Journalism.co.uk Editors' Blog » mainstream media

DNA09: ‘The Established Media React’

Judith Townend — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 14:52:23 +0000

A look at how mainstream media (MSM) is seizing upon, or resisting technological changes.

A panel chaired by Wired Magazine’s Ben Hammersley. He is joined by:

Guido Baumhauer, director of marketing, sales and distribution at Deutshe Welle.

Pat Loughrey, head of BBC Nations and Regions

Hans Laroes, head of news at broadcaster NOS News

Simon Bucks, associate editor, Sky News Online

Neil McIntosh, European editor, Wall Street Journal

Peter Vandermeersch, editor of the Belgian newspaper, De Standaard

Hammersley points out this been happening for a long time. So why are we still having the same conversations about the mainstream media reacting? There wasn’t really an answer to that one but there were some other big questions raised:

Are ‘publishers’ and broadcasters ending up in the same space?
It’s not really a relevant distinction, the BBC’s Loughrey tells Journalism.co.uk after the discussion.

“I do not see myself as part of the established media,” Hans Laroes is keen to point out at the beginning.

The broadcast enterprise is still quite a separate one from the web at Sky, says Bucks – although web users already have some influence on television content, and maybe, the future could see online increasingly dictating television content.

What on earth is ‘database journalism’?
Neil McIntosh said that while ‘it has to be said it’s being used for extremely boring journalism,’ it’s about pulling together raw material in exciting ways, such as in crime mapping. There is lots of potential for the Wall Street Journal, he added.

How do we manage editorial, strategy and sales relationships?
Following on from his keynote speech, Vandermeersch stresses that editorial, sales and strategy will have to work closer together.

However, how far that goes is up for debate he says: for example, do you drop stories which are less good commercially?

Meanwhile, at Deutsche Welle, marketing team, editorial and media sales representatives are meeting in small ‘competence teams’ in order to address monetising and editorial issues in different countries (they have 4,500 media partners worldwide), explains Baumhauer.

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Obama’s digital guru (aka Thomas Gensemer) at City: “Email is still the killer app”

Judith Townend — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 13:51:18 +0000

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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Sea change: did online campaign group force political transparency?

Judith Townend — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 16:38:36 +0000

It’s an interesting landmark: a quickly put-together online campaign in the UK may have influenced a political reversal. Gordon Brown has cancelled proposals for MPs to protect the details of their expenses.

The House of Commons leader, Harriet Harman, cited lack of cross-party support as the reason behind the change, according to the BBC report.

Meanwhile, the Guardian reported:

“The decision is a major victory for freedom of information campaigners and follows growing opposition led by the Liberal Democrats to the proposal, and website campaigns urging the public to email their MP objecting to the move.”

Does this show something of a sea change in political influence? Note that the campaigners directly mobilised their supporters, without reliance on mainstream media.

Tom Steinberg, founder of My Society, the organisation behind the campaign, thinks traditional media manipulation tools had little effect.

He comments on the MySociety blog:

“This is a huge victory not just for transparency, it’s a bellweather for a change in the way politics works. There’s no such thing as a good day to bury bad news any more, the internet has seen to that.”

Matthew Cain, over on his BacAtU blog, gives five reasons why he believes the campaign had clout, and points out that Stephen Fry helped the cause too… with a humble re-tweet on Twitter:

But, also today, a reminder of the way media connections have traditionally worked, with the appointment of a new head of political lobby, the Financial Times’ Jean Eaglesham. But how much influence and inside knowledge does the lobby have anymore?

Press Gazette reported:

“Eaglesham dismissed any suggestion that the need for constant ‘rolling’ news has diminished the quality of parliamentary reporting.

“She said: ‘Clearly it’s a risk we’re all aware of, however, now we also have the added value of more analysis and breaking news through blogging and other online content. Things change so fast now, it’s fascinating.’”

The role of the lobby was discussed at the end of last year in the House of Lords. Hazel Blears talked about the influence of the political bloggers in November, in an address to the Hansard Society.

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Ben Goldacre on how blogs can be ‘more reliable’ than mainstream media

Judith Townend — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 11:22:41 +0000

Courtesy of Conrad Quilty-Harper, of the Spalpeen blog, here’s Dr Ben Goldacre on video talking about Bad Science… in a toilet (Goldacre’s choice, apparently). With little fear of the germs, Goldacre puts the loo seat down (about halfway through) and summarizes his thoughts on sensationalised science reporting.

Perhaps most interestingly for online journalists he airs his thought on media reliability: around the seven minute mark Goldacre says:

“…blogs are potentially more reliable than mainstream media ever was – mainly because you can check for each individual blog author, how credible they are, because bloggers link to primary resources…”

His thoughts on journalists and their deliberate disguising of sources (for example, not making it clear they’re quoting a press release) are worth a listen.

The doc’s getting about in the mainstream media too: he was on BBC Radio 4 (again) yesterday, featuring on ‘Start the Week‘.

Here’s the original Spalpeen video:

Ben Goldacre of Bad Science talks about Sensationalised Science Reporting from Conrad on Vimeo.

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Jeffrey McManus: Consulting for free on ‘How to save journalism’

John Thompson — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 12:55:51 +0000

Jeffrey McManus, CEO of Platform Associates, sets out his advice on how to save the journalism industry. "Eliminate the distinction between 'mainstream media' and 'blogging'. Blogging is mainstream and has been for years now. What we’ve been referring to as 'mainstream media' is really 'large corporate media,' and that model is finished," he begins.

Mumbai online: the attacks reported live (updating)

Judith Townend — Thu, 27 Nov 2008 12:04:21 +0000

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

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‘Trust and integrity in the modern media’ – Chris Cramer’s speech to Nottingham Trent University

Laura Oliver — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 13:42:40 +0000

This is the full transcript of a speech given by Chris Cramer, global head of multimedia for Reuters’ news operations, at Nottingham Trent University last night. Journalism.co.uk’s report on the address can be read at this link.

So I accepted this invitation shortly after I retired from CNN international – where I was managing director and where I’d been for 11 years or so.

I became a consultant for Reuters news in January and now, in the last few months, have become their first global editor for multimedia.

So, I’m talking to you today as a working journalist, broadcaster and manager for 43 years now and what I would like to talk about is ‘trust and integrity in the modern media’.

I also want to ask the question of you whether the media has maybe lost the message somewhere along the way?

So here’s my starting question: give me a show of hands if you trust the print media today, newspapers and magazines? How about TV and radio news?

And let’s ask the same question about the internet – and that will include Facebook and Twitter and social networking sites in general, how much do you trust them?

And that’s an interesting set of responses I think.

It’s not an overstatement I think to suggest that we are in the middle of a revolution in information flow. Many old theories are broken. Many media businesses have closed in the face of competition and rising costs.

The old paradigms, the old rules and theories, are really threatened by the amount of information, chatter, chaff, stuff that is available to us all day, all night, all of the time.

Some of you may have heard of Marshall McLuhan – in his time considered the high priest of pop culture.

McLuhan was a Canadian, an educator, philosopher and scholar and certainly someone who – 40 or 50 years ago now – fastened onto the notion of the global village.

The fact we were, and are, all connected. In fact he is said to have invented the phrase. Though he probably saw the global village as more of a threat than a good thing. He believed it created tribalism and fear; xenophobia and even racism.

He is also credited with first coining the word media and asserting that the medium was the message. I think he meant that the mechanics of the media, the distribution system, the platform, rather than the content itself was the main influencer.

And consider that McLuhan wrote all of this long before the internet existed. A long time.

So I’d like to talk today about what role the media can play in a changing world and what its responsibilities should be.

Is it a passive window on the world, an inanimate mirror which reflects simply what is happening or does the media have a true social responsibility beyond getting ratings and readership and making profit? Can the media and journalists make the world a better place? Or are they just lazy tools of a fickle society?

Have readers and viewers and consumers lost trust in the mainstream media and do they now prefer to gather their own information via the internet and blog sites?

I want also to talk about so-called citizen journalism.

Are we all – you and me – active newsgatherers ?

Given the number of cameras and cellphones we have are we indeed taking over from conventional journalists and reporters?

They say there may be a billion high definition cellphone cameras out there in the world. Quite a few in the audience here I suspect (film that side of my face please, I prefer it).

So how does that change the balance of information flow ?

And if you accept we – you – are now active newsgatherers, do we have any responsibility to maintain balance and paint a fair and accurate picture of unfolding events.

Let me also talk about integrity and trust and whether that still plays any part in media coverage – where does opinion and spin fit with the notion of impartial journalism.

So let me start by stating the obvious:

The media world is changing so rapidly and so quickly that many of us who work in it are frequently overwhelmed by what’s going on, even frightened at the speed of change. Frightened as well that we may be left behind, even become irrelevant.

Recent research in the states, where I live, says only about 20 per cent of Americans between the ages of 18 and 34 even look at a daily newspaper.

30,000 media jobs in the states have disappeared over the last two years and that pace is accelerating in the past few months with the economic meltdown. More journalists being laid off this year than ever before.

Here in the UK a similar situation. On TV, ITV pulling back from local news. ITV’s main news, according to Michael Grade, may be jeopardy in a few years time. ITV’s rolling TV news channel dumped a few years back.

At the same time, we are living a fragmented and confusing world – a world of so many information options – that our level of trust in conventional, traditional media providers is probably at an all-time low.

In fact, there is a strong, prevailing belief that the traditional media, has had its day, gradually becoming irrelevant.

Take it from me that much of it, print and broadcast, is thrashing about in an identity crisis trying to rediscover its connection point with the consumer. Experimenting with reality TV, raucous news delivery, opinionated ranting – what I call shout and scream TV news – where every story is a crisis, every day is chaos.

Everything is presented to create fear and conflict.

News where there is little or no distinction between a terrorist attack and a fat cat stuck up a tree somewhere.

There is a criminal on every corner. Al Qaeda lives next door. It’s a good day when the threat alert is only orange.

Just hang on here – we know the world is not like that most of the time.

So what to do? How do you react when, it seems, the traditional media is letting you down?

Many millions of people (not just the young like many of you) are already bypassing traditional news sources. Abandoning the news providers that your parents so relied upon, maybe still rely on.

Let me explain.

I have spent the best part of 40 years or more working in the newsgathering business. I started as a cub reporter in local newspapers.

After a few unexceptional years in print I joined the BBC when I was about 20, first in radio and then into television, and then into TV news as a producer and later an editor.

Newsgathering is the stuff that makes news what it is. The content. The stories. The raw material that drives news bulletins and programmes. Some might say that engine that drives the rest of the news machine.

In recent years though, as I said, many more people around the world have the capacity to be newsgatherers. With the advent of cheap video cameras and now cellphone cameras anyone can be a news gatherer. You or me.

With devices like this – the flip camera – one hour of video, great quality, great video and audio. Shoot and plug into your laptop to share with a friend or upload to YouTube.

Truth to tell it is unusual these days for real, professional journalists to be first on the scene of a news story.

Plenty of recent examples: floods in the UK, hurricanes in the US, earthquakes in Asia.

Where most of the compelling pictures and stories came from local citizens or tourists. Eyewitness. On the spot. Much more visceral if you like than anything a journalist could have produced arriving on the scene a few days later.

And we have YouTube and Facebook and Twitter and other social networking.

Real time information and video exchanged at the speed of light – much faster and frequently more accurate than conventional news exchange.

We had eyewitness video of the al Qaeda attacks on New York in 2001. And the terrorist bombings in London in July 2005.

Manmade and natural mayhem these days tends to be covered not by media professionals but from people like you.

One of the most historical events of the decade – the execution of Saddam Hussein –was filmed not by the Iraqi authorities or the Americans but by one of Saddam’s prison guards. On his cellphone camera.

That’s what I mean by anyone being a newsgatherer.

One of the key weapons in the armory of any terrorist group these days is a video camera or a cellphone. It is as deadly a weapon as the AK47 and the suicide belt. Some might say much more deadly. (It stays, lingers, long after the event itself. Part of history)

So who needs the traditional, mainstream media for the message these days. Why don’t we just bypass those conventional information providers?

Any of us can set out with our cameras and an internet connection and start to change the world ourselves.

What a breathtaking opportunity this gives us, you might argue.

An opportunity to promote social and environmental change, to influence the course of history, through social and peer-to-peer networking.

In fact we can use new technology to create our own brand – to become the brand.

Some might go further And argue that if the outcome is profound enough why be hidebound by any ethical considerations? Doesn’t the effect outweigh the methods?

Doesn’t the end result justify the means?

Some examples that immediately come to mind:

Is it acceptable for environmental campaigners, producing say user-generated content and posting it on YouTube, to provide just a few misleading facts to make their point just a little stronger?

Is it fair game to abuse, adjust, sex up, some of the data in = viral campaigns and spam if the cause, as they see it, is legitimate?

How about creating fake election messages to distort one candidates viewpoint – to advantage the other. We saw many examples of that in the recent US election.

In fact do social or political campaigners – people desperate for change – need to abide by those same codes of conduct relating to integrity or the invasion of privacy that news organizations like Reuters, the BBC and CNN have to abide by? Spent years creating.

And what should our considerations be about balance or fairness or having a point of view? If a social filmmaker is focusing on the plight of the Kurds why should he care about giving the Turkish point of view? If you are promoting change in the Middle East why give the Israelis equal time with the Palestinians?

The list is endless.

In effect, how many perspectives or points of view should be given airtime or exposure ?

What level of moral equivalency is the right level. Doesn’t balance get in the way of social change?

These are powerful questions which too rarely get proper discussion.

And what about taste and decency?

A few weeks ago I read the most disgusting reporting via Twitter from a local reporter in America actually sending text reports from the graveside as parents buried their three year old. Describing the teddy bear in the coffin. The parents on their knees sobbing.

Has information technology driven us all mad?

Or the absurdity, here in the UK, last month of two national broadcasters leaving a series of offensive messages on someone’s answerphone boasting about the apparent sexual conquest of his granddaughter.

Doesn’t sensitive reporting and broadcasting and editorial integrity still have a place in today’s media?

I am happy to give you my view which you can agree with, laugh at or just ignore. They say it’s a free world.

My view comes wrapped up in that something called integrity.

What use is news and information from any party without complete integrity, editorial integrity. Shouldn’t we all have a simple set of values to guide us a moral compass.

But what exactly is editorial integrity? In the dictionary you will see integrity defined as ‘an adherence to moral principles… honesty… the quality of being unimpaired… soundness… wholeness… unity.”

And you can’t boast about editorial integrity. It is not a marketing ploy or a t-shirt slogan.

It is practised every day. It is demonstrable. And it is in the past tense. You can’t promise integrity without being able to point at something you have done. I think journalists are only ever as good as the story they last covered.

Reuters – where I work now – defines its journalism in a number of ways. Through its history – a century and a half of serving the world – the breadth of its journalism (2,500 hundred journalists working in almost 200 bureaus and read by more than one billion people each day).

But it also defines its journalism because of something called the Reuters Trust Principles.

Reuters believes that trust is everything, the bedrock of free information flow. They believe [sic] that everything done commercially enhances its reputation rather than undermining the principles that have taken a century and a half to build up.

That integrity, independence and freedom from bias define the organization.

And Reuters is a business. it does not shy away from that.

But it believes that trust and integrity make it a much stronger business. people, customers, end users, place a true value against these qualities. The principal reason that I am happy and privileged to now work there.

Truth to tell, there is plenty of lousy journalism out there today which may be why the public are so distrusting of the traditional media. There is too much journalism with cant and rant and a-not-so-cleverly disguised, camouflaged, axe to grind point of view.

News which says it is trusted and fair and balanced and which is patently anything but.

Please don’t misunderstand me. I have nothing against opinionated news. Some people like their news to come with a spin and a certain shrillness.

But we need to label it as such. This is opinion.

It cannot come as part of a clever confidence trick to get consumer attention, page views or ratings.

News organizations, those who disseminate news and information, those who tell a story – have a huge responsibility to represent all sides, all religions, all persuasions. Not just the so-called underdogs as we might see them.

I’m afraid most journalists have a propensity to speak just for what they regard as the underdog. The victim. It’s too simple to apply our labels to people and social issues.

We should speak for all sides – fairly, honestly and with balance. No one or no cause should get an easy ride from us.

So I don’t believe the end result justifies the means.

I don’t believe that you should distort the message to get the outcome you need or seek to persuade other people of the strength of your argument by adjusting the facts to suit the argument.

I don’t believe the internet should be used to disseminate rumour and gossip to somehow make your point. I certainly abhor the frequent trend to whip up fervour and anger by means of innacuracy and the deliberate focus on the untruth.

I think this is what our friend Marshall McLuhan meant so many years ago when he talked about the medium being the message. That the so-called global village – courtesy of available technology – is not always a force for good.

More an opportunity, in the wrong hands, for electronic mob rule. Something intelligent people should be wary of.

What I do believe is that we are living in an extraordinary interconnected world where an event on one side of the globe can have a profound effect on people many thousands of miles away.

The economic meltdown around the world is certainly the best example I can think of or where an occasion such as this one, today in Nottingham, can travel on the internet and the airwaves and the jetstream to many people a world away.

I believe that even in this rapidly changing world some principles are immutable. Whether you are a longtime journalist such as me – or a citizen newsgatherer, like all of you have the potential to be.

In particular, journalists and the media need to build trust and practise integrity each and every day. Remember those Reuters Trust Principles.

Those over-arching principles set us all apart from the unprincipled mob.

Even as we embrace every new information platform available to us we need to stay focused on integrity and brand value.

I take great comfort from believing that audiences and customers do gravitate towards the editorial brands that they trust. That it is worth staying true to the values we believe in.

So far as my chosen profession is concerned – if we wish to remain relevant and successful – we would do well to remember that journalists are not important at all – but what we do is important.

I thank you for listening.

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After the blogging storm

Judith Townend — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 10:12:20 +0000

The winds have slowed down to a tropical storm, but the Gustav blogging continues.

The mainstream media is reporting on the blogging phenomenon as well as the actual hurricane: the Chicago Tribune looks at the decision-making power of blogs and FollowTheMedia comments that the hurricane may stop print, but not the web.

Meanwhile, over at Poynter, NPR’s Andy Carvin examines the role of social media in Gustav coverage.

As we posted yesterday, this was one for the Twitterers and they tweet on as people assess the damage. A quick twitter local search shows how the twitterers regard the media professionals…

Pictures can be found easily on this Flickr search and over at gustavbloggers.com they reflect that it wasn’t as bad as they feared. Meanwhile, to prepare for reportage of the next natural disaster, the Blog Herald offers its disaster blogging tips.

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Online Journalism Scandinavia: Here come the Web 2.0 docusoaps

Kristine Lowe — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 10:43:10 +0000

Swedes are getting so hooked on social media that for many web-crazy young things reality-TV has all but moved online.

Last night Twingly, the Swedish web company that supplies a blog trackback functionality to newspapers world-wide and last week launched its international spam free blog search engine Twingly.com, aired the first programme of its new reality-series on YouTube: The Summer of Code.

YouTube reality-show
“We have recruited four ambitious interns and given them six weeks to develop a visual search engine for blogs; Twingly Blogoscope,” said Martin Källström, CEO of Twingly.

“Everyone can follow what happens in the project via daily episodes on YouTube.”

The episodes will be uploaded Monday to Friday at 6 PM GMT (10 AM in San Francisco, 19:00 in Stockholm) and the first programme aired last night.

“Openness in this project is a way to show the daily life in the office,” said Källström.

“Generally people are not familiar with the stimulating working atmosphere in a start-up. Hopefully Twingly Summer of Code will inspire more people to join Twingly or other start-ups.”

Media increasingly about conversation
Last week, Twingly launched its search engine Twingly.com to track 30 million blogs all over the world.

Despite this global scope, Källström said Twingly will concentrate on being number one in Europe, working with several different European languages.

“Google has not improved its blog search for more than two years,” he told Journalism.co.uk.

The company has teamed up with newspapers in Spain, Portugal, Holland, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Finland and South Africa, to show blog links to the news sites’ articles.

Källström added that his hope was for Twingly to be able to take on both Google and Technorati by providing more functionality and driving traffic to bloggers via its media partnerships.

“Media is more and more about the conversation between media and its readers. We see a very strong synergy between mainstream media and bloggers and try to provide a bridge that can improve this synergy,” he said.

Blogs have replaced docusoaps
Twingly’s target group for The Summer of Code will no doubt draw an audience of uber-geeks but a young Swedish reporter recently admitted she was addicted to a very different sort of ‘web docusoap’.

Madeleine Östlund, a reporter with the Swedish equivalent of Press Gazette, Dagens Media, claimed the country’s fashion blogs had replaced docusoaps (link in Swedish).

She confessed she found it increasingly difficult to live without her daily fix of intimate everyday details and gossip from the country’s high-profile fashion bloggers, a phenomenon Journalism.co.uk has described here.

“It is not their blogging about clothes that draws me in, rather it is the surprise and fascination with which I read about these young girls’ private lives. Surprise and fascination about how much they often reveal,” she wrote, citing posts about broken hearts, hospital stays, what they had for breakfast and descriptions of a caesarian birth.

Roll on the Web 2.0 docusoap about dashing media journalists, I say.

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News tracker helps uncover cit-j story in earthquake aftermath

Laura Oliver — Mon, 19 May 2008 16:40:12 +0000

Behind the reported events of last week’s earthquake in China, a story of a citizen journalism was emerging.

Ronen Medzini, an Israeli student, affected by the earthquake in the Chengdu area was quoted by the Associated Press on the crisis in the area.

Medzini’s role in reporting the disaster, which was quickly picked up by other mainstream media, was in itself newsworthy – he reported the devastation around him in a text message sent to the AP, a citizen journalist breaking news on a mobile.

But how to detect this thread within the mass of reporting? Ian Cairns from Managing News, has blogged about how the system, which tracks and analyses mainstream and social media sources, did just this.

What is particularly interesting – and crucial – about how Managing News worked in this situation, is the collaboration between two of its features: a map displaying geotagged news items on a topic (in this case breaking news) and a tag cloud.

Investigating the tag cloud next to the map of news coverage of the earthquake, tags for both ‘Ronen Medzini’ and ‘cellular’ showed up, as such highlighting the cit-j element of the story which would otherwise have been buried.

Interesting how the visual representation of news trends, in this case, allowed the observer to quickly pick up on new leads in the reporting.

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