#Tip of the day from Journalism.co.uk – planning a blog’s life

Often the focus is on the launch of a blog, but in this post blogger and journalist Peter Moore suggests thinking about the end of your blog as much as its beginning. Don’t be afraid to let it go, he says. Tipster: Judith Townend.

To submit a tip to Journalism.co.uk, use this link – we will pay a fiver for the best ones published.

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Journalism student tries high-speed live reporting at Chinese Grand Prix

The past two weeks have seen staff and students from Coventry University discovering the sights and sounds of the People’s Republic of China. Among the group here on an exchange programme organised by the university and its Chinese partner, Zhejiang University of Media and Communications (ZUMC), are 11 journalism students who have been reporting online at cutoday.wordpress.com – a blog started in March 2008 that has so far generated 60,000-plus hits.

Last week I attended the Chinese Grand Prix at Shanghai International Circuit in order to produce a live report for the blog. I was there as a guest of the BMW Sauber Team and despite a disappointing turn of events for the Swiss competitors the day was a great opportunity for me.

I was unsure how best to approach the live feed at first. I am familiar with the workings of hard news reporting and feature writing, but I’ve never had to produce a blow-by-blow account of a live event. I decided to adopt a relaxed, conversational approach, but also make every effort to post relevant information for the readers’ benefit.

Vikki Howe, a final year journalism student at Coventry University, continually monitored the TV screens and live timing feeds in the BMW Sauber hospitality suite. This allowed me to focus entirely on my short, concise post entries. BBC Radio 5 Live and the BBC Sport website turned out to be very useful sources for fact checking.

It was an interesting experience, and the reaction from readers was favourable, with a number of people sending me emails of congratulations and, more importantly, recommending the blog to others.

Live reporting, I found out, is fast. At times I felt like the speed of my reporting needed to match the speeds being set on the track. Well, perhaps not quite that fast, but you get the idea.

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Guardian asks readers who it should back for the UK election

The Guardian is using Comment is Free to ask its readers which political party the paper should back in its election editorial. Comments have to be submitted before 1pm today.

Beyond this, however, there’s a great table showing UK national newspapers’ support for different parties since 1945 – the data can be sorted by individual title, year and election winner:

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NYTimes.com: New York Times reports profit; will charge from January

A few takeaway points from the New York Times Company’s results yesterday:

• A net income for Q1 of $12.8 million;
• Introduction of the planned metered-pay system in January 2011;
• Launch of paid-for iPad application in January too.

Full story at this link…

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Ethical questions raised by photojournalist’s child sacrifice story

The story in the headline refers to Marco Vernaschi’s Pulitzer Center-funded project on child sacrifice. The project has generated several reports, including graphic images of child victims, and much criticism of Vernaschi’s reporting methods and ethics in obtaining the images and the role of the Center. His photographing of the exhumed body of one of the victims in particular has sparked debate – read Ben Chesterton’s post here and Roy Greenslade’s piece here for the full background.

The Pulitzer Center released its own statement on the project earlier this week from executive director Jon Sawyer, which is well worth a read in full and makes some interesting points in the challenge of multi-platform publishing and freelance networks of contributors to ethics:

We regret any damage that may have been caused. We intend to continue this project, documenting the phenomenon of child sacrifice, but in so doing we will redouble our efforts to authenticate every claim and to insure the privacy rights of individual victims.

In the course of this project so far we have learned some painful, useful lessons about the ambiguous intersections of freelance journalism, blog posts and articles that are published or broadcast.

The Pulitzer Center has worked with dozens of journalists over the past four years, funding travel and providing initial editorial guidance but then partnering with established newsmedia outlets around the world. This has provided multiple layers of editorial review and control, with the goal of insuring  compliance with the highest editorial standards.

The growth of the Pulitzer Center has resulted in our website becoming a significant outlet itself, especially our Untold Stories blog that features reports from the field by our journalist grantees. Given the increasing prominence of this platform we will be making our own standards more explicit, as a guide to our journalists and guarantee to readers.

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Shane Richmond: The value of reader comments to online newspapers

Telegraph Media Group’s head of technology Shane Richmond weighs in on a debate about the value of comments left by readers on newspaper websites.

Journalism professor Jeff Jarvis recently suggested a turnaround in his view on reader comments: “I defended [newspaper] comments for years. But the problem is that comments are too often the voice of assholes.” He added in a blog post: “[C]omments are an insult because they come only after media think they’re done creating a product, which they then allow the public to react to.”

This prompted a response from Ilana Fox, who ran online communities for the Sun and Mail Online, disagreeing with Jarvis and arguing that the majority of people interacting with newspapers online aren’t “assholes” at all.

Richmond says both are right – his post is worth reading in full – and makes a particular point about the effect of journalists’ involvement in comment threads:

Jeff makes the point that inviting readers in after the fact is disrespectful, which is what leads to the unconstructive nature of much commenting. But I’ve noticed that engagement by journalists breeds a culture of respect. If journalists join the conversation, they are more likely to be respected by readers.

I don’t think the “true collaboration” that Jeff would like to see is a replacement for commenting. Many people are happy to comment and don’t want to do more. True collaboration builds on the work we’ve done so far. And it is a goal that many of us are working towards.

Full post at this link…

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Johann Hari: ‘The forces blocking British democracy are becoming visible in this election’

One of these forces is the British media, says Hari, who suggests that the televised leaders’ debates act as a counter to the right-wing press – in particular yesterday’s kicking of Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg by the Conservative-supporting papers – and as such the media’s distorting effect on democracy could be bypassed:

The British media is overwhelmingly owned by right-wing billionaires who order their newspapers to build up the politicians who serve their interests, and marginalise or rubbish the politicians who serve the public interest. David Yelland, the former editor of the Sun, bravely confessed this week that as soon as he took his post, he was told the Liberal Dems had to be “the invisible party, purposely edged off the paper’s pages and ignored”. Only a tiny spectrum of opinion was permitted. Everyone to the left of Tony Blair (not hard) had to be rubbished – even when their policies spoke for a majority of British people.

The TV debates, then, were a very rare moment in which a slightly more liberal-left voice could speak to the public without the distorting frame of pre-emptive abuse and distortion. The window of permissible opinion was opened a little – and people responded with a wave of enthusiasm. It could’ve been opened wider still – to the Greens, say – and found a receptive audience too.

The reaction of the right-wing press to briefly losing the ability to frame how politicians address the public has been a frenzied panic worthy of Basil Fawlty. They have “revealed” Clegg is a paedophile-cuddling, Gaddafi-licking foreigner and crook who wishes we had lost the Second World War. But now – for a change – people can test the smears against what they see and hear with their own eyes, unmediated, on TV.

Read the full post at this link…

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#Tip of the day from Journalism.co.uk – understanding social search

Social Media today shares five articles on social search to help you get to grips with SEO and its relationship with social media at this link. Tipster: Judith Townend.

To submit a tip to Journalism.co.uk, use this link – we will pay a fiver for the best ones published.

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Outsourcing photography – what cost to local news organisations?

Last week, the Associated Press’ (AP) commercial photography arm, AP Images, launched a new service and a new revenue stream. The new Editorial Assignment Service offers other news organisations the chance to hire out its photojournalists to cover events for their reporting.

(Read more about the launch on the British Journal of Photography’s site and Photo Archive News.)

Twenty-five AP photographers are available via the assignment service and the images on display on the marketing site are great quality. For the AP it’s a new source of revenue and use of existing resources to create a money-making service; for other news organisations – as far as the agency is hoping – it could be a labour-saving device, allowing them to outsource work on far-flung or one-off assignments.

I’m thinking in particular of local media and newspapers here. Many of whom are already AP members in the US – some of whom have left the agency as a results of increased membership fees. Much is made of multimedia and the potential of online publishing platforms to mix words with rich images and more. But where do images from the field stand on a local or regional newsroom’s budget at a time of cuts/limited financial resources?

Some such news organisations are turning photo departments into visual departments – adding video to images – and creating their own money-making products by putting these desks at the heart of the newsroom. US newspaper the Star-Ledger and its website NJ.com is now generating revenue from specialist coverage of local events, in particular high-school sports, and as such video and images remains high on the agenda.

While outsourcing could bring a greater range of images to some news sites and free organisations from the labour of obtaining them, the local knowledge and understanding of an audience can’t be outsourced or replaced by the AP. Local media outlets wanting stronger visuals would do well to develop their own rather than outsource and build products for both a multimedia and potentially commercial end.

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The Straight Choice offers election leaflet widget to regional newspapers and bloggers

Election leaflet project, the Straight Choice, is offering regional newspapers and bloggers a free widget that displays recent leaflets distributed in their local constituencies.

“There are loads of local stories locked away in election leaflets, and we want to make sure that as many local eyes as possible are on them,” said Richard Pope, from the Straight Choice. “So we’ve created a widget that lets local papers and bloggers display leaflets from their constituency on their own website.”

To find your widget, simply visit your constituency’s page via this link, http://www.thestraightchoice.org/browse.php, and find the code at the right hand side of the page.

Furthermore, the Straight Choice is offering users the chance to customise the widget further, by aggregating several constituencies together. Pope encourages anyone interested to contact team [at] thestraightchoice.org.

As we reported at the end of last month, the Guardian started syndicating Straight Choice content on its politics sites.

Here’s an example of the Brighton Pavilion widget (Journalism.co.uk’s local constituency):

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