April 7, 2009 • 3:44 pm 1
The director of CBC Radio 3, Steve Pratt, spoke to my students taking the first-year undergraduate stream in New Media and Society at the University of British Columbia, about the station’s multiplatform media strategy.
(Watch the video in higher resolution at Blip.tv)
Filed under: CBC, broadcast, journalism, multimedia , CBC Radio 3, Steve Pratt
April 2, 2009 • 12:21 am 0
National Public Radio is one of the media success stories of the past year, with audiences at an all-time high.
Interest in the presidential election helped boost audiences to a record 21 million listeners per week, an increase of 9%.
NPR CEO Vivian Schiller says the rise is part of a long-term steady trend up, and NPR being described as the most successful hybrid of old and new media.
Schiller spoke about NPR’s strategy in her keynote at the NewsVision 2009 conference:
Filed under: broadcast, internet, journalism , NPR. radio, NVision, Vivian Schiller
April 1, 2009 • 12:08 pm 0
Image via Wikipedia
An internal briefing note by CBC President Hubert Lacroix on the broadcaster’s financial crisis provides some insights into its future.
The note aims to answer some of the questions raised by CBC staff following the announcement of sweeping job and programming cuts.
One area that was spared was CBC.ca as it is part of CBC’s digital strategy heading forward and its transformation from a broadcaster into a content provider. In the words of Lacroix:
All funds would (and should!) be directed toward things that push our strategic direction forward: in things that enable us to become a content company, to become the most important creator and distributor of Canadian content across all platforms, and to be deeply rooted in the regions.
This is a significant shift in strategy for what has been a traditional broadcaster, and Lacroix stressed how these principles would guide future investments.
If staffers were hoping that canceled programs would return, they were disappointed:
So, would we invest and re-invest, for example, in our regional roots, presence and visibility? Absolutely. Would we necessarily reinstate a particular program or position in a particular place? Not so much.
There was some good news, though, with Lacroix telling staff that:
Our Minister has now confirmed that CBC/Radio-Canada would in 2009-2010 be receiving the $60 million in non-recurring funding for programming initiatives that it has received each year since 2001. This amount was already included in our 2009-2010 budget. This confirmation doesn’t improve our current situation but not having received it would have been catastrophic.
These are clearly tough times at the CBC. In the words of Lacroix, “Hang tough. We will get through this.”
(Via Newslab.ca)
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Filed under: CBC, Canada, broadcast, journalism , Canada, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, Hubert Lacroix
March 19, 2009 • 10:46 am 0
The deputy director of BBC News, Stephen Mitchell, discussed the proper role of blogging in the BBC with media commentator Stephen Glover on this week’s Newswatch.
Filed under: BBC, blogs, broadcast, journalism
March 11, 2009 • 12:58 pm 1
The BBC has started letting their video be embedded on other sites. The first few videos are available on the technology section of the BBC News website (which I set up in 2001).
They include a video on Internet football fans and a report from the Bafta Video Game Awards.
As Andy Dickinson comments on an embedded BBC video on his blog, “How cool is that?
The BBC said there were “a huge number of tricky little issues to sort out and most of these have been complex business issues around rights, terms and conditions, etc.”.
The move is part of the BBC’s strategy to make its content more open to the public.
This year we are focusing on a number of projects which will make our content more open including some major changes to the News and Sport website content management and publishing systems.
According to the small print, “the BBC encourages you to embed its video and audio material on your website as long as you agree to a few terms”:
So while you can embed the content, you are not allowed to remix or mash it up.
I would embed a video on this post but am prevented from doing so as the blog is hosted on WordPress.com. Hopefully the WordPress team will create a short code to embed BBC video.
Filed under: BBC, Web 2.0, broadcast, journalism , BBC, embedded, video
January 28, 2009 • 6:39 pm 1
We run a visiting professor scheme at the UBC Graduate School of Journalism and the deadline for applications is fast approaching.
The aim of the scheme is to bring in professional journalists who are interested in coming to Vancouver to work with the students and teach a course in their area of specialty. From the school website:
The incumbent is expected to reside in Vancouver for the 3 1/2-month period and be actively involved in the day-to-day life of the School. The Visiting Professor designs and delivers a three-credit graduate course in his/her interest area, helps supervise thesis projects and delivers one public lecture on campus and one outside the University. Preference will be given to the candidate who has some journalistic teaching or training experience.
The deadline for applications is February 15, so if this is of interest, then e-mail the school director Mary Lynn Young at mlyoung@interchange.ubc.ca, with an up-to-date CV as well as a brief abstract on the course proposed.
Present and past professors include Rob Cribb, investigative journalist at the Toronto Star, Peter Klein, 60 minutes producer and now on faculty at the school, and Margaret Munro, a science journalist with Canwest newspapers.
It is a great opportunity to come and work at a vibrant school with an innovative integrated journalism program and talented students.
Filed under: academics, broadcast, internet, journalism, newspapers , CanWest, School of Journalism, UBC, visiting professor
December 4, 2008 • 12:12 pm 3
There has been plenty of discussion about the role of Twitter during the Mumbai attacks. The stream of tweets were seen by some as evidence that Twitter is where news is breaking.
This poses a dilemma for established news organisations that traditionally have been the ones to break news. But as Mindy McAdams notes, “breaking news — especially disasters and attacks in the middle of a city — will be covered first by non-journalists.”
In response, the mainstream media has sought to incorporate Twitter into its output. The BBC has been trialing a live updates page that brings together both professional and amateur content.
The aim of this approach is to:
Provide news, analysis, description and comment in short snippets as soon as it becomes available. It is a running account, where we are making quick judgments on and selecting what look like the most relevant and informative bits of information as they come in, rather than providing the more considered version of events we are able to give in our main news stories of the day.
This marks a significant departure from established practices, particularly at an institution like the BBC that prided itself on verifying information before publishing it.
The editor of the BBC News website, Steve Herrmann, explains the corporation’s thinking in a thoughtful post on the BBC Editors blog. He acknowledges there are risks with running accounts that the BBC has not been able to check, admitting that “we’re still finding out how best to process and relay such information in a fast-moving account like this.”
But he also indicates that the established approach of verifying first and then publishing is changing.
On a major unfolding story there is a case also for simply monitoring, selecting and passing on the information we are getting as quickly as we can, on the basis that many people will want to know what we know and what we are still finding out, as soon as we can tell them.
In this digital world of breaking news, the role of the journalist is no longer just about assessing information before publication. Instead there is a role in selecting and linking to emerging information, labelling it as coming from Twitter or some other source. Herrmann explains that evaluating the nature of this information “is left to you.”
This doesn’t mean that journalists won’t still produce the traditional news story, with what Herrmann calls “the most definitive and authoritative version of events we have, as established by our own correspondents and newsgathering teams who are there.”
But he appears to be suggesting that the BBC, one of the world’s most trusted news organisation, is prepared to publish unfiltered and unverified information on its site, leaving it to the audience to decide on its authenticity.
This marks a significant shift from established journalistic practices, as it expects the audience to take an active role in the filtering of news.
It has provoked a lively discussion on the blog post, with comments such as “on its news website, the BBC must not be allowed to use unverifiable information at all” and “it’s unacceptable to use it in the manner you have in major news stories.”
The comment reflect the tension as journalistic practices adapt to a new digital environment and as the mainstream media seeks to find ways of providing a valuable service for audiences.
Filed under: BBC, Web 2.0, broadcast, journalism, trust , Mumbai, Twitter
November 26, 2008 • 2:14 pm 0
One of my research interests is blogs at the BBC, so I was fascinated by the tweets coming from Paul Bradshaw and Dan Bennett on the session on blogging at the internal Future of Journalism conference organised by the BBC’s College of Journalism.
Bradshaw outlined the BBC blogs rules: authenticity, single author, impartiality, comments, commitment and obeying the rules of the blogosphere.
By all accounts, the star of the session was the BBC’s business editor and influential blogger Robert Peston. His blog had almost 8 million page views in October.
The BBC’s Jem Stone has posted his notes from Peston’s talk on his blog. Among the highlights from Peston’s comments:
Perhaps what is most remarkable about this session is that blogs are a relative new innovation at the BBC. The first truly official blog by a journalist was launched in December 2005 by Nick Robinson. Now the corporation has more than 80 blogs, almost half of them by journalists.
It has come a long way since a BBC columnist wrote in 2003:
Blogging is not journalism. Often it is as far from journalism as it is possible to get, with unsubstantiated rumour, prejudice and gossip masquerading as informed opinion.
Filed under: BBC, blogs, broadcast, journalism, social media , BBC, Nick Robinson, Robert Peston
November 4, 2008 • 11:13 am 2
What a difference four years make in the life of a presidential election.
As the New York Times has noted, this campaign has been fought, dissected and shared on forms of media that were merely a twinkle in 2004.
On election day, there are an overwhelming number of ways to tap into the pulse of voters.
Chrys Wu has put together a comprehensive list of sites to follow the results, from the NYTimes to MSNBC.
Paul Bradshaw looks at who’s making the most of the web to cover the vote, highlighting Perspctv for data junkies and 270towin for mapping addicts.
And there are a slew of Twitter-related tools which aim to capture the zeitgeist of the election. NowPublic.com’s Scan tool, monitoring micro-blogging services like Twitter, is registering 1,000 posts an hour on the election.
TwitterVoteReport is compiling live vote reports from across the US, while Twitter’s own Election2008 offers a constantly updated stream of tweets on the vote.
Another couple of innovative ways of using Twitter are the I voted widget and the Twitter Exit Polls, showing how Twitterers voted. And Mashable has combines tweets and mapping to show the election results according to Twitter.
And if you want an international perspective, head over to the BBC’s election special, The Guardian’s US Elections 08 or Sky TV’s election map.
If all of this is too much, you can always sit back and tune into any of the 24-hour TV news channels that will be running wall-to-wall coverage of the results.
UPDATE: NowPublic.com have put together a bewildering compilation of all the ways to follow the US election results via social media.
Filed under: Web 2.0, broadcast, journalism, new media, technology , #votereport, Biden, election, McCain, Obama, Palin, results, Twitter, US, US election results
November 1, 2008 • 9:47 am 5
Image by garyturner via Flickr
Comments by a senior BBC News executive at the Media Society event, ‘Broadsheet vs Broadband’ in London offer an insight into how the corporation views user-generated content.
Pete Clifton, who has the unwieldy title of head of editorial development for multimedia journalism explained how UGC fit into the BBC’s newsgathering:
It’s gathering in insights that the audience have that we can make sense of and then making it part of our newsgathering process.
This approach limits the potential of UGC. The ability of the public to participate offers an opportunity for a new relationship with audiences – one in which journalists work with audiences and engage them in the various stages of the journalistic process.
This goes beyond viewing UGC as a source of news content, which needs to be controlled by professional journalists.
The BBC’s approach fits in with how other news outlets view content from the public, with journalists retaining a traditional gate-keeping role. At the BBC, the content is heavily moderated to verify its authenticity, as Clifton explained:
It’s gone through all the filters that our journalism would have gone through. It’s quite labour intensive. We’ve another arm of our newsgathering operation – it can ultimately add to the richness of what we do, but we shouldn’t take it lightly.
Again, this is also the view shared by other UK news publications with moderation and/or registration the norm as editors’ concerns over reputation, trust, and legal liabilities persist.
This approach frames UGC as a way of providing technical, editorial, and managerial processes that allow contributions from the public to be elicited, processed, and published by professional journalists.
As international research has show:
The bottom line is that, overall, online newspapers are eager to open interpretation to the audience, as this is coherent with their definition of the audience as audience. Access, distribution and even processing are open to a lesser extent, but selection is completely closed to participation, as this is the core of the journalistic profession.
As an aside, given that the BBC has integrated its TV, radio and online operations into a multimedia newsroom, should Clifton’s title lose the “multimedia” tag?
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Filed under: BBC, broadcast, citizen journalism, journalism, user-generated content , BBC News, Pete Clifton, UGC
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