According to Reuters – and tweeting Channel 4 journalists – Britain’s High Court ordered its first injunction via Twitter today, saying that the social website and microblogging service was the best way to reach an anonymous Tweeter who had been impersonating someone.
Solicitors Griffin Law sought the injunction against @blaneysblarney claiming that it was impersonating the right-wing blogger Donal Blaney – the owner of Griffin Law.
#FollowJourn: Neil Durham
Who? Deputy editor of GP and Independent Nurse
What? Currently deputy editor of GP, a weekly newspaper for UK family doctors and Independent Nurse, a leading magazine for primary care and community nurses which is published twice a month. Both are publications of Haymarket Medical Media.
Where? @NeilDurham on Twitter.
Contact? neil.durham [at] haymarket.com
Just as we like to supply you with fresh and innovative tips every day, we’re recommending journalists to follow online too. They might be from any sector of the industry: please send suggestions (you can nominate yourself) to judith or laura [at] journalism.co.uk; or to @journalismnews.
If you won’t be in Brighton’s Grand tonight for the Twitter debate hosted by Channel 4’s Krishnan Guru-Murthy, then follow the live stream below.
You TWEET if you want to: the web is for opposition, not for governing:
20.15 – 21.45pm: Debate organised by Channel 4 and Fishburn Hedges: Rt Hon Ed Balls MP, Rt Hon Ben Bradshaw MP, Rt Hon David Miliband MP, Rt Hon Caroline Flint MP, Sadiq Khan MP, Kerry McCarthy MP, Tom Watson MP, Stella Creasy (PPC, Walthamstow), Alex Hilton (Blogger) and Google spokesperson (tba).
At the time of writing, this is still live – a published Associated Press story that looks rather more like an internal memo. ‘OK, can you do some more probing?’ is quite an unusual intro.
It can be seen on Google hosted news (published 19 hours ago) and Forbes.com. Twitter users have spotted but the AP hasn’t removed it yet – maybe it’s playing it cool. NB: Google’s SideWiki can be put to good use here, if you feel inclined to point out the error…
FT Alphaville wryly notes Reuters’ source for its Gmail fail story, ‘Twitter accounts’. Alphaville prefers a screen-grab from Gmail instead.
(Via @Psmith)
PS. Last Twitter post of the day, maybe.
Sidewiki (noun): a browser sidebar that enables you to contribute and read helpful information alongside any web page (source: Google.com)
or…
Sidewiki (noun): an attempt by our online colonial masters to own all of the comments on our websites (source: Andrew Keen)
On this occasion Jeff Jarvis would not do what Google is doing: the CUNY journalism professor and WWGD? author is worried. He can see some potential dangers for the development of Sidewiki, launched by Google yesterday. His commenters share their thoughts too, in a split conversation between the BuzzMachine comments thread and the Sidewiki (you’ll have to take the plunge and install it if you want to see how that looks). Jarvis says:
“This goes contrary to Google’s other services – search, advertising, embeddable content and functionality – that help advantage the edge. This is Google trying to be the centre. Quite ungoogley, I’d say.”
Sidewiki has the potential to be great for freedom of speech but what about the nastier side? Publishers no longer have control of the look of part of their site. Google has tested the application at news organisations it says – testimonials here – but it’s still developing its technology, and asking for feedback.
Some initial thoughts, then. The main concerns for journalists and news organisations might include:
1) Will it lose money for news sites?
Andrew Keen, writing for the Telegraph, comments:
“Sidewiki is a brazen attempt to own the Internet. What Sidewiki would do is replace/supplement the Telegraph comments section on this page with a Google comments page. So all comments on the internet would, in theory, be owned by Google (which, presumably, they could sell advertisements around – thereby eating into my salary).”
2) What happens about libel?
Google publishes its programme policy here, at this link.
‘Keep it legal,’ it says (and it will report us to the ‘appropriate authorities’ if we don’t).
“If you believe that someone is violating these policies, use the ‘Report Abuse’ button within Sidewiki. We’ll review your report and take action if appropriate. Just because you disagree with certain material or find it to be inappropriate doesn’t mean we’ll remove it. We understand that our users have many different points of view, and we take this into consideration when reviewing reports of abuse. Although not all reports will result in removal, we do rely on our users to tell us about materials that may be violating our policies.”
Have fun with that Google!
Here are a few questions about the legal aspect from Jo Wadsworth, online editor at the Brighton Argus, for whom comment moderation is part of her job:
“How long does it takes to get abusive comments removed? Where’s moderation criteria? Can site switch it off? Can trolls be banned?”
Meanwhile, SEO consultant and blogger Malcolm Coles is having a play… This morning, he says, he was finding it hard to resist the temptation to be the first to sidewiki the home page of UK newspapers. But someone else got there first.
Please add your own thoughts and questions. In the Google Sidewiki – to your left, via Twitter (@journalismnews) or in the comments…
What has the web ever done for journalism, except skewer its business model and return freelance rates to levels not seen since the early 90s?
Well, not much, apart from reinvent the form.
Amidst the doom of gloom in our industry it is easy to lose sight of how the web has transformed the way we tell stories, provide context and analysis, and cover live events.
This is arguably the most creative period in news journalism since movable type – new forms, new applications and new execution. Newspapers are embracing video and audio, radio stations do pictures, and TV has gone blogging.
You’re likely to have your own suggestions, and favourites. But here are five of the best:
1. Interactive infographics
Broadcast news was quick to adopt the graphic as a means of explaining complex issues or, more prosaically, make the most of a picture-challenged story. The web has taken the best examples from newspapers, magazines and TV and given them a twist – interactivity. Now you can interrogate the data, slice and dice it at will. Two of the best practitioners of the art can be found in the US – the New York Times and South Florida’s Sun Sentinel.
2. Crowdsourcing
From crime mapping to a pictorial memorial to the victims of post-election Iran to joint investigations, the crowd is proving a potent force in journalism. It took the web to provide the environment for a real-time collaboration and ad hoc groups are brought together by dint of interest, expertise, geography or some combination of all three. Not all crowdsourcing projects run smooth but the power of the crowd will continue to surprise.
3. The podcast
Just as cheap video cameras and YouTube democratised the moving image, so the podcast has made audio publishers of us all. Some podcasts mirror radio almost exactly in format, down to the commercial breaks at the top, middle and end of the show. Others break the rules. As Erik Qualman notes in his new book Socialnomics, today’s podcasters are taking liberties with advertising models (building in sponsorship) and with length of transmission (“If a podcast only has 16 minutes of news-worthy items, then why waste … time trying to fill the slot with sub-par content?”).
4. Over-by-over
A completely original approach to sports reporting, only possible on a real-time platform. Like Sky’s Soccer Saturday – where a bunch of ex-pros watch matches you can’t see and offer semi-coherent banter – over-by-over and ball-by-ball cricket and football commentaries shouldn’t work, but they do. And it’s not just the application, it’s the execution. The commentaries are knowing, not fawning, conversational and participatory. Over-by-over is CoveritLive and Twitter‘s (child-like) elder sibling.
5. The blog
The blog and the conventional news article are entirely separate forms, as any publisher who has tried to fob the user off by sticking the word ‘blog’ at the top of a standard story template will tell you. The blog allows you to tell stories in a different way, deconstructing the inverted pyramid and addressing the who, what, why, when, where and how as appropriate. Breaking news has become a narrative – early lines followed by more detail, reaction, photos, analysis, video, comment and fact checking in no defined order. It’s a collaborative work in progress. News is becoming atomised on the web and the blog is the platform on which it is happening.
I’ve named five but there are bound to be others. What have I missed?
Jon Bernstein is former multimedia editor of Channel 4 News. This is part of a series of regular columns for Journalism.co.uk. You can read his personal blog at jonbernstein.wordpress.com.
Heather B. Armstrong, full-time blogger and former web designer, is experimenting with a new way to make online revenue: publishing the hate mail she receives on a separate page of her blog, surrounded by advertising.
Armstrong set up Dooce.com in 2001, and since then it has rather grown: the site’s advertising sign-up section reports over 220,000 page views and over 30,000 unique users per day. Armstrong says that she now earns enough money from the website to support her whole family which includes a husband, two dogs and two children. On Twitter (@dooce) she is – at the time of writing – followed by 1,275,573 people.
With that popularity comes a lot of vitriol. Introducing the new ‘monetising the hate’ feature – an idea suggested by her friend Heather Champ, Armstrong wrote:
“Every awful thing you can say about a human being, it’s been said about me and my family. Over and over again, like a broken record, and I guess with the intention that it will at some point hurt me so badly that I will throw my hands in the air and give up.”
(…)
“Internet, let me introduce you to Monetizing The Hate. Here I will be posting all the hate mail I get in my inbox and all the hateful anonymous and not-so-anonymous comments left on this website.”
Hat-tip: Paul Waugh, London Evening Standard.
#FollowJourn: Anna Jeys
Who? Head of web for BPM Media, publishers of the Birmingham Post and Mail.
What? Multimedia editor, former news and features editor and news reporter.
Where? @ajeys and www.birminghammail.net
Contact? Find her on Twitter or email her via this page.
Just as we like to supply you with fresh and innovative tips every day, we’re recommending journalists to follow online too. They might be from any sector of the industry: please send suggestions (you can nominate yourself) to judith or laura [at] journalism.co.uk; or to @journalismnews.
In this morning’s MediaGuardian, technology journalist Charles Arthur says that technology journalists are the pioneers of new gadgets, and the ones in the industry to keep an eye on:
“[I]f you want to find out how you’re going to be working in a few years’ time, watch the technology journalists.
“[The BBC’s technology correspondent, Rory Cellan-Jones] tends to be in the forefront of trying new technologies – from email to the web to Skype to cloud computing to iPhones to Facebook to Twitter.”