The Guardian has published its first article including geolocation data and is using geographic tagging to track reporters covering the US presidential race. Every time a reporter posts a blog their location will be highlighted on a Google map.
Geotagged content has been around for a while now, but is starting to take effect in the UK media: last week, the Liverpool Echo, published a hyperlocal news map.
On Guardian.co.uk’s Inside Blog, Paul Carvill describes the geolocating process: reporters add their latitude and longitude to their article or blog post, and their location will appear in the RSS feed, which in turn can be fed into a Google map using a java script.
Online users can type in their postcode to find out what is being reported in their area, or alternatively click on an area of the map to source information from another location.
Tags: Guardian.co.uk, Paul Carvill, The GuardianThis week’s Guardian Ethnic Media Summit, supported by Channel 4 and Spectrum Radio was the first of its kind. The event itself may be new, but the common theme of the day seemed to be, ‘weren’t we having these conversations 10 years ago?’
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.
Tags: Aaqil Ahmed, BBC, Claude Grunitzky, Emily Bell, Equality and Human Rights council, ethnic media, ethnic media summit, Guardian.co.uk, ITV, Jay Kandola, Joseph Harker, Julita Kaczmarek, Kamal Ahmed, Leith FM, Leslie Bunder, Media Diversity Institute, Meera Syal, Milica Pesic, Parminder Vir OBE, Polot.co.uk, Richard Cooke, Samira Ahmed, SomethingJewish, Spectrum Radio, Sunny Hundal, The Guardian, Trevor Phillips, TRUE Agency, Who Do You Think You Are?Guardian.co.uk is in the process of moving the rest of its blogs to its new R2 platform, an update from the title’s own insider blog reports.
From tomorrow the site’s remaining 23 blogs will join the first phase of blogs, which made the switch last month, and will sport a new design and improved tools for commenting.
Titles making the change tomorrow include the technology blog, arts blog and PDA, which says comments will be turned off on the moving blogs between 4pm and 9pm (BST).
The key features of the new blog design are:
As previously reported on this blog, the new features were trialled on the site’s Comment Is Free platform and use social media firm Pluck’s commenting technology.
Analysis of the upgrade is already coming in: Shiny Media co-founder Ashley Norris says the move ’signals the end of the organisation using a traditional blogging approach’.
The new design, says Norris, gives readers only a brief view of the intro to a blog post on a section homepage.
Tags: Guardian.co.uk, PDA, Pluck, social media“To read the story users have to click through to the page. The reason the Guardian has done this is that being less generous means more click throughs, more page views per users and subsequently more ad impressions served,” he points out.
One of the Guardian’s newest bloggers, writer Dave Hill, is to use the platform to promote, and interact with, other external blogs.
“Blogging offers the chance to fill the void,” London blogger Dave Hill writes at his new Guardian.co.uk home. In an attempt to nourish connections with other bloggers, he’s asking for people to send him their favourite London blogs.
Prior to this blog he blogged at London Mayor & More, and his other blogs Clapton Pond and Big Britain are still active.
Tags: Clapton Pond, dave hill, Guardian.co.uk, London, The GuardianThe Guardian is moving its blogs onto its new platform, bringing them in line with the rest of the recently redesigned site.
The move will be completed in two stages starting with 14 titles, including its Lost in Showbiz and news blogs, an announcement on the Inside Guardian blog said. The remaining sites will move over next month.
Once switched the blogs will boast new colours and design features (see the right-hand screenshot below), including improved navigation and links to the rest of Guardian.co.uk.
Keywords linking blog posts to related content across the site will be added - a feature previously unavailable on the blogs platform.
Blogs will also be relocated to their sections - e.g. the politics blog in the politics channel - rather than housed in a separate blogs section.
The new blogs will also share features introduced across the rest of the redesigned site, including the option to share posts by Digg, del.icio.us etc, and a widget showing the most-linked to Guardian content.
Blog posts will now also be included in the site’s search.
Changes to the commenting function on the site’s blogs have also been made - the biggest change being the introduction of user profiles.
“For a long time, we and many other sites operated a content-driven model which meant that user comments were only associated with - and displayed alongside - a particular content item. The creation of user profiles reveals our growing community-driven approach, recognising that just as every guardian.co.uk author gets a contributor page in which their contributions are archived so that their participation can be explored across topics and over time, so should our users,” said Meg Pickard, head of communities and user experience for Guardian.co.uk, in a blog post
Additional features will be added to user profiles over time, added Pickard, and experiments with the layout of comments beneath blog posts are ongoing.
Basic formatting, such as creating block quotes and links, is also now possible on blog post comments.
The new features have previously been trialled on the site’s Comment Is Free platform and use social media firm Pluck’s commenting technology.
Tags: Guardian.co.uk, Meg Pickard, Pluck, redesigned site, social media, The GuardianFollowing yesterday’s launch of Guardian.co.uk’s redesigned culture section, chief arts correspondent Charlotte Higgins is now a full-time blogger for the site.
She discusses her plans for the blog and the debate between blogger vs critic.
Tags: Charlotte Higgins, Guardian.co.ukOnline video firm Brightcove has launched the latest version of its service in beta.
The new technology from Brightcove, which is already used by the Telegraph.co.uk, Hearst Digital and Guardian.co.uk, will offer new ways for incorporating video players and information about video content into web pages, according to a press release from the company.
The new service - Brightcove 3 - will also enable publishers to have long-form video content on their sites.
The full version will be launched this autumn.
Tags: beta Online, Brightcove, Guardian.co.uk, Hearst Digital, Telegraph.co.ukThe Guardian has redesigned its Comment Is Free (CiF) section as part of a new online community platform for the paper.
It has been integrated with the paper’s main site eradicating the divide between online and print comment, Georgina Henry, head of comment, has written in a blog post.
Changes to the design include:
The implementation of Pluck’s social media technology has added:
The redesign is part of the paper’s ongoing overhaul of its website.
Tags: Georgina Henry, Guardian.co.uk, online community platform, social media technology, The Guardian, web comment
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