No-one’s needed a licence to be a journalist in the 300 years since the first paper was printed in Fleet Street. You just have to be nosy and a little bit mad, the kind of person no-one else wants in their club.
A good headline? A storm in a teacup? All of that and more.
In the same way that we can argue that Lewis’ suggestions amount to an attempt to license, you could also argue that would legitimise professional journalists. beyond the NUJ card. This would be legally sanctioned journalists. Yes, state sanctioned but it would give them rights and access above all others. Especially the simply nosey or mad or worse still, those “Local nosey parkers with mobile phones “
Given the attitude of the industry to regulation, the public and citizen journalism, be forgiven for thinking that many journalists already consider themselves to be licensed already. I would imagine there are some who would welcome the differentiation.
That’s the real problem with attempting to make sense of 9/11 using social media: The former requires deep thought while the latter feeds on immediacy. Ten years and millions of articles after 9/11, we’re still trying to come to terms with what happened that day. We’re still sifting through the debris and our collective emotions in order to find whatever it is we lost, or to explain why things are the way they are now. I have a hard time believing 9/11 tweets or Facebook updates would have changed any of that for the better. And by now they’d be forgotten anyway, buried under 10 years of more shouting into the abyss.
“Some people argued the digital era would see paid journalists replaced by an army of citizen reporters,” he said.
“The riots proved otherwise: people might consume news differently, but they still want it told straight, and by reporters on the ground.”
I found myself agreeing with both posts but was a little uncomfortable about that.
The 9/11 post made so much sense given the recent experience of the coverage of the riots on twitter. Not that I am, for one moment, equating the events. No, its more the position that the rumour and hearsay where dangerous, pervasive and perhaps even a distraction from more important stuff.
Perhaps Lewis’ point about the need for journalists in that is even more valid but that in itself makes me feel uncomfortable.
What next, Journalism?
I suppose I can sum up my discomfort in terms of a question. “Ok journalism,. What are you going to do next?”
If you are that important and social media needs your influence and control what are you going to do to keep your place at the table? Do we have to wait for another riot or MP’s expenses or wikipedia to prove that you are doing journalism? All great work but not a huge hit rate given the number of you out there.
Visible not critical
Of course the truth is that there are loads of journo’s doing loads of great things at every level. Really good journalism. But we don’t hear about them. At least we don’t hear about them because we are often too busy telling people why all the other stuff is not as good.
So maybe I feel uncomfortable because, whilst twitter would have had a roll to play the rumour and lack of facts would have been a nightmare. But maybe it would have been a necessary evil. Maybe it would have had to be there to fill a gap.
Seventeen lost pyramids are among the buildings identified in a new satellite survey of Egypt.
Perhaps it was the idea that new technology would unearth these monuments to an older way of life. Maybe it was the irony that these seemingly impervious icons of an older way of life would just dissapear without anyone knowing.
All that effort, all the reason for them being there in the first place, forgotten.
Small committee makes big society - Image by The Prime Minister's Office via Flickr
I’ve been listening to and talking with a lot of people about community lately. All kinds of communities and all kinds of projects. One of the things that comes out of the discussions was the connection/tie-in/albatross-round-the-neck that is the “big society”.
A general embargo on political commentary on this blog means I won’t tell you what a none-sensical, keep all the blame away from politicians excuse for a concept it is. But it has certainly put the cat amongst the pigeons for those doing real community engagement stuff who genuinely have to worry about the way their work is seen/critique in a political context.
By real, I mean something other than the virtual – the twitter community or the community of readers – we often talk about in social media circles.
Social. Theres another word that means something else now. In my world, social often means social networks or collaboration. In the world of big society communities it means poor (and costly to the state) rather than the cash rich time poor that make up most of the demographic.
Social housing isn’t connected to facebook and social security isn’t just using backupify.
Despite the differences, what struck me about a lot of the discussion was the parallels between how media talks about community and the growing discussion in the broader ‘social’ arena; the idea that working with communities is a sure fire way to solve the big problems. Not because those small communities couldn’t help with that – they can. But because of the belief that there is a big solution out there to be found.
It’s not enough for a good community strategy to simply help and develop a community. It has to scale and have a model (preferably a business one).
But maybe they don’t have to be.
Maybe a local community group doesn’t have to be an exemplar of how ‘big society’ can work. Just like your hyperlocal community site doesn’t have to be the business model for others. Maybe they just need to be big enough to do the job. Big enough to sustain one journo rather than the business plans of many.
More importantly when we talk about community, maybe we should be looking at how we can make that word social mean the same thing for both sides of the digital divide.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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
