Reportr.net

• BBC drops subscription plan for international news website | Media | guardian.co.uk
  Sian Kevill, the BBC World News editorial director, said opposition to ads among bbc.com users had subsided.
  (tags: BBC internet journalism)
• Journalism.co.uk :: Public wants guidelines on use of personal info online, says PCC survey
  78 per cent of adults web users said they would change information they publish about themselves online if they thought the material would later be reproduced in the mainstream media.
  (tags: social_media socialmedia journalism ethics)

Image via WikipediaThe BBC’s new Statements of Programme Policy has a revealing snippet about the attitudes of TV to user-generated content.

On page 57 of this lengthy document (PDF), the broadcaster says:

We will augment our news coverage with video, still images and messages submitted by
viewers, where appropriate, in order to offer first-hand accounts and a wide range of views. We
aim to make it as simple as possible for audiences to make these contributions and create one
seamless BBC News proposition across all platforms.

This suggests that the BBC News overall approach is less about involving audiences in a way that lets them influence the news agenda.

Rather, it is about providing technical, editorial, and managerial processes that allow contributions to be elicited, processed, and published by professional journalists. In other words, a form of newsgathering that takes advantage of advances in technology.

This approach has is common among mainstream media, creating an architecture of publication rather than an architecture of participation.

There are some exceptions, such as the BBC iPm show that aims to discuss ideas with the production team on its blog. But these initiatives are at taking place at the edges, rather than at the heart of BBC News.

Guy Berger, head of the School of Journalism & Media Studies at Rhodes University in Grahamstown, South Africa, was awarded a $630,000 Knight News Challenge grant for the News is Coming project. As he explains, the aim is to have local news reports disseminated through cellphones to help connect an all-black township in South Africa with the white population living in the urban center.

(Shot on a Nokia N95)

Image via WikipediaThe Globe and Mail has finally realised that placing its best online content behind subscriber walls is a bad idea.

The newspaper has scrapped its subscription program, freeing up access to its columnists, horoscopes and more.

The question is why it took the Globe and Mail so long to decide that content wants to be free on the Internet. After all, the New York Times dropped its TimesSelect experiment in September.

As Christopher Flavelle makes a good point in The Walrus:

But now that the country’s largest paper has freed itself from the delusion of charging for content, maybe it can turn its attention to producing the same killer applications that make today’s NYtimes.com so good. If not, the Globe should start hiring people who can. Because here’s the rub, Mr. Greenspon: Free isn’t good enough anymore. I can get free anywhere. I want to be captivated.

But it looks like the Globe hasn’t quite given up on the idea of charging for content. It has introduced a new paid product called Globe Plus has been launched. The paper is hoping people will be willing to pay for access to its archives, as well as to investor tools.

There is a third component of this paid product, an electronic edition of the print edition of the newspaper. The idea is it “allows users to browse the newspaper as if they have it in their hands”.

This is an odd offering as if I wanted to access the print edition, I would just pick up a paper copy, rather than read a PDF version on a computer screen.

PDF versions of newspapers have been less than successful. The Toronto Star abandoned its Star P.M. afternoon edition in October.

It is puzzling that the Globe is investing in replicating print in digital format, rather than putting money innovative journalism online.

(Cross-post from Newslab.ca)

There are some contradictory findings in the AP report on the news habits of young adults (PDF).

The report, A New Model for News: Studying the Deep Structure of Young-Adult News Consumption,is based on a global anthropological study of the news consumption patterns of young adults between the ages of 18 and 34 in Britain, India and the US by the Context-Based Research Group.

The study found that young people suffered from “”news fatigue”, meaning they were overloaded with facts and updates.

This could be partly due to the fact that news is multitasked, as the study found:

Participants in this study almost always consumed news as part of another set of activities and therefore were unable to give their full attention to the news. This is very different from previous news consumption models where people sat down to watch the evening news or read the morning paper. Multitasking prevented participants from becoming completely engaged with a news story and therefore interaction with the news was limited to headlines and news updates.

At the same, young people said they also wanted more in-depth, quality news, but had difficulty immediately accessing such content.

This is interesting, given the amount of news and information available online, and the ability of users to delve as much as they want into a particular topic.

It raises all sorts of questions as to whether this is due to way news is presented online or whether it is more to do with the way this information is consumed.

Online, news competes for attention with a myriad of distractions that are only a click away.

Related articles

• Young People: The News is Exhausting Us! [via Zemanta]
• Study: Young Adults Feel ‘News Fatigue’ [via Zemanta]

Blame technology. According to the Inside the CBC blog, the reason behind CBC.ca was down for much of Thursday 29 May was “a major data storage ‘fallover’ involving all redundancy systems”.

Despite the site being down, work continued behind the scenes, as Jonathan Dube of CBC News’ director of digital media explained:

What you couldn’t see was that the CBCNews.ca staff continued to write and update dozens more stories all day long behind the scenes. [They did] extra work to enter the stories into two publishing systems, because we wanted to make sure that as soon as the site came back up, it was completely up-to-date — and that’s exactly what happened.

At least the content management system was still up and running then, even if no one could see the new material.

(Cross-post from Newslab.ca)

This 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.

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.

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.

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)