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When to quit your journalism job » Pressthink
“When the sales people are happy to sell what the newsroom is happy to make, there you have a well-run editorial company. So measure your own newsroom’s misery by its distance from that (ideal) state”
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“In practically every industry that I look at, I see a major disruption happening. I know the world will be very different 15 to 20 years from now. The vast majority of companies who are presently the leaders in their industries will likely not even exist. That is because industry executives either are not aware of the changes that are coming, are reluctant to invest the type of money that is be required for them to reinvent themselves, or are protecting legacy businesses. Most are focused on short-term performance.”
Interesting reads (weekly)
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“The digital disruption to news delivery has also posed questions about the need for impartiality in the digital age. With the internet providing so many varied opinions and views on an issue, and social media favouring strongly held opinions, is there still room for the objective reporting method?”
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Rolling Stone didn’t just fail readers — it failed Jackie, too – Vox
The Rolling Stone article on campus rape failed to protect the woman at the heart of the story by ignoring basic journalism, says Vox. I’m pretty sure such a piece would not have got past any of my old news editors when I was a reporter. “None of those things mean Jackie is lying. But it makes it all the more important to ask for proof. If you are going to expose a traumatized 20-year-old to the judgment of the entire world with a story that many people don’t want to believe is true, you owe it to everyone — to your readers, but especially to her — to make sure it is unimpeachable. It’s not just damage control for your publication or your personal reputation. It’s to protect the person who trusted you.”
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A collection of tools and resources for journalists from 2014 | Media news
Interesting reads (weekly)
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New Relationships, Forms, and Models for News — Geeks Bearing Gifts — Medium
“So perhaps the news industry must think past the idea that it is in the content, advertising, and distribution businesses. Perhaps we should ask whether — like Google and Facebook — news instead should be a service that helps people accomplish their goals. “
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Online Harassment | Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project
Pew’s research into online harassment is fascinating 60% of internet users said they had witnessed someone being called offensive names53% had seen efforts to purposefully embarrass someone25% had seen someone being physically threatened24% witnessed someone being harassed for a sustained period of time19% said they witnessed someone being sexually harassed18% said they had seen someone be stalked
Interesting reads (weekly)
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The menace of memes: how pictures can paint a thousand lies » Spectator Blogs
“And perhaps if trust in politicians were higher, these memes wouldn’t be shared so uncritically as people would think there was something rum about them. But I suspect that the lack of suspicion about what the graphics purport to show doesn’t just arise because MPs have let us down. It’s also because of a failure to read the internet critically and a lack of education about what Parliament does and how it works. These memes certainly aren’t doing any educating, they are deceitfully spreading lies.”
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Why invest in a news app when readers would rather visit a mobile-friendly website? | Press Gazette
“User behaviour should make all publishers, especially those without deep pockets, think twice before embarking on their app adventure”
Ironically, this appears on a site that is not responsive – it was A LOT of hard work to read on my mobile screen, and it’s only because the subject was so interesting that I persevered. -
Rewriting Cheezburger Saved My Life — Backchannel — Medium
Astonishing, illuminating and sometimes deeply sad account of Ben Huh’s exploits as founder and CEO of Cheezburger.
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Fascinating read around the troubles of First Look
“…for all the feverish speculation… the most obvious culprit is hiding in plain sight: the reliance on truckloads of money from Silicon Valley.
There’s a reason that the term “burn rate” was coined to describe the brief half-lives of tech start-ups—these frenetically overmanaged operations function more as monuments to the hubris of the innovation economy than as proven models of productivity. Compounding this, the First Look fiasco clearly shows that a tech industry conditioned for so long to scorn the outmoded folkways of “print culture” and “legacy media” (as the argot of Silicon Valley has it) is largely clueless about supervising the basic work of journalism.In a revealing account of Taibbi’s departure, a team of First Look journalists candidly noted that the start-up was hobbled at the outset by a “highly structured Silicon Valley corporate environment” riddled with “management-speak” and “a confounding array of rules, structures and systems imposed by Omidyar and other First Look managers.”
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Why Co-Creation Is the Future for All of Us
I heard about Co-Creation at a recent Media Trust conference; the Girl Guides representative was explaining whey they employed the strategy as they strove to reinvent themselves for the 21st century and digital world, and have achieved remarkable results. I really liked the idea of Co-Creation and saved this to remind myself to look for other examples.
“Low economic growth and high unemployment have led companies to look for ways to remain competitive and find new growth opportunities. Co-creating products or services together with social entrepreneurs could allow them to detect market failures quicker and find creative ways to address them, placing themselves ahead of the curve.At the same time, companies are looking for ways to motivate employees who are searching for meaningful jobs. As Schmidt says, “From lawyers and young marketing managers in large consumer good companies, the search for purpose is everywhere.” Co-creation projects between social entrepreneurs and employees of traditional companies are a powerful way to ensure the employees’ satisfaction with their jobs.
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Journalists in the dock | David Banks Media Law
“This practice of prosecuting editors and sometimes journalists for crimes of publication is, in my view, wrong. Very often they are strict liability offences where absence of intent is irrelevant to the prosecution.
These laws stem from an era, probably fictional, when the editor sat at the hub of the newspaper, examining every word they published. As for the deterrent effect of such prosecution, do they seriously imagine that editors across the country sit poised ready to identify victims?
A far more effective deterrent would be proper communication of court orders to all media”
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What’s the right relationship between technology companies and journalism? |The Guardian
“Because just as we arrive at the perfect point where a shadow cabinet minister can be sacked for an event entirely conducted on and through Twitter, social platforms are also wondering how they might manage the business of editing rather better. Their answer of course is not to have contemplative meetings involving people nodding sagely at whatever their boss thinks, but to build an algorithm which will decide “on your preferences” which news and comments you should see.
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4 Instagram Tools for Scheduling Instagram Updates | Social Media Examiner
Interesting reads (weekly)
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Brands Are Wasting Money on Facebook and Twitter – WSJ
“top brands’ Facebook and Twitter posts only reach around 2% of their fans and followers, and less than 0.1% of fans and followers actually interact with each post on average. What’s more, Facebook announced last week that another tweak to its news feed algorithm will soon make it even less likely brands’ unpaid posts will actually be seen by users.”
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Why podcasts are suddenly “back” – Marco.org
“Almost every time I’ve talked to a reporter has gone this way: they had already decided the narrative beforehand. I’m never being asked for information — I’m being used for quotes to back up their predetermined story, regardless of whether it’s true. (Consider this when you read the news.) Misquotes usually aren’t mistakes — they’re edited, consciously or not, to say what the reporter needs them to say.”
Six thoughts on emerging opportunities for journalism
Attending the Society of Editors* conference on November 10 and 11 meant a trip back to my old stamping ground of Southampton. I spent several years there in the ’90s with the Southern Daily Echo (editor Ian Murray completed his term as SoE president this month) and it was good to go back – not least to see how much the city has prospered since my last visit.
The conference had some excellent sessions – I particularly enjoyed the Full Steam Ahead panel, the Continuous Development panel on training, and the New Threats to the Media debate, with a special nod to Matthias Spielkamp, of iRights.info for his insightful view of journalists’ needs to protect processes, not just sources. The links above go to the SoE summaries of each debate but the Daily Echo also undertook a commitment of covering the conference live. Respect.
I was invited to take part in a panel on Emerging Opportunities for Journalism with my fellow panellists being Kathryn Geels, of innovation charity Nesta, and Peter Jukes, whose account of crowdfunding to live tweet the hacking trial was fascinating. At the end of the session it did feel a little as though digital journalism was still viewed as the freeloading cousin of the more solvent print product by some, although I don’t think it’s hard to find value in engaging audiences, getting social media right, and concentrating on dwell times and user needs rather than page views.
I have a bit more room to explain my ideas on this blog and, obviously, I work in regional legacy media so my view is slanted towards that segment of the industry. However, everything I talked about at the SoE is already being done by other companies – some are recognisably in the content creation business, others perhaps not so much – and they are making money. These are emerged opportunities but parts of the mainstream have’t cottoned on to that yet. So, these were the themes I chose to talk about:
1. Data and the roles of journalist/developer: Twenty years ago, I would go on a job with a photographer and between us we would tell the story using our own choice of media, which were blended to enhance reader experience. A posh way of saying, I did words, the toggie did pix, and the end result was a content package that was greater than the sum of its parts. In Trinity Mirror we have the data unit, where facts, figures and whole paragraphs of exposition are enhanced by developer coding skills to create entirely new pieces of content. Like the WWI search widget, for example. A standalone story, with data and visuals, that through existing brought in new stories as readers explored the data, discovered new things, and shared them. Of course, you can be your own developer, just as you can be your own photographers. I just think that the dynamic will see developers and reporters working closely in mainstream newsrooms in the future, just as we have always done with photographers and sub editors.
2. Mobile/wearables: From my notifications column in Tweetdeck, the most tweeted point I made as a panelist was ‘if it doesn’t work on mobile you need to ask yourself why you’re doing it at all’. The opportunities for mobile journalism are enormous – commercial developments aside (and there are so, so many) simply being able to deliver your new content into a platform that your target audience’s is already holding in their hand – (and tell them about it through some judicious notifications use) is a little mind-boggling when you stop and consider it. Apps aside, why would any media company have a news website that wasn’t responsive? It’s surprising how many do. In terms of wearables, we’ve only just reached the foothills; I’ve no time for dismissive ‘Glassholes’ chatter – if we aren’t looking at how the potential opportunities offered by these spaces now, when the audience shift happens (and, as with phones and tablets, it will be at a gallop when it does move) we won’t be there as a familiar brand to greet them. So ‘our’ audience will form new alliances with brands that did get there first. Under the innovations banner, we’ve got a Google Glass project running at the Manchester Evening News in conjunction with UCLan’s John Mills and we are already discovering wearables have advantages over handhelds for telling some stories (like the Manchester Live video linked to in point 5).
3. Socially shareable content: Just a glance at a news website’s real time anaytics shows how important the social audience is to driving traffic. The opportunities for mainstream media to create content – images, text, audio – that has a standalone life on social platforms are obvious and although I wouldn’t say this has been cracked yet I think the native advertising content being created around games and lists is a pointer A bit of a digital air plant; socially shareable standalone content should have a built-in life-support system of editorial and commercial content, and in a social media ecosystem users would interact, consume, and move through on to other points of interest on a website served up through linking and curation.
4. Immersive storytelling: I’ve seen for and against discussions on whether there’s a really life for long form online (here’s a long Twitter debate that’s worth a read). If you ask will people read 400+ words on a mobile device I’d say, on the evidence I’ve observed, you have the wrong question. As ‘how’ people will take in the information and you’re on the right track. Personally I think if they are 400+ worthwhile words, with associated multimedia, engaging graphics, interactive content and clean, easy scrolling, on an engaging subject, then yes, people will. And then there’s the immersive opportunities of long form audio storytelling – as the statistics of TAL’s Serial podcast show, for example.
5. Live and collaborative journalism: This is my favourite point, because it involves drawing people into the journalism you propose, and quite often it becomes a better – and perhaps different – thing because of that. Live invariably means more transparent – the immediate need to convey information to a waiting audience takes out the editing filter, often, and what’s comes across are pure facts or descriptions. It’s exiting and often compelling – readers stay for longer, share more, involve themselves and – particularly in the cases of regional brand liveblogs – living stories become authoritative pieces of work. Collaborative is fun to do because the crowd you work with knows so much. The Manchester Evening News ran Manchester Live for one day but the learnings it took away have been incorporated into the day-to-day fabric of the newsroom. A real case of seizing an emerging opportunity, seeing the value to an audience, and acting on the feedback.
6. Audience analytics and reader trends: None of the above points work without knowing the audience, their behaviour and the user trends. If we don’t know what our audience’s habits are, what devices they use, where, when and what information they are going to want, it’s very hard to deliver the right content. And this is a competitive market – we compete for users’ attention against other media, against their preferred music, their work, their loved ones… getting a slice of their attention is hard, and our best hope is to insert ourselves into their day at the points when they’re likely to have time to want information and entertainment. Layer real time analytics with historic data and social information, and you have a matrix to work from. Personalisation and automation of some content/content delivery are more opportunities that spin out of knowing audiences.
So that was the tone of my contribution. I tried hard to avoid jargon but when you’re talking about ‘wearables’, ‘immersive storytelling’ and ‘analytics’ it is kinda hard not to sound buzzword-y. Hopefully the message didn’t get too mangled by it though.
* A bit of disclosure: I’m a (very new) member of the Board of Directors for the Society of Editors
Bonus content: Since taking part in the panel, I’ve managed to catch Amy Webb’s immense 10 Tech Trends for Journalists slideshow, which is essential viewing in my opinion.
Interesting reads (weekly)
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Comments aren’t engagement, transparency or community — Medium
“omments do not make a community. They can help, but again, it’s about the editorial approach. Community takes a comprehensive social strategy, not just a comment box on the bottom of articles.”
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Three Truths about Social Media and Your Readers | Parse.ly
“Your audience already sends signals about their preferences; you just haven’t listened to them yet. Check out where your existing readers are coming from by looking at your social referral traffic, and determine if that says anything about them or the coverage that they’re finding on your site.
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Holding Back on Ebola: One Newspaper’s Tale of Caution – American Journalism Review
““We have been very careful to follow that maxim that we’d rather be right than first,” said David Duitch, editor of Dallasnews.com, the newspaper’s website. Caution has been a cornerstone of the company’s digital media strategy as it covered the disease in Dallas, according to Duitch and Robert Wilonsky, digital managing editor for The Dallas Morning News. The website editors opted to wait to release news developments on Ebola until they received confirmation from their own sources, even as the paper was experiencing a rapid increase in website traffic and social media followers during what became a big, fast-moving news story in their backyard.
“We understand the responsibility that comes with the digital side of things,” Wilonsky said. “Because yeah, you can go back and correct it quickly, but man, God forbid you put out one wrong tweet, one wrong fact, one wrong piece of information on a story like this. Because God forbid people stop trusting you, and when you report something really important you don’t want them to taste that grain of salt with it.””
Interesting reads (weekly)
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Minimum Viable Personal Branding for Writers and Journalists : Elizabeth Spiers
Wise words: ” think there’s a minimum amount of work you have to do to make sure that people looking to recruit you get a sense of your best work and what you’re aiming to do in the long term.”
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Fascinating read; I’m so pleased I also got to hear him speak on stage. “The biggest challenge facing newsrooms is changing the course of the Titanic. It’s turning the ship towards digital and mobile and away from print.”
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@ProfJeffJarvis: Waging a one-man war on tech media jargon
This is a Twitter account I can’t imagine ever unfollowing. A great leveller in a non-stop Echo Chamber.
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The Bad News About the News | Brookings Institution
Essay, longform
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Oh dear.
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Whisper: the facts | Technology | The Guardian
If you let a fox in the henhouse, you can’t complain when someone loses their head “The Guardian’s reporting is based on a three-day visit to the company’s Los Angeles headquarters last month, part of a trip to explore the possibility of an expanded journalistic relationship with Whisper. Two Guardian reporters were given access to Whisper’s back-end tools and spoke extensively with the company’s executives.
At no stage during the visit were the journalists (the authors of this article) told they could not report on the information shared with them.
As the reporters’ records confirm, Whisper executives spoke openly and extensively about their methods for researching the location of individual users they deemed potentially newsworthy. They said they used their in-house mapping tool to try to work out if users were who they claimed to be, and to fish for whispers being posted from potentially interesting places (like military bases or government buildings).”
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ONA14 resources: Session videos, photos, tips and takeaways – Online News Association
The how and why of Twitter lurking
It looks like there’s an interesting new paper out on social media use. I can’t be entirely sure because, y’know, academic paywalls, but when I saw this, I had to know a bit more…
I have a new article out in Journalism: ‘Tweet or be sacked’: Twitter and the new elements of journalistic practice http://t.co/zNP6WGMIGX
— Stephen Barnard (@socsavvy) October 10, 2014
The abstract is here, but on the whole it’s less exciting than the tweet: ‘TWEET OR BE SACKED’ is a good headline.
It struck a note with me as I spoke at the WAN IFRA International News Summit this week, about overcoming blockers in newsroom culture change. (My slides are at the end of this post and Julie Posetti‘s overview of the main takeaways is here)
I only touched briefly on the place social media has in changing newsroom culture, but two points seemed to strike a chord with the audience:
1. A strong social media presence for a journalist should be expected, not requested
2. Social media is our judge and jury and we should not only conduct ourselves accordingly, but be prepared for all outcomes.
With regards to point 1, the recent furore about whether NYT executives tweeted or not was valid – they should be tweeting; in my view they need to lead by example. Also if these people don’t have interesting news and views to discuss and share, the Times needs to take another look at its recruitment policy.
Point 2 was made for (hopefully) editorial leaders to take on board, because if you’re in charge of a mainstream media team you have to know what people are saying about you and your title. In fact, you should be a committed Twitter Lurker.
You might not always tweet a lot; there are times when newsroom managers would no doubt quite like to tweet about work-elated events but discretion proves the better part of valour. Nevertheless, even when you’re not active on Twitter, you should be actively consuming Twitter.
Editorial leaders really have be plugged into the conversation at a deep level, knowing what people are saying about them or their brand, and ready to respond or advise on a response, if need be.
My view is, if I heard someone in the pub sharing untrue information about a title I edited, I’d step in and correct them. It’s no different on Twitter – put people straight on inaccuracies, answer questions when they don’t expect an answer – and with a few straightforward tools you can make your brand the omnipotent voice you like to think it is.
It’s not hard to be a good Twitter Lurker, and you don’t need to be especially adept either. So, some things I’d say are useful for editorial leaders…
1. Be an admin: Your brand’s Twitter account is run by people you trust, obviously, and asking to be an admin isn’t undermining what they do. But social is a publishing platform with, ultimately, your name on the deeds if something goes terribly wrong. You should also be able to access the back end – although you may never need to. Know the Twitter login details so you can tweet as your brand if need be.
2. Put your brand’s tweets and @mentions in a Tweetdeck column, so you can see what people are responding to, or a-ing you about. Basic, but it’s very easy to quickly pick up on what story has really clicked with your audience, whether your account is more about broadcast than conversation, or how well it responds to a burgeoning Twitterstorm. A good social media editor can head a spat off with a few polite tweets and a 🙂 It’s an art form.
3. Set up and save Twitter searches around your brand, and your company. Not the @-names but the full text – ‘Nowhere Times’, not @nowwheretimes – and monitor it for conversations where you are being talked about but not talked to. I enjoy a good subtweet as much as the next person, but if you’re a councillor opting to sneakily spread misinformation, you shouldn’t get away with it. (This is the perfect riposte for a snarky mayor, btw)…
@joeforliverpool Must have missed you Joe. Been here all morning. Still here in fact. Would have been good to chat over a brew in the cafe. — James Maloney (@YouFromTheEcho) October 11, 2014
4. Use private Twitter lists. You might not want to follow people who continually talk down you/your brand, but you do want to know what they are saying about it/you. So… set up a private Twitter list (call it something really satisfying too) and add them too it. They will have no idea and you can always keep on top of their misinformation. People who call the Liverpool Echo the Oldham Echo, tend to get a tweet off me with its Old Hall Street address – anorak-y but hugely satisfying.
5. If someone does want to get into it online, ask yourself a few questions before responding. Are they simply grandstanding? (Generally, they don’t want a response, they want a reaction) What are their follower numbers like? Are they an egg? If they don’t even have an avatar, they aren’t usually that active or followed. Does their tweet make any sense or are they swearing? (I won’t talk to you on the phone if you swear at me, I’m not making an exception in digital life) Are they agent provocateurs? (if their Twitter stream comprises complaints, whinges and attacks then there’s a good chance they just enjoy annoying people)
There are, of course, lots of options for monitoring conversations – IFTTT.com is one of my favourite online helpers, and a host of new Twitter trackers have recently been created.
My WAN-IFRA slides from the Changing Newsroom Culture session
Interesting reads (weekly)
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“The research suggests that Facebook is a growing source of local news, with 27 per cent of respondents using it (versus 22 per cent in 2013) and some 11 per cent listed Twitter (versus 9 per cent a year earlier).
Local newspapers were by far the most trusted local news source in the survey.”
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Looking for the soul of journalism’s new machines at ONA 2014
“the vibe was a lot different 10, even 5 years ago — that people had big ideas and dreams about saving big journalism, that they were on the cutting edge of the movement to carry on the legacy of news in a digital world.
That didn’t exactly happen..and now we’re reduced to tweaking. People are fixated on one thing: What is the secret sauce for making your story go viral. I went to one session called “How Can I Make My Story Go Viral” and another that was called (you’ll never believe this) “You’ll Never Believe How This Story Went Viral.” There was debate over whether you’ll get more re-tweets for your story if the headline is in the form of a question or a statement. There was also speculation at more than one session whether putting the word “congratulations” in a Facebook post bumps it to the top of their news feed “
Headlines and Deadlines 