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February 28, 2007 • 8:46 pm 0

Get to grips with online journalism

The line-up for this year’s Online Journalism Symposium at the University of Texas, Austin, has just been posted.

It is an unusual event as it brings together news professionals and journalism academics. The aim is to encourage them to share experiences and ideas.

One of the key sessions is about the transformation of newspaper to multimedia news organization. It will be interesting to hear from how the Washington Post, New York Times, Wall Street Journal and USA Today are coping with the transition.

It is an event that has been gathering momentum over the past few years. I attended the conference two years ago and found it a stimulating couple of days. One of the best things about it was the small size of the symposium as this made it easier to chat with people in between the sessions.

This year’s event is a little bigger. And if you can’t make it to Texas, you can follow it online as the conference will be webcast live. Though there’s no excuse for not attending, given that the event is free.

(I am presenting at the conference on the second day, talking about the attitudes of UK newspaper editors to user-generated content).

Filed under: education, internet, new media, newspapers

February 27, 2007 • 10:01 am 0

What’s this news-paper thing?

There’s a very funny satire on the concept of the news-paper by Amy Gahran over at Poynter.

Amy GahranHere’s a snippet to give you a taste of it:

“You mean you have to handle all this paper every day?”

“No, I only paid for Thursdays, Sundays, and holidays.”

“You paid for this?…” he frowned, shaking his head. “How do you search it?”

“It’s not really searchable, but it’s scannable. See, you can open up the pages wide and see lots of stories.”

“Looks like mostly ads.”

It remains me of a session on the news habits of young people at last year’s Online News Association conference.

At one point, the panel of youngsters was asked if they ever read a newspaper. The result was blank looks all round, until one of them piped up with the classic comment: “But you get your hands all inky.”

It seems that Amy’s satire is not that far off the reality of today’s media world.

Filed under: interactive journalism, internet, new media, newspapers

February 24, 2007 • 8:14 am 0

Web 2.0 advice for CBC

As the CBC ponders how to move its into a Web 2.0 world, some advice for the corporation at the Northern Voice conference. At a session, entitled Hacking the Mothercorp, people working in social media offered their suggestions on how the CBC should move forward.

CBC’s Tod Maffin has a MP3 recording of the session on his blog.

(Nice mention of the BBC News website at the start.)

Filed under: Canada, broadcast, internet, new media

February 20, 2007 • 11:32 pm 0

BBC paying too high a price for ads?

It looks like BBC Worldwide is trying to allay fears over its plans for advertising on the BBC’s international websites.

The MediaGuardian reports that the ads will only run on “selected high-traffic genres”, such as news, sports and weather.

These are the crown jewels of the BBC’s online empire. News and sports account for at least half of all the page views to bbc.co.uk. And, of course, these are the most controversial areas for advertising.

Furthermore, BBC Worldwide appears to be downplaying expectations of how much money it expects to make. The MediaGuardian story talks of tens of millions in revenue, as opposed to figures of 100 million pounds annually.

This revised estimate does undermine the argument for ads. Is it worth endangering the BBC’s reputation for such a modest amount? Suddenly the sums don’t add up.

The timing of the story is significant. It comes just ahead of a key meeting of the BBC Trust on Wednesday on the ads plan.

Filed under: BBC, broadcast, internet

• 6:49 pm 1

The BBC dips its toes in video blogs

One of the points that Adrian Monck raises in his entry on online video is the issue of video specifically commissioned for the web.

He points out that the BBC News website is “awash with audio and video material but rather modestly, it hides these jewels away.” But this material is essentially TV packages made available online. So there is next to nothing that has been specially commissioned, shot and edited for the website.

Part of the problem here is that TV and radio news bosses at the BBC tend to view the internet as another means of distribution. So rather than conceive of new ways of using video, they tend to see the web as a way of making their content available to a younger audience which rarely watches BBC TV.

I can understand the strategy to offer BBC TV and radio content on anywhere, anytime, any place. But this is just a small step in exploiting the potential of the internet.

Services like YouTube have shown there is an appetite for video, but it often a very different product to the packaged TV news reports on the evening newscast.

The audio-video team at the BBC News website occasionally produces its own TV packages, or offers a clip of must-see video. These are the types of clips that draw a large audience. For the most part, the audience figures for AV on the site are a fraction of the demand for text-based stories.

In January, the BBC did try something new. BBC TV, radio and online worked together in the coverage of the Consumer Electronic Show in Las Vegas. The most visible sign of this collaboration was the Tomorrow’s World blog.

As part of this project, the team behind BBC’s weekly technology show, Click, produced a series of video blogs specifically for the web.

This is the sort of thing more news organisations should be experimenting with. In this case, offering video blogs about a show packed with all the latest gadgets and gizmos is a non-brainer.

The CES coverage was an example of how the silos of TV, radio and online can be broken. But more importantly, it showed how you can offer something in video that is distinct from the TV coverage and caters for the interests of an online audience.

Filed under: BBC, blogs, interactive journalism, internet

• 9:38 am 2

Thinking outside the TV news box

There is a flurry of discussion online about how established news organisations are offering video on their websites.

The debate centres over how far can existing TV practices be adapted to the world of YouTube and short clips.

Newspapers are rushing headlong into deals to offer video on their websites, but as Paul Bradshaw points out, “in all cases publishers seem to be making television – not video”.

This may seem like an obvious point but it is surprising how many mainstream news organisations are ignoring this. Adrian Monck has penned a piece for the BBC’s journalism college on the use of video on websites.

His main point is that we need to rethink how to do video online as the conventional TV news piece does not work on the web.

A quick review of video online tells you newspaper guys are still in charge of newspapers, and TV and radio people at the BBC control the commissioning strings for the content that ends up online.

What I find surprising is that the industry is still having this discussion. It reflects how people in broadcasting and print have failed to realise that the internet is a new medium. It shows the deep lack of understanding of digital journalism and its potential.

Rethinking how we do video online is a start. But we need to rethink journalism for an interactive and participatory age.

Filed under: broadcast, interactive journalism, internet

February 16, 2007 • 10:34 pm 1

Commercial rivals fear BBC online ads plan

A unexpected group has come out against plans to plaster advertising on the BBC’s international websites. The idea is strongly opposed by many BBC staff. Now, the opposition comes from media companies which are part of the British Interactive Publishers Alliance.

Usually the BIPA takes issue with anything the BBC does online, seeing it as unfair competition since the Beeb is publicly funded. But the issue of ads has ruffled their feathers. The alliance has called on the BBC Trust to kill the plans, arguing they would have a “serious negative impact” on their commercial hopes.

This is a real concern for media organisations that are struggling to boost online profits to make up for diminishing revenues.

The BBC ads would only be seen by international visitors, not in the UK. But they would still have a knock-on effect on commercial websites as many UK sites attract large numbers of foreign visitors, especially from the US.

You can understand why media companies such as News International, Sky and The Telegraph group are worried about the BBC ads plan. It could stall their efforts to break into the lucrative US online advertising market.

Filed under: BBC, internet, multimedia

February 15, 2007 • 4:16 pm 3

Online journalism is more than writing for the web

Paul Bradshaw from the University of Central England Birmingham had his students do an interesting exercise in class at the start of a module in online journalism.

He gave his students 20 minutes to write a blog entry on why they needed online journalism skills. As you can imagine, there was a wide range of entries – links to the student blogs are on his blog.

One thing that stood out was how many students equated online journalism with being taught how to write for the web. I found a similar attitude among the students in the multiplatform journalism course I run at UBC’s School of Journalism.

Writing is a key component of any course in digital journalism. But text is just one ingredient from a rich menu available to online journalists. This for many is the biggest challenge.

Making a leap from the written word into conceiving of stories as interactive and multimedia journalism. This is where there is a huge opportunity to come up with innovative ways to tell stories and reach new audiences.

Filed under: education, internet, multiplatform journalism, online

February 13, 2007 • 6:59 pm 0

Embrace the failure of We (the) Media

The BBC’s Richard Sambrook has some sound advice for the co-founder and CEO of Topix, Rich Skrenta – “Duck and take cover, Rich.”

This is always good advice for most situations. The reason this time is a provocative post by Rich following the WeMedia conference in Miami.

The nub of his argument is that no News 2.0 venture has yet proved it can succeed.

The problem is that the hopes that Dan Gillmor raised for the media industry in his book — which kicked off this whole business — have largely failed. Tremendous excitement followed the publishing of Dan’s We the Media (the conference’s namesake). It accompanied the trumpeting of a new model of media by the newsy press, and the rise of blogs with attendant breathless hype.

He goes on to list the Web 2.0 news initiatives which he dubs “a dog’s breakfast of start-ups.” No doubt his comments are bound to stir up a debate about citizen journalism, user-generated content and all the other buzzwords that trip off the lips of news executives nowadays.

Rich has a point. The media revolution is messy, untidy and no one knows where this is heading. When we look back on this period in 50 or 100 years, we will see a history littered with the wrecks of media ventures.

But we will also see a period which laid the groundwork for a new media world. Disruptive technology like the internet is by its very nature ‘disruptive’. It creates a uncertainty which we should embrace as an opportunity to experiment and, yes, fail.

Filed under: WeMedia, citizen journalism, internet, new media

February 10, 2007 • 1:56 pm 1

Why big media fears WeMedia

Mark Glaser has a thoughtful post wrapping up the WeMedia conference which has just ended in Miami.

He comments on how much of the the talk revolved how mainstream media could regain its former dominance of the news. Glaser said that at one point he was so riled that he had to comment, saying:

What no one wants to admit is that the mainstream media has lost power and lost control to the people. And Big Media is here to try to figure out how to exploit or make money off of citizen media. I’m not saying that they can’t be part of this new world, but they need to engage it in an authentic way.

This is reminiscent of last year’s WeMedia conference held in London. I blogged from the event for the BBC and recall how my prevailing impression was the gulf between mainstream and emerging media. Both sides were wary of the other and demonstrated a complete lack of understanding.

It to sad to hear that a year on, big media is still looking for ways to co-op the media revolution, with bloggers et al resisting.

Glaser quotes NYU professor and PressThink blogger Jay Rosen explaining the attitude to the mainstream media:

They are trying to change the vocabulary without changing the grammar. They use the new vocabulary [of new media] but they are not changing their mindset, and accepting a loss of control.

This is the kicker. New media, social media or whatever we call it nowadays, requires a change in the way we think of the media. It is not just about appropriating the tools, adding comment sections to stories or allowing reporters to blog. It requires a fundamental rethink in the traditional gatekeeping role of the press.

This is a scary prospect for a generation of editors and journalists, reared on the notion of being in control of information.

That control is an illusion. It is time to abandon our fears and embrace change, to embrace the “we” in WeMedia.

Filed under: WeMedia, citizen journalism, internet, new media

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Alfred Hermida
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