For its new Guardian Local online news project set to launch in 2010, the company is advertising for bloggers in each of Leeds, Cardiff and Edinburgh ‘to create and curate local text and multimedia content’. The job advert states:
“You will lead the Guardian’s innovative approach to community news coverage by reporting on local meetings and events with an emphasis on political decision making, identifying grassroots issues of importance to residents and signposting information and news provided via other sources.”
“Guardian Local is a small-scale experimental approach to local newsgathering. We are focusing on three politically engaged cities and we expect to launch in early 2010,” said Emily Bell, the director of digital development at Guardian News & Media, the Guardian’s PDA blog reported.
Sarah Hartley, previously head of online editorial at the Manchester Evening News, will lead the project as the Guardian Local launch editor.
Happy Birthday to Media Guardian, 25 years old on May 14. In this week’s supplement we learn what each of the writers were doing in 1984: Emily Bell was doing her A-Levels; Stephen Armstrong was still at school; Peter Wilby was education correspondent for the Sunday Times. And long before Media Monkey was even a twinkle in Mr Monkey’s eye – Monkey Jnr is a youthful nine years old, apparently.
One of the features to mark its anniversary examines the shift in the type of newspaper content:
Peter Wilby asks: ‘How did readers know what to think in 1984?’
“Once you get over the minuscule, blurred pictures and the lack of colour, the first thing that strikes you about the newspapers of that year is the paucity of opinionated columnists. The finger-jabbing, red-faced anger of today’s commentariat, the passionate, omniscient certainty with which they declare opinions, scarcely existed 25 years ago.”
As part of the commentary he also makes this claim:
“Meanwhile, it [the New York Times] produces more original stories than most rivals put together. The UK’s Guardian is another paper that has built a global brand from what was a regional paper, but it relies more on cut-and-pasting (or aggregating) from others.”
“John, in your column you asset [sic] that the Guardian has grown its online audience primarily by aggregating and cutting and pasting other people’s stories. This is demonstrably not true. If you look at our site on any given day (www.guardian.co.uk), you will I am sure find stories which are either from a wire feed (rather as the FT uses) or which reporters have picked up from other sources, again as does the BBC, FT, Times , even sometime the hallowed NYT. But this is not the core of what we do and it is certainly not how we have grown our audience…”
“(…)We have built our traffic on a higher investment in original multimedia journalism than most if not all of our peers. We have an active policy NOT to routinely aggregate high-grossing showbusiness, celebrity or ‘weird’ stories from elsewhere, which is common practice among some newspaper websites.”
And Gapper quickly responds (Journalism.co.uk wonders what is happening to journalism: shouldn’t they be in the pub by now on a Friday evening?):
“In fact, I don’t assert that. What I wrote was:
“”Meanwhile, it [the NYT] produces more original stories than most rivals put together. The UK’s Guardian is another paper that has built a global brand from what was a regional paper, but it relies more on cut-and-pasting (or aggregating) from others.”
“So I am comparing the Guardian’s ratio with that of the NYT, not claiming that the Guardian contains more aggregated than original content. I do not believe the latter, and would not write it.”
Excellent summary (I feel like I was there) of a lecture given this week by Guardian News & Media’s head of digital content, Emily Bell, on where she sees the future of journalism heading.
Journalists will need to be networked – acting as ‘hubs rather than destinations’ and build a community around themselves. What’s more they will need to share information whenever they have it and using whatever tool or medium is most appropriate, said Bell.
Today’s the UK government’s ‘Digital Britain’ interim report provided quite a lot to digest, so here’s a ten point link round-up of the most important parts:
A BBC News video of the Culture Secretary, Andy Burnham, outlining the report.
It’s hard to resist a good old Wordle (we’re as guilty as everyone else) and here is the Guardian’s depiction of the report, along with an explanation of how Lord Carter vows to force ISPs to crack down on piracy.
It was all a bit kids in a sweetshop at yesterday’s AOP Digital Publishing Summit, if we forget all the problems with wifi, of course.
The main aim, for most attendees, In all likelihood, was to talk to all the people they know in online life, but rarely get the chance to talk to in person – over coffee (and odd looking cake/pastries) and lunch during the day, and drinks in the evening.
The programme ranged from panels to energetic speakers with a broad range of digital publishing topics covered – though perhaps not as much new discussion was initiated as some participants hoped, despite Peter Bale from Microsoft attempt to get some answers from YouTube’s Jonathan Gillespie.
A few additional highlights to add to our coverage so far:
Emily’s Bell’s vision for Guardian’s international reach: In the panel introducing ‘the digital pioneers,’ Bell, director of digital content for Guardian News & Media, said the group sees now as a ‘uniquely’ timed opportunity for the brand to expand internationally – and to do so before their rivals do.
Speaking to Journalism.co.uk afterwards, Bell elaborated on her example of the Economist’s well-established grasp of the international market. Although it happened for the Economist over a 20-year period, she told me that a similar endeavour in 2008 is ‘compressed’ by the web.
Bell also pointed out during the panel that the Chinese words for ‘crisis’ and ‘opportunity’ are one and the same (I tried to keep that in mind as my laptop charger physically broke and the wifi went down).
The Guardian’s move stateside was also referred to by Saul Klein, partner of Index Ventures and moderator of later panel ‘Growing in the Digital World’.
Quoting Simon Waldman, Guardian Media Group’s director of digital strategy and development (and Emily Bell’s boss), Klein said the Guardian’s acquisition of ContentNext was ‘well set up to exploit’. Waldman explained how moves like that prepared the group for a US audience.
The ‘Unlocking the mobile internet’ panel: In the spirit of the thing, TechCrunch’s Mike Butcher gave out his mobile number for questions before probing the panel on their respective views on mobile internet’s future.
Is 2009 the year of mobile? Melissa Goodwin, controller of mobile at ITV says not: “I don’t think it’s next year, I’m hoping it’s 2010.”
“We just want to give you anything you may want,” she said of ITV’s mobile strategy, though she admitted that building advertising revenue was very much an ongoing issue.
Stefano Maruzzi, president of CondeNet International, on outlining Conde’s digital development: As reported over at MediaGuardian and PaidContent, CondeNet, the online arm of Conde Nast, has got lots of ideas about lots of things:
Rolling out a Wired website worldwide (and in different languages, he told PaidContent)
One of the speakers Claude Grunitzky talked about how the UK in 1996 had been a great place to be, to launch his magazine TRACE. Now, returning from the US – where he heads the TRUE Agency and the US edition of TRACE, and another publication TERRACE – he is not sure how much things have moved on. He went so far to say that the UK could be about 20 years behind in terms of ethnic representation in media. Ouch.
While many of the speakers focussed on the exciting times ahead for connecting with ethnic groups through social media (as we reported yesterday, Ofcom has found that the four main ethnic groups in the UK are using digital and online media more widely and diversely than the general population) there still seemed to be this pervading sense that some things hadn’t quite moved on.
News reporter Samira Ahmed, interviewed fellow Channel 4 colleague Aaqil Ahmed over his new appointment as the channel’s commissioning editor for religion and multicultural programming.
Her questions seemed to be weeding out whether this, too, might be a step backwards? After all, hadn’t the keynote speaker, Trevor Phillips, chair of the Equality and Human Rights council, just said that terms like ‘multicultural’ were dead?
“The feeling was that we need a champion,” Aaqil Ahmed answered. “The individual commissioning editors still want to make multicultural content, but alongside that I have a dedicated role.”
His advice, however, to young people from ethnic groups is to make other kinds of films before they try and reflect specific religious or ethnic content. He also cited BBC’s ‘Who Do You Think You Are?’ as one of the best multicultural programmes on television.
You can listen to the interview in full here (23 mins):
Various panel debates, with some big names in the ethnic (and mainstream) media world, discussed just exactly where we’re at, in terms of ethnic media: that’s on screen and off. Debates flitted between portrayal, participation and recruitment. It seems one feeds into the other.
Although actress and comedian Meera Syal and Observer news editor Kamal Ahmed didn’t show up, there were a host of other interesting people to listen to, among them: a panel of inspiring young people who have been involved in Live magazine through the Livity project; Leslie Bunder the founder of the SomethingJewish network (pictured above, courtesy of Richard Cooke, Guardian News and Media); Parminder Vir OBE, the award winning film and television producer; Joseph Harker, assistant comment editor at the Guardian; and Jay Kandola, director of acquisitions at ITV (but also previously at BBC, Channel 4 and 5).
Blogger and Asians in Media editor, Sunny Hundal, managed the proceedings, with lots of his own questions thrown in. Guardian.co.uk editor-in-chief Emily Bell joked that Comment is Free would be very quiet with Sunny’s absence for a day. Trevor Phillips’ keynote speech (pictured below, courtesy of Richard Cooke, Guardian News and Media) made particularly interesting listening: you can read the Guardian’s coverage here.
So: will things have moved on by next year? The big questions raised were how to best monetise ethnic media, do terms like ‘multicultural’ have a role in ethnic media, and how do you penetrate mainstream media with its very narrow horizons? Some speakers said that there was no point just replacing white, socially well-off, Oxbridge males with Oxbridge socially well-off males from ethnic backgrounds – issues of class representation were raised too.
In the very last panel debate about digital reinvention, Milica Pesic, from the Media Diversity Institute raised a good point: what’s the point of a panel all agreeing with each other? Next time, she wants the culprits who consistently misrepresent ethnic groups in the media up on the stage too. Hear, hear, I say. Let’s get the editor who commissioned the story about Polish people hunting swans up on the stage with the editor of Polot.co.uk, Julita Kaczmarek, and really get the debate going.
Finally, a small point picked up from Norrie, a blogger from Leith FM, a Scottish community radio station. He was invited to the Guardian’s Ethnic Summit too, but found the pricing scheme (even at the cheapest rate it was £364 per person) a little bit off-putting and not quite as inclusive as you might expect from an event about, well, inclusion.
Guardian.co.uk has added a bookmarking feature to that allows users to ‘clip’ stories they have read on the site and create profile pages so that others can read their recommended stories.
The clippings file allows readers to store links to articles and other content for later reference and also export the whole lot as an RSS feed.
Users can clip an article by clicking the scissor icon that has been add to the tool bar.
As an example, Guardian director of digital content Emily Bell published her clippings on the site.
The forthright criticisms left on Gogarty’s post were aimed less at the young writer’s style and more at his links with travel section contributor Paul Gogarty – Max’s dad – and as a result Guardian policy.
The ‘hate mail hell’ to which the Observer piece refers lasted for around five days, but I can’t help but think the publisher might have expected this. Surely the accusations of nepotism made could have been foreseen, as could criticism of what value such a blog contributes to the section?
Furthermore, much of the criticism centres around the blog vs professional blog debate, arguing that the writing offered did not match up with the professional content elsewhere on the site.
As such I feel for Max – I don’t know how I would react to such a torrent of online abuse, especially as most of this abuse should be levelled at the publisher and not the blogger in question.
This was an editorial error by the site – neither reader nor writer are satisfied with the outcome – yet the paper’s commentators don’t own up to this, condemning this as a case of ‘online mob justice’.Yes, some of the comments are an attempt to outdo the last with their mercilessness, but the fact that over 500 were left on this blog should set alarm bells ringing.
Do the comments lose their credibility because they are largely angry (and yes, sometimes borderline abusive)? If so, why allow so many through the moderation process in the first place?
These are your readers – telling you exactly what they think – best to listen to them and not label them a mob.
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Working in journalism and want to boost your digital skills? Questions about starting a news business online that you've been too afraid to ask?
