Category: Journalism

Social media is humanising – it’s how we use it that can dehumanise

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Discussions of what is and isn’t acceptable for publishing on social media (specifically Twitter and YouTube in current debates) are occupying much of my timeline.

Articles written around the role social media played in disseminating images and messages following journalist James Foley‘s murder will abound and I wasn’t intending to add to the noise, but then a couple of things happened: First, Mathew Ingram’s tweeted question made me consider my personal view, and where that view fitted in the expanding horizon of content publishing and distribution.

Most respondents indicated these platforms shouldn’t remove it (Mathew’s conclusions from the debate are here). I suspect our views are actually moot; removing such content from the internet is an exercise in futility – these images aren’t expunged, they simply slide down through the strata of the web to darker layers, or become downloaded shared content, and so viewers gain an extra frisson and the pedlars weird exclusivity-linked kudos.

When Ken Bigley was beheaded in 2004, the videos were removed by YouTube but you could buy a DVD  of the killing – should your tastes run that way – at a Liverpool street market. So YouTube did revoke publication rights but a secondary distribution market had already sprung up.  Ten years on, the options for alternative online distribution platforms are far greater, and harder to control.

The ability to view something isn’t really the same as wanting to view it. I know I could find and footage of James Foley kneeling and dying alone in the desert but I don’t intend to seek it out. I haven’t clicked any links that looked likely to lead to it, and although I believe there were gifs they weren’t in my Twitter feed or in my hashtag columns. Twitter is considering removing the images in deference to his family’s wishes, although I imagine that won’t stop them being searchable and shareable elsewhere.

The second thing that happened was a world away from the horrors of a young man’s murder, although it was a photo someone retweeted into my timeline. It was utterly innocuous but made me consider how censorship via the removal of content had influenced me.  It was a photo of Gerry Adams and a goat.

When I was a child, Gerry Adams was judged to be allied with a cause so dangerous UK TV viewers and radio listeners could not even hear his own voice being broadcast, thanks to a government ban. Instead, an actor spoke his words. Today he publishes selfies and uses myriad broadcast and distribution channels (not least an autobiography). The internet would never suffer such a restriction to hold  now and, that is a positive development.

Media companies make daily decisions around in-house and external codes of ethics and conduct, not to mention legal restraints and what the audience reaction might be. Twitter and YouTube are platforms that host content; they don’t create, own and distribute that content, users self-publish. Journalists rail at Google when it removes articles in accordance with the Right To be Forgotten ruling but I can see parallels with YouTube withdrawing a user’s content that is being re-published and distributed across myriad networks.

Taking away someone’s actual voice is a powerful insinuation that we need protection from them, and it made a powerful impression on me as a child. Skip forward a few decades and the world is quite a different place –  I know Adams doesn’t speak with Received Pronunciation, for a start, and he is considered the architect of the Peace Process. But until today I had never thought of him as a man likely to take a selfie with a goat.  Social media is actually very humanising; it’s how we use it that can dehumanise.

Later… 

The Guardian’s James Ball sums it up better than me: “Before clicking, serious self-examination is required: why do you want to see this? Do you need to see it to understand something important? Still deeper self-examination should certainly be engaged before even contemplating sharing such material.” I recommennd reading his article in full

 

Interesting reads (weekly)

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  • What society are we building here? — BuzzMachine

    “When you see a troll or abuser online, what do you do about it? Do you egg on or ignore the miscreant? Do you shame the fool? Do you support the troll’s victims? Or do you laugh at them?You — yes, you and I — are creating the norms of our new society. What are those norms? What is our new society? Is it something we are proud to pass on to our children? Does it improve society for them? Or is it easier to snark and snigger at some stranger’s expense?”

    tags: trolls online community culture

  • SEOing the death of Robin Williams isn’t evil. It’s the equivalent of shouting “READ ALL ABAHT IT”

    There is nothing wrong with wanting people to read something you have written well and spend time on. The SEO email doing the social media rounds jars with people who don’t work in newsrooms – I imagine some of the practical terms and descriptions you’d hear in hospital staff rooms would probably shock those of us who don’t work in the medical trade.
    “SEO is sales for your content…Newsagent posters screaming “Shock Hollywood death” work for that medium.
    A massive picture of the face of the person we have lost with their birth-death years works for print.
    But people won’t find your stuff online with headlines like that, because that’s not how people look for them.”

    tags: seo

  • Designing the homepage last | fffunction blog

    This blogger is writing about designing websites, but I think the idea translates to online journalism too – stories are constantly evolving and the presentation of them should too … “The homepage is constantly evolving throughout the project (even if you try to stick to your sketches, wireframes or prototype). It’s also the page which tends to block the project the longest, because getting the look and feel right is a difficult part of the design process.
    “

    tags: homepage online

  • Snapchat is now More Popular Than Twitter Amongst 18-34 Year-Olds [STUDY] – AllTwitter

    “32.9 percent of 18-34 year-olds now use Snapchat, reveals new data from comScore, compared to less than one quarter (23.8 percent) who use Twitter. To be clear, this is users of smartphone apps, and doesn’t include Twitter’s desktop audience. Still, with the world going increasingly mobile – and Twitter (alongside everybody else) wanting to gobble up the biggest slice of that pie – it’s a worrying trend.”

    tags: Twitter Snapchat

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Interesting reads (weekly)

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  • Twitter Testing Easier-To-Use Hashtags – WSJ

    “Twitter appears to be testing a feature that will better organize its chaotic world of hashtags” – Man, I *really* hope this happens.

    “

    tags: Twitter hashtags

  • Video social sharing: How do four of the big players stack up on the social web?

    The Google+ video shares figures are very interesting. In my unscientific way, just from the networks I have, or have been added to on there, it seems to be where the audience is more engaged, and possibly comprises more of time-served internet users. Possibly, as someone said to me this week, Google+ fans use it harder because they remember what happened to Wave.
    “We took the 20 most popular videos from the YouTube channels of four big players in the video space – VICE, BuzzFeed, The Guardian, and The Daily Telegraph – to see how some of their most successful content is performing on the social web.

    The results
    It’s apparent that Facebook and Google+ are where the majority of shares happen for these publishers’ video content.”

    tags: collaboration video social sharing

  • For New Jersey’s Local News Lab, Collaboration Is Key to Success | Mediashift |

    This is fascinating – what happened if news media treated each other as collaborators, not rivals?
    “What if five regional sites share ad staff and combine their audience numbers to attract new advertisers? What if 15 local newsrooms could support a world-class development and technology shop? What if a data journalist, an event planner or a designer could make a great living by serving a bunch of these local sites?” he asked.”

    tags: news collaboration

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Interesting reads (weekly)

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  • Manual retweets are just self-promotion and Twitter embeds aren’t journalism | Jeb Lund | Comment is free | theguardian.com

    Manually retweeting used to be the only option for passing on someone’s message on Twitter – you used to literally have to cut and paste on the Twitter site, although Tweetdeck and Hootsuite, among others, offered RT options. Since that’s no longer the case, I think this piece makes a fair point re original sources and credit… ” Use someone else’s picture to drive traffic to your brand, and people get mad. Slap an RT in front of someone else’s words, and that’s apparently just how the world works.”

    tags: social media twitter brand

  • USA Today Goes Viral – NYTimes.com

    I absolutely love this idea… “For Social Media Tuesdays, the staff must act as if there is no other way to get their articles except through sites likes Facebook and Reddit. That means USA Today’s journalists diligently place each of their famously punchy, graphic-rich stories onto various social media platforms. The purpose is to get them thinking like their readers, who increasingly get news through their Twitter feeds instead of the paper’s front page or home page.

    “

    tags: nytimes future+of+news social media

  • Rebooting Newsroom Strategy as Mobile, Wearables Rise | Mediashift | PBS

    ““I certainly think the trend in wearables is on an unstoppable trajectory,” Hutcheon said. “It will happen this year with smart watches. I’m not sure how smart watches will help journalism per se, but I do see things like Google Glass and drones as having a big part to play,” he said. “You can live-stream a news conference through a Google Glass; you could take pictures of people from that point of view. It’s a bit gimmicky still, but I think eventually it will be huge and mainstream.”

    tags: trends wearables strategy future+of+news

  • Five ways local media can help itself | BBC College of Journalism

    “As we adjust to a world where our regional and local media has fewer titles, fewer journalists, smaller profit margins and a reduced frequency of publishing, we need new models for local journalism to emerge.

    The BBC absolutely needs to be at the heart of this. But the commercial and community sectors shouldn’t just look to the BBC (and the licence fee) to help them solve their problems. They need to engage more creatively with structural challenges affecting the sector.”

    tags: journalism BBC

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The hook on which we are caught

Alison Gow4 Comments

These are some of my reflections on the Revival of Local Journalism conference, organised by the BBC and Society of Editors at MediaCity UK, and held on June 25. There are links to others’ posts and articles from the day throughout this piece. 

The Revival of Local Journalism conference (hashtag #localjournalism) on June 25 was a fascinating day, with stimulating conversation, proffered olive branches and some snappy presentations.

For me, it was thought-provoking and occasionally frustrating in terms of complacency and inertia . Perhaps if the day ended with some agreed outcomes and action points from others apart from James Harding (of which more here) it would have felt like a satisfying conclusion (maybe I’ve just sat in too many meetings?) because this needs to be a springboard and catalyst for wider discussion and momentum, not a cul de sac.

So, as to my reflections on the day’s theme and tone, here’s the thing: the media industry is either disrupted and the mainstream within it is either resisting or attempting to disrupt right back. The entrepreneurs and startups are more able to say “yep – so deal with it” and grasping what the next steps need to be more effectively.

Finding things out, writing them down and publishing them has fundamentally not changed; the hook on which too many of us are getting caught is platform.

So when the established regional media bends its thoughts to the revival of local journalism, there is a real danger that we end up talking in circles about our own platforms – whether that be print or broadcast or digital.

The revival of local journalism is a theme that spans staffing, tools, training, best practice, collaboration, competition and innovation – it isn’t whether newspapers are going to disappear at some point in the future, or whether Google is a publishing aid or a publisher in its own right.

I suspect that the best people to lead objective discussions on the revival of local journalism are not those enmeshed in the industry as realities intrude, defences laid, and the trouser of reinvention get snagged on the barbed wire fence of practicality.

We also have to set aside nostalgia – as flagged by Clay Shirky here.So, for a moment, I’m going to think about platforms, deal with it and then dismiss it for the rest of this post.

I was asked at RoLJ  if newspapers were going to disappear, and I replied along the lines of “if you had a better delivery method for news, why wouldn’t you use it?”

Me and my mouth. That prompted the more direct question “Do you think newspapers will die?”. To which I answered “yes”, and then there was an audible intake of breath from the room.

It was a fairly bald statement in a room full of press people (and my boss) but, yes, I think newspapers will cease to be required.  Which is a far different thing to journalism being required, although platform obsession seems to blur that distinction.

I plucked a number out of the air, and said within 30 years, Jasper Westaway , of borde.rs, said it would be more like 15, and followed it up with a lot more unpalatable truths about where things were headed.

Like…

I can’t say what platform we will be publishing on in five years time because predicting the technological, creative and cultural shifts likely to happen over that period of time is like, well, asking to be reminded of your naivety in five years time…

I’ve posted a lot over the years about the need for aggregation and curation. I am starting to wonder about what doing the opposite of these things could offer.

Is there an opportunity in dis-aggregation? The death of the homepage idea is well discussed, as is the  ‘each piece of content should be a destination’ viewpoint. So what if a mainstream legacy brand decided to make and distribute its content designed to travel purely through social platforms? And made it was self-sufficient, with its own life support system – commercial, editorial and marketing all bound up in one – networked to sister content through links?

Would that start to get us off the hook?

Anyway, enough platform.

I wish we could have talked more about the social media contribution. Jo Geary gave a storming presentation about Twitter which included a fairly damning slide about a US newsman scooping the UK media on the Glasgow helicopter crash, courtesy of an established and intelligent Twitter search.

And she also spoke nostalgically about the past – but it was just that. Platform does not define her type of journalism.

Understanding that isn’t throwing the baby out with the bathwater; it’s appreciating the baby is a teenager now, and is therefore an entirely different animal altogether.

Peter Barron, head of communications for Europe, Middle East and Africa, spoke of collaboration and the free tools to help understand audiences and connect with them.

In fact, considering the theme was revival, an oft-raised point was not knowing the tools to use.

This is a Google search of the phrase ‘best online tools for journalists’ – there are plenty of people out there writing about the free things you can use, and sharing their knowledge of how-to and why-to in great detail.

None of the apps or tools mentioned is particularly complicated, most are free and someone  (hint – the boss) in any media business should be taking responsibility for ensuring at least one member of the team is trained up to be expert in this stuff, so they can, in turn, make sure everyone else in the newsroom is getting clued up on it too. That’s as true for a local weekly paper as it is for Sky. Ensuring the skills are there may require hard decisions and maybe someone does need to be taken off the rota for a few days at a time to go on courses or conferences, and the company has to stump up for this. The outcomes will pay for themselves 20 times over in a few months, as you start bringing in better stories and connecting with your audience.

* Final points:

The folly of Giving It All Away For Free Online point was made. Paul Bradshaw took the parable offered up, turned it into a fairytale guaranteed to give some industry types nightmares, and posted it here. Recommended reading.

Staffing was also raised – David Higgerson’s excellent summation and reflection post on the conference and this particular issue is worth a read.

In the last panel session of the day, I was asked to respond to a question about why students didn’t want to work in newsrooms because they were sweatshops. However, that became a bit sidetracked by the whole ‘what tools to use’ debate.

I am in contact with journalism students from various J-schools via social media and email all the time – some of them I consider friends I’ve yet to meet in real life – and they don’t ask me about potential sweatshop conditions ahead of them. But perhaps that’s out of politeness.

So it’s a hard one for me to answer, too, as I don’t know enough about the situations in all newsrooms.  Perhaps it’s one for the industry press to pick up and examine in greater detail?

 

[Photo:  www.threeforksranch.com}

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Crime, mugshots and the public interest (updated)

Alison Gow2 Comments

Update: Lancashire Police has now retracted this policy.

Liz Riding, Lancashire Constabulary’s Corporate Communications Manager has reviewed the decision: ‘I have had a further look at this and have decided that we will not be applying the 12 month limited tariff for releasing images on conviction.

‘We are reviewing the demand into our press office, having lost two thirds of our resource over the last few years, and picture requests do add up to some significant demand.

‘However, on reflection, setting a minimum tariff is not acting in accordance with the spirit of which the ACPO guidelines were intended to be interpreted.

‘We will retain the right to look at each request on a case by case basis, and make the appropriate decision based on proportionality, necessity and legitimacy.’

She explained that the ACPO guidelines were open to interpretation: ‘We will not introduce it in Lancashire at this time but we will be reviewing our internal approval processes relating to the release of images.’

More on that turnaround here

[Original post began here] Lancashire Police is no longer issuing photos of criminals jailed for less than 12 months, and as the news got around today that decision did not play well with journalists.

As I am a long-time recipient of their police press office emails (along with the rest of the world, it seems) my inbox was soon pinging with launched broadsides from regional and national hacks, baffled by the decision.

Police photo release email
Lancs Police email announcement

Although, as Liverpool Echo crime reporter John Siddle pointed out, it’s by no means a single issue…

Every police force seems to use different criteria (and often, undisclosed ones at that) for photo releases. There are clear ACPO  checklists for decision makers –

custody2

The proportionality argument covered guidelines leaves it hard to think of many people who wouldn’t be interested if someone from their community were locked up for 12 months or less.

custody3

And the ACPO guidelines also state:

“Post conviction there is likely to be much demand from the media and from the public for information and this may include releasing an image. Forces are
Version 1.2 March 2009 5encouraged to engage with the media and be as open as possible. The release of images at this stage in the criminal justice process could assist with deterring potential criminals and preventing subsequent crime as well as encouraging other victims and witnesses to come forward.”

Anyway, as to the tweet that sparked the original email from the police, I’d imagine it is very much in the public interest, as Rebecca Koncienzcy revealed. And I don’t think she should feel awkward about it at all – at least it’s being discussed now:

However, not all police forces are as reticent with images. I remember well the golden moment  Liverpool Echo crime reporter James Glover (now poacher-turned-gamekeeper for a police press office) asked a force in the Netherlands if they had a headshot of a fugitive Liverpool gangster, found shot to death in their jurisdiction.

Yes, said the police officer, we do have a photo. When the emailed pic arrived it showed the corpse, in the morgue, with a gaping bullet wound to his temple.

A headshot in every sense of the word.

 

 

This week, I’ve been reading… (weekly)

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This week, I’ve been reading… (weekly)

Alison GowLeave a comment

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

This week, I’ve been reading… (weekly)

Alison GowLeave a comment

  • Reader Flow and theArticle Gateway

    I believe we spend far to much time faffing about making home pages look ‘right’ when much of our traffic comes to stories direct rather than from our shop window, so to speak. Therefore, of course I agree with this post (which also links to another worthwhile read on the subject at The Verge…TL:DR? Takeaway point is this – “the article page is the new homepage.”

    tags: audience

  • A Eulogy for Twitter – Atlantic Mobile

    “Twitter used to be a sort of surrogate newsroom/barroom where you could organize around ideas with people whose opinions you wanted to assess. Maybe you wouldn’t agree with everybody, but that was part of the fun. But at some point Twitter narratives started to look the same. The crowd became predictable, and not in a good way. Too much of Twitter was cruel and petty and fake

    tags: twitter

  • Instagram’s Sweet Spot: Better for Brands than Facebook and Twitter? | Simply Measured

    “brands on Instagram are getting exponentially more engagement as a percentage of followers/fans than content on Twitter or Facebook.”

    tags: instagram engagement audience

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