FT: BBC officially partners with AudioBoo to add programme web clips

The Financial Times has reported that the BBC has officially partnered with AudioBoo to post sound clips from programmes onto its website.

BBC journalists have been using AudioBoo since shortly after its launch in 2009 and the Radio 4 Today programme has providing catch-up audio for some time, getting around 20,000 listens to the 24 “boos” it posts each week, the FT states.

According to the article, the deal will “result in a series of branded BBC channels using AudioBoo, which the BBC hopes will broaden its audience reach worldwide”.

The FT states:

The decision to back such a small home-grown technology company is also a big step for the BBC, which has until now limited its official media partnerships to larger companies, such as Facebook and Twitter.

AudioBoo allows users to record and share up to three minutes of audio using the iPhone app or website. It also offers paid subscriptions for those who want to record and share longer interviews and sounds.

After launching in 2009, London-based AudioBoo gathered a loyal following of journalists and well-known personalities such as Stephen Fry who gave the platform an early boost.

AudioBoo founder and CEO Mark Rock told the FT that the BBC deal “took 18 months and 38 meetings to complete, because it was the first time a large media outlet had given official sanction to his business”.

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Norwegian tabloid newspaper offers readers a ‘Breivik-free’ online edition

Dagbladet, Norway’s second-largest tabloid newspaper, is offering its readers a ‘Breivik-free’ version of their website during the trial of Anders Behring Breivik.

By pressing a button at the top of the homepage marked “Forside uten 22. juli-saken”, readers can remove all mention of the high-profile trial.

Torry Pedersen, editor-in-chief of Verdens Gang, a Norwegian tabloid, told Journalisten.no that his paper considered the idea of having a similar button.

We toyed with the idea. We did the same – inspired by the Guardian – for the Prince’s wedding last year.

The Guardian’s liveblog of the Royal wedding in April 2011 featured a button on the home page which removed all coverage, leaving the reader with just the “proper news”.

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• Metro: World media gear up for the wedding

#Tip of the day from Journalism.co.uk – apps and tools for ‘facilitating the reporting process’

10,000 Words has compiled a list of “websites, applications and tools”, which arose out of the CIR/Google TechRaking conference earlier this month, which help in “facilitating the reporting process”. Tools range from those to help record audio to social media engagement intelligence and project management.

See the full list here.

Tipster: Rachel McAthy

If you have a tip you would like to submit to us at Journalism.co.uk email us using this link– we will pay a fiver for the best ones published.

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Knight Foundation senior advisor receives Markoff award for investigative reporting fund

Senior advisor to the president of the Knight Foundation Eric Newton has received the Markoff Award for the Foundation’s support of investigative reporting.

The Knight Foundation has invested more than $100 million (£63.2m) in reporting technologies and techniques since 2007.

The award was presented on Saturday 14 April by Lowell Bergman, the former 60 Minutes investigative reporter who founded the University of California at Berkeley’s Investigative Reporting Programme, Newton says on the Knight blog as he announces his win:

Knight Foundation has invested some $20 million in investigative reporting projects. They range from establishing an endowed chair, supporting  professional and training organizations, establishment of university-based investigative reporting projects, funding for specific investigations and direct support for independent nonprofit investigative  reporting newsrooms.

Knight’s most recent investigative reporting grant was announced last week – $800,000 to the Center for Investigative Reporting to work with the Investigative News Network to launch an investigative reporting channel on YouTube.

The Markoff Award is named after New York Times journalist John Markoff.

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#jpod – How to engage a subscriber community: Lessons from the Times and Financial Times

Image by Dreamer, via Wikimedia Commons

Community management is a key part of an online news outlet’s operation, and in this week’s podcast we speak to two people at the heart of community operations at the Times and Financial Times, to offer a unique insight into engagement strategies for subscriber communities.

Ben Whitelaw, communities editor at the Times and Rebecca Heptinstall, community manager at the Financial Times, discuss how subscribers use comment facilities to interact with journalists, the ways to recognise the value of subscriber through greater interaction and involvement in feedback and what community engagement really means both on the news website and on social media platforms.

Podcast: Download

For more on the topic of community engagement, this previous podcast looks in more detail at managing reader comments and here’s a feature on how the New York Times is using social media for “deeper” engagement.

And here is a link to the FT’s LinkedIn Readers’ Group referred to by Rebecca in this week’s podcast.

You can hear future podcasts by signing up to the Journalism.co.uk iTunes podcast feed.

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Delayed Kindle edition for Herald set to launch soon

The Herald in Glasgow is expecting to launch an edition for the Amazon Kindle within the next few weeks, following a disagreement with Amazon about delays in the approval process.

The publisher says on its site:

We will be launching a Kindle edition of The Herald soon and are currently going through the approval process with Amazon.

You may have seen our previous notice on this page where we said that Amazon had told us they were putting on hold the launch of any further newspaper publications on the Kindle. We’re delighted to say though that they have now agreed to get The Herald edition up and running as soon as they can.

The Herald previously said that Amazon had stopped approving newspapers for the Kindle – but this claim was denied in a statement to PaidContent:

We are not always able to immediately launch every publisher who contacts us using our more heavyweight integration method. For publishers that want to add their newspaper onto Kindle in self-service fashion, they can also do so via the Amazon Appstore for Android.

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The top 10 most-read stories on Journalism.co.uk, 31 March – 5 April

1. How to: verify content from social media

2. Ten ideas for news outlets using Pinterest

3. Archie Bland to be youngest Independent deputy editor

4. App of the week for journalists: SkyRecorder, for recording Skype calls on iPhone/iPad

5. Students to launch liveblogging platform Ocqur

6. Bloggers lose $105m pay claim against Huffington Post

7. Rebekah Brooks reapplies for Leveson core participant status

8. Veteran broadcaster and Media Society chairman David Walter dies

9. Future Publishing launches iPad-only title as second screen to computer

10. Police refer ‘Gypsy’ headline case to CPS

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#Tip of the day from Journalism.co.uk – data journalism inspiration

Mindy McAdams has created a Storify featuring lots of examples of data journalism to inspire budding data journalists, as well as background reading and other resources, which she has posted on her blog.

Examples include projects by the New York Times and ProPublica.

See the post here.

Tipster: Rachel McAthy

If you have a tip you would like to submit to us at Journalism.co.uk email us using this link– we will pay a fiver for the best ones published.

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#jpod – Advice on verifying social media content and correcting errors

In this week’s podcast we collect together practical advice from those working in digital journalism on the best techniques and tools journalists can use to verify content posted on social media platforms.

The experts emphasise that wherever possible journalists are encouraged to make contact with sources of content directly, such as by phone, but there are also additional checks journalists can make as part of the verification process.

Advice featured in the podcast ranges from how to effectively monitor platforms, how to investigate both the content and source of material and then, once it has been reported (with clear reference to the level of verification achieved), what to do if material later turns out to not be as it first seemed.

Interviewees include:

• Claire Wardle, director of development and integration, Storyful
• Malachy Browne, news editor, Storyful
• Fergus Bell, senior producer and UGC lead, Associated Press
• Paul Bradshaw, course leader of online journalism MA at Birmingham City University, visiting professor at City University London and publisher of Online Journalism Blog and HelpMeInvestigate
• Craig Silverman, founder, Regret the Error, now published on Poynter

Podcast: Download

Background reading/resources on verification:

• Paul Bradshaw, Online Journalism Blog: ‘Content, context and code: verifying information online’
• Craig Silverman, Columbia Journalism Review: ‘Best Practices for Social Media Verification’
• Peter Verweij, Memeburn: ‘Seven top tips for verifying tweets’
• Craig Kanalley, Media Helping Media: ‘Trusting Tweets, a guide for journalists‘
• Journalism.co.uk: ‘#media140 – Al Jazeera’s early start reporting revolutions’

During my interview with Craig Silverman this week, we spoke about the use of crowdsourcing in verification. His comments on this are in the audio below, in which he also refers to some of the advice shared with him by Andy Carvin from National Public Radio:

You can hear future podcasts by signing up to the Journalism.co.uk iTunes podcast feed.

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How the Guardian’s community of commentators contributes to the story

A community of commentators provides the Guardian storytelling process with “cross-fertilisation from below the line”, David Shariatmadari, deputy editor of Comment is Free (CiF), the Guardian’s comment, analysis and discussion platform, told readers at the Guardian Open Weekend event today.

In a session called “digital revolution: how publishing is becoming collaborative”, Shariatmadari explained how 400 non-Guardian staff are commissioned to contribute to CiF every month.

In addition to commissioned commentators, a post-moderated commenting system,  and reposting content from niche blogs, the “opening processes” provided by social media results in “unearthing unexpected gems from the readership”.

“It’s difficult to say where the future of digital collaboration might go next,” Shariatmadari said, but feels “moderation will always be necessary”.

The Guardian trys to reduce the need by moderators by “managing the conversation”, with journalists, community coordinators and moderators joining the debate.

Laura Oliver, a community manager who is one of those “embedded” within the news room and areas such as CiF,  works to reduce the need for moderation by encouraging a healthy community of moderators.

Oliver sees her role as to represent and be the “voice of the reader”, encouraging a “two-way conversation” and broadening the overage.

Once a story is published, that’s not the end of it as that’s where the readers come in.

The Guardian wants to build a returning community, Oliver said, beyond asking readers to “send in pictures of snow”.

She gave the example of ensuring the team “connected” with those contributing from North Africa during the height of the uprisings and ensuring those commentators “would come back to us”.

She also highlighted the collaboration from readers and expert commentators during the daily blog on the Health and Social Care Bill, run during the debate around the amendments to the bill, the pause and its passage through parliament.

Claire Armitstead, literary editor of the Guardian, talked about crowdsourcing and call outs for reader responses and how they influence the sections such as Books.

What this new journalism has opened up is new ways of responding to criticism within the arts.

Dan Roberts, national editor of the Guardian, the chair of the debate, explained how his team started trying to capture witnesses to events, harnessing citizen journalists, and has evolved into opening up to publishing the daily newslist.

The idea is that publishing the list encourages feedback, Roberts said, “in the hope we get some advice and help”.

That way we know that we are chasing the things that readers care about.

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