Tag Archives: media organisations

Deutsche Welle Global Media Forum – how to follow the event

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This week’s Deutsche Welle Global Media Forum (happening in Bonn from today till June 5) focuses on ‘conflict prevention in the multimedia age’.

Speakers including freelance journalists and representatives from Deutsche Welle and international media organisations will discuss the impact of new media on conflict reporting, the shift from traditional to multimedia coverage and the role of the media in peace and conflict reporting.

There’s a decent amount of coverage on the event’s own page – incorporating images from the event with a Flickr slideshow, a stream of Twitter updates and blog posts.

View the video message from conference host Erik Bettermann, director general of Deutsche Welle, below:

The event has its own Twitter channel (@DW_GMF updating in German) and you can follow delegates Guy Degen, broadcast journalist, Kevin Anderson, Guardian.co.uk blogs editor, and Yelena Jetpyspayeva, managing editor of Eurasia.net.

Alternatively take a look at the tweetstream for the hashtag #dwgmf at this link.

Libel, privacy, the ‘chilling effect’ and NGOs

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In its last evidence session for its inquiry into press standards, privacy and libel, the House of Commons Culture, Media and Sport committee today heard from not-for-profit campaign organisation Global Witness’ co-founder Charmian Gooch and Mark Stephens, a lawyer from Finers Stephens Innocent, who has represented non-profit organisations previously.

Most significant were Gooch’s comments on the impact of UK libel and privacy laws, high legal costs and conditional fee arrangements (CFAs) on media organisations compared with not-for-profit organisations.

As journalistic resources, in particular the investigative units of news organisations, are cut back, non-governmental organisations (NGOs) are increasingly filling that reporting space, said Gooch.

They must work under the same legislation as for-profit organisations, but have very different interests at heart, she added.

“This is long-term work, often years of work, attacking and trying to change vested interest. It’s not just the publication of a damning and very good article; it’s about trying to change behaviour. That can cause the loss of millions of pounds for a company or individual. That means these individuals might respond in a very different way to non-media organsiations than they would do to media organisations,” explained Gooch.

She said all researchers/reporters at Global Witness were trained in defamation and libel, and a Reynolds defence is considered at all stages of research and every point of publication.

Yet Stephens said he was yet to see an NGO that, despite having a good Reynolds defence, would win at trial with it.

“The problem is the cost of fighting it,” he said – around £100-200,000 or the equivalent of two researchers for an NGO.

High level public interest stories are denuded by high costs, added Stephens, who said his firm had NGOs coming through its doors concerned that they would be sued.

The cost of fighting on a Reynolds defence in the UK is ‘out of kilter’ with the rest of Europe, added Gooch.

However, Stephens said, it is not necessary to put Reynolds into statute:

“What wil happen is that the claimant’s lawyers at the libel bar will attempt to erode that defence by chopping at it and eroding it slowly but surely. That’s what I’m concerned about. If it is left in the common law, as it is at the moment, the judiciary have the option to resist that erosion,” he said.

Libel tourism was also described by the representatives as a threat to the press freedom of NGOs.

“Claimants who have an overseas domicile should be required to put a significant cash deposit down or the chances of doing justice are very slim,” added Gooch.

“For governments, that are serious about and claim they want to make poverty history, not to tackle this massive abuse and facilitate corruption is a long-term problem.”

Ofcom will not investigate ITV over Britain’s Got Talent

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According to this report on MediaGuardian, industry regulator Ofcom will not investigate ITV, despite receiving a ‘large number of complaints’ about Britain’s Got Talent – in particular the appearance of runner-up, Susan Boyle, in the final.

Speaking to a House of Commons select committee on press standards earlier today, culture minister Barbara Follett argued that Ofcom should hold informal talks with ITV over the incident.

This is a very difficult judgment, said Follett, exacerbated by the new media landscape.

“I first heard of Susan Boyle in the US, through YouTube. YouTube had brought her to the attention of the television networks,” said Follett.

With the advent of the internet, what you do in this room can be around the world in ’24 minutes’, argued Follett.

“Your [the broadcaster’s] duty of care is greater (…) She [Boyle] didn’t choose the effects, she wasn’t aware of the effects. She has been a victim of the changes that this committee has discussed,” she said.

“The beast that is the 24-hour news cycle has got much bigger in the last 20 years. The appetite of the beast is insatiable yet (…) they’re [media organisations] having to possibly chase after that food in a slightly more proactive way than they would have had to before.”

Audio reporting tool Audioboo experiments with paid-for account for ITV

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Since its launch in March, Audioboo, the service which allows users to record and upload short audio recordings, has notched up 30,000 registered users and been taken up by both hyperlocal and international news media.

This Saturday ITV.com is planning to use the tool as part of its FA Cup Final coverage: fans using the Audioboo iPhone app will be able to submit their audio reactions to the site.

Significantly this seems to be the first foray into running a paid-for version of an Audioboo account.

As CEO Mark Rock explains in this blog post, there will always be a free version of the tool, but the firm is developing a range of paid-for options intended for media organisations.

Audioboo Pro will be the version used by ITV tomorrow, ‘which will contain a series of web tools which make it easy for companies, particularly media companies, to manage content coming from their audiences’.

Key to these tools are ‘magic tags’ – a private tag that the account use can apply to any Audioboo content creating a specific feed for use in a player on their site. ITV are using this system to help moderate the ‘boos’ left by fans.

The use of Audioboo by ITV marks a focus by the broadcaster on capturing the online buzz about the match alongside the roar of the crowd within Wembley Stadium. As such, the site will use Twitter aggregator Twitterfall to stream relevant updates to the microblogging site.

In addition, using a tool developed by thruSITES:

“The players’ names and faces will appear alongside bars which will move up and down to reflect the buzz around players during the game. The tool will be available after the match so that fans can scrub along a timeline to see which players caused a buzz at crucial moments.”

Thoughts from Doha: a Q&A with Al Jazeera’s Tarek Esber

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Tarek Esber is senior analyst for Al Jazeera Mobile & New Media and based in Doha. Intrigued by his recent online updates, Journalism.co.uk sent him over a few questions. Firstly, we asked him specifically about the Al Jazeera forum which took place last month, and then asked for more general observations about use of social and new media in the Arab world.

So, we noticed you tweeting from the fourth Al Jazeera forum last month – what was that all about? [TE] The Fourth Al Jazeera Forum was built on the success of past Al Jazeera Forums to debate, discuss, and extend the discourse on the critical dynamics of the Middle East in the context of a globalised world. The forum focused on key topics such as the new players in this emerging multi-polar world, the historical context of the power shifts, and the media’s role in this new political landscape. In addition, two case studies examined the war on Gaza and the instability in the Indian subcontinent. The forum was attended by an international mix of journalists, analysts, strategists, academics, and intellectuals to help bring these issues into focus, as well as leading thinkers and strategists were present to explore the evolving face of the region, its place in the global landscape, and the challenges in reporting it in depth. Speakers spoke in either Arabic or English, sometimes both, and live translation was available in English and Arabic.

What were personal highlights for you? This was my first forum so the whole event was a highlight for me. In particular though was the fact that the Creative Commons Team were there with Joi Ito, their CEO, chairing the first Workshop at the Forum – ‘Building Successful Media Projects in Open Networks’.

That particular workshop had a fascinating discussion about how media organisations can open up their content to their advantage. Our Creative Commons repository came up as an example of this as well as the new US government’s use of CC Licences.

Another personal highlight was the case study about the reporting of the War on Gaza, especially having the opportunity to hear Robert Fisk talk about that conflict. The discussion was particularly interesting to me, given the role Social Media played in the PR battle between the two sides. It was also the first major conflict that we as a New Media team had been able to cover using a variety of New Media tools.

We picked up your comment via Twitter that quoted Al Jazeera English managing director Tony Burman: “Western interest in our [Gaza] content being distributed via New Media shows demand for our kind of message/method” 

What are your thoughts on that, as a member of the new media team? I should add that quote to my list of personal Highlights. Tony Burman was referring to the reaction our New Media initiatives received during the War on Gaza.

I think it’s great and as a New Media Team it’s exactly what we aim to do. A major part of our job is discovering new methods of communication – using the latest tools and services to reach out to and interact with new audiences. Inevitably most of the people using these new services tend to be based in the west.

There was also a huge amount of interest in the Twitter feed we set up just for news about the Gaza conflict. 5,000+ followers from all around the world and for a lot of them it was their first exposure to News from Al Jazeera. The feedback we got was fantastic.

Our Livestation stream, which allows anyone who has an internet connection to watch our English and Arabic channels live for free, also proved very popular. During the War on Gaza viewer figures shot up six-fold and the largest pool of viewers were in North America, a traditional dark zone for Al Jazeera. We’re working on that. Since the War on Gaza we’ve started to make a push to get Al Jazeera English broadcast in Canada and the USA: the IWantAJE.com site gives more information.

Our YouTube channels, in Arabic and English, were just as important. They have always been extremely popular but during the time of conflict we were one of the most viewed channels on there.

Did you find the Twitter activity surrounding the forum useful / something to learn from in future? We hadn’t planned to do anything on Twitter for the Forum this year. It was really a spur of the moment thing – I was at this Forum and a lot of very interesting things were being said. My natural urge was to tweet the most interesting parts especially as this was an invite-only event.

This was a personal reaction rather than a Al Jazeera New Media Team initiative. Some of the other members of the team were tweeting in Arabic as well and we set-up a Hastag (#AJForum09) for people to follow. It was all done using our personal accounts.

In the future, and we already have plans to do this for the AJ Film Festival this month, we might be better off setting up an official channel for the Forum so people can tune in specifically to hear what is going on rather than tweet from my personal account. It’s certainly clear that the interest is there. We’re also thinking about other things we can do for the next Forum such as taking questions via Twitter and trying to get some of the live streams online.

What are the most salient points about new media that came out of the forum? Well we’ve already talked about most of the larger points: The Creative Commons repository and the potential for Open Networks, our work during the War on Gaza and how New Media is helping Al Jazeera reach new audiences.

In the ‘Reporting from the Fragile World: Can the Global Media Reconcile with Changes in the Middle East’ session, New Media came up quite often, especially the online PR battle during the War on Gaza came up a few times. The extensive use of social media tools by both sides was unprecedented, especially the amount of preparation the Israeli government did before the conflict started.

In the same session some good points were made by Fahmi Howeidy, an Egyptian columnist and author, about political bloggers in Egypt. He mentioned that in Egypt, people under 30 don’t read papers, they read blogs as it is their method of escaping the government’s oppression of the media.

He also said that, while he didn’t feel political bloggers had much of an effect on government policy in Egypt, what they had done is made people aware of the governments attempts to control the media and dissenting voices.

He said that in the past, when journalists were arrested and imprisoned for speaking against the government, there wasn’t much national or international outcry but when bloggers were arrested, there was. This took away the impression that government officials were ‘Gods’ – it humanised them which means that they can be held accountable for their actions.

How does uptake/use of new media differ in the Arab and western world? Very interesting question, and it’s something I’ve been learning a lot about since moving to Al Jazeera in Doha from the UK. It’s hard to generalize about the Arab world as a whole as it’s really a diverse region in many ways.

Social media, in particular, seems to have really been embraced in the Arab world. There are more and more interesting Arab voices in the blogosphere everyday opening up their cities, their lives and their countries policies to the whole world. There are also a good number of Arab Social Media Services and more are being created every month. There is WatWet, the Arab Twitter and Ikbis which is usually referred to as the Arab YouTube. There are also Arab blogging platforms such as Maktoob.

But I digress from the question: How does it differ to the west? When I think about new media in the Arab world the first thing that comes to mind is constraints. There are technological constrains in some parts of the Arab world – good internet connectivity can be very expensive and might not be widely available. Hosting can also be an issue. Local hosting companies are rare in some parts and are usually expensive. Western hosting can be bought but the cost is still high.

Then there is censorship. In some Arab countries you can’t access services like Blogger or YouTube. In others you might be able to get started but soon find that if your content isn’t acceptable then your site might be blocked.

The biggest difference for me though is the reason people use the services. I feel that in some parts of the Arab world the services are mainly used as a way to escape restrictions in daily life. As with the example above about Egypt, it gives young people the chance to talk about their lives and their governments in a way they can’t do in public. That’s not to say people in the west don’t do the same, I just get the impression that it’s more widespread in the Arab world.

The Defence Advisory – its role on privacy and the British media

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This week the Defence Advisory’s (DA) notice secretary, Andrew Vallance, delivered the final lecture of Coventry University’s Coventry Conversations series on how the controversial subject of secrecy is handled to maintain our country’s national security.

The DA is an institution set up to advise media figures on whether new and sensitive information is suitable for publication or whether this would have an adverse impact on national security.

Vallance was keen to highlight that the organisation tries to create a compromise between allowing and pushing for intriguing information to be published and urging the media not to be too specific about subjects that could make British associates easier to target.

The DA ‘provides advice to avoid the inadvertent publication or broadcasting of information that would damage UK national security’, but also ‘facilitates maximum freedom of the media to report in public interest’, he said.

The DA Notice System has five standing notices advising the media against publishing information on Britain’s military operations, weapons, communications, addresses and services.

But in the UK, where secrecy is taken very seriously and is a ‘birth right’ to every Briton, according to Vallance, the effectiveness of the DA is limited by the rapid spread of information on the internet and because its services are only for domestic-based media.

The internet and a fiercely competitive media industry are the Advisory’s main challenges, Vallance said. These two factors combined create a platform for instant communication from media organisations who want the most popular story or angle, which could leave inside information susceptible to dangerous and unexpected predators; to mass audiences who create pressure by craving daily news and revealing details.

The only alternatives to the current system would be to create government legislation preventing media institutions from printing certain types of information, which could effectively transfer the DA’s five standing notices to parliament, posited Vallance.

The other and more damning alternative, according to Vallance, would be to have a ‘media free for all without a security safety net’.

If all currently secret information was released, which would undoubtedly cut costs for data storage and legal proceedings, would anybody actually take any significance from comparing how many weapons country a, b or c has?

In the modern climate, the likelihood is that vulnerable countries would be targeted from figures released in the press, and so although the DA’s system has no authoritative enforcement, it is a hindrance to any media moguls who may contemplate prioritising the financial lure of popularity over national security.

The Guardian’s Katine project: development journalism and Uganda

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Last night’s discussion at POLIS of the Guardian’s ‘It starts with a village project…’ in the Ugandan village of Katine raised plenty of questions about development journalism and the media’s accountability, and whether media organisations can work in the long term with NGOs and charities.

[See Journalism.co.uk’s Tweeted coverage of the event]

By far the most interesting remarks were made by Richard Kavuma, a Ugandan journalist working for the Guardian on the project for two weeks every month.

Kavuma, who was named CNN Multichoice African journalist of the year in 2007, is caught in the middle between AMREF, the Guardian’s partner in the project, and the paper – a tension he has learnt to live with and not let impact upon what he sees as his purpose as a journalist:

“My own understanding of the media from the elementary classroom is that we are supposed to be the voice of the people. Especially those who do not have the voice to be heard. I saw it [Katine] as an extension of what I was meant to be doing as the media.

“This project is bringing the voice of Katine to a wider interational audience – what they perceive as their problems and how they think the project is helping or not helping them.”

“There have been challenges at the centre of some fairly salient tensions: I’m not trying to become a PR officer, I’m a journalist.

“Traditionally the media is supposed to be a watchdog, we scrutinize things. But the NGOs get money from donors and they’d like to prepare good reports on how much the money has done.”

The Guardian and AMREF have been trying to recruit more local journalists to write for the project, but to little avail, as journalists in the country’s capital are already overworked, Guardian writer Madeleine Bunting added.

As a result Kavuma says his reporting has become something of a novelty and has attracted a great deal of interest. Part of this, which he is too modest to mention, comes from more focus on people-led reporting – a journalistic style not widely used by the Ugandan media:

“The tone is changing and becoming more people-centred [in the Ugandan media]. For example, it’s not reporting about mortality, but writing about a woman who is losing her life for becoming pregnant.

“I can’t claim the credit, but I am part of a new movement, which is putting people at the centre of development reporting.

“In Uganda high politics is seen as selling papers. The issue for the media is to try and spot the high politics in the development issues and writing stories as an issue of not numbers but of people.”

The content site for the project had its highest level of traffic last month with 46,000 uniques, Bunting told the gathering. But, as contributor and Guardian environment editor John Vidal pointed out, it’s not about traffic, the project ‘had to be done’.

Despite its flaws – huge costs, some conflict with partner organisations, slow recruitment of Ugandan contributors – those involved insisted there were invaluable lessons to be learnt from the scheme, which is just a third of the way through.

Kavuma agreed: there are lessons about a journalist’s role and writing as a development journalist; but more importantly there’s an opportunity to educate the public about the development process – how hard/easy it is and the ongoing progress.

A move away from, as Madeleine Bunting said, the traditional reportage of development:

“[S]weep in, show the extent of suffering and say that your cheque will put it all right and actually not got back to check.”

Online Journalism Scandinavia: Resolutions for 2009 – Yes, we link

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Danish journalists pen link manifesto, which should be an inspiration for journalists everywhere in 2009.

The last quarter of 2008 did not only open our eyes to how flawed the fiscal economy is, in Scandinavia more and more journalists also realised how awkwardly media organisations operate in the link economy.

In Norway, the union chapel at DN.no, the news site of the country’s biggest financial daily, suggested introducing a common link policy for all the country’s news sites to make it profitable to produce good original articles rather than just to copy-paste.

In Denmark, a survey by eJour found just two links to external sites when monitoring seven Danish news sites over a period of two weeks. Blogging journalists in Denmark were also up in arms over a renewed effort by Danish newspaper publishers to stop websites like Google News from linking to individual articles rather than a newspaper’s homepage.

Against this backdrop, Kim Elmose, the blog editor of Politiken.dk, and Lars K. Jensen, a project manager at Ekstrabladet.dk, launched a link manifesto and encouraged news rooms everywhere to write their own link commandments and use their manifesto freely.

Let’s hope this can inspire more and better linking on many a news site in 2009:

First law: We link to the sources for the data we use in our journalistic products. If we have read, seen or heard important new information on an external site – for instance about companies, people or surveys – we will link to it.

Second law: We link directly and precisely to the information we use from external sites. In this way we provide proper service to our readers rather than just linking to the front page of the external site.

Third law: We are precise in our information about where a link leads to; about who has produced the information we link to and when. The readers should know where it takes them when they follow a link.

Fourth law: We recognise that an article consisting of precise links to information that represents different angles on an issue is a journalistic product.

Fifth law: We are open to inbound links to our own news sites because we want to be an integrated part of the web’s ecosystem

Sixth law: We aspire to making it easier to link directly to our articles.

Pro-am journalism site Demotix gets facelift

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Demotix – the website which aims to match citizen journalists with mainstream media outlets – has been given a slick new look:

The ‘user-generated newswire’ splits revenues from content between citizen journalists and publishers and now features a handy ‘news by continent’ search.

In an interview with Journalism.co.uk, Demotix founder Turi Munthe said the site was aimed at both amateurs and professional freelance journalists and could help combat the ‘mass shrinkage’ of foreign news coverage by media organisations.

“We want to bring professionals back in and broker deals for their images all over the world. Professionals will lead Demotix; they will lead the aspirations of all our street journalists,” he said.

“By creating a website that everyone can access in many ways we give a megaphone to the person on the street where ever they are. Demotix sees itself as standing on the lines of free speech.”