Recently I came across an interesting new blog called Wannabe Hacks. (@wannabehacks) It’s a group blog from three people all taking a different route in to journalism. It’s an interesting idea and one worth watching.

So it was a nice coincidence to see my name, along with Paul Bradshaw in one of their tweets.

An interesting question. Any answer I give is bound to be viewed as biased. After all teaching undergrads is what pays my mortgage. But I’m going to give it a go.

Any discussion about the ‘value’ or ‘perks’ of a degree in general will always stray in to the area of the inherent value of a university education.

I enjoyed David Mitchells take on this in the Observer. I liked this summing up in particular.

Except in the case of a few very vocational degrees, university isn’t about what you learn on the course, it’s about how that learning, how living and studying somewhere new, changes the way you think and who you are. Instead of forcing kids to make binding career choices at 17,higher education is supposed to give students who would benefit from further academic development a bit of space in which to find themselves. People who are allowed to do that, statisticians have noted, tend to earn more than those who aren’t.

There is so much I agree with there. But I found myself nodding at the line “students who would benefit from further academic development”.

University is not for everyone. Not because some people are not capable or intelligent enough. It should be just one of the environments that are available to encourage and develop people. Of course the shame of it is that for a good while a University has become one of the only environments to develop. No more apprenticeships or on the job training any more – especially in journalism. Worse still they seem to have been steadily belittled and undervalued in recent times.

That means good journalism degrees have found themselves in that ‘few’ that Mitchell talked about. They are vocational courses, training people to work in journalism because, increasingly journalism orgs won’t.

That is one of their greatest ‘perks’.

I won’t go as far as to say that journalism undergraduate courses are the ‘best of both worlds’. But a good course will give you all the skills you need and the time to experiment with them in an environment that is geared towards your experience. A chance to find yourself, yes. But also a chance to develop skills and find your voice.

But (and this is a big but) there is cost to a degree. It’s not just in the very real and important issue of money. It’s in the amount of time and effort you put in.

Given three years in which to establish yourself and prepare for work, you have to keep an eye on where you want to go. At some point university is going to finish, so what are you doing to give yourself some ‘exit velocity’

Perhaps you are starting a hyperlocal news site or blog about your experiences. Maybe you have joined journalism.co.uk’s young journalism group TNTJ. Perhaps you write for your local newspaper or do shifts at the local radio station. Maybe you even work on the student media at your uni. All of that takes time. Time you could be in the bar finding yourself. But that’s journalism.

So, given my biased position, I think the perk of a journalism degree is time. You have three years and if you are outward looking and engaged nothing you do will be wasted.

The other side
In saying all of that I don’t want to give the impression that I see Journalism degrees as the only way to become a journalist. The idea of taking a first degree in a subject like economics or law and then doing a postgraduate in journalism is one I think has a huge amount of merit. As does going through the front door and getting a job with a media organisation or even starting your own blog/publication/podcast and building an audience. Plenty of people would advocate the university of life route over a journalism degree. But then the it always suprises me what skip-loads of extraneous horse-droppings get talked about the whole issue these days :)

Update:

The wannabe hacks (who seem to have spawned a fourth member since I last looked) have a very nice post about journalism degrees with some great input via twitter and the comments. Peter Moore also pointed me to a post asking if journalism degrees were a failed experiment. 

 Those posts and the comments highlight an interesting area that I think can be best summed up as ‘the difference between value and value for money’.  It’s an area I touched on but my main point was that time was a valuable aspect of a degree. That doesn’t mean I don’t think that value for money is a valid area to explore. I just think the two are not necessarily connected beyond my feeling that getting value for money does depend on how you use what you pay for – pay for a degree, use the time you payed for.

I do think it’s important to say that the issue the cost (as apposed to value or value for money) of education/training is a real worry. But it’s not just education that costs (and some think is a waste of money). If you go the none-academic route then you still pay. How much in unearned salary are you ‘subbing’ employers for when you do that “all important” unpaid internship? If you do a first degree and then a journalism PG you still pay. All of that is investment you are making.

I think it’s right and proper that students should ask universities why their investment in education is worthwhile. But let’s be fair. Shouldn’t we also be asking what employers are doing to make your investment (whatever and wherever you made it ) worthwhile?

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• OJR: Advice for new journalism students (blogs.journalism.co.uk)
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• TNTJ August: What skills do new journalists need? (journalism.co.uk)
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• Not having a degree has its perks | Ian Prior (guardian.co.uk)

This is part 2 of a couple of posts that develop some of the areas covered and not covered by the CNN mobile journalism panel I sat on at the Frontline.

In a previous post I clarified some of the points I made. I didn’t want to sideline them it was just going to be a long post. So I my touch back on some of that in this post.

To try and keep some shape to the post I thought I would go back and look at the suggested areas given to me for the panel. They are broadly the same as the topic areas on the eventbrite page.

How important are eyewitness reports in news today? In the future.

Of course it’s really important. We can’t be everywhere as journalists so being able to get input from the scene is invaluable, however we get it. Given the subject area of the panel I suppose the context for this is the use of mobile as the tool that gets eyewitness accounts to ‘us’, the mainstram media. The fact that the CNNi app comes with ireport built in illustrates the importance of mobile as a possible platform.

Of course this is where the vexed question of CitJ rears its’ head. I was amused to read in the pre-amble to the event “Citizen journalists and ordinary people are, increasingly, beating TV crews to the scene of breaking news stories.”. Yes people are racing to events but they are also there already. We used to call them victims or bystanders.

What motivates people to submit content to news orgnaisations? What type of people do it?

All kinds of people. All kinds of motives. Some people will do it out of a passion for the story and at the other end of the spectrum, some will do it out of spite. What’s clear is that that they send in to an organization because they have some affinity to it. They send to the BBC because they respect it and want to be part of it. They will take time to post a video to CNN because they may get a chance to be associated with it. That’s where we let them down sometimes. We don’t recognize that and engage. Sometimes we don’t even say thank you. How hurt would you be when someone something you respect let’s you down or treats you badly.

Is it important for practicing journalists to understand and use mobile technology in their work? What does it bring to their craft that’s new, or better.

In a nutshell, yes. If you don’t use mobile in what you do how can you possibly know how to serve and interact with your audience who do.

CNNi’s Louis Gump made a great point when he said that mobile is not just one thing. It’s mobile phone apps, its tablets and ipad stuff and its the mobile web (browsing the web on a phone). I think thats really important in this context. But we also need to add that in a journalistic context it’s also a tool to gather content. Alex Woods had it so right when he said we have to think of a mobile in its individual parts. It’s a camera, a video camera, a web browser and a phone.

That brings loads of opportunities but it also challenges.

It challenges the working practice and professional definitions. Take the mobile web. Louis rightly pointed out the stylistic differences for content online (images and bullet point text). But many journalists balk at that as a change from their ‘normal style’. The mobile phone as a tool is great but what about the feeling of inadequacy when using a mobile phone to shoot video rather than a big broadcast camera (subjugating your ego to small devices as @benhammersly summarized it!)? What about the problem that most journalists pay their own phone bills and don’t want to subsidize their org by paying the data tariff so they can stream their own video?

All of those questions, and the related by-ways of debate they create are, I think, one of the reasons the debate was a bit stale for some. You see, we haven’t really answered those questions. As journalists we haven’t come to terms with those changes. When people in the room are asking if it’s a good idea to specialise or learn a range of these ‘new skills’ then you realise that perhaps the debate isn’t so stale.

Tips on creating great stories using a mobile device?

I’d say consume some content on your own phone. Think about the limitations and your experience. It’s no different from the consumer so put yourself in their shoes then act on your own experience. I would also go back to Alex’s point about thinking about the individual functions- the camera, video, apps etc. The rest is then a case of what you are doing. If you are taking a picture then think about what makes a good editorial picture. That doesn’t change because you are using a mobile. Likewise with video. Yes, some of the tropes of TV can be subverted but the basics work.

What’s the impact of new technology on the business of news?
Obviously there is a huge impact. As I was drafting this post the BBC have just announced that they have  had the go ahead for BBC apps. That’ll put the cat amongst the pigeons. But that aside I think it’s important to look at the different sectors of ‘mobile’ to gauge the impact but in general I think the impact is in capacity. You have to spend money to get the capacity to do mobile – the technology part of it. But there is also your the capacity of the people within your organsiation – the understanding and skills.

Of course you could throw a lot of money at the problem but skills and understanding are often resilient to that. Hearts and minds don’t often change with cash. But time and money are well spent when building capacity and the smart people are seeing it as a medium term thing.

Take the ipad for example. In a quick straw poll of the audience only 3 out of 40’ish people admitted to having an ipad. So why the big fuss about it? Well, one part is the apps which are a big area of development. But for the smart set the ipad is a transitional platform. It’s a place to experiment with HTML 5 for example. Get you offering right on the ipad and chances are you will be a step further down the line when browsers catch up.

The danger is that some orgs will try and bypass the necessary investment by seeing mobile as just another platform to aggregate and dump content on to. Thats a mistake. Shovelware on any platform doesn’t work. Aggregation is something that is better left to your audience to do and not your organization.

How is technology changing the way people consume news?
Whenever new technology comes along it will change peoples habits. Mobile is no exception. But the killer combination is mobile and the rise of social media online. Any stats on mobile app use for example shows the importance of Facebook and social sites Facebook. Look at the fluster around Flipboard and you get an idea of the issues as the relate to journalism.

So if you are a large media organisation looking to develop for a mobile platform then ask yourself what social media elements you are adding? What social media habits are you tapping in to? Do your journalists have the capacity to work in a social media environment.

Perhaps the answer to a business model lies in the fact that if you are not up to capacity on understanding and working with communities then decide what content you can give for free in an app wrapper to get you on the platform. But don’t give it much thought beyond that. You just aren’t ready to make the best of it.

A quick bluster through I know. But it’s a start. I’d love more questions.

Big cameras at the Frontline

One commentator noted the white, male flavour of the panel. I agree and I’ll not go next time. But for many the problem was we didn’t really get round to what a lot of people wanted to know – what are the business models for mobile? @thevideoreport report tweeted that it was all “a bit 2002” and @adamwestbrook noted that, lovely though the panel was, nothing new was learned. I understand the frustration. The conversation ranged round some of the usual subjects – citizen journalism vs. journalism, big cameras vs. little cameras (a subject I’ve blogged in repeatedly) – and it seemed only vaguely touched on mobile itself. I suppose I should apologise for that, I was on the panel when all is said and done. But I just wanted to clarify some points and maybe develop the conversation a little more in to the areas people felt we missed.

As I was drafting this post it started to get a little long so I’m going to do it in a couple of parts. So,to start, some clarification. One point I wanted to pick up was the brief kick around of the ‘attitude’ of students to news and opinion. I was quoted as saying that “journalism students come in thinking everything they think is news” It’s not quite what I said but the point is worth amplifying. Students do come in with very strong opinions and ideas. Opinions about what journalism is, what they will be as journalists, right and wrong etc. As they should and, as I always say, that’s brilliant – not that they need my permission or approval. I love opinionated people and I love the passion that brings. But the reality is that for most jobbing journalists expressing their opinion is a luxury. It isn’t what journalism is about. It’s my job to help them understand that framework perhaps to frame expectations. But it doesn’t mean I don’t thing they should have opinions or that they are wrong (or that journalism is wrong or right for that matter). It’s just there is a time, place and form.

What takes time is building a professional identity that separates that opinion and journalism in a visible and transparent way. I suppose the web blurs that slightly as we still labour under the distinctions of journalists and bloggers for example. (if you want to debate this more you can go read this post, most of which I struggle to agree with, and knock yourself out ) But the truth is journalism works a certain way and if you want to be ‘in journalism’ its worth learning how to bend to that when required.

The issue of citizen journalists also came up. I said that I kind of liked the term because it described what the person was and what they did. They were a citizen, concerned and motivated by what was happening around them and they wanted to tell the world about that. The discussion prompted a question from the floor asking why, if it was so good, it hadn’t taken over from traditional news sources?

For me that isn’t it’s job. It’s there to amplyfy the concerens and interests of a collection of people; hyperlocal, niche, whatever. In that sense it doesn’t aim to replace the mainstream media, just live in the gaps. And, I might add, there is a nice opportunity for a business model there. Not, as I have said before, for the big guys. But big enough to support the community it amplifies. That’s a challenge for mainstream media. Not the threat itself but the fact that it’s happening because of them as they seemingly ignore or having only a passing interest in those communities. I’m going to stop there because I’ve blogged on all of these areas at length before.

Update: I said that there was a killer app on a mobile phone for journos -the phone bit. I’m pretty sure that I wasn’t the first to say this. If you were, let me know.  I also committed the cardinal sin of thinking two Canadians where American. I apologise. Although one did call in to question my dress sense :)

Last week I gave a short lecture to broadcast (and a smattering of magazine) students about using the web to help find a job.

I tried to sum the whole thing up in a pithy slide:

It was really about fitting digital in to an already well established pattern for job hunting – traditional ad’s with a good slice of what and who you know.

That’s why I started with a list of job sites offering a digital way of doing that long slog of working through the job ad’s.  No surprise there then.

But I made the point that looking for work in a converged world mean’t a bit of a change of perspective.

Even though you may come from a broadcast tradition and your target job may be in a traditional environment (radio newsroom for example) the market is increasingly varied. (as my highly technical diagram shows) Your skills carry across boundaries in a converging world. You could end up as a radio producer at a newspaper working on their podcasts or working for an online only publication working on video.

Increasingly that converged mindset is what you have to cultivate to get work. But I think it’s also  the mindset to apply for job hunting. Don’t limit yourself to one sector. Instead of starting in one of the circles, position yourself in the middle and aim at all of them. You never know what might crop up. So my tip around searching for jobs also included searching for jobs.

By searching for something like radio OR broadcast jobs UK you get a rich and broad pot that you can then start to refine and filter. To develop your searches, think laterally. Add phrases that are specific to your area of interest or that would be unique to a job : radio OR broadcast ~job +salary +enps uk.

Remember the aim here is not to get Google to simply churn out job ads; the jobs sites will do that. It’s also to introduce an element of serendipity in to the mix that will richen your understanding of the market.

Of course the introduction of a broader range of sites means more content to wade through so you’ll also need to consider ways to manage the flow. Simple things like setting up a Google Alert based on the search terms you enter can help. But you may also want to get your RSS reader working for you to pull all your job related feeds in to one place that you can search and filter.

If a speculative google search throws up an interesting company (who don’t have jobs but you might want to keep an eye on) then search for an RSS feed to subscribe to. Then when a job comes up you know what they have been up to.

When the orginal slides went up in a post on  journalism.co.uk, John Thompson pointed out a way to get custom RSS feeds based on custom searches.

In the top left-hand column on most of the pages on Journalism.co.uk, you will see a panel headed “Job of the week”. About half-way down there is a dropdown menu that allows you to search by job type. For this example, select “editorial assistants and trainees” and click “go”.

On the subsequent search results page, you will see at the top of the central column an advanced search form. This allows you to make a more detailed search based on sectors, categories, salary and location. You will also see an option under format to “return search results as RSS feed”. Select that and also tick “editorial assistants and trainees” under the “categories” section.

Click the search button and, voila, you will be presented with a customised RSS feed containing only editorial assistant and trainee vacancies.

Josh Halliday got in touch via twitter so say he has put together a combined RSS feed of popular job sites that you can subscribe to. (thanks Josh)

I’ve put together an RSS bundle of just five of the UK’s most comprehensive media jobs listings sites: Gorkana, Guardian Jobs, Journalism.co.uk Jobs, Hold The Front Page and the Editorial Jobs Twitter feed (it’s RSS is borked).

And don’t forget that there are other ‘oldschool’ ways. Sign up for email newsletters like the Gorkana alert

The Shmoozing bit.
In the media people will often tell you that it’s about who you know rather than what. So whilst the broad searching will tell you what jobs are available and give a broad view of what’s going on we need to get next to some real people.

At this point it’s worth stressing that this is not about using digital to replace the process. You still need to get out there and meet people. But we can build our own networks online that help us connect and experience the churn or views and news from the industry. It could be eavesdropping on the latest gossip to build up ‘intelligence’ or even using the community to help you get a job.

But if it’s about who you know, how do we know who to connect with?

This is where social networking sites like Twitter come in to their own. They offer an easy way to find and connect with people in your community. Take a look at MediaUK’s twitter page (@mediauk). Obviously a popular follow and the kind of thing that a lot of people in the industry would look at. Now we could go through the list of people that follow and are followed by @mediauk to find useful people; use their contacts if you like. But notice their lists

Mediauk's twitter lists

They are nicely split in to sections and make following a glut of people in your area easy. If you find someone on the list who really resonates with you or fits right in to your area then look at their lists (if they have them) and build your network.

The same logic (if not the same mechanics) work for other social networking sites. Take a look at LinkedIn or even Facebook. Connect with one person or join a Facebook group and you’ll open yourself up to more connections.

Of course, the key to success in social networks is to be an active part; Share, listen, help, participate. All of these things will build your profile. And profile is important as it doesn’t just build your recognition within the community (the most valuable part) but it also makes you more visible online.

The lists from mediaUK are actually generated from user submissions – you can go to their site and add yourself. That’s an easy way to be pro-active about building visibility. For some this might fall in to the ‘rampant self promotion’ section but it’s a way of getting your name out there.

That’s why I think a blog is still a valuable tool in your job searching kit.

Many people are leaving blogs behind in favour of the more dynamic ‘statusphere’ of twitter and social networks. But a blog offers something a little more stable, a more permanent place for you online. It offers you a chance to reinforce and expand your online identity. (I will always look at the link that people put in their twitter profile to get more information about a person.) To start with you could use it simply as a static CV/Portfolio site that you can point people to when applying for jobs. But it could soon expand to offer more. More active posting about your experiences and interests attract audience.

The most popular blogs within the journalism community tend to be the ones that share experiences – Think about Josh sharing that list of RSS feeds. It’s journalists trying things and showing their working out. Thats valuable to the community and people remember you for that (you’re playing an active role). That’s one of the reasons I linked to Adam Westbrook in the presentation. Like Josh, he’s a great example of someone who plays an active part in the community.

You could ask ‘why a blog and not a static website?’ My first response is that blogging is one of those things that you should have experience of in a converged world (back to my point earlier). But there are some, more practical reasons.

There are lots of great website builders out there (I’d add Jimdo to that list ), but blogs offer a lot of under the bonnet stuff that helps promote your stuff and make it easy to share. Built in notification of search engines and automatic RSS feeds are just two of the things that will help spread yourself around the web. They may be the thing that gets you popping up in a search engine when a prospective employer searches your name and it will link them to something that sells you appropriately.

Here’s a quick cheat sheet telling you how you can tweak a wordpress.com blog to start showing static pages rather than the more dynamic posts. You can change it later on when you are ready to go down the more dynamic posting route.

Given that this presentation was to broadcast students I also looked at the problems associated with multimedia on free sites and blogs. I’ve listed a number of third party hosts that you can try to get round some of those restrictions. Using a third party site also has the benefit of getting your work out there on another platform to another audience.

So, there it is. Use the web to sign up to job sites but don’t stop there. Use it to broaden your horizons, think multiplatform in where you look. Be part of and visible in the community and your profile will grow and that can only be a good thing.

I hope it made sense and if you have any questions then drop me a line.

• The slides are available at http://www.slideshare.net/digitaldickinson/webjobs
• On a related note: Any students reading this should go and read Alison Gow’s advice for work placement students. Invaluable stuff
• John Thompson has posted more about j.co.uk’s jobs boards and also points to their advice about CV’s.
• Glyn Mottershead (@Egrommet)has created a nifty yahoo pipe that lets you filter jobs from popular media jobs sites by location (thanks for that Glyn)

I’m not interested in “hyperlocal” journalism that scales.  These start-up, disruptive sites have their best chance at success if they are locally run and locally owned.

Catching up with feeds, as you do, I finally got chance to read Brian Cubbison’s Q & A with Howard Owens about his award winning online news service The Batavian.

Howard is a US newspaper exec and long time advocate of the web, journalism and their combined disruptive power; I have an image of Howard in a t-shirt with the slogan ‘I’m disruptive’ on it.

Obviously the quote I picked chimed with me and my thoughts about hyperlocal only having to be ‘big enough’. But the whole  interview makes for interesting reading and offers some useful insight in to his approach.

Go and have a look.

Tomorrow I’m off to Skillset to talk about their new standards framework for journalism. I’m looking forward to the chat around what skills journalists need and not just because I’m involved in delivering this stuff to our future journalists. What I’m equally interested in is what skills the industry think they need (the framework has been created in consultation with industry and accreditation bodies) as it says a lot about what they think a journalist actually is – what defines the job.

It’s been something on my mind since the newsrewired conference a few weeks ago when the vexed debate of identity reared its head. That debate is best paraphrased as “grumblings on why people can’t be called a journalist” and left at that.

But the skillset visit and a chat with Francois Nel about onions and data, pushed it to the front of my thinking again.

The best way I can sum-up where that thinking has got me is Skillwalls.

A skillwall is the best way I have found to balance the argument (in my head) of what sets journalists apart with the issue of what will people pay for.

In terms of the ‘definition’ debate a journalist would be defined by which skills your average punter/blogger/anyone-you-don’t-want-to-call-a-journo does not have or is unwilling to develop. The skillwall is too high or too much effort to climb.

Skillwalls help define the paywall debate for me in terms that are more tangiable. People will pay for stuff that they can’t do themselves. If you have the skills to do that ,they may pay you. Thinking about it as a skill issue works better for me than trying to assess a value proposition.

The web has become a place where people can do things – it enables. The successful sites are those that enable them to do things it would be hard to do otherwise. Things that would take new skills.

Skills Vs. experience or Skills and Experience

This is where it gets difficult for the industry and why I think recent discussions have been so interesting for me. Yes, the knowledge and experience is valuable but is it a skill? Is going to lots of council meetings a skill? Is knowing the PM’s press secretary a skill? Valuable, yes, but a skill? No. Being able to get that stuff online in an interesting way is.

Unless you can do one people won’t see the value of the other.

It’s easy to be dismissive of skills. They can be seen as functional, low level things. But skills enable. Get over the skillwall of data gathering on the web and you can add the value of your knowledge and experience.

Of course a skillwall is not an exclusive or all encompassing barrier. It’s a peculiar new obstacle/challenge that digital has thrown our way. But it’s also a powerful opportunity for journalists to exploit.

So where is your skillwall and what are you going to do to get over it?

I’ve spent the day at the very excellent news:rewired conference organised by the good folks at journalism.co.uk. Lot’s of interesting people and discussions. But I found one thing very frustrating. (actually I found it infuriating and apparently went a shade of purple not often seen)

It seems that some of the breakout sessions descended in to ‘arguments’ generated around an issue which can be best summed up as the “but they are not journalists” argument. The afternoon session on hyperlocal I sat in on certainly fell victem.

We had the whole gamut of arguments including a number of the old favourites, my personal fave was “someone holding a camera is not a photographer”. Erm…yes they are but…I found it frustrating because I thought we had moved on from this. By the time we got to the ‘close the BBC and local newspapers will thrive’ stage  I lost my patience and   my contribution reflects that.  But I realise that was naive and a little unfair.

Given the painful restructuring in the industry at the moment it’s perfectly understandable that people will be looking at where the pinch is. Adam Tinworth made a good point to me that in terms of the stages of loss at least they had moved on to anger from denial. But I realised that it’s not really fair of me to dismiss that out of hand. I should have sat on my hands.

What did become clear to me is a growing divergence in the way hyperlocal and community are being defined and applied. Let me expand.

For me hyperlocal is now best defined by outfits like the Lichfield blog, represented at the session by Philip John. It’s content built on social capital. People are involved because it means something to them other than just a job or brand. Money is second to social status or altruistic motivation.

In contrast we could say that (in the context of the future of journalism) community is a strategy employed by media organisations and the journalists within them to engage with audience. Money is a defining commodity here in terms of starting it and sustaining it. Whether it’s to use that community to newsgather/crowdsource or to bolster the brand.

Both have economies of scale.

A hyperlocal site can only be so big. It will eventually get to a point where it demands more time and resources than volunteers can sustain. The economics of altruism only stretch so far. They can be be satisfied with ‘big enough’ or look at alternatives. Communities can, perversely, be too big to manage for large organisations, they cost too much for little return. In the context of profit and investment the economics don’t work

Both are different.

This inherent difference of motivation and a definition of the economic (investment and return) is becoming increasingly clear (and more so in the debate today) and in that a truth is evident. Hyperlocal websites are not a solution for media organisations who are struggling. You can not fill the gap that hyperlocal sites are starting to fill. A good community strategy may work but your core motivations make it different.

But just as hyperlocal is not the solution it’s also not the cause of the problems.

The truth is that the shift is creating a lot of friction (it’s perhaps bad taste to refer to shifting tectonic plates) and I think thats what created a lot of the ‘grief’ in the sessions.

There was a lot of criticism of hyperlocal as undermining/stealing/destroying journalism; you know the arguments. Likewise the crowd sourcing session seemed to descend in to sa similar semantic debate. As Adam reports:

There’s an undercurrent of hostility to the very idea of calling these contributors to crowd-sourced journalism “journalists” in any way – and that it’s under-mining credibility. In answer, people are suggestion that people can become journalists for single events – one time they happen to be at the right place at the right time.

But growing difference between parish pump websites and the local media, between community and audience, suggests that even discussing hyperlocal and community together is, perhaps, a mistake at a journalism conference.

The motivations, models and practice, it seems from the tone of the debate, are just too different.

Amongst the marking and other stuff a few things have been pushing the ponder button. One of the the things was the recent updates to Google Translate.

Even if you haven’t used the tool itself you will have probably spotted the odd option to translate search results. If you use the Google Toolbar you may have even been surprised to be offered a version of the page you are reading in its original language.  It’s like a lot of things on the web these days, a background thing.

But I have been pondering it lately for two reasons. The first comes from the increased amount of contact I have working journalists who are getting to grips with using search tools and other online stuff in a more structured and journalistic way. Sitting in a room full of journos and seeing the mixture of awe and surprise at just what you can do with an IP address these days, for example,  just underlines how much of this stuff can pass you by if you don’t have a bit of headspace to explore.

The second is thinking about how, when training, I can make this as relevant to all the flavours of journalists I come across. It’s often the case that after a session of looking at searching council websites and the like, sports journos feel like there isn’t much in it for them. Most team websites have no RSS and the online presence for many official bodies is pretty slim. I get much the same from the Sports journalism students I teach.

Searching in another language

Of course, when you get on to community stuff, forums and blogs etc. some of the sports journos are pretty adept at finding and working with those communities. But I’m always on the look out for stuff for that search part of what I do that will peak their interest in the basic stuff which, I think, is really valuable. Google translate does just that.

Here’s an example picked at random.

The rumour mill throws up that Italian football coach and radio pundit Nevio Scala is pitching for the Scotland Manager’s job.

Interesting stuff. What’s this guy about then? We could push a few searches through Google:

Starting with  “Nevio Scala” or building on the search with information about his other clubs. e.g “Nevio Scala” +Parma or “Nevio Scala” +Spartak will turf up a lot. But it’s in English and this guy is Italian. So what do the Italians say about him?

We can push Google to search Italian sites by selecting Italian in the Language option of the advanced search. Which gives us some lovely results with the Translate This page option. Click there and we get translated results.

The language option in Googles advanced search

We can take that step further with Google’s Translated search option.

All you do is tell it what you are looking for, what language to search in and what language you speak. Then tell it which language you want to search in. The results are slightly easier to digest as you can see the options side by side. We can use the search to dig a little deeper.

A translated search from Google

Back to the Scala example. I want to delve in to the fan chat during his short spell at Spartak. Setting the results language to Russian means we can plug in a search like  “Nevio Scala” Spartak OR Spartacus +forum and throw-up forum discussions around Scala on Russian football sites.

Of course doing this is not just limited to Sport. It’s not uncommon to find someone from your patch appears in the foreign press.  Take “meredith kercher” OR “Amanda Knox” as a  translated search in Italian as an example. But given the international impact of sports, especially as the world cup comes in to view and I think sports journos have plenty to play with here.

Translating from the Toolbar

For me though the real flexibility comes when you use the translate options in conjunction with the Google Toolbar.  By installing the toolbar you can translate pages on the fly.  That makes searching in another language a lot easier.

I tried the same search for “meredith kercher” OR “Amanda Knox” in Google news but with the location set to Italy.  All the results come up in Italian but a quick click of the translate button and I have a better idea of what I am looking at. Then I can continue browsing in (Googles best approximation of) english.

Using the pages

Using the toolbar translation also means you can take advantage of the basic functions on the page.

Using the Nevio Scala” Spartak OR Spartacus +forum search I found a Spartak forum which I wanted to search for any mentions of Scala.  I could find the search box but sticking Scala in won’t work as it’s English not Russian cyrillic. So I used the Google translate tool to convert Nevio Scala in to Russian (Невио Скала) and went directly to the original Russian version of the football forum. The toolbar translate option converted the page in to english so finding the search box was easy. Then I plugged the Russian version in to the search box.  Bingo.

Ok, so the translation is pretty hokey sometimes and we need to be mindful of the different standards of journalism (legal and ethical) that we might encounter. But it’s a great opportunity to get a different perspective. I think this is especially important in sport. There is always the other team and if they happen to be from another country then it would seem a shame to miss their perspective.

The next step

The next step is to integrate some of this stuff in to your “passive aggressive newsgathering” by finding the best in foreign language sites and then using a site like Mloovi to translate the RSS feed. Then you really are doing international journalism.

The new CNN homepage

CNN have updated their website. I like the layout although I think the boxed content and the ad on the right are a little to similar and the movement of the ad is very distracting. But they aren’t going to move their ad’s around are they.

There is a shift in emphasis towards video on the site but the international version doesn’t get a link the Newspulse beta which is a shame. But few things did catch my eye with respect to video and multimedia in general.

The first thing was a neat little feature of their video player. If you drag the play head around on the video it overlays the running time . Not groundbreaking but a nice little touch.

The player overlays the running time as you drag the playhead

On the article pages themeselve many stories now have an integrated slideshow at the top. This is nicely done but it will be interesting to see how many articles get this treatment.

The integrated slideshow is a nice touch

The last thing that caught my eye was the use of video embedded in the article page. Video is presented as thumbnails in the left-hand-column which ‘pushes’ everything out-of-the-way on the page when clicked.

Video bullies its way on to the screen when clicked

I have mixed feelings about this. In one sense I’m pleased to see video in with the article but the overlay on the article feels wrong.  Many times when watching embedded video I will start it playing and listen to the content – it’s more often than not packaged content (script etc) so I can keep reading and dip back in when the video sounds interesting. (who says men can’t multitask!) This approach seems to bully its way on to the page and does little to integrate. This is made worse by the use of packaged content rather than clips with little or nothing to signpost the link between the article and the video.

I think a better option would be to go with the clickable thumbnail approach of video. Align the images more appropriately to the text and the expand your player from that point.

Still. Lots of interesting new tweaks and experiments.

I’m very taken with the general move towards more data from primary sources. Councils, government orgs etc. putting stats, facts, figures and information online for us to use and mashup. Those orgs who are savvy enough to drive this stuff through RSS make it even easier for us to harvest this stuff and add an extra dimension to our news gathering.

Of course the public sector moves slowly when it comes to IT and it’s no surprise that there are still a majority of orgs that hide their content away on static pages. No RSS feed to help there. So what do we do?

Well we could resign ourselves to adding them to the list of pages that we bookmark and visit. A bit like those regular calls we make to keep our contacts book fresh; no bad thing. But another solution is to use on of the many RSS services on the web to ‘scrape’ the page for content and convert it in to a feed.

Preston city council (the council nearest to me at work) has a few feeds but none around the basic operation of the council – meetings, decisions etc.  This kind of thing would be great to get a feed of. So I thought I would give it a go with their published decisions page using Feed43

No feed for the dull stuff!

The first thing I did was set the search so that it showed all results. That way any new ones would show up by default. I did this by using an * in the search box. The * is a standard operator for a wild card or ‘any matches’. So it seemed a logical punt to try it.

The next step was to copy the web address to feed my RSS maker. The URL looks complex but it contains all the information needed to drive the search.

Feed43 grabs the whole page for you to explore

The first step with Feed43 is to feed it the URL then click Reload. It pulls in the whole page and then you get the hard bit. The idea with feed scrapers is to give it enough information about the way the stuff you want is presented that it can ‘spot’ the stuff and ignore the rest. This means trawling through some HTML.

You get two options

The global search pattern looks for HTML that ‘wraps’ the content you want to make in to a feed. It could be the whole table that contains the search results. But this doesn’t really help in this case.

Better to go straight to the second option which defines the specific things to look for to define an item to be added to the feed. Here’s what I put.

<td > <a href=”{%}” title=”{*}”>{%}</a></td>

In feed43 language {*} means this could be anything, just ignore it. {%} means this is important so store it.

So I can saw from the HTML that each decision in the list looked like this

<td > <a href=”http://preston.moderngov.co.uk/ieDecisionDetails.aspx?ID=348&amp;displaypref=0″ title=”Link to decision details for North West England Regional Spatial Strategy Partial Review Consultation”>North West England Regional Spatial Strategy Partial Review Consultation</a>

So I told feed43 to look for anything between the <td> </td> tags regardless of what ‘class=’ said. Then I told it to grab the href link as the actual weblink, ignore the title and then grab the text between the <a> tag to use as a title.

Finding the useful bits on the page means working through the HTML

Clicking extract will filter the content and show you the results. You can see they are split in to {%1} for the link and {%2} for the title of the decision.

The filtered results display in a list

The last step is to define which of these makes up the key parts of the feed. You can see it’s pretty straightforward to fill the gaps at this point. Your feed is then ready to go. All you need to do is subscribe in the normal way

The filtered results can be added to the feed template

Moving beyond the basics

The thing that makes scraping pages difficult is picking through the HTML. Feed43 makes this easier by limiting the number of options to filter by. But if you need to push further in then you will need to explore other options. One to consider is Yahoo pipes which has a page grabber option. But you will also need to invest some time in understanding regular expressions.

I think this kind of stuff is more an more important for orgs and journalists especially when it comes to councils and government orgs. We all know how ‘mundane’ many see this stuff (important as it is). So making it in to a feed would be more conducive to newsgathering by stealth. Encourage more ‘passive aggressive newsgathering’ as Paul Bradshaw once described it.