerry, but more than good enough.
Androidâs app store â the âMarketâ â competes with Appleâs â and is catching up fast. Most of the must-have apps for journalists are already in there, and on this score itâs much stronger than BlackBerry or Nokia.
The biggest weakness is Androidâs battery life, which is around the same as the iPhone (some tips on that here).
But apart from their affordability it is the openness of the Android platform which presents the strongest case for being the student journalistâs mobile of choice.
When I advised that student to get an Android phone, it was because I think that Android will seriously challenge iPhone both in terms of userbase (which is already happening) and app development.
Computerworldâs Jonny Evans (an âApple Holicâ) compares the situation to the struggle for the PC:
â[Apple's] insistence on a closed system means partnership deals arenât open to it in the hardware space.
âSo, where Android can deliver multiple devices for multiple niches at multiple price points to the market, Apple delivers a limited number of devices, hoping the quality of its software will make a difference. It seems to attract customers that way.
âAs fellow blogger, Sharon Machlis, noted last week, the result of that strategy during the PC wars enabled Microsoft to seize monopoly-level market share on the desktop.
âThe gameâs not over.â
The same post, however, notes that âAppleâs key advantage against Android is its developer communityâ:
âDespite criticism of the way it curates its store, Apple does have an App Store that works, where 95 percent of apps are approved fast.
âThis means developers already have a reliable and profitable route to market at 100 million iOS users â set to climb with the addition of at least 24 million more iPhone 4 users this year.
âAndroid developers may be able to develop more openly, but development is fragmented by the need to develop for multiple devices.â
Apple alienated parts of their community earlier this year when they released a new developer agreement. Then, a couple of weeks ago, Google provided a platform for a whole new community when it announced the launch of a tool that can only challenge Appleâs dominance: the App Inventor for Android:
âTo use App Inventor, you do not need to be a developer. App Inventor requires NO programming knowledge. This is because instead of writing code, you visually design the way the app looks and use blocks to specify the appâs behavior.â
For the student journalist, this tool also offers an opportunity to experiment with mobile journalism and publishing in the same way that Blogger allowed you to experiment with online publishing and distribution, or Yahoo! Pipes allowed you to play with mashups (TechCrunchâs MG Siegler compares it with GeoCities). Tony Hirst has already written a series of posts exploring how the tool works (itâs currently in invite-only beta), which are worth bookmarking.
This tool seals the deal for me â itâs the difference between doing the job now and redefining it for the future.
But what do you think? What features do Android phones lack? What advantages do other phones hold?
For the record, I use an iPhone and an old N95. I use the N95 for phonecalls, texts and streaming video (because of its long battery life) and the iPhone for web browsing and apps â particularly RSS readers, Audioboo, editing blog posts and checking comments, Twitter, and email. Each handset is with a different operator, which gives me better 3G coverage options too. I also pay for an Android phone (a HTC Magic) in my household.
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The journalist and photographer Javier Bauluz is the only Spanish winner of the Pullitzer. He has published a preview of his next project, focused on journalism and human rights, at periodismohumano.com.
âThe responsibility of the crisis: the greed of a few and the lack of controls from whom should control them, the representatives of the people and the toxic journalism that reports the reality only in terms of the media corporationsâ political and economic interestâ.
Such is Bauluzâs view of the current media crisis.
He then describes a picture well-known to anyone who has ever worked in big media: âThere are more and more tired journalists, many hostages in their newsrooms, doing and saying what theyâre toldâ.
With this perspective in mind, Bauluz thinks that the only solution to reconstruct journalism is for groups of colleagues to get together and organise online, supported by citizens, foundations and philanthropists. So we can say that non-profit journalism is not only an American or English idea.
âFirst it was an option, now itâs a need,â argues the Pulitzer prizewinner.
Using the Wordpress platform (and its open source benefits), periodismohumano.com will see daylight in the following weeks with the Universal Declaration of Human Right as their only flag and with all content available in all possible formats:
âIf you want to save whales, youâre a member of Greenpeace; if you want doctors in Somalia, youâre a member of Doctors Without Borders; if you want quality information, youâre a member of Periodismo Humano (Human Journalism)â.
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/onlinejournalismblog/~3/CGeumrPx_us/
Ruud Elmendorp, a video journalist in Africa, writes about his experiences in the job
âMonsieur le journaliste? Votre interview avec le ministre est a deux heure.â
Mister journalist? Your interview with the minister is at two. Thank you, I say to the lady on the phone. Finally I managed to arrange an interview with a minister in Rwanda.
Some hours later I set up my tripod and camera, and start asking my questions. There I am with a small digital camera â and myself only. The minister is told that I am a correspondent for Dutch national television â normally the type of media you would expect to come with a camera man, reporter and a boom operator for the sound. The very kind and distinguished minister doesnât give a wink about my solitary presence, and comments profoundly on the issues I raise.
Just because heâs used to it.
Before 2000 I was the typical television reporter coming with a crew. When the small digital cameras entered the market I took the challenge to do it on my own. As early video journalists we for some reason were forced into an innovative and creative approach. We had to do something different to the traditional crews, and so we did.
That was before I moved to Africa.
Here I saw that almost every television person is a video journalist. Most local television channels cannot afford full crews, and they depend on one-man-bands. No need to come up with other approaches or styles of storytelling. The video journalists bring news just as the traditional crews do.
The camera which is still mostly in use is the good old Sony PD150 or 170. However over the last years there has been a slight shift towards lower end HDV cameras, although they will be switched to DV or DVCAM and 4:3 aspect.
Here weâre talking about major national channels, because there is also a group of other video journalists carrying older and smaller cameras. These VJâs are freelancers for the local channels or stringers for BBC or CNN. They really know their stuff, make reasonable shots, and know which questions to ask.
Being a VJ is about logistics.
In many African countries you have to a be a video journalist to move around. In remote areas itâs difficult to travel with a full crew, or you have to rent an expensive 4Ă4. A VJ can hop in local transport, or even board humanitarian or military flights taking the last and only, lucky-for-you, seat.
There are so many times it happened to me like that, and on arrival youâd discover that none of the traditional crews had made it there. Thatâs of course best, and it happens often.
Itâs the same with borders. A video journalist can easily cross since the camera will be stowed away in your backpack, and no customs officer will bother. No need to fill out temporary import forms, or to pay deposits. They just consider you a tourist.
Being a VJ is about press freedom.
In several countries in Africa the press is free, as long as it doesnât criticize the government or other big entities too openly.
It means that when things get dirty, it will become difficult for journalists to get there.
The fun part about it is that you will not openly be denied access. They let you go through friendly but lenghty accrediation procedures. If you get accredited at last, the event you were looking for will be long gone. Most journalists by then will have moved to other things to report on, and thatâs what theyâre aiming at.
Still, in the end your accreditation will only be a piece of paper, or a stamp. On the way you will find roadblocks manned by police officers who of course never heard of it, and can only let you pass after paying a hefty bribe.
The video journalist would be long back from shooting that same event, by being one of the passengers on local transport.
Being a VJ in Africa is about being able to report on matters you think are important.
http://videojournalist.nl
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Ben Goldacre is experiencing understandable frustration with the BBCâs policy on linking to science papers:
Jane Ashley of the websiteâs health team, says that when they write an article based on scientific research:
âIt is our policy to link to the journal rather than the article itself. This is because sometimes links to articles donât work or change, and sometimes the journals need people to register or pay.â
In email correspondence defending their policy, Richard Warry, Assistant editor, Specialist journalism, adds:
âMany papers are available on the web via subscription only, while others give only an Abstract summary. In these instances, the vast majority of our readers would not be able to read the full papers, without paying for access, even if we provided the relevant link.â
This just doesnât stand up. Hereâs why:
An abstract alone is actually very useful in providing more context than a journal homepage provides
It also provides useful text that can be used to either find another version of the paper (for example on the authorâs or a conference website),
It provides extra details on the authors, giving you more insight into the researchâs reliability and also an avenue should you want to approach them to get hold of the paper.
Even for the âvast majorityâ who cannot pay for access to the paper, they will still be taken to the journal homepage anyway.
Believing that the time spent pasting one link rather than another is better spent on providing âauthoritative, accurate and attractive reportageâ is a false economy. Authoritative, accurate and attractive coverage relies at least in part in allowing users to point out issues with scientific research or its reporting.
Catering for a âvast majorityâ belies a broadcast media mindset that treats users as passive consumers. The minority of users who can access those papers can actually be key contributors to a collaborative journalism process. If you let them.
If it helps, hereâs a broadcast analogy: imagine producing a TV package which captions a source as âSomeone from the Bank of Englandâ. Thatâs not saving time for good journalism â itâs just bad journalism.
Linking â and deep linking in particular â are basic elements of online journalism. Why can news organisations still not get this right? More on this to comeâŚ
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/onlinejournalismblog/~3/GhG5YuWm5UQ/
On Thursday Iâll be hosting Birminghamâs first âData Coffeeâ. Guests include The Timesâ Jonny Richards, Talisâ Zach Beauvais and a whole bunch of MA Online Journalism students.
Thereâs no agenda for the day â just turn up with questions and weâll pick each otherâs brains. Iâm bringing my Mac and an intense desire to get to grips with Python.
Itâs at Coffee Lounge on Navigation Street (free wifi). Weâll start to gather around 10 with the bulk of the day taking place from 12 onwards.
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/onlinejournalismblog/~3/Av-hs6cdENQ/
Hull â GeneralClassifieds â Notices via kwout
The Hull Daily Mailâs article accusing a hyperlocal competitor of having a âporn businessâ has been misfiring spectacularly over the past 24 hours.
The article ârevealsâ that the founder of HU17.net has designed sites for the porn industry.
At the time of writing it has over 300 comments overwhelmingly critical of what is variously described as a âsmear campaignâ, âset upâ and âcharacter assassinationâ by HDM.
Some point to the hypocrisy of the attack from a newspaper which recently launched a campaign to back local businesses, while others point out that the newspaper has previously published glowing articles about a local sex shop.
A distinction is also drawn by some commenters between operating a âporn businessâ and building websites for companies who then use them to publish porn. (I wonder if theyâve investigated their own printers to see if they are running a âporn businessâ?)
And many, of course, point out that the newspaper itself is happy to provide a platform for sex industry advertising in its own pages.
A commenter on Hold The Front Page remarks:
âMaybe some proper journalist should ring up the ad booking services at all Northcliffe titles and ask to place ad for personal services. Perhaps ask those who take the calls if they beleive that some of the girls who advertise are working girls. Ask for some anecdotal tales of girls canceling their adverts one week in 4 ⌠I beleive there might be a story there worthy of a DPS in the the Mail on Sunday !â
That comment is particularly salient when reading the Hull Daily Mailâs justification for running the story:
âWhat Mr Smith has done is not illegal, but it is certainly not consistent with publishing a responsible local website carrying reports, pictures and videos of community events and activities, many featuring children. It is in the public interest that people know the truth about the man behind HU17.netâ
Replace âMr Smithâ with âthe Hull Daily Mailâ and you get an idea where the backlash is coming from.
The comments spill over onto a response on HU17.net itself, which the publicity has clearly brought to a wider audience locally.
One comment suggests that ads for escort adverts are being removed from the Hull Daily Mail website as they are being highlighed in the comments â certainly there are a lot of dead links, which seems odd given that the Classifieds have a whole section devoted to âEscort Agenciesâ (image above).
Whatever you feel about the story, the comments across both sites provide a real insight into how people perceive their local paper and the attempts of hyperlocal publishers to run a business and serve a specific community.
More coverage at Journalism.co.uk and The Register. And Journopigâs post pulls out some of the unnecessary and unsupported paedophile-innuendo running through the story.
UPDATE: Hull Daily Mail editor defends the story.
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/onlinejournalismblog/~3/m8K_khrQf68/
Thatâs the question posed by Rednelly, with this screengrab:
Curious. Anyone at the BBC got any idea?
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/onlinejournalismblog/~3/JirR6d2Y7_A/
The New York Times has combined visualisation with audio to produce a fascinating piece of work on the differences between gold winning times and runners-up across a number of Winter Olympics events. Itâs a particularly creative approach to the challenge of communicating a relatively abstract story: what separates gold and silver. Well worth a look.
h/t Pete Ashton
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/onlinejournalismblog/~3/ZZ7_9_9lqz4/
Thereâs a fascinating study on newspaper bias by University of Chicago professors Matthew Gentzkow and Jesse Shapiro which identifies the political bias of particular newspapers based on the frequency with which certain phrases appear.
The professors then correlate that placement with the political leanings of the newspaperâs own markets, and find
âThat the most important variable is the political orientation of people living within the paperâs market. For example, the higher the vote share received by Bush in 2004 in the newspaperâs market (horizontal axis below), the higher the Gentzkow-Shapiro measure of conservative slant (vertical axis).â
Interestingly, ownership is found to be statistically insignificant once those other factors are accounted for.
James Hamilton, blogging about the study, asks:
âHow slant gets implemented at the ground level by individual reporters. My guess is that most reporters know that they are introducing some slant in the way theyâve chosen to frame and report a story, but are unaware of the full extent to which they do so because they are underestimating the degree to which the other sources from which they get their information and beliefs have all been doing a similar filtering. The result is social networks that donât recognize that they have developed a groupthink that is not centered on the truth.â [my emphasis]
In other words, the âecho chamberâ argument (academics would call it a discourse) that weâve heard made so many times about the internet.
Itâs nice to be reminded that social networks are not an invention of the web, but rather the other way around.
h/t Azeem Azhar
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In reporting yesterday on the linkspam story covered here last week (*cough*), The Guardian appeared to have opened something of a can of worms, with commenters quickly pointing out that The Guardian itself is publishing text ads without ânofollowâ tags.
Media hypocrisy? Almost. The newspaperâs SEO expert Paul Roach eventually chipped in to clarify:
âWe are in the process of updating our no follows across the whole of the site. The links you mention are do follow at the moment, but have only been so for a short period of time. Our policy of using no follow is for all commercial links and UGC, and weâre aware that the no follow tag isnât on the links you mention. It will be added to those links very soon.â
The comment thread as a whole is worth reading for an insight into the difficulties of this area. Sarah Hartley mentioned a recent meeting of the Digital Editorsâ Network where:
âA few regional and local newspapers had already been approached by advertisers keen to benefit from the page rank such bona fide websites earn.
âThe general feeling at the meeting was that this would be a move which, would not only be detrimental to the organsationsâ page rank, but could also compromise, or at lease confuse, the difference between editorial and commercial content.â
And Martin Belam and others pointed out that Googleâs own guidelines appear to be rather inconsistent on the matter (although their actions, it has to be said, are less ambiguous).
The sad fact is that many publishers are not in a position to take any judgement at all â itâs short term money or bust â and theyâre willing to risk the PageRank penalty and resultant drop is ad revenue in the longer term.
(h/t to Malcolm Coles for pointing me to the comment thread early on)
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The following post originally appeared on PhotoActive, but had to be taken down when the site host HostPapa complained about the traffic. Iâve offered to host it here.
With photographers about to lose copyright protection on their images, and the Government to curb their rights to take pictures in public, Philip Dunn looks more closely at these outrageous proposals and how they will affect you.
Photographers to lose copyright protection of their work
This startling and outrageous proposal will become UK law if The Digital Economy Bill currently being pushed through Parliament is passed. This Bill is sponsored by the unelected Government Minister, Lord Mandelson.
Letâs look at the way this law will affect your copyright:
The idea that the author of a photograph has total rights over his or her own work â as laid out in International Law and The Copyright Act of 1988 â will be utterly ignored. If future, if you wish to retain any control over your work, you will have to register that work (and each version of it) with a new agency yet to be set up.
Details about how this agency will be set up â and what fees will be charged for each registration â have been kept deliberated vague in Lord Mandelsonâs Bill. If ever there was a licence to print money, this is it. You will pay.
If they are not registered with this quango agency, your images can be plundered and used anywhere, by anyone â on the understanding that the thief makes a very minimal effort to find you â the author of the image.
Currently, International Law, through the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works, recognises the ownership rights of the creator of the âpropertyâ. This enables image owners to control how their work is used, and whether it is used at all.
International Law will be ignored by the British Government and this new Act will overturn more than 150 years of UK copyright law.
If ever there was a massive step forward to a police state and suppression of information, this is it. Most of this thievesâ charter is not even going through Parliament as primary legislation. The Digital Economy bill Section 42 sections 16a, 16b, 16c enable ad hoc regulation by Mandelsonâs office without further legislation. None of that will never be voted on.
Lord Mandelson works in devious ways â heâs clever.
The Government is determined to push through this legislation without amendment by May 6th â certainly before the date of the General Election.
You can find out much more about how the your photographs can be used by going to Copyright Action. This article exposes the devious detail in this Bill and just how it will affect you as a photographer.
Copyright Action
Photographers are to lose all effective rights to take photographs in public places.
Not content with taking away photographerâs copyright, another section of this Government is proposing sweeping changes to your freedom to take pictures in public places.
The Information Commissionerâs Office (ICO) has deemed that a photograph taken in a public place may now be considered to contain âprivate dataâ.
This means that if you take a picture in the street and there is a member of the public in the shot, that person has the right to demand either payment â if you wish to publish the image â or that you do not publish it. In fact, according to the ICO. There does not actually have to be an objection, it is up to the photographer to âjudgeâ whether the subject might object. Now work that one out if you can.
Applied to professional photographers, this is, of course, the perfect charter for politicians, crooks, and bent officials to avoid being photographed and exposed. How many working press photographers will find themselves in court?
How easily will politiciansâ nefarious behaviour be revealed for all to see?
How many innocent amateur photographers are going to be harassed and menaced by people in the street?
No matter that Britain has more CCTV cameras watching our every move than any other country in the world, in future, if you take a photograph in a public place and that image is published on the likes of Flickr â you could be liable to prosecution.
Write to your MP NOW and object to these outrageous constraints of your rights and freedom. Remember, there is very little time left.
Oh, and if you would like to use the image above on your website â please feel free.
Copyright Action
Royal Photographic Society
Digital Economy Bill
On a lighter note, I can report with confidence that photographers who come on my Photography Holidays to Spain NEVER have to deal with these problems. In Spain common sense still prevails. Photographers there are always made welcome and you can photograph people in the street to your heartâs content. Why not come and join us â you can enjoy your hobby freely there.
Philip Dunn is a former Sunday Times travel photographer and has been a professional photographer for 40 years. He now runs Photography Holidays and Courses in Menorca and Scotland and produces instructional DVDs
Philip Dunn will be at The Focus on Imaging Exhibition Stand L47 at Birmingham NEC next week
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A couple weeks ago I took a group of students away from the classroom for an experiment in teaching blogging and social capital â the Birmingham Social Media Treasure Hunt.
After a quick briefing and some pointers on using Posterous and Twitter from a mobile phone, the students fanned out across the city, finding people with a social media presence, talking to them, and blogging, tweeting and audiobooing all the while. The idea was to get them to stop thinking about âthe storyâ, start building social capital, and think of online journalism as something that can take place away from a desk.
Now some time has passed I wanted to share how the experiment went and how the students found it.
In short: it worked.
Mitchell Jones blogged 4 social media tips heâd learned this year, saying the treasure hunt:
âAdded an extra dimension to our learning process by throwing us out into the real world and encouraging us to broaden ourselves beyond good writing of good stories. Social media is more than reporting on stories online with a link posted to a Twitter account; itâs about communities, networking and bridging the gap between the journalist and the consumer.â
Job done.
Rachel Simmonite said:
âI found it a very useful exercise, one that I really enjoyed, as it got us talking to actual people rather than just sitting in front of a computer screen. I also think that we found out more doing it in a more personal way.â
Yasmine Hachani said:
âToday, I have realized how important it was to have an active social life. I always thought about the way to get great social capital but did not know that every little helps and that each person you meet might have useful contacts. For instance the [people] who gave us the contacts we needed for our blogs are not in the [environment] field at all. I was amazed to see that people were happy to help, right now I see the world differently and have another vision of the UK [Yasmine is French].â
For other student blog posts on the outcomes of the session see Jade Rance, Sian Jones and Victoria Elmore.
The one thing that didnât seem to quite work was the tagging element. The use of the hashtag #bsmth was patchy, and none of the blog posts appeared to use the tag at all (although Mitchâs audioboos were tagged). So the pre-treasure hunt briefing needed to look at the practicalities of tagging blog posts as well as tweets.
Also, if youâre going to need to check the tweets later make sure you archive them within a few days using one of these tools, as Twitter Search only reaches a week or so back.
As an aside, a different group of students last week spent their normal lesson time at the Birmingham Social Media Cafe meeting people from the local social media scene over free coffee. Again, it seemed a useful exercise, and both seem to have made them more confident in attending meetings and events of all sorts in the local area. Iâm sure theyâll correct me in the comments if Iâm wrongâŚ
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/onlinejournalismblog/~3/pZhGiz1FDpw/
1. Itâs the economy, stupid
Last weekâs official advice (Word doc) on the bill âwould effectively âoutlaw open Wi-Fi for small businessesââ said Lilian Edwards, professor of internet law at Sheffield University.
âThis is going to be a very unfortunate measure for small businesses, particularly in a recession, many of whom are using open free Wi-Fi very effectively as a way to get the punters in,â Edwards said.
It also makes it harder and more expensive for the sort of mobile young business people who frequent these shops. In Birmingham, for example, many entrepreneurs meet in places like Urban Coffee Company and Coffee Lounge to network, exchange ideas, and work (often at the same time). Take that away and youâre making it more expensive for those people to do business, itâs as simple as that.
In addition, the likes of Clause 17 (see below) make it difficult for any business to plan and innovate in an environment which can be changed on the whim of the Secretary of State.
2. Death to open access
Last weekâs document would also âleave libraries and universities in an uncertain position,â adds Edwards. From ZDNet:
âUniversities cannot be exempted, [Lord] Young said [in the document], because some universities already have stringent anti-file-sharing rules for their networks, and âit does not seem sensible to force those universities who already have a system providing very effective action against copyright infringement to abandon it and replace it with an alternativeâ.â
In fact, the government would do well to look more closely at just how âeffectiveâ those university measures have been. I know of students who have had internet access cut off without notice for apparently completely legal activity. I guess youâd call that âcollateral damageâ, and itâs a sign of things to come if we extend the principle throughout the country.
Thereâs a principle of open access to knowledge here that lies at the heart of what libraries and universities do. Restricting their (already hamstrung) ability to offer that is of real concern.
3. Unchecked power
Clause 17. Backed by the NUJ. Are you insane?
Clause 11. From SamKnows:
âWhatâs rapidly becoming the textbook example of this is the way that legislation designed to freeze terrorist funds was used against one of Icelandâs banks, Landisbanki, during the countryâs recent financial crisis.
â[Francis Davey, a practising barrister and legal advisor, says] âClause 11 could easily be used to force the blocking of specific sites or group of sites, such as those that have been identified as having unlawful content by an organisation like the Internet Watch Foundation; or the choking of specific forms of P2P protocol,â he told Samknows. âThere is not even a requirement that the subscribers to ISPâs are made aware of technical measures which could be imposed by stealth. The fact that there is no need to publish or consult on the use of the power means that there is minimal external quality control, or publicity which might serve in lieu of parliamentary scrutiny.ââ
4. The logic behind it is flawed, the data is skewed, and most people donât want it
Thereâs a great piece by Rory Cellan-Jones that identifies some of the data that is lacking surrounding the bill. Meanwhile, hello everyone from Mark Thomas and Google, Facebook, Yahoo and eBay, to MI5, Talk Talk and, yes, Stephen Fry, the Serious and Organised Crime Agency, Metropolitan Police, Consumer Focus, er, the public according to polls.
What can you do?
You donât even have to take to the streetsâŚ
Adopt an MP at Open Rights Group (thereâs also a wiki)
Add your voice here
Sign the petition on the Number 10 website
You can also receive email and RSS updates for the Bill via the Parliament website
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/onlinejournalismblog/~3/ky1IehTrhgo/
Last week I took a group of MA Online Journalism students to visit the BBCâs User Generated Content Hub. It was a hugely informative conversation about how the biggest team of its kind in the world manages an enormous flow of texts, comments, images and other media (If you want to see more, Caroline Beavon has video of the whole thing, while I recorded a couple of Audioboos answering questions posed via Twitter).
As we were discussing the changing nature of the hub â it is increasingly looking to engage with users beyond the core BBC audience â it became apparent that there is a paradox at the heart of what the BBC does here â and by extension, any UGC effort. And itâs a paradox around objectivity and neutrality.
Iâve often felt that the BBC is slightly hamstrung in its social media efforts by its requirement to remain objective. Objectivity makes it harder to stimulate conversations. You can start them â but once they get going, you have to remain on the sidelines, expressing no opinion either way.
Iâve written before on how online journalists should be a mix of the ideal party host and ideal party guest. Staying on the sidelines allows you to play the host, but restricts your ability to truly perform the âguestâ role.
The Switzerland of social media
But what I realised during this visit was that objectivity also makes it easier to attract contributions in the first place. Striving to remain neutral in any conversation means that (most) people see your space as âsafeâ for whatever they have to contribute.
Carrying the analogy further, in this case the BBC is like a warehouse party where the host has gathered an enormous crowd but youâre not entirely sure who they are or whether they like you.
Perhaps the problem here is the catch-all phrase âUGCâ (which the BBCâs Matthew Eltringham dislikes). The BBC is perhaps better positioned than any other news organisation to act as a focal point for certain types of UGC â raw footage, witness texts and other generic news event-related other material â largely because it strives to achieve a neutral position.
On the other hand, organisations with a defined ideological leaning have an advantage in other types of UGC- for example, âstickyâ conversation such as comment threads â because they can lay their cards on the table, get stuck in and inspire the sorts of strong reactions that stimulate debate.
The BBC, for those types of content, is reliant on users to perform that role.
In short, itâs an ecosystem with a place for both the BBC and news organisations on all points of the political spectrum.
To simplify enormously, the BBCâs objectivity gives it an advantage as a neutral ground for submitting content; left- or right-leaning news websites have an advantage in being able to stir opinion â but they will always have a smaller audience for that.
Enormous thanks to Matthew Eltringham and Trushar Barot for welcoming the students to the BBC, as well as their conversation and insights.
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/onlinejournalismblog/~3/s2QGapw-eFA/
The superinjunction obtained by England Captain John Terry was overturned on Friday â and the case raises some interesting issues (cross posted from John Terry: another nail in the superinjunction coffin):
Ecen when the superinjunction was in force, you could find out about the story on Twitter and Google â both even promoted the fact of Terryâs affair â via the Twitter trends list and the real-time Google search box.
No one got the difference between an injunction and a superinjunction - the former banned reporting of Terryâs alleged affair, the latter banned revealing there was an injunction. They werenât necessarily both overturned, but there was a widespread assumption you could say what you liked about Terry once the superinjunction was overturned. This wasnât necessarily the case âŚ
The Mail and Telegraph seemed to flout the superinjunction â as did the Press Gazette which decided if wasnât bound as it hadnât seen a copy. This seemed risky behaviour legally â which makes me wonder if the papers were looking for a weak case to try to discredit superinjunctions.
This superinjunction should never have been granted. What was the original judge thinking?
Google and Twitter ignored the superinjunction
Tweets from while the superinjunction was in force
The superinjunction was overturned at about 1pm or 2pm on Friday. Needless to say, the papers had a field day over the weekend.
But if you wanted to find out the story on Friday, it was relatively simple to do so. I typed John Terryâs name into Google on Friday at about 11.15am â long before the injunction was lifted â and saw the screenshot, above.
Googleâs real-time search box revealed tweets about John Terry and Wayne Bridge (and there were some giving full details of the affair â including the stuff that didnât come out until Sunday). Later on Friday, Google pulled the real-time search box â whether this was algorithmic or for legal reasons, I donât know. But if, spurred on by the clues Google was offering, you typed both Terry and Bridge into Google or Twitter search, and it was simple to find the full story.
And by Friday lunchtime, both John Terry and Wayne Bridge were trending topics on Twitter, raising the profile of the issue. If you clicked on either to see what was being tweeted, youâd have found out about the affair instantly.
Shortly after, a judge ruled there were no grounds for the injunction, super or otherwise.
Guardian links to Twitter search for John Terry
As an aside, I noticed that the Guardian, in its coverage of the superinjunction, even included a link in one of its pieces to a Twitter search on John Terry.
Theyâve removed it now (well, I canât find it anyway and probably for the best. You should either have the balls to run the full story or not. I donât think publishing a link to a twitter search is a reasonable half way house.)
Confusion still reigned
Once news that the super injunction had been lifted, no one knew (or perhaps cared) where they legally stood on Friday afternoon (as Iâve pointed out before about blogs and reporting restrictions).
It was reported that the superinjunction was lifted â but not whether there was a separate injunction relating to the facts of the case (ie could you report that JT had obtained an injunction, but not say why?).
Despite this, everyone went ahead and shouted about it all over the internet. If there was a separate injunction, it was finished.
You can see the confusion in the comments on this Guardian story from Friday afternoon
Seastorm: Iâve no interest in gossiping about EBJT, but I am a little confusedâŚ.is the paper concerned now allowed to go ahead and publish the allegations?
Busfield (replying to seastorm): The judgement means that we can now report that there was an injunction. The judge then says that the newspaper concerned will have to make its own assessment of the risks involved in publishing whatever the allegations may be, which will involve considerations of the laws relating to privacy and defamation.
Gooner UK (replying to seastorm): Nope, the removal of the superinjunction means that newspapers are allowed to publish the fact that an injunction is in place, and name the parties involved, but they are still not allowed to publish the subject matter itself.
The injunction still stands, itâs just that we now know an injunction is in place. A superinjunction is so damaging because it means we (the public) are deliberately kept in the dark as to the very existence of an injunction.
And bear in mind that an injunction is in theory an act of last resort anyway. A superinjunction adds another level to that, which can be very dangerous in terms of press freedom.
Busfield (replying to Gooner UK): my understanding, and I am not a lawyer but I have spent much of the day talking to one, is that both the super and the injunction have gone. It is up to the paper concerned to decide whether it can publish its story without breaking the laws of defamation and relating to privacy.
The background: two papers ignore the injunction
Itâs also interesting that two newspapers decide to ignore, or sail very close to the wind with regards to, the superinjunction â ie they ran stories that appeared to be in breach of it.
Mail reports injunctionâs existence
As the Press Gazette reported on Friday morning (ie before the superinjunction was lifted):
A new âsuper-injunctionâ has been used by a Premier League footballer to stop national newspapers reporting his alleged marital infidelity.
The Daily Mail identifies the man only as a married England international.
The Daily Mail today reports, in apparent defiance of the order: âSo draconian is Mr Justice Tugendhatâs order that even its existence is supposed to be a secret.â
(Itâs interesting that the Press Gazette felt able to run the story about the existence of the superinjnction stating âPress Gazette has not been served with the injunction.â â I would have thought that this was also sailing close to the wind. It knew there was a super injunction, and Iâm surprised its lawyers didnât make an attempt to find out the full details.)
The Mailâs piece had a couple of nods and winks to Terryâs role:
A married England international footballer was granted a sweeping injunction to prevent publication of his affair with the girlfriend of a team-mate ⌠It could be anyone from the captain of the top team in the land âŚâ
What, like the captain of England and Chelsea, you mean?
As does the Telegraph
On top of this, the Telegraph had run a piece, too, according to the Guardian:
Yesterday [Thursday] The Daily Telegraph technically breached the âsuperâ part of the superinjunction by reporting that the courts were hiding the identity of a footballer and allegations about his private life. (This piece appeared in print but is no longer online).
Maybe since the Trafigura injunction, newspapers have been looking for a way to kill off superinjunctions. If they wanted a weak super injunction to pick on as a way to discredit them, this seemed a prime example.
Whatever their reasons, nothing seems likely to happen to the Mail and the Telegraph for breaching or nearly breaching this one â unlike in the Trafigura case, it seems unlikely John Terry is going to successfully sue anyone over this issue.
Conclusion
The Mail sums it up well:
In a scathing ruling, the judge made it clear he suspected Terry was more afraid of losing the commercial deals than anything else.
He said the footballer appeared to have brought his High Court action in a desperate move to protect his earnings â rather than the woman with whom he had been conducting his affair.
(And given this, itâs hard to see how the superinjunction was ever granted.)
There are legitimate reasons for injunctions and even superinjunctions.
But judges need to think very carefully before granting them. And the British courts and the right to privacy should not be used to protect the commercial interests of the âfather of the yearâ.
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/onlinejournalismblog/~3/ntBfGjsOhpE/
The Future of News gathering first organised by Adam Westbrook has its first West Midlands meetup next week (organised by The Lichfield Blogâs Philip John. Iâll be there, along with leading Portuguese blogger Alex Gamela, Brummie alpha blogger Jon Bounds, Andy Brightwell of Hashbrum and Grounds Birmingham; top journalism blogger Nigel Barlow and Pits n Potsâ Mike Rawlins, among others.
Itâs taking place from 6.45pm on Monday February 8 at Birmingham City University. Places are free but limited â book at http://www.meetup.com/The-West-Midlands-Future-of-News-Group/calendar/12461072/
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/onlinejournalismblog/~3/8-MFG6zumOE/
The NUJâs New Ways to Make Journalism Pay conference on Saturday brought together a group of journalists and entrepreneurs who are making money through online journalism in the UK. Many of the speakers had toiled to build brands online, and those that had were now running sustainable businesses. If the future of journalism is entrepreneurial, then these speakers are evidence of it.
You can read a breakdown of all the speakersâ points at Ian Wylieâs blog and if you scroll back on my twitter account @Coneee. Here are five points from the conference that jumped out at me.
Getting to a sustainable position is difficult.
David Parkin, founder of Thebusinessdesk.com, took two years to raise the ÂŁ300,000 he thought heâd need to survive an estimated 18 months of operating at a loss. In the end it only took 9 months after an expansion into the Northwest, but it was still very âhairy.â He had to âmake noiseâ: put up posters, give away coffee on the street, and branded mints to posh restaurants where businesspeople dined. Daniel Johnston, founder of Indusdelta.co.uk, had to live off his savings for the first 18 months. The site is now profitable, and supports the salary of another staff member.
The rules of the journalism game arenât changed by the internet.
Paul Staines of the Guido Fawkes blog gets up at 6.30AM, and is still up when Newsnight is on in the late evening. He hasnât got any ins with big politicians, and most of his news comes from disgruntled interns. No wonder! David Parkin found that for him, starting a successful venture was still âvery much about contacts.â Daniel Johnston, although professing to not know whether he was a journalist, borrowed the principle of independence from good journalism: providing a counter point to the Government view (which he said was âgospelâ before he came along) of the welfare-to-work industry also allowed him to build a sustainable business.
Traditional media doesnât do investigative journalism.
Gavid MacFadyean, director of the Centre for Investigative Journalism, said 75% of investigative journalism is now done by foundations or NGOs. This is because of cost cutting at newspapers and in TV, but also because foundations offer a far more effective environment for investigative journalism. Gavid said: âFoundations say just do your worst, and weâre trying! Itâs no strings attached money,â which seems to be bliss compared to less independent advertising-supported models.
Email is important.
Many of the speakers had collected the email addresses of their readers in the tens or hundreds of thousands, allowing them to quickly notify readers of news, while also opening up possibilities for making money. David Parkin recalled success with sending emails when the interest rates changed. By providing this information within 2-3 minutes (speed which the BBC and âbig mediaâ donât bother with) after it had happened, businesspeople could be more informed. Angie Sammons of Liverpool Confidential said having an email list of interested individuals means you can directly provide them with sponsored offers, making you money and also helping your readers.
Local freelance journalism is dying.
Since this was an NUJ conference organised by the London freelance branch, itâs not surprising that the room was full of freelance writers, many of them used to pitching stories to editors of local newspapers. Note that many seemed to be âused toâ doing this. A combination of a crash in rates, an unwillingness for local editors to commission work and the virtual impossibility for newcomers to get their first (paid) start gave me the impression that itâs never been harder to get work as a freelance local journalist. Fortunately, the overriding message from the day was itâs never been easier to make it online.
Also see:
Jon Slatteryâs news from the conference: Manchester Confidential puts up paywall, and Guido Fawkes achieves the Marxist ideal.
Martin Cloake wrote a post with his thoughts from the event.
My presentation case study of Engadget.com on the âMaking Blogs Payâ session with Paul Staines.
Making Blogs Pay
View more documents from Conradq.
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/onlinejournalismblog/~3/gAVYngt8wRk/
Stefan Mey from Berlin talks to Julian Assange, the spokesperson of the whistleblower platform Wikileaks.org. The interview took place during the 26th Chaos Communication Congress where Assange and his German colleague Daniel Schmitt gave a lecture on the current state and the future of Wikileaks.
Julian Assange (photo: flickr.com by Esthr, cc-by-nc-2.0)
At the moment Wikileaks.org has an unusual appearance. The website is locked down in order to generate money. The locking-down of the website was first planned until Jan 6, then Jan 11 and now it has been announced that it will last âuntil at least Jan 18â. How did you decide in favor of this tough step?
In part, this is a desire for us to to enforce self-discipline. It is for us a way to ensure that everyone who is involved stops normal work and actually spends time raising revenue. Thatâs hard for us, because we promise our sources that we will do something about their situation.
So, you strike?
Yes, itâs similar to what unions do when they go on strike. They remind people that their labour has value by withdrawing supply entirely. We give free and important information to the world every day. But when the supply is infinite in the sense that everyone is able to download what we publish, the perceived value starts to reduce down to zero. So by withdrawing supply and making our supply to zero, people start to once again perceive the value of what we are doing.
Do you urgently need money?
We have lots of very significant upcoming releases, significant in terms of bandwidth, but even more significant in terms of amount of labour they will require to process and in terms of legal attacks we will get. So we need to be in a stronger position before we can publish the material.
In mainstream media as well as in non-commercial media there are two important questions. What does it cost? And how is it financed? Would you please first describe the cost side âŚ
By far the biggest cost is people. Thatâs also a cost that scales with operations. The more material we go through, the more the management and labour costs are. People need to write summaries of the material and see whether itâs true or not. In the moment everyone is paying himself, but that canât last forever.
How big is the core team of WikiLeaks?
There are probably five people that do it 24 hours a day. And then there are 800 people who do it occasionally throughout the year. And in between there is a spectrum.
How do you and the other four guys who work full time without salaries finance living costs?
I have made money in the Internet. So I have enough money to do that, but also not forever. And the other four guys, in the moment they are also able to self-finance.
Was Wikileaks your idea as many assumed?
I donât call myself a founder.
Nobody really knows about the founders, says Wikipedia âŚ
Yes. This is simply because some of the people in the initial founding group are refugees, refugees from China and other places. And they still have family back in their home countries.
So at the moment the labour costs are still hypothetical, but the big costs that you really have to pay bills for are servers, office, etc.?
On the bandwidth side, the backing is costly as well when we get big spikes. Then there are registrations, bureaucracy, dealing with bank accounts and this sort of stuff. Because we are not in one location, it doesnât make sense for us to have headquarters. People have their own offices across the world.
What about cost for lawsuits?
We donât have to pay for our lawyerâs time. Hundred of thousands or millions dollarsâ Â worth of lawyer time are being donated. But we still have to pay things like photocopying and court filing. And so far we have never lost a case, there were no penalties or compensations to pay.
So all in all, can you give figures about how much money Wikileaks needs in one year?
Propably 200 000, thatâs with everyone paying themselves. But there are people who canât afford to continue being involved fulltime unless they are paid. For that I would say maybe itâs 600 000 a year.
Now letâs talk about your revenues, your only visible revenue stream is donations âŚ
Private donations. We refuse government and corporate donations. In the moment most of the money comes from the journalists, the lawyers or the technologists who are personally involved. Only about ten percent are from online donations. But that might increase.
At the bottom of the site is a list of your âsteadfast supportersâ, media organisations and companies like AP, Los Angeles Times or The National Newspaper Association. What do they do for you?
They give their lawyers, not cash.
In other words: If Wikileaks.org goes down as a result of a legal action, the same precedence can be used to take down nytimes.com the next day or the German Spiegelonline.
Why do the they help you? Probably not out of selflessness.
Two things: They see us as an organisation that makes it easier for them to do what they do. But they also see us as the thin end of the wedge. We tackle the hardest publishing cases. And if we are defeated, maybe they will be next in line. In other words: If Wikileaks.org goes down as a result of a legal action, the same precedence can be used to take down nytimes.com the next day or the German Spiegelonline.
My explanation was that maybe they do it because they know that what you do is actually their job, but they donât have the money to do it.
Maybe. The cost per word in investigative journalism is high. We make it a little bit cheaper for them. If you can bring these costs per word down you can get more words of investigative journalism and publish even in a company that wants to maximize profit, because we do some of the expensive sourcing. And there is another really big cost, namely the threat of legal action. We take the most legally difficult part, which is not the story, but usually the backing documents. As a result there is less chance of legal action against the publisher. So we help them to bring their costs per word in investigative journalism down.
You need to motivate two groups of people, in order to make the site run, the whistleblowers and the journalists. What are the motivations for whistleblowers?
Usually they are incenced morally by something. Very rarely actually they want revenge or just to embarrass some organisation. So thatâs their incentive, to satisfy this feeling. Actually we would have no problem giving sources cash. We donât do that, but for me there is no reason why only the lawyers and the journalists should be compensated for their effort. Somebody is taking the risk to do something and this will end up benefiting the public.
But then the legal problem would become much bigger.
Yes, but weâre not concerned about that. We could do these transfer payments to a jurisdiction like Belgium which says, that the authorities are not to use any means to determine the connection between the journalist and their source. And this would include the banking system.
On the other hand, you experiment with incentives for journalists. This sounds weird at first. Why do you have to give them additional incentives so they use material you offer them for free?
Itâs not that easy. Information has value, generally in proportion to the supply of this information being restricted. Once everyone has the information, another copy of the information has no value.
That produces the counter-intuitive outcome that the more evidence there is of some scandal and the more important the scandal, the less likely it is that the press will write about it. If there is no exclusivity.
But nearly every journalist in the US has daily access to the material of a news agency like AP.
The material of AP is ready to go straight into the newspaper. Our material requires additional investment. So when we release an important leak, it requires an important, intelligent journalist who is politically well connected. Those journalists have significant opportunity costs. Okay, they want to spend their time on 200 pages. In order for that to be profitable they need to make sure that they will come out with an exclusive at the end. But if it is perceived to be something of interest, it is probable that also other people will be working on it at that moment. And when they publish is unpredictable. That produces the counter-intuitive outcome that the more evidence there is of some scandal and the more important the scandal, the less likely it is that the press will write about it. If there is no exclusivity.
In Germany you made an exclusivity deal with two media companies, with Stern and Heise. Are you satisfied with these kind of deals?
We have done this in other countries before. Generally we have been satisfied. The problem is that it takes too much time to manage. To make a contract, and to determine who should have the exclusivity. Someone can say, oh, we will do a good story. We are going to maximize the political impact. And then they wonât do it. How do we measure this?
You want to make sure that if you give them the exclusivity that they really do what they promise to do âŚ
Yes. One thing that canât be faked is how much money they pay. If you have an auction and a media organisation pays the most, then they are predicitng, that they will benefit the most from publishing the story. That is, they will have the maximum number of readers. So this is a very good way to measure who should have the exclusivity. We tried to do it as an experiment in Venezuela .
Why Venezuela?
Because of the character of the document. We had 7 000 e-mails from Freddy Balzan, he was Hugo Chavezâs former speech writer and also the former ambassador to Argentinia. We knew that this document would have this problem, that it was big and political important, therefore probably no one would write anything about it for the reason I just said.
What happened?
This auction proved to be a logistical nightmare. Media organisations wanted access to the material before they went to auction. Consequently we would get them to sign non-disclosure agreements, chop up the material and release just every second page or every second sentence.That proved to distracting to all the normal work we were doing, so that we said, forget it, we canât do that. We just released the material as normal. And thatâs precisely what happened: no one wrote anything at all about those 7 000 Emails. Even though 15 stories had appeared about the fact that we were holding the auction.
The experiment failed.
The experiment didnât fail; the experiment taught us about what the burdens were. We would actually need a team of five or six people whose job was just to arrange these auctions.
You plan to continue the auction idea in the future âŚ
We plan to continue it, but we know it will take more resources. But if we pursue that we will not do that for single documents. We will instead offer a subscription. This would be much simpler. We would only have the overhead of doing the auction stuff every three months or six months, and not for every document.
So the exclusivity of the story will run out after three months?
No, there will be exclusivity in terms of different time windows in access to the material. As an example: there will be an auction for North America. And you will be ranked in the auction. The media organisation which bids most in the auction would get access to it first, the one who bids second will get access to it second and so on. Media organisations would have a subscription to Wikileaks.
They would have timely privileged access to all Wikileaks documents that are relevant for North America âŚ
Yes. Letâs imagine there are only two companies in the auction. And one pays double what the other one pays. And letâs say the source says they want the document to be published in one monthâs time. So there is a one month window where the journalists have time to investigate and write about the material. The organisation that pays the most for it gets it immediately, so therefore they would be able to do a more comprehensive story. Then the organisation that pays half as much gets it half the time later, they get the documents two weeks later. And then after one month they both publish.
That sounds promising. Wouldnât then the financial problem be solved?
It depends on how many resources the auction itself takes. And media themselves donât have so much money at all. But all in all I think we only would have to have a few bid cases per year, that would be enough to finance it.
The interview is a cross-posting from the German Medien-Ăkonomie-Blog.
Watch and listen to this interview as Xtranormal-Video.
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/onlinejournalismblog/~3/Iu5na3ahPKk/
If, like me, youâre a regular reader of The Guardianâs media coverage, or you listen to their Media Talk podcast, you might have been surprised to have read the following in the February 2010 UK edition of Wired:
The Guardian⌠hopes users of itâs ÂŁ2.39 (iPhone) app will pay extra for privileged access to in-demand columnists. (p.89)
This seems to fly in the face of what I know about The Guardianâs digital strategy. The Guardian have always seemed to be staunch opponents of paywalls, and Emily Bell, Director of Digital Content at Guardian News & Media, always seems to me to take a particularly strong line that she doesnât want to charge for online content. I asked her to comment on Wiredâs claim. âIâm not sure where the âcolumnistsâ assumption comes from, not us, thatâs for sure. Bit off beamâ she told me on Twitter (incidentally the âcolumnistsâ in question include David Rowan, Wiredâs Editor, who co-wrote the piece).
So, order is restored to my universe: The Guardian is still the bastion of free online content, creatively looking for another way to make digital pay. But wait, whatâs this? Wired have weighed back in, with this tweet:
@jonhickman @emilybell Came from a senior Guardian exec who demonstrated the app in person, actually
So, are The Guardian really thinking about paywalls? Was this loose talk? Has there been a misunderstanding? Is someone fibbing?
I donât know, but I think it matters. The Guardianâs online brand seems to be about free: free data, free access, free comment. If thereâs a grain of truth in Wiredâs claim, what does it tell us about the future of online access?
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/onlinejournalismblog/~3/SeBirmrLlm0/
This article frames the problem of news dissemination as a problem of market lemons, analogous to the issue raised by George Akerlof in 1970. Framing news as a mechanism of vetting common knowledge as opposed to entertainment allows one to see that instant common knowledge in the byzantine and uncertain way in which humans communicate and live in is unattainable. Given this frame of the problem a potential solution is posited which allows traditional newspaper companies to serve and focus on the role of validating news rather than simply creating or capturing it. The most value added service that traditional news organizations can provide is validation of truth and quality assurance.
âIt is hard to get the news from poems, but everyday, men die miserably for lack of what can be found there.â (William C. Williams)
Introduction
Gauging quality of entertainment is fairly simple and self-evident. Consumers know instantly whether a product is entertaining and consumers continue to pay attention if they find the material to be entertaining.
News providers tend to serve both an individualâs desire for entertainment and information in one product bundle. Although it is very easy for consumers to test the quality of the entertainment component of news it is much more difficult to gauge the information quality of news.
Consumers face the intangible dilemma of assessing whether news is accurate or true, which poses a problem of asymmetric information for consumers.
Despite the availability of virtually infinite potential news sources and automated search engines, the search costs of getting the truth are too high. Human beings are bombarded with information throughout the day and despite the ease of search engine technology only 28% of the internet is actually available for search (Barabasi, 2002). The internet is growing in content exponentially and current computing cannot search the majority of the internet.
The threat of news becoming a market for lemons is an important issue worth exploring as news serves to provide a gatekeeping and watchdog function in democracies.
Although it might appear that the advent of increased competition for news via independent and unbiased bloggers on the internet would improve news quality this may not be true in practice. Without a way to assess the accuracy and quality of the information the market of news on the internet tends toward a market for news lemons.
Shleiferâs research on the market for news shows that competition is not enough to ensure accurate news and that, ironically, competition results in âlower prices, but common slanting toward reader biasesâ (Shleifer and Mullainathan, 2005).
Shleifer posits that âa reader with access to all news sources could get an unbiased perspectiveâ and that âreader heterogeneity is more important for accuracy in mediaâ (2005).
That said, the issue of search costs of consumers has not been explored as in practical terms as no reader has time to read all news sources to form a perfect model of unbiased information.
The problem of assessing the validity of news quality is in essence the âmarket for lemonsâ problem raised by Akerlof (Akerlof, 1970). The market for lemons phenomenon relates to âquality and uncertaintyâ and news is clearly a business in which ââtrustâ is importantâ and, as Akerlof points out, âInformal unwritten guarantees are preconditions for trade and productionâ and âwhere these guarantees are indefinite, business will sufferâ (1970).
The aim of this paper is raise the issue of the market for internet news lemons as the quality of free information served piping hot on the internet is âindefiniteâ. When the quality of a good is unknown consumers are willing to pay for it, assuming it is not reliable, and thus this drives sellers with a good product out of the market as the consumer is unable to determine high quality from low quality goods.
Akerlof showed the detrimental effect of markets for lemons using the case of used cars in the 1970s where people with good used cars could not obtain the price their car was worth and would not sell their cars, thus leaving the market full of lemons in a self-fulfilling prophecy of sorts. Similarly, any market for good where the quality of the product is uncertain tends to a market for lemons.
This phenomenon has been at play in the mortgage securities market and is no different for news as a product.
Towards a definition of news and newspaper quality
News as a system for humans provides the following affordances to humans:
connects people with information,
provides branding of perceived truth,
helps support democracy and its ideals, and
fulfills an entertainment component via narrative integrity.
The narrative integrity itself has recently been criticized by Taleb as it encourages readers to build unrealistic assessment of risk in financial and other aspects of daily life (Taleb, 2005). Newspapers in general tend to either exaggerate or under-represent risks faced by individuals and are not sound guardians from a risk management point of view.
Quality for a news product is a perception of validity and truth amongst peer groups that consumers communicate with. Most consumers of news want to know what is going on. What is big? News thus functions to provide roles of gatekeeping, watchdog, anti-corruption, and in general a sharing of true facts of interest to human communities in relation to purported values and themes.
The existence of a strong free press has been associated with lowered corruption across nations (Brunettia & Wederb, 2003). In a study of government ownership of the news media, which is the case in 97% of countries, it was found that per âpublic choice theoryâŚgovernment ownership undermines political and economic freedomâ (Schleifer, Djankov, Mcliesh & Menova, 2003).
Scoping News
For the scope of this work the emphasis will be on the non-entertainment quality aspects of news as a product. This is consistent with Shleiferâs definition that the âquality of [news] information is its accuracy. The more accurate the news, the more valuable is its source to the consumer. Pressure from audiences and rivals force news outlets to seek and deliver more accurate information, just as market forces motivate auto-makers to produce better carsâ (Shleifer, 2005).
Hamiltonâs book on the economics of news highlights the fact that news is meant for rapid commoditization, it is information good and is a product of network effects (Hamilton, 2003). Per Hamiltonâs point, speed of delivery, accuracy, and relevancy seem to be desirable characteristics of news as a product (2003).
If we step back and look at this, news is really a mechanism of generating âcommon knowledgeâ within a byzantine environment where quality and truth are uncertain.
Taking this perspective one can see that the work in artificial intelligence and philosophy conducted by Halpern and Moses is relevant in this context (Halpern etal, 1984). Halpern and other students of common knowledge find that in practice it is impossible to guarantee reliable and true common knowledge in real time. The closest one can get to is almost common knowledge (Halpern etal, 1994).
Given the complex nature of the problem of common knowledge in a distributed uncertain environment Halpern et al point out that the modeling of time is critical in achieving eventual common knowledge. One way to look at this is, given that a consumer wants common knowledge, they should wait a sufficient time until a news story can be vetted. The expectation of instant and true knowledge is a pipe dream, as Eugene OâNeil would say.
One side effect of the current market equilibrium for news is the segmentation of the market for news into the following groups of people:
people who donât read the news,
people who the read news to interpret facts to suit agendas i.e. politicians, lobbyists etc, and
people who read what they want to believe and are aware of it.
I believe this segmentation exists due to high search costs for the truth.
I personally donât read the news much at all. If I am interested in a topic I research the field, get input from experts, and make my own inferences. I of course do not engage much in casual conversation. For the majority of citizens who do, news is an invaluable source to relate with others and share experiences of âtrue eventsâ and common knowledge.
Noted anthropologist Roy Wagner has pointed out the pervasive problem of information which humans grapple with:
âPersuasion, from the days of Aristotle onwards, never works as it is intended to and has its greatest effect on the persuaders ⌠To the extent that the vast, worldwide communications industry, the media, the internet or Web, the ubiquitous âsensoryâ modes and guidance-circuitries use âinformationâ or âcommunicationâ as code words for what is really going on, we live in a world that is actually created by a failure of persuasion.
âThis means that we live in a world of information-stealth â the half truths of our lies and the lies of half truth  - or what the CIA, or at least its critics, would call disinformation. I wouldnât be kidding you, now would I? Disinformation has a far more ambiguous or ambivalent effect than persuasion ever could have and is both more informative and communicative than its buzz-word surrogates. It works on a âleakageâ principle, partial truths leaked out in the telling of deliberate lies and deliberate lies leaked in the telling of partial truths. It is motivated by goals and objectives that have nothing directly to do with either belief or conviction on one hand or doubt and cynicism on the other; it offers deniability with both hands. âIt is either half true,â as the Viennese aphorist Karl Krauss said of the aphorism or âone and a half times trueâ.
âWe are unconvinced (e.g. apathetic) on one hand, and overconvinced on the other, and the middle ground is the most contested of all ⌠Disinformation rules the world, and it does so through âdeniabilityâ. We know for a fact that every single trade, occupation, and especially profession has its secrets, known to its initiates and unknown to others.â (Wagner, 2000)
The last piece applies to journalists as well.
Potential solutions: a new business model for news
To date innovation in news has been focused on either transforming traditional media into high tech companies, which is unlikely, and the adoption of the market niche strategy of hyperlocal news.
The model of niche and differentiation/specialization has potential but is perplexed with the issue of changing interest and taste. How does one know which hyperlocal news is of interest? With limited time and highly contested attention spans hyperlocal news is a difficult to maintain proposition. That said, given non-profit and community support it can work as a niche solution.
The solution we propose here is targeted to larger well established news players and is a novel approach to the problem.
Traditional print sources like the Washington post etc. have a platform and reputation for checking and ensuring high quality information. The expertise that existing print media companies have can be used to focus on validation and authentication of breaking news stories, as on the internet there is no authority for the validity of news.
One innovative solution to the market of news lemons problem might be for traditional news papers to create reputation-based blogging spaces where stories are tested and validated before publication. This is consistent with the work of Yamagishi who studied the market-for-lemons problem in online trading and found an online reputation system to be a useful solution to the problem (Yamagishi, 2002).
Yamagishi noted that online trading results in âinformation asymmetryâ which âdrives the ⌠market into a lemons marketâ (2002). This is analogous to the problem of news consumption.  Yamagishiâs analysis segments reputation into 2 forms: positive and negative reputation. Yamagishi finds the openness of internet trading precludes negative reputation and  âpromotes positive reputation as an effective means for curtailing the lemons problemâ (2002).
An important aspect of understanding why negative reputation is not effective on the internet is that it is too easy to switch and create new identities. Thus methods of âinclusionâ which validate positive reputation are critical to combating the lemons problem (2002).
Per Yamagishiâs suggestion, existing newspapers with positive brand reputations have value as providers of positive reputation in an open market of internet news.
An enterprise devoted to assuring quality of the news could be a new hybrid form of existence for traditional newspapers in which the goals of the news system is preserved.
The price differential paid to the news companies would be based on their quality of checking and not on slant of the news or sensational quality of it.
Under this model papers would specialize in news domains with expertise and offer objective validation stories. For true objectivity the influence of advertising profit would need to be removed. Perhaps the advertising revenue would accrue to content providers who provided the stories along with advertisements which underwrite the authors. The news intermediaries who select the stories based on quality and validation would be paid only for quality assurance.
A successful example of dealing with âcyber lemonsâ was that of an âonline intermediaryâ used by Chinaâs largest online consumer-to-consumer trading site, which built a âcredit evaluation system to serve as a quality-intermediary and reputationâ (Pan, 2005).
In short, several eBays for news, specializing in different news domains, would serve to mitigate the lemons problem.
The newspaper industry must face the disintermediation of its power to dictate the news agenda. The notion that a few, supported by commercial advertising, would decide what was newsworthy was paternalistic and with the disintermediation of this component the responsibility of what to pay attention to falls on society. This issue itself is best tackled through education and the fostering of civic and democratic ideals in youth.
Dhruv Sharma is an independent scholar in the fields of organization behavior, risk management, artificial intelligence, and systems engineering. A graduate of the McIntire School at the University of Virginie, he holds a Masters in Systems Engineering and a Masters in Organizational Development from Marymount University.
Special thanks to George Akerlof for email discussion of the idea and also guidance of areas to research and focus.
This article is dedicated to Emma Brown, a greater writer and journalist and George Akerlof, the great economist.
Citations:
Akerlof, GA. (1970) The Market for âLemonsâ: Quality Uncertainty and the Market Mechanism. The Quarterly Journal of Economics, Vol. 84, No. 3. (Aug., 1970), pp. 488-500
BarabĂĄsi, A.L. (2002) Linked: The New Science of Networks, Perseus, Cambridge
Brunettia, Aymo & Wederb, Beatrice (2003) A free press is bad news for corruption. Journal of Public Economics 87 (2003) 1801â1824
Hamilton, James T., (2003), All the News Thatâs Fit to Sell. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press
Halpern,J.Y. and Moses,Y. (1984). Knowledge and common knowledge in a distributed environment. Journal of the ACM, 37(3):549â587, 1990. A preliminary version appeared in Proc. 3rd ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing
Halpern,J.; Fagin, R; Moses,Y. and Vardi,MY (1994). Common knowledge revisited. Theoretical aspects of rationality. Proceedings 6th Conference. Retrieved from http://www.cs.cornell.edu/home/halpern/papers/ck_revisited.pdf
Schleifer, A. Djankov, S., Mcliesh, C. Menova, T. (2003) WHO OWNS THE MEDIA? Journal of Law and Economics. vol. XLVI
Shleifer, Andrei & Mullainathan, S. (2005) The Market for News. The American Economic Review
Taleb, N.N. (2005) âTHE OPIATES OF THE MIDDLE CLASSESâ Retrieved from http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/taleb05/taleb05_index.html
Yamagishi, T. Masafumi, Matsusa. (2002) Improving the Lemons Market with a Reputation System: An Experimental Study of Internet Auctioning. Retrieved from http://joi.ito.com/archives/papers/Yamagishi_ASQ1.pdf Hokkaido University
Wagner, Roy (2000) âOur Very Own Cargo Cultâ. Oceana
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/onlinejournalismblog/~3/pxEqIVpgOH0/
This article frames the problem of news dissemination as a problem of market lemons, analogous to the issue raised by George Akerlof in 1970. Framing news as a mechanism of vetting common knowledge as opposed to entertainment allows one to see that instant common knowledge in the byzantine and uncertain way in which humans communicate and live in is unattainable. Given this frame of the problem a potential solution is posited which allows traditional newspaper companies to serve and focus on the role of validating news rather than simply creating or capturing it. The most value added service that traditional news organizations can provide is validation of truth and quality assurance.
âIt is hard to get the news from poems, but everyday, men die miserably for lack of what can be found there.â (William C. Williams)
Introduction
Gauging quality of entertainment is fairly simple and self-evident. Consumers know instantly whether a product is entertaining and consumers continue to pay attention if they find the material to be entertaining.
News providers tend to serve both an individualâs desire for entertainment and information in one product bundle. Although it is very easy for consumers to test the quality of the entertainment component of news it is much more difficult to gauge the information quality of news.
Consumers face the intangible dilemma of assessing whether news is accurate or true, which poses a problem of asymmetric information for consumers.
Despite the availability of virtually infinite potential news sources and automated search engines, the search costs of getting the truth are too high. Human beings are bombarded with information throughout the day and despite the ease of search engine technology only 28% of the internet is actually available for search (Barabasi, 2002). The internet is growing in content exponentially and current computing cannot search the majority of the internet.
The threat of news becoming a market for lemons is an important issue worth exploring as news serves to provide a gatekeeping and watchdog function in democracies.
Although it might appear that the advent of increased competition for news via independent and unbiased bloggers on the internet would improve news quality this may not be true in practice. Without a way to assess the accuracy and quality of the information the market of news on the internet tends toward a market for news lemons.
Shleiferâs research on the market for news shows that competition is not enough to ensure accurate news and that, ironically, competition results in âlower prices, but common slanting toward reader biasesâ (Shleifer and Mullainathan, 2005).
Shleifer posits that âa reader with access to all news sources could get an unbiased perspectiveâ and that âreader heterogeneity is more important for accuracy in mediaâ (2005).
That said, the issue of search costs of consumers has not been explored as in practical terms as no reader has time to read all news sources to form a perfect model of unbiased information.
The problem of assessing the validity of news quality is in essence the âmarket for lemonsâ problem raised by Akerlof (Akerlof, 1970). The market for lemons phenomenon relates to âquality and uncertaintyâ and news is clearly a business in which ââtrustâ is importantâ and, as Akerlof points out, âInformal unwritten guarantees are preconditions for trade and productionâ and âwhere these guarantees are indefinite, business will sufferâ (1970).
The aim of this paper is raise the issue of the market for internet news lemons as the quality of free information served piping hot on the internet is âindefiniteâ. When the quality of a good is unknown consumers are willing to pay for it, assuming it is not reliable, and thus this drives sellers with a good product out of the market as the consumer is unable to determine high quality from low quality goods.
Akerlof showed the detrimental effect of markets for lemons using the case of used cars in the 1970s where people with good used cars could not obtain the price their car was worth and would not sell their cars, thus leaving the market full of lemons in a self-fulfilling prophecy of sorts. Similarly, any market for good where the quality of the product is uncertain tends to a market for lemons.
This phenomenon has been at play in the mortgage securities market and is no different for news as a product.
Towards a definition of news and newspaper quality
News as a system for humans provides the following affordances to humans:
connects people with information,
provides branding of perceived truth,
helps support democracy and its ideals, and
fulfills an entertainment component via narrative integrity.
The narrative integrity itself has recently been criticized by Taleb as it encourages readers to build unrealistic assessment of risk in financial and other aspects of daily life (Taleb, 2005). Newspapers in general tend to either exaggerate or under-represent risks faced by individuals and are not sound guardians from a risk management point of view.
Quality for a news product is a perception of validity and truth amongst peer groups that consumers communicate with. Most consumers of news want to know what is going on. What is big? News thus functions to provide roles of gatekeeping, watchdog, anti-corruption, and in general a sharing of true facts of interest to human communities in relation to purported values and themes.
The existence of a strong free press has been associated with lowered corruption across nations (Brunettia & Wederb, 2003). In a study of government ownership of the news media, which is the case in 97% of countries, it was found that per âpublic choice theoryâŚgovernment ownership undermines political and economic freedomâ (Schleifer, Djankov, Mcliesh & Menova, 2003).
Scoping News
For the scope of this work the emphasis will be on the non-entertainment quality aspects of news as a product. This is consistent with Shleiferâs definition that the âquality of [news] information is its accuracy. The more accurate the news, the more valuable is its source to the consumer. Pressure from audiences and rivals force news outlets to seek and deliver more accurate information, just as market forces motivate auto-makers to produce better carsâ (Shleifer, 2005).
Hamiltonâs book on the economics of news highlights the fact that news is meant for rapid commoditization, it is information good and is a product of network effects (Hamilton, 2003). Per Hamiltonâs point, speed of delivery, accuracy, and relevancy seem to be desirable characteristics of news as a product (2003).
If we step back and look at this, news is really a mechanism of generating âcommon knowledgeâ within a byzantine environment where quality and truth are uncertain.
Taking this perspective one can see that the work in artificial intelligence and philosophy conducted by Halpern and Moses is relevant in this context (Halpern etal, 1984). Halpern and other students of common knowledge find that in practice it is impossible to guarantee reliable and true common knowledge in real time. The closest one can get to is almost common knowledge (Halpern etal, 1994).
Given the complex nature of the problem of common knowledge in a distributed uncertain environment Halpern et al point out that the modeling of time is critical in achieving eventual common knowledge. One way to look at this is, given that a consumer wants common knowledge, they should wait a sufficient time until a news story can be vetted. The expectation of instant and true knowledge is a pipe dream, as Eugene OâNeil would say.
One side effect of the current market equilibrium for news is the segmentation of the market for news into the following groups of people:
people who donât read the news,
people who the read news to interpret facts to suit agendas i.e. politicians, lobbyists etc, and
people who read what they want to believe and are aware of it.
I believe this segmentation exists due to high search costs for the truth.
I personally donât read the news much at all. If I am interested in a topic I research the field, get input from experts, and make my own inferences. I of course do not engage much in casual conversation. For the majority of citizens who do, news is an invaluable source to relate with others and share experiences of âtrue eventsâ and common knowledge.
Noted anthropologist Roy Wagner has pointed out the pervasive problem of information which humans grapple with:
âPersuasion, from the days of Aristotle onwards, never works as it is intended to and has its greatest effect on the persuaders ⌠To the extent that the vast, worldwide communications industry, the media, the internet or Web, the ubiquitous âsensoryâ modes and guidance-circuitries use âinformationâ or âcommunicationâ as code words for what is really going on, we live in a world that is actually created by a failure of persuasion.
âThis means that we live in a world of information-stealth â the half truths of our lies and the lies of half truth  - or what the CIA, or at least its critics, would call disinformation. I wouldnât be kidding you, now would I? Disinformation has a far more ambiguous or ambivalent effect than persuasion ever could have and is both more informative and communicative than its buzz-word surrogates. It works on a âleakageâ principle, partial truths leaked out in the telling of deliberate lies and deliberate lies leaked in the telling of partial truths. It is motivated by goals and objectives that have nothing directly to do with either belief or conviction on one hand or doubt and cynicism on the other; it offers deniability with both hands. âIt is either half true,â as the Viennese aphorist Karl Krauss said of the aphorism or âone and a half times trueâ.
âWe are unconvinced (e.g. apathetic) on one hand, and overconvinced on the other, and the middle ground is the most contested of all ⌠Disinformation rules the world, and it does so through âdeniabilityâ. We know for a fact that every single trade, occupation, and especially profession has its secrets, known to its initiates and unknown to others.â (Wagner, 2000)
The last piece applies to journalists as well.
Potential solutions: a new business model for news
To date innovation in news has been focused on either transforming traditional media into high tech companies, which is unlikely, and the adoption of the market niche strategy of hyperlocal news.
The model of niche and differentiation/specialization has potential but is perplexed with the issue of changing interest and taste. How does one know which hyperlocal news is of interest? With limited time and highly contested attention spans hyperlocal news is a difficult to maintain proposition. That said, given non-profit and community support it can work as a niche solution.
The solution we propose here is targeted to larger well established news players and is a novel approach to the problem.
Traditional print sources like the Washington post etc. have a platform and reputation for checking and ensuring high quality information. The expertise that existing print media companies have can be used to focus on validation and authentication of breaking news stories, as on the internet there is no authority for the validity of news.
One innovative solution to the market of news lemons problem might be for traditional news papers to create reputation-based blogging spaces where stories are tested and validated before publication. This is consistent with the work of Yamagishi who studied the market-for-lemons problem in online trading and found an online reputation system to be a useful solution to the problem (Yamagishi, 2002).
Yamagishi noted that online trading results in âinformation asymmetryâ which âdrives the ⌠market into a lemons marketâ (2002). This is analogous to the problem of news consumption.  Yamagishiâs analysis segments reputation into 2 forms: positive and negative reputation. Yamagishi finds the openness of internet trading precludes negative reputation and  âpromotes positive reputation as an effective means for curtailing the lemons problemâ (2002).
An important aspect of understanding why negative reputation is not effective on the internet is that it is too easy to switch and create new identities. Thus methods of âinclusionâ which validate positive reputation are critical to combating the lemons problem (2002).
Per Yamagishiâs suggestion, existing newspapers with positive brand reputations have value as providers of positive reputation in an open market of internet news.
An enterprise devoted to assuring quality of the news could be a new hybrid form of existence for traditional newspapers in which the goals of the news system is preserved.
The price differential paid to the news companies would be based on their quality of checking and not on slant of the news or sensational quality of it.
Under this model papers would specialize in news domains with expertise and offer objective validation stories. For true objectivity the influence of advertising profit would need to be removed. Perhaps the advertising revenue would accrue to content providers who provided the stories along with advertisements which underwrite the authors. The news intermediaries who select the stories based on quality and validation would be paid only for quality assurance.
A successful example of dealing with âcyber lemonsâ was that of an âonline intermediaryâ used by Chinaâs largest online consumer-to-consumer trading site, which built a âcredit evaluation system to serve as a quality-intermediary and reputationâ (Pan, 2005).
In short, several eBays for news, specializing in different news domains, would serve to mitigate the lemons problem.
The newspaper industry must face the disintermediation of its power to dictate the news agenda. The notion that a few, supported by commercial advertising, would decide what was newsworthy was paternalistic and with the disintermediation of this component the responsibility of what to pay attention to falls on society. This issue itself is best tackled through education and the fostering of civic and democratic ideals in youth.
Dhruv Sharma is an independent scholar in the fields of organization behavior, risk management, artificial intelligence, and systems engineering. A graduate of the McIntire School at the University of Virginie, he holds a Masters in Systems Engineering and a Masters in Organizational Development from Marymount University.
Special thanks to George Akerlof for email discussion of the idea and also guidance of areas to research and focus.
This article is dedicated to Emma Brown, a greater writer and journalist and George Akerlof, the great economist.
Citations:
Akerlof, GA. (1970) The Market for âLemonsâ: Quality Uncertainty and the Market Mechanism. The Quarterly Journal of Economics, Vol. 84, No. 3. (Aug., 1970), pp. 488-500
BarabĂĄsi, A.L. (2002) Linked: The New Science of Networks, Perseus, Cambridge
Brunettia, Aymo & Wederb, Beatrice (2003) A free press is bad news for corruption. Journal of Public Economics 87 (2003) 1801â1824
Hamilton, James T., (2003), All the News Thatâs Fit to Sell. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press
Halpern,J.Y. and Moses,Y. (1984). Knowledge and common knowledge in a distributed environment. Journal of the ACM, 37(3):549â587, 1990. A preliminary version appeared in Proc. 3rd ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing
Halpern,J.; Fagin, R; Moses,Y. and Vardi,MY (1994). Common knowledge revisited. Theoretical aspects of rationality. Proceedings 6th Conference. Retrieved from http://www.cs.cornell.edu/home/halpern/papers/ck_revisited.pdf
Schleifer, A. Djankov, S., Mcliesh, C. Menova, T. (2003) WHO OWNS THE MEDIA? Journal of Law and Economics. vol. XLVI
Shleifer, Andrei & Mullainathan, S. (2005) The Market for News. The American Economic Review
Taleb, N.N. (2005) âTHE OPIATES OF THE MIDDLE CLASSESâ Retrieved from http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/taleb05/taleb05_index.html
Yamagishi, T. Masafumi, Matsusa. (2002) Improving the Lemons Market with a Reputation System: An Experimental Study of Internet Auctioning. Retrieved from http://joi.ito.com/archives/papers/Yamagishi_ASQ1.pdf Hokkaido University
Wagner, Roy (2000) âOur Very Own Cargo Cultâ. Oceana
http://onlinejournalismblog.com/2009/12/22/internet-news-as-a-market-for-news-lemons/
Last week, the Guardian reported on a few promising citizen journalism projects in Africa that use mobile phone technology effectively to not only communicate with people but to also allow the audience to contribute to newsgathering. As opposed to the excessive â and even frivolous â growth of smart phone applications in the Western world, mobile phones in developing countries, which are nowhere near as sophisticated as ones in America and Europe, are being used as a reliable proxy for high-speed Internet access to perform basic functions, such as paying grocery bills and delivering medicines. Cell phone companies have bought into this as well, developing cheap, reliable phones with ease of use and practical functionality.
The Ushahidi crowdsourcing project that the Guardian article elaborates, is perhaps one of the best known and most successful mobile journalism exercises in Kenya. Ushahidiâwhich means âtestimonyâ in Swahiliâattempts to gather as much information from the public as possible and then verify this collected data with the help of computer and human confirmation. Launched during the post-election violence in Kenya in 2008, Ushahidi has since been implemented worldwide â from monitoring unrest in the Congo, tracking violence in Ghaza, to reporting on the Indian elections earlier this year.
The project allows people to contribute in the form of simple text messages, photos and video delivered through smartphones, or reports submitted online; this is posted in real time to an interactive map, accessible directly through smart phone technology. This information can also be converted to formats that are readable in various communities by news organizations in developing countries. The technology itself is open source, so anyone can help enhance and develop it. In order to verify the accuracy of information obtained in the case of breaking news events, Ushahidi has also launched the Swift River Project, which helps voluntary participants worldwide to separate good information from ânoise,â or in the teamâs own words, in âcrowdsourcing the filter.â
Basically, the way it works is that once the aggregated data comes in through multiple streams, be it Flickr, Twitter, or Ushahidi, people can go in and rate the data â the information is thus verified by the sheer power of numbers, as in any crowdsourcing project. In addition, the information is filtered through machine-based algorithms to confirm accuracy. Ushahidi used a similar method to track the Indian elections earlier this year through VoteReport.in. In India, âmobloggingâ or microblogging, made possible through the explosive popularity of cell phones, has been growing for the past few years. Sites like smsgupshup.com and Vakow.com â Indian versions of Twitter â allow people to disseminate 160-character messages to groups, enabling amateurs to deliver personalized, customized news through sms messages. This makes up for the relative lack of interactivity from mainstream Indian news organizations.
Cell phones as tools for information dissemination are particularly valuable in countries like Zimbabwe where radio transmission is often blocked. Text messages can allow an uninterrupted flow of information in such cases. The Guardianâs Activate 09 project sends out headlines to tens of thousands of citizens in the Southern African country through sms messaging. In addition, the paper has been crowdsourcing ideas from its global audience on the different methods available to reach thousands of people during breaking news events.
The Grameen Foundation, a global nonprofit, has partnered with Google and a Uganda-based telecommunications provider MTN, to answer important queries sent in by residents via text messages; questions range from clarifications about deadly diseases to agricultural problems. In Kenya, RSS feeds from the Internet are fed into mobile phones to educate and inform people, and text-to-speech tools that convert sms messages into audio files are helping the visually impaired. Some Western companies are encouraging Kenyans to take part in crowdsourcing projects in return for micropayments. Citizens perform small tasks such as transcribing audio and tagging photos for small sums of money. The BBC is now providing English language learning capabilities in Bangladesh through cheap audio and SMS lessons through a partnership with mobile service providers.
Despite the availability of hi-speed Internet access in Western countries, the versatility of the cell phone as a vehicle for citizen journalism is very special indeed. The ability of a phone to provide real-time, on-the-ground coverage is undisputed, whether you see an unusual occurrence on the street on your way to a mall in Los Angeles or witness a riot in a displaced community in Darfur.
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/onlinejournalismblog/~3/ri95n0DUuos/
Questions from a UCLAN student on paywalls, published here as part of my FAQ section:
1.A tabloidâs cover price barely covers the distribution costs, showing all profits are aquired through advertising:Â Given that The Sun & Daily Mail still sell 5million copies between them, how much do you think making companies advertise across two platforms (print and online) has damaged the business model of journalism to force solutions in paywalls?
Firstly, most tabloids actually make the majority of their profits through cover price. This makes them unusual compared to most other newspapers, which rely more on advertising, but the advertising-cover price split in profits varies widely between publications.
I think companiesâ initial moves to sell advertising across print and online harmed their business model in a number of ways:
Firstly, they treated web ads as a cheap âadd onâ to sell to print advertisers, which both devalued the ads and overlooked new advertisers (around a third of readers of local sites, for example, come from outside the local area)
Secondly, Iâve seen little investment in online advertising as a medium; little training of ad sales people; and little thought about how to work to the strengths of the medium (I may have missed something, and would love to know of examples of investment on the ad side). This is why Google has been so successful â it sold advertising based on user behaviour and results, rather than simply âdisplayâ
Publishers are starting to address this by introducing paywalls, one of the advantages of which is that you get more information on users. But to truly compete in this marketplace we need to look at the successful sellers of ads online and work out where weâre not serving advertisers as well.
Thereâs a further issue here, which I think is fundamental to publishersâ difficulties: it is not really in publishersâ interests to sell advertising online. Why? Because the profits are so much smaller than selling print advertising. If you help a print advertiser move to online advertising, youâre cannibalising your print margins for something less profitable. Now of course your competitors donât have that problem, and advertisers will move â and are moving â online sooner or later. And you should be prepared to sell it to them when they do. But fundamentally there is very little incentive for ad sales staff to sell print advertising, and equally little economic incentive for publishers, apart from fear of being left behind.
2. Going from paying nothing to monthly, quarterly and annual subscriptions is a big jump. Why do you think micropayments have been rejected by News Corporation and Johnston Press?
News Corp are on record â or at least the editor of the Times is â as saying that having micropayments risks affecting editorial so that you donât spend money sending people to Sri Lanka but you focus instead on what readers are paying for. Thatâs a surprisingly principled statement. But with everything said in these matters, you need to be sceptical about how much of it is genuine and how much is PR.
One big problem with micropayments is the cost of the transaction. If you just buy one tune on iTunes in a week then iTunes actually loses money; they bank on you spending enough money to cover the cost of processing your credit card payment (and they process those weekly to reduce the costs).
There are other problems such as standardisation and how difficult it is for users.
3. Once the genieâs out of the bottle you canât put it back in: Wonât people just be able to get news straight off the wire from AP, use the BBC (which will always be free) or follow selective feeds off Twitter?
Of course. But even when they paid for newspapers they could get âthe newsâ for free on TV or radio, and they still bought newspapers because they offered things the other platforms didnât. Now the selection is even wider, and more niche, so I guess the question is: what can you offer online that print and broadcast doesnât?
Will people pay for convenience, for service, and for other benefits such as events, discounts, membership etc?
Look at the Guardian iPhone app â it went straight to the top of the paid-for app charts despite the same content being available for free on the Guardianâs iPhone-friendly website. But it offered more convenience (personalisation), service (speed) and membership of a community (being able to say âIâve got the Guardian app!â). Weâre still learning.
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/onlinejournalismblog/~3/RrnimQ4lf8o/
This story was originally published at Poynter. Republished here for archiving purposes.
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/onlinejournalismblog/~3/LGgpUAcB6GA/
Hereâs another tutorial on the mashup platform Yahoo! Pipes, showing how you can use it to create a meta-search that will push any search term by the user through a number of search engines, and present you with a combined result (and RSS feed).
This tutorial builds on a previous post I published on how to create basic mashups with Yahoo! Pipes. If you havenât any knowledge of Pipes you should probably read that first.
How to create a custom meta-search in Yahoo! Pipes
First, you obviously need to log in to Yahoo! Pipes, and click on Create a Pipe. Youâll be taken to the Pipe editing interface: on the left will be a menu with a series of sections (User Input, Url, Operators, etc.) to choose modules from. In the centre will be the canvas where you create your pipe â and at the bottom a âDebuggerâ area where you can see the results of any particular part of your pipe.
In the area on the left, under the âUser Inputâ section, click on the âText Inputâ module and drag it onto the canvas (or you can click on the + sign for it to be placed for you).
Select the Text Input module
In the box marked âPromptâ type the instruction text for users of the pipe, e.g. âWhat do you want to search for?â. If thereâs a default search you want to have appear in the search box to begin with, enter it in the box marked âDefaultâ.Under the âUrlâ section, click on âURL Builderâ and drag it onto the canvas.
Select the URL Builder module
Go to a search engine that offers RSS feeds for searches, e.g. Google News. Do a test search (e.g. âfireâ) and copy the address of the RSS feed for those search results (on Google News it will be at the foot of the page)
In the âURL Builderâ module paste the address of that RSS feed into the box marked âBaseâ
Youâll notice that the rest of the module now expands to include all of the parameters that the URL includes. The main one we are interested in is the one that relates to our search (you can tell which one it is as it should have the topic of your search in the right hand column) â in the case of Google News, this is âqâ.
Customising the URL Builder module
Drag a wire from the circle at the bottom of the Text Input module to the circle to the right of that search term (e.g. âfireâ). It should turn grey and you should now be able to see a wire joining the two modules. Your search term should now be replaced by âtext [wired]â.
Now drag a third module onto your canvas: this time itâs under the âSourcesâ heading, and the module is called âFetch Feedâ.
The Fetch Feed module
This time drag a wire from the circle at the bottom of âURL Builderâ to the circle on the right of the âFetch Feedâ module. Again, it should turn grey and the previously empty box should now read âtext [wired]â.
A grey wire linking the URL Builder and Fetch Feed modules
Drag another âURL Builderâ module onto the canvas and repeat the process detailed above for a separate search engine. Connect your âText Inputâ module to it in the same way. You may have to delete some of the parameters to make these work. A blog search on IceRocket, for example, includes the parameter âtabâ. Deleting this (with the â-â button next to it) appears to make the search work in Pipes. If you know of any similar tweaks, please let me know.
In the âFetch Feedâ module click on the â+â icon to add a new, empty, box. Click on the circle at the bottom of your second âURL Builderâ module to the circle to the right of that empty box. Again, it should turn grey and you should now be able to see a wire joining the two modules and the box should now read âtext [wired]â.
You can repeat these steps for further search engines.
Once youâve finished, from the âOperatorsâ heading on the left, drag a âUnionâ module onto the canvas. You need this to combine your feeds.
To combine them, drag a wire from the bottom of all âFetch Feedâ modules to separate circles at the top of âUnionâ at the bottom of the canvas. Unlike the other pipes this will be blue.
Wires connect the Fetch Feed modules to the Union module, which in turn is connected to the Output module
Finally, drag a pipe from the bottom of âUnionâ to the top of âPipe Outputâ at the bottom of the canvas.
That is it. Save your pipe and click on âBack to My Pipesâ towards the top centre of the screen and you should see your pipe listed. Click on that pipe to run it â you should see a text entry box towards the top where you can enter your search to change the results. If you want to embed this somewhere, click on âGet as a Badgeâ to get the code.
However, before you do that youâll notice that results will be clustered by search engine, and also may contain duplicate results. Youâll need to click on âEdit Sourceâ and add a couple more modules to tweak your pipe and solve the problem.
The modules you will need to use are the Unique module (in the Operators section) to filter out duplicate results (probably place it between Union and Pipe Output - drag wires to remove them), and the Sort module (also in the Operators section)Â to order results by date (otherwise they will cluster by search engine).
Iâm by no means any expert on this, but put this out there for others to build on, comment on and correct.
Many thanks to Paul Daniel who showed me much of this as part of an open MA Online Journalism session and whose blog is a great resource on Pipes.
http://onlinejournalismblog.com/2009/12/18/how-to-create-a-custom-meta-search-in-yahoo-pipes/
Hereâs another tutorial on the mashup platform Yahoo! Pipes, showing how you can use it to create a meta-search that will push any search term by the user through a number of search engines, and present you with a combined result (and RSS feed). A finished version of the pipe can be seen here.
This tutorial builds on a previous post I published on how to create basic mashups with Yahoo! Pipes. If you havenât any knowledge of Pipes you should probably read that first.
How to create a custom meta-search in Yahoo! Pipes
First, you obviously need to log in to Yahoo! Pipes, and click on Create a Pipe. Youâll be taken to the Pipe editing interface: on the left will be a menu with a series of sections (User Input, Url, Operators, etc.) to choose modules from. In the centre will be the canvas where you create your pipe â and at the bottom a âDebuggerâ area where you can see the results of any particular part of your pipe.
In the area on the left, under the âUser Inputâ section, click on the âText Inputâ module and drag it onto the canvas (or you can click on the + sign for it to be placed for you).
Select the Text Input module
In the box marked âPromptâ type the instruction text for users of the pipe, e.g. âWhat do you want to search for?â. If thereâs a default search you want to have appear in the search box to begin with, enter it in the box marked âDefaultâ.Under the âUrlâ section, click on âURL Builderâ and drag it onto the canvas.
Select the URL Builder module
Go to a search engine that offers RSS feeds for searches, e.g. Google News. Do a test search (e.g. âfireâ) and copy the address of the RSS feed for those search results (on Google News it will be at the foot of the page)
In the âURL Builderâ module paste the address of that RSS feed into the box marked âBaseâ
Youâll notice that the rest of the module now expands to include all of the parameters that the URL includes. The main one we are interested in is the one that relates to our search (you can tell which one it is as it should have the topic of your search in the right hand column) â in the case of Google News, this is âqâ.
Customising the URL Builder module
Drag a wire from the circle at the bottom of the Text Input module to the circle to the right of that search term (e.g. âfireâ). It should turn grey and you should now be able to see a wire joining the two modules. Your search term should now be replaced by âtext [wired]â.
Now drag a third module onto your canvas: this time itâs under the âSourcesâ heading, and the module is called âFetch Feedâ.
The Fetch Feed module
This time drag a wire from the circle at the bottom of âURL Builderâ to the circle on the right of the âFetch Feedâ module. Again, it should turn grey and the previously empty box should now read âtext [wired]â.
A grey wire linking the URL Builder and Fetch Feed modules
Drag another âURL Builderâ module onto the canvas and repeat the process detailed above for a separate search engine. Connect your âText Inputâ module to it in the same way. You may have to delete some of the parameters to make these work. A blog search on IceRocket, for example, includes the parameter âtabâ. Deleting this (with the â-â button next to it) appears to make the search work in Pipes. If you know of any similar tweaks, please let me know.
In the âFetch Feedâ module click on the â+â icon to add a new, empty, box. Click on the circle at the bottom of your second âURL Builderâ module to the circle to the right of that empty box. Again, it should turn grey and you should now be able to see a wire joining the two modules and the box should now read âtext [wired]â.
You can repeat these steps for further search engines.
Once youâve finished, from the âOperatorsâ heading on the left, drag a âUnionâ module onto the canvas. You need this to combine your feeds.
To combine them, drag a wire from the bottom of all âFetch Feedâ modules to separate circles at the top of âUnionâ at the bottom of the canvas. Unlike the other pipes this will be blue.
Wires connect the Fetch Feed modules to the Union module, which in turn is connected to the Output module
Finally, drag a pipe from the bottom of âUnionâ to the top of âPipe Outputâ at the bottom of the canvas.
That is it. Save your pipe and click on âBack to My Pipesâ towards the top centre of the screen and you should see your pipe listed. Click on that pipe to run it â you should see a text entry box towards the top where you can enter your search to change the results. If you want to embed this somewhere, click on âGet as a Badgeâ to get the code.
However, before you do that youâll notice that results will be clustered by search engine, and also may contain duplicate results. Youâll need to click on âEdit Sourceâ and add a couple more modules to tweak your pipe and solve the problem.
The modules you will need to use are the Unique module (in the Operators section) to filter out duplicate results (probably place it between Union and Pipe Output - drag wires to remove them), and the Sort module (also in the Operators section)Â to order results by date (otherwise they will cluster by search engine).
Iâm by no means any expert on this, but put this out there for others to build on, comment on and correct.
Many thanks to Paul Daniel who showed me much of this as part of an open MA Online Journalism session and whose blog is a great resource on Pipes.
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/onlinejournalismblog/~3/oH4PQGzZOWY/
Matt Kelly doesnât like the term âusersâ. In a speech to the World Newspaper Congress keynote in Hyderabad he bemoaned the sterility of the word:
âWhat a word! âUsers.â Not readers, or viewers. Certainly not customers â not unless we are being deeply ironic. For the fact is the word âuserâ is, for the vast majority of people consuming our products online, entirely accurate.
âWeâd never choose such a sterile word to describe the people who buy our newspapers. But online, âusersâ is about right. They find our content in a search engine, they devour it, then they move back to Google, or wherever, and go looking for more. Often, they have no idea which website it was they found the content on. This was the audience weâve been chasing all that time. A swarm of locusts.â
Heâs not alone. Many others have expressed â if not in such forthright terms, and often on very different bases â similar objections to the term.
But I like it.
I like it because it makes very plain how people use the medium. They were readers in print, an audience for broadcasters, and customers and consumers for businesses, but online⌠they âuseâ. Not in the exploitative sense that Matt Kelly insinuates, but in an instrumental fashion.
People use the web as a tool â to communicate, to find, to play, and to do a hundred other things. So many of the success stories online are tools: Google, Facebook, Flickr, YouTube. And one of the changes in mindset required when you publish for an online audience, it seems to me, is to recognise that people will want to âdoâ something with your content online. Share it. Comment on it. Remix it. Correct it. Rate it. Search it. Annotate it. Tag it. Store it. Compare it. Contextualise it. Analyse it. Mash it.
In his book The Wealth of Networks, Yochai Benkler suggested that the âuserâ was emerging as âa new category of relationship to information production and exchange.
âUsers are individuals who are sometimes consumers and sometimes producers. They are substantially more engaged participants, both in defining the terms of their productive activity and in defining what they consume and how they consume it. In these two great domains of lifeâproduction and consumption, work and playâthe networked information economy promises to enrich individual autonomy substantively by creating an environment built less around control and more around facilitating action.â
That quote should be at the heart of any online journalism training. Different medium, different rules.
http://onlinejournalismblog.com/2009/12/17/in-defence-of-the-user/
Last month I blogged about the consultation currently taking place on the law of defamation and the multiple publication rule. The deadline for that is today. Below Iâve published my own responses. If you feel Iâve got something wrong or missed something, please let me know.
Question 1. Taking into account the arguments set out [in the document], do you consider in principle that the multiple publication rule should be retained? If not, should a single publication rule be introduced? Please give reasons for your answers.
Comments: Based on the arguments set out, I do not believe that the multiple publication rule should be retained. The primary reason for this is that the burden of proof in these cases rests on the publishers, in situations where any records may well have disappeared. This is particularly problematic when employment within publishing is increasingly unpredictable, and employees â along with their records â are either frequently leaving or being made redundant from positions, or working for the organisation on a freelance basis. A single publication rule should be introduced.
In addition, the multiple publication rule is based on a print-based industry where defamatory material might be hard to access. In an industry that commonly publishes content online, with its concomitant findability, ease of distribution, and monitoring, it would be particularly unusual for a person not to become aware of defamatory content within a year of its publication.
Question 2. If the multiple publication rule were to be retained should there be an obligation to place a notice on an archive once the person responsible has been notified that the material is subject to defamation proceedings?
Comments: Yes. This would not only guard against other actions but also alert potential witnesses who may read the article or, in future, receive updates on it.
Question 3. Do you agree that if a single publication rule were to be introduced, it should apply to all defamation proceedings, not just those relating to online publications?
Comments: Yes. Otherwise someone could simply use online archives to find the material but visit the physical archives to support their case.
Question 4. If a single publication rule were introduced,
a) should it be made obligatory to remove or amend material held in other formats under the control of the same publisher in the event of a successful defamation action against the original publication of the material?
Yes. Clearly if material is found to be defamatory then the publisher should alter any defamatory material under their control.
b) should there be a provision that, where defamatory material is re-transmitted in a new format, the single publication rule would only protect the previous publisher and not the publisher of the new article?
No. The idea of an article, for example, linking to defamatory material being defamatory itself would seriously threaten the culture of transparency in web publication where authors are expected to link to their sources.
Question 5. â¨b) Should online content that has been modified be regarded as a new publication?
No. This would discourage useful modifications and corrections as staff would then have to check the entire text every time a small element of it was brought to their attention. If every modification was considered a new publication, publishers would simply leave erroneous or outdated material unchanged.
Question 6. As an alternative to introducing a single publication rule, do you consider that the Defamation Act 1996 should be amended to extend the defence of qualified privilege to publications on online archives outside the one year limitation period for the initial publication, unless the publisher refuses or neglects to update the electronic version, on request, with a reasonable letter or statement by the claimant by way of explanation or contradiction? Please give reasons for your answer.
Comments: I am inclined to say âYesâ here because it restricts the opportunity for profit-motivated legal action against publishers. However, such a move also runs the risk of inclining publishers to complying with such requests to avoid losing their qualified privilege, regardless of the truth of the âreasonableâ letter. Itâs not clear whether simply having a commenting facility on a story represents an opportunity for claimants to update an article with a response, or whether that response would have to be published in the main body of the article. All these elements need to be factored in.
Question 7. Do you agree that if the multiple publication rule is retained, the limitation period should remain at one year from the date of publication (with discretion to extend)? If not, what limitation period would be appropriate and why?
Comments: Yes. As the current one year period is not causing problems, there appears little reason to extend to ten years.
Question 8. â¨a) If a single publication rule were introduced, should the limitation period of one year run from the date of publication (with discretion to extend) or the date of knowledge (without discretion to extend)? If the latter, should there also be a ten year long-stop from the date of publication?
From publication. The introduction of date of knowledge is problematic to prove and makes preparation of a defence equally complicated. Given the accessibility of contemporaneous content, companies and those in the public eye are likely to monitor online media for mentions and become aware of defamatory content quickly. Even those who donât are likely to be made aware of potentially defamatory content within a short time, given the nature of the web. The increased ability of people to search, distribute and access content online makes it difficult to support any limitation period based on date of knowledge.
http://onlinejournalismblog.com/2009/12/16/defamation-and-the-internet/
When I translated the sixth part of the Model for the 21st Century Newsroom into Spanish, I learned some of the new roles for journalists in news organizations.
Now I have the chance to write about a new role for digital journalists thanks to my Argentinian colleague Alvaro Liuzzi, who recently visited Spain to interview some of the directors of national news websites for his documentary on Hispanic online newsrooms (Argentina, Peru and Spain).
The Editorial Director of 20minutos.es, Virginia PĂŠrez Alonso, told him about a new position they created to permanently control the long home page of the site to make sure everything is correct (links, images, headlines) and to track the most popular stories in each column, using their own software that shows real time stats.
They call this new position the âPortadistaâ (Portada is Spanish for home page). This is how it works in the newsroom:
The âportadistasâ are journalists [This may seem obvious but it is important to note that it's necessary for the people in charge of this job to have journalistic skills].
There are three portadista shifts every day, and the first one arrives at 7 AM. They say it is a exhausting job so they change the people in charge every 15 days.
They receive all the information from the journalists via Google Docs and organize the home page according to that.
Then they proceed to review the hole home page, check the links, control that the verbal tenses are correct, the photos, etc.
They constantly monitor that the home page doesnât exceed a maximum file size. If that happens they have to take out images, cut articles and reduce their size.
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/onlinejournalismblog/~3/587jXaaUCEw/
It is always fun when a hoaxed piece of research gets past all the filters and makes the newspapers, but what does it teach us? This is a video report from the Hungry Beast team in Australia, âprovingâ which part of Australia is the most gullible. The answer is, apparently, âthe mediaâ.
Link, in case the video doesnât embed properly.
Hereâs a different example from last week: Andrew Lansleyâs insurance of a painting and medal on his Expenses as an MP.
All the papers quoted a value of 3500 ukp, except for the Independent which quoted a *premium* of 3500 ukp.
Independent:
âOther senior Tories also faced embarrassment over the latest expenses revelations. Andrew Lansley, the shadow Health Secretary, submitted a 3,500 claim for the cost of insuring a medal and a painting.â
FT
Among the more whimsical claims was a 58.67 whistling kettle bought by Tory MP Douglas Carswell, 400 of repairs to Crispin Bluntâs âwaterwheel structureâ and Andrew Lansleyâs insurance of a medal and a painting.
Cambridge News
Andrew Lansleyâs home insurance policy reveals he specifically paid for protection on a medal valued at 2,022 and a painting, Hotel Tropical Island by D D D Ferris, worth 1,506.
Times
Andrew Lansley, Shadow Health Secretary, claimed the 398.92 cost of a home insurance policy, which listed a medal valued at 2,022 and a painting by DDD Ferris, entitled Hotel Tropical Island, valued at 1,506.
So what conclusions can we draw?
These are my reflections as a blogger:
We have shifted to reading multiple sources on the same story presented together by Google News and other âheadline summarizingâ websites, such that variations are more visible.
Articles reported in the media are just another set of sources. Sometimes they will not be consistent amongst themselves.
If I am commenting, my reputation depends on the facts Iâm commenting on being the accurate ones. If the big media source I quote is mistaken, then it takes part of my reputation with it too. So I have to do careful checking.
It is the easiest thing in the world to be provoked by an âoutlierâ report, such as the Independent above. That way lies madness, and a broken reputation.
Perhaps commentatorsâ need to fact-check is one factor driving more detailed scrutiny.
Tight deadlines and thinner journalistic resources perhaps exasperate any difficulties.
I think that both bloggers and MSM writers need to re-emphasise traditional craft disciplines â dual sourcing, fact checking, sweating the detail. In other words, all the boring stuff.
http://onlinejournalismblog.com/2009/12/15/when-the-big-media-gets-it-wrong-quality-in-reporting-4/
Free does not mean that content has no value, but when the very sustenance of the entity producing that content is in danger, the concept of âfreeâ begins to edge closer to devaluing content.
But even if content online has been free for so long, if it is captured back and tightly shut under a pay wall, does it become more valuable as a result? Or would news organizations have to earn that money if and when they finally achieve that pay wall?
As has been pointed out several times before, and on this blog as well, pay walls have been tried, tested and have, in effect, mostly failed. But many of the experiments that have involved paid content have erected pay walls around generic content or opinion that would perhaps be available elsewhere for free.
Moving toward specialized content
It is a pretty reasonable assessment that the more reasons a news Web site gives its readers to spend time on a site, perhaps by offering in-depth, contextual and narrative journalism, the higher the chances are that they will linger on the page longer, and even buy products through targeted advertising. And for better or for worse, this idea that the most engaged readers of a Web site will not only be willing to pay for content but also click through and purchase products advertised on the side of it is catching on.
As Steve Myers writes in Poynter:
ââŚpay structures create narrower, more specialized audiences and offer more opportunities for higher-yield, behaviorally-targeted advertising, which changes depending on usersâ online habits.â
He explains that as paid sites start to attract more focused readers who recognize and identify a brand and content, it would also make it easier for news organizations to use targeted advertisements.
Free and paid content can co-exist
What worries me, however, is that news organizations are looking at options as either-or propositions. Getting your users to pay for content does not mean you can do away with Google, like Rupert Murdoch seems to believe.
Thereâs no denying that random visitors that are led to a site through search engines account for a large enough percentage of revenue to be ignored, as Paul pointed out in a previous post. In fact, itâs been roughly estimated that stumbling from search engines can make a news site about 50c a day per person, way less than subscriptions can, but it is still close to a hundred million a year, considering the average newspaper gets about a million visitors per month through Google searches alone. For the actual math, I direct you to the excellent Ryan Chittum at CJR.
Hence, blocking Google might not be the answer, but it is also important to note that the Wall Street Journal does have over a million readers subscribing to its content monthly, and since these users prove to be valuable to advertisers, specialist content could well be the answer for other newspapers as well.
There have been complaints all around that for an industry on the brink of collapse, news organizations are less than savvy in the area of market research, and arenât doing much at all to help determine the monetary value of the content they offer and the kinds of products they should be providing in order to make money.
Instead, what many news organizations have resorted to over the years, is the âmassificationâ of news in order to appeal to the broadest conceivable audience, a process that merely erodes the quality of journalism, without offering solutions for revenue generation, since such audiences do not have a brand identity that advertisers can appeal to.
As Slate editor David Plotz points out, the more media companies and editors begin to focus on the numbers, the faster they will shift from their pursuit of a âmass audienceâ and begin to produce more exclusive, in-depth content. Along that line of reasoning, Steven Brillâs Journalism Online plans to charge only the most frequent users who seek very specific content while allowing cursory surfers to avail of most topical news for free.
Following the lead of financial publications
Successful pay models, such as the Economistâs premium content, and the Financial Timesâ paywalls are, after all, based on loyal readers returning to a site frequently on account of the exclusive content it provides. Financial publications, of course, are in a league of their own when it comes to paywalls, because of their high value, well-differentiated content and affluent consumers.
But as WSJ.comâs Alan Murray explained in an interview with the Nieman Journalism Lab, most news organizations should be able to tap into the idea that loyal readers will pay for exclusive information, as long as they steer clear of charging for the most popular content, which has the potential to yield maximum traffic and hence, revenue.
Whether it is due to declining ad revenues and falling readerships or the recession, newspapers in the US from the Minneapolis Post to the Arizona Republic, are adopting the idea of pursuing these âloyal readersâ to sell their content. Others, like the Tribune company, are merely seeking them to target advertising.
Very early this year, Andrew Currah, a fellow at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, called on news organizations to not give up their core editorial values in the quest for clickstream data, not simply because such lack of focus would be detrimental to journalism, but because it would not prove to be beneficial to revenue generation in the long run.
âThe basic logic of a webcentric strategy is to maximise the size of the audience around the news, for as long as possible. But a rush to generate clicks may in fact erode the distinctiveness of the brand and its connection to a specific audience,â Currah wrote.
Regardless of what theyâre seeking â direct payment for content or indirect revenue through clickthrough advertising -Â specialized, in-depth content to retain that brand and connection has got to be good for journalism.
http://onlinejournalismblog.com/2009/12/14/winds-blowing-in-the-direction-of-paid-content-targeted-advertising-and-better-journalism/
At the start of this week, Dave Cole of the Atlantic Council of the UK organised the first visit to NATO Headquarters for bloggers.
I should have been on that trip on behalf of the Wardman Wire . Instead I found myself in a nearly built new wing of a Nottinghamshire Hospital, chattering with other patients about politics and NATO.
An objective for the Atlantic Council was to encourage an already quite wide ranging public debate about their âStrategic Conceptâ to include bloggers and independent commentators. It was also a âfirstâ for NATO in attempting to engage new media commentators. Roughly, twenty years after the end of the Cold War, and the changes in role that have developed since, NATO is asking the question:
âWho are we? Where are we? What are we doing here?â.
Iâll write about the Strategic Concept later, but for now Iâve a few comments on the bloggersâ briefing itself, which was organised by the Atlantic Council UK.
First, a disclosure: I did a small project earlier this year as a consultant/adviser to the Atlantic Council UK in setting up this process and visit.
NATO is â by its nature as an organisation which provides a platform for political, military and security co-operation over timespans of decades or even generations â necessarily conservative (with a small c), and highly security-conscious.
The visit was under the auspices of Dr Stephanie Babst, NATOâs Assistant Deputy Secretary General for Public Diplomacy. As others have commented, it is a new departure for an essentially conservative organisation to engage with a field of commentators as varied â and as changeable â as bloggers.
NATOâs âStrategic Conceptâ incorporates more than just straight politics. The role of NATO has developed to include providing infrastructure for peace-making / peace-keeping, support for humanitarian relief, activities touching on civilian policing, and providing resources for other organisations (such as the European Union) seeking to develop their own role. Also, the NATO has moved beyond its traditional area of operations. Some of these have developed on an ad-hoc basis, or as a result of NATO being the only organisation capable of meeting certain requirements.
Therefore commentators from other niches within the blogosphere may be just as interested as those of us who focus mainly upon politics. A change in the Strategic Concept can have an effect on, and therefore needs to incorporate insights from, for example:
The world of politics.
Military and weapons specialists.
Policy wonks, and think tankers.
Development organisations.
Human Rights campaigners.
Communities which may be affected by changes in the military â consider the impact on Yeovil if there was a smaller (or larger) role for British made helicopters.
Traditional troop towns, and their local politicians.
Expatriate communities in the UK from countries where NATO operates.
All of these niches and communities have their bloggers, and have different thoughts and viewpoints to bring to the conversation. All will all ask highly targeted questions based on their own knowledge, and the host organisation needs to have the relevant people available to engage with the different questions.
Further, bloggers are also not always as familiar with normal ârules of engagementâ with the media as professional journalists, and we hate being either âbullshittedâ on the one hand, or âstonewalledâ on the other.
NATO also needed to be sure that it would be a useful exercise to host the visit, and to appreciate the more informal way which bloggers operate, compared to more traditional media outlets.
Combine all of those, and there is plenty of potential for misunderstandings, wheels to fall off, and thereby the prospect of future repeat visits to be derailed.
I hope to do a more detailed case study of the project later.
Bloggers who attended:
Luke Akehurst (lukeakehurst.blogspot.com)
Martin Butcher (natomonitor.blogspot.com)
David Cole (davecole.org)
Mehdi Hasan (newstatesman.com)
Sunny Hundal (liberalconspiracy.org)
Zohra Moosa (thefword.org.uk)
James OâMalley (poddelusion.co.uk)
Will Straw (leftfootforward.org)
Bloggers who have commented:
Sunny Hundal: NATO hosts first ever briefing for bloggers
Will Straw: NATO: We wonât bugger off
Mehdi Hasan: My conversation with a Nato brigadier-general
Luke Akehurst: NATO holds bloggers briefing
http://onlinejournalismblog.com/2009/12/11/nato-engages-with-bloggers-for-first-briefing/
Below are the slides from my presentation at todayâs Association of Online Publishers Microlocal Media Forum, where I was asked to talk on the subject of âMonetising Microlocalâ.
Monetising Hyperlocal
View more presentations from Paul Bradshaw.
You can read Dan Daviesâ notes on the forum here (with a link to a further post with notes from the panel discussion).
http://onlinejournalismblog.com/2009/12/09/presentation-from-aop-microlocal-forum/
How good is this? While Murdoch and Sly complain about Google, The New York Times and Washington Post have been working with the search engine behemoth on a new form of online journalism. Iâm still getting my head around the results, because the format is brimming with clever ideas. Hereâs the obligatory cheesy video before I get my teeth into it:
So whatâs so special about this? Firstly, it is built around the way people consume content online, as opposed to how they consumed it in print or broadcast. In other words, the unit of entry is the âtopicâ, not the âarticleâ, âbroadcastâ or âpublicationâ. If you look at search behaviour, thatâs often what people search for (and why Wikipedia is so popular).
But topic-based content is already creeping into news websites, largely for SEO reasons. This has a few more tricks up its sleeve.
One of my favourite features is the âconversationsâ link in the top right corner. This takes you to a pop-up graphic/map of various comment threads from the website against particular themes. Whatâs particularly innovative is that this is embeddable â comments become distributable. This gives you more incentive to comment yourself (because you can embed the thread in your own online presence), and it also provides more opportunity for your content to be distributed and bring readers back to your site. And you can customise which elements of the conversation you embed. Iâve tested it at the end of this post.
Back on the main page the navigation on the left offers a useful breakdown of content: in addition to medium-based navigation such as images, video and graphics you can choose to look at the people involved; you can navigate by key quotes; and you can look at resources such as reports, blogs and interactives. My word, yes â itâs linking to the sources! (Although sadly not to any blogs outside the stable)
Again, hugely useful for that significant proportion of people who are searching for a particular piece of information on a topic (and therefore will stick around longer and return in future).
You can also choose to go to opinion or articles, or navigate by event.
You can reorder the content in reverse-chronological order, or choose to show âMost Important Onlyâ.
There is an RSS feed and email updates on the topic.
And particularly clever is that it remembers what youâve seen so that when you return new additions are highlighted and old content removed.
At this early stage the format is still rough around the edges: itâs not the most intuitive piece of interface design, bombarding you with information while some useful elements (such as conversation) are not particularly visible. It seems odd that there is only one RSS feed and email alert for the whole topic â it would be useful to have more specific feeds, for instance on new video only. And itâs actually less inviting in making you want to contribute comments or other material, partly because youâre too busy reeling from the sheer volume of information and possibilities.
Finally, the biggest â and killer â question for me is how much of the construction of the page is done automatically, and how much requires someone to input and connect data.
And of course, it doesnât address the advertising problem (but thereâs plenty of potential here for stickiness and engagement).
The New York Times reports that
âJosh Cohen, business product manager for Google News, said that if it worked well, Google would make the software available free to publishers to embed in their sites, much as those publishers can now use Google Maps and YouTube functions on their sites.â
Googleâs blog, meanwhile, says the platform will be improved in the coming months:
âOver the coming months, weâll refine Living Stories based on your feedback. Weâre also looking to develop openly available tools that could aid news organizations in the creation of these pages or at least in some of the features. If youâre a news reader, weâd love to hear your thoughts. If youâre a news organization, we want to hear your comments on the Living Storyformat. If you decide to implement this on your site, we would love to hear about that too. At the very least, we hope this collaboration will kick off debate and encourage innovation in how people interact with news online.â
One to keep an eye on. Oh, and hereâs that conversation embedded, just to see how it works:
http://onlinejournalismblog.com/2009/12/08/living-stories-nyt-and-google-produce-jaw-dropping-online-journalism-form/
The OJB Facebook Group is about to hit 1500 members, and yet weâve never really done anything interesting with it. Iâd like to change that.
I am advertising the position of OJB Facebook Group Manager. It has no pay, of course, but it does have potential for fun, and valuable experience.
For example, could we crowdsource something? Could we broaden the voices on OJB? Use apps and widgets creatively? Engage with the Wall and forums better? Something else? (setting up a Fan page?).
What would you do with a group of 1500 people? Send me a message on Facebook with your ideas and a link to your online presence, and then Iâll set up some online discussion to develop it further.
PS: As an equal opportunities non-employer, Iâm particularly interested to hear from people outside of the Anglo-American world.
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/onlinejournalismblog/~3/bb4RAWx4Y8s/
Forget about turning your Twitter avatar green or adding a Twibbon, hereâs something you can do today which can make a genuine difference to both professional journalists and bloggers: write to the Ministry of Justice as part of their consultation on defamation which has just a few weeks left:
âThis consultation seeks views on the âmultiple publication ruleâ under which [people can be sued for every time a web article has been  accessed], and its effects in relation to online archives. The paper considers the arguments for and against the rule and the alternatives of a single publication rule.â
This consultation couldnât have been published in a more user-unfriendly way. The consultation page consists mainly of a link to a PDF and a Word document (which was clearly written for an online form that was never created, even down to HTML coding).
There is no clear address to send your responses to. Youâll find it on the 4th line of the Word document. Itâs defamationandtheinternet@justice.gsi.gov.uk. Donât worry, Iâll repeat that again at the end of the post.
Hereâs what theyâre asking (also here, here, here, here, here and here), reproduced in a rather easier-to-navigate format and rephrased for slightly easier reading:
Question 1. Taking into account the arguments set out in the PDF, should the multiple publication rule be retained? If not, should a single publication rule be introduced? Please give reasons for your answers.
Question 2. If the multiple publication rule were to be retained should publishers have to place a notice on an archive once the person responsible has been notified that the material is subject to defamation proceedings?
Question 3. If a single publication rule were to be introduced, should it apply to all defamation proceedings, not just those relating to online publications?
Question 4. If a single publication rule were introduced,
If the publisher is successfully sued against the original publication of the material, should publishers have to remove or amend material held in other formats under their control?
should there be a provision that, where defamatory material is re-transmitted in a new format, the single publication rule would only protect the previous publisher and not the publisher of the new article?
if neither of these are considered appropriate, how could claimantsâ interests be protected?
should the existing âvoluntaryâ obligations to correct inaccurate and misleading material be strengthened? If so, how should this be done?
Please give reasons for your answers.
Question 5.
a) If a single publication rule were introduced, do you consider that the approach taken in the United States in respect of what constitutes a new publication of hard copy material would be workable? If not, what changes should be made?
b) Should online content that has been modified be regarded as a new publication?
c) Are there any other issues that would need to be resolved in establishing a single publication rule? Please give reasons for your answers.
Question 6. As an alternative to introducing a single publication rule, should the Defamation Act 1996 be amended to extend the defence of qualified privilege to publications on online archives outside the one year limitation period for the initial publication, unless the publisher refuses or neglects to update the electronic version, on request, with a reasonable letter or statement by the claimant by way of explanation or contradiction? Please give reasons for your answer.
Question 7. If the multiple publication rule is retained, should the limitation period remain at one year from the date of publication (with discretion to extend)? If not, what limitation period would be appropriate and why?
Question 8.
a) If a single publication rule were introduced, should the limitation period of one year run from the date of publication (with discretion to extend) or the date of knowledge (without discretion to extend)? If the latter, should there also be a ten year long-stop from the date of publication?
b) If you consider that an alternative approach would be appropriate, what should this be and why?
In case you need further nudging, Iâve started a pledge at PledgeBank â if 10 people sign up to that pledge to write to the MOJ, then I will write too. But not until then. If you need any help let me know.
Once again, the email to send your responses to is defamationandtheinternet@justice.gsi.gov.uk. Please donât be put off by the exam-style phrasing and intimidating raft of questions. Just answer the questions you feel able to respond to. If youâve ever complained about the law not catching up to the internet age, this is your chance to do something about it. So do it.
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/onlinejournalismblog/~3/iBaqhHoC6Rg/
If the inverted pyramid as a writing form is tied to the printed page, what writing form does the web suggest?
That was the question asked by JoĂŁo Canavilhas of Portugal when he proposed the âtumbled pyramid,â a more open story architecture designed to encourage online navigation and personal reading paths. Canavilhas describes a new structure with four levels: base, explanation, and two levels of exploration.
Iâve wrestled with the same question. My solution: the âmappedâ writing model (interesting how we reach out to new metaphors to replace old ones). Where my approach differs is its simplicity. The mapped model is really just a specific way to organize information. It assumes little change in how you, as the practitioner, define a story or function as a journalist. Iâd like to explain the concept and how it rethinks the inverted pyramid.
HOW IT WORKS:
The mapped model views the news story as a whole and parts. First comes a summary of the main elements. Then the story breaks into an orderly conversation of one element or thread at a time. Itâs up to the writer to define the content threads. Each thread starts with a subhead that clearly conveys what comes next, for example: âwhat happened,â âwhat witnesses saw,â or ânext steps in the process.â The subheads function as a map, telling readers ahead of time where the story will lead, what turns in the road they can expect, and reminding them where they are. This form seems to work best on longer news and feature stories.
Below is a simple example of a mapped story I wrote recently for our community newspaper. I presented the story experimentally in a simple Flash file, to see how it might look on the web. You wonât be wowed by zippy graphics. Itâs meant to show how the subheads can become the means of navigation, literally. On the web you could also present this story as a continuous text, with subheads set into the story, acting as signposts.
Click for mapped story example
ORIGIN OF THE CONCEPT:
I developed this model as a news designer a few years ago as I tried to imagine ways to make stories easier to read.
I was troubled by what seemed like information chaos in many news stories dealing with complex topics. With a background in writing, I began to analyze how stories were built. I used color markers to highlight the various categories or threads present in a story, wherever they showed up in the text (I choose the colors at random). For example, âbackgroundâ might turn up as a block of yellow in the second paragraph, then again in the sixth paragraph, then as a chunk toward the end of the story. Fully deconstructed, the story might contain six or eight threads, showing up as a patchwork of colors.
It was hard work at first. As I surveyed texts at my own newspaper and elsewhere, comparing structures in writing, an intriguing picture emerged. On one hand, I realized I had stumbled onto a useful way to see and describe some of the building blocks of writing. Shaping and layering are skills some writers seem to pick up almost intuitively, but donât often talk about. On the other hand, I could now âseeâ the chaos I felt as I read some stories. A change in topic shows up as a shift from one colour to another. Frequent colour shifts indicate a dense weaving of elements.
In many cases, the reason for the chaos can be traced back to the inverted pyramid construct. By orienting an entire story around newsworthy fragments, we make it harder to have a more paced and logical conversation geared to readers who arenât as familiar with the subject. Perhaps this partly explains why we have a hard time attracting younger readers.
In my survey of storytelling forms, I noticed a few writers using a whole and parts logic. This seemed to get around the problem of confusion caused by too much toploading. My color-coding technique revealed far fewer shifts between colors and more sustained chunks of monologue. As a designer, I tinkered. I introduced subheads as a reader help. I gave the model a name.
REACTION TO A NEW FORM:
Does the mapped writing model work? Jacqueline Farnan, then an associate journalism professor at St. John Fisher College in Rochester, New York, spotted an article I had written for a writing coachesâ newsletter, contacted me, and suggested a formal study to find out what newspaper readers thought. She selected a published story from her local paper and I reorganized it according to the mapped model, being careful not to do any actual rewriting. She led focus groups where participants compared the two versions of the story. The result: 70% of readers preferred the mapped version.
Unfortunately, the idea didnât catch on in print. The idea of segmenting text and interrupting it with unsexy subheads made writers queasy. Print reporters steeped in the subculture of the inverted pyramid found it incompetent to subordinate newsworthiness in the writing to some organizational structure. I could see I was bumping into some of the fundamental assumptions of my craft.
I put my ideas on the shelf, where they gathered dust for more than a decade. In the back of my mind, I wondered if the mapped model might have more application on the web. It seemed to align perfectly with the thinking of web usability experts such as Jakob Nielsen. So when I decided recently to upgrade my own education, it was great to read about the âtumbled pyramid,â the ânews diamond,â and a group of people thinking about ways to adapt journalistic practice for the online environment.
SO TRY IT, ALREADY:
If you feel like taking the mapped model for a spin, you may be surprised. As a writer, youâll find when you announce your topic in a subhead, now you have to deliver on that promise or the story will come across as weak. Scattered bits of information donât work. Each of the threads tends to turn into a more complete, rounded, transparent conversation. Thereâs a disciplining effect and I believe the result is a better story.
Some tips: Take care to write subheads that provide a clear map or index when read on their own. Try not to repeat the subhead words in the text. Craft each segment.
Iâm speculating here, but it seems to me this model would support the evolving, collaborative nature of the ânews diamond.â Early in the cycle, only a short story would exist, the top. Later, threads would sprout and develop as more news comes in. With a clear, transparent writing structure, itâs easier to include more voices and angles in the story while retaining a cohesive focus. Whole threads could be devoted to the levels envisaged by Canavilhas and others, for analytical perspectives and links.
Does the mapped model bring us closer to multi-level navigation and differentiated reading? Good question. Drop me a line at hedleyd@shaw.ca if you try it. Iâd love to hear how it goes.
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/onlinejournalismblog/~3/PIE25mQI1nk/
Articles in newspapers complaining about bloggers and twitter users seem to come along like bills from the taxman â at a rate of about 5 a week.
We have had the remarkable exhibit of Janet Street-Porter (or âJanet Self-Publicistâ) complaining about âpublicity seeking bloggersâ, and more recently Rachel Sylvester starting a pop-psychology consultancy practice for sad and lonely individuals possessed by the Twitter demon.
Last Monday, Nicholas Lezard, the usually literate writer for the Guardian and the Independent, had what I would call a âTwit-Fitâ, wibbling furiously for an entire 700 words against Twitter â here.
This is my commentary cum translation. A little light relief for a Sunday, and I hope that Paul Bradshaw doesnât give me an ASBO.
So youâre eating lunch? Fascinating
(I only read boring Twitter accounts)
Stephen Fry ⌠Twitter âŚ
(faux introductory wibble ⌠letâs set up the target)
I have nothing against Stephen Fry
(lots of my friends use Twitter, so I am not prejudiced ⌠I have the right to quibble wibble)
but I CERTAINLY have something against Twitter
(pop-polemical wibble)
The name tells us straightaway
(pop-etymological wibble)
itâs inconsequential, background noise, a waste of time and space
(unintentionally self-revelatory wibble)
Actually, the name does a disservice to the sounds birds make, which are, for the birds, significant, and, for the humans, soothing and, if youâre Messiaen, inspirational
(arty-farty-Primrose-Hill-party wibble)
But Twitter? Inspirational?
(well, it isnât when you canât hear for your own ranting)
The online phenonemon is about humanity disappearing up itâs own fundament, or the air leaking out of the whole Enlightenment project
(I just managed to look over Nigel Molesworthâs shoulder, and I cribbed a bit from his 2nd year philosophy test, Hem-Hem)
It makes blogging look like literature
(I have a whole quiverful of cookie-cutter stereotypes, and boy am I going to use them)
Itâs anti-literature, the new opium of the masses
(Clickety-click! I taught Blue Peter how to prepare things earlier, and this one is from 1843)
Itâs unreflective instantaneousness encourages neurotic behaviour in both the Tweeter and the Twatters
(Dear Damien Hirst, can I be your Press Officer ? )
Seriously, the Americans have proposed that âtwattedâ should be the past participle of âtweetâ
(Obviously there are 300 million identical cardboard-cut-out idiots across the pond. Perhaps âstereotropedâ should be the past participle of âstereotypeâ)
It encourages us in the delusion that our random thoughts, our banal experiences, are significant
(I want to be Alain de Botton when I grow up, Blankety-Blank)
It is masturbatory and infantile, and the amazing thing is that people canât get enough of it â possibly because it IS masturbatory and infantile
(or ############, Yankety-Yank)
(redacted to avoid being sued by a certain award-winning journalist)
Oh God, that it should have come to this. Centuries of human thought and experience drowned out in a maelstrom of inconsequential rubbish.
(Does Andrew Keen or David Aaronovitch need a ghost-writer for when they are on holiday? )
Donât tell me about Trafigura â one good deed is not enough
( donât tell me about the hundreds of other achievements either; the last thing I need is facts â or reality â interfering with my opinions)
(My Rachel Sylvester piece includes a list of about 10 examples of how Twitter can be used positively that I compiled last March).
and an ordinary online campaign would have done the trick just as well
(bollocks âŚ. no other online forum has anything like the permeability or reaction speed of Twitter)
It is like some horrible science-fiction prediction come to pass: it is not just that Twitter signals the end of nuanced, reflective, authoritative thought â itâs that no one seems to mind
(pleeeeeeeease ⌠SOMEBODY ⌠Iâll even write leaders for the Daily Mail)
And I suspect that itâs psychologically dangerous
( Was it Twitter that did for Gordon Brown?)
We have evolved over millions of years to learn not to bore other people with constant updates about what weâre doing,
(I didnât consult my partner before writing this column)
and weâre throwing it all away
(which is what would have happened if I had consulted my partner)
Twitter encourages monstrous egomania, and the very fact that Fry used Twitter to announce that he was leaving Twitter shows his dependence on it.
(Unlike being an opinionated columnist, of course, Hem Hem)
He was never going to give it up. Heâs addicted to it.
(And â finally â did I tell you that I am a self-qualified Doctor able to diagnose from afar)
(Hem-Hem)
Wrapping Up
I really have trouble understanding why some people just do not seem to appreciate the positive side of Twitter, although many of them seem to be general commentators inside the London media bubble.
I suspect that it could be that the main benefits of Twitter (and blogging) have made to make politics and media more permeable, and have made it possible for a far wider group of people to engage in the political debate without going through the media filter.
The point is that if you are inside the bubble and already get politicians reply to your emails in person because you work for an organisation they have heard of, then all of these seem to be unwelcome threats, rather than benefits or opportunities.
Bye-bye media bubble, I hope.
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/onlinejournalismblog/~3/Ar1dw-R01dY/
Another set of questions from a student (based on a discussion I did on Radio 4âs Today programme with Will Hutton) which I am answering in public:
1) What is the difference between monetising content and monetising audience?
What a great question. Monetising content means selling content or, more often, a container of content. So most news organisations sell a ânewspaperâ as much as ânewsâ. Although wire services like PA sell ânewsâ and, sometimes, âinformationâ, their clients ultimately re-sell that as a print package.
Monetising audience generally means advertising: you sell an audience to an advertiser, or, put another way, you sell their attention. This is the dominant business model in most publishing â for example, it is the main revenue stream for broadcast news. Printed news combines selling audience with selling packages of content, and the split varies: tabloid newspapers take a lot from sales of the actual paper, for example, whereas broadsheets make more from advertising.
There are problems for both models online: the user has already paid for the platform (web connection) so they are less willing to pay for pure content, even before you get onto issues of commodified news, digital duplication etc.
And the supply of advertising is so high it drives the price down, while control over distribution (which might drive price up) is lost.
2) Will Hutton said the future is paying for news online, do you agree?
Unless news organisations move away from commodified, cheap news towards genuinely unique and valuable journalism that manages to be well distributed on search engines and social media but not visible in its entirety or duplicatable⌠No.
The only way I can realistically see it happening is if a platform is invented which is as useful in the online world as a newspaper was in the physical world â and then again, you wonât be paying for news as much as you will be paying for the service of news. So the answer is still: No.
I think thereâs an enormous amount of vanity among journalists who forget that people buy and bought newspapers not just for journalism but crosswords, cartoons, TV listings and indeed advertising.
3) What kind of dangers could this transition imply?
What transition? Paying for news online? I think there are enormous implications for democratic engagement and thatâs why the existence of organisations like the BBC and Guardian are so important. Iâd like to see Ofcomâs Local News Consortia idea do the same at a local level, but Iâm sceptical.
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/onlinejournalismblog/~3/ZzIQPmkuJzA/
Hereâs a great interview with Clay Shirky by GRITtvâs Laura Flanders.
Clay Shirky talks about the power of digital networking, and how social media can do everything from cause revolutions to create whole new political parties when done right.
The simplicity of Twitter, of course, is its genius. It has the power to do so much by doing so little. But thatâs not the only thing thatâs simple about Twitter. The service itself was only intended to share 140-character messages with the world. Its significance is its evolution. Everything from @replying and retweeting to using hashes and symbols can be attributed to the users. It has brilliantly allowed users to define it â almost entirely. As Shirky points out, âMost of the uses of Twitter were not imagined by the designers of the service â they were managed by the users of the service.â
As Claire Cain Miller wrote in this NYT piece, Twitter exploded to unprecedented popularity by outsourcing âits idea generation to its users.â
What Twitter did well was absorb it all. Twitterâs founders were not initially pleased that so many other companies were taking advantage of what they had created but then they began to see the advantages. It is not just that dozens of companies are creating tools for Twitter, it is that Internet and social media giants like Facebook and Google are adapting their features to âfit inâ Twitter.
Williams and Stone were quick to realize that cross-functionality in various formats would only mean that more people would use it. And it did.
So third parties â be it individual users or companies â were allowed to tinker with it, and adapt it to various platforms. As Shirky points out, Twitter allowed these various applications to be integrated into the service. Retweets and hastags were integrated, among many other user-suggested features, and âTwitter listsâ is the latest in a long line of features that is gaining popularity.
While this bottom-up approach is a recurring theme in the case of creative technology companies, Twitter, arguably, owes more to its users in terms of both social participation and technology. As Flanders astutely observes in the video, the popularity of Twitter worldwide also has something to do with the fact that it can be used with simple text messaging â and this is especially significant in countries like Iran, India, and China where weâve seen some of the most productive examples of Twitter usage, from civilian revolutions to terrorist attacks to natural disasters.
But while social media can empower and mobilize citizens, Shirky does believe that organizing power for real world action on the Internet is still lacking. He makes an important distinction between the creation of intellectual property online and real world action through the Internet.
âWe donât yet have a way of incorporating groups that gives people the same kind of access to real world action as the creative commons copyright license do for intellectual property. I think weâre going to see a push for more real world groups using the Internet as their organizing tool and gaining some kind of incorporation as a way to participate in society.â
Social media is still young. All evidence indicates that it will happen soon.
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/onlinejournalismblog/~3/zs7EXU1B1CU/
I recently heard a newspaper chief editor say something quite shocking. I attended a meeting arranged by the Norwegian consortium New Media Network where the chief editor of the second biggest national tabloid in Norway, Dagbladet, was to give a speech. And believe it or not, chief editor of Dagbladet, Anne Aasheim, said: âI have been a media executive for 20 years now and I must say; itâs more fun today than ever before!â
More fun today than ever before? Everybody at the meeting knew that Dagbladet has suffered massive losses in recent years â much more than their competitor VG, which is the flagship of Schibsted, one of Europeâs most successful and innovative newspaper publishers, according to The New York Times. Dagbladet is probably the newspaper that has suffered the most in the Norwegian newspaper market in recent years. What could possibly be fun about that? Was Anne Aasheim joking?
Anne Aasheim wasnât joking. She soon explained what she meant: âWhen the crisis becomes big enough you no longer just mend things. Your tear everything apart and then you re-construct it. We are now searching for the power to do disruptive innovation. Itâs going to be a cut-throat competition to have the greatest power of innovation.â
Then she smiled before exclaiming: âAnd we are gonna win that competition!â
I thought this was an interesting argument â especially since I have conducted much research in the Dagbladet newsroom during the last four years. Dagbladet is one of those newspapers that always wants to be the first mover. When new technology comes around Dagbladet jumps on it. Dagbladet was the first Norwegian newspaper to launch an online edition, it implemented bloging as the first online newspaper in Scandinavia, etc, etc. Dagbladetâs position in the shadow of the bigger and more successful newspaper VG has forced it to push for innovative initiatives.
The key question for Dagbladet and any other firm that push for successful innovations, is of course: How do you know if a innovative initiative will be a success? I shall not claim that I have the answer to that question (if I did, I would probably be very rich man). However, I have done some research in order to pinpoint the factors that influence processes of innovation in newsrooms. In an article in the current issue of the journal Journalism Studies I argue that there are five factors that affect whether an innovation is diffused successfully or not in an online newsroom:
Newsroom autonomy: are innovative projects initiated and implemented within an autonomous newsroom and with relative autonomy within the online newsroom? (If not, the project is less likely to succeed)
Newsroom work culture: does the online newsroom reproduce editorial gatekeeping or are alternative work cultures explored? (reproduction of âold mediaâ work cultures is likely to prevent innovative initiatives from being successful)
The role of management: is newsroom management able to secure stable routines for innovation?
The relevance of new technology: is new technology perceived as relevant, i.e. efficient and useful? (New technology can be costly and time consuming to utilize)
Innovative individuals: is innovation implemented and understood as part of the practice of journalism?
These factors derive from an ethnographic case study of a process of innovation in dagbladet.no â the online edition of Dagbladet. The findings of this case study are compared to all other research on innovations (or lack of innovations) in online newspapers. This body of research consist of â among many other studies â the research done by Pablo Boczkowsi in his book Digitizing the News: Innovation in Online Newspapers; David Domingoâ Ph.D-thesis Inventing online journalism: Development of the Internet as a news medium in four Catalan newsrooms (which can be downloaded here); Lucy KĂźngâs When Innovation Fails to Disrupt. A Multi-lens Investigation of Succesfull Incumbment Respons to Technological Disconuity: The Launch of BBC News Online; and Jody Brannonâs quite old, but still very interesting Ph.D.-thesis Maximizing the medium: assessing impediments to performing multimedia journalism at three news web sites (parts of it available on here website).
One last point: Innovation and crisis tend to go hand in hand. Businesses, organisations and nation states alike have always pushed for innovations in times of crisis. There are two reasons for this assumed causal link between recession and innovation, according to an article by Geroski and Walters published in The Economic Journal. First, in times of recession the value of existing rents usually falls, thus making it more attractive for firms to implement new products and processes that hopefully will yield higher returns. Second, to invest in innovations requires a firm to divert resources from activity/production to product development. Such a diversion of resources is more likely to be feasible when the current production is less profitable, e.g. in times of recession.
No wonder why the chief editor of Dagbladet, Anne Aasheim, was so enthusiastic about the opportunities for disruptive innovationâŚ
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On Monday I attended The Big Debate, an event organised by Birmingham City University with The NEC Group and the Birmingham Post that tasked itself with the question âCan the Midlandsâ creative industries revolutionise the UK economy?â
The question itself became less interesting to me than the reaction to the debate from the social media scene in Birmingham. That Twitter stream of reaction is stored for posterity here, and to me the themes running through it appeared to run along the lines of âSame old stuffâ; âStop talking about it and just do it alreadyâ; and âYou donât get itâ.
Iâve experienced the same frustration myself at many media conferences. As Pete Ashton put it so well: JFDI.
But this was not a media conference: it was a conference for the people in industry who donât get it, who canât do it already, and to whom this is still very new stuff indeed.
Beyond the echo chamber
Listen, for example, to Thomas Dillon the âChairman of Creative Advantage Fund, Europeâs first public venture capital fund for the creative industries,â as he says that âone of my proudest achievements was when The Pirate Bay defendents were convicted in April this yearâ.
As we say on the Internet: WTF?
Then look, for example, at one of the list of actions that came out of the conference itself: âmore networking events pleaseâ.
âMore?â We canât move for meetups and unconferences in this city. Or is that just us?
The Big Debate was about moving people out of their comfort zones and mixing them up with people from other fields â and maybe exposing parts of the regionâs creative industry that we arenât used to seeing, like the Jewellery Quarter, like the industries where Facebook is banned at work.
So yes, there are people in this region who do think that the 3 Strikes concept is a good one; and clearly there are people who are not so plugged in as to be spoilt for choice when it comes to choosing which social media networking event to attend that week.
There are also, I discovered, people who feel excluded from the âBirmingham cliqueâ.
And there are people in the room who have not read We Think. And there are people who think social media is a âchannelâ to sell things. (And if the history of Web 1.0 is any guide, it may well become that).
So getting them to listen to Charles Leadbeater (who, by the way, was a great speaker and a credit to the ambition of the organisers) say that they should make Birmingham âa home for piratesâ is important.
Likewise, understanding why they might disagree with Leadbeater is important too, because if you want to persuade these people to do the right things to support creative media, then you have to make the most effective argument, which means listening.
Ultimately the whole event is an exercise of power. Use your vote â have a voice â because if you donât, and let ignorance exercise power unchallenged, then you canât complain when the other side does something you donât like.
JFDI
Because ultimately action will come out of The Big Debate â glacier-like, not at the pace we would like, but hopefully in the right direction. The results of the conversations, Iâm told, will be used with external funding agencies to review priorities moving forward; within Birmingham City University to inform what it does; it will be used with research centres; and with meetings with Birmingham City Council.
The organisers could have been better at communicating all of this â it wasnât clear during the event â but there it is.
Likewise, the event could have been more porous: have a Twitterfall on the big screen so those participating from afar could do so genuinely. Use facilitators to show the people on the tables who donât use Twitter how it can be genuinely conversational and productive rather than just another channel or waste of time. Have a genuinely conversational web presence.
(That said, I got to speak to people who werenât on Twitter, which is always useful. And a physical meeting space can be just as levelling as social media, when done right.)
Thatâs all for next year. For now, we throw in our opinions, and we wait for the lumbering behemoths to squint and read what has been written, and then we go off and JFDI anyway.
UPDATE: Dave Harte has written a wonderful post busting the myths propagated at the event (I particularly like no.2).
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/onlinejournalismblog/~3/VlkvuvrNtl0/
James Craven believes that instructive blogging should be paid. That was part of his inspiration behind leaving a job as CEO of a successful B2B media company and launching Asian Correspondent, a news site intended to report and aggregate news and information from the continent.
âI think that the blogosphere is one of the most important things to happen in media in the last thirty years. And I think itâs a real game changer. That said, the biggest problem with it is that it is quite difficult to navigate and find content. Thereâs enormous opportunity in working hard to find like-minded writers that have synergy, and to create channels that allow readers to find the sort of information theyâre looking for globally,â he says.
To achieve this, Craven and his team hand picked thirty-five bloggers spanning thirteen different Asian countries after a careful survey of the regionâs blogosphere, based on quality of reporting, relevance and popularity.
Craven admits that while he has the utmost respect for sites like the Huffington Post, which have been able to generate so much influence and traffic in less time than it took the New York Times, he does not agree with the idea of paying little or no monetary rewards to writers who contribute time and effort, not to mention page views and unique visitors to such sites. âItâs highway robbery!â he says.
So, it may come as a surprise that Asian Correspondent, the first such undertaking for Cravenâs Hybrid News Limited, is being hailed as a HuffPo for Asia. However, the motivations are somewhat similar. Craven hopes to capitalize on the inarguable talent that lies in the blogosphere, and also tap into the mobilizing power of the Internet that is so exclusive to blogs and citizen media.
âIt struck me that recent events such as the Obama election, the UK PM scandal and the Afghan elections were huge media moments, driven by citizen reports,â says Craven. âIt also struck me that some of the audiences individual bloggers were building completely blew away anything that could be done cost effectively in print.â
That doesnât mean the site will merely harbor a collection of views and opinions from people around Asia. Bloggers, who are paid a set monthly fee, will provide commentary, opinion and fact-based reporting.
Sometimes, bloggers are in a better position to cover a story than traditional journalists, says Craven. This is especially true with declining revenues that are unable to sustain foreign bureaus and international correspondents in western countries such as the US and UK.
Craven cites the example of the Philippines-based blogger who covered the recent devastating floods in the region for Asian Correspondent. âIn the case of Paul Farol in Manila, a couple weeks ago, when the floods lapped his door, he was in the perfect position in terms of content, photography and video to cover that story.â In addition, there are advantages to being a native in narrating such an experience. The mainstream media is often unable to empathize with locals, or see a story in the same way as residents.
But do readers in other countries want to read that story about floods happening thousands of miles away? Craven believes that there is an appetite for these subjects; the key is targeting the right people. Seeding such articles with groups that would be interested, such as, say, the Filipino American Chamber of Commerce, would increase impact and interest.
âWeâre interested in digital PR and traditional marketing, which would introduce [such] stories as they break to the large Filipino community in America and obviously target the Philippines as well.â
The same is true of advertising, according to Craven. Context-based ads are the answer for revenue generation. Advertisers such as Exxon Mobil and BMW donât believe that aligning their message with gossip news will help them sell their products. âIf you can create that context and advertisers can see that their buyers are reading your paper, then itâs not just about millions of hits. Itâs about the right hits and thatâs what weâre doing with Asian Correspondent.â The site is already approaching advertising agencies to purchase media campaigns that go directly to readers, and has a couple of partnerships.
Craven is confident that there is money to be made online with stories that donât necessarily involve Britney Spears. No conversation about journalism is complete, of course, without invoking Spears, or the kind of reporting she represents: universally rejected by the mainstream media, and yet, attractive in its ability to generate traffic, page views, and hence, revenue.
Craven worries that many news sites that start out with high ambitions of delivering quality news content often degenerate into celebrity gossip portals. Asian Correspondent does not plan to go that route, he insists. âIt doesnât have to be the most popular or most commercial story or angle to still be a real business. I think we have to make sure that our business looks for opportunities to report on stories that arenât being covered by anybody else.â
With a home page that showcases stories as wide-ranging as a standoff between Tasmanian timber workers and environmentalists, the banning of fake Twitter accounts in India, and the Afghan elections, that is exactly what the site is trying to do. News reports from bloggers are supplemented with AP news wire from the region. Citizen journalists are also encouraged to post their stories, and there is plenty of room for multimedia reporting and citizen videos.
Editors are based in Chang Mai, Hyderabad and Brisbane, and the site attracted over 140,000 unique visitors within the first six days of launching its beta version. If the model is successful, there is a plan to expand to other countries and continents.
âI call the company hybrid because I feel that my business model is a combination of all the fantastic elements of investigative journalism and foreign correspondence, but also through model delivery platforms.â
The past few years have seen a slew of news sites aimed at deploying citizen journalists and bloggers to fill a newshole in international reporting. How successful any such site will be depends on quality content and a viable business model.
Asian Correspondent seems to have the right ideas. If it can attract the right audience and advertisers, it could be well on its way to being a comprehensive source for Asian news.
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/onlinejournalismblog/~3/21Sc6KudC7Y/
Hereâs another collection of Q&As from a correspondent, published here to prevent repetition:
1. How do you feel about the opinions published in your blog being used by journalists in the news?
Iâm not clear what you mean by this question, but broadly speaking if my opinions are properly attributed then I am fine with it.
2. Why do you blog?
I started blogging out of professional and creative curiosity â at that point it wasnât an online journalism blog. I continued to blog largely because I started to feel part of a wider community â I particularly remember comments from Mindy McAdams and links from Martin Stabe. Now I blog for a combination of reasons: firstly, it is hugely educational to put something out there and receive other peopleâs insights; secondly, it leads to meetings and conversations with very interesting people I otherwise wouldnât meet; thirdly, itâs a useful record for myself: forcing myself to articulate an idea in text means I can identify gaps and come back to it when I want to make the same point again.
3. Do you consider yourself a journalist when blogging in that you source news and broadcast it?
Yes. But how much I âsource newsâ and how much I âbroadcastâ it are subject to further discussion.
4. What do you think about information put on social media websites, such as photos and personal details, being used in mainstream media?
I assume you mean without permission? I think thereâs a lack of proper thought on both the part of the individual and the journalist. On a purely legal front, itâs breach of copyright, so media organisations and journalists are in the wrong. On an ethical front, journalists need to realise that a social network is not a publishing platform, but a conversational one. If someone puts information there it is often for an intended, personal, audience. The closest analogy is the pub conversation: it is being held in public, but if someone listens in and publishes what youâve said to a much wider, different, audience, then that is unethical (public interest aside).
5. When blogging, are you aware that you are putting your opinions and thoughts out there for the world to see? Do you censor what you say because of this?
Yes. And yes. âCensorâ is probably the wrong word: I choose what I say; I generally donât talk about my personal life or meetings which I assume are confidential.
6. Do you think a news piece sourced from blogs is as worthy as a piece sourced from investigative journalism?
To properly answer this Iâd probably need lengthy definitions of what you mean by âworthyâ, blogs, news, âsourcedâ and investigative journalism. And even then I think to impose broad-brush distinctions like these is a flawed approach. A news piece sourced from blogs can be investigative; âinvestigative journalismâ can be âunworthyâ. Judge each case on its own; donât dismiss the value of something because of the packet it comes in.
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I spent today at the hyperlocal C&binet event, organised by Creative Industries MP Sion Simon at the Department for Culture, Media & Sport. Iâve already blogged my thoughts leading up to event but thought I would add some more links and context.
For me, it is significant that this happened at all. Normally these sorts of events are dominated by large publishers with lobbying muscle. Yet here we had a group combining hyperlocal bloggers, successful startups like Facebook, Ground Report, Global Voices and the Huffington Post, social media figures like Nick Booth and Jon Bounds, and traditional organisations like The Guardian, BBC, RSA and Ofcom. Jeff Jarvis pitched into the mix via Skype.
As for the event itself, it began the previous afternoon with a presentation from Enders Analysis, embedded below:
Local Newspaper Economics
View more presentations from william perrin.
The following morning saw more experiences thrown into the pot â Jeffâs CUNY business models for hyperlocal; Rachel Sterneâs experiences at Ground Report, embedded below:
US Hyperlocal News Market â
Nick Boothâs experience from Podnosh followed, then my own contribution, and The Guardian, Huffington Post, and Northcliffe all took centre stage at various points too.
Following that exchange of perspectives attendees put together 2 lists: what they thought government should or could do, and what they thought government should not do. These are listed on co-chair Will Perrinâs blog and some reproduced in their glorious fluorescence below:
You can read more about the day on that Will Perrin blog post and Hannah Waldramâs post for Podnosh.
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Iâm sat on a train on the way to the C&binet session at the Department for Culture, Media and Sport looking at the question of what the government should do â if anything â to save local journalism. Here are my notes:
The problem is not journalism
The vanity of journalists often leads to chest-beating deprecation of modern journalism. While there is some validity to that argument, it misses the point. Audiences have been steadily declining since well before the internet â thatâs not whatâs caused the current crisis.
The problem is not a journalism problem â it is an advertising problem, and a distribution problem.
The advertising problem is this: over recent years the market has been flooded with suppliers. This has driven the price down to a level that cannot sustain shareholder-owned print operations. In the last 12 months a sheer drop in demand has compounded the problem, and itâs widely accepted that some of that demand may never come back.
Advertising itself has changed too â from the traditional model of CPM (selling eyeballs) to CPC (selling clicks) to CPA (selling actions, e.g. purchases), and is likely to evolve further in the future towards VRM (vendor relationship management, i.e. managing the relationship between seller and buyer). Iâve seen little evidence of newspapers adapting their own advertising offerings in line to get a foothold when advertisers catch up â itâs still print-centric.
The distribution problem is that newspapers do not control distribution online â by and large their readers do, and newspapers have failed to acknowledge this, leaving themselves open to web startups that build user distribution into their design and operation. Of course the loss of control over distribution means losing the monopolies that allowed newspapers to keep advertising prices high enough to sustain the profit margins they were accustomed to. Now advertisers have choice, and the newspaper ad offering doesnât look much of a bargain.
What does the future of local journalism look like?
I see 2 main paths of development, and both have one thing in common: the future is networked.
On the one side I see the national-grassroots-data path â Iâll call it the Networked Model for simplicityâs sake. As increasing numbers of local newspapers close or stunt their operations, hyperlocal blogs will spring up to address the gap. At the same time national news organisations enter the local market and partner with these and data-based operations. The most likely figures in this scenario are The Guardian, hyperlocal blogs and the likes of MySociety and OpenlyLocal. Itâs a patchwork solution that is likely to leave gaps in coverage.
On the other side is the Local News Consortia proposed by Ofcom. Established operators like PA, ITN and regional newspaper publishers will partner up to gain access to a pot of public money and efficiencies that they cannot achieve without ending up in front of the Competition Commission. This will require some public service commitments such as covering councils and courts, and universal coverage â but fundamentally this will be Business As Usual.
More to follow in further posts
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In addition to the usual reading list I give to students on the new MA Online Journalism, I also provide an OPML file of around 50 RSS feeds they should be subscribing to â broadly, 5 feeds each in 10 categories.
I thought I should make it available here, so: here it is.
The idea is that a) they get instant access to up-to-date news and analysis of a range of relevant areas; and b) it introduces them to the concept of RSS, if they donât already know about it, and how to share OPML files.
It seems a no-brainer that we should be doing this on all courses.
Oh, and if you think there are better feeds, let me know.
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/onlinejournalismblog/~3/ehJ8N0h_BNM/
Bloggers are generally more affluent than the average person
5 things journalists should know about the report:
The blogosphere continues to be dominated by male, affluent and educated bloggers
Bloggers use Twitter far more than the average person and microblogging is changing blogging habits
Blogging is becoming more mainstream and influential, but not replacing traditional media
More bloggers are making money, but most donât make any
Most bloggers are âhobbyistsâ and are driven by personal fulfilment rather than financial gain.
Last week over five days, Technorati released the annual 2009 State of the Blogosphere Report with a strong theme of gaining strength. A record number of 2,828 bloggers submitted extensive surveys about their blogging activities from the past year from 50 countries, with half from the US (48%), 26% from the EU, 10% from the APAC (Asia Pacific) and 16% from elsewhere.
Results were combined with interviews with professional and well-known bloggers and statistics and findings from Lijit and Blogcritics. Bloggers were separated into four distinct groups; hobbyists, part-timers, self-employeds and professionals.
While blogging is gaining in popularity and credibility, the blogging demographic doesnât appear to be widening. The average blogger continues to be male (two thirds), affluent (a majority have household incomes of an average of $75,000) and educated.
While most bloggers are blogging more regularly and have at least three blogs, the majority consider their output a hobby (72%).
The vast majority of bloggers seek to share their personal experience for emotional and personal fulfilment rather than monetary gain. Most bloggers feel their blog has acted positively on their personal and professional lives. Generally, respondents said they blog for one of three distinct reasons: speaking oneâs mind; sharing expertise and experiences with family and friends (old and new); and making money or doing business.
70% of all respondents say that personal satisfaction is a way they measure the success of their blog, but for Pros, the leading measure of success is the number of unique visitors.
The survey found that contrary to popular belief, many bloggers have had professional media experience, with 35% of all respondents having worked in traditional media as a writer, reporter, producer, or on-air personality, and 27% continue to do so.
Interestingly, 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% donât think newspapers will survive the next ten years.
The report highlighted the instrumental role the blogosphere has played in recent global issues; namely the protests during the recent Iranian elections and debate surrounding last yearâs US presidential elections. Even though only a relatively small number of bloggers commented on these events, bloggers believe their influence on global affairs is growing. 51% believe it will be a more effective tool to voice dissent in the future and 39% believe blogs made the Iranian protests earlier this year more effective.
Bloggers are getting savvier and more influential. Most bloggers know how their blog is created and use an average of five activities to draw an audience to their site. Bloggers with greater audiences and with Technorati authority ratings blog more regularly, posting more than 300 times more than lower ranked bloggers. One in five bloggers report updating on a daily basis, but the majority update their blog two to three times per week. The survey results and interviews with influential bloggers clearly show the number of page views depends on how prolific a blog is.
More bloggers are earning some revenue from their blog, but they are not in the majority and most income streams are indirect. For 83% of people that make money from their blog, it is not their primary income. Interviewees agreed the key to a successful blog is passion. In each case they describe how professional and lucrative blogging stemmed from their original passion and drive.
The growth of Twitter is having a big impact on the blogosphere. A large proportion of bloggers (73%) report using Twitter, largely for promotion and interaction with readers, compared with just 14% of the general population. Furthermore, according to Lijit, blogs with greater than 100 page views a day received on average 83% of their page views from Twitter referrals. Twitter was also by far the fastest growing content source to be included by bloggers.
Bloggers are avid Twitter users
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