Tag Archives: G20

Media140: Are tweets journalism?

There’s a wealth of great blog posts reporting/observing/filtering yesterday’s events at the microblogging and journalism conference, Media140.

To name but a few:

We Are Social at #media140 by we are social
Media 140 – The future of real-time news from you talking to me-dia?
Adam Tinworth’s round-ups
Kevin Anderson’s posts on Guardian.co.uk

One question that arose: does a 140-character update equate to journalism?

If it comes from a news organisation/journalists does this make it more journalistic? What about eyewitness reports of news events, for example?

Speaking personally, recent coverage of news events – using Twitter as one element – such as Al Jazeera’s tweets from Gaza, UK newspapers’ tweeting of the budget and G20 protests have provided me with breaking news, relevant contextual links and real-time insight.

As Suw Charman-Anderson commented (appropriately on Twitter): ‘isn’t journalism just polished-up conversations?’ – the conversations encouraged by social media use.

You can also add the question: does it need to be defined?

Perhaps, to a certain extent for news orgs, it does – with regards to accuracy, verification, regulation.

But as a format using Twitter in combination with other multimedia tools and outlets can create a new grammar for presenting news – and a way to unpack ‘journalism’ from its box and show the context, links to and conversation around what would previously have been a standalone ‘news item’.

Press Gazette: Media favoured protestors in G20 coverage, says police chief

The media was one-sided in its reporting of last month’s G20 protests, detective chief constable Sue Sim, who specialises in public order at the Association of Chief Police Officers, has said.

Examples of assaults on police officers had disappeared from coverage in particular, she said.

Full story at this link…

Event: Liveblogging with CoverItLive’s Keith McSpurren

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.

Times Online did some great work during the G20 protests; the Financial Times’ Alphaville blog has long used a real-time approach for reporting the markets; while Trinity Mirror’s regional titles have joined forces to produce group-wide liveblogs in the past – to name but a view.

Liveblogging tool CoverItLive was first profiled by Journalism.co.uk in April 2008.

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).

Leave a comment below if you’re interested or email laura [at] journalism.co.uk and I’ll send you more details.

Spread the liveblogging word.

Nick Jones: Newspapers’ approach to video gives them exclusive edge

Nick Jones, former BBC political correspondent, joined panellists Iain Dale and Paul Staines (aka Guido Fawkes) at the Foregin Press Association yesterday, where the impact of new media on newsgathering and reporting was discussed.

Further to Dale’s comments on blogging and political journalism, Jones added that audio and video material appearing on newspaper websites is ‘stretching journalism in the way it should be stretched’.

“Newspapers are making money out of video and audio. They are buying up exclusive material obtained in dubious circumstances – but it is getting good ratings,” said Jones.

Thanks to video evidence The Guardian, for example, was first with exclusives about police involvement in the death of G20 protestor Ian Tomlinson, he said.

“The Guardian was prepared to take risks the BBC would not have contemplated,” said Jones, who claimed the BBC would have had to apply a ‘whole host’ of tests to the video evidence.

The code for newspapers is much simpler, he suggested: “They just need to ask, is it in the public interest?”

The budget online: Liveblogging and Twitter dominate news orgs’ coverage

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?

Telegraph.co.uk
Currently performing well in Google News search for budget, the Telegraph is going in big on online coverage today.

It will be updating throughout the day via its @Telefinance Twitter account (headed up by @hrwaldram). Meanwhile a trio of Telegraph reporters have been liveblogging budget news since 6:30am.

On the subject of Twitter – the Telegraph has reinstated its Twitterfall – an embed aggregating all Twitter updates marked #budget. The feature had to be taken down earlier in the week, because of some mischief, but so far so good with the tweaked (filtered?) version.

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:

There will also be use of CoverItLive (CiL) for a liveblog starting at 12pm, which was similarly used in the site’s coverage of the G20 summit.

Some nice additional touches include the use of FactCheck to test the claims made by the chancellor in the budget; and a wordcloud (or Snowcloud) of Darling’s announcement.

Sky News Online and Times Online
A specially built budget page has been set up including a liveblog, live video streams of the budget speech, and analysis from bloggers, tax experts and taxpayers, the site told us. There’s a good guide to how to use Sky’s online coverage too – one particular highlight, the chance for users to get answers from PKF UK tax accountant Matt Coward.

Meanwhile Times Online will be following up its excellent liveblogging of the G20 summit with a version starting at midday today.

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.

Wales Online (bringing in a tax expert) and the Birmingham Post – under its dedicated Live! Section – also host budget day liveblogs (using CiL again).

Guardian.co.uk: Marc Vallée on journalists on the front line at G20

A piece on the treatment of journalists at G20 from photojournalist Marc Vallee, over at the Guardian’s Comment is Free:

“Who needs section 76 when you have a baton? Back in February I wrote how terror legislation had been increasingly used by this government, and brutally enforced by the police, to criminalise not only those who protest but also those who dare to give the oxygen of publicity to such dissent.”

Full post at this link…

More4 News: Changes in citizen journalism

A More4 News feature on how citizen journalism is changing the news scene, in light of recent events, namely the G20 protests and the Damian McBride affair.

Charlie Beckett, director of POLIS, is interviewed: The importance is connecting the citizen with the journalist, he says. “(…)These stories would never have the impact if they had just stayed on the blogosphere…”

A call by the More4News team for Twitterers to meet outside the office to participate in the feature didn’t bear fruit, however.

Watch clip at this link…

Marc Vallée: Police cite Public Order Act 1986 and order media to leave G20 memorial protest

Images from photographer Marc Vallée, who specialises in documenting protests.

On his blog: “A City of London police inspector orders the media to leave the area as police ‘kettle’ protesters outside the Bank of England [Thursday 2 April 2009 in London].

“The police officer ordered members of the media to leave the area for 30 minutes under the threat of arrest by citing Section 14 of the Public Order Act 1986. The protesters had congregated to mark the death of a man who had died on an anti-G20 protest the day before.”

More images here…

‘BBC refused Guardian G20 protest vid’ – too much of a London story?

Interesting footnote to Duncan Campbell’s piece on Comment Is Free (‘De Menezes taught the Met nothing’) on the death of a G20 protestor last week from Guardian contributor Stephen Moss.

Apparently the Guardian’s footage of Ian Tomlinson being knocked down by police officers (as was seen repeatedly on broadcast news bulletins last night) was rejected by BBC News at 6, who said it was seen as ‘just a London story’.

Was this the reason? Some viewers would argue this is valid and part of the BBC’s remit to better represent the whole of the UK. Or was it, as Campbell suggests in the piece, an unwillingness to implicate the police:

“Although the Guardian reported the death on its front page, almost all the coverage elsewhere ignored it completely or concentrated on a version of events that suggested that the police’s only connection with Tomlinson had been to try to rescue him from a baying mob of anarchists.”

Update: A BBC spokesman has told Journalism.co.uk:

“It’s simply not true to say the BBC News at Six turned down the footage. We didn’t run it on the Six O’Clock bulletin as we didn’t receive the footage until 7pm.  We verified it and ran an extensive piece at Ten O Clock. It’s also been shown extensively across our outlets today.”

The video is now available to embed (HT @janinegibson):

Audioboo debuts in Guardian article

The Guardian’s inventive use of mobile application Audioboo during last week’s G20 news coverage isn’t the end of the paper’s experiments with the audio recording service.

According to a tweet from Guardian journalist Matthew Weaver, who was posting sound clips or ‘boos’ frequently during the summit, today’s article on the Tamil protests in London is the first time a recording from Audioboo has been embedded in a news article on the site.

Nice.

Extra nice is a Twitter update from Audioboo CEO Mark Rock suggesting that a version of the service for non-iPhone users is near at hand…