“The general election is fast approaching and the Sun’s decision to publish its support for the Tories has brought the subject of political reporting to the forefront of debate once again,” is how City University introduces tonight’s political journalism debate.

The panel debating the general election race will include: Sam Coates (chief political correspondent, the Times), Pippa Crerar (political correspondent, Evening Standard) and Steve Richards (chief political commentator, the Independent). They’ll be answering:

“Does it matter nowadays if the Sun switches party? Will TV debates make any difference to the result? What effect will the scandal of MPs expenses have? Has blogging changed politics? And what do Gordon Brown’s aides mean when they talk about ‘the news sandwich’?”

We’re hoping there will be some tweets live from the event. We’re told the hashtag is #citywot, so look out for them here…

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Last night celebrated the launch of City University’s new Science Journalism MA; its first students had front row seats for the libel debate featuring, among others, science journalist Simon Singh and blogger/doctor, Ben Goldacre.

Around 75 per cent of the students come from science backgrounds, its course leader Connie St. Louis, a former BBC journalist, told Journalism.co.uk.  Science, health, medicine and environment are on the front pages more than ever, she said.

“This MA is designed to fill the gap between poor reporting and good reporting – to make sure the journalists for the future are multi-skilled, well informed, can negotiate science papers and understand the process of science and become champions of evidence not just speculation.

It’s ‘essentially unravelling of the scientific process’ she said.

But, added St. Louis, she is not keen on scientists replacing journalists as the purveyors of scientific news: “I think there’s a danger when scientists themselves report the news. I think the role of journalist as the adjudicator and the person who understands, interprets and contextualises the story is incredibly important.”

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As reported in May,  Adrian Monck is to leave his position as head of journalism at City University, London after four years, to lead the communications team for the World Economic Forum, which holds the annual meeting for global leaders in Davos, Switzerland. Today, he bids farewell to City in this blog post, originally published here.

Although I’ll be haunting College Building for the next week or so, today is my leaving drinks (or ‘glad you’re gone’ party as we used to call them).

I’ll be keeping up a link with the place as a prof, and I’ll be trying to bash out a PhD. And I’ll also be giving a modest sum for the highest scoring MA project, which will be a prize in memory of Richard Wild. The first £250 will be handed out this autumn, so any City students reading: heads down for the finishing line!

Since I came to City in 2005, we’ve launched an MA in Journalism with new pathways in science and investigation, a Masters in Political Campaigning and Reporting, an MA in Creative Writing Non-Fiction, and a BA in Journalism. We’ve gained some fantastic new staff to go alongside the existing terrific team, including the Guardian’s David Leigh, Channel 4’s David Lloyd, ITN’s Penny Marshall and visiting fellows like Heather Brooke and tech guru Robin Hamman. We have a distinguished scholar as head of research, Professor Howard Tumber, and we’ve just appointed Britain’s first professor of financial reporting, a chair in honour of Marjorie Deane (expect more on financial journalism soon).

We brought the Centre for Investigative Journalism to City, and its successful summer schools and hopefully there’ll be new initiatives to announce in that area soon.

We’ve established a digital core to our curriculum – there should be a partnership with Nokia coming up in the autumn.

And this year we finally moved into multi-million pound facilities (on Flickr) worthy of the talents of the people who teach and study here. And we have a Graduate School of Journalism to go alongside the best anywhere has to offer.

Best of all, I’ve witnessed the annual progression of an extraordinary group of people who’ve joined us from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe, and from Lancashire to Lagos – our students. Their qualities are what make so many people want to give up time to teach here. Their enthusiasms and passions are among the rewards.

It’s not all been plain sailing, as anyone who’s brushed up against me will doubtless agree. But I hope it’s been worth it. City is now, more than ever, a global school for journalism, bringing in people from around the world to share experiences and gain new insights. Its future is already being mapped out in areas like political and humanitarian campaigning, and in deepening specialist knowledge amongst those competing to enter what is still an extraordinarily privileged world.

And the privilege of journalism? It’s the privilege of speech. Maybe it’s narcissistic, maybe it’s worth dying for.

But despite our disagreements (and let’s be honest, academics have to be able to start arguments with themselves) it’s what unites me with colleagues in education, in the news business, and with new friends and acquaintances in the ever-widening world beyond.

So, with whatever voice you choose, keep speaking up.

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A little while ago Journalism.co.uk asked for examples of journalism students’ projects. Feel free to send more, whether you’re midway through, or at the end, of a course.

As mentioned in the last post, City University MA International Journalism students (2008-2009) produced the London File, at this link. Now their course is over, the news stories are out-of-date but the sites is still live for a visit.

It’s a news site divided into eight sections (home / EU elections special / social affairs / world affairs / insider life / science & health / arts / sport / money), plus a campaign, which ‘aimed to explore the various forms of public surveillance and investigate issues relating to ways in which the government monitors the private lives of ordinary citizens.’

The team’s overall goal was to ‘to capture and report the realities and issues on the ground in London, as they happen’.

Here’s what their editor-in-chief, Annabel Symington, had to say at the end of the project:

“The London File was the last assessment for our MA, and it was really nice to all be working together on a project. We began planning the
site five weeks before we went live, and planned to keep up loading new content to the site on a rolling deadline for two weeks.

“The two weeks were a really intense time. We were responsible for every aspect of the site, from getting the content to designing the pages, and it was a lot of work balancing all of the different jobs necessary – getting a website to work as well as going out and being journalists.

“Throughout the process we have been supported by our tutors who have been putting in as much time as we have. It’s certainly been a steep
learning curve. I don’t think that anyone had appreciated how much work needs to be put into a site before it actually goes live, and in
many ways we were trying to get a fully formed website running before we could even walk. But we got there in the end. The site looks great, despite the few hiccups we had along the way.”

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Last week (Thursday May 28) Bloomberg’s former multimedia editor, Abhik Sen, spoke to journalism students at City University on a range of topics:

MPs’ expenses:
Revelations about MPs’ expenses would not have had as much impact if the story had been broken online, the former editor of multimedia at Bloomberg told students. “There are still some stories which work much better in traditional formats,” he said. “The MPs’ expenses story could have been broken in any format but it would not have had the same impact if it hadn’t been print.”

“The resulting chaos in Westminster probably would not have happened if it had broken on a blog or website. That medium just doesn’t have the same impact as the front page of a newspaper does.”

Sen added that the gradual ‘drip feed’ of information in the daily papers and sustained ‘wall-to-wall coverage’ in the Daily Telegraph allowed the story to build a momentum that would not have been possible in the rolling news environment of the web.

Where multimedia works best
He emphasised that online journalism continued to surpass traditional formats in  providing ‘more detailed, more thoughtful’ coverage and a ‘360 degree view’ of any story.

“For the swine flu story, for example, you get the headlines in the newspapers and the footage on the television channels, but for a comprehensive view you have to go online and look at videos, stories, first person pieces, interactive graphics, maps,” he said. “That rule holds true for pretty much every big story, from Obama to climate change.”

“TV and newspapers are the entry point for the news cycle,” he added. “Only people who are particularly interested in a story will then go digging for more stuff online. But that’s when they will expect comprehensive, meaty content.

“Then, multimedia journalists have to take the game to the next level: beyond the headline, beyond the immediate soundbite.”

Sen’s tips for journalists
“In tomorrow’s world, which is pretty much today’s world, there is no media organisation which is not thinking multiplatform,” the former multimedia editor at Bloomberg. “Everyone will have to be a multimedia journalist of some sort. The earlier you get familiar with the grammar of multimedia, the easier and better it will be.”

• Planning is important. “Most bad multimedia pieces flounder because not enough thought has been put into what you are trying to communicate,” he warned. “Think about how your story could best be told and what sort of interactivity you want to offer.”

• Get creative. The challenge for multimedia journalists covering diary stories, such as the G20 protests, is to find a way of reporting that is “original, refreshing, different from the newspapers and television, and yet complimentary,” said Sen. “You must build on what others have done, but also do what others cannot do.”

• Think flavour, not just facts. “In a multimedia piece, you need to convey not just who was there and what happened, but what was it really like?” he said. “You need to capture things that make the piece alive. They might look small at production stage, but become really interesting and useful at the editing table.”

• Less is more. “Five minutes is an eternity in news time,” he warned. “Most multimedia pieces won’t ever run for more than a few minutes.”

• Always shoot action and emotion. “It doesn’t need to be someone fighting a war, but you need mobility or some dynamic element,” he advised. “It might be someone’s eyes floating from left to right, clinking glasses, natural sunlight.”

• Develop skills beyond conventional journalism, or work with somebody who has. “A graphic designer is critical to a multimedia project,” said Sen. “It’s up to them to bring all the elements together and present them in a way that can either make or break a multimedia piece.”

• Keep the big picture in mind. Remember that neither audio or visual will ever work alone in a final multimedia production. “They will be next to text, or on top of a picture, so always have an idea of the final product in mind,” said Sen. “Then you don’t always have to face the dilemma of dropping or cutting to fit.”

• But if in doubt: “Shoot first, make up your mind later,” he advised.

Sen, who spent more than a decade as a television and newspaper journalist before joining Bloomberg, added that these skills should be developed in addition to, not at the expense of, the traditional journalist’s toolkit. “The nuts and bolts remain the same. Good journalism, solid reporting, news judgement and good writing skills are as important online as off,” he said.

Sen’s favourite multimedia packages:

• Barack Obama’s first 100 days by the Guardian: “Every media organisation ticked the box and reported that he’d completed 100 days,” said Sen. “For flesh on the bone, you go to a place like this.”

• Talking to the Taliban by the Globe and Mail: “This is interesting, surprising and offers different takes on a lot of things,” he said. “It’s an interesting way to come at the story.”

• Economy Tracker by CNN: “Somebody has done the hard work of crunching numbers and then somebody has made it into a really visual, interesting piece of work,” said Sen. “It’s a good example of telling a big story simply but effectively”.

• Forty Years of Respect by the Detroit Free Press: “This not only covers the story but involves the audience in many ways, which a good multimedia piece should always try to do,” he said.

Related link:

Alison Battisby’s report on her blog: ‘Everyone will be a multimedia journalist,’ says ex-Bloomberg editor.

Lara King is a freelance journalist and blogs on the media at www.lara-king.co.uk.

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Bloggers and journalists discussed their shifting roles and relationships in the context of online political blogging at Monday’s Voices Online blogging conference at City University, organised by the Next Century Foundation.

Blogging is improving the quality of journalism by forcing reporters to be more honest about their sources the Guardian’s senior political correspondent, Andrew Sparrow, said yesterday.

Sparrow said that traditional journalistic secrecy had become ‘hard to justify in the blogosphere’ because readers act as ‘particularly aggressive sub-editors’.

“There’s an expectation that you will be more upfront about your sources, and that’s a good thing,” he said.

“In a conventional news story, you can never own up to doubt. In a blog, it’s perfectly acceptable to say what you know and what you don’t know.”

Sparrow also suggested that political bloggers have raised the bar of competition for traditional news organisations.

“I don’t see myself as part of the blogging community in the way that Paul Staines or Nick Fielding are,” he said. “I view blogging as a tool that we use [at the Guardian] for our mainstream journalism. But I worry if the amateurs are doing it better than we are.”

However, in an earlier panel, Paul Staines questioned whether drawing a distinction between ‘journalist’ and ‘bloggers’ is still relevant.

“How long is it before we stop asking that question?” he said. “With converging digital platforms, there may no longer be a difference.”

Sparrow, who has previously reported on the political arena for the Daily Telegraph and the Daily Mail, said that he had been frustrated by ‘the limited way you could tell stories’ in traditional print media.

“The internet has an immediacy that you don’t always get in mainstream media. I like the commentability, but it makes many journalists uncomfortable,” he said.

He added that digital media has improved the range of sources available to journalists. “Once, you might have had to spend the morning ringing ten people to find out what they thought about something, whereas now, you can subscribe to ten RSS feeds,” he said.

However, Sparrow also said that the Guardian ensures its blogs ‘report in accordance with its journalistic values and the public interest’, and acknowledged that the wider blogging community ’survives on subjectivity’ which is at odd with traditional journalistic notions of balance.

But Mick Fealty, creator of the Slugger O’Toole blog and who also blogs at the Telegraph and the Guardian sites, insisted this did not compromise the quality and integrity of blogging. “The journalists who make good bloggers are the ones who know they’re only interjecting into a larger conversation. There is a value in being challenged,” he said.

“Truth is more useful than balance. One truth at a time is enough.”

Journalism.co.uk reported live from the Voices Online Blogging conference 2009. Follow @journalism_live on Twitter for updates from a wide array of media events.

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As reported on Journalism.co.uk Neil Thurman and Merja Myllylahti’s study into online-only newspapers has suggested that going online alone is unlikely to bring an ailing newspaper title back into profitability.

Focusing their research on Finnish financial news site Taloussanomat, which folded its print edition in December 2007 after 10 years of publication), the pair found the title had suffered a drop in unique users of 22 per cent in five months of being online-only.

A week’s newsroom observation, access to web traffic stats and financial information, and interviews with journalists at Taloussanomat give context to the statistics and a deeper insight into the psychological and cultural barriers still at work in the title’s transitional newsroom.

Thurman and Myllylhati in their research article have been careful to point out that their predictions for the wider news industry and online-only newspapers stem from specific examples, so I think it’s important to put our report on their findings into the same context with the information below.

Firstly, the stats on traffic changes after the paper went online only – what size was its web and print audiences previously?

• Between 2001-2006 its daily print circulation fell from 88,000 to 72,000; over the same period it recorded a 1,180 per cent rise in weekly ‘visitors’ to its website;
• It is the second most popular (in terms of traffic) financial news site in Finland;
• The site posted an initial rise in visitors after going online-only and sustained this growth for five months until June 2008 when weekly visitor numbers began to fall (from 292,059 in June to 185,714 in July)
• By October 2008 (10 months after closing the print edition) the site is recording page impression figures 97 per cent higher than the week before it went online-only;
• But, as the research points out, neither the page impressions figure nor the number of weekly visitors has performed better than a title with a print counterpart.

Challenges in the newsroom

Metrics

• Metrics, central to this study, have become increasingly important within Taloussanomat’s newsroom and work practices, according to the research;
• Journalists are increasingly aware of how individual stories ‘perform’;
• There is an added pressure to this: advertisers, who would previously spend with a title based on its performance as a whole, will now look to the performance of individual articles or site sections;
• “The fact that we need high visitor numbers on the site is part of being an online newspaper, but it has an impact on the journalistic work. The positive side of it is that we know what stories people find interesting. The negative aspect is that the journalists also know that,” Hannu Sokala, editor for development and strategy, told the study;
• Increasing awareness of metrics may also be driving a more consumer/populist news agenda on the site according to some journalists interviewed.

Working patterns:

• Despite supporting the amount of space to fill and experiment with online, journalists at Taloussanomat were found to sticking to traditional print work patterns e.g. filling at 5pm, keeping stories the same length as in print, not innovating with use of multimedia;
• Journalists were also largely deskbound within the newsroom – a result of cut resources and also a desire to ‘feed’ the website with more frequent updates and content;
• Yet, the researchers also noted a reluctance amongst journalists to file breaking news in short-form ways, because they view it as ‘incomplete’;
• A higher frequency of online stories had also increased the newsroom’s reliance on agency copy.

The study concludes:

“The online-only newspaper should be freer to exploit the potential of the online medium without the burden of legacy content from a print or broadcast parent. The reality this study found is that the online-only newspaper carries other burdens – financial and logistical – that counteract its advantages. The cumulative effect means killing the print edition does not immediately transform a title’s ability to produce interactive, nonlinear, multimedia content. Nor does it mean that staff are ready or willing to service new publishing platforms or readers’ expectations for multiple daily updates.”

It’s early days – Taloussanomat is one of the first titles to have ditched its print edition to go online-only. According to the study, the fact that unique users decreased folowing the switch shows ‘just how much the medium, rather than the content it carries, determines how news is consumed’.

Yet, as Juha-Pekka Raeste, editor-in-chief and CEO, remarks in the research, practices such as the increased ‘churning’ of copy are not a long-term solution. Instead Taloussanomat needs to focus on niche content and coverage, he adds.

It is clear Taloussanomat and other online new entrepreneurs have ideas about how editorial content can be adapt successfully to online – but can the necessary staff resources and revenues need to fund this be adapted in the same way?

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Obama digital campaign ‘guru,’ Thomas Gensemer, has attracted a fair bit of attention with his arrival in London – check out the Guardian G2 feature and this article at TimesOnline, for example. A Guardian video can be watched here at this link.

Gensemer, whose company Blue State Digital built the Obama website and managed the online campaign, was also speaking at City University on Tuesday evening: at an event entitled ‘Obama’s (not so) Secret Weapon: the role of the internet in the 2008 US Presidential Election’.

His talk officially launched the journalism school’s new MA in Political Campaigning and Reporting. A video of the event can be watched here.

Etan Smallman was at the event, and shares his report with us here:

Plain old-fashioned email is the key tool for successful political campaigning in the digital age, the mastermind behind the Obama digital campaign, Thomas Gensemer, told an audience at City University this week.

Thomas Gensemer, managing partner of Blue State Digital, who built the highly acclaimed online operation, dismissed the impact of social networking in favour of ‘the simplicity of email’.

The message is ‘use tools, not gimmicks’, Gensemer said. “For all the talk of social networking, blogs, and mobile applications, email is still the ‘killer app’. Our email list of 13.5 million individual email subscribers was the backbone of the campaign,” he added.

“This is not a story about technology; this is not a story about Facebook or Twitter. This is about dynamic, personalised, two-way relationship via email,” he said. Gensemer said that more than a billion emails were sent out to over 13.5 million email subscribers throughout Obama’s presidential campaign. It resulted in my.barackobama.com raising half a billion dollars in donations.

The mainstream media is ’still included in the cycle’, Gensemer said. “It is often that you’re bypassing them to get to the audience, and then encouraging the media to tell the story to the audience. You’re inverting the relationship a little bit. They don’t serve as the filter any more – when you have the engaged constituency online, you go directly to them.”

Gensemer, who previously worked in the UK on Ken Livingstone’s unsuccessful London mayoral campaign, is currently expanding his operation to the UK political arena by opening an office in London.

Some organisations still believe their audience isn’t online, he said. “It’s no longer the case in the ‘first world’. Even people over 70 – the ’silver surfers’ – they’re out there. They’re willing to do something for you. They just need to be asked. This isn’t just about college kids. This isn’t just about bloggers in Westminster.”

“It is not about magical technology,’ he said, arguing that the key components to successful online campaigning are transparency and authenticity: “You can’t fake it,” he added.

“Do you really believe that the average MP is Twittering?” he asked. “Do you believe that Barack Obama Twitters? I’ll tell you, he doesn’t.”

New social media crazes like Twitter ‘tend to distract,’ Gensemer said.

“It tends to be from shiny object, to shiny object, to shiny object. For organisations that need to invest in deep personal relationships with a variety of people, just doing that sort of scattergun approach is dizzying.

“It burns through political capital pretty quickly because it doesn’t really talk to the people it’s trying to talk to,” he said.

“The lesson of the Obama campaign is to use tools to facilitate a message – don’t use gimmicks. None of this would have happened [just] because somebody was Twittering.”

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Reed Business Information’s (RBI) Tom Vaughan was a double winner at today’s Periodical Training Council’s (PTC) New Journalist of the Year awards.

Vaughan, who writes for Caterer and Hotelkeeper, picked up the overall award and new business features journalist too. Unfortunately (or fortunately for him) he was in absent – busy holidaying in Switzerland – and had the awards collected on his behalf.

The awards, which focus on new or young journalists in the UK magazine industry, also saw prizes for Jheni Osman, editor of Focus from BBC Magazines, who was named new editor of the year.

Full list of the winners:

Overall winner - Tom Vaughan, Caterer and Hotelkeeper, RBI

New editor of the year – Jheni Osman, Focus, BBC Magazine; (highly commended) Lucy Scott, Property Week, CMP Information

New section editor of the year – Emma Dent, Health Service Journal, EMAP Inform; (highly commended) Tom Bill, Building, CMP Information

New consumer journalist of the year – Josh Woodfin, FHM, Bauer Media; (highly commended) Jo Adnitt, Look, IPC Media

New consumer specialist/customer magazine journalist of the year - Ben Brain, Photoplus, Future Publishing

New magazine designer of the year - Tina Smith, Property Week, CMP Information; (highly commended) Luke O’Neill, Computer Arts, Future Publishing

New business journalist of the year – Crispin Dowler, Inside Housing, Ocean Media Group; (highly commended) Victoria Gill, Chemistry World, Royal Society of Chemistry

New business features journalist of the year – Tom Vaughan, Caterer and Hotelkeeper, RBI; (highly commended) Lydia Stockdale, Property Week, CMP Information

Most promising student journalist of the year: Audrey Ward, MA magazine journalism, City University; (highly commended) Alix O’Neill, MA magazine, Goldsmiths

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