Monthly Archives: May 2010

International journalists in Thailand spread word in the face of violence

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First-hand accounts and Twitter updates from journalists on the ground in Thailand this week have given an insight into the level of violence faced by citizens and journalists reporting ongoing clashes between the red-shirt anti-government protestors and the Thai military.

According to the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), at least eight journalists have been shot, two fatally, while covering the unrest in Bangkok. Freelance Italian photojournalist Fabio Polenghi was killed on Wednesday – another casualty following the death of Reuters cameraman Hiro Muramoto on 10 April.

Those journalists reported to have been injured include Dutch freelancer Michael Maas; the Independent’s Andrew Buncombe, and freelance Canadian writer and photographer, Chandler Vandergrift.

“Covering civil unrest in Thailand is always dangerous, but for months, neither side in the political turmoil has been willing to address ways of allowing journalists to do their jobs without fear of being killed or injured,” says Bob Dietz, CPJ’s Asia programme coordinator, on the group’s website.

Buncombe, who was shot in the leg while covering violence at a Buddhist temple, tweeted eyewitness reports from the scene providing a harrowing yet fascinating narrative of his experience, which he has also covered in a piece for the Independent:

The injured were removed, with priority given to those most badly hurt.

The first to leave was the man shot in the lower back. Next was a man shot in the leg. As he was lifted on the stretcher and carried towards the ambulances, he moaned and cried. He pressed his palms together as if to say a prayer, perhaps both for himself and his country.

A man who had been shot in the thigh and I were taken out in the final two ambulances. That man’s name was Narongsak Singmae, he was 49 and from the north-east of the country. As he lay waiting to be taken away to hospital, he said: “I cannot believe they are shooting in a temple.”

Tweets and images from fellow journalist Mark MacKinnon, East Asia correspondent for Canada’s national newspaper, the Globe and Mail, (who managed to sneak a cold beer into @andrewbuncombe while he was in hospital according to this tweet) have been pulled into a transcript by the Globe and Mail, creating a vivid account of the Thai government’s crackdown on protestors.

The Vancouver Sun has a moving account of photojournalist Nelson Rand who was hit by three bullets while covering the violence but survived; and another Canadian journalist, Vandergrift, who was seriously injured in clashes between Red Shirt protestors and Thai soldiers. A producer with CBC News, Cedric Monteiro, describes the moment he realised Vandergrift was injured:

There was more yelling down the road, from more soldiers running with stretchers. As the first one went by I recognized Vandergrift on it. He was motionless, his head bandaged, his shoulder bleeding. Someone was shouting at him: “Chandler stay awake.”

According to reports, he was struck by shrapnel from a grenade that also tore through the arm of a Thai soldier. Tonight Vandergrift lies in hospital in serious condition, fighting for his life. The sadness of the moment lies even heavier because I knew him. He is among four journalists who were injured today. Another was killed – an Italian photographer.

As I try to fathom why so many scribes race with such intensity and abandon to cover conflict, I’m reminded by what my journalism professor once said: “There is no story in the world worth dying for.”

#JEEcamp: What does the election result mean for publishers and start-ups?

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We had breakout groups at today’s JEECamp pre-lunch and I got too absorbed in my chosen session (media law & ethics) to tweet or blog but you can find a summary by @owmyfoothurts here, at this link.

The next session:

Panel: What does the election result mean for publishers and startups? Siôn Simon (former Labour creative industries minister), Matt Wardman (Blogger, The Wardman Wire), Stewart Kirkpatrick (Founder, Caledonian Mercury), and Mark Pack (co-editor, Liberal Democrat Voice).

A few notes:

The session kicks off with a discussion on government data. Sion Simon says he can’t imagine why the new Lib-Con coalition would not proceed with open data plans. But, he says, it would be a new government getting the credit for the spadework a previous government had done.

Then over to blogger Mark Pack: he says there’s huge amount of information out there and it’s a necessity for lots of people outside traditional media to make use of that data. This, he says, will give a huge boost to hyperlocal and outside traditional media coverage. It will be painful for local authorities to be held to account (but it’s important).

Matt Wardman pays tribute to Tom Watson (not in the room) and Sion Simon for their role in the campaign for open data. But for him the big trend is the possible break down of the Westminster “political bubble” and the London “media bubble”, as independent outlets break stories.

How it will the coalition affect reportage?

Sion Simon says we’re in the honeymoon period of government at the moment (Tony Blair’s was ‘like living in a pink candyfloss cloud’ he says).  “Everybody loves it, it’s all great”. But, he adds, all the qualitative research that been done over the past few years shows that the public ask ‘why can’t they all get on with each other’. The public reaction to the coalition then, is positive.

The newspapers are motivated by, or reflect, the readers. Over time, it will give way to a negative dynamic: the tension between the fourth estate and the political classes.  Don’t expect the big society to save the coalition from the press, warns Simon.

Matt Wardman is hopeful for resources such as theyworkforyou.com, where you’ll be able to look up what ministers said 14 years ago. “I want to see that happen at a local level,” he says. Local bloggers need to pick up the sort of skills to do freedom of information requests. He wants to see the sort of skills that are used nationally and used more widely.

The Birmingham City students have liveblogged the session here.

#JEEcamp: Simon Waldman – developing online businesses (beyond what Google would do)

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Journalism.co.uk is at JEEcamp in Birmingham today. It’s the third such annual informal event for journalism experimentation and enterprise. But organiser Paul Bradshaw says it will be the last.

I’m trying a One Man and His Blog style live blog today, as long as the dongle holds up. You can also follow #jeecamp tweets here: http://bit.ly/aeb9BV.

First up, Simon Waldman the former digital strategy and development director of Guardian Media Group. His new job is as LOVEFiLM’s product director, and the session so far reflects that cross-sector flexibility.

He’s talking about what people like about the web: challenging authority (through Christmas number one campaigns for example) and stuff that’s free and cheap.

Each time new technology comes out, our behaviour changes, he says. What has wifi changed, for example? Well, we can all sit round tweeting what he is saying. With wifi, you can watch TV and have the laptop on your lap (‘bellyvision’!).

Waldman says he thinks we’ve got another decade of “quite profound change” ahead of us.

He says that  it’s not necessarily a Jeff Jarvis ‘what would Google do’ question, because Google would be doing it. The Guardian’s Sarah Hartley tweeted this great quote: ‘looking at what Google would do and attempting to copy it is like me looking at Rooney & attempting to play football like him’.

Waldman looked at IBM and says that if a company like that can turn its business around, there’s hope for the rest of us.

Companies need to transform their core business, he says: it’s about making sure your business as a whole is in good shape.

Innovation needs tight deadlines and speed. He’s not sure about the Economist’s Project Red Stripe for example. Entrepreneurs get on and do things, he says.

The kind of businesses editors and publishers think about are quite difficult to scale (at this point he says he’s not going to spill any beans about the Guardian – boo!).

There’s a load of challenges ahead – for at least the next decade and a half. Now is a fantastic time to be entrepreneurial, but think really carefully about how big it can be, says Waldman.

Find someone who can help you turn into a real business. “Do brilliant things,” he says.  Waldman can never stop being grateful that his career coincided with digital explosion, he says.

Image courtesy of Adam Tinworth on Flickr

Explained: iPad’s role in the media ecosystem

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This is an edited version of a post that first appeared on Kristine Lowe’s blog, Notes on the Changing Media Landscape.

Since its launch earlier this year, the media industry has been abuzz with talk of how the iPad will change the industry. As a media journalist I’ve already attended quite a few talks and read an extraordinary number of articles on the subject, but INMAs Tablet summit in Oxford this week gave me new insights into what kind of role the iPad might come to play in the media ecosystem.

Convenience or uniqueness?

That is not to say that there is a consensus about this role. For instance the Guardian’s Jonathan Moore said his newspaper saw the iPad more as convenience device, it’s iPad app offering pretty much the same content as you find on the Guardian’s news site, while the majority of the presenters saw it as the perfect device for offering unique content people were willing to pay for.

“This has to be a premium content. If you approach it as something free: let’s just turn off the light and go home. It has to be premium, paid for, from day one,” said Juan Senõr, Innovation in Newspapers UK director. He asserted that we can’t talk about tablets without talking about the rest of our platforms, pointing out that you have to have different content for different platforms.

“Tablet and paper will be premium, provide background etc, while we have to see online and mobile as mass media. You will have to charge perhaps five times more for print paper and for tablets,” he said, citing some of the products Innovation in Newspapers has remade, especially the successful Portuguese daily news magazine I, as perfect journalism to be transformed to the iPad.

Long form journalism and the ‘lean-back device’

Media consultant and commentator Frédéric Filloux said the iPad offers long-form journalism a new chance. In his view, it provides three major rehabilitations: 1) Re-bundling the news. Tablets and mobile can re-bundle content, 2) Visual 3) Length.

He also sees the device as being primarily about media consumption rather than production: “The iPad is the lean-back device: it’s a consumption device rather than a production device – it has nothing in common with a lean-forward device such as the PC.” Read more of his thoughts on this here.

Jon Einar Sandvand, digital strategist at Aftenposten, Norway’s newspaper of record, said iPad readership figures suggested it was most used in the evening, between six and eight.

Juan Antonio Giner, president and founder of Innovation in Newspapers, reiterates similar ideas to Filloux on media consumption: “Research suggests iPad will become the leading platform in terms of how much people spend consuming media on it. It is a media consumption device. If you are a mono-media operation producing second-hand stories you won’t win from iPad: garbage in, garbage out.”

Now, let me confess, I often find that big media conferences tend to focus too much on ideology and too little on how people are actually approaching a certain issue or innovation, but the Tablet Summit offered some excellent insight into how different news organisations are approaching the iPad.

Among those, the most useful was the very hands-on presentation by Saulo Ribas, creative director at Brazilian Editora Globo’s Epoca Magazine.

Useful iPad tips for publishers

His newspaper wanted to be first in the country with an iPad app, so they built a light version first, and will launch the full version in July. He offered five useful tips for newspapers wanting to develop iPad apps:

    1. It’s an app, not a magazine or newspaper. We have to make the best use of the interface Apple has provided.
    – Good apps are non-linear. You can access content from everywhere in the app.
    – Good apps don’t require users to learn how to use it, or at least not so much. If you need instructions on how to use the app it usually means it’s poorly designed.
    – Good apps have very simple information architecture. Simplify and eliminate the unnecessary
    – Good apps allow the users to leave and then come back to where he left. Try to produce the best reading experience possible
    2. Think about templates not pages. What is the role reserved for the editorial designer in the age of the tablets? If it looks awesome on the iPad it will look awesome on any other tablet.
    3. Personalise: the reader is really in control. Allow the reader to define the settings of the app, the more the better. It’s a big change for us because we’re very attached to our typography in our mags and papers. We have a search view. Can’t be static, people are used to search. We’ve tried to put the basic controls at the bottom of the page.
    4. Technology is content. Have programmers part of the newsroom
    5. Choose the right flow of information inside the iPad app

Who controls the data?

“I do believe Apple wants to become the world’s kiosk. We could end up like the music industry; we do need to be aware of what’s happening. They control pricing and they control customer data – and if you loose those, you loose out,” said Senõr. That Apple also controls the customer data was new to me, but it was also mentioned by one of the other presenters. If that is the case, it sounds very worrying indeed.

Repurposing vs. reinvention

Many industry experts have looked to the iPad as a potential saviour for the media industry. In essence, the sound bite I took away from the Tablet Summit which best answers this proposition was that yes, there is a future life for the news industry if we reinvent, not if we just repurpose.

While I made extensive notes during the summit, Marek Miller was doing such an excellent job of live blogging it that I thought I’d afford myself the luxury of taking some time to reflect a bit on the event before I started writing about it. I will return to a few other thoughts I took away from the event a bit later, but, if you want to read more about the individual presentations, do check Mareks excellent live blog from the event here.

#JEECamp: Follow live

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Today we’re up in Birmingham for the JEECamp unconference. Follow the live blog below for tweets and comments from the conference.

JEEcamp is an opportunity for a range of people to get together to talk about how on earth journalists and publishers can make a living from journalism in the era of free information, what the challenges are, and what we’ve learned so far.

You’ll find details of the day at this link: http://jeecamp.pbwiki.com/. It has a flexible agenda, but the keynote will be given by Simon Waldman, digital director, Guardian Media Group.

Next Generation Journalist: crowdfund your journalism

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This series of 10 moneymaking tips for journalists began on Adam Westbrook’s blog, but continues exclusively on Journalism.co.uk.

Adam’s e-book, Next Generation Journalist: 10 New Ways to Make Money in Journalism is on sale now.

10. crowdfund your journalism

Crowdfunding has made it into my book even though, on the face of it, it is hardly entrepreneurial. It is however a method only possible thanks to the internet; and as you’ll read in the e-book, a method which actually requires some of the toughest entrepreneurial spirit.

The idea of crowdsourcing news stories, opinion and media isn’t that new. But the notion of crowdsourcing money is only beginning to come to fruition. The real pioneers on this have been in cinema: last year the producers of Age of Stupid funded the entire project with donations from the public.

The internet has made it easier too. In particular we’re seeing new platforms from which to launch your crowdfunding project. Spot.Us is one of the first, and currently helps to fund projects with networks in Seattle, San Francisco and Los Angeles. More recently another startup – Kickstarter – has emerged working along similar lines.

Crowdfunding your journalism…

  • has so far proved successful in print, online and cinematic projects
  • is not easy and requires strong marketing skills
  • is only possible because of the internet

But be under no illusions: crowdfunding is not an easy ride.

“You have to tell people what’s in it for them” says multimedia journalist Annabel Symington, “people want to know what their money is going to do, and saying it’s going to fund a piece of quality journalism isn’t enough.”

Along with two partners Annabel has spent the last few months using Kickstarter to raise enough money to report on the Guarani Aquifier. As with almost all of the ideas suggested in Next Generation Journalist: 10 New Ways to Make Money in 2010, crowdfunding it’s about being more than a journalist:

“Through this project I’ve become a brand designer, a social media guru, a public speaker and an event organiser. You name it, I think I’ve done it,” says Annabel.

You can find out more about the Guarani Project here, and more about the ins and outs of crowdfunding in the ebook.

And that wraps up the 10 new ways to make money in journalism in 2010. If you’ve been inspired by any of them you can find out how to make them happen inside the ebook – on a discount price until 27 May.

Brand Republic: FT withdraws from ABCe audits for web traffic

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In the same month that it launched its own metric for measuring readers across print, online and other media, the Financial Times has officially withdrawn from the monthly audit of UK newspapers’ web traffic conducted by the Audit Bureau of Circulations Electronic (ABCe). It’s been some time since the FT website’s figures were included in the monthly stats – listed as N/A below a print circulation figure in the monthly multi-platform reports issued by the auditor.

Says a spokesperson:

The FT no longer participates in ABCes as volume traffic measures have become less relevant to our advertisers and clients. We do not intend to compete on volume, rather the quality of our registered and subscriber readership.

Full story at this link…

Cindy’s Take on Tech: ‘The Journalist as Programmer’

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Cindy Royal, an assistant professor at Texas State University in San Marcos teaching web design and multimedia journalism, has shared details of her paper ‘The Journalist as Programmer: A Case Study of The New York Times Interactive News Technology Department’ in this blog post – her slideshow below, courtesy of slideshare, is well worth a look for anyone interested in how programming, news applications and data can fit into a newsroom set-up: