November 5, 2009 • 3:03 pm 0
Leonard Brody’s keynote address to Connect ‘09 is well worth a watch.
In his talk at the even for tech start-ups and innovators, organised by the BC Innovation Council, he outlines how we are in an age where innovation, entrepreneurial and technology are creating new opportunities.
There are some lessons for the media here.
Filed under: innovation, internet, journalism, media , BC Innovation Council, Connect '09, innovation, Leonard Brody
October 31, 2009 • 9:56 am 0
Please join me in congratulating my journalism students on the first edition of this academic year of our online publication, TheThunderbird.ca.
My colleagues and myself at the UBC Graduate School of Journalism have been working with our grad students on stories from their beats in Vancouver.
It was their first major assignment of the semester. This week was crunch time, with Thursday being an intense day of final edits and online production.
The student uncovered a range of issues, from plans to open an illegal crack cocaine smoking space to the beetle decimating Vancouver lawns.
There are also stories about H1N1, from confusion over the vaccine to the sporadic presence of hand sanitizers in the densely populated West End of the city.
With Vancouver ramping up for the 2010 Winter Olympics, students looked at the controversy around Olympics lessons in schools, the impact on refugees, and the unexpected consequences of the planned road closures.
The students are taking a well-earned break this weekend, before we start work on the second issue next week.
Filed under: academics, education, internet, journalism , journalism students, TheThunderbird.ca, UBC, Vancouver
October 27, 2009 • 6:35 pm 0
Just a few weeks ago, the Spanish Soitu.es news site was praised for its “where core ideas come through as confident innovation and mesh with traditional journalism to create a fresh and distinctive package”.
The words came from the judges at the Online News Association awards, where Soitu.es was, for a second year running, as an example of excellence in online journalism.
But the pioneering news site is closing down. In a story titled, Hasta la vista y gracias, founder Gumersindo LaFuente talked about how Soitu.es had became a victim of the financial crisis.
LaFuente explained that in the last few months, he had failed to persuade the site’s main backer, BBVA, that patience was needed as the nascent project found its feet in turbulent economic times.
Despite being barely two years old, the site attracted half a million unique users a month, while reaching a further two million through third-party widgets.
Its closure is a loss to the field of online journalism, as Soitu.es was doing what all news organisations should be doing: innovating and developing new tools, experimenting with new ways to tell stories online and reach audiences.
In the words of the ONA judges:
An underlying philosophy of sharing, linking and audience-focused engagement runs through its mix of original content and aggregated news and features material. Giveaway widgets, the ambitious flashinfo news panel and the elselector crowd-aided aggregation tool all get front-page billing.But the site is more than just these elements. It’s a work-in-progress.
Unfortunately, a work-in-progress takes time to nature and bloom.
In a second post, talking how staff had cried, swore and blamed themselves for what had happened, Soitu.es said it was planning a public memorial on Wednesday evening at its offices in Madrid.
All of us who believe in online journalism will be there, at least in spirit.
Filed under: innovation, internet, journalism , BBVA, Online News Association, soitu.es
October 26, 2009 • 5:13 pm 0
Filed under: Links
• 12:55 pm 0
Like countless others, I watched at least some of the webcast on YouTube of the U2 concert at the Rose Bowl. It made me think of the only time I have seen U2 play live, more than 20 years ago at the Milton Keynes Bowl in Britain.
Back then, to reach a global audience of millions would have required the collaboration of national TV networks. Today, all you need is YouTube.
But it was still a one-to-many broadcast. The significance of the U2 webcast was less the webcast itself, but the integration of Twitter into the YouTube page.
This added a real-time, social dimension to the concert, enabling thousands of fans to participate in a shared experience.
Essentially, Twitter helped created a virtual, networked community around an event, in this case the U2 concert. One way of thinking about this is social capital theory.
Social capital is a broad term that is open to multiple interpretations, but it can be defined as norms and networks facilitating collective actions for mutual benefits.
These networks, norms and social trust allow for coordination and cooperation in society. In the social capital model, a person’s involvement in organizations builds trust with others in the community.
Robert Putnam took this a step further, arguing that the internet is a new mechanism of bridging and bonding in society. Whereas older models of community relied on face-to-face communication,the internet allows for the creation of a virtual community where people interact without ever seeing each other.
As I watched U2 on one screen, and participated in the discussion on Twitter, it occurred to me that this is what was happening. People were creating social capital by coming together via Twitter.
It left me questioning how to measure the value created by connecting people around specific events like this. This is a question that applies directly to journalism, as media organisations seek to connect with audiences online.
And, for some, the question will be how to convert this social capital into a return on capital.
Filed under: internet, media, social media, television , Rose Bowl, U2, YouTube
October 20, 2009 • 5:14 pm 0
Filed under: Links
October 7, 2009 • 11:30 am 2
The BBC has made a draft of its revised editorial guidelines available online as a PDF for public consultation.
This is first time the public have been consulted on the BBC guidelines, which are updated every five years.
In the 190 page document includes a short paragraph on the use of material from social media services, such as Facebook or Twitter. Section 7.4.8 in the chapter on privacy reads:
Although material, especially pictures and videos, on third party social media and other websites where the public have ready access may be considered to have been placed in the public domain, re-use by the BBC will usually bring it to a much wider audience. We should consider the impact of our re-use, particularly when in connection with tragic or distressing events. There are also copyright considerations.
As far I can tell, this is the first time the BBC has codified its approach to social media. I couldn’t find this in the existing editorial guidelines.
The guidelines are in line with the advice issued last year to BBC journalists over the ethical use of social media material.
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Filed under: BBC, journalism, social media , editorial guidelines, privacy
October 6, 2009 • 9:52 am 0
Dr Siva Vaidhyanathan was briefly in Vancouver for a talk about his forthcoming book, The Googlization of Everything.
To him, Googlization is the process of the world being processed, rendered and represented by Google.
He argues this is problematic, given Google’s mission to organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible.
His concern is that Google’s focus on satisfying the consumer is “fabulous for shopping, but we make a mistake as use the same lens for learning.”
“All Google does is about instant gratification, and that means that we privilege shopping over learning,” he concluded at the UBC event, organised by the Centre for Cross-Faculty Inquiry in Education and co-sponsored by the Digital Literacy Center.
The talk can also be downloaded as a podcast via UBC iTunes U.
You can subscribe to podcasts from the UBC Graduate School of Journalism on iTunes U.
Filed under: academics, internet, journalism , Google, Googlization of Everything, Siva Vaidhyanathan, UBC
October 4, 2009 • 3:47 pm 2
The New York Times emerged as the big winner in the Online Journalism Awards, rewarded for general excellence and for outstanding use of digital technologies.
But the Online News Association awards also recognised the emergence of small start-ups that may be the shape of journalism to come.
The Seattle hyperlocal site, MyBallard, took the first community collaboration award and the NYC news site Gotham Gazette took the general excellence award for a micro site.
The increasing role of technology in journalism was recognised by a new award for technical innovation in digital Journalism, backed by the Gannett Foundation.
It went to Publish2, a two-year old startup that collaborative linking tools for journalists.
The full list of winners with comments by the judges is on the ONA website.
The 10th annual awards ceremony capped a stimulating and rewarding conference in San Francisco.
Well done to the staff, directors, volunteers and journalism students who made it happen.
Filed under: innovation, internet, journalism , Gotham Gazette, MyBallard, ONA09, Online Journalism Awards, Online News Association, Publish2
October 3, 2009 • 3:06 pm 1
The Online News Association conference session on the semantic web has been scheduled on a sunny afternoon in San Francisco.
But there is still a decent turnout, demonstrating there is an interest in discovering how this idea can play a part in journalism.
Paul Berry, CTO of Huffington Post defines the semantic web as the ability to pull context from any body of text and structure or categorise it – is it angry, insightful.
Kurt Cagle of MetaphoricalWeb.org starts by messing with people’s head by saying that the semantic web is gaining meaning from meaning.
He goes on to explain that the semantic web is about assertions – about whether something is truth or not truth, and the relationship between these assertions.
Peter Offringa of CBS Interactive brings the session back to earth by talking about the semantic web as the ability to analyse text and find content.
In terms of applying these ideas in a practical sense, Berry says that a first step is tagging content. But he mentions the value of correct and incorrect tagging.
For example, HuffPost tagged their story on Heath Ledger’s death as “Keith Ledger”, as people used a misspelling of his name in searching for news of the death. The misspelled tag had 10 times the traffic that Health got.
The HuffPost also uses Adaptive Semantics to manage community and moderate comments.
Cagle argues we are moving away from brands. “We don’t have a music industry, we have thousands and thousands of industries.”
As a result, there hundreds of thousands of way of organising a category, and each of those micro-categories is also a micro-market, says Cagle.
CBS Interactive uses semantic web technologies to create topic pages on its CNET properties that pull together content in one area, explained Offringa.
It also uses semantic analysis to see what users are looking at and associate users to particular interests and products, making them valuable to advertisers.
This is only a brief summary of the session that went on to talk the technical aspects behind the semantic web, with acronyms like RDF, XQuery and Json flying across the room.
Filed under: innovation, journalism, technology , ONA09, Online News Association, semantic web
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