I’ve been doing a bit of ‘multimedia’ with students including maps and the wonders of Dipity timelines. Whilst picking through the backlog of posts in my reader I came across a few posts with defining moments for online journalism. So, as a bit of fun, I thought I would add them to dipity as an example to use.

I’ve used Mindy McAdams’ Timeline of breaking news and Paul Bradshaw’s post asking “Are these the biggest moments in journalism-blogging history?” as the main sources. Alf Hermida also pitched in suggesting the BBC election coverage and Death of Diana as defining moments. I agree so I’ve added them as well.

I’ll add some more when I find them or , of course, if you want to suggest any.

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…

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.

No, it’s not some secret new publication from Johnston Press. The JP Digitaldigest is a blog that offers a round up of all that’s interesting to newspaper people involved in online.

It’s run by  Prof Jane Singer and Louise Thomas who are colleagues of mine at the Department of Journalism.

Worth a look.

Alf Hermida has a great post on how he beat a tight budget by using WordPress as a CMS system to create a news site for the UBC Graduate School of Journalism.

The site [TheThunderbird.ca ] is run on an installation of WordPress MU, the multiple user version of this versatile software. WordPress offers an easy to use content management system, making it simple for the students to learn how to post stories. WordPress MU can be a little temperamental, meaning that some plugins won’t work with it.

Over the past few years I’ve tried a number of CMS systems to run the online newsdays. Everything from Mambo to a neat piece of software called PROPS. Anything free that would save the students doing too much hard coding of webpages. But it hasn’t been an easy journey.

Looking for a solution

This year we just finished an installation of Avid’s Active Content Manager so we should soon have a pretty hefty CMS but I still needed something quick and easy to fill the gap. I had braced myself for a long hard battle with Joomla. Like othes I was not looking forward to the template work – my experience with joomla forerunner mambo had burned me there. So I bit the bullet and thought that WordPress couldn’t be that hard to tweak. It wasn’t and I know run newsday exercises using wordpress as the cms.

Templates

Like Hermida I came across the excellent Revolution News theme. There are other premium news themes out there as well but thought that $99 would have to come out of my pocket if I wanted to get it done quick. So before taking the plunge I did a bit of searching around.

There are some pretty good free themes around well suited to newspaper/magazine style work. I ended up using the Mimbo theme by Darren Hoyt. I liked the layout and it seemed like a flexible template

Plugins

Of course there are number of plugins I use as well.

• Aizatto’s Related Posts
• Anarchy Media Player
• WP-Polls
• Ultimate Tag Warrior

I’m also planning in using the Role Manager plugin to add an extra layer of control for users.
Overall

It needs some tweaking and I got a little more equated with WordPress template tags than I would have liked (oh, okay, I got a perverse geeky pleasure from making it work). The process for putting up thumbnails images isnt as neat as it could be, but it’s simple and it works. It also seems to be the standard way of doing it in these templates.

So, overall its a success.

If anyone wants to try the version of the template I ended up with, drop me a line and I’ll share.

Paul Bradshaw continues his essential series on Newsroom of the 21st century with a look at what should happen to your story after it goes online.

He amplifies a great point about the permanent nature of a webpage and its place as an anchor for your story to develop.

I like this idea. Almost a year ago I posted on the idea that the web was really a whole range of stories waiting to happen:

On a macro level the web edits itself. We throw stories online and they find a place. Sometimes that place remains unknown until another story takes an audience there and the content is discovered. It wasn’t an editor who made that connection. The web enabled me to.

But Paul’s takes this to a much higher and more reasoned level co-opting the five W’s and one H of journalism 101 to great effect.

What I would recommend is re-reading Paul’s previous two posts to really get the flavour of the concepts he puts forward.  A lot of what he talks about in this article should be seeded in the way we collect and report on stories.

When he suggests the question “What did the journalist read to write this?”  he mentions social bookmarking.

This should be part of routine practice already, but through a combination of resistant journalistic culture; clunky CMS’s; and lack of time, journalists still don’t routinely link to their sources. So, we need a way to make this happen.

But how many journalists use social bookmarking as part of their reporting routine? More to the point, how many know what it is?

I talk to my students about building usefulness in to their content. Simple things like taking a dictaphone to interviews so that you could have some audio to go on the site as well as good audio notes.  Everyone involved in journalism education should be stressing the value of digital as an addition to the process not as a replacement.

Paul’s posts make for a compelling and intelligent argument for everyone to take on board. Great, great stuff.

I tell my students to try and avoid pun headlines on the web. Physician heal thyself as they say.

I thought I would give a higher profile to a comment on my post about Jay Rosen left by Oliver Luft from Journalism.co.uk. He was at the Journalism Leaders forum and used his nifty stereo recordergramme device to get Rosen word for word.

A couple of audio snippets from Jay Rosen at the event:

On his next Assignment project

And talking about why UK papers are two years behind the US, bit of clarification on his point.

Worth a listen.

Also worth lifting out is a comment by Jay himself. He points to a few examples of the kind of wrk he is doing. This includes details of a new project “beat blogging with a social network”.

He’s also keen to point out that

When I said “two years behind,” I was not thinking of the people who on both sides of the pond are engaged in the new media discussion. People like Adrian, Robin Hamman, Kevin Anderson, Richard Sambrook, to name a few, are not “behind” anyone. This discussion in the UK and the discussion in North America are the same discussion. The Telegraph, The Guardian the BBC are doing as well as any US news organization. But you know that.

I was thinking more about the broad middle of the news profession and where they are in understanding the challenge of the Web and changing balance of power.

Changing balance of power is absolutely right.

Journalism.co.uk reports that the Press Complaints Commision (PCC) is to extend its regulation of UK newspaper content to include AV content published on newspaper sites.

The PCC already regulates online editions of UK newspapers and an announcement about the extension of the commission is expected in the next few weeks.

The news came during an interview with Andrew Neil on the BBC News’ Hard Talk programme.

Andrew Neil then asked: “But they’ll be bound by the same sort of rules as they are in the papers we pick up in the morning…”

Sir Christopher Meyer replied: “Exactly the same kind of rules. Now, we are going to make an announcement, I hope, pretty soon in the next few weeks about exactly what that entails – there are some definitions to be sorted out – but it’s a major step forward, and it’s the first time, I think, that newspapers have voluntarily agreed without outside pressure to extend the remit of regulation through the PCC.”