Journalism.co.uk Editors' Blog » Standards

Should newspapers limit subject matter of their bloggers?

Laura Oliver — Thu, 01 May 2008 16:17:39 +0000

Roshan Doug’s blog post ‘Check-out desk woman and Saddam Hussein’ for the Birmingham Post has been causing a stir on the site. Whether you agree or sympathise with Doug’s post, the readers’ reaction raises questions over what guidelines or control the title should exercise over the topics their bloggers write about.

Reporter and overseer of the Post’s blogs Joanna Geary has raised the question via Twitter:

This would be a moderation headache for staff working on a paper and would curtail many of the benefits of having a blogging platform in the first place. Doug’s post has certainly got the conversation going and limiting posts could lead to staler content.

But how much control can the publisher relinquish without endangering their reputation or causing grievous offense to its readership?

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OUT-LAW.com: complaints about online content and ads outstrip TV and newspapers, says ASA

Laura Oliver — Thu, 01 May 2008 12:50:26 +0000

The annual report from the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) has suggested that the number of complaints made to the body about online advertising is for the first time higher than those relating to TV or newspapers.

ASA received 2,980 complaints about the internet in 2007, though 72 per cent of these related to content and as such fell outside of the authority’s jurisdiction.

“Interestingly, these complaints are almost entirely about truth, accuracy, misleadingness, and availability – the ‘meat and drink’ of the ASA’s daily work on print and broadcast ads,” said Chris Smith, chairman of ASA.

“We hope for an early outcome to the detailed discussions under way within the industry, led by the Advertising Association, on the development of ways to ensure continued responsibility in advertising in new media settings.”

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Tip of the day from Journalism.co.uk

John Thompson — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 11:22:19 +0000

Audio-visual: Online news videos/audio recordings/images should complement the story they accompany, not repeat it. Readers will not be happy if you simply ‘double-up’ on content. Tipster: Oliver Luft

Got a tip? Submit it here – we will pay a fiver for the best ones published.

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Hysterical woman – also a Spanish government minister – ruins AP copy

Laura Oliver — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 09:41:46 +0000

I don’t mean to sound over emotional – it’ll just be the hormones acting on my smaller female brain – but I’ve got a problem with a report yesterday from the Associated Press about Charme Chacon, the Spanish defense minister.

The ministry has ordered its staff to stop browsing entertainment and sport websites during working hours. Says the report:

Spain’s Defense Ministry, run by a woman for the first time, has ordered its staff to stop browsing sports and entertainment Web sites while on duty, an official said Thursday.

A ministry official said the order was distributed this week, but did not come directly from the new minister, Carme Chacon, who took over last week as Spain’s first female defense minister. She is 37 years old and seven months pregnant.

What relevance do these points (in bold) have to the story? The order didn’t even come directly from Chacon, as the report states, so why let the copy imply that her gender and her pregnancy are somehow related to the situation?

Just in case there’s any confusion over this blog post – I am 24 years old and not pregnant.

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BBC Trust says news website must review fact checking procedure

Laura Oliver — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 13:03:11 +0000

The sourcing and fact checking process for stories on the BBC News website must be addressed by management, the BBC trust Editorial Standards Committee has recommended.

The committee made the suggestions as part of its response to a complaint about an article on the site, which pointed to inaccuracies in the report on Congressman Joseph P Kennedy II’s marriage to Sheila Rauch.

During the complaints procedure, the online news team conceded to oversimplifying the story and admitted that this could mislead the reader.

More worringly the online team offered this reason for not having avoided the errors in the article in the first place:

“…we are writing for a general audience. While an online story can in theory be of any length, we do have constraints on our time and resources to devote to each story. Put simply, our staffing simply doesn’t allow us to go into the detail you [the complainant] outline in your email correspondence.”

The complaint about the article, which was published in June last year, was partially upheld by the committee, as the online team did amend the piece.

However, the Trust said the web team ’should have acted more quickly in its responses to the complainant to ensure the story was corrected sooner than it was.’

The committee also resolved to write to management at the corporation to request a review of sourcing and fact checking of articles before publication on the website.

For full details of the recommendations read the committee’s findings.

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Reflections on the life of a videojournalist

Laura Oliver — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 15:07:29 +0000

Having spent April 1 shadowing the two-person web video team at the Express and Star, I came away with:

3 minutes 41 seconds of video footage
14 minutes of audio
54 photos

After a day spent gathering the material I then spent approximately two days editing it for the piece on the site, entailing two slideshows with audio (40s and 48s), one audio clip (6mins 49s) and one video clip (2 mins 20s).

Okay – so I’ve not been specifically trained as a multimedia reporter, which might not make me the fastest when it comes to editing. But essentially two days work resulted in one feature.

Similarly, on the Express and Star’s team, videojournalist Victoria Hoe spent two hours boiling down 16 minutes of footage into a 1min 50s final package.

The Express and Star’s set up with a dedicated video team trained on a Press Association videojournalism course means that it’s time well spent: they put up around 20 videos a week – many shot, edited and published in the same day – and are using the medium in a variety of ways to add value to other areas or stories on the site, as well as for standalone pieces.

But not all publishers have such well-established roles and departments and, having now experienced it first hand, trying to be an all-in-one multimedia reporter/editor/publisher is extremely time consuming.

This is why I voted for ‘Not on its own – video has to be part of a mixed media package from papers in the digital age’ in Journalism.co.uk’s poll on whether video can save newspapers.

While creating such a role may enable publishers to stretch their resources and staff to increase their multimedia content, the benefits of doing this for staff and the resulting content must be slim. As it is so time-consuming, surely it’s better to get it right?

From my day out last week ‘right’ to me means seeing video as a new way of storytelling. It can work with text, but should add something new to text articles and not just as a scripted piece to camera rehashing the article.

The VJs I spoke to said it was crucial to think visually and in sequences to ensure you get all the shots needed while on location. Think visually and video can become a great medium for explaining and representing stories in an alternative way to print.

What’s more it’s another way to reach out to your audience and new members of that readership, so if set up and executed well it will add value – and hopefully traffic – to your site.

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Criticism from blogosphere for journalist’s interview with Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg

Laura Oliver — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 12:36:03 +0000

Business journalist Sarah Lacy’s interview with Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg at the SXSW conference is being torn to shreds by bloggers, because of Lacy’s anecdotal style and rambling questions.

Lacy’s response: an angry message to Twitter (flagged up by CNET) shown below.

Lacy’s interview is now being touted as teaching material for journalism professor Jeff Jarvis’ classes. On his blog, Jarvis says Lacy’s biggest mistakes were not knowing or listening to her audience and her treatment of Zuckerberg – who apparently had to interrupt her ramble to suggest she asked a question at one point.

A post on Adam Tinworth’s blog details the lessons that should be learnt from this interview, namely: ‘engage, know your occasion, do your research and don’t confuse yourself with the story’.

Well said – these are basic interview skills, but Tinworth’s post highlights how these rules should be applied in a new media environment. He points out that despite working in a social media area, Lacy has ‘no direct means of replying that isn’t mediated by others’.

Lacy’s credentials as a business reporter covering technology for BusinessWeek and author on the subject of Silicon Valley and Web 2.0 should have stood her in good stead for this interview.

But it seems her reputation was not sufficient to endear her to or engage with her audience or the blogosphere – after all the interview wasn’t supposed to be about her…

UPDATE – Lacy gives her reaction to the interview in a video response (from Omar Galagga)

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Innovations in Journalism – AngryJournalist

Oliver Luft — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 11:25:20 +0000

Each week we give developers the opportunity to tell us journalists why we should sit up and pay attention to the sites and devices they are working on. This week it’s online rants about the perilous state of the news industry with AngryJournalist.com.

1) Who are you and what’s it all about?
I’m Kiyoshi Martinez. I’m a former journalist who’s now gone into government communications.

AngryJournalist.com is a simple concept. Type why you’re angry with your media job and hit “vent.”

It’s an airing of grievances, rants on the life of journalists and bitter tales from the newsroom. All the comments are moderated before posting in order to keep the site on topic.

I like to think of it as the punching bag for the news business.

2) Why would this be useful to a journalist?
Hopefully, the site helps relieve some stress. It’s probably not as helpful as professional therapy, but it’s less damaging than picking up other vices. Outside of this, I think it’s a great glimpse for newsroom managers and executives of what’s actually going on in the minds of their silently brooding employees. For all the over-the-top responses, there are kernels of truth there worth following up.

3) Is this it, or is there more to come?
There’s been some talk of others independently wanting to start up foreign-language versions of the site, which I think would be really neat, but I won’t be directly involved.

Another person is helping me with creating a widget for others to add to their blog and potentially a Facebook application. I’m considering the idea of doing a “best of today’s responses” list that will get sent out via Twitter, but I’m not sure if I really like that idea or not just yet.

I might take the time eventually to do a really thorough analysis of the responses and perhaps write something on it, but that’s further in the future. As someone who’s a nerd about data and loves to read reports, I know others might appreciate something like that.

Finally, I’m also debating if I want to add revenue-generating features to the site.

4) Why are you doing this?
It initially started as an experiment I wanted to conduct that stemmed from a variety of things I’d read, discussions I had with friends and just generally observing the industry turmoil.

I have my own opinions on the journalism industry and made up my mind to leave it, but I wanted to see the responses from those who’d been in the industry longer than me about their impressions of what’s wrong with the profession today. I was curious to know if others had thoughts echoing my own.

So, I created the site with the idea that I wanted to get the unfiltered, raw angst of the industry’s workforce in the most efficient way possible.

5) What does it cost to use it?
It’s 100 per cent free. Users will never be bombarded with advertisements while surfing the site, nor will they ever have to register, give an e-mail address or jump through any other hurdles to participate.

6) How will you make it pay?
From the beginning, I’ve made a commitment to not put advertising on the site. For me, the purpose of the site wasn’t to make money, but to provide a forum for the industry to be brutally honest with itself.

The costs associated with the site are extremely low and I consider the time spent like that of a person spending time on one of their hobbies. Plus, I see advertising as annoying and there’s increasing evidence that online display advertising is becomes less effective. I didn’t see a point in cluttering my layout and distracting from the content.

Still, this doesn’t mean I’m opposed to finding ways to cover the few costs I have and maybe make some additional cash. I’ve been toying with a few ideas.

One would involve creating a job board on the site. However, there are already several great resources for journalism jobs. I’d want to find a way to make my job board more effective and less impersonal.

Another idea is to sell merchandise. I really like the idea of AngryJournalist.com coffee mugs on the desks of reporters in newsrooms across the country. Also, T-shirts with some of the responses could be mildly entertaining.

I’m also considering writing a book based on the responses. Conceptually, I see it as part critique on the industry, part management techniques with a healthy dose of dark newsroom humour.

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BBC stance on pulling images from social networks

Oliver Luft — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 11:42:26 +0000

The ease of availability of a picture does not remove the BBC’s responsibility to assess the sensitivities in using it, according to the editor of BBC News online.

Writing on the BBC Editors Blog, Steve Herman stated that the question of the ethics of pulling pictures from social networking sites has bee raised by colleagues during an editorial standards meeting.

As a result of that meeting a newsletter is produced, he wrote, summarising discussions circulated to staff to offer guidance.

The advice offered to BBC reporters is that because material has been put into the public domain does not necessarily give the media the right to use it, primarily because the BBC would bring significantly greater public attention than would normally be expected.

The newsletter added that consideration on the original context and the impact of re-use to those who may be grieving or distressed must also be applied.

Legal, copyright and accuracy of the image should also be at the forefront of reporters minds when considering use of images from social sites.

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‘Bloggers will fall by the wayside’ says PCC chairman

Laura Oliver — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 10:28:08 +0000

Many bloggers will ‘fall by the wayside’, because they lack integrity, Sir Christopher Meyer, chairman of the Press Complaints Commission (PCC), told the Yorkshire Post.

Meyer, who was speaking ahead of a PCC open day in Leeds, said blogs would undergo a process of ‘natural selection’ by readers:

“There are publications which fall under our responsibility, and there is some wild and woolly stuff on the internet that does not. As far as blogs are concerned, I believe there will be a process of natural selection. Readers will soon sort out what they can rely on and what they can’t. As time goes by, a lot of these bloggers will fall by the wayside.

“If you have a well-known and respected brand, that is very important. The integrity of the brand becomes very important, and if you can see information in that publication or on the website that tells you that you can go to the PCC if you wish to raise a grievance, then it becomes a reinforcement of that brand’s integrity. You’re not going to get that on a blog.”

Meyer also expressed concerns about citizen journalism and again urged readers to use news websites that show ‘integrity’, such as newspaper websites.

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