Armed With Smartphones, Russians Expose Political Abuses

From the New York Times...

"Violations of Russia’s elections rules have typically gone unnoticed, but now Russians armed with smartphones and digital cameras are posting videos of the abuses online." 

The article also notes that Russian bloggers are influencing Google's search results (though just how often is "occasionally"?):

"A slogan adopted by bloggers describing United Russia as “the party of swindlers and thieves” has become such a prominent Internet meme that it occasionally appears as a top hit when Googling the party’s name."

The Future of International Broadcasting

The BBC's Director of Global News (far left of panel) discusses the Future of International Broadcasting at Reuters yesterday.

Laura Oliver, who was sitting a few rows behind me, has a good summary of what Richard Sambrook said at journalism.co.uk. Well worth a read for his thoughts on the end of the old foreign correspondent model in the face of economic pressures.

While he urged broadcasters to "embrace" UGC as a "valuable supplement" and a way of capturing the "authenticity" of news events, he also said the "expertise of seasoned journalists" was still required.

Generally, the panel was optimistic about the future, expressing particular confidence in state funding and pledging to continue to send journalists to all parts of the world.

Bits and pieces on blogging and journalism

• Blogger cleared of misleading South Koreans on the state of the economy. Funnily enough it turned out that Park Dae-Sung's ("Minerva") exaggerated claims of financial turmoil weren't that exaggerated after all.

• Tracing how journalism is changing. Charlie Beckett highlights some useful literature on the history of journalism by Terhi Rantanen.

• BBC online journalist Adam Blenford on the G20 photographers and the blurring of amateur and professional photojournalism.

• Jeremy Bowen, the BBC's Middle East Editor, breached the BBC's guidelines on impartiality according to the BBC Trust in an online article on the 1967 Six Day War. Robert Fisk's typically belligerent commentary defending Bowen is also worth a read.

Future of the newsroom - giant screens showing Twitscoop

If you go into any newsroom you'll see TVs. I'm told these are not merely there for journalists who want to sneakily catch up on the cricket at the lunchtime, but so the newsroom can monitor breaking news and their rivals' output.

Obviously these TVs are still useful for doing the latter, but for the former surely Twitter or a place like Twitscoop is the place to be.

How long will it be before someone rigs up a giant screen in a newsroom with Twitscoop on it? Or perhaps even better, why not plug Twitscoop into Tweetdeck and then set up several other feeds searching for the top stories of the day and stick all that on your giant screen? (You may wish to use several smaller screens depending on the layout of your office and available resources.)

That way the whole newsroom can monitor breaking news at a glance. We all know that for certain stories - like earthquakes - Twitter is faster and it's a great citizen journalism/crowdsourced supplement to the press wires.

I would get that done as a matter of urgency if I was in charge of a newsroom. But I'm not.

Links for today: New media - challenges, changes, clashes and toilet doors

• More pessimism at the Telegraph and other newsrooms about the new media world. Several emailers to Roy Greenslade argue that fewer jobs mean fewer facts.

• A blogger at The Scotsman is fired for letting slip that (shock, horror) advertising is moving online.

• A New York University journalism student is told to stop twittering and blogging about her "Reporting Gen Y" student journalism course. (Don't want these adventurous students actually using the tools, after all. At least not yet.)

• 'Blogs no match for old-fashioned ad-funded investigative journalism'. Apparently.
  

"I was taken by an expression used in an editorial in The Australian a month or so ago that observed that blogging had all the intellectual value of graffiti on a toilet door.....I accept that some blogs have value and potency -- remember the Baghdad blogger Salam Pax during the early days of the Iraq war? -- but I cannot see how blogging does much other than add a forum for discussion to newspaper sites."

(Feel very slightly offended by my blog being compared to graffiti on a toilet door. But comforting myself with the knowledge that it does depend on the toilet door and who's writing on it. I remember reading some interesting comments on the doors of the Bodleian library toilets...though admit I can't recollect any of them now.)

• Check out the state of the blogosphere with Technorati's annual report. It documents the estimated number of toilet doors in the blogopshere, how often bloggers use their spray cans etc

Citizen journalism?

Terence Eden uses Qik, a video-streaming website, to film being stopped and searched under the Terrorism Act at Waterloo station. He has a blog post about his film here.

Picked up via Joanna Geary.

The definition of citizen journalism considered (ignore my previous post!)

"When the people formerly known as the audience employ the press tools they have in their possession to inform one another, that’s citizen journalism."

This is Jay Rosen's definition of citizen journalism. Obviously this is a pretty good effort and defining something in one sentence is nigh on impossible in any case, but here are some thoughts.

The problem I have is with its non-recognition of the nature of news and journalism. 'Journalism' itself is very difficult to define and is changing radically at the moment, but I think the fact that journalism is about the publication of information to many rather than to just one person needs to be emphasised. ((This may be covered by the definition above if you narrowly define 'press tools' merely as tools of publication but I'm not convinced this was what was meant (surely you must include the mobile phone, handheld camera etc) so I'll carry on...))

Now, how many people you need (10, 100, 1,000, 100,000?) to inform in order for something to be 'published' and become journalism is an interesting question. But what I would say is this: If I (a person formerly part of the audience) pick up my mobile phone (a press tool) and call a friend to say 'hi, I'm eating lunch' (informing him of something), this is not journalism, (let alone citizen journalism).

This is why citizen journalism is a digitally-based phenomenon because it allows for simple one to many publication. Consider the difference between these examples:

• I pick up my phone and take a photo of a road traffic accident and show my friend. This is not journalism.

• I pick up my phone and take a photo of a road traffic accident and upload it to Internet photo-sharing site Flickr where it is published. It may only be looked at by my friend but it has the potential to be viewed by many. This is more like journalism.

But 'journalism' also relates to the subject matter. In this case the picture of the road traffic accident might be newsworthy - (another difficult concept to define and currently undergoing significant change but best explained by example). The accident might have been caused by a drink-driver who's killed a passenger in another car. This is a local news story, raising issues about road safety, and drink-driving legislation. There will also be a court case to cover etc.

Would it be journalism if I took a picture of a daffodil in my garden and posted it on Flickr. This may be informative and interesting (somehow) but is it journalism? I don't think so. Now people's definitions of a newsworthy event change and alter, and I'm certain that 'the citizen journalism' phenomenon has vastly broadened the definition of a 'newsworthy event' (for the better), but I still think the concept of 'news' is different from 'information'.

Merely informing one another is not journalism. This happens all the time. Teachers inform children in classes all the time, but this isn't journalism is it?

So what of Jay Rosen's definition? I think it might be worth adding emphasis on publication by including the word 'many' and also sticking in the phrase 'an event deemed to be newsworthy' or for brevity just 'a newsworthy event'. Here's my stab at it:

"When the people formerly known as the audience employ the press tools they have in their possession to inform many others of a newsworthy event, that’s citizen journalism."

I'm sure there will be further thoughts...

Updated: 18/07/08

• Dr Andrew Cline at Missouri State University has a think about the 'tools' aspect of the definition.
  
• And if you haven't had a look already from the link at the top of page, Jay Rosen does a great job of collecting other bits and pieces that are relevant to his post.

Updated 23/07/08

• Global Voices take up the challenge too.
  

Arianna Huffington at the BBC

Earlier today I went to see Arianna Huffington speak at an event for BBC journalists at Television Centre. She's the founder of the Huffington Post - liberal US blogs website-cum-Internet Newspaper.

I've written about the war reporting aspect over at the Frontline Club which you can go to now by clicking here.

But below I thought I'd stick some other thoughts up on the virtual paper.

1. A few facts about the Huffington Post:

• 2,000 plus bloggers, who aren't paid. (Nor are 'the citizen journalists')
• Last month the site had 600,000 comments
• Arianna reckons it takes 3 minutes for a mistake by a blogger to be corrected
• 55 people on staff
• 30 people who work part time moderating comments (how many of the 600,000 do they get through?)
• Funded by advertising
• Planning to expand locally and globally

2. Arianna started the website after seeing the way in which bloggers forced Trent Lott to resign as a Senator after he made racist comments at a birthday party way back in 2002. She recognised this as a major new development and wanted to be a part of it.

3. She said the Huffington Post believes in a "very old-fashioned and idealistic" form of journalism, emphasising the importance of establishing the facts, "ferreting out the truth", and presenting a clear distinction between news and opinion.

4. Giving two sides of a story equal weight wasn't something Arianna was keen on if one side had a better case. But importantly nor was she advocating a move towards an entirely partisan media and highlighted the necessity of considering different points of view and reporting news that questioned 'your side' of the story.

As the chair of proceedings pointed out, this is a challenge to BBC journalists who are trained in the principal of impartiality. Though I think it's time to move beyond the 'one side against the other' definition of impartiality and consider how impartiality is enhanced by blogs as they provide a space for a multiplicity of views and angles on a story.

5. Addressing a concern about amateur journalism, Arianna felt there's an exciting future ahead for journalism that combines the skills of trained journalists and the advantages of using 'citizen journalists' - particularly their ability to access places that trained journalists for whatever reason cannot reach.

6. There was an interesting discussion about 'off the record' conversations. This was in reference to the actions of Mayhill Fowler who broke this story about Bill Clinton recently. Some journalists felt this 61 year old 'citizen journalist', who was acting on behalf of the Huffington Post, had broken some journalistic rules by not telling Bill Clinton who she was before she published the former President's diatribe about a Vanity Fair article.

Arianna thought Fowler should have introduced herself but maintained that the exchange happened in public and should therefore be deemed 'on-the-record' in any case. She did not rule out using 'off-the-record' conversations but was concerned about the use of anonymous sources in the media.

7. And as a final thought - it may have started as a group of blogs but isn't the Huffington Post already part of the mainstream media? It's now styled as an 'Internet Newspaper' after all with a full time staff. Oppositional definitions of 'blogs', and 'mainstream media' will have to be reconsidered (if they haven't already).

Links to other coverage:

• Robin Hamman claims the first blog post on the event and now has other links too. Also you can check out his photos here.
• The result of Rory Cellan-Jones's arm-ache inducing video coverage is here.
• Richard Sambrook's not convinced about the Huffington Post's plans for global expansion

Citizen journalists, transparency and openness

New school vs old school: a debate between blogging evangelist, Jeff Jarvis and Guardian America Editor, Michael Tomasky.

Chinese 'citizen journalist' killed

A Chinese man who tried to film a protest on his mobile phone was killed by a city official on Monday.

Wei Wenhua, 41, was beaten to death as he filmed a confrontation between officials and villagers in the province of Hubei.

The villagers were complaining about waste being dumped near their homes.

The killing has caused outrage in China's online community and Qi Zhengjun, chief of the administration bureau at Tianmen has already lost his job over the incident. For more see CNN and Global Voices.

Reorganising the BBC Newsroom

On the BBC Editors blog Peter Horrocks, Head of BBC Newsroom, asks this question:

"Text messages and e-mails from our audiences have brought a valuable additional aspect to our journalism. But how much attention should we pay to people who care strongly enough about an issue to send a message? They might either be typical of a wide part of the audience or perhaps just a tiny vocal minority."

And he talks a lot of sense in answering it.

One of the issues Peter Horrocks discusses is the structural and physical reorganisation of the newsroom. I think this is necessary if the BBC wants to get the best out of user-generated content.

There is already a system to feed UGC to the website, TV and radio. Peter Horrocks mentions that Paul Wood, then Defence Correspondent, picked up a story about poor living conditions for members of the armed forces from photos that were sent in from soldiers' families.

But I think the fact that most of the Online team are currently on the 7th Floor of Television Centre, a long way from the main TV and radio news hubs must mean that some potential follow up stories are missed, and that journalists are not always aware of what is going on in other departments.

One BBC correspondent I spoke, for example, seemed to be unaware that the BBC website already has editors publishing round ups of the best blogs on certain international affairs such as Iraq and more recently Kenya.

I would suggest that the reorganisation of the newsroom might give BBC journalists a greater awareness of the potential value of citizen journalism and that, at worst, the content the audience produces would be very useful to them as background information.

The key journalistic and technological challenge will be sifting through the ever-increasing haystack of thoughts, pictures and videos that are sent in to the BBC in order to find the hard needle of a journalistic story.