Tag Archives: mainstream media

BNP members list leak gathers pace online – to link or not to link?

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Removing the original online posting of the leaked list of members of the British National Party (BNP) has failed to contain the spread of the information online.

The list and reactions to it are being avidly Twittered, as a search for BNP on Twitter search engine Summize shows, while the document has made its way onto Wikileaks.

According to the party’s website, the blog that posted the ‘outdated’ list was removed from Blogger ‘after urgent legal action was instituted by the BNP leadership’.

In a Guardian.co.uk article, BNP leader Nick Griffin has admitted that the party is relying on the Human Rights Act, which it opposes, to help protect its members’ privacy.

Meanwhile reporting on the incident has raised questions of linking, as this blog post from TimesOnline suggests:

“The Times decided not to link to the list, even though we often do link to material without taking that as some kind of endorsement.

“There were various reasons for the decision, most of them expressed in other comments on our various online reports. Firstly, BNP members have as much right to privacy as anyone else. Secondly, last time we checked it was still a free country: there is no law against membership of the BNP.

“The list is out there now, even if a Google search no longer throws it up. The anti-fascist campaigners and phone-prankers are having a field day. We don’t need to help them.”

Blogger Craig McGill adds the following observation on the list’s travels online:

“I see the list has appeared on file sharing outlets? Will social crusaders claim this is a good use for P2P which is normally associated with piracy?”

Similarly a Google Maps mashup has also been created, though, as TechCrunchUK warns, it’s dangerously inaccurate and has the potential to aid vigilantes – while I write the map was taken down because of inaccuracies.

McGill also suggests that this story was broken first by mainstream media, despite being an online story – is this the case? If so, for an online leak, this could be a good sign of ‘traditional’ outlets upping their game when it comes to online news tracking.

Blogger Matt Waldman suggests the story of the leaked list was broken by the Lancaster Unity blog, while TheRegister.co.uk posted a report on the leak at 2:31pm (GMT) on Tuesday – also citing the Lancaster Unity post. MSM not quite first past the post then.

Waldman goes on to discuss the potential legal implications of linking to it:

“Links to material that is alleged to be defamatory (e.g. reports about Nadhmi Auchi preserved on Wikileaks) is part of the basis for the objections that the law firm Carter-Ruck have put to the New Statesman that have caused them to take down articles about Nadhmi Auchi by Martin Bright. No determination has yet been made whether that will stick under English Libel Law, but if the New Statesman and their legal advisers are taking it seriously I wouldn’t go the other way at this point. You will be relying on not being sued, which is your call.”

I haven’t linked to it in this post (though it’s easy enough to find with or without the directions given) for the reasons cited by both Wardman and the Times’ blog post.

The UK’s national newspaper websites aren’t linking either, though Mail Online posts both a screengrab of the list and pictures of alleged members and individual articles are being posted about ‘members’, their identies and any action taken by employers.

Debate on the blogs also focuses on how the list can be used – both journalistically and otherwise. The list was posted despite an injunction granted by the High Court in earlier this year banning its publication, so how will journalists (and the police and employers) act on it when it has been obtained in this way?

‘Trust and integrity in the modern media’ – Chris Cramer’s speech to Nottingham Trent University

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This is the full transcript of a speech given by Chris Cramer, global head of multimedia for Reuters’ news operations, at Nottingham Trent University last night. Journalism.co.uk’s report on the address can be read at this link.

So I accepted this invitation shortly after I retired from CNN international – where I was managing director and where I’d been for 11 years or so.

I became a consultant for Reuters news in January and now, in the last few months, have become their first global editor for multimedia.

So, I’m talking to you today as a working journalist, broadcaster and manager for 43 years now and what I would like to talk about is ‘trust and integrity in the modern media’.

I also want to ask the question of you whether the media has maybe lost the message somewhere along the way?

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NMK: ‘What happens to newspapers?’ – place your bets, please

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Rounding off last night’s discussion panel hosted by New Media Knowledge on the future of the newspaper industry, panelists were asked what or who they would put their money on for success and survival over the next few years.

Martin Stabe, media blogger, former new media editor of Press Gazette and online editor of Retail Week, plumped for niche and expert content:

“I would bet on anyone who can create unique, high quality content. I’d bet on the Financial Times, the Wall Street Journal – those corners of more generalist publications that become more expert,” he said.

Newspapers need to have ‘the ability to compete with all the freely produced expert content that is sometimes better than what is produced by the professionals’, he added.

Neil McIntosh, head of editorial development at Guardian.co.uk, agreed that niche coverage could help newspapers compete with the blogosphere.

“In areas where blogs are working really well, mainstream media has two options: to raise its game and start covering those niches better; or it can get out and as Jeff Jarvis says, ‘do what you do best, and link to the rest’,” said McIntosh

“Those are two areas where mainstream media can move forward but it’s about acknowledging that this world exists.”

Assistant editor at Telegraph Media Group, Justin Williams said trusted brands and content areas such as finance, politics and certain sports are best placed to survive.

“Brands that are trusted and valued no matter how they are produced, those brands will still be here in 10 years time. You’re looking at areas like finance, politics, certain kinds of sport, where we still thrive. During the financial crisis most of us have turned to established news outlets,” said Williams.

“We’re positioned in those markets already, if we can hone in on what’s important to our readers and deliver it in a smart way, then we [newspapers] can be here in 10 years time.”

Blogs make money and live long lives: Technorati’s 2008 report

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Blogs can make money, and are not distinct from mainstream media, is the verdict of the first instalment of the Technorati report 2008.

Technorati’s ‘State of the Blogosphere 2008’ report is their annual assessment of what’s hot and what’s not in blogging.

This time round they ‘resolved to go beyond the numbers of the Technorati Index’. In order to try and make a more fruitful analysis they talked to the bloggers directly.

For the first time bloggers have been asked about:

  • The role of blogging in their lives
  • The tools, time, and resources used to produce their blogs
  • How blogging has impacted them personally, professionally, and financially

It’s best to look at the report in full for yourself but here’ are a few of the highlights:

‘Blogs are profitable’: The majority of the 1,290 respondents (from 66 countries, across six continents) have advertising. Among those who advertise, the mean annual investment is $1,800 and the mean annual revenue is $6,000. For the lucky ones with 100,000 or more unique visitors per month the mean annual revenue is $75k +. Technorati flags up that the medians are lower than those figures.

‘Blogs are here to stay’: On average the bloggers have been at it an average of three years and are collectively creating close to one million posts every day. Blogs have representation in top-10 web site lists across all key categories, and have become integral to the media ecosystem.

US bloggers: 57 per cent male; 58 per cent aged 35+; 56 per cent in full-time employment; 26 per cent single (surprising, no?)

Blogs are not distinct from the mainstream: “Larger blogs are taking on more characteristics of mainstream sites and mainstream sites are incorporating styles and formats from the Blogosphere. In fact, 95% of the top 100 US newspapers have reporter blogs,” the summary reads.

Technorati’s methodology is described here. The main question that springs to mind is whether the type of people likely to respond to the random requests for participants (and perhaps engage in a bit of blog-boast) might have more success on average than the people who ignore these kind of requests.  But is it possible to find bloggers at random, to represent the mass blogging population?

Thoughts from the Ethnic Media Summit: where do we go now?

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This week’s Guardian Ethnic Media Summit, supported by Channel 4 and Spectrum Radio was the first of its kind. The event itself may be new, but the common theme of the day seemed to be, ‘weren’t we having these conversations 10 years ago?’

One of the speakers Claude Grunitzky talked about how the UK in 1996 had been a great place to be, to launch his magazine TRACE. Now, returning from the US – where he heads the TRUE Agency and the US edition of TRACE, and another publication TERRACE – he is not sure how much things have moved on. He went so far to say that the UK could be about 20 years behind in terms of ethnic representation in media. Ouch.

While many of the speakers focussed on the exciting times ahead for connecting with ethnic groups through social media (as we reported yesterday, Ofcom has found that the four main ethnic groups in the UK are using digital and online media more widely and diversely than the general population) there still seemed to be this pervading sense that some things hadn’t quite moved on.

News reporter Samira Ahmed, interviewed fellow Channel 4 colleague Aaqil Ahmed over his new appointment as the channel’s commissioning editor for religion and multicultural programming.

Her questions seemed to be weeding out whether this, too, might be a step backwards? After all, hadn’t the keynote speaker, Trevor Phillips, chair of the Equality and Human Rights council, just said that terms like ‘multicultural’ were dead?

“The feeling was that we need a champion,” Aaqil Ahmed answered. “The individual commissioning editors still want to make multicultural content, but alongside that I have a dedicated role.”

His advice, however, to young people from ethnic groups is to make other kinds of films before they try and reflect specific religious or ethnic content. He also cited BBC’s ‘Who Do You Think You Are?’ as one of the best multicultural programmes on television.

You can listen to the interview in full here (23 mins):

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

Various panel debates, with some big names in the ethnic (and mainstream) media world, discussed just exactly where we’re at, in terms of ethnic media: that’s on screen and off. Debates flitted between portrayal, participation and recruitment. It seems one feeds into the other.

Although actress and comedian Meera Syal and Observer news editor Kamal Ahmed didn’t show up, there were a host of other interesting people to listen to, among them: a panel of  inspiring young people who have been involved in Live magazine through the Livity project; Leslie Bunder the founder of the SomethingJewish network (pictured above, courtesy of Richard Cooke, Guardian News and Media); Parminder Vir OBE, the award winning film and television producer; Joseph Harker, assistant comment editor at the Guardian; and Jay Kandola, director of acquisitions at ITV (but also previously at BBC, Channel 4 and 5).

Blogger and Asians in Media editor, Sunny Hundal, managed the proceedings, with lots of his own questions thrown in. Guardian.co.uk editor-in-chief Emily Bell joked that Comment is Free would be very quiet with Sunny’s absence for a day. Trevor Phillips’ keynote speech (pictured below, courtesy of Richard Cooke, Guardian News and Media) made particularly interesting listening: you can read the Guardian’s coverage here.

So: will things have moved on by next year? The big questions raised were how to best monetise ethnic media, do terms like ‘multicultural’ have a role in ethnic media, and how do you penetrate mainstream media with its very narrow horizons? Some speakers said that there was no point just replacing white, socially well-off, Oxbridge males with Oxbridge socially well-off males from ethnic backgrounds – issues of class representation were raised too.

In the very last panel debate about digital reinvention, Milica Pesic, from the Media Diversity Institute raised a good point: what’s the point of a panel all agreeing with each other? Next time, she wants the culprits who consistently misrepresent ethnic groups in the media up on the stage too. Hear, hear, I say. Let’s get the editor who commissioned the story about Polish people hunting swans up on the stage with the editor of Polot.co.uk, Julita Kaczmarek, and really get the debate going.

Finally, a small point picked up from Norrie, a blogger from Leith FM, a Scottish community radio station. He was invited to the Guardian’s Ethnic Summit too, but found the pricing scheme (even at the cheapest rate it was £364 per person) a little bit off-putting and not quite as inclusive as you might expect from an event about, well, inclusion.

After the blogging storm

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The winds have slowed down to a tropical storm, but the Gustav blogging continues.

The mainstream media is reporting on the blogging phenomenon as well as the actual hurricane: the Chicago Tribune looks at the decision-making power of blogs and FollowTheMedia comments that the hurricane may stop print, but not the web.

Meanwhile, over at Poynter, NPR’s Andy Carvin examines the role of social media in Gustav coverage.

As we posted yesterday, this was one for the Twitterers and they tweet on as people assess the damage. A quick twitter local search shows how the twitterers regard the media professionals… The complete mobile version, on the other hand, gives you a full package of the Nairabet desktop site on your mobile phone, including online casino games

Twitter comment

Pictures can be found easily on this Flickr search and over at gustavbloggers.com they reflect that it wasn’t as bad as they feared. Meanwhile, to prepare for reportage of the next natural disaster, the Blog Herald offers its disaster blogging tips.

Stephen Quinn on mobile journalism

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“You need to have the fundamentals in place before you start playing with new technology. The skills are the same as for traditional media plus an awareness of what’s possible, and a willingess to play with the tools, a willingness to accept that journalism may move beyond what we currently know,” Stephen Quinn, academic and author of Knowledge Management in the Digital Newsroom, told Paul Bradshaw from the Online Journalism Blog in this interview.

Quinn discusses mobile journalism and how the mainstream media are getting involved:

Online Journalism Scandinavia: Here come the Web 2.0 docusoaps

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Swedes are getting so hooked on social media that for many web-crazy young things reality-TV has all but moved online.

Last night Twingly, the Swedish web company that supplies a blog trackback functionality to newspapers world-wide and last week launched its international spam free blog search engine Twingly.com, aired the first programme of its new reality-series on YouTube: The Summer of Code.

YouTube reality-show
“We have recruited four ambitious interns and given them six weeks to develop a visual search engine for blogs; Twingly Blogoscope,” said Martin Källström, CEO of Twingly.

“Everyone can follow what happens in the project via daily episodes on YouTube.”

The episodes will be uploaded Monday to Friday at 6 PM GMT (10 AM in San Francisco, 19:00 in Stockholm) and the first programme aired last night.

“Openness in this project is a way to show the daily life in the office,” said Källström.

“Generally people are not familiar with the stimulating working atmosphere in a start-up. Hopefully Twingly Summer of Code will inspire more people to join Twingly or other start-ups.”

Media increasingly about conversation
Last week, Twingly launched its search engine Twingly.com to track 30 million blogs all over the world.

Despite this global scope, Källström said Twingly will concentrate on being number one in Europe, working with several different European languages.

“Google has not improved its blog search for more than two years,” he told Journalism.co.uk.

The company has teamed up with newspapers in Spain, Portugal, Holland, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Finland and South Africa, to show blog links to the news sites’ articles.

Källström added that his hope was for Twingly to be able to take on both Google and Technorati by providing more functionality and driving traffic to bloggers via its media partnerships.

“Media is more and more about the conversation between media and its readers. We see a very strong synergy between mainstream media and bloggers and try to provide a bridge that can improve this synergy,” he said.

Blogs have replaced docusoaps
Twingly’s target group for The Summer of Code will no doubt draw an audience of uber-geeks but a young Swedish reporter recently admitted she was addicted to a very different sort of ‘web docusoap’.

Madeleine Östlund, a reporter with the Swedish equivalent of Press Gazette, Dagens Media, claimed the country’s fashion blogs had replaced docusoaps (link in Swedish).

She confessed she found it increasingly difficult to live without her daily fix of intimate everyday details and gossip from the country’s high-profile fashion bloggers, a phenomenon Journalism.co.uk has described here.

“It is not their blogging about clothes that draws me in, rather it is the surprise and fascination with which I read about these young girls’ private lives. Surprise and fascination about how much they often reveal,” she wrote, citing posts about broken hearts, hospital stays, what they had for breakfast and descriptions of a caesarian birth.

Roll on the Web 2.0 docusoap about dashing media journalists, I say.

News tracker helps uncover cit-j story in earthquake aftermath

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Behind the reported events of last week’s earthquake in China, a story of a citizen journalism was emerging.

Ronen Medzini, an Israeli student, affected by the earthquake in the Chengdu area was quoted by the Associated Press on the crisis in the area.

Medzini’s role in reporting the disaster, which was quickly picked up by other mainstream media, was in itself newsworthy – he reported the devastation around him in a text message sent to the AP, a citizen journalist breaking news on a mobile.

But how to detect this thread within the mass of reporting? Ian Cairns from Managing News, has blogged about how the system, which tracks and analyses mainstream and social media sources, did just this.

What is particularly interesting – and crucial – about how Managing News worked in this situation, is the collaboration between two of its features: a map displaying geotagged news items on a topic (in this case breaking news) and a tag cloud.

Investigating the tag cloud next to the map of news coverage of the earthquake, tags for both ‘Ronen Medzini’ and ‘cellular’ showed up, as such highlighting the cit-j element of the story which would otherwise have been buried.

Interesting how the visual representation of news trends, in this case, allowed the observer to quickly pick up on new leads in the reporting.