Guido to introduce community rating system to blog

(or, ‘how many times can we use the word ‘comment’ in one blog post’?)

Guido Fawkes got the comments going today with a post that said he is ‘mulling over’ whether to moderate comments over the holiday period. He also announces that in the new year a ‘community rating’ element will be introduced to his blog (details at end of this post).

Guido Fawkes, aka Paul Staines, referred back to November, to the Goldsmiths seminar on media ethics and a comment from the Times Comment editor, Anne Spackman, who said that TimesOnline spends ’six figures’ on pre-moderating online comments [unclear over what time period - Journalism.co.uk will follow-up soon. UPDATE 19/12: Anne Spackman told Journalism.co.uk that the paper cannot currently clarify exact details, but that a six figure bill is paid to another partner.]

Fawkes said today on his blog:

“It is certainly expensive in time, every morning Guido deletes a load of comments which have, in his rather arbitrary judgement, just gone too far.”

Journalism.co.uk was also at the Goldsmiths event and spoke to Fawkes afterwards. He told Journalism.co.uk that he doesn’t moderate comments - ‘it has to get pretty gynecological before I do’.

In regards to the BNP list (which had leaked that week): “I did allow it. oh terrible, terrible, terrible. Oh well…”

“I deleted the stuff about Baby P,” he told Journalism.co.uk.

“I noticed it [information about Baby P] was still on the BBC’s website. I called them up, and they said ‘we’re not taking it down because the order doesn’t apply’.  I said ‘well, is it because it’s an order or because it is right or wrong?’”

Fawkes said that if he is found to be ‘in the wrong’ he’ll take something down, but added that ‘it’s very difficult to send me a writ.’

“Unless you catch me having a drink here, where are you going to send the writ?”

“There’s no bricks and mortar,” he said.

While Guido Fawkes says on his blog post that he takes a ’sticks and stones view to a large extent’, he outlines a number of changes to be introduced in the New Year:

“[Y]ou [the users] will still be able to say what you like (within somewhat arbitrary inconsistent limits) without pre-moderation or registering. However there will be incentives for those who produce better quality commentary based on a new element of co-conspirator community rating.

“Good comments will be more prominently displayed, disliked comments will be less prominent. The biggest innovation is that it will be possible for readers to set their own tolerance thresholds. Poorly rated comments will be invisible to those who set their preferences accordingly.

“If you only want to see comments judged by co-conspirators to be witty, amusing or illuminating, set your threshold to ‘Recommended’. Don’t want to read foul language? Set your threshold to ‘U’. Want to see all and any comments no matter how foul? Set your threshold to ‘XXX’.

“If your commentary is consistently recommended your comments will automatically be more prominent in the future and may even get highlighted on the frontpage.”

Unmoderated comments follow his post.

Tags: Ann Spackman, BBC, British Broadcasting Corporation, Guido Fawkes, Journalism.co.uk, media ethics, New Year's Day, order-order.com, Paul Staines, The Times, The Times Global Broadcasting Co Ltd, XXX

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YouTube round-up: BBC Russian and Davos videos

The BBC has made good on its October promise to launch six new video channels on YouTube in Urdu, Spanish, Russian, Persian, Portuguese and Arabic and has rolled out its Russian stream.

The BBC Russian YouTube channel will feature footage from BBC Russian correspondents and Russian-language reports on major news events.

The other multi-language channels will be launched between now and early 2009, a press release from the corporation said.

YouTube is getting in on the act again ahead of the World Economic Forum at Davos next month by asking users to send their video answers to the following questions:

Are you confident that global growth will be restored in 2009?
Will the environment lose out to the economy in 2009?
Will the Obama administration improve the state of the world in 2009?
Should company executives have a code of ethics similar to doctors and lawyers?

The best clips, which can be uploaded to the site’s Davos channel, will be broadcast at the forum during sessions; while the user who creates the best video, as voted for by other YouTubers, will have the opportunity to attend the event, all expenses paid, as a citizen reporter for YouTube.

In a repeat of last year’s event, a YouTube booth for attendees of the forum to upload their video responses to the debates will also be available, according to a press release.

This seems to be just one strand of the forum’s multimedia activities. It’s also represented on Twitter, MySpace, Facebook, Flickr and  questions for press conferences can be submitted via Qik and Mogalus.

Tags: BBC, British Broadcasting Corporation, Davos, Russian stream, World Economic Forum, YouTube

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Women don’t fare too well on the power league lists

The Observer’s Women’s Special in the Review section, spanning 80 years of history, made interesting reading over the weekend: apparently men still dominate the top levels of media, politics, finance and … church. Of note were the ‘big lists’ split into male/female ratio. Here are those relevant to the media sector (percentages refer to the female portion of the list):

• Sunday Times Rich List: 1%
Of 95 women listed in the top 1,000, 56 are half of male-female partnerships.

• Vanity Fair ‘New Establishment’ 100: 9%
Three women feature as part of male-female partnerships; only one woman - Angelina Jolie - in top ten.

• Telegraph 100 Living Geniuses: 15%
No women feature in top 30.

• Media Guardian Top 100: 21%
One woman, BBC’s Jane Tranter, in top ten.

• Entertainment Weekly 50 Smartest People in Hollywood: 24%
Two women in top 25.

• Evening Standard 1001 Powerful Londoners: 27%.

Tags: Angelina Jolie, BBC, British Broadcasting Corporation, Entertainment Weekly, Evening Standard, finance, Sunday Times, The Observer, the Review

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Peaceful elections just ain’t news - the dire state of world reporting on Africa

Yesterday I picked up a discussion on Facebook, via a friend, about media coverage of the Ghanaian elections (voters went to the polls yesterday, and votes are being counted now, if you missed it, by the way) why had there been so little election coverage on the Western networks? Very little on CNN; very little on BBC.

“I was hoping, only hoping that for just a fraction of a moment the media cameras and the pens will slip from Mugabe’s Zimbabwe onto Ghana. Just a bit of positive reportage on Africa! That’s all I was hoping for. But I guess that’s not sensational enough for the Western media. ‘Ghana peacefully elects a new President’… that’s not headline stuff! It simply does not sell,” wrote Maclean Arthur.

Meanwhile, Oluniyi David Ajao rounds up the poor global news coverage here, on his blog. ‘Does Ghana exist’ he asks? He finds it ‘interesting that many of the leading Western media outlets have not made a mention of Ghana 2008 Elections.’

“Perhaps, Ghana does not exist on their radar screen. Ghana, like the rest of black Africa will only pop-up on their monitoring screens when over 1,000 people have butchered themselves or over 300,000 people are dying of starvation, or over 500,000 people are displaced by a civil war,” Ajao writes.

Over on Facebook, others were quick to join in the criticism and call for more African specific coverage, in the form of an African television network.

That’s exactly what Salim Amin wants to set-up, in a bid to counter existing coverage (or lack thereof) with a proposed all-African television network, A24, as I have written about on Journalism.co.uk before. Amin told me in September:

“Everything we get is negative out of Africa. 99 per cent of the news is genocides, wars, famine, HIV.

“We’re not saying those things don’t occur or we’re going to brush them under the carpet, but what we’re saying is there are other things people want to know about. About business, about sport, about music, environment, health…

“Even the negative stuff needs to be done from an African perspective. African journalists are not telling those stories – it’s still foreign correspondents being parachuted into the continent to tell those stories. We want to give that opportunity to Africans to come up with their own solutions and tell their own stories.”

However, Amin is still searching for suitable investors that won’t compromise the ideals and aims of the channel. In the meantime, A24 exists as an online video agency.

The pitiful global coverage of the Ghanaian election reinforces the need for better and wider spread African news coverage, that isn’t just the stereotypical coverage we’re so used to, as Maclean Arthur referred to on Faceboook as ‘the usual images of dying children with flies gallivanting all over their chapped lips.’

Yes, some websites are bridging some gaps (for example, New America Media for the ethnic media in the US, and Global Voices Online - who wrote about Twittering the Ghanaian elections here), but there’s still a heck of a way to go. BBC World Service may have a Ghana Election page, but it’s not quite on the same scale as you might see for a European election is it?

Tags: africa, african news agency, african television network, BBC, British Broadcasting Corporation, CNN, ethnic media, Ghana, ghanaian presidential election, global voices online, media cameras, media coverage, online video agency, Salim Amin, television network, United States, Zimbabwe

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BrandRepublic (via PopBitch): Daily Mail and BBC Local conspiracy theory

"It isn't like the Daily Mail needs an excuse to bash the BBC, but was there more at play in the recent 'Sachsgate' affair than meets the eye?" asks Gordon Macmillan, following up on today's PopBitch item. Full story...

Tags: BBC, British Broadcasting Corporation, Gordon Macmillan, The Daily Mail

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Official statement from family of BBC journalist, Kate Peyton

Further to the interview and news item on the Journalism.co.uk main page, here is the Peyton family’s official statement, made following the conclusion of the inquest investigating the circumstances of BBC journalist Kate Peyton’s death in Somalia in 2005. The Coroner’s verdict can be read here, as reported at the Guardian.

“We are gratified that, after nearly four years, the Coroner has been able to offer some advice as to how the BBC might improve its treatment of journalists asked to undertake dangerous assignments - especially when there may be aspects of their personal lives or of the nature of their employment that impair their capacity to make a clear and considered judgment of issues of risk, both to themselves and their colleagues.

“However, we have found it baffling, depressing and exhausting that the BBC has put so much of its energy, and considerable financial resources, into preventing that advice from being heard - beginning in 2005 with a claim from a senior newsgathering executive that it was ‘neither necessary nor appropriate’ to look into the detail of the deployment and the role of Kate’s immediate manager in it, and concluding with strenuous efforts to narrow the Coroner’s scope so radically that nothing would have been considered other than events after Kate’s arrival in Mogadishu.

“We would like to believe that the BBC is sincere in its assurance, given in court, that it will incorporate the Coroner’s advice into its future procedures; but given that, since this summer, it has strained every nerve to prevent him from having the opportunity to deliver that advice, and even now has not ruled out judicially reviewing his decision, we have reason to doubt its seriousness.

“We wholeheartedly agree with the substance of the Coroner’s advice. In light of it, we would like to ask whether it is sensible to employ journalists who may be asked to go to dangerous countries on a regular basis using short-term contracts. In our view, this practice presents a clear possibility of the repetition of tragedies such as this.”

Tags: BBC, British Broadcasting Corporation, charles peyton, coroner, inquest, Journalism.co.uk, Kate Peyton, Mogadishu, rebecca peyton, Somalia, The Guardian

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Mumbai bloggers interviewed - video collection

Here are clips of the various Mumbai blogger interviews. Fuller multimedia round-up here.

Dina, who blogs at Mumbaihelp.blogspot.com and on her own site and Vinu, whose photographs have been viewed by nearly 100,000  (at time of writing) on Flickr, speaking on CNN.

Amit Varma, who blogged a first-hand account, interviewed by the BBC (vision very poor but audio is adequate)

Gaurav Mishra, also interviewed in a text interview on the main page of Journalism.co.uk, here featured in the CBS Early Show coverage, looking at the reportage through citizen journalism:

Watch CBS Videos Online

Tags: Amit Varma, BBC, bombay, British Broadcasting Corporation, CBS, CBS Corporation, CNN, Gaurav Mishra, India, Journalism.co.uk, Maharashtra, Mumbai, terror attacks, terrorism, Time Warner Inc.

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Organ Grinder: Jeremy Dear: end casualisation in war reporting

Journalist Kate Peyton, who was killed in Somalia in 2005, was a victim of 'the creeping casualisation of the media workforce', argues the general secretary of the National Union of Journalists (NUJ). Peyton agreed to work in Somalia to protect her contract with the BBC, says Dear. "It casualisation makes people disposable and discourages dissent and caution. Staff near the end of their contracts feel they have to go to any lengths to prove their worth," he adds. Full story...

Tags: BBC, British Broadcasting Corporation, Jeremy Dear, Kate Peyton, National Union, Somalia

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Mumbai online: the attacks reported live (updating)

A look at where the news has unfolded. Please post additional links below. Journalism.co.uk will add in more links as they are spotted.

Washington-based blogger and social media expert, Gaurav Mishra talks to Journalism.co.uk in an interview published on the main page.

One of the few on-the-ground user-generated content examples, Vinu’s Flickr stream (screen grab above). Slide show below:

How it has been reported:

• NDTV looks at the way it unfolded on the net and promotes its own forums. “Citizens of the World Wide Web have connected to terror-stricken Mumbai in a way never seen before,” it reports. One eyewitness, Dinesh Kumar, used a forum on NDTV.com to share his experiences as he tried to make his way back home from work, the article says.
• The Wikipedia current event page is almost filling role of a blog or news service, with its extremely quick updates.
  

Photography:

• Flickr users such as Vinu, have uploaded pictures from the scene (images: all rights reserved).
• A Flickr search such as this one, brings up images from Mumbai, although many are reproduced from a few sources. People have also taken pictures of the television news coverage.
• But before you re-publish your finds beware: an advanced search which filters pictures by copyright and only shows up images opened up under Creative Commons, limits the results.

Blogs:

• Bloggers, such as Gaurav Mishra are tracking it live, and point out useful links. He has also collected together relevant Tweets.
• Other blogs to look out for: Rediff.com; Mumbai.metblogs.com. More to come.
• List of blogs, probably from outside, but outside Mumbai: Blogada roundup here.
• On the ground blogs: Amit Varma’s India Uncut; Sonia Faleiro; Arun Shanbhag

Breaking news:

• The BBC has a good stream of breaking news, with most recent at top; likewise, the Guardian’s is here.
• Away from mainstream media, NowPublic are charting it here and Ground Report here.

Social Media:

• Facebook doesn’t seem to have that much activity as yet and is not that helpful for finding news, although members of Mumbai related groups are posting comments on the walls.
• Update (27/11/08): New Facebook groups formed:‘In memory of all those who died in the 26th-27th november MUMBAI massacre’; ‘26 November 2008 - Terrorist Attacks on Mumbai’.

Microblogging:

• This Roomatic page brings together Twitter updates in chatroom format: makes it very easy to follow and updates quicked than you can read.
• Lloyd Shepherd blogged that Mumbai ‘tweets’ appear to have been restrained, seemingly by the Indian authorities. (update: however, seems quite unlikely… Anyone know if any truth in this?) Check out Amy Gahran’s post here, which raises some good points about the danger of Twitter rumours…
• The Twitter stream can be followed here: http://search.twitter.com/search?q=mumbai
• Gaurav Mishra writes, “so far, micro-blogging service Twitter seems to be the best source for real time citizen news on the Mumbai terrorist attacks, and “Mumbai” & “#Mumbai” are both on Twitter trending topics now.”
• Summed up here, at Wired.com.

Mapping:

• NYTimes.com has linked photos to the attack sites on its interactive map.
• The Guardian does a nice job here. Click on the cameras to see what took place.

Video:

• The Google video seach is here. YouTube videos are mainly limited to broadcast footage, with one user even filming the TV reports, for those without access to live television coverage. YouTube videos seem to be all second-hand broadcasts from mainstream media.

Timelines:

• Mirror.co.uk (Mumbai November 26-7) and Guardian (for past terrorist attacks in India). BBC timeline here (complete with contentious Twitter quote).

• Dipity timeline here:

Campaigns / Aid:

• In the same vein as Tsunami Help started in 2004/5, MumbaiHelp has been launched, with lists of the dead/injured here: http://tr.im/1kg3 http://tr.im/1kg2 /  http://tr.im/1kg1 / http://tr.im/1kg0 / http://tr.im/1kfz

Tags: Amit Varma, Amy Gahran, Arun Shanbhag, attacks, BBC, bombay, British Broadcasting Corporation, D.C., Dinesh Kumar, Flickr stream, Gaurav Mirshra, Gaurav Mishra, google, India, Journalism.co.uk, Lloyd Shepherd, Maharashtra, mainstream media, media, Mirror.co.uk, Mumbai, social media, social media expert, Sonia Faleiro, The Guardian, Twitter stream, United States, Washington, YouTube

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British and Spanish journalist kidnapping in Somalia - details still to be confirmed

Although reports with additional information are available online, exact details of the journalists kidnapped in Somalia remain unconfirmed. Articles that name the journalists have been removed from various news sites.

BBC yesterday reported:

“A British and Spanish journalist in Somalia have been kidnapped from the north-eastern Puntland region, local authorities say.

“Government officials said the pair were taken from their hotel in the port city of Bossasso.

“(…) the journalists were in Bossasso to cover the story of piracy hijackings off Puntland’s coast. He says the foreigners were abducted by gunmen along with two local reporters.

“‘The two foreigners are British and Spanish,’ Abdulkebir Musa, Puntland’s assistant minister for seaports, told news agency AFP.

“The office of Puntland’s president confirmed this information to the BBC.”

Journalism.co.uk will update when further reports are received from the relevant sources.

Tags: Abdulkebir Musa, Administradora de Fondos de Pensiones Provida S.A., afp, BBC, Bossasso, British Broadcasting Corporation, journalists, kidnapping, news agency, Puntland, Puntland's coast, Somalia

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