Much as I hate people dictating how Twitter and other social media tools should be used, ‘Josh’ makes a good point about using Twitter for easy vox pops. Simply cutting and pasting Tweets that happen to fit the subject of whatever article you are writing is lazy journalism. It’s also a privacy issue. Full blog post…
Beatblogging.org is part of NewAssignment.Net, and is on a mission to look at “how journalists can use social networks and other Web tools to improve beat reporting, with an empahsis on “pushing the practice” and spotlighting innovation”, according to the site’s authors.
They have 57 responses so far, mostly US-based. So how about we get a UK thing going here? If you are a journalist using Twitter in the manner described above, please leave a comment with your Twitter handle below. I’m @johncthompson and this blog’s other authors are @jtownend and @lauraoliver. All our news is broadcast on @journalismnews (and you can talk to us on that channel too).
The brainchild of the European Journalism Centre, we will all be blogging away until June, with the aim of throwing some much needed light on that most uncool of institutions, the European Union. Think of it as the blogging world’s Eurovision Song Contest.
Barber and Mardell confessed that their now successful blogs came into being not from an initial personal enthusiasm for blogging, but from above: “I was ordered to,” Barber admitted.
Using podcasts, vodcasts, photos and plain old fashioned text, representatives from all 27 EU member states, will be bringing their individual experiences to the new blogging fraternity.
The official site will be launched on February 1, when readers from across the globe will be able to get involved in the discussion, as well as vote for their favourite blogs. A high-tech bonanza of prizes, from Flip Cameras to iPhones, will be awarded throughout the competition.
For an event that involved bringing dozens of international competitors from all corners of the continent to one place, everything went sensationally smoothly. There was only one controversy.
“Why isn’t the wireless working in here?” a fellow blogger publicly demanded. “WE ARE BLOGGERS,” he exclaimed, as if it were the essence of his being, an article of faith.
I was worried it was all going get a bit heated when one candid British MEP said that he was proud to have a blog, but conceded (rather warily) that he has disabled the comments facility, therefore not allowing any discussion on the site: for fear of rival parties and political groups using it as a platform for their views.
“NO COMMENTS, NO BLOG!” a militant blogger boomed at him. And that was that.
Thankfully everything continued peacefully, though I sensed there were many who wanted to officially strip the gentleman of his self-appointed status as a ‘blogger.’
It was just left to Marjory van den Broeke, head of press at the Parliament, to wrap up the day by quoting one of the speakers who described us as:
“Lively, challenging, not too respectful, young, cool and attractive. Everything bloggers should be.”
And if that is not enough to convince you that the EU – for better or for worse – can be fun, then I urge you to visit my blog to see what Euro-bloggers get up to when they – just for a few minutes – prize themselves away from their beloved MacBooks.
Suffice to say: European relations at their most amusing.
John Butterworth, group editor of Shropshire Newspaper’s weekly series (part of the Midland News Association), was made redundant yesterday, according to HoldtheFrontPage’s Tamlyn Jones. The 55-year-old has a journalistic career spanning 36 years and was awarded an MBE a year ago for services to journalism and various charities. Full story…
Neil Thackray has 25 years experience in B2Bs, in senior roles at RBI, Miller Freeman and as CEO of Quantum Business. Most recently, he was CEO of Nexus Business Media, before stepping down a few weeks ago.
He gets off to a good start with his second blog post: ‘Starting a discussion about the future of B2B Media’. He looks at the effects of the internet on niche business to business publications. One effect “has been the result of the phenomonen you are reading now” – the rise of the lone or collaborating bloggers.
Meanwhile, far from business magazines being the ‘bible of the industry’, “they are reduced to being one of many sources of information in a world where reader loyalty is as fickle as a click on a Google search result,” Thackray argues.
MediaGuardian reports that there will be ‘a series of editorial job cuts’ across News International’s tabloid and broadsheet newspapers in the next two weeks and that the group will ‘cut the rates it pays some agencies for stories’. News International refused to comment on the reports.
“Meet Rob, he’s a film-maker who lost his eye as a child. He’s embarking on a journey to replace that lost eye with a video camera – a battery operated, wireless, full fledged video camera. He’s assembled a team of world class engineers to do it, and we’re making it happen.”
Two videos which give you an insight: one can’t be embedded, so follow the link here. And this (Pre-view warning: possibly the most gruesome video Journalism.co.uk has yet displayed – finish your breakfast first. It starts off gently enough…), from Daily Motion:
Spence will be at the Brussels Digital News Affairs Conference in March, DNA2009, ‘to talk about and more importantly to show how his implanted camera works and what it can be used for,’ according to yesterday’s DNA newsletter.
Definitely one for our ‘handy tools and technology’ category.
Crikey.com reports that a meeting at News Limited’s Australian headquarters in Holt Street was due to take place today (Friday) ‘at which the company’s most senior local lieutenants will talk about the coming year.’ Crikey writer, Margaret Simons, speculates that there could be “axings, redundancies and restructuring to allow for yet more redundancies are on the agenda.”
However, because of widespread cross-ownership, Icelandic media is not only feeling the impact of the crisis on its advertisement revenues; it’s in the eye of the storm, and angry Icelanders have turned to turn to the web to inform each other, organise anti-government rallies and vent their frustrations.
“It’s a grassroots revolution,” said Andri Sigurðsson, a blogger and web developer.
He explained that Iceland had seen a surge in political blogs in the wake of the financial turmoil, and that people had turned to using web tools such as Facebook and Twitter to organise demonstrations and protests.
With so many people losing their jobs, this year the island is facing the highest unemployment in decades. Some have turned to blogging full time – the blogger behind Newsfrettir, for example, has started translating Icelandic news to English after being made redundant in October.
Since the country’s biggest newspaper, Fréttablaðið, along with a large portion of the rest of Icelandic media, is controlled by Baugur (the ailing investment company that also owns a large stake in Iceland’s and the UK’s retail industry); and the second biggest newspaper, Morgunblaðið, has been controlled by Björgólfur Guðmundsson (owner and chairman of West Ham FC and chairman of Landsbanki, the bank embroiled in the Icesave scandal)… the whole situation gets rather complicated.
“We’re trying to cut all our connections to Baugur. You know, the sugar daddy behind DV and Fréttablaðið was Baugur, but the sugar daddy behind Morgunbladid was Björgólfur Guðmundsson? Every media here has its problem. We had Baugur’s Jon Asgeir Jóhannesson, they have Björgólfur,” said Reynir Traustasson, editor-in-chief of Icelandic tabloid DV, pictured right.
It is against this backdrop that political blogs such as the conservative AMX.is and the socialist-green Smugan.is have grown in popularity. However, Fréttablaðið’s editor-in-chief Jón Kaldal, does not see the surge in independent sites for news and opinion as a threat to mainstream media.
“None of these are doing investigative reporting; they are just repeating what has been written elsewhere. It is an outlet for gossip and rumours. But certain internet sites have worked well to get information out of the government. When gossip breaks out on these sites, the government is forced to come out of hiding,” he said.
Yet Kaldal was not optimistic about the times ahead:
“The whole society of Iceland is in a very strange place at the moment. It’s like we’re engulfed in a thick fog, and we don’t know quite how the world will look like when it lifts. Always in a recession or downturn there is a stronger demand for effect in advertisement. The strong grow stronger during a recession. But the situation here on Iceland is so critical that I don’t know if that’s enough.”
