BBC The Editors: Helen Boaden on citizen journalism and democracy

mySociety publishes analysis reports on its own sites

June 15th, 2011 | No Comments | Posted by Rachel McAthy in Editors' pick, Non-profit, Politics

MySociety, the organisation behind some of the biggest democracy projects in the UK, has today made public two reports which it commissioned to gain greater understanding of two of its sites – TheyWorkForYou and WriteToThem.

As the site itself says: “We think transparency is a good thing for many reasons, but one of its rarely mentioned virtues is how valuable transparency can be for the people within the organisations which are transparent.”

And there have been some interesting discoveries. According to MySociety one of the reasons that both the sites were set up was to make representatives accessible to newcomers to the democratic process. So it was “heartening” to find, for example, that 60 per cent of visitors to TheyWorkForYou had never previously looked up who represents them, and two in five users of WriteToThem have never before contacted one of their political representatives, was a positive sign.

But, as you would expect with any properly neutral evaluation, it’s not all good news. Our sites aim to reach a wide range of people, but compared to the average British internet user, WriteToThem users are twice as likely to have a higher degree and a higher income. It also seems that users are disproportionately male, white, and over 35.

Find the reports here…

Tags: democracy, mySociety, Politics, research, transparency

#Jpod: Why we need to view the news industry on an international scale

November 24th, 2010 | No Comments | Posted by Rachel McAthy in Business, Events, Journalism, Newspapers, Podcast

The newspaper industry “is not going to dry up overnight” – these were the words from the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism’s new director of research Robert Picard, speaking at the launch of the institute’s new book ‘The Changing Business of Journalism and its Implications for Democracy’.

The book itself offers a series of essays on seven countries, looking at recent developments and trends in the news media. It was introduced at the launch event by Picard and the book’s editors, institute director Dr David Levy and research fellow Dr Rasmus Nielsen.

Nielsen told the audience that the industry and business of journalism is today widely seen as in a “potentially terminal crisis”, spurred on by some imported American debates. He said the book aimed to make better sense of how these generalisations hold up.

While many of these are common challenges, there are also persistent differences in how the industries developed in different countries. We need to understand not only the common challenges but persistent differences.

For example, according to the book’s comparative tables featuring the most recent figures, newspaper revenues were down 30 per cent in the USA, compared with 10 per cent in Germany. “Germany weathered the storm and can turn its attention to strategic challenges,” Nielsen said.

Fellow editor Dr David Levy said one of the benefits of the book is that it provides a portfolio of different policy approaches and highlights those which need to be considered, shown in summary below:

Stimulating supply – tax breaks, new funding
Terms of trade – aggregators and copyright, ownership/plurality rules, public service media and commercial media
Demand – (only raised in one area of the book)

Before handing over to a panel, Picard said there was a great business misunderstanding in the journalism industry.

The last quarter of the last century was unusually enriching for media. Large firms were created through consolidation, which created a great deal of wealth and produced enormous profits.

There were far fewer financial resources than today in the 1950s, 60s and 70s. We have to think in broader terms when looking at the health of the industry.

There is a good deal of reason to be concerned. Revenues are leaving and not coming back, there are shifts in how people are using information. But the newspaper industry is in fact a very wealthy industry and producing more money worldwide than other forms of media.

It is not going to dry up overnight.

Listen below for Journalism.co.uk’s podcast, including interviews with the book’s editors and members of the launch event panel, Professor George Brock, head of journalism at City University and Professor Natalie Fenton from Goldsmiths, University of London.

Podcast: Download

Tags: Business, democracy, international news, jpod, reuters institute for the study of journalism

A journalistic limbo until we reach The New World

September 25th, 2009 | No Comments | Posted by Benji Lanyado in Comment, Online Journalism

According to many, the perfect storm is approaching. The winds have been whipping for a while. But there’s a problem. The Old King is dying but the New King, apparently, isn’t quite ready yet.

Clay Shirky, internet theorist and the harbinger-in-chief of newspaper death, encapsulated the problem at a recent Harvard Shorenstein Center talk:

“We are headed into a long trough of decline in accountability journalism because the old models are breaking faster than the new models will be put in their place.”

He’s right. But, intriguingly, he also slings in a caveat. Shirky imagines a time in the future when everything is hunky-dory, and a broad conglomeration of multiple news organisations will ‘overlap and provide a small percentage of journalism individually, but taken as a whole, represent the same position of accountability held by newspapers in the 20th century’.

Perhaps. But until then, we’ve got a problem.

So what’s going to happen in this imminent limbo stage; when journalism enters an intermediate ‘state of nature’?

Allow me to imagine…

1) The paywalls go up, and a black market for scoops emerges

Paywalls and micropayment schemes begin to appear on news websites. A few of them make a decent stab of it: News International in particular, as they have a competitive advantage.

As Malcolm Coles at Econsultancy suggests, Murdoch’s sites begin corralling in Sky News, Sky Sports, Fox as well as umpteen other publications and broadcasters that it owns, offering an attractive package behind the wall.

Jason Wilson, writing at NewMatilda.com, suggests that News Corp will ‘draw on its corporate experience with pay television to leverage audiences and money using niche content of various kinds’ kicks in, and, for a while, it all seems to be working.

Desperate to lure readers beyond the paywalls, the organisations that enacted them scramble for scoops. They get dirty. They hunt for drug scandals and nip slips like never before. Investigative journalism becomes feral. They get some real goodies.

Infuriatingly, the exclusives start being screengrabbed and hijacked on pop-up sites.

A black market for scoops emerges, but readers don’t care if the scoop they are reading is 14th hand and poorly delivered, because they’ve still got it.

Shane Richmond notes in the Telegraph that ‘it doesn’t matter that versions of the story on free sites ‘won’t be as good’ because they’ll be free, which offsets the loss of quality considerably’ (and Google’s Eric Schmidt agrees).
More »

Tags: business models, Clay Shirky, democracy, payment models