A new server and a new design. The last ‘re-design’ for a good long while and hopefully a more reliable service from the new box jockeys.
Fingers crossed.
If you find anything missing or something not working then please let me know.
A week or so ago I found out that newsroom leaders where asking big questions.
According to Poynter these are the questions that 192 online newsroom leaders are going to try and answer over the next three days at one of their seminars.
Well it seems that, even if we go on working days, they haven’t managed to come up with any answers yet.
Is there going to be any white smoke soon I wonder.
A few quick ‘go-and-play’ links:
Have fun
So, marking, training and a new macbook pro (warm geek love feeling when I mention it) have kept me busy. I’m catching up with stuff so a few catch up posts to round up all the great stuff I missed.
I see that in my absence the roundup of newspaper video concept has spread. Ian Reeves does a round up on video on the press Press Gazette website which was picked up by a number of people. Brian O’Connell linked to it after a Multi-media news round up of his own noting much of the regional content resembled the stuff happening in the states.
Jeff Jarvis was disappointed with the lack of anything interesting from the UK press and Andrew Grant-Adamson was less convinced of the style of the presentation but agrees with Jeff’s disappointment in the content.
Having kept an eye on this kind of thing for a while I would say there is more cause to be optimistic. Look at how far we have come in such a short space of time.
Speaking of Mr Adamson. He asks a very pertinent question about the commercial value to the MSM of being involved in second life. Personally I think they should be in for no other reason than they are participating in a community. It’s valuable experience in learning how to participate rather than profit. Of course, if Adam Boulton’s Avatar is anything to by, the first hurdle for any mainstream player is to get recognised.
Mindy McAdams had some excellent stuff on her blog. I particularly liked her posts about visual literacy and ways to approach multimedia storytelling:
Let’s work on editing our multimedia the way we edit a text story: Omit unnecessary words. Get to the point. If establishing a mood or a scene helps advance the story, then do it. Anything that doesn’t contribute to the actual story you’re telling right now — cut it out.
And if you fancy having a go then there is Mindy’s No fear guide to multimedia skills.
Mindy also pointed out a new blog – Multimedia Reporter - by Ron Sylvester. A good post on audio in particular caught my eye.
Danny Sanchez raised a smile with his new cartoon series. (via Howard Owens).
Howard also has a great post about why all journos should blog which apart from being spot on, means I have to delete a rough post I was working on that said the same thing.
I’ve said it for completely selfish reasons. I want print journalists to GET the web. I want them to understand how the web is different. I want to cure them of their tone deafness to the conversation going on around them.If you blog in the way blogging is meant to be done, you’ll realize these benefits
He’s commenting on a post by Scott Karp at Publishing 2.0 which generated a real torrent of comments for and against.
All good stuff, particularly Bobbie Johnsons rebuttal, but I would still fall back to Howard’s point. It isn’t a replacement for your job, it isn’t a vanity process. It’s about experiencing some of the world you work in.
And on that very subject is a slightly older but no less wiser post from Matt Waite on journalists taking charge of their own development.
I can hear people I know gnashing their teeth already. Why should I do something that costs me time and maybe even money to benefit my employer when I don’t get paid for it? Here’s my response, and it’s two-fold: If you don’t, you run the risk of being first up for layoffs (so you’ll REALLY be uncompensated) and the more skills you have, the better off you are for whatever newspapers evolve into. Or even if they go away completely. Let’s play fantasyland for a second: newspapers collapse, and all that content goes away. Someone is going to step into that void. Let’s pretend it’s Google and Yahoo and MSN. Do you think for a second they aren’t going to want new media skills? That they’ll be impressed with your paper clippings and your stubborn insistence that you can only write a story for a printed publication? Come on. Wake up.
Good place to stop for now I think.
You know when you have one of those days?
I had one yesterday.
It ended with me leaving the phone ringing to Pipex support in the vein hope that the beeping phone would simply annoy anyone near it to the point of madnes, even if they weren’t going to answer it! I tell you, Pipex telephone support is fast becoming a modern day labour of hercules. If anyone has any better suggestions for hosting I will gladly take them.
But the day started with an email from Martin Stabe giving me the heads up on a something he posted about some of his work appearing uncredited on a blog out of the department I work for.
We did a trial of blogs for our final year and masters online courses last year and I thought that it was ‘a good idea’ to roll that out across the second year – they are doing some digital journalism so experience of blogs seemed essential. That means we have over 100 journalism students blogging in the second year which, on paper at least, is a pretty encouraging sign of things to come. Of course it was only a matter of time before it raised issues.
One of the issues has been the perennial opinion/rant vs. proper journalism. We aren’t the only ones to see the issue but it strikes me as an occupational habit of journalism not just student journalism. Hell, even our own students are fed up of some of the excesses of our trade.
It also prompted one of my colleagues to ask:
So, an accepted, if unwritten, rule of traditional journalism: Nothing published without someone else checking it and questioning it. If this is accepted as a definitional quality is blogging journalism? Or merely anonymous broadcasting of personal opinion?
All good debate.
I’m not going to dredge through the details here and I certainly don’t want to play down Martins concerns, but it did seem to quickly whip up a fair response, and one that went beyond the original issue.
The upshot of the comment conversation (comversation?) and, to be fair, the main thrust of Martins post in the first place was that, these days, learning how to behave in the blogosphere should be part and parcel of training to be a journalist.
[B]logs exist as part of the blogosphere, a global subculture with emergent informal social norms and etiquette. Journalists, journalism educators and journalism students need to understand these laws and informal norms before hitting publish.
I agree.
Reflecting on the whole experience, and if the volume of interest it has raised amongst the students is anything to go by, i think it served as a very useful learning experience for everyone involved. But it only hit home how prescient it was last night when i got chance to catch up on more reading.
Being out of the web loop for a while I had missed the student ‘attack’ at Bobbie Johnson’s blog and I also missed the original post about Tim O’reilly announcing discussions on a blogging code of conduct. ( I think the old radar is a little off there Tim.)
You could argue that with a code of conduct like the one O’reilly is suggesting (where it not so unbearably pompous and patronizing) then none of yesterdays events would have happened.
O’reilly’s point is that it’s up to the responsible bloggers to set the standards for others – scarily awarding themselves sheriffs badges and elevating themselves to the law – and to a point I can see that. Somebody has to do it.
Neil Macintosh sums up the blogging code issue fantastically on his blog, saving me the effort of blathering around too much trying to sensibly put across just how pointless the exercise is and maybe I would adsd that for journalism, more so.
As a profession the main stream media has a poor track record when it comes to codes of conduct. Does that make it any less vital or mean that there aren’t any morals of values there? Of course not. Because groups may make the codes but it’s individuals that break them.
If yesterday’s experience taught me anything it’s that somebody is doing what Tim wants. Or should I say a body- the community in the blogosphere – is doing.
The lessons may be harsh but they are fair and because they are out in the open everyone learns. This doesnt just make for dynamic debate. Perhaps it goes some way to prove that on the web,more maybe than the real world, journalism can do a pretty good job of regulating itself.
Like a container of good advice washed up on the webshore, Tomski provides an insight in to the BBC’s web 2.0 approach with 15 guidelines we should all pick over and take away something interesting from.
1. Build web products that meet audience needs
2. The very best websites do one thing really, really well
3. Do not attempt to do everything yourselves
4. Fall forward, fast
5. Treat the entire web as a creative canvas
6. The web is a conversation. Join in
7. Any website is only as good as its worst page
8. Make sure all your content can be linked to, forever.
9. Remember your granny won’t ever use “Second Life”
10. Maximise routes to content
11. Consistent design and navigation needn’t mean one-size-fits-all
12. Accessibility is not an optional extra
13. Let people paste your content on the walls of their virtual homes
14. Link to discussions on the web, don’t host them
15. Personalisation should be unobtrusive, elegant and transparent
A nice post from Bryan Murley over at the Center for Innovation in College Media, taking a tongue in cheek view of a post by J.D. Lasica on ways to treat breaking news online.
A great picture from the What’s next:Innovations in newsrooms blog that reminds us where the real power of newspapers is – in the community. Still ‘100% newspaper’ without any of the technology.
