Category Archives: Journalism

Principles for reporters & bloggers in a networked era

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From Paul Bradshaw, Online Journalism Blog. Mr. Bradshaw’s post has lot of useful links that I did not include below.
  • To verify & contextualise what’s online
    • Because finding things to publish isn’t difficult – for anyone.
    • Because the voices that stand out online are those that dig behind the statistics, or give meaning behind the headlines.
    • Because curating context is as important as curating content.
  • To digitise what’s not online & make it findable
    • Because in a networked world, information that’s not online is, to all intents and purposes, for most people hidden.
    • Because journalists have always sought to bring hidden information to a wider audience – but in the networked era that’s no longer a one-way process. SEO, tagging, linking and social media marketing are just as important as publishing.
    • Because online, information has a life of its own: adaptable, aggregatable, mashable.
  • To empower communities & make connections between
    • Because the web is a tool as much as a channel.
    • Because journalists have always been generalists whose strength is in making connections between diverse areas – in the networked era that role is reinvented as a connector.
    • Because serving communities sometimes means looking out as much as looking in.

Truth 2.0

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Arianna Huffington makes some predictions of what comes next for the Internet and I sure hope she’s right. A few excerpts:

  • “An online tool that makes it possible to instantly fact-check a story as you are reading it — or watching it on video. Picture this: It’s last summer and you are reading or watching a story about health care, and Sarah Palin or Betsy McCaughey is prattling on about death panels. Instantly, a box pops up with the actual language from the bill or a tape rolls with a factual explanation of what the provision in question really does. And this is a non-partisan tool. So when, in the midst of the legislative debate, President Obama says “I didn’t campaign on the public option,” the software will fire up and instantly show you where support for the public option appeared in his campaign plan, and clips of all the times he mentioned it in public after he got elected.
  • A .com innovation that immediately provides a reader or viewer with the background knowledge needed to better understand the data and information being delivered as news. The powers-that-be — both political and corporate — have mastered the dark art of making information deliberately convoluted and indecipherable. For them, complexity is not a bug, it’s a feature.
  • Our future tool will also automatically simplify needlessly complicated laws, contracts, and linguistic smoke screens. So when a politician or Wall Street CEO performs the usual verbal gymnastics in an attempt to befuddle and bamboozle us, his words will immediately be translated into clear and precise language. It will be Truth 2.0.
  • In the future, software will be created that allows us to pull the curtain back on the corridors of power and see who is really pulling the levers. A great early iteration of this was provided by the Sunlight Foundation during the recent health care summit. During its live streaming of the discussion, the Foundation offered a dose of transparency by showing, as each of our elected officials was speaking, a list of his or her major campaign contributors. It was simple, powerful, and spoke volumes about the extent to which many players in the summit were bought and paid for.

I think this will happen because it can happen. I hope this scares the shit out of the politicians and power-brokers.

“Depth but no conversation”

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David Johnson (Poynter Online – E-Media Tidbits) offers some insight on how news organizations cover live events like the recent Health Care Summit:

“Big media and broadcasters can’t give lip service to social media and focus on business as usual because their audiences aren’t even listening with half an ear anymore. Instead, they’re increasingly talking amongst themselves as the tools for conversation and interaction become commonplace and easier to use. (And that audience is having a conversation that may be painful for traditional news directors and producers to hear.)

Speaking as a long-time radio guy, we always thought a wall-to-wall live audio feed was as good as it could get. My god, you got to listen to the entire debate/press conference/trial/etc live! What more could you want?

We’ll, “the people formerly known as the audience” want a lot more.

The New News Audience

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No big surprises in this report from Pew. I found slide #8 interesting. Shows % of Americans who “regularly” go to news by source:

  • Local TV – down 25%
  • Natl TV news – down 52%
  • Cable News – up 18%
  • Newspapers – down 41%
  • Radio – down 27%
  • Online News – up 1,850%

And one slide tells us 29% of mobile phone owners have gotten some kind of news on their phone.

“Digital-age monks illuminating manuscripts”

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From an op-ed piece on NYTimes.com, by Sheelah Kolhatkar:

“You can tell when a print journalist has lost his full-time job because of the digital markings that suddenly appear, like the tail of a fading comet. First, he joins Facebook. A Gmail address is promptly obtained. The Twitter account comes next, followed by the inevitable blog. Throw in a LinkedIn profile for good measure. This online coming-out is the first step in a daunting, and economically discouraging, transformation: from a member of a large institution to a would-be Internet “brand.”

“While most people are worried about getting paid for their work, I’m more concerned that journalists might be the digital-age equivalent of monks illuminating manuscripts, a group whose skills will soon disappear.”

I feel bad for anyone that has lost a job, but can’t help wondering why the reporter in this piece didn’t already have the online presence. It’s like going camping without a flashlight.