iHerald – a comment from the editor

Posted on February 14, 2009 by Andy

I’m trying to whean myself of too much weekend posting – work life balance and all that. But I thought it was worth giving a bit more visibility to a comment on my recent post about The Plymouth Heralds new social networking site.

The Herald’s web editor Neil Shaw responded to a number of the points in my post. Picking up on the disparity of the number of users he makes the very valid point about marketing which he says “has been very restricted (non-existent) so far.” I think that’s a good point but I still wonder about ‘transferring users’ from Facebook. That would be my concern for any social network endeavor (including Johnston Press’ recent efforts).

That doesn’t take away from the Heralds success on Facebook, in number of followers at least, something that I take my hat off to. It would be great to hear a little more about the kind of things they have done to make Facebook work.

Anyway, back to the rest of the comment. I think Neil does a great job of explaining their position and the thinking behind it. I hope they get the support to do it.

The motivation behind our use of Facebook, iHerald, MySpace, Bebo, Twitter and YouTube has always been to interact with our users, rather than dump print content online and hope that appeals to the audience. We now get thousands of page views every day on thisisplymouth directly from these sites, and users on these sites discuss us and our news every day.

Hitting the 5,000 limit on Facebook was the trigger, but the real drive is to create a platform where our users can interact with us and each other AND share their content with us. Gathering User Generated Content is a key part of our goal here.

As for the Facebook group, its limitations have always disuaded us from putting in too much effort. The only advantage it has over the profile, so far as I can see, is that we can contact the group members in bulk – rather than only sending emails 20 at a time.

Facebook has allowed us to take our content direct to a new audience who are genuinely interested in us and Plymouth news, and it has allowed those users to contact us with information (just today we were tipped off about a large number of job cuts in the city, while yesterday we were sent tributes to a young mum who died in the city over Facebook). But while it has raised the profile and altered the image of our brand among a key audience (damn, must have been spending too much time with the marketing team) it can’t really provided the interaction we want, or the UGC.

Facebook has been great for us, we enjoy it and we will continue to use it, but iHerald is different.

As to duplication of effort, using Twitter apps we take an RSS straight from our site, through Twitter, on to Facebook so effort is minimal and iHerald is mostly about monitoring – but as the number of users increases we are building a team of editors to moderate the content.

Thanks for the comment Neil

Interesting links for Friday

Posted on February 13, 2009 by deli

This is what’s been turning my head today:

Special mention to a series of posts by Sam Shepherd responding to Roy Greenslade’s “no reason for subs” thoughts

Subs v Greenslade (part one) « Subbed Out? – “to write off every sub outside London (and every sub that doesn’t work for a tabloid) as non-creative, a purely mechanical beast that simply chops copy to fit a box it didn’t even design, is quite possibly the most ridiculous thing he’s ever said.”
Greenslade v subs (part two) « Subbed Out? – “Take away local subs, who care about and are proud of their pages, who know what the paper is and what its stance is on everything from how it reports suicides to in what context you can use the word interweb, and you take away part of that personality.”
Subs v Greenslade (part three) « Subbed Out? – “So when a story breaks and you’re running constantly updating copy on the web you’ve got a sub who can make it accurate, make it clear, make it interesting, make it sing – in both the old sense, and the new SEO sense – and finally do it fast, like in the old days of deadlines. Exciting for them and for the reader. Doesn’t sound so bad, does it?”

Deep breath…and…relax

Peter Barron: Journalism ‘underplayed tech revolution’ – Press Gazette – Interesting stuff but I would disagree with “The public, not Google, will decide the fate of the mainstream media” Actually I would say it’s the MSM that decides the fate of the MSM. How they behave and treat their audience. Why would the public care?
How much is too much? Defining the grey areas in attribution and linking | Journalism.co.uk Editors’ Blog – This is fast becoming a debate about arrogance but you could also read it as a sad effort by the MSM to hide their cut-and-paste habits from an all too knowledgeable public. Whatever it is one thing is clear. A linking policy is a must and it must be as open as possible
Johnston Press is the HBOS of newspapers, says NUJ official ahead of strike | Media | guardian.co.uk – Eeeek. There’s a headline
YouTube Toolbox: 100+ Tools and Resources to Enhance Your Video Experience – Ooodles of youtube related goodness and gadgets to play with from Mashable
Journalism Beyond Newspapers – Don’t Become Nonprofits – Work for Them – Dave Cohn makes a great point
Halifax Evening Courier launches ‘experimental’ social networking site – More Facebook cloning action. This time from Johnston Press
7 Ways To Keep Costs Low, Content Fresh Using Social Media – Roland Legrand offers “seven attention points which could help to increase content production while staying cost effective.” but my favorite bit was the caveat at the end “There is one area where you should never cut costs: training.”
What do we call this new form of journalism and media? – Very interesting – for me – and something I will blog on at some point
OFT seeks initial views on review into local and regional media merger regime – One question in particular struck me “the extent to which public service broadcasting, local authorities and other public sector news and local information services, whether or not funded by advertising, constitute competition to commercial local media services”

Have a good weekend

If you saw you on facebook would you give you a job?

Posted on February 13, 2009 by Andy

Superman, Clarke Kent or drunk traffic cone molester - what does your facebook profile. Picture by shaun wong (flickr)

Okay, that has to be the worst English I have written (even by my standards) but think about it.

This post may appear more relevent to the students who occasionally look at my blog or who will find their way to this post via Twitter. In fact it was a chat with some first-year students that prompted the post and this link to a guide for setting your profile on Facebook, which I thought would be useful. But I think there is a broader issue.

My point to them was that their Facebook profiles where often not the best advert for them. That wasn’t a reflection on them at all. Just that some people don’t use Facebook as a social network. They use it as a way to ‘use’ those social networks and the information they generate. That could be a prospective employer or, to be honest, a journalist stacking up a story.

One student said they planned to delete their profile before they began applying for jobs, whilst others claimed that their profiles where already secure. But many were unaware that Google can search Facebook (and does a pretty good job of it) and that the privacy settings could be tweaked to the level they could. This is before you get in to a discussion about whether you really can delete anything on the web.

But the point, and here’s the wider issue, was not the appropriateness of the profile. It was that Facebook is a public facing service and as someone who plans to be in the public eye as a journalist, you should exercise some control over your professional image online just as you would offline.

Work/life balance.

The idea of public/private persona is not just limited to Facebook. Dilyan Damyanov asks a similar question in his post “Should professionals have separate work accounts on Twitter?” which replays a twitter debate about the much mentioned Twitter outburst by David George-Cosh. Like Dilyan, I’m looking forward to Mark Comerford’s take on this.

Update: Just caught up with Mathew Ingram’s take on this

My first years are setting out on the what I call the change from “poacher to gamekeeper”. They know how to take what they want from the web as consumers but now they are working to another standard (I’ll avoid the word ethic there). Alf Hermida’s recent article underlines why this is important.

But they are not alone. There are hundreds of journalists moving online and whilst we explore this new media (or whatever we end up calling it) we all need to think about what trail we leave.

Facebook is the Most Visited Social Network (and Twitter Is Third) (futurelab.net)
Rules of Engagement: Users Are Spending More Time On MySpace (techcrunch.com)
The Perils of a Public Persona (markevanstech.com)

A Process and content checklist

Posted on February 12, 2009 by Andy

I’ve been chatting with my undergraduate students about their experience with digital whilst on work placement. They went to a mix of magazines, regional newspapers(weekly and daily) and some to websites. As you can imagine their experience was a mixed bag from no digital at all to shooting video for the website.

When I asked those who had little or nothing to do with the web why, I got a range of answers. Some publications simply did not have a website and those that did saw it as secondary to the main task of putting out the paper. One of the students summed up the motivation for this when they quoted an editor who had told him (and I’m paraphrasing here)

“You can’t put the paper out with any gaps in it but you can put the website out with stuff missing”

It may surprise you to hear that I have a lot of sympathy with that view – if nothing else I’m pragmatic. After all the editor is right. The paper is a pre-set framework with stuff to put in. Of course the web would come second. But we all know that it can and has to change.

Integrating the web in to the journalism process

Key to that change is the idea that the process of generating content has to consider the web platform from the start of the reporting process not just as an afterthought. As Paul Bradshaw recently blogged “Newsgathering IS production IS distribution”

It’s a concept that is reflected in the development of what I do at the university.

In the ten years that I’ve been teaching this stuff I’ve found myself stepping further and further away from the point of publication (teaching html, dreamweaver etc) and closer to the start of the journalistic process. Now I’m telling people about how to integrate twitter and facebook in to their journalistic process. By thinking digital from the start you can begin to create content for the newspaper AND for the web. Not one after the other. It’s a convergence of effort rather than a duplication. What Robin Hamman called turning process in to content.

I had that in my mind when I was talking to another group of students about their assignments and encouraging them to consider a kind of check list, based on the tried and tested 5 W’s, when they where starting off on a story.

Who - who are the key players in the story and do I have (or need to get)
- a picture
- a link to a bio or other information about them
What - what’s the issue? Do I have a link to a backgrounder or other articles that fill out the context of the story
When – make a note of times and dates of key events in your story. More than 5 or 6 of these may mean that your story would suit a timeline online.
Where – note locations, postcodes if you can, mentioned in the story. These may be useful for a map
Why - why is this important to your audience. Do you need to look across forums and communities to see what the reaction is like.

I also noted that you could, perhaps, throw a How in there as in “how did this happen”. This could be a mixture of the what and when and may help define and create a timeline or infographic.

Process and content checklist

I want to explore the best way to ingrain that way of thinking in the students and one way I’m going to try is with a checklist I created (pdf)

The idea is that this check list is filled out as the story develops and handed to the digital editor as the story nears completion

Here is an idea of how it might work – A local builder has asked for planning permission to build a slaughterhouse and rendering plant in an area that, local residents say, is too close to a school.

: An example of a completed form

The list, generated as the story develops, to include images of the main players (the minimum you would want for a webpage). It also points to websites that could be included as related links. These will have been gathered as the journalist researched the story. Postcodes and a chronology of events where appropriate fill out the detail and indicate whether maps or timeline would work.

This may seem a little too systematic for some but I’d be interested in what you think of the idea as an aide memoir to kick start more online thinking earlier in the reporting process.

Interesting links for Thursday

Posted on February 12, 2009 by deli

This is what I’ve been looking at today:

BBC uses copyright image from Flickr for News 24 | BitterWallet – Oops. Maybe it’s creative commons rather than open source that the BBC need help with :)
Five open source ideas to inspire a meeting – The BBC’s Steve Bowbrick has a few examples of what ‘open source’ can mean in a content sense.
Shifting Content: A young peoples’ game? – “The takeaway for CE marketers, telecom service providers, and content producers is that many Americans already have the means to shift content on one, if not multiple devices. ” How this translates across the world is anyones guess but I think “content shifting devices” is an interesting idea to ponder.
In case of rain – Do you worry about your video camera getting wet in the rain? Some freezer bags and a roll of gaffer tape and this post from Roman Mischel could be the answer. I love the pictures.
Fast, Embeddable YouTube Video Can Build Your News Brand – Amy Gahran’s impatient spouse makes her ponder why cross posting live video could tap in to what consumers demand
Ideas that get in the way of saving journalism, Part 2 – ““People absolutely should pay for news.” Or “People absolutely won’t pay for news.” Actually, people might pay for specific reporting or delivery even if they won’t pay for general news” – More challenges to the received wisdom in the online debate
Insite | People behind sites – an insite guide – Finding out who runs a site – Colin Meek tells you how (via journalism.co.uk)
Why the press should declare itself a religion. – Slate’s idea for a new model for newspapers – “the tax benefits, as the accountants say, would be substantial—and there would be other advantages, too.”
Twitter for Teachers – Help write a book on Twitter for teachers.
Sitting and stewing… « VideoJournalism – Cyndy Green ponders “are we the know-it-all High Priests of the Truth and Journalism? Or are we outdated?”
Photographers fear they are target of new terror law | Media | The Guardian – “They will now be able to arrest you if a photograph could potentially incite or provoke disorder. But isn’t that any protest?” Reasons why, even given their apparently crap stance of new media, the NUJ are still important
Teaching Online Journalism » RGMP 4: Start editing audio – More great stuff from Mindy on getting to grips with multimedia
10 ways to find people on Twitter | Online Journalism Blog – Another great slideshow from Paul Bradshaw
Twitter for beginners (slideshow) | Online Journalism Blog – Paul Bradhsaw’s fantastic slideshow giving an intro to twitter
Mastering WordPress Shortcodes | Developer’s Toolbox | Smashing Magazine – A great post on tweaking WordPress. The shortcode for getting the latest image in a post is a good example of how useful shortcodes could be to anyone looking to tweak wordpress.

iherald – newspaper group clones facebook

Posted on February 11, 2009 by Andy

: iHerald – it’s facebook for local people

Going through my feeds today I can across news, via Press Gazette, that The Plymouth Herald had launched its own social networking site called iHerald

Thisisplymouth and Herald web editor Neil Shaw said: “The response has been great, with 200 members joining in our first month to upload more than 1,000 items including pictures, videos and blogs.

The first thing that struck me was why?

Shaw said: “The site goes to the heart of our online strategy, not lazily duplicating our print product online, but interacting with our users so thisisplymouth and The Herald combine user-generated content with live input from our audience. It is a constant dialogue differentiated from and contributing to our print offering.”

The motivation here is apparently that Herald had exceeded the limit of 5000 friends on Facebook a limitation that has been taxing a number of users for some time. And the only alternative, a Facebook page, has failed to convince those upset by the limit with its ‘fans’ rather than friends and less features.

The Herald has moved to a page, carrying 96 people across compared to the 4755 (not quite 5000 but near enough for them to stop them accepting unsolicited friend requests.) so you have to credit them with trying to do something about it.

But whilst I can cheer the desire not to lazily duplicate the print product, I’m still wondering if the limitations of facebook is the real reason here.

4755 Facebook friends is credit to the way the Herald use Facebook. Compare that to 151 for my local paper. But the fact that they have only shifted 96 fans on their page shows that the attraction is in Facebook as a platform and the features it offers when people interact with you as a friend.

Even with a 200 users of iherald you have to wonder how many of them are from Facebook rather than new users and if their efforts would have been better spent working on educating more of their
‘friends’ to the benefit Facebook page. The fact that it hasn’t really been updated since August last year may say something about how successful it is.

Immitation creates more work

Part of me wants this to work – the site looks pretty robust. But I still can’t shake the nagging idea that this is another attempt by a newspaper group to reinvent the wheel in an attempt to try and control the cart.

It may be more functional but it isn’t Facebook and it strikes me it just adds to the workload – simply managing the amount of copyright music that has appeared in the audio section would be enough to keep a lawer busy for week. With 4755 users of Facebook it would be madness to simply ignore them in favour of their new users so who manages that relationship?

It seems a weird duplication of effort.

Interesting links for Wednesday

Posted on February 11, 2009 by deli

What I’ve been reading today:

Multimédia : le NYT sait emballer ! – Fabrice Gontier see’s the NYTimes latest slideshow offering and wonders why the French are so far behind
A local Twitter tool for local journalists – A heads-up of a nice new tool for journos from John Thompson
Recovering Journalist: Who’s Doing Good Work in Online News? (Part 1) – “These are people who really do have good ideas for the future of news and advertising.”
Roy Greenslade: Johnston Press boss attacks local council papers – “Like so many beleaguered newspaper managers, despite a public commitment to digital media, Fry’s plea shows that he has yet to grasp that the clock cannot be turned back.”
Budding Journalists Use Twitter, Blogs to Open Doors – Alf Hermida does a great job of explaining why budding journos should get online.
Why Television Still Shines in a World of Screens – NYTimes.com – ” An audible book, however, requires the listener to mentally visualize the narrative. A video, even if no more visual than an author facing the camera, offers the appealing prospect of relief from such heavy lifting. ” or video is great because consumers are lazy.
QuickTime Pro to lose the ‘pro’? – Ian Douglas at the Telegraph with the great news that “Apple’s next version of itsOSX operating system, that comes with a version of QuickTime that doesn’t require you to go and buy the £20 upgrade”
Why the PCC is broken – a case study in trying to complain – Martin Belam shows in fine fashion why the PCC is borked
Five follows BBC, ITV with Mac-friendly online TV service – But Channel 4′s 4OD does not – ‘It’s Apples fault’ they say. No it isn’t if everyone else can do it
Chris Pirillo is wrong about best pocket video cameras – “The Flip Mino HD is the best of the bunch for most people and you can now ignore Chris Pirillo.” Video big dogs battle it out over the best pocket video cameras. Pick around the remains and there is good advice.
Why the Kindle will fail » Nieman Journalism Lab » Pushing to the Future of Journalism – “the distribution model behind the Kindle is much more likely to be a success” Oh thank god, some sense on the Kindle will save publishing issue.
Flickr and geotagging: Part of the newsgathering model? | Journalism.co.uk Editors’ Blog – “A great resource for news organisations looking for new images and on-the-ground witnesses and contributors (just remember to respect Creative Commons licencing and attribution principles).”
Ideas that get in the way of saving journalism, Part 1 News Leadership 3.0 – ““saving newspapers” is not “saving journalism.” But if journalism is saved, you can bet many newsrooms will be along for the ride.” Amen. A nice think piece from Michele McLellan at the Knight Media center
Disagree with Andy on video ethics | News Videographer – Angela tackles my blasphemy over video directing
Create a code-free Google map with tabs in 3 steps | graphic designr – Does exactly what it says in the title
Newsgathering IS production IS distribution (Model for a 21st century newsroom pt.1 cont.) – “Newsgathering, production and distribution are often the same thing in an online environment” Paul expands on his excellent work on defining models for online practice

Interesting stuff for Tuesday

Posted on February 10, 2009 by Andy

Here’s what I’ve been reading today:

Free Sheet Newspapers versus Traditional Daily Newspapers: Competing or Complementary? An Empirical Comparison of their Gratifications to Readers – “The free sheets’ strength lies especially in fulfilling an entertaining function” and “readers receive a higher gratification by traditional daily newspapers in the information/orientation dimension” [via Adrian Monck]
John Ryley: ‘Mobile phones are future of TV news’ – Press Gazette- “The mobile, or something of that size, will change things. I suspect fewer of us will sit in front of the television.” In the US it is the Kindle in the UK it’s mobiles.
Join the NUJ? Why? | Dave Lee / jBlog – “If the NUJ is really out there to act as a service for all working journalists, it needs to wake up. It needs to get over its fascination with tradition. It needs to pull its head from the sand, stand up and come up with a plan to really help those in need.”
Let’s have a PCC for the 21st century – currybetdotnet – 10 February, 2009 – A nice list of suggestions from Martin on how to improve the PCC
after their mauling at the hands of the Media Standards Trust
Paying for the news: A link-a-thon – “If you’re not interested in the debate over micropayments and whether that will help save the newspaper industry, you’re probably not going to be interested in this post. If you are interested — as I am — you can find plenty of food for discussion in the links that follow.” Yes you can.
Multimedia… but why? – Graphics work better online with some interactivity. So says Mark S. Luckie. I agree but part of me thinks that the increasing complexity of site design and graphic elements means that even the best online graphics can often be a weak signal in amongst the design noise. Perhaps adding interaction would make them stand out. But it could also raise the whole volume of the page.
Battle Plans for Newspapers – Room for Debate Blog – NYTimes.com – An interesting round up of US big thinks of what’s gone wrong and what can be done. As usual the comments are as interesting as the copy which shows what a good discussion starter this would be left in any
newsroom
Can ‘The Printed Blog’ Succeed with Blogs in Newspaper Form? – MediaShift talk to Joshua Karp, the man behind paper based blog aggregator The Printed Blog. An interesting idea which harks back to the days of penny publishing/pamphleteers
Note to press offices: do not get on the wrong side of Noel Edmonds | Journalism.co.uk Editors’ Blog – Quite a few people have pointed to this great rant from Noel Edmonds who as well as apparently doing his show for free has never been so angry. Shades of the film Network or a vision of a distopian future where the Daily Mail is televised. You decide.
One Week Without Virtual Newspapers Petition – This petition is doing the rounds (and getting a lot of comment) asking newspapers to shut their sites for a week to non-paying viewers. Why? “it is critical that all Americans understand that daily newspapers aren’t simply businesses, but an integral part of American Democracy” But closing a channel of information to all but those who can pay doesn’t seem very democratic does it
Local newspapers, blogs and the future – “Professional journalists don’t waste your time” So says an editorial at the WestSeattleHerald.com. Blogs and the web, apparently do.

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online and digital journalism, newspaper video and digital media

Monthly Archives: February 2009

Interesting links for Friday

A Process and content checklist

Interesting links for Thursday

Interesting links for Wednesday

Interesting stuff for Tuesday

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