Tag Archives: Online Journalism

The changing face of the news editor in the world of social media

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The freedom attributed to the world of online journalism supports the notion that the internet fosters equality. When it comes to news, we can be our own gatekeepers and use social media to carve out our own news agenda.

The issue is at the heart of a post on Nieman Journalism Lab by Ken Doctor, looking at the evolving image of the news editor within social media, from the experienced newsdesk figure to our community of online friends.

In this hybrid era of straddling print and digital publishing, the role of the gatekeeper has markedly morphed. It’s shifted from “us” to “them”, but “them” includes a lowercase version of “us”, too. Gatekeeping is now a collective pursuit; we’ve become our own and each other’s editors.

With social media, the serendipity that came with turning pages and suddenly discovering a gem of a story that an editor put there happens in new ways. We’re re-creating such moments ourselves, each of us―individually and collectively―as we tout stories and posts to each other. A friend e-mails us a story; we might read it, time permitting. We get the same story from three people, and chances are good that we’ll carve out time to take a look.

Doctor says that in the future news organisations will need to “harness this power” by combining a professional and traditional news judgement with the value and reach of social media networks. Additionally – never underestimate the importance of aggregation in appealing to social media audiences.

Go ahead and call it gatekeeping, but think of it with a different slant when it comes to flexing those well-honed news judgment muscles. These days editors have a much bigger bank of news and features on which to draw. It’s not just what staff reporters and wire copy offers; it’s the entire web of content.

See his full post here…

Facebook on how news organisations can best use the social network

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The main man behind media partnerships at Facebook, Justin Osofsky, has posted a blog detailing the social network’s recent analysis of how news sites currently use Facebook.

A Facebook team conducted the independent analysis of the “100 top media sites”, assessing their user engagement through social plugins.

We recently set forth to learn how news organizations can best use Facebook to (1) drive growth in audience and traffic, (2) increase engagement, and (3) gain valuable customer insights.

We also analysed the pages of several top media organizations and the stories they posted, including their content, types of status update, and time of day.

The findings have been shared today on a Facebook and Media page, with an overall aim to improve news organisations’ use of Facebook media in the future.

Examples include the use of Facebook Insights to better understand user interests, and placement of the ‘Activity Feed’ and ‘Recommendations’ social plugins on both the front and content pages to gain up to ten times more clicks per user than on the front page alone.

See the full post here…

‘It is a biased medium’: Douglas Rushkoff on power roles in journalism

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Douglas Rushkoff has a thought-provoking look at internet power roles in journalism on the Nieman Journalism Lab, claiming a bias given to immediacy on the internet damages the value of journalism.

(…) at first glance the Internet seems to be different. It is a biased medium, to be sure, but biased to the amateur and to the immediate—as if to change some essential balance of power. Indeed, the Web so overwhelmingly tilts toward the immediate as to render notions of historicity and permanence obsolete. Even Google is rapidly converting to live search—a little list of not the most significant, but the most recent results for any query term. Likewise, our blog posts and tweets are increasingly biased not just toward brevity but immediacy—a constant flow, as if it is just humanity expressing itself.

But, he adds, this is not a sustainable model for “professional journalism” and the role of the Fourth Estate.

(…) a professional journalist isn’t just someone who has access to the newswires, or at least it shouldn’t be. A professional newsperson is someone who is not only trained to pursue a story and deconstruct propaganda, but someone who has been paid to spend the time and energy required to do so effectively. Corporations and governments alike spend hundreds of millions of dollars each year on their public relations and communications strategies. They hire professionals to tell or, more often, obfuscate their stories. Without a crew of equally qualified—if not equally funded—professionals to analyze and challenge these agencies’ fictions, we are defenseless against them.

And thus, we end up in the same place we were before—only worse, because now we believe we own and control the media that has actually owned and controlled us all along.

See his full post here…

Equatorial meets digital: Online journalism in Guyana

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John Mair is a senior lecturer in broadcast journalism at Coventry University. Writing from Georgetown, Guyana for Journalism.co.uk, he takes a look at the South American country’s media landscape.


In London it is all too easy to get swept along by the tide of digital mania. Too easy to think the future of our craft is all tweeting, Facebook, citizen journalism and all the buzz words of the recent news:rewired sessions.

But what is the digital reality here in the Third World? It is limited, to say the least. Communication is still mostly about chopping down trees and spreading ink on them. The four nationals here don’t really ‘get the net’. They put their editions up on the web after publication and leave them there for a day. No updating and very little interactivity. Where news is concerned, the web is a static platform here.

One man is making some headway though. Former employee of state radio station GBC Denis Chabrol has created a multi-platform site, Demerarawaves.com, with a radio programme and some text, plus Facebook and Twitter sharing tools. Chabrol still has a long way to go however, his efforts are still based on a weekly radio programme and daily text alerts. He can scoop with the best though – this week he revealed that the president had sold his recently built house to the man who does his election advertising for a substantial profit. But a story like that that needed the full internet works and it didn’t quite get it.

It is on the blogs that Guyana comes closest to facing the future. The country’s blogs are satirical and they are political – so much so that at least one Guyana media critic has been driven out of business by the government. Today, at least three survive: propagandapress.wordpress.com; ohguyana.blogspot.com; liveinguyana.blogspot.com. With varying degrees of success they dig and they lampoon the Jagdeo/PPP government and various public officials. They are, though, too often a melange of half-truths, viciousness and malice. I suspect many are edited outside Guyana.

The bloggers here are also very coy about breaking cover. Under strict conditions of anonymity, I managed to obtain an interview with ‘Nelly’, one of the founders of propagandapress.wordpress.com. She and her colleagues see their purpose as “propaganda for the masses”:

“Fodder for intelligent asses as our slogan says. Guyana is a fucked up country and we want to see changes. We want an end to state sponsored murder. We want an end to privatisation of the country by PPP Crime Family & Friends Inc and soon.”

These bloggers do not necessarily follow strict checking of story sources and facts, it all seems a bit laissez faire in fact.

“Some things don’t need to be checked. Once our agents operating behind enemy lines send in certain things, we don’t need to check it because they’re putting their lives on the line to get some of that info.”

And what about their effect on the country’s polity?

“That’s hard to say as we do not know at this time. We know people like James Singh, CEO of Canu (the custom’s anti-narcotics unit), and others wake up daily panicking at what we’re going to say next about them as we have moles in Canu. As far as our impact on political/cultural life of Guyana that’s still to be seen. Until our flagship was hacked, we were getting six to eight million hits a year. That’s since dropped tremendously but we are building bigger, better and stronger. We’re here to stay!”

It is difficult to predict how long some of these bloggers will last. They will persevere at least until the national and presidential elections in 2011, when they hope their work will culminate in the ousting of the Jagdeo/PPP party.

Image courtesy of Douglas F. on Flickr

BBC Scotland: Old hack or new journalism tricks – which wins?

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BBC Radio Scotland is running a journalism experiment of sorts today – pitting an office-based, but internet-enabled journalist against another hack only allowed to ferret out stories face-to-face without even so much as a mobile phone for company.

The pair will be tasked with finding stories specific to the village of Cellardyke in Fife. Of course, a bit like the social media experiment by journalists in France, you have to wonder what the point of separating supposedly ‘old’ and ‘new’ skills is when the two can and should be combined. But in an age where many working journalists report a more desk-bound culture in the newsroom, the outcome will be interesting to see.

According to Allmediascotland, renowned journalists Bill Heaney and Joan McAlpine will then have to identify the source of each story produced and judge which made for better reading.

The programme ‘Old Hack, New Tricks’ will air today  at 11:30am and on Sunday 27 June at 10:30am on BBC Radio Scotland.

Late Night Marketing: How one newspaper lost 5,000 incoming links

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Late Night Marketing discusses how Norwegian newspaper Dagbladet.no lost more than 5,000 natural “inlinks” (links to its website from external sites and blogs) to its website by disabling a feature from blog search engine Twingly on its website:

The first thing here is that Dagbladet.no now loses a lot of blog traffic, but this is not the most important thing, because the traffic from blogs is not enormous compared to the traffic a newspaper can gain from good rankings on search engines.

What do you think that Google will think of your site if you suddenly have approximately 5,000 fewer incoming links per month?

Full post at this link…

PDA: Andrew Sparrow on liveblogging the general election

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For the 2010 general election, the Guardian’s senior political correspondent Andrew Sparrow has been tasked with liveblogging the event on an almost daily basis. In this post for PDA he explains his approach, the practical considerations and the benefits for journalists and readers:

I live blog a lot and I believe the format – minute-by-minute updates, combining news, analysis and links – allows journalists to report events with more thoroughness and immediacy than if they are just writing stories (…) If journalism is the first draft of history, live blogging is the first draft of journalism. It’s not perfect, but it’s deeply rewarding – on any day, I was able to publish almost every snippet that I thought worth sharing, which is not the case for anyone who has to squeeze material into a newspaper – and it beats sitting on a battlebus.

On a typical day the site’s liveblog generated between 100,000 and 150,000 page views, rising to 2 million on election night, adds Sparrow.

Full post at this link…

See the results of our poll on the best journalists, tweeters and bloggers of #ge2010…

E&P: Will the Pulitzer Prizes finally recognise digital journalism this year?

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Editor & Publisher’s Mark Fitzgerald talks to veteran Wall Street Journal and Economist Group journalist Roy J. Harris Jr. about the Pulitzer Prizes, and the chances of online-only journalism being in among the winners this year.

More than a decade ago, in 1999, the Pulitzers opened entries to online content, and in the past two years has eased eligibility requirements for entries by online-only news organizations. Yet, no entry that appeared only on the Web has ever won a Pulitzer.

“It’s one thing to have press release from the Pulitzer organization that we welcome online entries,” Harris said. “But when you go a couple of years without anyone winning it – that sends a signal too.”

Full story at this link…

Brighton Future of News: telling the election straight

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Freelance journalist John Keenan reports from last night’s Brighton Future of News meetup. This post originally appeared on his blog.

As the general election lumbers ineluctably into view, householders across the United Kingdom must brace themselves for an avalanche of political leaflets. But hold on a minute before you bin the bumf.

According Richard Pope, web designer and political provocateur, there is a mine of unintended information in the annoying pamphlets littering your doormat. Pope told the meeting of the Brighton Future of News Group (BFONG) at the Skiff last night that careful monitoring of such material can prevent politicians getting away with murder.

Pope’s election leaflet project, The Straight Choice, is an attempt to turn the propaganda back on the spin doctors. He outlined a number of ways that journalists (and by implication any engaged citizen) can use leaflets to dig out inconvenient truths. Among these were:

  • Track down ‘fake supporters’. Pope highlighted how a supposed group of British National Party members featured in one leaflet were, in fact, a group of Italian models whose photo the BNP had lifted from another source.
  • Follow the money. A close reading of the small print detailing where the leaflet was printed can lead you to often surprising information about political donors.
  • Spot the spoof: in a desperate attempt to snare your attention, the parties will dress up their dreary slogans as gossip magazine fodder. And you thought photos of celebs in front of their mantelpieces were dodgy – you ain’t seen nothing yet.
  • Capture the contradictions. We all know that politicians of every stripe will promise the moon in order to get elected. But they trust us to forget about their lunar pledges as soon as we have tossed aside the handbill. Pope’s website aims to keep them on message and under the microscope.
  • Splat the stats. It is amusing and instructive to compare the surreal use of statistics as politicians play the numbers game to support any policy they choose.

Pope was candid over his desire to see a party official lose a job over a gaffe highlighted by his website. A more measured ambition is to improve the quality of political debate – moving it away from gratuitous character attacks to sensible arguments over policy.

Don’t fret, however, if you are not deluged with leaflets in the coming weeks; this simply means that you live in an area where a donkey with the right rosette would find itself in Westminster.

As Dan Wilson, who is campaigning for Nancy Platts in the Brighton Pavilion constituency, told the meeting, the prime purpose of leafleting is to gather names and addresses of each party’s supporters so they can get the vote out on the day. “I’m not convinced that the Argus wields political influence,” he said, sucking the air out of the room.

Brighton Future of News group was founded by Journalism.co.uk’s Judith Townend and journalist/blogger Sarah Booker. Find out more at this link. You can see tweets from last night at this link.

Coventry Conversations: The birth of BBC News Online

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BBC News Online was initially devised in 1997 as a response to CNN’s online news page, claims its creator and former Editor-in-Chief, Mike Smartt.

“The reason that the BBC decided to go online was that CNN went online in 1996. And because the BBC doesn’t do anything in a hurry, it took it a very long time to actually make the decision.”

Speaking at the University of Coventry as part of its ‘Coventry Conversations’ series, Smartt told of the early days of online news and the difficulties faced by both designers and journalists.

Online journalism had to wait for technology to permit it to expand to its full potential, he said. Deadlines were demolished and journalists were regularly spending over half an hour to write a code with their story, only to have to go back again when a space, comma or any other character wasn’t in place.

The BBC were very wary of going online at first, Smartt said. “Initially, in the BBC, the journalists rejected the idea for two reasons: the money that was used to finance it was obviously coming from radio and television, so there was some resentment, and the internet was seen, amongst the people in the more traditional media, as competition,” he confessed.

When they did push ahead with the idea, experience was obviously thin on the ground. “My only qualification was that I used one of these” he said, showing a picture of his laptop back in 1997. The initial website was running from a server similar both in size and internal technology to his original laptop, he said. “Actually, for three weeks when we first launched the server, big in theory, … looked like this, that’s what we served News Online from, for three weeks, in the corner of the Newsroom.”

He also spoke of the problem of deciding what a story should look like online, whether going on the internet meant that people were looking for “three Ceefax sentences” or something more in-depth. The BBC’s 1996 ‘Online News Concept’ outlined goals that are beginning to be met only recently: valuable text, high-quality pictures that load fast, high-quality audio, full screen videos and full interactivity.

The content of the first test pages was mostly made up of jokes, but the team, led by Smartt, had to redesign the site again and again until the first BBC News Online page was finally agreed upon. He showed one version of the front page with a lively design and a high number of images, but explained why they couldn’t go with it: “If you remember back then you had dial-up, and you literally rang them up, and then this sound came along, and then you were connected, and only later up came the site, very, very slowly.”

Smartt finished with a warning to those who are not prepared to embrace new forms of journalism: “If you can’t handle multi-media, and you will have to in future, you are doomed in this business.”