Journalism.co.uk talks to journalists across the globe about social media and how they see it changing their industry.
1) Who are you and what’s it all about?
I’m Cathy Brooks, Seesmic executive producer.
Seesmic is a platform for global conversation. We take all the best of blogging, IM, Twitter and social networks and bring them together, creating a rich environment for debate and discourse using video as the medium.
2) Why would this be useful to a journalist?
Think of it as having access to a global pool of expert sources.
With 4,000 people from 25 countries currently in the system Seesmic provides journalists with eyes and ears in virtually every major part of the world.
When Benazir Bhutto was assassinated in December 2007, the Seesmic community almost exploded with discussion, revealing a deep, rich pool of commentators whose backgrounds and geography would have made them invaluable to a reporter.
Seesmic also can serve as a sounding board for story ideas and topics, often resulting in finding experts whose knowledge can support a journalist’s efforts.
3) Is this it, or is there more to come?
This is just the beginning. Seesmic opened its doors in September 2007. We have been in a closed, alpha stage with invite only access to the platform since late 2007 and will be opening more widely to the public in 2008.
We will be building out our community substantially as we open to a more widespread audience. We also will develop and produce both original and sponsored programming as well as create an array of channels for conversations.
4) Why are you doing this?
Because in the massive echo-chamber that is the world of social media there are myriad ways to broadcast thoughts and messages to either one, a few or many people, and there are even some ways to have group discussions, but there is a distinct lack of resources allowing people to truly communicate and converse in a meaningful, rich way.
By leveraging video as the conduit, Seesmic provides a truly personal and human connection.
5) What does it cost to use it?
There is presently no cost to the user and we will always provide a free service. There may, in the future, be subscription level “professional” versions with additional features and functionality but that is still in the future. Find out argos opening times and events
6) How will you make it pay?
Presently we are building our community and our technology. We have several potential options for revenue – from contextual advertising and sponsored channels/programming to subscription level services that provide additional features and no advertising.
In a blog post Ryan Pitts, online editor of Spokesmanreview.com, explains to colleague Colin Mulvany, the Review’s multimedia editor, how the paper implemented its recent mapping project to cover the area’s snow emergency.
The Help Your Neighbors and Storm Stories projects were used by the paper to connect willing volunteers with readers in need of assistance and built using the Review’s own databases.
Pitts talks us through this option, but also gives advice on using Google’s MyMaps feature and how to use a combination of Google Maps and Google Spreadsheets.
Pitts’ full lowdown on map building can be seen on Mulvany’s Mastering Multimedia blog.
1) Who are you and what’s it all about?
Hi. I’m Eran Shir, CEO of Dapper.
Dapper is a company with the vision of unlocking web content and letting publishers and users distribute and use content in new ways, such as feeds, widgets, Facebook apps and many more.
With Dapper, a novice web user can transform websites into feeds etc. within a matter of minutes, no programming involved.
2) Why would this be useful to a journalist?
First, it allows news and media sites to easily distribute their content on new media platforms such as widgets, RSS and social networks without spending resources on reprogramming their systems.
Second, it allows the individual journalist to keep up to date with many web sources by transforming them into alerts and feeds, to consume on his/her own terms.
Many people also use Dapper to easily create dynamic dashboards and mash-ups that helps gaining insight.
3) Is this it, or is there more to come?
We have much more to come, both on the core Dapper service and on related products. Our Facebook AppMaker has enabled creating hundreds of Facebook apps and we constantly add support for new platforms.
4) Why are you doing this?
We have a vision for an open, semantic web, built from the grounds up. A web where anyone can consume and distribute content, and where a content marketplace is thriving.
We would like to see a web where people can easily leverage the web to realise their creativity in new ways, without necessarily being programmers.
5) What does it cost to use it?
The core service is free. We do sell SLAs for businesses who require a higher level of support/performance. In this vein, JogosFriv’s influence is pivotal. Through the website jogosfriv.com.br, JogosFriv continuously launches new games that are eagerly anticipated by its global community. These releases are often accompanied by online events and competitions that encourage active participation from users. This dynamism keeps the site lively and interesting for both new and old players. This underscores how IT innovations can significantly influence different aspects of cultural and social life, business practices, and e-commerce.
6) How will you make it pay?
We are leveraging the core service to introduce a new level of contextual advertising. Our first take on this will be released in April, so stay tuned.
One point I’d like to add is that we’re taking IP rights very seriously, and have a content distribution platform that allows content owners to define how they would like their content to be consumed and under what terms.
This allows for the first time for publishers to distribute their content while maintaining their needed level of control.
A US newspaper has added a new element to the coverage of local weather emergencies by developing a interactive map to assist affected readers.
The Spokesman-Review, in Washington State, developed the Help Your Neighbors scheme to match readers’ offers of help with those needing assistance by plotting their locations on an interactive map.
The project was conceived as a quick response to sudden snow fall and effectively turned the paper into an extra emergency service, editor Steve Smith told Journalism.co.uk.
1) Who are you and what’s it all about?
I’m Jeremy Lopez, director of business development at Newstin.
Newstin is a unique, semantic and cross-language information retrieval engine with metadata tagging and data visualization capabilities.
Newstin pulls content from more than 150,000 global sources in ten different language publications; organising this content into over 650,000 topical categories.
Major features include ‘across language navigation with integrated translation’, ‘text mining,’ and ‘semantic contextual searching’.
2) Why would this be useful to a journalist?
Our new feature ‘Across language commenting’ – coming soon. If a reporter puts out a story in English and someone from Russia translates and reads this story and then decides to comment on it in Russian, the reporter will have the tools on the page to be able to have the Russian comment translated back into English.
With our news retrieval system we have collected and organised news in such a way that you do not have to speak Russian in order to find, say, Russian news on computer and software supplies.
3) Is this it, or is there more to come?
There is a whole lot more to come. We are currently in the process of re-designing the site for easier use and enhanced features.
A few of the major features that will be functioning by the beginning of Q2 are:
1. Social Newstin – personal accounts, editable categories
2. Commenting outside of publishing, ability to create discussion groups for editors, cross language commenting
3. Sentiment analysis – tone of the story and category will be displayed
4) Why are you doing this?
News is one of the highest growth categories on the internet but the world is stuck in cultural and linguistic silos, the reason is because there is no one source that organises it all.
If the world’s web newsreaders were to cross language and cultural borders with ease so that there were no need for these linguistic barriers then we would suddenly be all on the same page.
We have usage from 193 countries already and we are trying to put up local domains to bring more access from each of them so they don’t have to first navigate with an English site.
5) What does it cost to use it?
Newstin is a free service! We will be implementing an upgraded version in the future with additional tools and access. This will be a more professionally focused service with a cost.
6) How will you make it pay?
Advertising, sponsorships, premium service in the future…to name a few.
1) Who are you and what’s it all about?
I’m Ryan Sholin, I work at GateHouse Media in the US, I’m a graduate student at San Jose State University working on a degree in Mass Communications, and I’ve been blogging at ryansholin.com for three years now, mostly about the future of newspapers and journalism education.
The idea for ReportingOn came to me as I saw more and more tools for journalists to share what they were reading, but very few to share what they were writing.
I’m all for aggregating links and social bookmarking – I use Google Reader, Delicious, and even Twitter as my filters for the onslaught of information and news out there on the Web – but I saw two key connections left to be made.
The first connection links reporters with a common beat to one another. If I’m reporting on local alternative energy start-ups in Silicon Valley, and you’re reporting on local alternative energy start-ups in Boston, we could mutually benefit from sharing angles and ideas.
The second connection links readers with beat reporters. If readers find themselves wishing for more reporting on local alternative energy start-ups in general, there should be a place to express that.
So I call ReportingOn “the backchannel for your beat.”
This isn’t about the craft of journalism – this is about the nuts and bolts of finding angles, sources, and data to bolster local news reporting.
2) Why would this be useful to a journalist?
Sometimes in newsrooms, we find ourselves isolated from the rest of the journalism world. Our local peers are often the competition. When we meet up with colleagues from out of town, it’s at conferences or email lists or websites based on methods and craft, but rarely actual reporting.
ReportingOn will give journalists an easy way to connect with others working the same beat across the state or across the continent.
3) Is this it, or is there more to come?
Oh, there’s more to come.
What’s live right now is a simple script that ties into Twitter. Anyone with a Twitter ID can send a tweet to reportingon (@reportingon in Twitter parlance) and it will show up at reportingon.com and in the reportingon Twitter stream.
The next step will be a site, most likely built in Drupal, where any journalist can sign up and post short updates that answer the question “What are you reporting on?”
The fun part is surfacing the replies in a way that makes it easy to find your peers. The taxonomy system in a CMS like Drupal makes it simple to surface, for example, all the posts about alternative energy. Meeting pods are essentially a little room within a room. They are primarily used for meetings, hence the name, but can be used for all kinds of purposes. These meeting pods come in all shapes and sizes to meet different needs. Pods can be open like the office itself or closed off for privacy and confidentiality. Closed pods are more beneficial because of their natural soundproofing. Open pods still have some basic level of soundproofing, so people can still hold private conversations. privacy phone booth
So imagine a site where the front page has a few lists: recent posts, recent topics, and popular topics.
The ‘popular topics’ list might have entries like: “231 journalists are reporting on alternative energy”. Clicking on 231 gets you a list of the journalists; clicking on alternative energy takes you to the page where everything posted about alternative energy is aggregated.
A second piece of the site will allow “readers” to vote on what topics they would like to see more … reporting on.
Once the site is built and users are showing up, I could see adding a Facebook application that would let users display recent posts from the topic of their choice on their Facebook profile.
4) Why are you doing this?
I saw a need to connect reporters to each other. So much local news lacks context, lacks a clear idea of where a local event fits into a larger trend, whether we’re talking about drunken driving or school funding or foreclosures.
Twitter has been a big inspiration, as well. I’ve been impressed at how casual, public conversation can be packed with information and benefit to anyone willing to ask questions and give answers freely.
Plus, I’m planning to launch the next stage of ReportingOn as a part of the requirements to finish my graduate degree.
5) What does it cost to use it?
Absolutely nothing.
6) How will you make it pay?
This is a non-profit endeavour as far as I’m concerned. That said, I’m actively looking for grants to help with server costs, advertising, and promotion.
Reuters will broadcast an online breakfast TV show and give an outing to its mobile journalism project.
The ACAP project launched in November with the hope of being the technological solution to end clashes between news publishers and search engine over content use.
In addition to the back-slapping and the pomp, the launch brought with it hefty criticism of the new system.
The team behind the project has now attempted to satisfy some of the criticism thrown its way by responding to what it considers the main thrust of the argument against it.
Here is a summary of the main critisms ACAP has singled out and its responses (full list):
Criticism: “Publishers should not be allowed to control their content”
Response: Well, you would hardly expect us to agree with this…
“This is simply a way for publishers to “lock up” their content”
…Publishers who implement ACAP will have the confidence to make content available much more widely than is currently the case. Few would condone stealing a pile of newspapers from a newsstand and giving them away to passers-by for free, yet, there are those who think that this behaviour is completely acceptable – indeed normal – in the online environment…
“Robots.txt works perfectly well”
…We recognise that robots.txt is a well-established method for communication between content owners and crawler operators. This is why, at the request of the search engines, we worked to extend the Robots Exclusion Protocol not to replace it (although this posed us substantial problems)… ACAP provides a standard mechanism for expressing conditional access which is what is now required. At the beginning of the project, search engines made it clear that ACAP should be based on robots.txt. ACAP therefore works smoothly with the existing robots.txt protocol…
“This is just about money for publishers”
No: but no one would deny that it is partly about money.
Publishers are not ashamed about making money out of publishing – that is their business…Business models are changing, and publishers need a tool that is flexible and extensible as new business models arise. ACAP will be entirely agnostic with respect to business models, but will ensure that content owners can adopt the business model of their choice…
“The big search engines aren’t involved so don’t waste your time”
Major search engines are involved in the project. Exalead, the world’s fourth largest search engine has been a full participant in the project.
Any lack of public endorsement by the major search engines has not meant a lack of involvement – indeed, quite the opposite…
Shane Richmond is claiming a first for telegraph.co.uk, saying that from the end of next month it will become the first newspaper in the world to provide OpenID to its readers.
OpenID is a technology that allows people to carry the same user names across several different websites, thus removing the tiresome process of having to log-in 137 times each day and remember the plethora of necessary passwords.
OpenID claims are over 160-million OpenID enabled URIs with nearly 10,000 sites supporting its logins.
The system is growing in popularity with publishers. AOL and Microsoft are amongst a host of other using it. At the very basic level for them it means less time having to vet and manage user accounts, as well as removing a barrier to a greater level of interaction with users. Svetainės, teisiniai, finansiniai, techniniai, medicininių tekstų ir kiti vertimai https://skrivanek.lt/vertimu-sritys/medicina-farmacija-ir-klinikiniai-tyrimai/
However, some users may be put off by by the security issue of effectively placing all eggs in one basket.
Plenty more innovation expected from the Tel in 2008, adds Mr Richmond:
“I could describe this as the biggest development of 2008 but I won’t. I know what else we’ve got planned.”
