Journalism.co.uk Editors' Blog » Social media and blogging

What’s Murdoch’s ‘cool new toy’ for accessing media content?

Judith Townend — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 11:46:49 +0000

Australian media is busy speculating over Rupert Murdoch’s new idea for content access.

Margaret Simons of the Content Makers, reports how Caroline Overington, senior writer and columnist with The Australian (part of Murdoch’s News Limited) let slip that Rupert Murdoch’s pay wall plans might include a ‘cool new toy’ for accessing media content.

Simons reports from the Media140 conference:

“Overington said that News Limited had many wonderful plans of which they were very proud, and they could not be unveiled yet, but she believed they would lead people to pay for content.

“Then in the closing stages of the session, she referred to iTunes, and how people had turned to paying for music that they could get elsewhere for free because of the entry of a ‘cool new toy’ in the iPhone.

“She added: ‘That’s kind of what we are thinking about.’

“So what is it, I wonder? Some kind of deal with Apple, soon to release its new electronic reader? A competing product? Very intriguing.”

An update, pointing to coverage of the Apple Tablet negotiations, with more speculation on the ‘iRupert’ at this link.

And Overington at Media140 courtesy of SlowTV.

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Testing times for Mail Online’s comment system

Laura Oliver — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 17:12:53 +0000

The introduction of a rating system for comments on articles on the Daily Mail’s website back in December last year was a bold move for a site that often publishes highly controversial (or certainly comment-provoking) articles.

Comments on the site can be removed by the editorial team if necessary, but the aim of the system is that users will act as moderators, flagging up inappropriate content.

One particular story last weekend tested its mettle: the report on the death of a man in the back of a lorry in the channel tunnel.

The article in question provoked a spate of offensive and abusive comments (as shown in this screengrab captured by FiveChineseCrackers.com).

As Mail Watch points out in a post on the matter: “If these are the highest rated, and thus most visible, comments, how does that reflect upon the ‘controls’ and ‘processes’ used by Mail Online to prevent ‘inappropriate content’ appearing?”

By Monday afternoon the comments referred to had been removed from the piece. At time of writing this blog post, only two comments appeared on the article and additional comments are no longer being accepted:

As Mail Online’s terms and conditions page states, the site is not liable for third party content including comments posted by users.

And the site’s own House Rules suggest that pre-moderation of comments is not always the case:

“Reader comments that violate the letter or spirit of these rules or our Terms may be removed (or, if checked in advance, not published in the first place). If we do remove something, we will generally remove whole posts, or where necessary, whole threads (not parts). This means that even if only one sentence is objectionable, the whole comment will usually be removed (or not published).”

In this case, however, the screengrab clearly states above the offensive comments: “The comments below have been moderated in advance.”

Asking how such incidents affect the Mail’s attitude to commenting, a spokesman told Journalism.co.uk:

“As regards the Channel Tunnel story, several inappropriate comments were posted until they were rightly flagged up through the ‘report abuse’ facility when we immediately took them down. This shows our system is working as it was designed.

“The comments facility is a much-loved part of Mail Online and phenomenally popular.

“To enable as many people as possible to have their say the vast majority of our comments are now not moderated in advance. This presents a new challenge for us and our readers but we are happy the system is working well.”

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Brighton Argus recruiting police community bloggers; PCSO Sam Justice among them

Judith Townend — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 16:13:32 +0000

It’s nearly an entry for the Radio 4 ‘Sorry I Haven’t A Clue’ Late Arrivals game, and definitely a candidate for PopBitch’s ‘Favourite’ feature: PCSO Sam Justice is among the new police community support officer bloggers recruited by the Brighton Argus.

As reported very speedily by Sarah Hartley this morning, Newsquest’s Brighton Argus plans to use community police officers to cover local beats for its hyperlocal network.

“I’m hoping the contributions to the site will start becoming really varied, a mixture of people hoping to cut their journalistic teeth, the community figures who have always reported on their neighbourhoods in some shape or form, and those who want somewhere to get their voices and stories heard,” web editor Jo Wadsworth told Journalism.co.uk.

And if she’s looking for more contributors, Journalism.co.uk would highly recommend checking out Channel 5’s Brighton Beach Patrol, featuring some wonderful characters we’ve been looking out for ever since [show pictured left].

Wadsworth has been building up the community correspondent network for a while: around six months ago, students from Brighton Journalist Works were brought on board. Students upload weekly vox pop video interviews with members of the public and three students run a weekly fashion blog.

Earlier in the year she recruited – with a little egging-on from Journalism.co.uk – Guardian media blogger Roy Greenslade as a Kemp Town community correspondent, whose latest post can be viewed here.

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Revolution: Welt Kompakt launches Google Wave to reach readers

Laura Oliver — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 15:22:12 +0000

Welt Kompakt, sister title of German national newspaper Die Welt, has created a ‘wave’ on Google’s new service in a move to attract younger readers.

I don’t have an invite so if you can access the wave at this link, tell us what Welt is doing and if it works for you.

Full post at this link…

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The Media Blog: What’s the value of a journalist that Twitters?

Laura Oliver — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 09:25:58 +0000

Chie Elliott looks into the relationship between journalists that use Twitter and the Audit Bureau of Circulations Electronic (ABCe) results for their respective titles in this post.

“Media people are using Twitter as an instrument for sharing and crowdsourcing, for networking and live-reporting. A journalist with a popular blog or social media presence can only be positive for the publication’s brand. If Twitter is a waste of work time, time has never been so well wasted. Furthermore, if a journalist is creating content while simultaneously publicising the content carrier, isn’t that doing two jobs for the price of one?”

via The Media Blog: Are journalists who tweet value for money?.

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OJR: Q&A with ‘personalised’ news service TwitterTim.es

Judith Townend — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 09:53:09 +0000

Writing on the Online Journalism Review, Eric Ulken profiles TwitterTim.es, a new service that uses Twitter feeds to created personalised ‘newspapers’.

Maxim Grinev (@maxgrinev) from TwitterTim.es said: “We look at the tweets that your friends send, and also tweets that friends of your friends send. So, first circle and second circle. And then we extract links from those tweets. Usually links are shortened, so we get the long versions. Then we group by links and calculate how many times each link is posted by your friends and friends of friends to built your personalized ‘newspaper’.”

Full post at this link…

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Malcolm Coles: Growth of newspaper Twitter accounts running out of steam

Malcolm Coles — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 12:07:51 +0000

This is a cross-post from Malcolm Coles’ personal website. You can read other posts by Coles on the Journalism.co.uk Editors’ Blog at this link.

UK national newspaper Twitter accounts are continuing to grow – but at an ever slower rate, according to the latest figures for the 130 accounts I’m tracking:

July to August growth: 17 per cent
August to September growth: 17 per cent
September to October growth: 13.1 per cent
October to November growth: 8.3 per cent

The detail
These 130 accounts had 1,801,811 followers on November 2, up by 137,568 from 1,664,243 on October 1. Of that increase, 95,007 (or 69 per cent) was for the @guardiantech account (which benefits from being on Twitter’s suggested user list).

(NB – the Telegraph seems to have deleted its badly spelled @TelegraphScienc account, so I’ve restated October’s figures to be for 130 accounts, rather than the 131 I used to track).

The biggest mover was @MirrorFootball, up 11 places to 81st (from 455 to 809 followers), suggesting the Mirror is finally making some use of Twitter (most of its other accounts are near the bottom – and only appear to have moved up a place because of the demise of the Telegraph’s Science account).

As ever, the full spreadsheet is here or you can see the iframe below.

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Comment: Raw nerves and healthy debate over the new ‘Twitter mob’

John Mair — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 10:08:05 +0000

It is good to be a pioneer and start a healthy debate. I did just that with my Journalism.co.uk article on the ’smart and not so smart mob’ all of two weeks ago.

That short opinion piece focused on the row over Jan Moir and her Daily Mail article on the death of Stephen Gately and the subsequent mass complaints (over 22,000) to the Press Complaints Commission.

It hit a nerve. A raw nerve in the case of Suw Charman Anderson who accused me of just ‘not getting the point’ of swift internet social movements. The piece was categorised ‘Fuckwittery’. No bias there then. The followers on her blog echoed her sentiments.

But then others joined in: Stephen Glover in his weekly column on the media in the Independent on October 25 talked of hate in the blogosphere and whether it was a good or bad thing. His view was the latter. His conclusion? ‘The Jan Moir case would seem to show the internet, which is supposed by many to enhance pluralism and democracy, being used by some outraged members of a lobby to challenge the traditional right of free speech’.

Fellow hack Joanne Geary weighed in three days later with an intelligent and measured piece in her blog about her disquiet on online protests. Her piece was thoughtful and thought-provoking and has elicited some very sympathetic responses and comments. No wonder Roy Greenslade describes her as ‘that most enterprising of newspaper bloggers’. Read that debate. It is measured and rational and open.

More nationals were not far behind, Jon Henley in the Guardian with ‘The power of Tweets’ (October 31) about the new mob from which the paper had reaped much benefit in the Trafigura case; a Stephen Armstrong piece in the Sunday Times, ‘An online mob. On the internet retribution is swift’ (November 1). The great Nick Cohen joined the discussion in the Observer. The debate was and is out there.

But will the Twitterati ultimately eat themselves? At the weekend, the best known of them all, Stephen Fry, announced he was quitting Twitter after being insulted by a fellow Twitterer, then got on a plane to Los Angeles.

As he was airbound, the cyber-storm (he has close to a million followers on Twitter) erupted over his head pleading with him to rescind. The crowd cried for him to come back to Twitterland. He did from LAX.

Let the online debate continue.

John Mair is a senior lecturer in broadcasting at Coventry University. He is a former BBC, ITV and Channel Four producer. He is the incoming chair of the Institute of Communication Ethics.

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Jon Bernstein: Tweets, elites and the same old news agenda

Jon Bernstein — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 10:36:59 +0000

Has new media reinvigorated democracy or throttled good journalism, asks Dr Natalie Fenton in her forthcoming book ‘New Media, Old News: Journalism and Democracy in a Digital Age’.

And her answer? Well, the clue is in the title.

The book is not quite a pessimist’s charter, but nor does it side with the ‘utopian vision [of] everyone connected to everyone else, a non-hierarchical network of voices with equal, open and global access.’

Fenton and her team of researchers at Goldsmiths make two key observations. Firstly, that the mechanics of the journalist’s trade is suffering because of the desk-bound demands of new media – ‘iron cages’, they call them.

Secondly, new media rarely means new voices on the national stage because the ‘economics of news remains stacked against the newcomer’.

Fenton was on Radio 4’s The Media Show on Wednesday last week to expand on her thinking. Of the new media newsrooms her team studied in detail (BBC, The Guardian and the Manchester Evening News), she said:

“What you get is a vastly speeded up news environment, a huge expansion in space to fill but actually with less journalists with less time to do proper investigative journalism.

“There was a big concentration in ‘cut and paste’, administrative, desk-bound journalism largely because these journalists have to fill a vast amount of space, have no time to do it in. So what they do, is they either take PR copy or they take copy from other newsprint or other news broadcasts. So it’s a sort of creative cannibalisation.”

Clear echoes of Nick Davies and Flat Earth News here.

She was asked about the power of social networks to influence the news agenda. On the Jan Moir saga she said:

“[You] have to take account of who is saying what to whom. The who is actually a very small amount of people. Ten per cent of people who Twitter account for 90 per cent of the content.

“That 10 per cent is an elite. They are the likes of Stephen Fry with a celebrity status who can generate these millions of followers and therefore bring attention to a particular issue. Most people who are tweeting do not have that power.”

On the Twitter campaign against the Trafigura super-injunction, meanwhile, Fenton conceded that this was a good example of institutions being held to account:

“But on the whole what they are still doing is responding to agendas that are set by the mainstream news.

“You still have to remember that most people, most of the time get most of their news and information from mainstream news sources whether that’s online or not. So what’s going on in the mainstream is vitally important.”

A well-worked argument, forcefully put. But on elites and news agendas it rather depends where you look.

If you study established players like the BBC, the Guardian, and, yes, a venerable regional like the Manchester Evening News, you are likely to find established forms of interaction.

It’s true that many social media campaigns either take up a mainstream media cause – think Trafigura – or need the mainstream to mediate – think the secret filming of Alan Duncan.

Nevertheless, there are many other campaigns and activities below the radar that provide effective examples of reinvigorating democracy.

In this respect, think hyperlocal. Indeed one of the leading practitioners of the form, Will Perrin, took me to task for applying big media assumptions to ultra-local coverage. He wrote:

“Hyperlocal content is best looked at bottom up, generated not by an abstract, detached journalist, but by people on the ground who it affects. Seen from that angle the trad top down issues fall away – grassroots hyperlocal content is defined by its own creation.”

Again, it depends where you look. As with Davies’ widely acclaimed book, the research methodology might just point to a structural weaknesses.

(You can listen to the interview on the iPlayer. starts around 23 mins.)

Jon Bernstein is former multimedia editor of Channel 4 News and was recently appointed as deputy editor of New Statesman. This is part of a series of regular columns for Journalism.co.uk. You can read his personal blog at this link.

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OJR: ‘Does your site really need to be in Google News?’

Judith Townend — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 09:59:03 +0000

Just how important is it to get your site into Google News? Robert Niles raises the question on the Knight Digital Media Center’s Online Journalism Review.

“For many online publishers, affiliated with newspapers or not, the Holy Grail of traffic is inclusion in the Google News index.

(…)

“But is inclusion in that index or other search engines’ news indices really worthwhile for the majority of online news publishers? I’m going to argue… no. (Well, at least it’s not worth making a fuss over.)”

Full post at this link…

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