Tag Archives: Paul Bradshaw

JEEcamp: Follow the journalism enterprise ‘unconference’

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Journalism.co.uk is attending JEEcamp today – an ‘unconference’ (e.g. any attendees can suggest the topics for discussion) about future models for journalism, focusing on enterprise and experimentation.

“JEEcamp is an opportunity for a range of people to get together to talk about how on earth journalists and publishers can make a living from journalism in the era of free information, what the challenges are, and what we’ve learned so far.”

Organsied by Birmingham City University lecturer and Online Journalism Blog blogger Paul Bradshaw, the event is a sell out – but there are plenty of ways to follow what’s going on.

There’s a liveblog of the event here.

There will be lots of twittering (see the attendees list for a rough guide of who to follow and @journalism_live) under the #jeecamp hashtag. If you tag your tweets in this way they’ll be fed through to the CoverItLive bloggers too.

What would a UK-based ProPublica look like?

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In today’s MediaGuardian, City University of New York (CUNY) journalism professor Jeff Jarvis writes that that foundations will not take over newspapers, à la Scott Trust / Guardian relationship. He told Journalism.co.uk: “It is an empty hope for white knights to save news from inevitable change and business reality. But he says: “We’ll see foundation and public support able to fund a decent number of investigations.”

Yesterday, Journalism.co.uk published comments from New York University (NYU) professor, Jay Rosen, and ProPublica’s managing editor, Stephen Engelberg, as well as from Jarvis in a feature looking at the sustainability of ‘lump sum’ funded journalism – they all said that the point was not to look at ‘one solution’ but at a hybrid of funding opportunities (an issue picked up by Julie Starr here.)

US-based ProPublica, funded by the Sandler Foundation, for example, employs full-time journalists to conduct investigations which are then supplied to other media bodies. Journalism.co.uk raised the point with some of the NYJournalism interviewees (fuller features forthcoming) that similar foundation funding is a bit trickier to come by in the UK: just what would a UK version of ProPublica look like and could it be funded?

Would the equivalent of ProPublica work over here? Or, for that matter, something in the mould of Spot.Us, New America Media, the Huffington Post Investigative Fund, or the Center for Public Integrity?

Last week the Guardian’s Stephen Moss mentioned Paul Bradshaw’s new project, HelpMeInvestigate.com in his giant G2 feature on the troubled regional newspaper industry. It’s a proposal not quite on the scale of ProPublica, which has an annual operating budget of $10 million, and it’s seen success so far, making it to third stage of the (American) Knight News Challenge 2009 and it awaits news of further progress.

How about existing organisations in the UK? There’s the Centre for Investigative Journalism with its annual summer school, but it doesn’t run and supply investigations in the way ProPublica does. There’s MySociety which can help journalists with stories, but is not designed as a primarily journalistic venture.

Author of Flat Earth News, Nick Davies, has previously told the Press Gazette (which has just announced its last issue) about his idea of models of ‘mini-media’.

“It may be that we are looking at funding mini-media or a foundation that will give money to groups of journalists if they can pass the quality threshold,” Davies said at an National Union of Journalists (NUJ) event in January, as Press Gazette reported.

“The greatest question in journalism today is what will be our ‘third source’ of funding,” Davies told Journalism.co.uk last week.

“If advertising and circulation can no longer pay for our editorial operation, we have to find this third source.

“I suspect that place by place and case by case, the answer to the question will be different, a matter of wrapping up whatever package of cash is possible, using donations or grants or sponsorship or micropayments from foundations, rich individuals, local councils, businesses, NGOs, universities – anybody who can understand that the collapse of newspapers is not just about journalists losing their jobs but about everybody losing an essential source of information.

“And in an ideal world, central government would lead the way by setting up a New Media Fund to provide seed money to help these non-profit mini-media to establish themselves and to find their particular third source.”

So could a third source-funded model work? And what shape would it take? It’s a question Journalism.co.uk will continue to ask. Please share your thoughts below.

Paul Bradshaw, Twitter and the art of predicting the interview

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Prior to his appearance to talk about Twitter on BBC West Midlands’ breakfast show this morning, Birmingham City journalism lecturer and Online Journalism Blog blogger Paul Bradshaw put out a call on the service to see if he and his followers couldn’t predict what questions he’d be asked.

[You can listen to the audio of the interview at this link until February 25 2009 – Paul’s interview comes in around the 2 hours 15 mins mark]

Here’s the full audio of the interview courtesy of BBC West Midlands and the Phil Upton Breakfast Show:

150 responses later and the #bbcwm tag became the seventh most popular search term on Twitter. Here’s the predicted interview (full names of Twitterers and responses can be seen on Bradshaw’s blog):

  1. Isn’t it a waste of time?
  2. What’s Twitter all about?
  3. What famous people are on it?
  4. Have there been any catfights on it?
  5. How do you ever get any work done?
  6. What advice can you give me on using Twitter?
  7. Can’t these people make real friends?
  8. Why would you want strangers knowing what you do?

And, of the five questions presenter Phil Upton got to ask, numbers 1, 2, 3 and 5. A bonus question – also predicted by Bradshaw’s followers – included ‘what’s the best tweet/tweeter you’ve seen?’. Aptly, Bradshaw used responses that had been sent by Tweeters to illustrate his answers.

Upton, who tweets at @flupton, had been following the responses to Bradshaw’s shoutout and may have used them as free research. Even if he didn’t base his questions on the #bbcwm replies there’s a strange ‘self-fulfilling interview’ prophecy going on here, with questions answered before the interview has even taken place…

Guardian releases football data; BBC creates gossip widget

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New releases from the Guardian and BBC for fans of football and online innovations alike.

First up, the Guardian’s new Chalkboards, which give users access to player and match data as soon as the final whistle goes. There’s a competitive edge to creating your data mashups too, as the best chalkboards will be awarded prizes.

(Here’s my first attempt below from one of my favourite football matches of recent times. And yes, I do live on past glories.)

Screenshot of Guardian's interactive football 'chalkboards'

Users will be able to embed the boards on their own sites, as the Guardian hopes to encourage discussion both off and on-site.

According to a release from the title, the feature is part of Guardian News & Media’s new product development programme.

Meanwhile (and a hat tip to Paul Bradshaw’s blog), the BBC has created a widget of football transfer gossip – most significantly, it aggregates rumour links from other news sites, which is part of the Beeb’s remit to make better use of external links.

LA Times: Micropayments – a rainbow for journalism… or a Hail Mary?

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The prospect of micropayments for news raises its head once again. This article follows in the wake of David Carr’s piece in the NY Times, ‘Let’s invent an iTunes for news’ which has been neatly debunked by Paul Bradshaw on his Online Journalism Blog.

Might have worked a few years back, but most agree that horse has already bolted. Full story…

NCTJ Journalism skills conference: Is shorthand ‘vital’ as a journalism skill?

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The full results of the National Council for the Training of Journalists (NCTJ) convergence skills survey are in under the fairly predictable headline of ‘you need old and new skills’ to survive in this journalism age.

But the study, which questioned 217 employers and 50 NCTJ-accredited institutions, did flag up some interesting skills gaps – cited by employers – between new recruits and employer expectations:

Here’s Paul Bradshaw’s video of the presentation of the results from the Society of Editor’s conference last month:


A combination of new and ‘traditional’ skills (finding own stories, use of language, writing, media law, shorthand, newsgathering, video, SEO) were all areas of particular concern for the 71 per cent of those employers surveyed who reported skills gaps among new entrants.

But it was the gaps in traditional skills that employers and educators saw as most important. As the NCTJ chairman Kim Fletcher says in his intro to the results, a worrying gap in recruits’ ability to write shorthand was reported, a skill which is ‘as vital as ever’.

The above claim has already been causing some debate amongst twittering journos:

Is shorthand a ‘vital skill’ or just a handy one? It was part of my training and I find it useful for quick transcriptions, but there are growing calls for reporters to tape everything – something which has the added benefit of allowing you to post audio clips.

Excerpts from interviews conducted as part of the skills survey raise sound ideas on the whole – but are they really referring to shorthand when they mention important traditional skills? For example:

“It is a difficult task, but teaching the traditional skills must be maintained while cultivating multimedia talent as well – and both to a high standard. The traditional should not be  downgraded to accommodate the ‘sexy’. The basics are needed for whatever medium is being used.”

(For me there’s still a slight hangover from the print (solid, traditional, credible) vs online (sexy, irreverent and all front) in the above…)

Educators reading this – what emphasis do you place on different skills and why?

New recruits and journos – in what proportion are you using the new and traditional skills you’ve learnt?

US elections: the best of the rest on the web

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For those that have been under a rock/on Mars for the last year, the next President of the United States will be decided tonight, giving news organisations another opportunity to flaunt their interactive, live reporting and user-generated wares as the votes unfold.

We’ve already covered Sky News’ election coverage and BBC News’ live online plans, but here’s our round-up of some of the best projects out there – open up twenty browser tabs, sit back and enjoy:

  • NYTimes.com: the paper has set up a political ‘word train’ visualising how readers are feeling. It’ll update with new answers every 30 minutes (thanks to @matthewbuckland for the link). Elsewhere the site’s homepage is dominated by election coverage, with plenty of images and video – making use of the new video player – and a pop-up results widget.
  • Twitter Vote Report: the microblogging tool has been harnessed by a network of volunteers to map voters’ experiences at the polls. Tweets tagged with waiting times (e.g. #wait 120 for a 120 minute delay) are plotted creating a rapidly updating map of problems. Could be a great service for local newspapers in the states to provide:

  • Yahoo: created a one-stop shop, US election microsite drawing together all of its features, including forums, Yahoo Answers, AP and Politico stories and aggregated content from external news sites, a Flickr stream of photos and options to set up news alerts on the candidates.
  • Hubdub: the just-for-fun news prediction site is carrying an election forecast map, which it claims is based on ’51 underlying prediction markets that respond in real-time to breaking news’. Users can view forecasts state-by-state to help them decided where to place their Hubdub dollars when predicting the outcome of questions such as ‘Who will win the 2008 US Presidential Election?’ and ‘What will be the margin of victory in the state of Ohio?’

That’s not enough, I hear you cry. You want more? Well, over at paidContent:UK, Robert Andrews has wrapped up the online coverage from the UK’s newspapers, while Online Journalism Blog chieftain Paul Bradshaw has an extensive list of online activities.

This is only the tip of the iceberg – any other great coverage, tools or websites that need a mention, let us know below.

Social network for journalism researchers

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Journalism lecturer and blogger at the Online Journalism Blog (OJB), Paul Bradshaw, has set up a rather nifty social network for journalism and news researchers using Ning:

“It’s an attempt to provide a way for journalism students and academics to get in touch with others researching the same area, exchange ideas and tips, and ask for help on everything from finding relevant literature to sourcing contacts and the best research methods.

“Research is traditionally a solitary, frustrating endeavour. It doesn’t need to be. If you work with journalism students, please encourage them to join the network and contribute a question or an answer,” writes Bradshaw on the OJB.

There are 139 members at time of writing, so go get yourself signed up.