patshine's posterous

Hurling in Waterford (tags: Ireland))

Attended the Waterford County Senior Hurling Final between Lismore and Ballygunner at Walsh Park in Waterford a week ago. I don't know enough about hurling to be a real fan but I loved the event and the spectacle. Before the game a brass band led the two teams around the field. At the front of the band was an old guy who much have been in his eighties waving and twirling a baton (cheerleader cannot be the right term here). The band members were all either ancient white-haired old guys or tiny pre-teen girls in uniforms far too big for them. The band were followed by the two teams. A quarter of the players had kids with them wearing team colours. It could have been ridiculous but I thought it was wonderful. This was a real local community event. All amateur players. Maybe three thousand people watching. Lots of kids and families. Teenage boys and girls. Beside me a girl in one of H&M's finest leopard print tops sat next to an old farmer in muddy pants that were probably bought 30 years ago. I was quite proud.

Img_4234

Gawker Media opens tag pages to masses, expecting “chaos” » Nieman Journalism Lab

Gawker Media is unveiling an innovative and unruly twist on traditional reader forums this morning. The new feature, part of an otherwise modest redesign across the company’s nine blogs, could transform tag pages, typically little more than archives of old posts, into commenter free-for-alls and transparent tip lines.

via niemanlab.org

Gawker will allow users to put hastags into all user comments. User content will then be browsable by hashtag. Essentially users will be able to create pages on the site by using hashtags for them and then post whatever they want on those pages. So user comments will be able to not only go off-topic but to explore things that Gawker has never got close to discussing. In the future users will also be able to post comments with hashtags directly from twitter. Should be very interesting to see.

Steve Outing: Culture holds old media back

Newspapers are struggling, losing readers, losing advertisers to newer forms of media, losing relevance. Yet they stick to the old ways of doing things. And in this case, the local news institution that brought this family’s story to public light will not get the credit when caring members of the public help pay off their medical debt. The Huffington Post will get that credit, because it’s not afraid to take action to support a worthy cause.
via steveouting.com

Good post by Steve Outing. The St. Petersburg Times did a great story on a family who couldn't pay their medial bills even though they have insurance. HuffPo summarised what the St. Pete Times did but added a box where users can make donations directly via paypal. They went beyond just reporting the story to giving readers a chance to take action.

I'm sure that technically the newspaper could have done this. But either they didn't think of it, or ideas about objectivity stopped them doing it. In either case, it is the culture of how journalism has worked that stopped them. Whether this particular box is right or wrong, if newspapers are to survive in the future questioning the assumptions about how things have always been done and changing the culture of journalism so that they think like online natives is maybe the biggest challenge newspapers face.

Q&A: BusinessWeek.com Editor-in-Chief John A. Byrne | Blog | Econsultancy

What journalism needs to become is this digital age is a process that embraces and involves your audience at every level, from idea generation to reporting and sourcing and finally to the publication of the article when the journalism then becomes an intellectual camp fire around which you gather an audience to have a thoughtful conversation about the story's topic. 

If done well, that conversation, orchestrated by the writer or editor of the article, has as much or more value to a reader as the journalism itself. 

via econsultancy.com

Interesting details on how journalists can engage with readers.

Great post on the Magazine business

One major point I made in them is this: The mass-media magazine business model is what is broken, not the magazine format. For instance, magazine readership is up over the past eight years — which I think is pretty good for a dead medium. And technology has radically changed magazines over the past 20 years: it has enabled my company to compete on a level field with any magazine publisher in American in terms of design and production tools, access to collaborative tools and a myriad of other mundane things.

And, as I pointed out the other days, technology is changing the economics of the production and distribution of magazines.

But to reiterate a common theme of this blog: Magazines that try to be all things to a mass audience are dying.

But you can also say that about internet-based media that try to be all things to a mass audience.

Tight focus. Niche. Passion-focused community. Must-have information. Great design or usability. Those are the key to any media these days.

via rexblog.com

Nothing to add. I can only quote:

"The mass-media magazine business model is what is broken, not the magazine format."

"Tight focus. Niche. Passion-focused community. Must-have information. Great design or usability. Those are the key to any media these days."

Citizen Journalism - incomplete notes

I have been reviewing Citizen Journalism sites for a project I am doing. Citizen Journalism can mean many different things, from people sending in photographs and videos, to crowd-sourced document analysis, to newspapers offering training and equipment to citizen reporters. There is a whole range of websites out there doing these things and many things in between. Some examples:

User-submitted content - disaster pics
This is usually photos and videos, often of disasters. Good examples this year were the photo of the Hudson River crash plane with passengers standing on the wings of the plane in the river, and the video footage of Ian Tomlinson being knocked over by police at the G20 summit in London. This kind of user-submitted content is not new. One of the most famous pieces of citizen content is the Zapruder tape of JFK's assassination. 

Most user content is still given freely. Earlier this year Scoopt, one of the agencies for citizen journalist photographers, folded. The CEO said one problem with the agency model for citizen photographers was that you can never be sure one of the people who are signed up with you will be where an incident happens, and you can't be sure when they take the photo that they will come to you. The hudson river photo was uploaded to Twitpic and freely available, not submitted to any agency.

Crowd-sourced document analysis
Josh Marshall's Talking Points Memo seems to have been the first place to get this working. Both the Guardian with MPs expenses and the New York Times have tried this too when there are large amounts of documents to review. 

Mass reporting, or Pro-Am journalism
The Huffington post ran a project called Off the bus during the last US election where they got citizen journalists to report on local campaign events. As the previous post noted what was most successful was having  CJ's report the events but then having professionals write the stories. Amanda Michel, the manager of this Off the Bus project, went to ProPublica after the election and is now running an adopt a stimulus project there. One key point she makes in this Poynter interview is that with this model not everything will be covered: "At 'OffTheBus' about 20 percent of our small-scale distributed projects failed to turn up a story. I suspect the ratio will be higher here."

From the interview with Amanda Michel it is clear that it will take a hands-on professional editor to make a project of this size work. She has to coordinate the efforts of many people, provide online tools showing people how to do research etc, have brainstorm meetings with the most important citizen journalists, get the results written up, etc. If the reporting couldn't be done without the citizens, the results wouldn't be as good with out the professionals.

Mass opportunity
Anyone can be a journalist. This is getting quite idealistic. For example: NowPublic - Crowd Powered Media. Anyone can go on the site and write a story or upload a video. There are guidelines for what stories are like, hints for creating compelling content, tools for journalists, etc but basically it is up to CJs to do a good job themselves. On the editorial side, users can recommend stories to push them up on the site. A professional editorial staff do the same but their opinions have more weight than users.

Some large media organisations have started offshoots to collect citizen journalism, which are someplace between NowPublic and ProPublica, for example CNN ireport - Unedited. Unfiltered. News. and CBS EyeMobile - where everyone reports. On these two sites, CJs can upload anything to the website. The best of this can then be filtered up to the mothership. the editorial control is quite lax on ireport and eyeMobile, but stringent on CNN and CBS. CNN claims to have 378,547 ireports and to have used 724 on CNN last month. 

Korea's famous OhMyNews is this kind of site. Anyone can submit stories but the site is edited by professionals.

Trained citizen journalists
Under this model anyone can aspire to be a citizen journalist but MSM will give them some help. The Oakland Press in Michigan created The Oakland Press Institute for Citizen Journalism. According to an interview at Journalism.co.uk. "We are looking for citizen journalists to provide blogs, expertise in particular subject areas, videos of sports and other events, government meeting coverage, human interest stories and even police blotter coverage in a more extensive way than we now provide it. We will teach the basics of news writing, including elements of a news story and approaches to writing - from the inverted pyramid to the narrative storytelling approach - as well as basic grammar. We will also teach basics of sports reporting and videography. We hope to offer two-hour classes as interest dictates."

Do these count?
  • User comments on the basis of which a journalist changes a story. This is an important user contribution. 
  • Digg, Reddit, etc. This is a kind of mass editorial judgement. 

Yet another not a silver bullet (YANASB)
There have been already been some failed citizen journalism projects. I mentioned Scoopt above. Backfence, a big American local news site, was another. This doesn't mean citizen journalism has failed or will fail. However, it is likely to be better at some things than others. Right now the ones the likely successes are:
  • Local News: This could be aggregation of local bloggers, or like the Oakland Post it could mean training aspiring journalists
  • Disaster reporting: The main thing here is making it as easy as possible for CJs to upload content. CNN has an ireport iphone app
  • Documentation: It is hard to get statistics on how well this has worked. But if 20% of Off the Bus's stories weren't completed, we can expect the results here to be much higher. 
But it is clear that any serious effort at citizen journalism will take serious effort and serious commitment. It will require resources and probably fulltime professional editors. 
  • A fulltime professional editor. (It's worth reading the full Poynter interview with Amanda Michel, linked above) 
  • Online guides. Not only how to write but how to report: how to investigate a company, how to get information on local government 
  • Training

How citizen journalism really works - reporting, not writing

this is what I think Michel’s most important discovery during Off the Bus was. The original idea of off the bus is that everybody could be David Broder, right? Then it turns out that a high percentage of the people who could be David Broder already are David Broder.

That barrier was kind of a crisis for her. And then she said, you know what? These people didn’t want to write anyway. They’re nervous about writing, they don’t do it well, they know they don’t do it well, they’re not excited about doing it well. So, she started doing stuff like sending hundreds of them out to cover all of the individual counties of Iowa during the caucus — something that no professional reporter can do, which is to be in 436 places at once. And then she aggregated those stories and gave them to the professional storytellers.

So I don’t think that storytelling is one of the things that syndicates well, but I do think that the inputs of the storytelling syndicate well. And I think the old telephone model of “I call the source and I call the source and I call the source and it’s all just a bunch of point-to-point connections and then I integrate it and I write my story” is giving way to a model which is closer to a database, which is “all the data is there and I’m given the tools to shape it and then tell the story.”

So what Michel ended up with was a pro-am fusion, a professional-amateur fusion of amateur inputs of the sort that you literally could not buy on the open market, but the stories written by people who were good at storytelling. That’s, I think, one of the — ProPublica’s probably one of the great models of this.

via niemanlab.org

From the Q&A after Clay Shirky's Shorenstein talk.

Good example of a journalist going it alone and setting up a niche site

Sharon Waxman, a former NYT journo in LA set up The Wrap, a site covering Hollywood for industry insiders. It's a good example of one of the ways journalism needs to develop to survive. Individual journos need to set up niche sites covering their own beats.

From an interview with Ad Age

"We aren't a traditional trade at all, we aren't even an untraditional trade --- we're something new and different...a hybrid, I suppose, that's a little bit tradey, a little bit bloggy....A little trashy, a little sassy, a little serious."
"I'm learning and evolving as a writer and as an reporter, and I've allowed myself to be a lot more personal with The Wrap than I've ever been -- and I think that's part of how journalism needs to be in the age of the internet. Traditional journalists have to be more daring with the voice that they write with."

"There's not going to be room for press-release journalism anymore -- there's no need for it. Any company can post their own press releases and at The Wrap we'll eventually have a system where things that I consider to be industry announcements will just be posted to the site -- the most interesting announcements -- but I'm not going to pay a staff of reporters to do that."

Perhaps the most interesting this is the detail on how she is funding it. Basically display ads, sponsorship, events.

"The Wrap announced a content partnership with Microsoft's MSN -- with stories from The Wrap getting distribution throughout Microsoft's various entertainment destination properties -- which should significantly boost traffic to Waxman's site. The deal underscores just how quickly The Wrap has come to be considered a must-read within the industry it covers"

"There is display advertising on the site, our e-mail newsletters, sponsorship -- sponsorship has to do more with underwriting different pieces of content, and usually that goes with events that we've had. British Airways and Four Seasons were two large sponsors. Lifetime is sponsoring an event with us, Blackberry is working with us. Almost all the TV networks during the Emmy campaigns, and we're just closing advertising agreements with various studios for their Oscar campaigns. People are going to start jockeying for space.

We're also building up our event strategy. We're having our third event coming up and then we're having a screening series as well in which we'll screen a movie that's an Oscar contender -- we'll do a Q&A -- so it's very synergistic with our content, and then we always cover it, so then there's that ripple effect for our sponsors."