Wednesday, 26 August 2009
Michael Yon and embedded journalism
I've been looking at the end of Michael Yon's embed with the British Army in Afghanistan including the views of Michael himself and the Ministry of Defence. It's a two-parter over at the Frontline Club - Part One and Part Two.
Labels:
Afghanistan,
British Army,
embedded journalism,
Frontline Link,
Michael Yon,
MoD
Friday, 21 August 2009
Sky News journalists debate the value of Twitter
Picked this up off Twitter. A Sky News field producer (@fieldproducer) debates the value of Twitter with political correspondent, Niall Paterson. My thoughts in italics.
- fieldproducer: spoken to a lot of journalists who don't get twitter. They should read this http://tinyurl.com/kvsmr3 (via @journalistFeed)
- niallpaterson: @fieldproducer Read the twitter link you posted - what utter truistic strawman drivel! "twitter is what you make it"!!
- niallpaterson: @fieldproducer The article's author is equally guilty of the sneering of which he accuses the MSM! The evangelical zeal with which people
- niallpaterson: @fieldproducer greet every latest web 2.0 innovation is nothing new. give it a couple of mins and there'll be another emerging
- niallpaterson: @fieldproducer tech/app we'll be asked to integrate into our already busy days. christ, when did you last receive a hand-written letter? how
- niallpaterson: @fieldproducer Plus, has twitter actually made any money yet? best not to slag off the "ailing industry" when this thing isnt profitable.
- niallpaterson: @fieldproducer What % twitter accounts are currently active? of those, how many are spamming??
- fieldproducer: @niallpaterson ahh, but as journalists we have broken quite a few stories after getting leads from twitter. Profitable or not, bloody useful
- niallpaterson: @fieldproducer you make my point for me - it's just another tool. might as well evangelise about the telephone. or more approp. the internet
- niallpaterson: @fieldproducer arent profits important? they are to our employer and the vast majority of journos. and where in the article were T's faults?
- niallpaterson: @fieldproducer i'm sick of faceless webgeeks being so condescending to those who fail to share their unfettered adoration of social network
- fieldproducer: @niallpaterson but it isn't like a telephone is it? It is more like a wire feed. I don't think pofits are important to maj of journos either
- niallpaterson: @fieldproducer not talking about you there!!
- fieldproducer: @niallpaterson we should spend some of ours on a few drinks and debate this properly rather than in 140 characters!
- niallpaterson: @fieldproducer tell that to those on More4 or the londonpaper, or the 1000s of regional hacks who've lost their jobs
- fieldproducer: @niallpaterson or those at Five
- fieldproducer: @niallpaterson yeah have DM you
- niallpaterson: @fieldproducer Indeed. we're all just a bad day away from the dole.
- RT @johnny_phipps @fieldproducer Forgive me 4 putting my oar in, 2 add weight 2 ur POV, look at coverage of GMP raids by @deankirbyMEN
- fieldproducer: @niallpaterson check RT of @johnny_phipps tweet, bring it on Patterson!
- niallpaterson: @fieldproducer Interesting. a rolling tally of arrests? wow. perhaps time would be better spent crafting an easily updateable blog piece
- niallpaterson: @fieldproducer which could actually tell me what's going on... i'm being a tad facetious, but look at how many followers he has...
- niallpaterson: @fieldproducer I'm not saying twitter doesn't have its uses - just that as a journalistic tool it has a number of drawbacks
- fieldproducer: @niallpaterson irrespective of the subject matter it is a constant flow of info which you recieve passively in real time.
- niallpaterson: @fieldproducer Exactly. unverifiable, unadulturated raw data. where's the context? it's just a data dump
- fieldproducer: @niallpaterson but you are a journo your job is to take that info stand it up and put it in context.
- fieldproducer: @niallpaterson in short a journo using twitter would have the info faster than someone without.
- niallpaterson: @fieldproducer eh? HE'S the hack! This is what journalism has come to? trawling twitter feeds for tips?! i've just phoned the GMP phonebank
- niallpaterson: @fieldproducer You know, like we used to. and got twenty times as much info. verifiable info.
Or, if you work in a media organisation like Sky, you can afford to have people performing different roles. What does Sky's Twitter Correspondent do? Surely part of her role should be feeding tips to journalists from Twitter? Then the journalist can worry about following the tips up, phoning people and doing all that 'old-fashioned' stuff. Though there's nothing old-fashioned about it in my opinion.]
- fieldproducer: @niallpaterson we broke the Conrad Murray vid before anybody else, how? I saw it drop on twitter. Wires 20mins & BBC 2hrs after us.
- niallpaterson: @fieldproducer Your argument would see me spending most of my time standing up twitter tips rather than actually doing my job properly!
- niallpaterson: @fieldproducer Yep, as a source of links twitter really is useful. but didnt the person who tweeted in fact "break" the story?
- fieldproducer: @niallpaterson yes but i'm talking TV here.
- fieldproducer: @niallpaterson what do you mean standing up twitter tips rather than doing your job??Were you on the day of Speakers resignation?
- niallpaterson: @fieldproducer Ah. that old chestnut. if i read something in the papers then do a telly turn before the beeb, am i breaking it?!
- fieldproducer: @niallpaterson How do you think we got that first? you guessed it Twitter tip.
- niallpaterson @fieldproducer explain the difference between an rss feed and a twitter feed? both require you to "follow"
- niallpaterson: @fieldproducer and no - we got that story first because our corr read a report of a rumour on twitter...
- niallpaterson: @fieldproducer had he been in the HoC rather than in front of his computer, we might have had it sooner. you know, proper legwork!
- fieldproducer: @niallpaterson right let's finish this tomorrow over a pint.
- niallpaterson: @fieldproducer good idea. the one disadvantage of debating in twitter is that i can't punch you
- fieldproducer: @niallpaterson don't you'll end up like http://tinyurl.com/m795r7
- johnny_phipps: @fieldproducer @niallpaterson Your debate brings into question the value of @RuthBarnett http://bit.ly/4CcAx
Labels:
Journalism,
Sky,
SkyNews,
Twitter
Tuesday, 18 August 2009
BBC's Nic Newman: "better links within blogs amongst the most effective"
Last Friday, BBC Online conducted an open meeting about plans for the website over the coming months. The meeting was held in response to criticisms that the BBC's online services were not sufficiently open and transparent. The talks and discussion are available in a series of videos on the BBC Internet Blog.
I haven't watched them all yet, but I thought this section on the BBC's approach to external linking by Nic Newman, Controller, Journalism, FM&T*, was worth pulling out, (especially as it ties so neatly with last week's wee rant):
That sort of thing doesn't happen overnight. But the BBC has a responsibility to continue to work on the area of external linking - it's absolutely key to the BBC Trust's aim of the Corporation being 'a trusted guide to the Web'.
*That's 'Future, Media and Technology' for those outside the BBC's jargon-laden walls. Although actually I remember talking about "FM&T" to a BBC journalist who looked at me as if I was talking about a souped-up form of shortwave radio so the previous sentence might be of some use to BBC employees as well!
I haven't watched them all yet, but I thought this section on the BBC's approach to external linking by Nic Newman, Controller, Journalism, FM&T*, was worth pulling out, (especially as it ties so neatly with last week's wee rant):
"Our aim is not to link indiscriminately, but to link in line with our public purposes and editorial guidelines. So we look to add value through our links. We look to take people to content that further enriches or informs.These are steps in the right direction and I think editorial linking, rather than automated linking, is vitally important. Regular readers will know that I wrote a post about the value of link journalism a while back and as I did then, I still think more could be done which would involve some significant changes to the working practices of BBC journalists.
"We will continue to use a mixture of manual and automated methods to do so. So we've already talked about Search Plus which is part of our automated solutions but a lot of the evidence points to the focus on editorial linking as being a really important part of the mix.
"One of the most trafficked pages on the Sports site is the football transfer page and the deep editorial links that we've added here in the last few months are responsible for delivering a significant amount of that uplift that you see in the previous graph. [Showing a rise in external clickthroughs from around 8 million a month to over 12 million a month for bbc.co.uk].
"In news, the better links within [BBC] blogs, are amongst the most effective because of the editorial relevance that comes from the authorship of that (sic) blogs and the relationship that people have with that content."
That sort of thing doesn't happen overnight. But the BBC has a responsibility to continue to work on the area of external linking - it's absolutely key to the BBC Trust's aim of the Corporation being 'a trusted guide to the Web'.
*That's 'Future, Media and Technology' for those outside the BBC's jargon-laden walls. Although actually I remember talking about "FM&T" to a BBC journalist who looked at me as if I was talking about a souped-up form of shortwave radio so the previous sentence might be of some use to BBC employees as well!
Tuesday, 11 August 2009
A rant: adding value by leaving links in comments
I submitted the following comment to the Defence Management website on an article they had written about the MoD's new social media guidelines: "MoD wants personnel to use Twitter". (Something I covered here for the Frontline Club.)
I rarely promote my own blog in this way, because it takes too long. So I'm not one of those people that constantly leaves links in all sorts of random comments sections as a promotion tool.
Of course, I was hoping to push a few readers (probably one or two) my way. But apart from the fact that it's nice for me to think that a couple more people might read my work, it doesn't make much difference to me.
I don't make any money from my Frontline blog. It's not like I need readers for my share of the advertising revenue because there aren't any ads on Frontline.
(Unlike Defence Management, I note. And I wonder how much pressure they are under from their advertisers to keep people reading what their advertisers want people to read on their site and not be directed to anyone else's point of view?)
I thought this would be a neat way (rather than copying and pasting my whole post into the comments section) of letting people know of a different take on the issue at hand and letting them decide if they wanted to find out more.
In short, I thought I was doing Defence Management a favour by adding value to their content. How naive of me. I won't make that mistake again.
I mean, maybe I'm wrong and my blog post doesn't add any value to the discussion and they were right to edit me out. Or maybe my comment adds enough value without the link to my post and the extra information it provides. You can decide for yourself.
But whatever you decide, that's the last time I'll be commenting on the Defence Management website.
If I'm way off message with this, let me know in the comments or write your own post and stick a link in the comments! Is there an etiquette for promoting your own work in comments? Did I fall foul of it?
"If you read the guidelines in full you'll see that the remit for using social networks is very narrow, (which is only hinted at in this article.) They certainly don't encourage soldiers to tweet from the field or in fact say a great deal which would be of much interest without permission. I've written a blog post which includes a discussion of the excpetions at the Frontline Club which might be of interest bit.ly/4BiIS."When the comment was published a couple of hours later Defence Management chopped off the last sentence with the link to my post leaving just the following:
"If you read the guidelines in full you'll see that the remit for using social networks is very narrow, (which is only hinted at in this article.) They certainly don't encourage soldiers to tweet from the field or in fact say a great deal which would be of much interest without permission."Now, if I was a bot leaving a spam link then by all means edit out my link. But I'm not a bot.
I rarely promote my own blog in this way, because it takes too long. So I'm not one of those people that constantly leaves links in all sorts of random comments sections as a promotion tool.
Of course, I was hoping to push a few readers (probably one or two) my way. But apart from the fact that it's nice for me to think that a couple more people might read my work, it doesn't make much difference to me.
I don't make any money from my Frontline blog. It's not like I need readers for my share of the advertising revenue because there aren't any ads on Frontline.
(Unlike Defence Management, I note. And I wonder how much pressure they are under from their advertisers to keep people reading what their advertisers want people to read on their site and not be directed to anyone else's point of view?)
My main reason for adding the link on my comment was because I thought it might have been of interest to the readers of Defence Management.
I thought this would be a neat way (rather than copying and pasting my whole post into the comments section) of letting people know of a different take on the issue at hand and letting them decide if they wanted to find out more.
In short, I thought I was doing Defence Management a favour by adding value to their content. How naive of me. I won't make that mistake again.
I mean, maybe I'm wrong and my blog post doesn't add any value to the discussion and they were right to edit me out. Or maybe my comment adds enough value without the link to my post and the extra information it provides. You can decide for yourself.
But whatever you decide, that's the last time I'll be commenting on the Defence Management website.
If I'm way off message with this, let me know in the comments or write your own post and stick a link in the comments! Is there an etiquette for promoting your own work in comments? Did I fall foul of it?
Labels:
Comments,
Defence Management,
Frontline Link,
Link journalism,
linking,
Twitter
Thursday, 6 August 2009
Links for today: BBC Newsnight, Twitter and a few others
BBC Newsnight, Twitter and journalism
I couldn't possibly comment on Newsnight's interview with Twitter CEO, Evan Williams, but here's some links for those of you who are interested...
I couldn't possibly comment on Newsnight's interview with Twitter CEO, Evan Williams, but here's some links for those of you who are interested...
- 'Read it and Weep': Guardian transcript of the interview
- Shane Richmond: 'Newsnight is not a form of journalism'
- Twitter responses to the interview: loved it, embarrassing, do Newsnight understand?
- There's a lot of news from Afghanistan at the moment. Most of it far less positive than this blog post about an online journalism and blogging workshop in Helmand. Twenty-eight attendees had to share two computers but they were determined to learn new ways to make their voices heard.
- Rupert Murdoch to charge for news content online. The proprietor of the Sun noted that "quality of journalism is not cheap".
- Some have faith in the link economy.
- Others are not at all convinced by the marketplace of the 'free'.
Labels:
Afghanistan,
BBC,
blogging,
Business,
Evan Williams,
Journalism,
Newsnight,
Twitter
Monday, 3 August 2009
Social networking and the 'decline' of face-to-face communication
Archbishop Vincent Nichols is worried about the impact of social networking on community. He has many concerns but at least one which I think is slightly overblown is the alleged decline of face-to-face communication.
Whether through Facebook 'Event' groups, Tweet-ups or online dating, it seems to me that a lot of people on social networks use them to help them meet people in 'real life'.
So here's one for any historians out there. When the telephone was invented or perhaps more pertinently when it became a standard household item was there also grave concern that people would stop meeting face-t0-face?
Whether through Facebook 'Event' groups, Tweet-ups or online dating, it seems to me that a lot of people on social networks use them to help them meet people in 'real life'.
So here's one for any historians out there. When the telephone was invented or perhaps more pertinently when it became a standard household item was there also grave concern that people would stop meeting face-t0-face?
Labels:
social media,
Vincent Nichols