Tag Archives: Events

#VOJ10: Follow the Value of Journalism conference

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The BBC College of Journalism and media thinktank Polis are hosting a one-day conference today to discuss the value of networked journalism, free newspapers, political and government reporting and ‘grassroots’ journalism. Keynote speakers include Channel 4 News presenter Jon Snow and BBC Global News director Peter Horrocks, interviewed by Journalism.co.uk at this link.

Journalism.co.uk is hosting the session on ‘grassroots journalism’ and we will be discussing what new ‘hyperlocal’ start-ups are up to, how sustainable these ventures and opportunities this trend could in turn create for ‘big’ media groups in the local space. In keeping with the title of the conference we’re hoping to move the discussion away from what is hyperlocal or definitions of ‘citizen journalism’ and talk about the value of ‘grassroots journalism’ to the public and the media in the UK as a whole.

For our updates you can follow @journalism_live on Twitter – there’s also a hashtag of #VOJ10 and tweets from the conference in the liveblog below:

<a href=”http://www.coveritlive.com/mobile.php/option=com_mobile/task=viewaltcast/altcast_code=0d5ec4cb51″ mce_href=”http://www.coveritlive.com/mobile.php/option=com_mobile/task=viewaltcast/altcast_code=0d5ec4cb51″ >#VOJ10 – Value of Journalism Conference</a>

#newsrw: 10 tickets left – get yours before the price goes up

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There are just 10 tickets left for news:rewired – the nouveau niche, Journalism.co.uk’s one-day event on 25 June for journalists working within a specialist beat or patch.

If you want one now – here’s the link to book: http://www.journalism.co.uk/195/

The price is currently discounted at £80 (+VAT), but will return to the full price of £100 (+VAT) tomorrow, Friday 11 June.

If you need more convincing, full details of the day are at this link. In summary we’ve got speakers from MSN UK, the Financial Times, Reed Business Information and the BBC discussing paid content, mobile, social media, data journalism and much, much more.

If you’re not able to attend you’ll be able to follow proceedings on @newsrewired and http://www.newsrewired.com.

Nieman Journalism Lab: ‘Empowering citizens through public media’

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Nieman Journalism Lab is posting a selection of videos (those most relevant to the future of news) from a series of weekly discussions at the Berkman Center for Internet at Society.

The latest features Ellen Goodman and Jake Shapiro on ‘Empowering citizens through public media’.

See the previous two at the following links and look out further posts.

David Weinberger: How information became the “dominant metaphor” of contemporary intellectual life

Jure Leskovec: How memes move, heartbeat-like, through the news

Could peace journalism offer a future for news media?

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Non-violent activism is not reported enough in the media, which focuses on violence in too much of its language and reportage, Richard Keeble, Professor of Journalism at the University of Lincoln, argued yesterday in a Coventry Conversation event at Coventry University entitled “Give Peace Journalism a Chance!”

“Peace journalism is solution-orientated. It gives a voice to the voiceless. It’s attempting to humanise the enemy and exposing lies on all sides, highlighting peace initiatives and focusing on the invisible effects of violence, such as psychological trauma,” he said.

Keeble attacked the traditional media, for acting as propaganda for war, rather than a resolution promoter, but stressed the importance of alternative media in promoting peace journalism.

“Part of the critique is the critique of the language of the media and one of the things that always amazes me, is the way in which the metaphor of war is everywhere […] there’s all different kinds of ways in which alternative citizen journalists are challenging the professional monopoly of this word journalism, and I celebrate them enormously.”

Talking about the exposure of war, Keeble said: “It is the responsibility of journalists to expose the truth.”

“You are not being told to be objective,” he added. “There’s no way in which X can be balanced with Y, because what about A, B, C and D and everything else in between? The whole notion of balance is problematic, isn’t it?”

#ppa: Follow the PPA’s annual magazine conference

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Today sees the PPA’s annual conference – a chance to hear the business and consumer magazine industry discuss social media, iPhones and iPads, digital revenues and more. Speakers include: David Rowan, editor of WIRED; Christian Hernandez, head of international business development, Facebook; and the CEOs of IPC Media, Future Publishing and Reed Business Information. There’s a full agenda to download here.

Follow live Twitter updates from delegates in the liveblog below:

#ds10: Blinked.tv – the emphasis is on live video and audio

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Last week technology firm Blinked.TV demoed its mobile phone app for livestreaming audio and video to delegates at the Digital Storytelling conference (#ds10).

[Disclaimer: Blinked.TV was a sponsor of Journalism.co.uk’s news:rewired conference in January]

The app, which will soon be available for iPhone users, lest you record and stream audio and video, and send text updates. Users can create channels archiving this multimedia content and different permissions, which can be embedded in their sites. Users can also switch between broadcast, audio and text modes without losing connection to a server during the stream, said co-founder Andrew Cadman.

The problem that digital journalists have is constantly swapping between applications to do multimedia work. Switching between applications is time lost.

The app’s interface is illustrated in this roughly-shot video below:

According to founder Andrew Cadman the app allows for “digital storytelling with a single broadcast” – an important part of this is the metadata attached to each piece of material. By itself a broadcast won’t tell a story, said Cadman, but with captions and location data attached to it, it can. The app also allows for multiple users to contribute to the same channel from different handsets and locations.

Providing high-quality livestreaming is the company’s ultimate aim – current 95 per cent of content uploaded via the Blinked.TV site is streamed live, said Cadman. Blinked.TV will also be trialled by a big UK media group in the next few months and is looking a charging larger companies for use of its embedded channels or charging on a bandwidth use basis.

Competition

As part of the Digital Storytelling event, Blinked.TV is running a competition offering prizes of £350 for the best individual and best team broadcast produced using the application. The deadline for entries, which will be judged by Blinked and digital journalism collaborative not on the wires, who organised the event, is 3 May.

Prizewinning journalism students: what do they do next?

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As reported by HoldTheFrontPage last week, two students from the Journalist Works fast-track course based in Brighton, were recently awarded top marks in the NCTJ Public Affairs examinations, scooping them £250 prizes.

Journalism.co.uk is keeping an eye on the type of jobs newly trained journalists are going onto: Nicky Newson, who came top in the central government exam, is about to start work as a researcher at the House of Lords.

“One of the topics I was asked about at my interview was reform of the House of Lords, which we had covered as part of the syllabus, so studying at Journalist Works definitely helped me to land a great new job, even though I haven’t gone down the route of becoming a news reporter,” Newson said.

If you’ve just finished your NCTJ examinations, drop us a line and let us know what you’re going on to do. Is it a traditional journalism job, or something a little different? What benefit was the journalism training? You can email judith or laura [at] journalism.co.uk, or send us a tweet via @journalismnews.

The presentation, from left:  Nicola Newson, Paula O’Shea, Nicola Corfield

journworks

Twitter and hashtags at conferences – questions to ask

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A post from Travolution fits in neatly with a discussion Journalism.co.uk has been having with some followers: how best to provide live coverage from conferences?

As an alternative (and additional service) to @journalismnews, we set up @journalism_live on Twitter, and it’s grown relatively steadily in followers. However, we are aware that some people, do not find immediate updates from conferences particularly helpful.

So this post by Kevin May, about covering a travel conference (the Travolution Summit 2009) provides some interesting points for debate. It discusses whether publishing a Tweet-stream behind a panel is useful. May also flags up this point, as an aside:

“A fellow conference organiser told me recently that his organisation felt that the quality of coverage suffered as a result of delegates spending their time tweeting whereas in the past they might have been busily crafting more analytical coverage.”

This question from Neal Baldwin in the comments is also interesting (this could apply to using Twitterfall pages on site homepages too.)

“Can I ask a question with my ‘old media’ hat on? If someone tweets a libellous comment, say about a speaker for example, and you ‘broadcast’ it to all via your wall, don’t you become the publisher and therefore liable?”

Lastly, in another comment, Mark Hodson suggests appointing an ‘official twitterer’ of comments, to ‘free up the bloggers and journalists to add their own comments and intepretations’.

(via @adders)

stevenberlinjohnson.com: The crucial ecosystem of technology news

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From a speech by Steven B. Johnson, co-founder of Outside.in, at the South by South West Festival:

“I think it’s much more instructive to anticipate the future of investigative journalism by looking at the past of technology journalism (…) It is the old-growth forest of the web. It is the sub-genre of news that has had the longest time to evolve.”

Full post at this link…

DNA09 – Economically distressed but making the most of it

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It started off bleakly, but the talk got more positive as the participants warmed up. These are four digital leaders, driving forward ambitious online projects in their respective countries:

  • Eric Echikson, Google’s senior manager for communications in Brussels
  • Katharina Borchert, chief editor of the online newspaper DerWesten.de and also the managing director of WAZ NewMedia
  • Pierre Haski, president of the society and editor-in-chief of the online French newspaper, Rue89

In a discussion led by Richard Gizbert, the panel discussed their hopes for opportunism in a dire economic climate.

Starting with a gloomy video reminder of the demise of the Rocky Mountain News, the panel were then probed on their own thoughts and experiences.

Katharina Borchert, from WAZ media, said the last 3-5 years have been a real opportunity, despite the fact they’re currently laying off a third of their staff.

To be using user-generated content in the way they are would have been unthinkable three years ago, she said.

Web is no longer an add-on, she said. There’s ‘more freedom to create content for the web’.

Video is the most popular content on their site, she added.

Pierre Haski, who left his job at Liberation newspaper to set up the independent French newspaper, realised the opportunity for different types of conversations with readers.

“Through blogging you reconnect with your readers. We tried to develop a model of participative news website, where readers could contribute to news process,” he explained.

After failing to sell the idea to Liberation, he and other colleagues left to launch Rue89.

“Not only will we survive the crisis but we will make money next year,” he said.

Then, Munthe, who set up his agency Demotix in a bid to source citizen journalism from around the world to counter what he perceived as a lack of original foreign news content.

“The flip side of the doom and gloom there are all sorts of opportunities out there,” he said.

He’s not worried about the content control, as editing happens within the process. “Who figured out three columns of smoke was wrong? Bloggers. That’s exactly what Demotix is trying to replicate.”

Demotix tries to bring together collaborative voices to self-correct stories and content, Munthe explained.