Liveblogging is increasingly being used by the media to cover events as they happen, and news consumers now expect almost instantaneous updates from reporters on the ground.
This trend means the thoughts of Keith McSpurren, founder of Cover It Live, as he talks at City University tomorrow will be well worth paying attention to. His company allows users to embed players on their own sites and pull in content such as video, pictures or interactive polls alongside text updates.
In the spirit of things I will be liveblogging the event from 1pm, and you can follow Keith’s talk over at Blogger or on the Cover It Live site itself.
Liveblogging is a technology that is burgeoning in popularity, The Times used the format for covering the recent Budget, while Trinity Mirror’s regional titles have really embraced the concept – the Liverpool Daily Post even liveblogged the Rhys Jones murder trial.
However there are issues with both the concept of liveblogging and the technology that lies behind it. Does the immediacy detract from an analytical approach and devalue a reporter’s coverage? Or as Cover It Live is almost invisible to search engines, will publishers be able to embrace a technology which will be hard to monetise?
If you have any questions you would like to ask Keith you can leave them below as a comment and on Blogger too, or just tweet them towards @michaelhaddon. I’ll be sure to try and get his take.
The final session of JEEcamp saw randomly selected panels from a list of attendees discuss crowdsourced questions, with the first being chaired by Joanna Geary, a web development editor at the Times.
New business models
John Thompson, founder of Journalism.co.uk, discussed the changing nature of journalism as traditional business models evolve and publishers struggle to keep up.
“I really believe good journalists know their readership and their communities and they can use that commericially – they just don’t realise it because they have always had the luxury of support structures in place.
“Conversations I have had today are discussing the idea of putting pay walls up and I sincerely believe that is a no hoper strategy.
“Publishers are going to have to realise they are being forced to compete with other business than just publishing – they are going to have to get into other areas.”
There were concerns voiced that this could make journalism come too close to advertorial but Thompson dismissed these fears, arguing “I wouldn’t say it it a way of advertising services, it is a way of building communities that you can sell services into and create content.“
Local democracy
The second panel tackled the role of local authorities in regional journalism and specifically the prevelance of council-published newspapers. Andy Dickinson, lecturer at the University of Central Lancashire, said “I think it is a convenient lie for councils that they can’t engage with journalism organisations because they don’t disseminate information properly.“
Dickinson said he saw a changing dynamic in this historic relationship, and advised professionals to engage in existing communities instead of emulating them in an attempt to chase profits:
“Maybe we just have to accept that in terms of democratic interplay the movement of information from government institutions to the great public – the fourth estate role – is something we can’t make money out of.
“Where I see things like that working really well and an opportunity for journalists to get involved and make money is fantastic websites like What Do They Know and Fix My Street.”
With so many debates, ideas and arguments sparked by the unconference, Paul Bradshaw, lecturer at Birmingham City University and organiser of JEECamp, was hopeful concrete developments would come as a result:
“There all kinds of exchanges of mediums and contacts so interesting things come out of that – hopefully people will have great ideas. It’s the big fight about what comes of all this change.
“It is not a revolution, I think it is more complex than that and the people in this room will to a large extent determine what shape the future takes.”
Photo taken by These Digital Times on Flickr, videos shot by Kasper Sorensen on Vimeo.
After Kyle MacRae’s JEECamp keynote speech there were several breakout sessions on community management, new business models and tips for finding funding. However, the main recurring theme was how the digital age has changed the nature of local media – with regional newspapers under threat it seems hyper-local projects are the great new hopes.
Hyper-local News
James Hatts, editor of London SE1, summed up the essence of hyper-local news by saying “if you do these things right then there is a lot of goodwill out there” and those concerned about their area “will care that it’s well reported on and that there is a sense of community and information sharing“.
However, he spoke of the sector’s difficulties in developing enough revenue and argued that Google Adsense needs to be easier to use for advertisers:
“There’s an obvious synergy between sites that celebrate a sense of place and the local independent businesses, but at the moment it is difficult to make money from the referrals. There’s a real opportunity there for bridging the gap.”
Meanwhile Sue Greenwood demonstrated Sweeble, a site allowing community websites to be easily converted into a print product. She believes combining a blog and a hyper-local newsletter might be a feasible economic model. Then James Fryer from SoGlos.com reiterated the importance of SEO, and signalled a changing of the guard, as Google still sends 70% of their traffic despite links with traditional media outlets.
Social media networking
The ethos of Jeecamp was informality and many smaller huddles had formed to discuss issues relevant to them. Christian Payne (aka Documentally), from Our Man Inside, talked about how freelancers can best utilise the sense of reciprocity inherent in social media to make contacts.
The photographer and new media consultant, who has almost 5,000 twitter followers and 24,000 updates, sees embracing the internet as an extension and improvement on traditional methods:
“I don’t think the value of the network depends on how many people are following you, to be successful on twitter you just need to connect to the right people who are going to help amplify you.
“My social networking existed before the internet, it’s just been easy for me to migrate into the digital world – the difference is I can hold 50 conversations a day instead of two.”
Photos taken by kasperbs and These Digital Times on Flickr, video shot by Kasper Sorensen on Vimeo.
Standing before a collection of social media nuts as they update twitter, write blogs, record Audioboos and film with Qik, it is clear Kyle MacRae is brave man.
The founder of Scoopt is talking at JEEcamp, an unconference organised to explore issues in the news and technology industries with a specific focus on experimentation and enterprise. He has essentially just told his audience they need to get out more:
“I think it does pay dividends to escape the echo chamber, to get out of the field you are working in and view it objectively from a distance. Most journalists here are all completely clued up and savvy about what is going on.
“I’m not convinved that is an advantage when it comes to starting a new business in the sector. Look at the industry from the outside without getting specific knowledge and just try to spot opportunities.
The Scotsman clearly doesn’t scare easily, as he uses his keynote speech to dismiss the usefulness of consultants and new media gurus – gods to the geeky attendees.
“My advice would be stop listening to Jeff Jarvis and all the others – do they really know anything, are you actually learning anything from them, or can you work it out yourself?”
MacRae certainly has tried to work things out for himself, and he spoke about selling his user-generated picture agency to Getty Images and negotiatiating with the BBC to obtain seconday re-sale rights on their viewers’ photos. These plans were thwarted when the Corporation felt unable to exploit the content in a commercial arena.
MacRae also attempted to provide images for professional outlets through Flickr, but the process dragged so much he resorted to asking anyone interested to tag their photos with ’scoopt’ instead.
He feels Getty failed to fully develop Scoopt’s potential and the site finally closed in February. However, despite this setback he is positive about the future for new business models in journalism:
“I am still convinced there are a lot of opportunities in journalism to do something professionally, to build something that can generate money.
“We all know there are precious few jobs and the industry doesn’t know what it is doing, but there are all sorts of ideas and startups and experiments going on – some of which will hopefully fly.”
This is a belief at the heart of JEEcamp, that journalism can flourish under new business models as enthusiastic new initiatives replace the tired old models that now seem obselete.
“I think being an entrepreneur in journalism right now is probably the best, and possibly the only, opportunity there is.
“If you can do it without funding it is a great time – really cheap, really easy. Just go for it, commit and hopefully make a success of it.”
Photos taken by JemimahKnight on Flickr, video shot by Kasper Sorensen on Vimeo.
The fallout surrounding the smear emails between Damien McBride and Derek Draper has seen much media attention being paid to the role played by Paul Staines and his Guido Fawkes blog. However some commentary has cast this shameful ploy, which was designed for the anonoymity of the internet, as problematic for politics and society.
‘Once the internet – with its instant response ability, its tendency to destroy secrets and its vast memory – becomes the dominant medium, then scandal, gossip and personality come into the foreground as main elements in the political struggle.’
In the wake of McBride’s resignation over the damaging emails, this appraisal of the political climate by John Lloyd seems familiar. The contributing editor to the Financial Times uses the plot to advance an old argument, that this is another indicator of how the British media have negatively impacted upon political discourse.
It is a return to the form of ‘What the media are doing to our politics‘, where Lloyd states that the degradation of politics by cynical journalists is harmful to democracy. His advice on how this could be rectified is counter-intuitive:
‘The goal of developing informed citizens need not be served by acts of constant aggression or attitudes of constant suspicion towards politicians and public officials. It could also be served – and better served – by understanding and taking seriously official and representatives’ stated aims.’
If Paul Staines, or Guido Fawkes, had not adopted an adversarial approach to expose those shameful messages then it is likely they would have remained secret. Surely the Internet’s ‘instant response ability, its tendency to destroy secrets and its vast memory’ are all wonderful developments that will help to increase the quality of political reportage and should be celebrated at this juncture.
This post was originally published at Tomorrow’s News, Tomorrow’s Journalists.
Michael Haddon graduating from University of Liverpool
So there is to be more soul-searching about the lack of prospects for journalism graduates after our national news agency joined the long list of companies to cancel their trainee scheme. I found out the Press Association’s decision on twitter thanks to a fellow applicant but was not too surprised. The Guardian and Telegraph have already come to the same conclusion as economic and advertising trends continue to conspire against us. The Times stands alone as the last shot for a trainee position at a national and, as probably the most prestigious, it will get a enormous number of applications.
This post was originally published at onlinejournalismblog.com.
Many of the services that are being developed as part of the ’semantic web’ are necessarily works in progress, but they all contribute to extending the success of this burgeoning area of technology. There are plenty more popping up all the time, but for the purposes of this post I have loosely grouped some prominent sites into specialities – social networking, search and browsing – before briefly explaining their uses.
BROWSING
OpenCalais is a way to tag people, places, facts and events in pre-existing content to increase its value and accessibility. It makes use of RDF to annotate content intelligently and automatically so that it can be used in more meaningful ways. Developed by Thomson Reuters, the service now has a preview tool that can take any document and provide a display of the results of tagging and linking the semantic data. It provides an immediate and useful example of the way the technology works and is fun to play around with. OpenCalais is also available as a WordPress plugin which uses the service for auto tagging posts and archives with the correct themes.
headup is a Firefox plugin that enables semantic capabilities within any web page. Extra data is displayed fully in context as the service just alerts the user with a ‘+’ symbol when there is something else of interest to them. On encountering data about a band, headup might highlight the latest YouTube videos, tour dates and official blog-posts next to their name. This data can all be viewed without ever navigating away from the original page. Impressively headup’s semantic engine promises to provide a personalised service by retrieving information that specifically interests the individual user. Watch a demonstration video below.
This post was originally published at onlinejournalismblog.com.
There are billions of pages of unsorted and unclassified information online, which make up millions of terabytes of data with almost no organisation. It is not necessarily true that some of this information is valuable whilst some is worthless, that’s just a judgement for who desires it. At the moment, the most common way to access any information is through the hegemonic search engines which act as an entry point.
Yet, despite Google’s dominace of the market and culture, the methodology of search still isn’t satisfactory. Leading technologists see the next stage of development coming, where computers will become capable of effectively analysing and understanding data rather than just presenting it to us. Search engine optimisation will eventually be replaced by the ‘semantic web’.
The thrust of the final chapter of Nick Anstead and Will Straw’s ‘The Change We Need‘ is ostensibly about the need to open up the political process – but what this really means is that the Labour Party need to relax their controlling instincts.
They show how technological advances and the resulting social changes were utilised effectively by Obama’s Presidential drive and highlight a new way of political campaigning. The authors argue in their conclusion that this point needs to be recognised by all parties if they want to remain relevant in today’s world, and I would agree with that sentiment.
It seems the incidents that define Barack Obama’s campaign to become the 44th President of the United States were the user-generated content produced in his honour, like the ubiquitous Obama Girl. However, in a more serious capacity…
‘Barack Obama’s web site contained a social networking element, my.barackobama.com, or MyBO as it became known. This allowed users to register with the campaign, and then create policy or interest groups with like-minded supporters (such as Veterans for Obama), organise their own fundraising drives or canvassing events, and advocate their beliefs through blogs or online petitions. This approach was extremely successful.’
It seems unlikely that people would willingly sign up to a social networking site built around the presence of our current Prime Minister. Surprisingly, mygordonbrown.com has already been registered so perhaps this might not always be the case. That the same organisation has also staked a claim for mydavidcameron.com suggests this is opportunism more than any guiding principle though. And I am sure that the Liberal Democrat leader will still be upset that there is no mynickclegg.com.
Seriously though, the way the US public took to MyBo was incredibly successful but some of the other initiatives operated by the Obama campaign did cause problems. Change.gov, the transition project where the President-Elect asked users to ‘come back often as we define new programs and possibilities to engage and be part of this administration’, is a case in point. Users did come back often and placed almost a million votes on more than ten-thousand questions – the most popular of which were to be put to the next President. The winner, displayed prominently on the homepage?
Will you consider legalizing marijuana so that the government can regulate it, tax it, put age limits on it, and create millions of new jobs and create a billion dollar industry right here in the U.S.?
Clay Shirky, internet writer and consultant for the Obama campaign, recently recounted how this caused problems for the administration – some staffers calling for the question to be taken down. Others managed to convince them that this would only cause more embarrassment and so the question stayed . This was the eventual response and the problem was solved, no more adverse publicity. The interesting thing is whether Labour would be in a position to take a similar attitude of fortitude, I can’t speculate authoritatively but assume it would take a significant realignment in attitude at some levels.
The Government must avoid giving ammunition to Islamist propagandists by guaranteeing British ex-detainees get the same basic benefits as the rest of us.
The story of Guantánamo Bay is familiar for many of us, but the fate of the prison’s inmates after they leave and attempt to integrate into society is one we pay less attention to.
This should not be the case in a compassionate democracy, but the issue has become all the more pressing now President Barack Obama has broken with the policies of his predecessor by pledging to close the camp within a year.
Obama’s refusal to use the term ‘enemy combatant’ should also restore some of the lost humanity of those held there, which demonstrates the problems in our perception of those caught up in the ‘War on Terror’ waged by George Bush.
In an exclusive interview with the Hackney Post, ex-Guantánamo detainee Tarek Dergoul has revealed the shameful treatment he received after eventually returning home to the borough.
The 31-year-old says he was tortured during three years of imprisonment in Cuba but was then refused basic benefits after coming back to Britain.
Dergoul was released without charge and although he should have got the same care that anyone would hope for after a period of such suffering this was not the case.
Humiliated, he had to campaign for three years to secure simple income support and housing benefit.
This is the same length of time he was denied liberty on a barren beach 90 miles from America.
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