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Making sense of the intersection between media, society and technology

May 30, 2008 • 9:53 am 4

No user-generated content please, we’re Rush

Rush liveThis post is slightly off topic, but it relates to issues of technology, copyright and social media.

Go to a gig today and there’ll be dozens of people shooting photos or video on mobile phones or small point and shoot cameras. I am usually one of these people and have never had any trouble.

Last night, I was at the Rush gig in Vancouver. Yes, I fess up, I have a weakness for Rush – blame it on hearing Spirit of the Radio during my formative years.

Back to last night. I was happily enjoying watching these virtuoso musicians play live and taking some snapshots on a small Canon point and shoot camera.

So imagine my surprise when one of the ushers came up to me and told me to stop. “There is a strict no cameras policy”, I was told.

I was shocked and somewhat taken aback. It is the first time this has happened to me, and I go to see bands all the time. What was more surprising was that many others were doing exactly the same thing, but using cell phones.

Now, it could have been an overzealous usher. But the incident highlighted for me how old rules of what you can and can’t do at live performances have not kept up with how cultural practices have changed, partly due to technology.

Nowadays, just about everyone has the means to take photos or video, thanks to the ubiquitous nature of mobiles.

But this is also about how people can now share this content online, through Flickr or Youtube. Bands should be encouraging their fans to produce and distribute their own content. This creates loyalty and community.

For a band, your fans are your strongest asset. Telling them they can’t take photos or shoot some shaky video is counter intuitive.

The music industry has found it hard to cope with the MP3 file-sharing phenomenon. Perhaps it is also struggling to understand user-generated content and social media.

The gig itself was hugely enjoyable old skool rock, with fireworks, flames and psychedelic visuals.

Filed under: internet, social media, technology, user-generated content , , , ,

May 29, 2008 • 2:00 pm 5

How BBC blogs are engaging with audiences

Buried in the BBC Trust’s review of bbc.co.uk is some revealing information about how the corporation has adopted blogging.

In a section on accountability, the Trust explores how the BBC’s commitment to “to forge a new relationship with licence fee payers” online and suggests that “recent developments, such as the development of BBC editors and management blogs, mean that the BBC may be able to fulfil this commitment much better in the future”.

What is startling is how the audiences for the BBC’s blogs have grown, with the Trust noting that “usage of the blogs now outstrips usage of the BBC’s corporate site and the Have Your Say message boards. In fact, usage of Have your Say message boards has been fairly static between 2006 and 2007″.

Audience research by the Trust (PDF) found that the BBC’s blogs are already highly appreciated, demonstrated through comments such as:

The Editors’ blog is a great way of developing a relationship between the BBC and viewers. It allows the editors to explain their decisions and viewers to give feedback, and thus allows a continuous dialogue between the BBC and its audience

These figures suggest that the informal, conversational tone of the blogs resonates with audiences. According to the BBC, 70 BBC News and BBC Sport editors made 500 posts and received over 30,000 comments from readers in response in 2006-2007.

BBC Management highlights (PDF) blogs as one of the ways the corporation is trying to create a conversation with audiences:

Editors’ blogs on the news site have rapidly grown to become a key point of engagement between the BBC’s journalists and its audiences. 1.5m user comments and posts are published on bbc.co.uk messageboards and blogs every month

While blogs are providing a new way for the BBC to reach out to audiences, there are limits to this conversation. The BBC itself and my research has found that editors on the whole tend to regard blogs as a publishing platform, rather than as a way of engaging with audiences.

Filed under: BBC, blogging, internet, journalism ,

• 10:53 am 2

Everything you wanted to know about BBC online

The BBC Trust’s review of the BBC online activities has been published, with some media seizing on the overspend of £36m.

Overall, the Trust is positive about bbc.co.uk, describing it as an “excellent service that is highly valued by users and makes a strong contribution to delivering the BBC’s public purposes”.

But it adds that “it is essential that the service remains distinctive” and more significantly that:

The Trust will not approve new investments without further scrutiny and until confident that improved management controls are in place to ensure better financial accountability and editorial and managerial oversight.

Behind the headlines, the full report (PDF) has a wealth of detail about the BBC’s online activities. The Trust has also made available a range of reports it gathered as part of its review process.

It is going to take some time to read through all this material. So here are some selected highlights from the Trust’s report on the BBC News website:

  • BBC news online is the most used area of bbc.co.uk and usage is still growing strongly. In the last three months of 2007, the BBC’s online news reached around 6.7 million users in the UK each week, up 18% from the same period in 2006
  • The BBC’s online news service is highly appreciated by licence fee payers. It was praised for its accuracy, impartiality, range and ease of use and its users clearly have a high level of trust in it
  • bbc.co.uk may help the BBC reach younger adults with news but the less well off remain better served by television and radio news. The BBC’s online and mobile news services have a higher proportion of 16-34 year old users than most of its television or radio news services
  • There is encouraging evidence that BBC news is thinking hard about how it manages user-generated content and other forms of participation and we encourage it in this, given the importance of the BBC’s distinctive journalism values

Clearly the Trust views news as one of the jewels in the BBC’s online crown.

Filed under: BBC, internet, journalism, technology ,

May 28, 2008 • 4:34 pm 0

The future of news in Canada

The state of journalism in Canada is coming under scrutiny in an event on Thursday May 29 in Toronto organised by the Canadian Media Research Consortium.

The one-day event, entitled The Future of News, aims to “bring together the best minds in industry and media studies to consider some of the challenges posed by today’s media landscape”.

The event aims to examine how audiences are changing, the impact of citizen journalism, the search for new business models and, as the title suggests, the future of “classic” news.

Perhaps more interestingly, the CMRC will present the results of new studies into how Canadian news habits are changing.

These are likely to show that the trend towards more people getting their news online is gathering pace in Canada.

Unfortunately I will not be there as I was unable to take part, but I am hoping to get hold of the research and will be writing about it.

(Cross-post from Newslab.ca)

Filed under: Canada, citizen journalism, journalism, new media , ,

May 26, 2008 • 2:27 pm 0

Research into Canadians online news habits

Good news. I’ve received some funding from the University of British Columbia to investigate online news habits in Canada.

Here’s the abstract for the research project, Behind the Discourse on Online Media Democracy: The Canadian Experience, which I will be starting over the summer:

Pundits, policy-makers and academics suggest that new online information sources are challenging traditional media elites. Yet recent studies suggest the democratization of sources is more myth than reality, with mainstream media solidifying their position. This study would analyze audience data to determine if Canadians are accessing news from a greater plurality of sources online compared to traditional media. This is an important project as studies indicate that Canadian media are not fair, democratic or objective. By analyzing data on whether a more democratic media space is being created online, this study will be of substantial value to scholars and policy-makers.

Any comments, thoughts and suggestions are most welcomed.

Filed under: academics, internet, journalism ,

• 7:38 am 3

Citizen journalists make the news

Hold the front page – citizen journalists can produce original news!

This came out of research by Zvi Reich of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Israel presented at the ICA annual conference in Montreal on Saturday. He looked at three mainstream news organisations in Israel and compared them to the Israeli citizen journalism site, Scoop.

What he found was that 52% of the material on Scoop were original news items, rather than opinion pieces or recycled fragments from the mainstream media.

This is an interesting finding, but it also seems to consider news from a professional journalistic perspective rather than questioning how we define what is news. At a time when there are so many sources of information, this is a key question for any research.

Perhaps more interesting was what Reich found about how citizen journalists got their stories. MSM reporters tend to rely on official sources and PR folks, whereas citizen journalists rely on either internet sources or being physically present at a news scene.

There was also a big difference in the patterns of sourcing. MSM reporters were in daily or weekly contact with sources, whereas around half of the time, citizen journalists contacted a source for the first time. They also tended to rely on a single source, with half of stories based on only one.

One other interesting difference was how these contacts were made. MSM reporters tended to use the phone, whereas their citizen counterparts relied on e-mail or face-to-face meetings.

Reich had some recommendations in his paper for the evolution of citizen journalism. For these new forms of news organisations to develop, he argued they needed both a critical mass of contributors and audiences.

But they face some challenges in doing this. First of all, Reich suggested, they need to stabilise their volunteer workforce, which is volatile by its very nature. They can also look at ways of helping citizen journalists function as reporters, for example by setting up training programmes, especially in terms of sourcing.

In this, Reich seems to suggest that citizen journalists should become more professional – in other words, more like mainstream journalists. This was picked up during the discussions by Natalie Fenton of Goldsmiths College in London.

She questioned whether we should be be applying the professional definitions of journalism and then using this as a standard to measure citizen journalism. Or whether there is a bigger question here in terms of what is journalism and what is news.

Filed under: Web 2.0, citizen journalism, internet, journalism, technology , , ,

May 25, 2008 • 7:57 am 0

Video: Joseph Carrabis on the two types of bloggers

Joseph Carrabis, founder and chief research officer of NextStage Evolution, talks about how there are two kinds of bloggers, the Holmes and the Watson.

(Shot on a Nokia N95 at the ICA annual conference in Montreal)

Filed under: blogging, innovation, new media, social media, technology , , ,

May 24, 2008 • 7:54 am 10

How the MSM is tackling participatory journalism

I have been at the ICA annual conference in Montreal this week, talking about the research that Neil Thurman and myself have done into “participatory journalism” in Britain. What follows is a shortened version of the talk, but it is still on the long side for a blog post.

The term participatory journalism is itself rather ill defined. We’ve taken it to mean the technical, editorial, and managerial processes that allow readers’ contributions to be elicited, processed, and published at professional publications. So the term, user-generated content (or UGC) and user-generated content initiatives seems more appropriate in this context.

Neil started the work in 2004 with a study of online editors’ attitudes to participatory journalism and a survey of the UGC initiatives they were running at that time. Back then participatory journalism in the UK was unevenly distributed.

Only one of the national news sites surveyed hosted real blogs—those with comments enabled. And one national newspaper website had no formats for readers to contribute at all. Where readers could contribute, editing or pre-moderation were the norm, applied in 80 percent of cases. In this sense, the media was retaining a traditional gate keeping role, with journalists acting as message filters.
Read the rest of this entry »

Filed under: Web 2.0, internet, journalism, newspapers, user-generated content , ,

May 23, 2008 • 2:21 pm 2

Video: An inside look at online newsrooms

Media scholar David Domingo talks about the he co-edited with Chris Paterson, Making Online News: The Ethnography of New Media Production. The volume is a compilation of research into the working routines and values of online journalists.

(Shot on a Nokia N95)

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

• 8:46 am 6

What your instant messaging status says about you

Have you ever switched your instant messaging status to ‘away’, even if you are at your computer?

Then you are not alone. According to a paper presented at the ICA annual conference, the use of this white cyberlie is common among older teens.

The findings came in a paper by Mariek Vanden Abeele of the Katholieke Universiteit in Leuven, Beligum and Keith Roe, of the Catholic University, also at Leuven, Belgium, entitled White Cyberlies: The Use of Deceptive Instant Messaging Statuses as a Social Norm.

They found that new social norms were emerging, with kids using the IM status in novel ways.

The researchers looked at how the role of instant messaging in the life of adolescents. They found a big difference in honesty between younger and older teens.

The under-14s tended to only use the ‘away’ status when they were literally away from their computer.

By comparison, the over-16s used what the authors described as “a kind of online deception” with their IM status.

This was less about consciously lying to friends online, and more about a way of controlling who teens talked to online.

This was because these teens were often confronted with “empty conversations” – friends asking, ‘What’s up?”, “Nothing much” and the like.

So to avoid these pointless exchanges, older teens tended to up the IM status as a barrier to conversation, said the researchers. In other words, as a way to screen chat requests.

What is more interesting is that this was creating a power dynamic among teens online. The researchers found that older kids routinely said they were ‘away’, even though they are at their computer.

“The away status means I am probably here and if I like you, I will respond,” said Mariek Vanden Abeele.

The away status has become a way of a teen telling the online world, “I am popular”, whereas if someone is available, then it signals “I have no friends” and that you are desperate to talk to someone.

The research suggests that, as often happens with new technology, an online tool designed for one purpose has been appropriated and reimagined by a particular group of users, in this case, teens.

Filed under: Web 2.0, internet, privacy, social networking, technology , , , , , ,

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Alfred Hermida
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