Digital Media and Reporting Conflict: The book and the end of Mediating Conflict

This blog has been dormant for a while and the publication of Digital Media and Reporting Conflict: Blogging and the BBC's Coverage of War and Terrorism is the right time to formally close it.

It's been an amazing journey over the last five years or so and I've really enjoyed working on the project, working with people at the BBC and meeting people throughout the media industry.

I'd like to thank all the people who made this book possible - my family, my friends, my PhD supervisor at King's College London, everybody at the BBC who gave up their time to participate, the Frontline Club and the countless people I interacted with online.

When I decide to do something I put everything into it. I hope the book testifies to the high standards and hard work that I tried to bring to it.

But perhaps more than that I hope the book and the hundreds of blog posts I wrote continue to be a useful resource for students of warfare, media, journalism and the BBC.

I took most pleasure from knowing that other people found my work useful and that it contributed in a small way to public understanding of the changing nature of reporting war and terrorism.

Achievements come at a cost and over the last couple of years in particular I invested a lot of myself, my time, my financial and physical resources into seeing the book through.

I also spent a lot of time banging at academic doors that I found were closed to me or only open if I was willing to work for free which I sustained for far longer than I should have done.

In hindsight, all this effort was too much and I really burnt myself - not giving up is a great strength and a terrible weakness. I think it's a sacrifice I am only willing to make again in a different context.

A wise man once said that you have to give up your life in order to save it. And it's time to leave a road which had become intolerably tough and start something new.

I'm not entirely sure what that looks like yet but I have long been involved in Christian ministry and I'm pretty sure it involves achieving a lot less and loving other people a lot more. In the meantime, I need to rest, heal and rebuild my strength.

For those of you who want to remain in touch my current email address is mail-AT-dsbennett.co.uk.

Research: A Twitter Revolution in Breaking News

Abstract

Twitter facilitates the spread of news and information enabling individuals to combat censorship and undermine the stranglehold of state-controlled media. It is undoubtedly playing a significant role in a rapidly evolving digital media landscape and 21st century politics. But journalists’ dubbing of the events in Moldova, Iran, Tunisia and Egypt as “Twitter revolutions” is perhaps more reflective of the experience of their own changing working practices than the politics on the ground. It points to a Twitter revolution occurring in the newsrooms of media organisations, evident in the increasing importance of Twitter for journalists covering breaking news stories.

The Paper

Available here to download from the Social Science Research Network.

Citation

Bennett, D., 'A Twitter Revolution in Breaking News' in Keeble, R. & J. Mair (eds.), Face the Future: Tools for the Modern Media Age, (Abramis, 2011), pp. 63-73.

Research: "A Gay Girl in Damascus", the Mirage of the "Authentic Voice" and the Future of Journalism

Abstract

In the 21st century journalists are making judgements, usually at speed, about whether to trust the identity of a “real” person through their “virtual” representation. 

In order to maintain their cultural dominance over the representation of reality and their role in making sense of the world, journalists and news organisations have thus far reiterated their commitment to traditional practices of fact-checking and verification.

This article demonstrates, however, that traditional journalistic practice was not sufficient to spot the Gay Girl in Damascus hoax - a fake blog set up in Syria during the 'Arab Spring'. Instead, it was the adoption of a networked approach to journalism that ultimately uncovered the author, Tom MacMaster.

The article shows that increasingly, understanding and representing reality requires a “mutualistic interaction” between traditional news organisations and the new models of journalism, enabling us to identify, hear and amplify the “authentic voices” calling for political and social change around the world.

The Paper 

Available here to download from the Social Science Research Network. 

Citation

Bennett, D., 'A "Gay Girl in Damascus", the Mirage of the "Authentic Voice" and the Future of Journalism' in Keeble, R. & J. Mair (eds.), Mirage in the Desert? Reporting the Arab Spring, (Abramis, 2011), pp. 187-195.

Insight 2.0: The Future of Social Media Analysis

Just a note to say I'm looking forward to taking part in this event on 27 April looking at the future of social media analysis. 

There are some great speakers including Kevin Anderson, Pippa Norris, Alberto Nardelli, Simon Collister etc etc...it's well worth checking out the programme. 

I'll be moderating the first panel in my role as "independent social media expert" - a title I wouldn't give to myself but I suppose "done a bit of research about blogging and social media" isn't the way to sell yourself. 

If you're interested in coming along, there are still tickets available and they are very affordable (for those of you who are worried about budgeting for that 20% increase in the price of pasties.)

If you're affiliated to a university there is a special rate of £37 which you can snap up by emailing info@zero1events.com for a discount code.   

A heady brew

I like this line in 'What is News' by Harcup and O'Neill on the makings of a good newspaper story:

"...our findings...suggest that certain combinations of news values appear almost to guarantee coverage in the press. 

"For example, a story with a good picture or picture opportunity combined with any reference to an A-list celebrity, royalty, sex, TV or a cuddly animal appears to make a heady brew that news editors find almost impossible to resist." 

10 research articles on blogging, Twitter, UGC and journalism 2010-1

So I'm doing my viva examination for the PhD later this month - nothing like a couple of hours worth of questioning as reward for several years hard work.

In preparation for the impending engagement, I'm trying to get a handle on the latest research around blogging and related subjects. And I thought I'd collect them here for those of you who are interested...

(Afraid these are all institutional or Athens-type log-in access only...which forms part of the complaint about academic publishers in this recent article in The Guardian.)

1. D. Murthy, Twitter: Microphone for the Masses? Media, Culture and Society, 2011

"Twittering citizen journalists are ephemeral, vanishing after their 15 minutes in the limelight. In most instances, they are left unpaid and unknown. Although individual citizenjournalists usually remain unknown, Twitter has gained prominence as a powerful media outlet...It is from this perspective that Twitter affords citizen journalists the possibility to break profound news stories to a global public."

2. M. El-Nawahy & S. Khamis, Political Blogging and (Re) Envisioning the Virtual Public Sphere: Muslim— Christian Discourses in Two Egyptian Blogs, Int. Journal of Press/Politics, 2011

"Our analysis showed that although there was a genuine Habermasian public sphere reflected in some of the threads on the two blogs, there was a general lack of rational— critical debates, reciprocal deliberations, and communicative action as envisioned by Habermas. It also showed that this newly (re)envisioned virtual public sphere aimed to revitalize civil society, through broadening the base of popular participation, which in turn led to boosting and expanding the concept of citizen journalism, beyond the official sphere of mainstream media."

3. S. Steensen, Online Journalism and the Promises of New Technology, Journalism Studies, 2011

Useful survey of current research into hypertext, interactivity and multimedia.

4. A.M. Jonsson & H. Ornebring, User-Generated Content and the News, Journalism Practice, 2011

"Our results show that users are mostly empowered to create popular culture-oriented content and personal/everyday life-oriented content rather than news/informational content. Direct user involvement in news production is minimal. There is a clear political economy of UGC: UGC provision in mainstream media to a great extent addresses users-as-consumers and is part of a context of consumption."

5. Williams et al, Have they got news for us?, Journalism Practice, 2011

"Our data suggest that, with the exception of some marginal collaborative projects, rather than changing the way most news journalists at the BBC work, audience material is firmly embedded within the long-standing routines of traditional journalism practice."

6. A. Hermida, Twittering the News, Journalism Practice, 2010

"Traditional journalism defines fact as information and quotes from official sources, which have been identified as forming the vast majority of news and information content. This model of news is in flux, however, as new social media technologies such as Twitter facilitate the instant, online dissemination of short fragments of information from a variety of official and unofficial sources."

7. C. Neuberger & C. Nuernbergk, Competition, Complementarity or Integration?, Journalism Practice, 2010

"At first glance, three different relations can be identified between professional and participatory media: competition, complementarity and integration. We found little evidence that weblogs or other forms of participatory media are replacing traditional forms of journalism. It seems to be more likely that they complement one another. Besides this, we observed that the integration of audience participation platforms into news websites is expansive."

8. G. Walejko & T. Ksiazek, Blogging from the Niches, Journalism Studies, 2010

"Results indicate that science bloggers often link to blogs and the online articles of traditional news media, similar to political bloggers writing about the same topics. Science bloggers also link heavily to academic and non-profit sources, differing from political bloggers in this study as well as previous research."

9.  A. Kuntsman, Webs of hate in diasporic cyberspaces: the Gaza War in the Russian-language blogosphere, Media, War and Conflict, 2010

"This article looks at ways in which a military conflict can produce circuits of hatred in online social spaces. Ethnographically, the article is based on the analysis of selected discussions of Israeli warfare in Gaza in 2008 and 2009 as they took place in the Russian-language networked blogosphere."

10. T. Johnson & B. Kaye, Believing the Blogs of War?, Media, War and Conflict, 2010

"This study surveyed those who used blogs for information about the war in Iraq...In both 2003 and 2007, blog users judged blogs as more credible sources for war news than traditional media and their online counterparts. This study also found that different types of blogs were rated differently in terms of credibility in 2007 with military and war blogs rated the most credible and media blogs being judged the lowest in credibility."

Let me know if you spot any good ones I've missed out...

Journalism students use social media but not to produce "news-like content"

Some interesting conclusions from research into the use of social media by 105 New Zealand journalism students in April 2010.  

• "In general we concluded from these data that our students are accomplished users of social networking and sharing content with their online friends and acquaintances; however, they are less engaged with producing news-like content for an audience outside their immediate peers."

• "This cohort is not comfortable with publicly expressing themselves via Twitter, or blogs, and tends to maintain high levels of privacy in Facebook interactions; for example, being selective about who they ‘‘friend’’ on the site."

• "we also noted only a very small number are building websites, blogging or uploading multimedia content."

• "...Our final question sought responses to the idea that social media sites can be useful tools for journalists. Nearly all respondents answered positively to this question (99 responses; 94.3 per cent). The positive responses can be classified generally in terms of social media providing access to news and news-like information; providing new ways of networking and seeking contacts or sources for stories and social media providing forums for discussion of topical issues."

The paper, written by Martin Hirst and Greg Treadwell, is entitled 'Blogs Bother Me'. It's available with an Athens account or institutional log in from InformaWorld.

Latest research on blogs

Axel Bruns has been blogging about some of the latest research on blogging at the ICA conference in Singapore.

1. The Effects of Reading Political Blogs

"The next paper in this ICA 2010 session is by Aaron Veenstra, whose interest is in the cognitive processing of blog-based information...Blog readers also do seem to have a particular understanding of how the media work (this is somewhat different from political sophistication - more a kind of media sophistication); what also needs to be examined are the effects of starting to read blogs as compared to increasing use."

2. Political Participation by Active and Passive Blog Users

"...there was a positive relationship between an active use of blogs and political participation on- and offline; there was no such correlation for passive use. (Younger people were especially active online; wealthier users offline.) Active use was also related to greater engagement with weak ties, disagreeing views, and better reasoning strategies." (Research by Sandra Hsu).

3. Personal Bloggers' Perceptions of their Audiences

"Audience relationships as expressed by the bloggers could be categorised as self-directed (writing is a goal in itself), narrowcast (speaking to known friends), dialogic (speaking with known friends), and telelogic (speaking to or with anyone reading). Self-directed bloggers in particular seemed somewhat disinterested in responses, and even felt annoyed that they would now have to respond to their readers."

I found this research by David Brake most interesting. He surveyed and interviewed 150 UK-based personal bloggers and his findings provide a useful counterweight to anybody that over-emphasises the 'interactive' nature of blogging.

The bloggers he spoke to were much less concerned with how effective their communication with their audience had been and often assumed that nobody would be reading their posts.

It appears that these bloggers use a blog as a diary whereby the blogger has some consciousness that others might be reading their posts but that this fact is incidental to the personal gain obtained from the process of writing a blog.

The latest blogging research (a little late)

There was a conference in Milwaukee recently which I feel like I should have been at. But then you can't go to everything. It was the tenth annual conference of the Association of Internet researchers, entitled Internet: Critical.

Fortunately for me, Axel Bruns, documented a number of the blogging panels and there were quite a few:

1. Bloggers and the Networked Public Sphere in Singapore, Carol Soon.

2. Political Blogging in the 2008 US Election, Aaron Veenstra.

3. Israeli and Lebanese war blogs in the 2006 Conflict, Muhammed Abdul-Mageed & Priscilla Ringrose.

4. Bloggers as Opinion Leaders in the Transformation of Israeli Politics, Carmel Vaisman.

5. Political Discourse from Truth to Truthiness, Megan Boler.

6. Blogging the Aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, Daisy Pignetti.

Future of Journalism Notes 1: Journalists' views of news practice and US Newspaper websites

This is the first in a series of catch up posts with my notes from the Future of Journalism Conference in Cardiff. Here's some of Wednesday's papers that I found interesting.

Exploring the political-economic factors of participatory journalism: A first look into self-reports by online journalists and editors in ten countries.
(Vujnovic, Singer, Paulussen, Heinonen, Reich, Quandt, Hermida, Domingo).

What are the motives of journalists and editors for using UGC and citizen journalism?

• Building a community around a newspaper.

• Citizen journalism is a necessary tool for attracting and maintaining an audience.

• 'We exist if we have a lot of hits.' There is a need to encourage users to stay on the site with a variety of features. This is a survival strategy rather than a way to foster debate.
  

• 'Everyone is doing it - we have to do it.' There's been no thought about why journalists are doing some things with the Web. This is just a case of new tools, experimentation and the fear of not being left behind by competitors.
  

The Form of Reports on U.S. Newspaper Internet Sites, An Update.
(Kevin G. Barnhurst)

Taking a long historical view, U.S. journalism has become more interpretative and less denotative. Barnhurst argues that U.S. journalists have increased their influence in the United States by taking greater control of public discussion. Barnhurst looked at the websites of the New York Times (national), Chicago Tribune (regional) and Portland Oregonian (local) comparing the 2005 results with those from 2001.

Length of Stories
Between 2001 and 2005 news has got shorter rather than getting longer for the first time since the 1950s. In 2001 only 1 story out of 8 appeared on the home page. By 2005, almost half the stories appear on the front page.

Links
Links were three quarters of a page closer to the home page in the 2005 compared to 2001. A reader required less mean clicks to reach a story. But once the reader arrives at a news story there is more scrolling and screens to get through to read it, aiding traffic stats and advertising revenue.

More images and links in 2005, but external links remain rare. Barnhurst suggested this might be due to time pressures as well as a desire to keep readers on the site.

Print vs Online content
In 2001, content online was almost identical to what was printed in the paper. In 2005, only two thirds of print and online articles were the same. There was an increase in discussion forums, chat pages, and controlled feedback forms in 2005.

Stories
Barnhurst highlighted a 'sensational drift' whereby accident stories have moved closer to the front page. Stories about politics and jobs required more clicking and scrolling.

Newswork Across Europe: Some preliminary findings
(Henrik Ornebring)

Parameters of the Study

• Feb 2007 - Feb 2010
• Compares journalistic cultures of Europe: UK, Germany, Italy, Poland, Estonia, Sweden.
  
• Investigate the emergence of a 'European' journalism.
• Is there a dominant model of journalism in Europe? What is its effect on different national cultures?
• This presentation was based on 61 semi-structured interviews with journalists (daily news production, career stage, medium type, work situation)
• Culture defined as 'working practice' - values, communication, artifacts. What you do when you work.
• Puts journalism in the changing context of work. General deregulation of labour markets, rise of flexible employment, technologisation of the workplace, changing skill demands.
• After all, journalism is just a job for a lot of people.
  

Technology has made many aspects of journalism easier

• e.g. easier to do research.
• journalists equated easier with faster. For them, it doesn't mean greater depth, or improved quality, it means they can do things quicker. (Ornebring focussed on journalists who undertake daily news production.)
  
• As the potential of instantaneous communication increases, so too does the pressure to produce content.
• Technologisation is coming from above - blogs and other innovations are inspired by editors and employers who want to do new things.
  
• Role of CMS - this is also about streamlining and standardisation. Get in this technology so you can make staff cuts.
• Young journalists expect to work for free and this acts as a sorting mechanism for the industry. Journalism culture emphasises staying at work as the norm - 'if you want to go home you shouldn't be here'.
• Freelancing - tends to be a necessity rather than a choice.
  

Skills

• Journalists say the skills required have not changed that much. First and foremost being a good journalist means being a good storyteller.

Seven fours are...

I've been transcribing a couple of research interviews over the last couple of days. Here's a classic quote from a participant who shall remain nameless:

"But again they send out four emails a day at least and they build up nicely. That’s seven fours...are 36. That’s 36 a week."

Unlikely to make it into the final cut for the PhD, but by way of background it does go some way to explaining why they're doing journalism and not helping us clamber out of the financial crisis.

(Then again, maybe it was this sort of numerical 'skill'...)

In the 'stuff I've bookmarked' section:

Twitter

• Twitter use by UK newspapers. (The Guardian leads the way.)

Blogging

• Web pioneer Marc Andreessen to fund blogging investigative journalism initiative.

Tweets of the Week (so far)

• How the sophisticated news consumer curates news and information.
  

• And this one caught my eye: "Conclusion from a chat with regional station editor: there's a lot of "pressure" for journos/editors to use twitter/social media tools..."

Frontline Club

• Catch up with my latest Frontline posts on the US Army and wikis and a different look at the recent deaths of two British soldiers in Afghanistan.
  

Realising Paul Mason's worst fears

The other day BBC journalist Paul Mason was talking about blogging at the National Union of Journalists. He still thinks the skills on offer in professional newsrooms are important to journalism in the future. And that 'pyjama bloggers' can't replicate them.

Unsurprisingly, there was some feedback to this comment. This was former colleague Kevin Anderson on Twitter:

"@craigmcginty Paul Mason using 'pyjama blogger' line? Paul embraced blogging at the BBC when I was there. Sad. No peer review in blogging?"

Paul later clarified his comments:

"Because the interview was for the union website it took a lot of things for granted. Those of you who know my work will know I am not anti-blogging: I am pro it - and I mean real blogging not the ersatz blogs the BBC lets us do. But I reject the theory that social media will simply destroy journalism; and that skill and status and above all income (!) cannot be defended in a world of easy-to-use technology. I certainly don’t dismiss bloggers. However I think their limitations are being exposed, just as journalists’ limitations are."

And indeed, Paul Mason's use of blogging to cover the G8 summit in 2005 helped people at the BBC understand how a blog could be a valuable journalistic outlet.

Today, I've been poring over blogging at the BBC in 2005 as part of a doctoral paper due to be published (if anyone fancies it) in 2010 and came across Paul's assessment of his G8 blog.

He concludes using his own emphasis:

"On that note, the blog takes a break. It will be left up here in perpetuity to be pored over by academics. Indeed I will hold a competition for a spoof doctoral media studies paper on this blog, published in 2020. Send entries in to the email address: 500 word summaries only. Soon the BBC will get its head round what to do about blogging. I hope this has helped."

So he was ten years too late but not too far wrong. Though I'm hoping my paper won't be a spoof.

Paul - Thanks for leaving it up by the way.

Research Update

My laptop's gone down.

At first I wondered whether it had been a victim of the Home Office's security machine, which I went through last week, but apparently laptops pass safely through here all the time.

So I'm not sure what caused this rather frustrating sudden loss of power, but not being able to switch the thing on is a fairly fundamental problem.

I have made a couple of (amateur) efforts to fix it. It's not the power supply or the battery. And the old favourite - unscrew everything, take it apart, fiddle, and put it together again (twice) - didn't provide a permanent solution either.

Fortunately, I managed to salvage my work before it went under.

In the meantime, I'm borrowing a friend's laptop, but it takes so much longer to do everything when you don't have your bookmarks, etc.

Research progress has slowed.

Research update

About to pack up work for the day at BBC Television Centre. So what progress today?

Well I've spoken to some BBC producers about blogging, where I did too much talking. I showed a BBC journalist delicious and they seemed keen to use it - a little bit of recompense for their time helping me.

I also went to an interesting talk by Scott Karp about Link Journalism. He has a vision of using the power of links to put news journalism at the top of the Web agenda. By harnessing the value that good journalists can add to the Web by collective and networked linking, he sees how journalists could take on Google's algorithms. Great idea but getting everyone on board might be hard work.

I've also been going through my introduction and a first chapter I've written because next Monday I get mini-vivaed - a necessary hoop to make sure the project is on the right track.

Research update

Just been talking to Robin Lustig about his World Tonight blog at Television Centre, which was all very interesting.

At the moment, I'm working on a historical chapter for the PhD about how the BBC blogs started and how they began using them for news.

Of course, the BBC doesn't presently have a blog exclusively focussed on defence or security, which would be the project ideal. But Robin's foreign affairs blog does regularly cover war and terrorism so I thought it would be worth talking to him. (It was!)

I don't post up much stuff about the interviews I do which is a bit of a shame. But I'm afraid I'm reluctant to get into the difficulties of working out what I'd be allowed to publish and what I'd not. More than anything else it would be quite time-consuming to liaise with the various parties involved and work it out.

Blog: Genre? Literary Form? Medium?

Genre?

Carolyn Miller and Dawn Shepherd in Blogging as Social Action: A Genre Analysis of the Weblog

'When a type of discourse or communicative action acquires a common name within a given context or community, that’s a good sign that it’s functioning as a genre (Miller, 1984). The weblog seems to have acquired this status very quickly, with an increasing amount of attention and commentary in the mainstream press reinforcing its status.'

Literary Form?

Kathleen Fitzpatrick quoting Himmer 2004 in The Pleasure of the Blog.

'It is, according to Himmer, the shared codes among bloggers and blog readers that result in this process of narrative completion that produces the primary experience of reading blogs, an experience that he understands as "a distinctive literary and creative mode, something richer and more nuanced than viewing it as simply the outcome of a specific toolset or formal structure allows for” (Himmer).

And, as he goes on to note, such an understanding of the "literariness" of blogs makes clear that this quality is not one "achieved by some weblogs and lacking in others.... This literary nature of the weblog is instead the loose set of shared criteria that allows us to speak of a plurality of ‘weblogs’ in the first place” (Himmer). All blogs, for Himmer, are in some sense literary, because of the nature of their readers’ interactions with them.'

Medium?

Danah Boyd in Reconstruction 6:4 (2006)

"Moving away from [a] content-focused approach...blogs must be conceptualized as both a medium and a bi-product of expression. This shift allows us to see blogs in terms of culture and practice. Furthermore, this provides a framework in which to understand how blogging has blurred the lines between orality and literacy, corporeality and spatiality, public and private."

Do bloggers think they're writing journalism?

Taken from a Pew Internet Research Project 2006, which was based on a telephone survey of American bloggers:

Only one-third of bloggers see blogging as a form of journalism. Yet many check facts and cite original sources.

• 34% of bloggers consider their blog a form of journalism, and 65% of bloggers do not.
  
• 57% of bloggers include links to original sources either “sometimes” or “often.”
  
• 56% of bloggers spend extra time trying to verify facts they want to include in a post either “sometimes” or “often.”

Today's researcher's view

Today, I'm footnoting. This doesn't make a good blog post, nor for particularly interesting post-work conversation, I might add. Instead, I offer you today's researcher's view, which isn't that much more exciting to be honest...

...but please note that the sort of cutting edge digital research I do does involve running wires into my literature, and (apparently) the use of sellotape as one half of an unusual book-holder.

White phosphorus and newsroom curmudgeons

I'm reading and writing about White Phosphorus, it's use by the US Army in Iraq and media coverage of it with special focus on blogging, of course, in November 2005.

In short, the episode was a major embarrassment for the mainstream media.* Beaten to the story, the mainstream media then made things worse by describing what amounted to some impressive investigative journalism as 'rumours' 'surfacing on the Internet'.

Indeed, as yet, I haven't found a British mainstream media article that actually mentions Mark Kraft by name - the guy who discovered an article in a military magazine that nailed the story.

This sort of stuff annoys bloggers, as you might imagine. In fact, it would annoy anyone regardless of whether they happened to blog about it or not.

Hopefully, I'll have some time to write a linked commentary at a later date, though if you really can't wait, you can browse my delicious links on the subject.

In the meantime, I'd recommend reading Jeff Jarvis on 'newsroom curmudgeons', which shows that some journalists haven't learnt from this and other episodes in the last few years.

*The 'mainstream media' is a term which is becoming increasingly meaningless as this article demonstrates, but you get my drift for the moment at least.

This is why there's only been one post this week

I'm redrafting, hacking, editing, chopping, adding, polishing and footnoting a couple of chapters of the thesis at the moment so blogging has been sucked into this all-consuming black hole for the time-being.