Category Archives: carnival of journalism

A video guide to video strategy

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This is my contribution to the third Carnival of journalism. This month it’s being hosted by Bryan over at Innovation in college media.

I have been trying to get some thoughts down about the recurring issue of teaching dreamweaver but Mark Comerford has said what I wanted to say, and better.

So instead I thought I would share something that occurred to me when I was driving in to work – I have a longish commute – quick guides to a the quality and point-and-shoot video strategy.

The quality strategy

The Point and Shoot strategy

In my defense. It’s been a long week.

Journalism Gnostics

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(This post is my , shockingly late, contribution to the January Carnival of Journalism. Your host this month is Adrian Monck. )

Predictably a lot of the recent chatter in the j-blogasphere has been around Paul Conley’s post . What did it say? I paraphrase here, suggested that you cant teach the web so if people are not embedded in it all ready – in that culture – then they weren’t worth training. They had chosen to leave themselves behind.

Opinion is divided. Some suggest that Paul is absolutely right – leave ‘em behind. Others say bring them in – assimilate them in to ‘the culture’.

As an Iain M Banks reader that has a slightly ominous tone. But I digress.

I’m not sure which side I come down on. I feel like I’m in a war film and I’m not sure which part to play. Part of me wants to be the defender of the weak, platoon leader screaming ‘No one should be left behind’. Another part of wants to be the embittered old soldier in the crossfire thinking ‘this waster is going to get me shot if we don’t get moving. Maybe I’ll shoot them myself’.

But one thing I do know is that I have heard parts of this discussion before.

I hear it every day from those who believe that you can’t teach journalism. It’s usually follows comments like ‘the web isn’t real journalism is it?’ or discussions on what makes a ‘real’ journalist.

I have a hard time putting my finger on what is that frustrates me so much about that conversation. But reading round the comments and discussion generated by Paul’s post I know what it is.

Some see journalism as gnosis.

Gnosis (from the Greek word for knowledge, γνώσις) is used in English to specify the spiritual knowledge of a saint or enlightened human being. It is described as the direct experiential knowledge of the supernatural or divine.

It’s a higher level of being and to try and explain it to mere mortals like me would simply make my head pop. Journalism is not citizen journalism, or blogging, or even reporting. It, well, er, is!

Sounds a bit esoteric? When this thought struck me I did a quick Google for Gnostic Journalism. Here’s Marvin Olasky in obit mode for David Halberstam:

The journalism he was the heart of, one where reporters claimed to possess gnostic wisdom, is also dying. We’ve entered an era of citizen journalism, where everyone has a camera and YouTube replaces You Believe What I Write.

Now I’m not saying that Olasky is attacking the new way or is anti-web. It was just interesting to see the term used in the way I was thinking about it. Proof of concept if you like.

So armed with that knowledge I can confidently say that in the discussion around Paul’s post I hear a lot of the language of the jourgnostics; an oppressive enlightenment from the technotrati. You don’t get it, you can’t be it and if you don’t know what it is then you don’t get it. So you can’t be it… etc. etc.

So, on reflection (and before this gets far to quasi-religeous) I’m putting my cards on the side of ‘everybody gets out alive’. Let’s train everyone. Why? Because if there is one sure fire way to create entrenched views, dare I say extremism, it’s to isolate those who don’t agree.

I can see all those Gnostic journalists banding together, and it’s bad enough that I have to listen to their brand of mystical journalism crap as it is. It will only get worse if we force them in to some sort of puritanical stance. But can I also ask that perhaps the techgnostics* amongst us avoid the same trap.

There isn’t any mystery about what you can do on the web just like there is no mystery or monopoly on journalism. It’s all out there to see and do. If some of us think it’s so important that we are prepared to sacrifice those who don’t quite get it that would suggest it’s more important to see that they do.

*I wish I had invenetd that word but I didn’t.

[Update:] More freaky feed reading connectedness. I post this and first thing in my feed reader is this article by Shawn Moynihan uncovering an early article by David Halberstam article. Almost supernatural!

[Update 2] Bryan Murley pointed me to an essay by Jay Rosen from 2004: Journalism Is Itself a Religion which I hadn’t seen before. “The newsroom is a nest of believers if we include believers in journalism itself. There is a religion of the press. There is also a priesthood. And there can be a crisis of faith.” Obviously given this much more thought than me.

Barriers to convergence

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This post is my contribution to the inaugural Carnival of Journalism: I’m so thankful for the motivation to get this idea out of my head at last. Find out more about the carnival…

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Last week I sat in on a presentation to a World Editors Forum study group. They came to the Department to hear about how our relationship with Johnston Press worked – industry and education working together in what I suppose is called Knowledge transfer.

They got the opportunity to have dinner with Tim Bowdler the (now outgoing) Chief exec of JP. I got a reminder of a phrase I hadn’t heard in a while.

Gather Once – Publish Many

This was a phrase that JP used in their first digital strategy document and it became a bit of a motto – a mantra for a monomedia organization going multi-platform.

Hearing this put some perspective on the issue of convergence.

It’s something thats been at the forefront of my thinking recently. To be honest its been one of those really annoying things I couldn’t get out of my head and in to a post. The picture above is just one of the many pages of working out in my moleskine. And thats where the thoughts stayed until I heard that phrase.

There is a real issue with convergence in newsrooms. How do we do it? Why doesn’t it work? And thinking about that phrase finally slotted a few things in to place for me.

I think I know why integrating digital in to the way we work is so difficult for some; almost impossible for others. I think its because most organizations have slipped in to the mentality of

Gather once. Many publish

It’s a commonly accepted approach that an essential part of making digital work is that you free our content to as many people as you can – your community. They will help spread your content and develop it. Great in principle.

Of course the practice is that the process and so the content hasn’t changed to reflect that. That mantra has been split. Gather once applies to the newsroom. Many publish is left to the community. The process, the gather if you like, is still geared towards the artifact. A single page. There are two problems with that.

The first is that content generated in this way is not fit for (digital)purpose. The journalist spends a huge amount of time refining and editing the content for the page – it’s what we do. It’s the leanest, focused content it can be. Whilst that’s great for reading it’s rubbish for developing. You can’t put back in what you’ve taken out.

The second problem is that the point of convergence moves outside the organsiation. That means that the experience and knowledge doesn’t develop inside the newsroom. Convergence becomes difficult because the culture hasn’t changed.

Nowhere is this more obvious in multimedia. Whilst many publishers have made little or no effort to embrace multimedia. Those that have generally keep it separate from the rest of the process. This seems to be in stark contrast to the way that these same organisations think the audience will behave. Apart from being naive its actually pretty condescending.

To make convergence work we need to make newsrooms behave in the way we are expecting the audience to work. We need to bring convergent behavior back in the newsroom, away from the point of publication. That means reporters need to take stills cameras out with them every time they leave the office. They should be recording every interview with a digital dictaphone. That doesn’t mean that they should be doing anything with that content. They should be making that content available, where appropriate, in the same way we know they should be using Delicious or a blog.

I think we need to change the mantra inside the industry to

Gather everything: Share

We need to do that well before we even think about where its going to go.