UPDATE (May 12) – The session with Keith McSpurren will kick off at 1pm tomorrow – if you’re attending it’s in Room AG03 ground floor, College Building, City university – that’s 280 St John St, London EC1 (map here)
Liveblogging – the format of choice for news sites to cover events it would seem given recent examples.
Next week its founder Keith McSpurren is in the UK and will be coming to City University in London to talk about the good, the bad and the potential for liveblogging and news.
This is an informal and free event, from 1pm next this Wednesday (May 13).
Journalism.co.uk is attending JEEcamp today – an ‘unconference’ (e.g. any attendees can suggest the topics for discussion) about future models for journalism, focusing on enterprise and experimentation.
“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.”
Organsied by Birmingham City University lecturer and Online Journalism Blog blogger Paul Bradshaw, the event is a sell out – but there are plenty of ways to follow what’s going on.
There will be lots of twittering (see the attendees list for a rough guide of who to follow and @journalism_live) under the #jeecamp hashtag. If you tag your tweets in this way they’ll be fed through to the CoverItLive bloggers too.
“To be the only English channel on the ground could be a ‘one-off experience’ during her career, [Tadros] said. While she thrived on being part of the only English-language media team on the ground – ‘everything we did was exclusive’ – Tadros was aware of the responsibility to cover as much as possible for an English speaking audience.”
Now it’s your chance to join in and put your questions to the pair. Visit this site at 2pm (GMT +1). Journalism.co.uk will be putting a series of questions, via CoverItLive, to Tadros and Mohyeldin about their experience. Was it liberating to find themselves without the BBC working alongside? Was it a daunting responsibility?
Leave your own questions in the comments below this post and they will be included in the interview. See you at 2pm (4pm Doha time). You can also submit questions to @journalism_live on Twitter.
UPDATE 15.00 BST: THIS EVENT HAS NOW FINISHED. Thank you for your questions and thoughts. Please leave additional comments on the subject of media coverage in Gaza below this post. If you participated and wish to comment on the use of CoverItLive in this format please send your feedback to judith at journalism.co.uk. Did it seem a good way to present an interview? Was the balance of questions between Journalism.co.uk and users about right? Many thanks in advance for your help.
Today’s budget announcement is being billed as the most significant of recent times given the UK’s current financial woes.
This is both a breaking news story, but one that requires closer analysis and follow up – and, perhaps most importantly, the ability to make it relevant to the reader.
So how are news organisations covering it online and who’s ticking these boxes?
In addition there’s a nice ‘What to expect’ guide breaking down the issues that are likely to feature in the budget announcement.
FT.com
Arguably the go-to site for budget coverage given its specialism, the FT is building on tried and trusted features from last year (a budget day podcast, video analysis, a budget calculator) with a new liveblog from 12pm covering Alistair Darling’s speech, editor Robert Shrimsley, who will participate, told Journalism.co.uk.
The format is based on the site’s MarketsLive feature successfully developed and used by its Alphaville blog. As such it will ‘bring people people up to speed, but inform them in an entertaining way’. Financial analysis but entertaining – two styles that rarely meet, said Shrimsley, but that will be key to FT.com’s liveblogging of the budget.
“There’s a premium on getting that information out and telling people what its means. We feel at the FT that we have the right people to pass on that analysis,” explained Shrimsley.
There will be a Twitter feed too, but it’s crucial not spam people with updates, he added. Readers are encouraged to participate in both this stream and the liveblog though.
Alphaville isn’t being used as a lab for experimenting with new ways of coverage, he stressed, but there is potential for more liveblogging across the site. It’s important not to overdose on technology, however, but to use only when applicable, he added.
“Can we offer our audience what is worth reading? There’s lots of innovation on the internet and there’s lots that you can do – that doesn’t mean you have to,” he said.
Channel 4 News website
More use of Twitter by the Channel 4 news team – as introduced by presenter Krishnan Guru-Murphy in the vid below:
Liveblogging at regional level
Deciphering what the budget means for the average news reader is being tackled head on by the Newcastle Evening Chronicle with a liveblog taking place across a number of Trinity Mirror centres.
“We’ll be mainly trying to digest it for *normal* people with rx [reactions] from experts, rather than the scary £180bn debt figures,” said Colin George, multimedia editor, in a Twitter update.
We’ll link again to a round-up post, but in the meantime here’s the CollegeJourn.com ‘Bring A Professor chat’ from yesterday evening, displayed via CoverItLive. Journalism educators shared their thoughts on ‘how journalism education can be improved’: “what they’re doing right and how, together, we can help redefine the future of journalism and journalism education,” the host, Suzanne Yada, asked the range of US college students and professors.
Sponsorship for distribution e.g. people who care about journalism should invest in profitable industries outside of journalism and reinvest the profits in news
Someone needs to try something
Other interesting titbits:
A whopping 85 per cent against paying for news on a poll during the debate
Create an online/offline community around a news brand and that community will pay for news online (well it used to work for paid-for newspapers didn’t it?)
Micropayments have potential if they are used without building a wall around newspapers (from @NewspaperWorld)
Any other participants from the debate are welcome to leave comments/links to their blog posts on the debate.
A Twitter debate kicks off this morning at 10am London time, organised by Alexandre Gamela (@alexgamela), which looks at ‘new business models for media’
“We do not want to discuss just the transition from traditional to online media and their revenue sources, but how money can be made online by independent bloggers and journalists too,” Gamela writes on his blog.
You can follow via CoverItLive, or make use of the Tweet stream below.