Where's Andy - Image by Nick.Garrod on Flickr
I’m taking a break and dissapearing to the other side of the world for a rest. Normal service will be resumed in a few weeks time.
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Monthly Archives: January 2009
Any journalist who hasn’t tried Twitter should re-think their career: New Year convictions
The last of my new year convictions I said Any journalist who hasn’t tried Twitter should re-think their career
A bit of link bait really. I don’t thing that any journalist who doesn’t use Twitter should not be a journalist.
But I do think is that if you have heard of Twitter but haven’t tried it then you should be thinking about what kind of journalist you want to be. Even if you try it and think it’s a complete waste of time.
You could substitute twitter with anything from trying RSS feeds, Plurk, Qik or starting a blog. Whatever it is you have to engage and you have to engage for yourself. If you don’t engage, you aren’t punishing your employer, you are limiting yourself.
I’m convinced that if you are journalist who isn’t curious about the web then you you may find yourself seriously limited as the industry shifts or worse still, not being a journalist for very long.
Point and shoot will dominate but you still need a quality strategy: New Year convictions
The third of my recent new year convictions was Point-and-shoot, mojo video is the predominant form for newspaper video but organisations will still need to develop a quality video strategy
Not sure what point-and shoot is here’s my not so serious definition
Looking back over the year I’ve realised that I haven’t blogged about video very much. Given that I started the year predicting newspaper video would die in 2008, you would be forgiven for thinking that I believe that had come true and there was nothing to write about.
The truth is that video is stronger than ever just not in newspapers. It’s fallen off the agenda and I think that’s for a number of reasons:
- The development of social media and community strategies
The development of social media has stolen videos star. Where video was once the defining mode of a forward thinking digital newspaper, now it’s social media and community. Investing in facebook apps, twitter, linked in forums etc is seen as an investment closer to the core business of a newspaper – linking with communities.
This focus on the dialogue is interesting for me. On the one hand I think it’s massively positive and, looking back over the year, that’s something that’s engaged me a lot. But I’m wary that some organisations have replaced one apparently effective technology with another. Just because you are doing it, doesn’t mean you are using it.
- The Immediacy of twitter
I’m using twitter as an example here of the return to the concept of immediacy in newsrooms. The take-up of cover it live, for example, shows how the idea of first is still an important factor. Video, especially the quality approach just doesn’t fit that style any more.
- The development of content management systems
I’ve spent a good deal of time (and you, bless you, have read a good deal of the drivel I’ve written) moaning about the way that video was effectively channeled by content management systems. We where always going to get video that was ‘too much like TV’ because it was in its own little part of the website, with no context, so it had to be packaged and TV like.
Now a most orgs have woken up to the fact that video should be embedded in the story. It should be another content element on the page that tells the part of the story it does best. The video of the crashed car, next to the story of Ronaldo’s accident for example.
Add a map showing the loacation of the crash and you have a near perfect example of mojo journalism
- The economic downturn
Video is time consuming and expensive. It takes a lot of people to do it (even badly) and in this climate some types of video are not cost effective anymore.
Fit for purpose
Put all those things together and the only viable strategy for getting video in your newsroom now is point-and-shoot. It’s responsive, cheap and easy to implement and the kind of video produced – short clip content, illustrative video and vignettes of action – is best suited to the embedded style we see on news sites.
That doesn’t mean I’m ditching the idea that a quality video strategy has lost. It isn’t a betamax Vs. VHS type thing. Those that invested in the training and development of that strategy will always get good results from it. Those who just bought lots of kit and left the newsroom to it will have already put the camera in a cupboard.
But to ignore the quality strategy all together will be a mistake. When Laura at Journalism.co.uk asked me for new years prediction via twitter here’s what I said:
I said much the same thing in my predictions last year and I still believe it.
It will not be long before video finds itself back in the commercial sector. Video ads, advertorial content, wedding vids, video house guides, video production, whatever you like, would be fair game for an ad department looking to expand it’s repertoire. The investment in the distribution technology has been made. What the ad departments need to do is start behaving like broadcast ad sales.
Newspapers as commercial broadcasters
Here in the UK I think we will see some very interesting changes to the broadcasting landscape after a general election (maybe sooner if the credit crunch really bites) with local media really starting to define itself as something more than the weak, territorial battleground it is at the moment. A commercial production capacity will be a head-start in building the capacity to commercially exploit that.
A point-and-shoot strategy won’t help develop that. The skills will be geared more to the newsroom not to the more structured video that a commercial strategy will need. One will suit the newsroom, the other the commercial imperitive. A division that will warm the hearts of many a journalist who’s been asked to knock out a quick video of the local furniture shop.
So have I finnaly come down on the side of p&s? No. I was never for or against either strategy. But the truth is we now have a convention. A way of making and using video on non-broadcast news websites and I’d be a fool to advocate doing anything different.
But to lose the capacity to “high-quality” video is, I think a mistake. How orgs make it fit will be the best indicator of how they are approaching the next year or so. If you do video and you have no quality stratgey then you are not thinking about the future. All you have done is adopted the P&S strategy because it’s cheap and that’s no strategy at all.
Print organisations will need to open source their systems: New year convictions
Cookie cut or good business? Network template CMS's - Picture from Flickr by Toucanradio
The second of my new year convictions is Print organisations will need to open source some or all of their content management system if they want to stick with corporate templates.
Why? Because it hampers attempts to upskill journalists and softens the brands that are supposed to be so valuable
Let me explain (ahh, go on.)
By corporate templates I mean the practice of centrally controlling websites and rolling out the same core design across all the group publications. The most recent example of this that I’ve seen in the UK is the recent roll out of Archants new template.
The motivation for this practice, on the surface, seems pretty logical
- A standard template ensures the brand identity is managed effectively
Brand awareness
Thats’s an intersting one for me.
I’m constantly being told that the brand value that the local newspaper has, the identity within the community, is key, unique in fact. So why spoil that with one size fits all websites?
I started the post with an example of the latest in a line of network templates take a look at the site below by comparison.
This is the website of the the Champion newspaper group who, apparently bucking the trend, have just announced that they are about to launch a new, free weekly newspaper in Mersyside
The Champ News
It’s worth a visit so that you can explore the whole thing. In particular take a look below the scroll and have a look at all the widgets and free things stuck in there alongside all the free hosted video (I recommend the Visit Southport video where all the grey sky has been replaced with wonderful blue)Not going to win any awards is it. I think it has a bit of charm but is way below par. That said is it any less navigable or useable then Archants new template?
IT and ads drive CMS not content
The other reasons for ‘network templates’ often given are:
- IT provision is easier to manage if it is all in one place
- CMS backends essentially render geographical control of the systems redundant
and finally and most importantly for newspaper groups
- advertising and commercial activity can be managed, packaged and sold as a national concern across a network
What this really means to the people who are using the system is a response and development time, wildly out of line the assumptions of the constant news flow and demand for innovation in the industry. Put simply, if you want a dipity timeline or a youtube video, you can’t have one until we have rolled it out across the network.
It’s limited flexibility for least risk. That’s a lowest common denominator approach and it stifles creativity.
Limiting creativity
I could speculate on the reasons for this slow development mentality. Maybe it is technical. Maybe the systems are built to interface with the print systems which would baulk at anything other than text. Maybe the IT people don’t trust the journalists. But whether its the curse of print legacy system (and the models they sustain) or the cautiousioness of IT people. That’s not really the point.
What this limitation in the capacity for flexibility does is take any activity to take journalists forward with digital skills and puts a big ball and chain on it. A really frustrating, rusty, hulking printing press of a ball and chain.
I only need to look at the increase of twitter followers, new blogs and fresh faces that have appeared since christmas to know that journalists are really fired up about online. They love twitter and blogging and RSS. Once they get excited by slideshows or video or maps they want to try them. The avalaunche of new apps that appear on the web news of which spread through their newly followed feeds appear as a tweet are the biggest most exciting toy box imaginable. They have stories they want to tell.
Then they go in the office and it grinds to a halt.
That great stuff they tried on their blog the night before needs a form signed in triplicate, a request to central support and good dollop of patience. By then the stories dead and a little bit of the excitment has died with them.
The tenacious ones will stick with it and innovate. They will eventually get Dipity or a Google maps through the system and approved for use and really fly with it getting much earned kudos and immitation. Others will bypass the system all together and use open source blogs and website tools to get their content across getting no less praise.
Open sesame
That’s why I say print organisations will need to open source some of their systems.
What I would like to see is more print organisations integrate open source software in to their networks and keep it open source. Not take it and ‘stitch it in’ removing all the functionality. That means they can benefit from the fast moving developments in the community and support the innovation where required. I can’t believe that proper implementation of an existing system like wordpress or moveable type is no harder to support than a ground up creation of a similar system or the heavy handed integration of many.
Better still some or all of the elements of a companies own CMS could be made opensource. Look at the benefits the BBC get through projects like Backstage.
Many will argue, and perhaps with some justification, that the innovation does get through and IT are responsive (I’ve been scrupilous in my efforts not to attack IT people here). But even if the space is there for the innovation that newly upskilled journos are bringing to the newsroom the ubiquity of ‘network’ templates does little to protect a brand.
Essentially there is no excuse not to be a little more open.
Interesting stuff for Tuesday
I thought I would start with a “guess the object” comp. Answer at the end.
Wendy Parker has some good advice about getting started with blogging -Beginning blogging for journalists: Get started, already!
On the geek side of things JVC Pro debuts solid state camcorders for Final Cut Pro editors which could solve the problem of intermediate timelines ( a common affliction of FCP users)
Less geeky but still video related is a post by Chrys Wu outlining 10 golden rules for video journalists. These come from Washington Post video journalist Travis Fox at a recent “Creating Video Narratives” workshop at Beyond Bootcamp. Solid stuff.
From the sublime to the ridiculous. Joe the plumber is going to ‘report’ from Gaza. Old news I know but, honestly, you couldn’t make stuff like that up could you. Next Obama will send Hillary Clinton over and they will do battle like Mothra and Godzilla over Jerusalem. What makes me more mad about that, and in a more serious tone is that journalists are being hacked to death. Much as I hate to question Joe’s motives. Man, journalism has to be taken a bit more seriously than ‘joe the plumber’.
Maybe that re-inforces Bob Steele’s point as he worries about Ethics Crashes on the Digital Media Highway over at Poynter. It’s a thoughtful piece but the tone doesn’t recover from “Too often we give unjustified credibility to bloggers who are, at best, practicing amateur journalism or simplistic punditry.” Recent events in Mumbai and now Nepal, plus the countless other incidences of violence against journalists and bloggers reporting the world around them should be making this kind of them and us redundant.
On a lighter, but no less interesting, note though is Mark Hamilton who explains how he could get behind some of Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s recent rambles about journalism
The ever brilliant Martin Belam continues to pick apart media sites and their web presences by looking at how the sites appear when people search for them in Google
And more UK goodness from Lindsay Bruce giving more valuable lessons in community in part 9 of an invaluable series on Paul Bradshaws Online journalism blog
Meanwhile Pat Thornton calls for more innovation in the user interface of news sites. I think he is right but it may be a difficult balance between convention – already established – more depth which you could deliver as effectivly with a better relationship with the print product. But that takes us multi-platform and away from Pat’s point. Worth a read
Read/Write web’s How to: Build a Social Media Cheat Sheet for Any Topic has been popping up across the place with glowing recomendations. Well worth a look. As is their article on Mobile TV.
Aspiring web journos can get a glimpse of life as it could be as the NYtimes profiles the renegade cybergeeks who may just save the paper. (wasn’t that the plotline of the last Die Hard?) It feels a bit 90210 to me. By which I mean, this is how the beutiful people do journalism. But read it with a less cynical eye and there is some nice insight.
And the picture? It’s one of several arty shots of Fabian Mohr’s new FlipHD. He has more nice pics and some test movies on his site. Go and have a look.
Broadcast thinking will be the heart of successful print models: New year convictions
Not that TV model! Image from Flickr by C-Monster
Yesterday I set out four new year convictions. Things that I thought where going to be important this year because, well, they had to be.
First was Broadcast thinking will be the heart of successful print models this year.
In the past I’ve been pretty hard on broadcast. I think they have been slow to embrace the possibilities of the web particularly in the context of news. On reflection I guess my disappointment with the broadcast media is framed as much in my frustration that the print media didn’t embrace the advantage it gave them. But I still think broadcast are slow.
That said there are some elements of online development, most notably the development of the web as a platform, where the broadcast players are driving the agenda. In that context I appreciate that I live in a country where all things broadcast are skewed by the BBC and that colours competition . But I think it’s difficult to argue (though many will try – if you want to fill a lull in conversation with independent news execs just mention BBC innovation and sit back) that some of the BBC’s multi-platform activities have produced the “proof of concept “ that the rest of the media wouldn’t or couldn’t do. I’m thinking of the equally cursed and blessed iplayer in particular. But this follows for the broadcasters outside the UK who have taken the web to heart as a platform.
I think Clay Shirky summed it up nicely when he talks about embracing the conversation, saying:
The question is who figures out the business model that says it’s better to have 6 million passionate fans than 7 million bored ones? That is going to be the transformation because what you see with these user groups, whether it’s for reality TV or science fiction, is that people love the conversation around the shows. The renaissance of quality television is an indicator of what an increased number of distribution channels can do. It is no accident that this started with cable.
And it’s that last point that is of particular importance to me when it comes to this particular conviction.
Let me sidetrack with a (very, very) brief history of broadcast
- Broadcast starts as a closed-shop; state broadcasters with large production capabilities.
- Then large, none-state, independent/commercial broadcasters appear with equally large production capabilities.
- Cable/satellite/multi-channel appear and change the economies of scale
- A steady influx of independent production companies appear, working across broadcasters benefiting from the changing economies
Let’s stop at that point
If I was to look at the print media at the moment, I think they are at step 3 after an extended period of step 2. And this is where there is plenty to learn from the broadcast model.
When I talk about a broadcast model I’m not thinking of the platform implications discussed above, important as they are, For me the broadcast model, particularly as it relates to the changes in journalism, starts before that. It’s about the way content is commissioned and produced.
Broadcast has always been good at recognising the need to bring in expertise. Originally it was about employing the talent, keeping it in house. But later, in the multi-platform world, it would be about commissioning that talent; People who had the knowledge and contacts to create the best content.
Opening up their model to a more transparent broadcast commissioning style of content creation is the biggest opportunity for those changing their model. They have to develop from the model of owning the talent to commissioning talent. Those that embrace that approach can benefit from having the best people and the audience they attract. The independent producers (perhaps a single journalist) maintain a level of authority and ownership. They can take their content to the open market (just as broadcast independents do). That creates a broader content economy that benefits all.
Of course things are not that shiny bright in broadcast.
The next steps in our little broadcast history go something along the lines of
- Though the number of channels grow, revenue shrinks. Commissioning budgets shrink with the knock on impact on independent producers. Quality suffers all round
- Independent companies follow the economies of scale and consolidate to super-indies
- Super indies take a stranglehold on production and garner more control over rights.
- Large broadcasters are relegated to participating in a bidding war for superindie owned rights they can’t afford.
You can colour round the edges with failed attempts at convergence and constant rows with independents and unions but that’s about where broadcast is now (Ok, maybe they are stuck around point 3). Imagine those next steps played out in print world. Replace independent production company with journalist and it would seem the writing is on the wall.
But I think that we are at a turning point. Done right, the commissioning model is sustainable because the platforms are more diverse but print can still have a sustainable business, smaller perhaps, but profitable because of the diversity. To seriously engage with the model print needs to start doing things a bit differently
- Change its relationship with their freelance providers – stop treating them as faceless labour and start seeing them as value added.
- Be more transparent with the sources of content – broadcasters have credits and a logo of the independent company at the end of their content, why doesn’t print?
- Pro-actively commission – Broadcasters have slots and briefs for the programmes that they want. Print needs to do the same. There is no better example of this than Dave Cohns Spot.us model. A commission/marketplace model similar to broadcast.
If these things don’t change then the broadcast history will come to pass. We can already see signs of the superindie model appearing in the online territory print are trying to hold. Print needs to adapt to make itself more attractive to those with the contacts and audience as the economy is fragmented by the platforms and the market becomes more fluid in favour of smaller independents.
New Year convictions
From Flickr by Guerrilla Futures = Jason Tester
I don’t really have any new years predictions this year over and above the one or two that I’ve been asked to give. Even then, the reaction to those has shown me that the current climate, predictions are a bit of a hostage to fortune.
In my positive predictions post for the recent carnival of journalism I threw together a quick graph to show the decline of traditional media brand over individual journalistic brand. One commentator, following the curves on the graph, had the trad-brands gone by 2012. Of course what I should have added, in the positive vein of the post, is the upturn the trad-brands would get if they were more savvy about the way they work with their journos.
That’s off the cuff graphs for you.
Still, that gave me pause for thought in terms of the way my thinking has changed over the last year or so and how things will develop in the coming year an rather than predict I thought I share some things that I’m convinced of; things that need to change.
- Broadcast thinking will be the heart of successful print models this year.
- Print organisations will need to open source some or all of their content management system if they want to stick with corporate templates
- Point-and-shoot, mojo video is the predominant form for newspaper video but organisations will still need to develop a quality video strategy
- Any journalist who hasn’t tried Twitter should re-think their career
I’ll expand on those this week.
Interesting stuff for Monday
More marking today and I’m finding interesting things about Preston and the people there. I’m also learning a lot about what I need to teach people before they leave us for the uncertain “real-world”. We all learn from assignments in ivorytowerville.
So, whilst I digest tails of dogging (no, I’m not adding that to my tags), Chess, parks, boxing, teen pregnancy and the credit crunch here is the stuff that I’ve been distracting myself with.
Most of what I’ve been marking is stuff online so I was interested in a post from Sam Shepherd commenting on why subs are still vital(maybe more so) on the web in light of Press complaints commission ruling on the coverage of a mans suicide.“Standards, codes, ethics, quality; these rules still apply” I agree but perhaps that’s one of the tough pills to swallow in these leaner times. Perhaps we let the responsibility for that stuff slide. Time for individual journos to take back that skill?
Also pondering (or pontificating) on those leaner times is Paul Mason, economics editor of the BBC’s Newsnight programme and NUJ rep gives his views (on video) on the uncertain times ahead. Comment about this video has been sharp, particularly for his “pyjama bloggers” comment. But if you listen to the first 3 minutes that seems unfair .
Despite continuous goading by Tim Gopsil, Paul keeps his line. But 3 minutes in and Paul loses it. I think the question was worse than the rant that comes next “what’s the difference between the stuff that trained journalists produce and the poor stuff that badly trained people produce” What kind of a question is that!
Paul thinks that the union can be the gel that helps inform organisations going multimedia when the models are still not there. This does little to convince me that they can. Worse still it seems that the only way they can see to sustain the ‘craft of journalism’ is to help support the models that no longer work. Oooh, me blood is boiling just thinking about it.
A much better bet to get a handle on what we should be thinking about is Zac Echola’s Cutting the cords, bridging the gaps. Getting this online stuff is a journey not a destination and we have a while before industry aligns itself with the new audiences out there let alone those of us immersed in this stuff. Zac strikes a nice balance on this front and adds to the mix nicely. As does this post by Alex Gamela where he asks the media industry to think about whether this whole thing is about The vehicle, the road or the voyage
More intelligence on where we go next can be found at the Guardian who feature Clay Shirky’s predictions for the future of print and broadcast in the Guardian. For Print? Well “The 500-year-old accident of economics occasioned by the printing press – high upfront cost and filtering happening at the source of publication – is over.” and it don’t get much better for TV “The question is who figures out the business model that says it’s better to have 6 million passionate fans than 7 million bored ones?” Ouch.
In a similar vein Telegraph digital editor Ed Rousell gives a dose of reality “For decades now, newspaper newsrooms have centered on “going to press,” which has meant pointing all efforts towards a single deadline that culminates in the publishing of a definitive version of a story.” And yet we still build the model round it. Shades of my mon0media funnel of despair come to haunt me.
By the way both of those links came via Mark Hamilton’s Daily Squibs -one of the most consistently useful things I read. Go see. It’s good pickings.
Go on! Shoo!