Monthly Archives: June 2008

June Carnival of Journalism

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I have the pleasure of hosting this months Carnival of journalism, a monthly extravaganza of posts from the journalism blogasphere. (You can find out more here).  Last month Ryan Sholin suggested a theme: “What should news organizations stop doing, today, immediately, to make more time for innovation?”.

In that spirit I have done the same and suggested an area to consider (if fellow carnivaliers wanted to).

Is (digital) journalism better the more local it is and what does that do to growth?

I chose that question for a few reasons. I’ve been dipping in and out of the comment around Rob Curley’s move (and some of the talk around his move back in 2006 when he went ‘big time’) At the same time I’ve been mulling over some of the coverage of flooding and fires and the like coming out of newspapers here and stateside.

All of which made me think of a debate that took place at an event as part of our last Meld project. The debate came when we where trying to define what the journalist of 2013 will look like – maybe that should have been the post – and a few of us had them as a journo who made a name locally and was now working globally. One of the group, Joanna Geary, got a bit upset (and rightly so) that this somehow limited local journalism as something that people left behind – it wasn’t important.

In fact the debate got me thinking so much I even pondered it on camera and got a few replies.
The vibrant range of stories that local throws up and the apparent belief that (hyper)local is where the industry needs to be suggests that local is better. But local is a limited market. Is local to limiting for growth?
What do you think?

Over to the carnival…

First in to the ring is ‘digital’ Dave Cohn and or him ‘local is better’ is a value judgment. But thinking about his latest project, spot.us, he suggests a ‘sci-fi’ future where news is a locally produced commodity on community platforms. Journalists become employees of the community. Where does the journalism industry fit here and where is the growth? Well that’s something the industry need to ask themselves: “The real question is if that platform will be built by somebody who holds the same values of traditional media or somebody who wants to make a quick buck”

Next up is Charlie Beckett who is thinking about the language and the result of getting it wrong. What is local? How we do we measure growth? For Charlie, local is  ‘’better” when it is genuinely local. And our concept of “growth” has to be redefined in terms of expanding communications or networks, not always as profit.

Adrian Monck pitches in on the basis that local journalism based on geography isn’t his bag. It’s all about communities of interest – networks – for Adrian. What does that means for the journalism industry?   “In the future, journalism may well survive as information advocacy. It’s already heading there with some NGOs. And yes – in the future – all journalism may be not-for-profit.”

Next in my in-box, Jack Lail, who has some good tips/advice/suggestions for those looking to get in to ‘hyperlocal’ journalism. His biggest tip? Don’t call it hyperlocal: “once you call it that, it’s doomed. Doomed to be irrelevant. Doomed to be ignored? Doomed to be abhorred by advertisers.”

Over in NZ, Dave Lee is trying to cast out news agency demons, and suggests a ‘solution’ to the problem of dying local journalism. His suggestion is a NewsHub (I’d check the url on that one Dave) which acts like a news agency but isn’t – it’s a kind of critical mass of local content. He says “by harnessing the power of local digital journalism and turning it into a mutual, lucrative business, local media can grow and grow.”

John Hassell has also been pondering how local networks can work for journalism. He sees some commonality with politics. It all starts with local angagement and the chance to take risks. Whatever it shakes out as John is convinced that “the name of the game, I’m convinced, will be local. It makes everything else possible.”

Wendy Withers rejoins the carnival (glad you’re better Wendy) with her view that Local isn’t better and her take on why so much ‘local’ doesn’t work. Given all the opportunities that the web offers Wendy wonders why the newspaper industry doesn’t seem to be able to get a handle on what works. Maybe, she says, “We need to stop seeing Web 2.0 as a way to create a community we control but as a way to join a greater community.”

Paul Bradshaw, the multi-platform fella he is, posted a video response to the question and then, later, a blog post to develop some of his thoughts. The nub, all journalism is local and the term itself is a bit of an old media crutch.

Doug Fisher ponders the points in the question with a doom’ish start “any news outlet focused solely on geographic community in the digital age is limiting its growth prospects, if not flirting with suicide”. The rest is less pessimistic. He also has a go at defining the journalist of the future to.

Much later:

A few strays for the debate. Alf Hermida returns from honeymoon  (as good a late note as you can have) and ponders, like Paul Bradshaw, if the questions is the right one: “The issue then is less whether local is better, but rather how do we redefine local to remain relevant in a digital news environment.”

links for 2008-06-18

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Photojournalism Ethics is an ivory tower.

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I’m often reminded as my status as a lecturer. It’s usually in that ‘it may work for you in your ivory tower, but this is the real world sonny’ way, but I don’t mind.

One of the reasons I like being in education is it allows me to have a foot in both camps and, importantly, the time to reflect on that. But I am careful though. Wherever possible I try to not let the minutia of everyday academia filter through. That should stay in the ivory tower.

Sometines I wish industry would return the favour.

PJ Mark Hancock has been pondering ethics in photojournalism and makes some very interesting points. At the heart of the ethical debate for photographers is the issue of photo-manipulation. Its clear that, in photojournalism, these are big ethical no-no’s.

I get the impression that Mark is frustrated that this is even an issue for snappers given the apparent acceptance of ethical practices by journalists.

If a reporter requests we do something unethical, for example, we could ask if they “make up” quotes in their stories. While they should recoil from the notion, the actions are exactly alike. A lie is a lie.

Part of me wonders where reported speech comes in to that analogy – but I digress. Mark puts the blame for ethical problems at the feet those who break the rules. But he see’s a potentially bigger problem in convergence.

Putting photographers at the sharp end of a convergent policy is common – in fact many photographers will demand that they should be there – puts them at a point where photojournalism and TV journalism meet.  That raises some ethical issues.

For Mark there is a very clear lack of journalism ethic in TV news. Why? Well one reason is that practitioners don’t come from newspapers:

While early broadcast news pioneers came from the newspaper business, most recent broadcast celebrities have not.

With an ear to my experience in TV that feels a bit unfair in a broad brush way but I have to concede that the reality (in the US at least) would seem to support Marks view.

But interestingly for me some of the blame for this comes the way of education.

This divergence is often compounded at universities. While some universities do understand the connection, others continue to place RTV majors in the theater arts departments rather than journalism.

If you surround them with actors then they are more likely to make stuff up.

In my university the TV production course is in a different department from journalism. They are taught in the same building as Dancers and actors. We actually teach our journalists to shoot and edit so it’s a bit of an odd model. But in a sense, that isnt the point.

The real issue is that because of a lack of consistency in the industry, ethics becomes an academic debate. What is acceptable or not is an internal issue.  It’s the industries own personal ivory tower. In the same way a professor will reserve the right to pontificate on the ethics of academic research or what consitutes a good student,  the j-industry see fit to reserve the right to use the moral, theoretical issues as defining features of the industry.

I don’t disagree with a word Mark has said. His proffesionalism and genuine hope for a better ethical standard in the industry is the kind of thing that the indusrty needs to drive the standards. But those standards need to be in place for the rest of us to respond to rather than react to.

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Transparency: Don’t look at me…

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A number of browser tabs to consume already today – damn the reader. But rather than tag them all to delicious I thought I would give them a bit more discussion (a la Mark and his Daily squibs)

Speaking of things ‘a la’. Richard Titus over at the BBC internet blog has been thinking flattery rather than theft as a number sites pop up bearing an uncanny resemblance to the new BBC web design. The post has a boat load of useful information about some of the thought processes behind the page design and is a pretty mature response to the issue. There is also a great link to the BBC’s open source project with some nifty flash libs amongst other things.

Whilst I’m on the BBC blogs site I would recommend a quick scan of Steve Herrmanns blog about the physical shifting of journalists to their ‘new’ multimedia newsroom. A nice level of transparency.

And transparency (see what I did there) is a word that pops up in newspaper land. A nifty bit of video from the The Spokesman Review about their efforts at transparency gives the US perspective and, in the UK, the recent efforts by the Liverpool Echo Daily Post,(sorry Alison) and now one or two others, has given pause for thought. Joanna Geary asks just how open should newspapers get and gets some interesting comments back.

A lot of the discussion seems to be around trust and image. Or let’s put it another way, if we look like idiots (as you do on camera) then people will trust us less. Others worry about nutters – plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose. And others worry about placing the journalist at the heart of a story – erm, isn’t that where they should be in a community focused local newsroom.

Inching to success

Maybe another reason for not liking an all-seeing-eye in the newsroom is to avoid the bosses being able to get a handle on the amount of content you are creating. A number of pixel/inches have been given over to Sam Zells 50/50 equation for editorial and ads. A good Fortune article outlines the broader issue. But it’s an article in Slate that extrapolates the equation and applies it to Zell’s plans to measure productivity based in word count.

The Slate article picks up on a Editor and Publisher article by Jennifer Saba which highlights just what an accountants wet dream this policy seems to be. Worse still just how preriously close to ‘never mind the quality, feel the width” this is. Saba quotes Tribune Chief Operating Officer Randy Michaels:

Chicago Tribune is typically 80 pages per edition, and then compared that count with the Wall Street Journal — which is around 48 pages on average. “If we take the Los Angeles Times to a 50/50 ratio eliminating 82 pages a week, the smallest papers would be Monday and Tuesday at 56 pages. It’s still larger than the Wall Street Journal. … We can save a lot of money by producing the right size newspapers.”

You might say, Oh, those crazy yanks. But I guarentee there are some UK newspaper execs looking at the logic, and thinking hard.

And finally, whilst some might see measuring word-counts as a step backwards, transparency as too brave a brave new world, Ryan Sholin reminds us that the good old day’s and the past are different things.

If you can’t be bothered to post a breaking news story online after your print deadline, try yelling “Stop the press!” sometime. (Good luck with that one.)

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Release your API

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Go Nuts

Picture by ~Jetta Girl~ (camera off to Nikon ER) at Flickr

According to the Webopedia an API is

Abbreviation of application program interface, a set of routines, protocols, and tools for building software applications. A good API makes it easier to develop a program by providing all the building blocks. A programmer then puts the blocks together.

Why tell you that? They seem to be all the rage at the moment. Some of the biggest names in the biz are promising ‘api’ like access to their wares: The NYTimes, The Guardian and the telegraph and Reuters(labs) to name just a few. And we shouldn’t forget the venerable Backstage effort from the BBC.

So why the excitement? Well essentially it means more mash-up stuff in the form of Apps. Little web/phone applications that use content from the publication. We love that stuff don’t we.

Dare to share

No web service is worth its salt these days without some form of api access and considering the voracious way the media fell on api’s from the likes of facebook it’s nice to see the share-alike attitude finally filtering through. Of course they will get something from this.

But something is nagging me about this.

Essentially an api provides an interface. A way for people outside the organisation to access content and data and make new and interesting stuff from it – a way to collaborate on terms that suit everyone. Right?That’s what nags me. Organizations already have that. It’s called a journalist.

So whilst you are mashing-up why not release your most powerful user-agent. Harness the the power of your most productive functions. Let your journalists interface with the public more.

So I thought about re-defining what an api is in that context. Audience pleasing interface? Audience providing interest?

No, your journalists as an API – Allow Profitable Interaction

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links for 2008-06-11

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Braindump -owning up to ownership

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Marking has done a good job of getting in the way of things – shows up my inability to multi task doesn’t it – but i’ve been storing up one or two bits to go at thanks to Taboo. So here goes a brain dump on the theme of ownership- sorry

In a kind of last-in-last-out thing taboo served up a story I had tabbed about the process of recovering a stolen laptop. One Joey Carenza III has been remote accessing a friends laptop that was stolen and used it to harvest a large amount of data (including screenshots) before the guy worked out how to stop (most of) it. It’s a great story which reminds me of the infamous stolen sidekick story. My favourite part:

That being said, today I found out this guy is: 27, an ex-con, i know his DOB, his mom’s maiden name (thanks e-bay!! – he has been shopping ebay for a police scanner…i wonder why?), he belongs to local sex/date hook up site , his email address, and today i snapped a screen shot so clear, that you can read the lettering on his ink.

Scary, hey!

Whats yours is mine

Perhaps the techno-donkey thief could argue that possession is 9/10th’s of the law. If he was a journalism manager he could be right.  Over at Poynter Christopher ‘Chip’ Scanlan uses his Chip on the shoulder column (see what he did there) to ask who owns the stories that reporters write. Or rather, he asks who should own them: the journalists who produce it or the companies that publish it? So is it what you write or the means for people to access it?

Interesting question. For what it’s worth (insert magical prediction music here) I predict a state of play where journalists are employed on a profit share basis and editors become content agents. Think football without the salaries and a transfer window rather than silly season.

And on the subject of ownership, the idea of who owns local raises it’s ugly head again. The Newspaper Society has announced the imminent publication of its ‘six-figure’ called Local Matters, that will prove that newspapers are the only ones allowed to exploit local audiences, sorry,  help “isolate the real differences in needs, activities and attitudes across the UK, and how local media continues to play a vital role in people’s lives.”

How much of this is about users/audience/local people? Didn’t see any ‘community’ on the list of their recent, by strick invite only, Local matters conference. Don’t get me wrong, there are a lot of livings at stake here and I realise the Newspaper society is there to help the industry but here is a little hint. Serve the local community properly rather than trying to keep the compatiton out and you may get a bit more loyalty (and business).

Under-fire

Still, perhaps you can’t blame the trad-media (and that is pretty much newspapers these days isn’t it) for being a little defensive.  They’ve been playing by the rules – all be it ones they made up – for years and then others just ignore them, right? Take this from firedoglake founder Jane Hamsher:

“It’s hurting America that journalists consider their first loyalty to be to their subjects, and not to the people they’re reporting for,” she said. Told, for example, that the Times ethics policy states that “staff members should disclose their identity to people they cover (whether face to face or otherwise),” Ms. Hamsher was dismissive. In the context of political reporting, she said, such guidelines are intended to “protect this clubby group of journalists and their high-ranking political subjects, and keep access to themselves.

Ouch! She was responding to the actions of Huffington post journalist Mayhill Fowler in a  NY Times story earlier in the week.

Eyebrows where at full raise over Fowler’s antics at the front of a press scrum which elicited some off colour comments by Bill Clinton. The big problem – she didn’t say she was a journalist – as she told the LATimes:

“Of course he had no idea I was a journalist,” Fowler said by phone from her Oakland home, recalling her close encounter with Clinton for “Off the Bus,” a citizen journalism project hosted by the Huffington Post website. “He just thought we were all average, ordinary Americans who had come out to see him. And, of course, in one sense, that is what I am.

The death of the gentleman

Phrases like deception and dishonesty have crept in to the debate around Fowler’s actions. I think that’s strong. We have a saying in the UK for someone not playing by the rules – it’s just no cricket. It belongs to a time past when only a gentleman had the time to learn and play cricket. So to not follow the rules, well you weren’t being a gentleman.

In so many ways the trad-media is a gentleman’s club playing cricket. But why are they so surprised when no-one else plays by the rules.

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