Category Archives: Events

Guardian: Royal Channel to cover wedding from all angles

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Next week’s royal wedding is to be live streamed via YouTube, the Guardian reports, to accompany coverage on the official wedding website, on Facebook and on Flickr.

According to the Guardian Prince William’s press office will also be producing a live blog with commentary offering historical information, additional photographs and video footage, along the live stream on the Royal Channel on YouTube. See more on this on the official royal wedding website.

Besides the four-hour live web coverage, including the ceremony at Westminster Abbey, route to Buckingham Palace, and the newlyweds’ balcony appearance, there will be a video wedding book “for the public to sign”.

Citizenside: Al Jazeera Talk blogger responsible for Facebook page that took down Mubarak

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According to a video report from citizen press agency Citizenside, it was an Al Jazeera Talk blogger, a member of the Egyptian army, that created and managed the Facebook page central to the uprisings in the country.

So far only Google engineer Wael Ghonim has been credited with administrating the page.

In the video, Ahmed Ashour, managing director of Al Jazeera Talk, speaks to Citizenside editor-in-chief Philip Trippenbach.

#ijf11: Full coverage from the International Journalism Festival 2011

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Image by International Journalism Festival on Flickr. Some rights reserved

Between Wednesday and Sunday last week the small Italian town of Perugia played host to the International Journalism Festival 2011 (#ijf11). I was there for some of it and I was lucky enough to see some fascinating panel sessions and workshops and meet some of the industry’s veterans, entrepreneurs and innovators.

This post is a round up of the news stories, blogs and audio I posted from the conference:

Blogs

Lessons in data journalism from the New York Times

The key term in open data? It’s ‘re-use’, says Jonathan Gray

‘Innovation is about about throwing spaghetti at the wall and seeing what sticks’

Playing at engagement and verification with Citizenside

Be accessible, be realistic, Guido Fawkes advises small news outlets

Charles Lewis on the ‘interesting ecosystem’ of non-profit news

Are paywalls incompatible with community engagement?

News

ONA launches MJ Bear fellowships for early career digital journalists

Online video project for Indian women scoops journalism innovation prize

Horrocks outlines new global strategy for BBC

Audio

CJR online editor Justin Peters on the news frontier database

New York Times deputy graphics editor Matt Ericson on how his team works

Nigel Barlow from Inside the M60 on making money as a local news startup

Guardian data editor Simon Rogers and national editor Dan Roberts on the future of leaking and mainstream media

Peter Horrocks on the BBC and data journalism

Charles Lewis on the future of non-profit journalism in the US

Image by International Journalism Festival on Flickr. Some rights reserved

#media140: Full coverage from media140 2011

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Last week I attended the media140 conference in Barcelona, which focused on the use of social technologies in journalism. The two-day event was filled with presentations, debates and demonstrations, and I’ve collected together my coverage from our blog and news pages below.

News

Al Jazeera’s early start reporting revolutions

Jay Rosen on a ‘golden age’ of press freedom

Amnesty International launches news service

Human story of Japanese earthquake lost in nuclear scaremongering

Big Society solution for supporting citizen journalism

On the blog

Pat Kane keynote speech: Back to basics for journalism industry

Carlos Alonso’s favourite tools to find stories behind the data

Get messy with mobile journalism says Adam Westbrook

Huff Po bloggers take legal action for back pay

Jay Rosen’s eight points of ‘the great horizontal’

El Pais writer Joseba Elola witnessing history with WikiLeaks

Choice of multiple business models as traditional press dies off

Top tips on managing your online identity

Podcasts

#jpod – Day one round-up with interviews

#jpod – Day two round-up with interviews

#ijf11: ‘Innovation is about about throwing spaghetti at the wall and seeing what sticks’

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Journalism conferences, as with all conferences I suspect, are always vulnerable to least a bit of tiresome industry navel-gazing, if not a lot. Even when they’re good, which the International Journalism Festival was, there is inevitably a lot of talking.

But on the last day of #ijf11 there was a welcome antidote in amongst the talk to round things off, a coherent message from several of the panelists: go out and do things, try things, find out what works. This particular session looked innovation in news, specifically at what it takes to go from having a good idea for a news site, to getting off the ground, to staying solvent.

Nigel Barlow trained as an accountant. He worked in small businesses for 20 years before he decided it was enough, and packed it in for a journalism course at UCLan.

Shortly after graduating Barlow co-founded Inside the M60, a local news site for the Manchester area. He told the #ijf11 panel that people need to start worrying less about the traditional journalism routes and start trying new things.

It’s a difficult time for journalism, but difficult times tends to bring out the best innovation. Don’t just look at the traditional routes, if you’ve got an idea just get on and do it. It’s abut throwing spaghetti at the wall and seeing what sticks.

A model example of getting on with it, Nigel was covering news for Inside the M60 before it even had a website.

Before the site was even there, we started to report on news in the area using Twitter, and created momentum for the site a few months before it launched.

We actively made connections with what I would call the local movers and shakers, MPs and businessmen for example.

We got a couple of big interviews with local MPs as well, which helped a lot at the beginning, and we were the first on the scene to cover a large gas explosion in Newham and were covering it live from the scene, after which we put about 1,500 followers in a couple of days.

We didn’t have a lot of money and we still don’t, so we have to make the most of free tools. But we got started by using social media and basically making a big noise on Twitter.

Using Barlow’s site as one example, Google News executive Madhav Chinnappa said the important thing was “the barriers to starting a news organisation have fallen”.

Fifteen years ago, starting a news organisation from scratch would have been impossible, but we have three people on this panel who have done exactly that.

And Chinnappa echoed Barlow’s sentiments on just getting on with it.

Google’s take on this is experimentation and interaction. Go out, try it, try it again, see what works.

He acknowledged it was difficult for smaller sites like Inside the M60 to get a decent ranking on Google news, and they would inevitably be dwarfed by the big global stories.

We know that if you’ve got a local news story that no one else has that it can be difficult to get out there. If you go to Google News and you don’t see an Inside the M60 story, that’s because they are getting outweighed by the likes of Fukushima and Libya.

And he acknowledged Google News was not giving proper due to certain types of content.

We’re not as good as we should be around video, or image galleries. And we’re almost playing catch up with the news organisations as they innovate, whether that’s graphics or slideshows.

But he also said there isn’t a magic formula to cracking Google, and argued that original, creative content was still important.

I think there is this myth about getting the technical aspect just right, and hitting on a formula and then you will suddenly be great on Google.

I don’t want to sound cheesy, but having good original content is still very important.

I spoke to Nigel Barlow after the session about making money as a local news startup:

Listen!

#ijf11: The key term in open data? It’s ‘re-use’, says Jonathan Gray

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If there were one key word in open data it would be “re-use”, according to Open Knowledge Foundation community coordinator Jonathan Gray.

Speaking on an open data panel at the International Journalism Festival, Gray said the freedom to re-use open government data is what makes it distinctive from the government information that has been available online for years but locked up under an all rights reserved license or a confusing mixture of different terms and conditions.

Properly open data, Gray said, is “free for anyone to re-use or redistribute for any purpose”.

The important thing about open data is moving from a situation of legal uncertainly to legal clarity.

And he sketched out in his presentation what the word “open” should mean in this context:

Open = use, re-use, redistribution, commerical re-use, derivative works.

The Open Knowledge Foundation promotes open data but most importantly, Gray said, was finding beneficial ways to apply that data.

Perhaps the signal example from the foundation itself is Where Does My Money Go, which analyses data about UK public spending.

Open Knowledge Foundation projects like Where Does My Money Go are about “giving people literacy with public information”, Gray said.

Nothing will replace years of working with this information day in and day out, and harnessing external expertise is essential. But the key is allowing a lot more people to understand complex information quickly.

Along with its visualisation and analysis projects, the foundation has established opendefinition.org, which provides criteria for openness in relation to data, content, and software services, and opendatasearch.org, which is aggregating open data sets from around the world. See a full list of OKF projects at this link.

“Tools so good that they are invisible”

This is what the open data movement needs, Gray said, “tools that are so good that they are invisible”.

Before the panel he suggested the example of some of the Google tools that millions use every day, simple effective open tools that we turn to without thinking, that are “so good we don’t even know that they are there”.

Along with Guardian data editor Simon Rogers, Gray was leaving Perugia for Rome, to take part in a meeting with senior Italian politicians about taking the open data movement forward in Italy. And he had been in France the week before talking to people about an upcoming open data portal in France – “there is a lot of top level enthusiasm for it there”.

In an introduction to the session, Ernesto Belisario president of the Italian Association for Open Government, revealed enthusiasm for open data is not restricted to larger, more developed countries.

Georgia has established its own open data portal, opendata.ge, and according to Belisario, took out an advert to promote the country’s increasing transparency ranking.

Some are expensive – the US, which began open government data publishing with data.gov, spend £34 million a year maintaining the various open data sites.

Others are cheap by comparison, with the UK’s opendata.gov.uk reportedly costing £250,000 to set up.

Some countries will pioneer with open data, some will bitterly resist. But with groups like the Open Knowledge Foundation busy flying representatives around the world to discuss it, that movement “from legal uncertainty to legal clarity” seems likely to move from strength to strength.

See Gray’s full presentation at this link.

See more from #ijf11 on the Journalism.co.uk Editor’s Blog.

#ijf11: Playing at engagement and verification with Citizenside

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Journalists, a lot of journalists in this room probably, recoil at the G word. “Oh you want to turn my really serious story into a game…

This was Citizenside editor-in-chief Philip Trippenbach speaking in an #ijf11 session earlier today called Beyond the Article.

Trippenbach has been trumpeting the benefits of gaming for journalism for some time now. He made a convincing case for gaming at a recent Journalism.co.uk news:rewired event called, coincidentally enough, Beyond the Story.

Trippenbach has worked on interactive projects for the BBC and a host of other outlets. But clearly the “G word” is still a long way from taking root with most journalists.

He made a convincing case again today. This time – having joined citizen press agency Citizenside in January – for the power of gaming for citizen journalism initiatives.

The most powerful interactive form is gaming, in terms of interactive journalism, that is where the win is. When you talk about gaming baked right into the heart of a package, that is very profound.

With the addition of Trippenbach to its staff, Citizenside is certainly baking gaming right into the heart of its operation, and he outlined how it is using the form for two key purposes.

Citizenside users are encouraged to progress from level to level by accomplishing certain tasks, or “missions”, just like you did when you played computer games as a kid (or maybe as an adult too – according to Trippenbach more people in Western Europe and North America play computer games than don’t, although I forgot to ask where he got the data for that one).

And just like those computer games, the missions at Citizenside get harder as you go along, with the early stages requiring you to capture a relatively easy-to-obtain image, and the latter requiring, say, a good image of a state leader or an important newsworthy event.

Perhaps the most interesting thing Trippenbach talked about was how the agency uses that points-based gaming system not just for engaging users, but to help  with assessment and verification of user-generated content, always a thorny issue for citizen press agencies.

If we get a picture from a level 35 user, well, it takes a long time to get to level 35 or 45, and the Citizenside editorial team know that that user has demonstrated commitment to our values.

So not only does the gaming element of the operation help engage users by breaking down their involvement into a series of incremental tasks and levels, it also is a huge advantage to Citizenside for an indication of the reliability of the content it is receiving.

If its someone who has submitted five packages and five of them have been refused, well, we know what that is, but if it’s someone with a 100 per cent record, well, fine.

We have a trust system that allows some users to post directly to the homepage and be post moderated.

As well as information about the user, Citizenside uses software to access data about the package itself.

This technical side of the verification process can potentially allows the agency to see whether an image has been edited in PhotoShop or uploaded to Flickr, and reveal when and where it was taken and uploaded.

I want to return to the issue of gaming and engagement quickly before I finish. However many journalists Trippenbach has seen turn their noses up at gaming, I have seen examples at this festival of gaming creeping in to some of the best and most popular mainstream journalism taking place.

Citizenside’s example of breaking the user engagement down into small, incremental stages has echoes in the Guardian’s MPs expenses app, which aimed to crowdsource the examination of the 458,000 documents published.

The app had two million hits in the first two days but, as the Guardian’s Martin Belam explained recently, users were unenthusiastic because the process hadn’t been broken down into achievable-seeming stages.

When a second batch of documents were released, the team working on the app broke them down into much smaller assignments. That meant it was easier for a small contribution to push the totals along, and we didn’t get bogged down with the inertia of visibly seeing that there was a lot of documents still to process.

So gaming doesn’t necessarily mean the fully-fledged computer games we play on a PlayStation, it can be the simple interactive engagement of the Guardian app, or the New York Times’ Budget Puzzle interactive in which you attempt to solve the deficit.

As Trippenbach acknowledged after the session, gaming is not yet taken seriously as a medium. But at Citizenside it may be the solution to the two key problems facing any citizen agency, engagement and verification, and for that reason you can bet that they take it very seriously.

See more from #ijf11 on the Journalism.co.uk Editor’s Blog.

#ijf11: Be accessible, be realistic, Guido Fawkes advises small news outlets

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Accessibility and community are key to having an impact as a small online news outlet, political blogger Paul Staines (aka Guido Fawkes) told the International Journalism Festival this morning.

Some of my best stories come from my readers.

If I want to contact the Sunday Times investigations editor, I can maybe ring the switchboard but I probably won’t get through.

I have my phone number and email address on my site. Alright, you won’t get though to me directly, you’ll get an answerphone, but I will get back to you.

And there is the promise of a free T-shirt if I use your information.

Staines cited the recent example of an image of David and Samantha Cameron looking terrifically glum waiting for a Ryanair flight to Malaga.

The image was sent to Staines by a reader, and within an hour he had published it and sold international syndication rights, making enough money to fund the blog for a month.

The blog shared the money with the photographer, he hastened to add.

Another important factor is being realistic, he said, knowing what you can and can’t do.

The Guido Fawkes blog is a two-man operation, and “can’t spend a long time investigating a corporation across five continents”.

The way we approach it is much more tabloid, more hit and run, but we will keep coming back to a subject and wear at it to get results.

We’re not worried about getting scooped as long as we keep at the story.

He put that need for realism in sobering financial terms when he said that he had bid £10,000 – as much as he could – for the MPs expenses disk, but came up against the Telegraph, which bid £100,000.

Since its modest beginnings, started “on a whim” in 2004, the blog has landed “one politician is jail, a few fired, a few resigned”, Staines claimed. “Oh and a few special advisors, I forget about them”.

Not all of them perhaps, The Guido Fawkes blog was responsible for a story about William Hague sharing a room with a young special advisor, who resigned as the story spread like wild fire across the nationals.

Compared with larger, more established news organisations, Staines’ disregard for the need for double checking the facts was another advantage, he said.

Newspapers have to have double sourcing and verification, Whereas I’m more likely to take a flyer and a risk with the lawyers.

For that very reason, another important source of stories for Staines is political journalists who have had stories spiked by their editor for not standing up, but who want to get it out.

That’s great, when that happens, because I get all the credit and they get nothing.

#ijf11: Charles Lewis on the ‘interesting ecosystem’ of non-profit news

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There are more than 50 non-profit journalism organisations operating today in the US, which leads the rest of the world in investigative journalism funded by private donations.

A sizable number of them – eight at last count – were founded by veteran US journalist Charles Lewis, including the Center for Public Integrity (CFPI), which has gone from his bedroom to having more than 40 staff and a budget of more than $8 million.

Lewis now runs the Investigative Reporting Workshop (IRW), which employs 14 staff, a third of which are students.

He said that the IRW was purposely “trying to mix the generations”, adding that having young people around vastly increases the organisation’s capacity to innovate.

Like the CFPI, the workshop also has a none-too-shabby budget of $2.2 million a year.

But speaking on an International Journalism Festival panel today on how small online news outlets can have an impact, Lewis said that millions of dollars and scores of staff were not a prerequsite for doing in-depth investigative work.

There is a non-profit in San-Diego that is doing this kind of work and they have two  people. They have done five impactful investigations.

One of the ways you do that is data. In San Diego they took the response times of ambulances in the city, and looked at how they differed over certain areas. This came from one dataset and one guy did it, over a few months.

Great journalism can be done by a few people.

Speaking to me after the session, Lewis said that with the rise of non-profits there was an “interesting ecosystem emerging” in US news.

Listen to more from Lewis on the future of that system and in the US and the future of the relationship of non-profits and traditional mainstream media:

Listen!

#media140 – Top tips on managing your online identity

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The final session of media140 looked at building an online identity.

Throughout the session plenty of useful tips and pieces of advice were imparted by the speakers – Ricard Espelt, co-founder of redall.cat and Gemma Urgell, journalist, blogger and consultant for redall.cat – and delegates alike. Here’s a collection of some of the thoughts shared:

  • Ask yourself who you are and how you are going to be seen, and want to be seen.
  • Have a good attitude, it is not only what we do ourselves it is what we say and what everyone else says about us.
  • You can control what you say, you can’t control what other people say, so you have to take that into account.
  • Should be transparent, need to be unique, you can adapt your own identity.
  • Be conscious about what you use it for, you have to remember it will still be there tomorrow.
  • We make mistakes and we learn from them on the net. If you see someone else make a mistake on the net you should learn from that too.
  • Main attitudes– transparency, common sense, share your knowledge, be humble, be constant/current, be updated.
  • If you have a specialism – use it to find your own community.
  • Use lists on Twitter to find and follow sources.
  • Broadcast journalists – use online platforms to offer extensions to short broadcasted news snippets, add depth.

But there were a couple of points of disagreement, too, such as audience statistics.

While some encouraged the use of analytics and audience statistics, others felt a better representation of audience feedback is in the comments left behind and the focus should be on quality of content, rather than quantity to increase statistics.

If you have anymore to add please do so using the comments below.