Chris Cramer, global editor for multimedia at Reuters, dropped a new project into a speech at the AOP Publishing Summit 2009 that welcomed social media as the ‘first resort’ in newsgathering.

The development in question is Project Insider, he outlined in the next session, and will see clients provided with specifically targeted content via PDAs.

It’s narrowcasting, not broadcasting, Cramer said.

Currently in beta for selected clients, it delivers live financial markets coverage, analysis and breaking news through a web-based TV service.

Users are able to tag specific points in videos to share with others, and can engage with producers to invite them ask questions of an interviewee, he said.

“It doesn’t attempt to replicate what’s already in the marketplace,” Cramer said, adding that ‘at this moment in time, it’s unique’.

And – he was speaking in a social media session – it is ‘driven on the basis of social media. There is a sub-strata in there which is social media’.

“It’s about the financial professional who wants to know smart data now before their competitors,” he said.

More to follow from the summit throughout the day: in the meantime, follow this tweet stream featuring choice 140ch updates by digital journalists and publishers at the event.

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Econsultancy’s report highlights some interesting figures from a recent survey sponsored by the TEKGroup, which looked how journalists use social media in the newsroom and for newsgathering.

In 2008, according to the study, 44 per cent of journalists surveyed were using RSS feeds regularly, compared with 37 per cent the previous year. Nineteen per cent or more were reading five or more a day.

“Over 70 per cent of journalists surveyed wanted organizations to provide a page in the online newsroom containing links to every social media environment in which that company participates. Thirty-eight per cent of journalists prefer to receive information via company tweets,” reports Econsultancy.

Full post at this link…

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“Many editors are still not sure how to police the growing Twitter trend and Facebook ‘friending’ phenomenon. Since much of it relies on casual and candid conversation, standard newsroom regulations may not apply,” comments Editor&Publisher’s Joe Strupp. He rounds up recent discussion and regulation at news organisation in the US.

Full story at this link…

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“We are putting a massive amount of trust in one platform here. Twitter is throttling this mechanism obviously for its own commercial ends (…) If we put so much of our newsgathering onto one platform we’re in real danger,” said Mike Butcher, TechCrunch UK editor, yesterday as part of a panel on the ‘140-character story’.

While much of yesterday’s Media140 conference focused on best practice and how journalists can use microblogging tools such as Twitter, Butcher and his fellow panellists comments were a warning to news organisations tempted to jump on a social media bandwagon.

As journalists, ‘we always want the next big thing, because it validates the fact that we’ve written about them’, said fellow speaker Bill Thompson, referring to his own experience as a freelance technology writer.

But, added Thompson, if ‘old media’ rules are applied too readily to new media, organisations will ‘miss the essential quality of what Twitter is doing’.

Some ‘old’ guidelines still apply, suggested BBC technology editor Darren Waters: “We cannot get into a world where the real-time web means the ‘not wrong for long’ era.”

Listening to yesterday’s panel the issue of the personal/professional divide when journalists enter social media or online communities – indeed how ’social’ they can be on these platforms – is still a work in progress.
The BBC is still working on its editorial policy towards personal social media use by journalists (and after all ’social media’ is not some fixed, homogenous lump) – it has set out some guidelines at this link – the corporation must consider its relationship with its audience and to what extent personal content is seen as representing the BBC.

But – as panellist Jon Gripton, senior editor at Sky News Online, suggested – in terms of following up reports on Twitter and social media, for example of breaking news events, the same journalistic attitude towards fact-checking and verification apply.

A mantra from Thompson: “I don’t believe anything I see or read on Twitter, it tells me where to go.”

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So, as reported on the main site, and in John Mair’s tribute to the fearsome journalist, Jeremy Paxman collected the inaugural Charles Wheeler Award last night. His Newsnight colleagues had put together a little tribute, which as David Dunkley Gyimah pointed out on Twitter, is a ‘This Is Your Life’ style must-watch. Journalism.co.uk will try and obtain an embeddable link asap.

In the meantime, enjoy the clip at the end of this post: when Paxman dipped his toes into YouTube waters for Newsnight (which, incidentally, BBC director-general Mark Thompson later confessed to never having seen till that evening: “I had no idea  – I’d missed that”).

So Journalism.co.uk asked Paxman: you’re a little sceptical about social and new media, then?

“It’s a joke [his YouTube video - see below]! One of the functions of journalism, seems to me, [is that] it sifts and analyses – and it’s great to have a lot of raw material, but someone still has to sift it to make sense of it,” he said.

There are occasions, for certain stories, he said, ‘when one spends a lot of time looking at blogs… comments… it’s just time wasted.’

“We haven’t yet developed a mechanism for synthesising what comes out  – we’re currently at a stage where someone goes to a rally and writes down the comments of everybody there. That’s no way to report an event – it doesn’t tell you very much,” Paxman said.

“We still need journalists forming perception and analysis of what’s happening – that’s getting drowned out by this Babel-like cacophony. But we’re at a very early stage of development with it. I think there are new things going to happen.”

And, does he still advise wannabe hacks to go and do something more sensible and worthwhile, like become a brain surgeon?

“You do it [give advice] with a certain knowledge that those who are determined won’t be put off anyway. But, I think, overall, the prospects in this trade are not good,” he told Journalism.co.uk.

“Wages are being cut – [there are] apparently respectable newspapers which actually survive on work experience people – and not paid. This is no good! When you’re 21 you don’t think about it. You’ve got to think about it: the longevity of it, [being able to] afford to put a roof over your head and feed your kids etc.

“It’s always been a young person’s trade I think, but it’s even more that now.

“I personally believe in it of course – I think it’s a really worthwhile activity. But it is, I think, the case that there are more immediately socially worthwhile things that you could do with your life. I just think these are strange circumstances.”

Paxman trying out YouTube:

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The Telegraph’s website gets eight per cent of its traffic from sites like Digg, delicious, Reddit and Stumbleupon, its head audience development, Julian Sambles, has said.

According to Coles’ calculations, this amounts to around 75,000 unique visitors a day gained through social sites.

Search engines are responsible for around 300,000 daily uniques, Sambles added. Earlier this year Sambles discussed the site’s search strategy at an Association of Online Publishers forum (AOP).

Full post at this link…

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A fuller account [from Wednesday] of the speech made by Rusbridger at Queen Mary, University of London on Tuesday.

Rusbridger talks about open-source journalism, the tax gap series and the paper’s use of social media.

One interesting point reported by the Guardian’s Jemima Kiss, which makes that April Fool seem slightly more believable:

“Guardian Tech has more followers on Twitter than the Guardian newspaper has readers each day.”

Full post at this link…

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