Courtesy of Slideshare comes Steve Buttry’s presentation on Twitter for Journalists.
(@stevebuttry is coach for the ‘Complete Community Connection’ (C3) programme at Gazette Communications in the US)
A great resource for those just getting into tweeting or if you need to talk your news colleagues around…
Good round up from the Editors Weblog of the case of US blogger Shellee Hale, who may be required to reveal her anonymous sources behind comments she left on an online messageboard.
Despite offering proof of her journalistic credentials Hale’s submissions were ruled as insufficient evidence of her professional status. As such she is not covered by New Jersey’s state shield law, which allows journalists to keep sources private.
The global advertising recession will a new low point in the second half of 2009, dropping by 8.5 per cent this year, according to a new report from ZenithOptimedia, reports MediaGuardian.co.uk.
Western Europe and North America will be most affected, suggests the forecast, which can be downloaded in full at this link.
Elsewhere in the industry, Guy Parker, chief of the UK’s Advertising Standards Agency, has predicted a greater number of complaints relating to fewer campaigns in 2009.
In 2008 ASA received 26,433 complaints about 15,556 ads, but 2009 could see more than 30,000, says Parker.
Across the pond Broadcasting & Cable reports that four major US ad associations have joined forces to issue a set of guidelines on behavioral advertising – most significantly a ruling requiring internet service providers and desktop app software, such as web browser tool bars, to ask a user to opt-in before engaging in behavioral ads.
From Politico: a report on a panel at the Institute’s Ideas Festival in Colarado, asking ‘What’s the News Worth to You?’
For us Brits, this is the interesting part:
“During the panel’s Q&A, Gawker Media’s Nick Denton sarcastically thanked the American newspaper industry for being so unaggressive, making it possible for ‘thugs’ like him to succeed.
“Conversely, Denton said he’d never set up shop in England. ‘Every single day, those editors get up and try to kill each other,’ said Denton. Not so in the U.S.”
Australian newspapers aren’t finding it as tough as many of their US and UK counterparts, John Hartigan, the chairman and chief executive of News Ltd, claimed in a speech on Wednesday. Roy Greenslade picked up on the Murdoch-owned Australian newspaper’s report that the nation’s print publications are ‘holding up well’.
But we feel he missed the best bit. As Crikey.com.au flagged up in its daily newsletter, there was something a little odd about a print headline in the paper on July 2 (helpfully highlighted here by Mumbrella.com.au – hat-tip @BlackAdder). This, courtesy of Crikey:
Also see Crikey’s comments on the speech / report here (registration required):
And links and commentary from Mumbrella here.
Oh, and you can ‘Marc the deth of newpapers with this stilish Crikey tee shiort. Avilable now fom the Crickley shop.’
Back in February last year, Journalism.co.uk caught up with Ryan Sholin, director of News Innovation at Publish2, about his project ReportingOn, which had received funding from the Knight News Challenge.
“I call ReportingOn ‘the backchannel for your beat,” Sholin told us.
“This isn’t about the craft of journalism – this is about the nuts and bolts of finding angles, sources, and data to bolster local news reporting.”
Today the funding from the initiative comes to an end, but that doesn’t mean ReportingOn will – in fact Sholin is gearing up for the launch of version 2.0, which will see the base of the platform, built using Django, go OpenSource
You can follow developments with the project on its blog or Twitter account. But we thought it was time for an update from the man himself:
What changes are being made that will affect the user?
[Sholin] It’s an absolute re-imagining of the network. The first time out, I built it to be quite Twitter-esque in the hopes that journalists would use it like Twitter, asking questions of their followers and sharing ideas about stories they were working on. That didn’t happen organically, or if it was going to, it was going to take years.
So, with the help of a professional development and design team, we’ve rebuilt the site from the ground up, framed around the act of asking and answering questions. There’s no 140-character limit, but what you will find are lots of basic features that make sense in this sort of social network. You can ‘watch’ users, beats, or a particular question, viewing everything in an activity feed that brings you the latest questions and answers from the journalists, topics, and particular issues you’re interested in. [See Sholin’s demo of the service as it stood on June 17 below]
Why was it necessary to make these changes?
Although the first version of ReportingOn was a great proof of concept, a fun experiment, and a solid first iteration of the network, doing all the development myself didn’t produce a feature-complete, extensible codebase that I could open-source and let the community build on. I wanted to take the next step to develop a backchannel for beat reporters that could be used as is, or reproduced as a question & answer tool for any purpose, especially by a news organization.
Has this involved significant amounts of back-end work/technological change?
Most definitely. The site has been completely rebuilt. It’s still built on the Django platform, but rather than me teaching myself this style of programming in the middle of the night and at the crack of dawn to demonstrate what one curious journalist might be capable of, it was built by the professional team at Lion Burger, who are also responsible for tools like Snipt.net and recently built afeedapart.com for the popular ‘An Event Apart’ series of Web design conferences in the US.
The strength of hyperlocal is also its weakness – disparate projects in far-flung places.
But here’s the thing. What works in KW1 – the business model, the editorial proposition – is likely to work just as well in TR19.*
So we have a choice. Wait for exemplars of the form to rise up, then copy and adapt, or give the whole process a hand by collating, sharing, talking and learning. Right now.
Let’s do the latter. Here’s a quick and dirty call to action:
1. Find out what’s out there
In the United States they are doing just that.
The City University of New York Graduate School of Journalism has invited ‘bloggers, independent journalists, website publishers and entrepreneurs’ to complete a survey so it can ‘gather information and innovative ideas from across the country’.
“We want to bring facts, figures, and business analysis to the debate over the future of journalism,” it states.
Where’s the equivalent effort over here?
I’m told that there are voices in Ofcom, the media regulator, who want to collate information about all of the little community newsletters and bigger sites which could now be called hyperlocal.
If that’s the case, it’s time to get moving. Oh, and we’ll have some of that US data when it’s ready, too.
2. Share ideas
Good practice, sound business models, strong feature strands and story hooks are not geographically-defined. So share, feed off each other, beg, borrow and steal.
Talk About Local is a good start. More, please.
3. Share resources
Can you apply the franchise model to the hyperlocal? For some the answer is a definite yes.
Again Talk About Local offers a possible lead with its plan to seed 150 sites in deprived areas nationwide.
Paul Bradshaw and Nick Booth’s Help me Investigate, is another service with franchise potential.
As is Mapumental.
This is a MySociety.org concoction and, like Help me Investigate, is a recipient of 4iP seed funding. Mapumental is postcode-based tool that brings together publicly available local house price and transport data and mashes it up with a ‘scenicness’ rating .
MySociety is also responsible for FixMyStreet. Both are centrally-built pieces of software with a hyperlocal application.
Integration is the key.
4. Share content
Like franchising, syndication is another old media model that has a home in the brave new world of hyperlocal.
And there is a commercial opportunity for those who create usable aggregation models.
Take Outside.in which has just launched a service in the United States it claims ‘will allow users to quickly create a mass amount of hyperlocal news pages’.
Outside.in is coming to the UK, but why isn’t a UK start-up doing this for the UK market? Perhaps one is. Time to make some noise.
5. Engage government
There’s a crisis in the public service provision of local news. If you want proof just look at the horse-trading between ITV and Ofcom. It’s a perfect opportunity for the government to think laterally.
Yet despite the warm words – and suitable use of new media lingua franca – in last month’s Digital Britain report, Lord Carter and co failed to put anything radical in train.
Carter’s defence is that this report was a sprawling undertaking and wasn’t designed to mandate government.
If so, someone needs to pick it up in Whitehall, but also in county halls up and down the country.
Rather than fund me-too freesheets that threaten to kill off local newspapers, local authorities would be better advised to help provide the infrastructure for hyperlocal.
It’s time to free your data for postcode-based applications, create a support system for local citizen journalists and use those soon-to-be-thriving platforms to promote the uptake of online public services.
Enough of the action plan. Go create.
(*That’s John O’Groats to Land’s End, postcode fans. Well, near enough.)
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 this link.
Regular Journalism.co.uk contributor John Mair is a senior lecturer in broadcasting at Coventry University and the inventor of the Coventry Conversations, now on iTunes U. He was born in Guyana and returns there regularly to observe and advise the local media. His nom de plume in Guyana is Bill Cotton/Reform.
I am at one of the frontiers of modern journalism: Guyana in South America, but of the Caribbean. Most things go here. Four daily papers and 20+ local television stations feeding the news appetite of the 750,000 population. Journalists rank just above dog catchers as a trade in Guyana. At least the latter get some training.
Over here there is a university course in ‘Public Communication’ but little else to fine-tune wannabe hacks. The best and brightest go north drawn by the bright lights of the USA and Canada, like many others in their country. Newspapers are still sold on the streets by vendors on commission. The four on sale range from the supermarket tabloid Kaieteur News to the urbane Guyana Times. Kaieteur is the baby of local shoe shop entrepreneur Glenn Lall. Brash, vulgar, full of crime stories with some challenging columnists (including me behind a nom de plume).
It hits the popular mark as nearly does The Stabroek News, a paper instrumental in bringing democracy back to Guyana in 1992 after a period of dictatorship. Its guiding light, the Caribbean media giant David Decaires, died last year. The paper has lost some direction since. It is worth looking at though – for the letters column alone. A national Conversation tree but one which is prolix. Working out which letters are genuine makes for a fascinating read. Both major political parties (the PP and the PNC) and racial groups (Indo and African Guyanese) employ specialist correspondents to support their positions under a variety of noms de plumes (I am not alone in my anonymity. It is a Guyanese tradition).
Third in the press race is the Government-controlled Daily Chronicle. Cynics dub it The Chronic or The Daily Jagdeo in honour of the now second term President Bharrat Jagdeo. If a government minister speaks, they report it. If the President does, it hits the front page. The masses have not gone for it in thousands, nor for the new kid on the block for the last year, The Guyana Times. Intelligent, erudite, semi-broadsheet and the brainchild of a pharmaceutical baron Bobby Ramroop. It is well-written if stodgy, but at a level way beyond the literary level of the mass of the population. The Guyanese middle classes are now not here but in Toronto, New York and Miami. They read their papers on the internet.
The big action is on screen-in TV journalism. That is madness. Tout court. 20+ stations all stealing product from international satellites and re-transmitting it. The Guyanese journalism content ranges from the vulgar-local poujadist and station owner CN Sharma, the soi-disant ‘voice of the people’ with oppositional news shows like ‘Capitol News’ and ‘Prime News’, to the ‘Chronic’ of the airwaves NCN and its ‘Sixo’Clock News’ – which I invented a decade ago. The latter is news on the station owned by the Minister of Agriculture (and President manque) Robert Persaud and makes few pretences to impartiality.
Few of the TV journalists have any training. Few stay in the job for long. Few ever work out what the medium means. They think relaying a press conference with a few links is a ‘story’. More than one over several days if they can spin it out as they get paid per piece. Wallpaper is too kind a word to describe their use of pictures to tell tales.
So there you have it. Poor journalism by under-trained hacks. But all will change later this week when the heads of the Caribbean Governments come to town for their Annual Caricom Csummit. They bring with them the cream of the Caribbean Press Corps. That should be an intriguing piece of media anthropology in action. I will be there.
Some interesting US figures from a recent report by The Media Audit, which looks at lifestyle factors and socioeconomic traits in relation to an individual’s media consumption habits.
Quoted by MediaPost, Bob Jordan, president of The Media Audit adds:
“Daily newspapers were the first to embrace a multi-platform distribution strategy amidst a period when consumers were spending more and more time with the internet. And as a result, newspapers followed the way of the consumer. By doing so, they have broadened their reach to include younger consumers. And these consumers are buying new cars and driving sales for retailers who represent a significant portion of the newspaper industry’s revenue… ”
“Al Jazeera English will begin its foray into the American market on July 1 after signing its first major US distribution deal with a cable TV company in the Washington DC area,” Arabian Business exclusively reports.
According to AB’s report, Al Jazeera’s director general, Wadah Khanfar, said in an interview: “On July 1 we [AJE] are going to launch the first operation in cable distribution in the United States.”
(Hat tip: @amonck)