Tag Archives: London

Searchable Twitter makes it more robust for news

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Thanks to Cybersoc for drawing attention to Tweet Scan, a site that allows you to keyword search public Twitter messages – another useful addition which makes it even less arbitrary and more newsworthy.

Twitter’s credo as a mainstream news device has been growing over the last few months. In September it launched a tracking service that allowed users to follow phrases on mobiles and through IM and it was used to good effect to follow real time reports of last year’s fires in East London and the Californian bush.

Robin makes the point that it’s a great resource for journalists looking for firsthand accounts from people close to events. To that I’d add it’s ability to mix professional and non-pro accounts around a topic. It’s short nature also lends particularly well to reporting traffic problems and other necessary travel information.

How I really want to see it used though is by a UK news publisher, be it national, regional or local, on a breaking news story. Be bold, I say.

Get an RSS feed from a Twitter search term embedded into a blog or on the news pages updating the user with alerts from the public and other news sources about breaking news events.

New blog for Messy Media

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Publisher Messy Media has ever-so softly launched its second blog title since setting up in September.

Glitterditch promises to be ‘your eyes and ears into the dark world of London’s trash and glamour’ serving up reviews, news, gossip and glamour from the city. It’s headed up by Sian Meades, who according to the site biog cut her blogging teeth writing for sites wehanghere and londonist.

The blog’s layout and tongue-in-cheek writing style on first glance are very similar (and happily) so to sister title Westmonster.

Breaking news coverage on Twitter of fire in East London

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London-based twitterers have broken the news of a huge fire in East London.

Tweets describing the spread of a black cloud of smoke in the Stratford area of the city are the first reports of the incident – before any accounts online from the mainstream media.

The first tweet Journalism.co.uk saw on the fire came from the Guardian’s head of blogging Kevin Anderson shortly before 12:30pm. Anderson has also posted pictures to Flickr and at 12:45pm posted an entry on the events to his Guardian blog.

Again according to Twitter The Press Association has now put up pictures of fire.

Sky News are now showing live coverage on the site and a quick search on Google News suggests Sky was the first mainstream media to file on the story at 12:34pm. Sky seem to have been the first news organisation on the scene and are now providing regular updates and a map pinpointing the location of the fire.

A ticker across the top of the BBC News site promises “more soon” reporting a “large plume of smoke” rising from a fire in East London”.

A brief report on Reuters also appeared at 12:39pm.

Tweets from Martin Stabe, new media correspondent with the Press Gazette, say the smoke cloud is now covering PG’s offices based in Underwood Street. (As Martin points out in a comment below, the cloud appeared to be covering the PG’s offices, but was actually further away. Still, he updated his Twitter accordingly and very quickly.)

Was anyone covering it earlier than the Twitter correspondents mentioned here?

UPDATE: reports are that the fire began in a disused bus depot – here’s a view of what the site looked like before it started.

@SoE: (Audio) ITV Local – citizen journalism and traditional news side-by-side – yet distinct

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Nick Hayworth, channels manager of ITV Local London, outlined how the broadband wing of the local TV service was trying to win back favour with its lost viewership – the trick? Mixing citizen journalism and more traditional news online.

To maintain the public trust and integrity of each, he added, a clear separation is placed between citizen media and professional journalism on the site.

“The problems of trust occur for us when we start to carry mini documentaries or standalone citizen news videos, since ITV Local was launched we have been sent hundreds of videos made by local people that effect them, in those films there are often some strongly held opinions and scenes that sometimes tell us in very graphic ways some of the major social and political issues.”

ITV, he says, maintains the standard of citizen journalism content and keeps its 39 local borough channels in London distinct from its traditional news through ‘compliance, labelling and separation’.

Listen here for his definition of what this means:

[audio:http://www.journalism.co.uk/sounds/itv.mp3]

New media rank amongst London’s ‘most influential’

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Tomorrow the Evening Standard will release its list of the 1,000 most influential people in London – complete with a brand new section devoted to media.

Roy Greenslade has had a sneak preview of the media movers and shakers, and writes that plenty of new media names make the list.

Political blogger Iain Dale, Annelies van den Belt, managing director of ITV Broadband and former Telegraph Media Group director of new media, and Simon Waldman, digital director at The Guardian, all make the 50-strong media list.

Nikesh Arora, Google’s European vice president, founder of the Carphone Warehouse Charles Dunstone and Mark Zuckerberg (not strictly a Londoner, but hey…) , founder of Facebook, make it into the top five.

Five libel

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Football club chairman David Allen has started libel proceedings over comments made on the message boards of BBC radio’s Five Live show, the Press Gazette reports.

Allen, who is chair of Sheffield Wednesday, says defamatory messages have been left on the forum connected to the channel’s weekend football programme 606. He also alleges that ‘the BBC has become mixed up in the wrongdoing of some users’.

According to Press Gazette, he wants to sue two individuals, who go by the online usernames of ‘enchanted-fox’ and ‘Rocker’, for comments made about him in August. The popularity of online casinos is growing every year. And although in many countries the authorities are trying to ban gambling, but modern technology allows you to access any online casino with a click in a VPN application.

Allen has asked London’s High Court to order the BBC to reveal the names, emails and postal addresses of the individuals concerned.

On a quick scan the comments have been removed, with entries on Sheffield Wednesday only going as far back as September.

AOP: What the Washington Post will do next – mobile, Europe and a relaunch in the Spring

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Caroline Little, chief executive of Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive, told the AOP conference, in London today, that the Post would be focusing its attention on developing its mobile offerings as a way of expanding its audience.

“We’re really far behind in mobile compared to Europeans, that’s one area that we are really focusing on right now,” she said.

“Not just on mobile phones but also being able to read stuff on your Blackberry or iPhone, or whatever else. We are really far behind. It’s an area that we are really pushing forward on.”

During a Q&A session she was asked if the Post was looking actively at other markets internationally.

“We are in the UK, we have advertising offices here. But in terms of editorial, we’re not looking at hyper-local content outside of our market.

“You have to do what you know, but we would like to do more in Europe and we have some plans to do that.”

The Post, she added, is planning an entire redesign in the Spring next year.

Round-up: Blogging in Burma

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As Burmese citizens joined their nation’s monks in pro-democracy demonstrations, the international media became reliant on bloggers and eyewitnesses posting images, videos and accounts to the web.

Two weeks later, this flow of online information has been stemmed by a government crackdown, which, according to The Guardian, has now made all websites with the .mm suffix unavailable and reduced the number of active blogs from the region to almost zero.

Increasing control over the internet is thought to have begun last week with a block on access from within Burma to some political blogs.

A complete block of Google-owned service Blogger.com followed according to the same Guardian report, and, on Friday, internet access stopped entirely.

Through its English-language TV channel MRTV-3, the military Junta has broadcast messages branding international news providers as liars and ‘destructionists’.

The BBC has been asking for first-hand clips and statements by way of specialised comment boxes at the end of articles on the events:

Are you in the area? Are you affected by the events in Burma? Send us your comments using the form below.

You can send your pictures and moving footage to yourpics@bbc.co.uk or text them to + 44 (0) 7725 100 100

Click here for terms and conditions on sending photos and video

When taking photos or filming please do not endanger yourself or others, take unnecessary risks or infringe any laws.

Audio and video, pictures and text sent to the BBC from people in Burma allowed for frequent, on-the-ground updates.

However, a BBC report on Friday said:

Journalists at the BBC News website say no images are now being sent from Burma and the previously fast flow of e-mail comments sent from inside the country has slowed to a trickle.

Not all sites have lost communication: The Irrawaddy news website, produced by exiled Burmese journalists, carries photos of the protests from Friday and text updates, including alerts from today.

Some blogs published by third parties, such as London-based blogger Ko Htike and the Burmese Bloggers without Borders site, which was started in response to the demonstrations, are still active.

Within Burma, internet users have been gaining access to news sites through foreign-hosted proxy sites, such as your-freedom.net and glite.sayni.net, but the latest restrictions to internet access will make even these tactics impossible.

Investigative journalism online

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A posting on SplashCast.com reviews some bastions of investigative journalism on the web. Most are from the US, but London-based indie documentary distributor Journeyman Pictures gains an honourable mention.

Daily news show Democracy Now! comes highly recommended, as does the on-the-ground footage from Alive in Baghdad, which takes footage from Iraqi correspondants.

ITV citizen journalism platform – just a vox pop by another name?

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We reported here a few weeks ago that ITV had set up and was about to launch a Cit Journo platform called Uploaded.

“For the first time, viewers’ contributions will not just be an add-on to coverage of the big stories – they will become an integral part of all three ITV News bulletins every day… A Citizen Exclusives section will give everyone a platform to contact the ITV News team directly if they have captured amazing exclusive footage.”

It launched yesterday, according to the pr blurb to:

“creating the UK’s first nationwide network of citizen correspondents who can shape TV news
coverage on a daily basis.”

ITV sees the site as a big unwashed debating arena, the best posts of which will find their way into its TV news offerings. Delegates at the Future of News conference, in London last month, were more skeptical.

“Isn’t this just a vox pop by another name?’ came the cry from the floor.

Au contraire, claimed Deborah Turness, editor of ITV News, this is active civic participation in news, feeding the news agenda.

But don’t editors then select the talking heads according to their editorial line? How is that any different from a vox pop if there isn’t any input to the editorial process from those contributing to debates?