JEEcamp, the online journalism enterprise and experimentation unconference, was held for the last time yesterday (Friday 21 May 2010) in Birmingham but went out with a bang with excellent and revealing speeches from Stewart Kirkpatrick, founder of the Caledonian Mercury, and Simon Waldman, former director of digital strategy for the Guardian Media Group and now group product director at LOVEFiLM.
Expect other future great events from either Paul Bradshaw and/or his students in the future. As I said in my previous article, I’m studying the circulation of money in sports. And I was faced with the fact that the applications of many bookmakers cannot be downloaded due to various blocks. If you know ways to get around them, please write in the comments.
To spread the word even further about our forthcoming digital journalism event news:rewired – the nouveau niche, we are offering you the chance to win a Livescribe Pulse smartpen worth £150.
Imagine a pen that can record audio as you write and link that recording to the exact notes you taken down, before transforming your written notes into notes on your computer screen to be saved and searched.
Using a camera, microphone and speaker, the Livescribe Pulse smartpen does just that. As a journalist, this means its easy to find audio clips from interviews and speeches quickly by simply tapping the relevant notes in your pad or by searching your handwritten notes on a computer. Furthermore, you can share your notes through pencasts: online interactive Flash videos of handwritten notes and audio.
Come to #newsrw digital #journalism event 25:06:10. Follow @newsrewired & RT for chance to #win smartpen http://is.gd/c7f2a
In the run up to the first news:rewired event earlier this year Guardian community moderator Todd Nash won an HD Flip Camera after taking part in our retweet competition.
The competition will close on Friday 4 June 2010 at 1pm (GMT) and the winner will be selected at random and announced shortly after. The terms and conditions of the competition are listed below.
Not convinced? Watch the pen in action:
news:rewired – the nouveau niche is a one-day event hosted by Journalism.co.uk aimed at specialist journalists looking for digital ideas, tips, and inspiration from the industry’s best. It’s hosted in partnership with the BBC College of Journalism and MSN UK and sponsored by Kyte.
We’ll be offering practical sessions on crowdsourcing, data visualisations, community management; emerging news technology; and paid-for content. Keynotes include MSN UK executive producer Peter Bale, and Marc Reeves, editor of TheBusinessDesk.com West Midlands and former regional newspaper editor.
Tickets cost £80 (+VAT) until 11 June when they return to the full price of £100 (+VAT). They can be booked here – our last event sold out so please buy your tickets early to avoid disappointment.
If you’re interested in sponsoring the event or have any other queries, you can contact the Journalism.co.uk team. Contact us on laura [at] journalism.co.uk for more details.
Competition entry terms and conditions
1. Competition entry is subject to the acceptance of these conditions.
2. How to enter: the competition requires entrants to both follow the @newsrewired twitter feed and retweet the following phrase ‘Come to #newsrw digital #journalism event 25:06:10. Follow @newsrewired & RT for chance to #win smartpen http://is.gd/c7f2a’. The retweet must keep the entirety of the phrase intact to be valid for entry.
3. Competition will run from 11am (GMT) Friday 14 May 2010 until 1pm (GMT) Friday 4 June.
4. Any entries received after 1pm (GMT) on Friday 4 June 2010 will be void.
5. The winner will be selected at random from all correct entries received.
6. The judges’ decision will be final.
7. Although every effort will be made to ensure the prize is with the winner before 25 June this cannot be guaranteed and Mousetrap Media Ltd accepts no responsibility for late prize delivery.
8. Mousetrap Media Ltd reserves the right to discontinue the competition at any stage without reason.
9. The prize is both non-refundable and non-returnable. Mousetrap media Ltd accepts no responsibility for any harm, expense, liability or injury that may be sustained relating to or arising from participation in this competition or acceptance or use of the prize.
10. Employees of Mousetrap Media Ltd, those involved directly with the news:rewired event and their immediate families are not eligible to win.
11. The winner in accepting the prize authorises Mousetrap Media to publicise, in any media, his or her name, job title and Twitter handle unless prohibited by law.
12. You can retweet as many times as you like, but it will only count as one entry.
Journalism lecturer Andy Dickinson (@digidickinson) has now updated his recent SlideShare and blog post on how to find editorial jobs online, which we featured on this blog last week, to include a more detailed transcript of his talk.
His blog post this week contains lots of handy tips for the dedicated journalism jobseeker, so if you are in the market for a new job, check it out.
Meanwhile, here at Journalism.co.uk, we have produced a new page explaining how to get the most out of our own jobs board, including six step-by-step videos taking you through the jobseeker registration process and various alert systems. Here are the benefits, all of which are free:
ability to save jobs you have searched for and liked for later;
ability to upload and store your CV;
ability to apply online and save your applications for future re-use/modification;
ability to register a personal statement so that our can advertisers can find you using our CV match service;
ability to receive job opportunities by daily email;
ability to create customised RSS feeds based on your own search criteria.
I would urge you to take a few minutes to sign up, even if you are not necessarily looking to make a move now. You never know what opportunity might coming knocking on your door.
As former Observer political editor Gaby Hinsliff (@gabyhinsliff) tweeted earlier today, Gordon Brown’s post walkabout gaffe (see video below), in which he called an elderly former Labour voter a “bigot”: “Shows how easy it is to forget the first law of broadcast: even if you’re not on air, if you’re miked up you’re effectively on record.”
Channel 4 News was quick off the mark with an online poll on its live election blog, asking: “Does Gordon Brown’s unguarded ‘bigot’ remark make you less likely to vote Labour?” At the time of writing, the ‘no’s” had a 68 per cent majority but watch that space…
Meanwhile, a spoof Twitter account @bigotedwoman and the phrase “Bigoted Woman” are currently trending on Twitter.
Online journalism lecturer Andy Dickinson (@digidickinson) recently gave a lecture to his broadcast students advising on ways to find jobs online and promote themselves digitally.
His presentation appears in this slideshare:
Here’s another tip for creating a customised jobs feed using Journalism.co.uk’s jobs board search facility.
In the top left-hand column on most of the pages on Journalism.co.uk, you will see a panel headed “Job of the week”. About half-way down there is a dropdown menu that allows you to search by job type. For this example, select “editorial assistants and trainees” and click “go”.
On the subsequent search results page, you will see at the top of the central column an advanced search form. This allows you to make a more detailed search based on sectors, categories, salary and location. You will also see an option under format to “return search results as RSS feed”. Select that and also tick “editorial assistants and trainees” under the “categories” section.
Colin was in Oslo to give, among other things, an evening presentation to the Norwegian Online News Association (NONA). Colin, when he’s not advising on Journalism.co.uk’s editorial board, is an investigative journalist and trainer in advanced online research skills (his next one-day, open course is in London Tuesday 15 June 2010). Here are some of the tips he shared with our Norwegian colleagues:
Wikileaks today released a video depicting the slaying of more than 12 people – including two Reuters news staff – by two Apache helicopters using 30mm cannon fire.
The attack took place on the morning of 12 July 2007 in the Iraqi suburb of New Baghdad. Two children were also wounded.
Among the dead, were two Reuters news employees, Saeed Chmagh and Namir Noor-Eldeen. Chmagh was a 40-year-old Reuters driver and assistant; Noor-Eldeen was a 22-year-old war photographer.
An investigation by the US military concluded that the soldiers acted in accordance with the law of armed conflict and its own rules of engagement.
According to this video presentation by Jesse Thomas, eighty-one percent of email is spam. But if you view the rest of the statistics, you can see how email is becoming rapidly irrelevant as a key communications – and publishing – tool.
Media journalist Patrick Smith asks on this blog today How much is an article worth? His answer, as far as likely online readers are concerned, is very little.
This got me thinking. How much does a news article cost to produce? Journalism.co.uk is an online-only operation – a bootstrap operation as Kevin Anderson once called it – and obviously has much lower overheads than London-based national newsaper businesses. But if we could work out the cost-per-article for our own business, then that would at least provide a baseline guide to the likely costs to Murdoch et al.
Taking into account wages, expenses and a percentage of overall overheads (rent, bills etc), but discounting non-news-related administration, aggregation, tip of the days etc, we calculated the average cost of an article (feature, news story or blog post) to be around £37.00.
We have no intention of erecting a paywall around our news content, but if we were to, just to recoup that expenditure we would need 370 people to pay 10p each to read each article, or 3,700 to pay 1p each. In 2009, the average number of page views per article on our blog and main site was 440 (this includes all our aggregation posts, which probably skew the figure downwards slightly) but that means at current traffic levels we would need a model of 10p per article to be paid for by 84 per cent of our current readers.
Factoring in the much greater overheads of national newspaper publications, I would guess that the cost per article could be as much as 10 times the cost to us, perhaps around the £400 mark. I could be wildly off, and would be very interested to hear from anyone who has actually analysed this properly, but I think it is pretty obvious that there is a serious problem with the paywall model as a sole path to profitable news production.
WebMediaBrands chairman and chief executive officer Alan Meckler was so frustrated with Twitter’s slowness in dealing with his complaints over ‘Sqwitters’ (Twitter username squatters) parked on some of his brands that he publicly aired his grievances – on Twitter.
WebMediaBrands is a US media behemoth that is probably best known in the UK for its ownership of MediaBistro, an online community for mostly US-based media professionals. Meckler did not mention which of his brands are being squatted on, but @learnnetwork and @semanticweb are both WebMediaBrands and currently inactive with only a handful of followers.
Twitter expressly forbids username squatting in its terms and conditions so it seems likely that Meckler will get his way, but the subsequent minor spat that broke out following his Tweet (see screengrab below) rather neatly encapsulates the clash of cultures on the web described by Dr Aleks Krotoski in the first two episodes of the BBC documentary The Virtual Revolution:
The founding father of the Web, Tim Berners-Lee, believed his invention would remain an open frontier that nobody could own, and that it would take power from the few and give it to the many. Now, in a provocative, strongly authored argument, presenter Aleks Krotoski will re-assess utopian claims like these, made over many years by the digital revolution’s key innovators – and test them against the hard realities of the emerging web today, exploring how the possibilities of the pure technology have been constrained, even distorted by the limitations of human nature.
PS interesting skunk fact: skunks can spray up to 4-7m in a favorable wind, although they are usually only accurate for up to about 2m.
To spread the word even further about our forthcoming digital journalism event news:rewired – the nouveau niche, we are offering you the chance to win a Livescribe Pulse smartpen worth £150.
