How the BBC challenges censorship in Iran and China

There was an interesting article in The Guardian a few days ago documenting how the BBC is combating censorship in Iran and China using social media (and some good old-fashioned journalism).

At a South by Southwest festival panel, Sanam Dolatshahi, producer and presenter with BBC Persian TV, described an information struggle with the Iranian regime: "they would jam our footage and show their own version of events – using the same UGC, but to tell a different story, a different version of events. They would also try to make us broadcast wrong stuff so that we would lose our credibility."

She suggested that even more emphasis was subsequently placed on "verification and cross-checking of our sources."

Meanwhile, the head of BBC China, Raymond Li, said he uses microblogging websites to publish material. He finds that regulation is less prohibitive on these sites and he can outwit state censors. But he said it required no little skill and plenty of care.

Iran has a history of jamming BBC Persian TV satellites, while China blocks the BBC website every now and then. Like in 1998 or in 2010. 

Live blogging at The Guardian

I've been away for a while but I'm back. I've been writing a few bits and pieces at the Frontline Club on Twitter, and Egypt and revolutions and the like, which you might like to check out if you haven't already.

Martin Belam has been writing some really interesting posts on blogging and liveblogging at The Guardian which I wanted to collect here on the blog.

1.  When did the word "weblog" first appear in The Guardian? (I reckon the first BBC appearance is June 1999, though if you find an earlier one, then let me know).

2. "Blogging at the Guardian" - Notes on a talk by Matt Wells

3. "Live blogging at the Guardian" - Notes on a talk by Andrew Sparrow

4. Is Guardian live blogging really the "death of journalism"?

And then there's also a piece by Kevin Anderson, former Guardian journalist (among other things), who argues that live bloggers should add context and curate rather than simply collecting a mass of material.

Update: And another. From Adam Tinworth who takes the opportunity to have a prod at 'second stage shovelware' where journalists have "accepted that internet is a viable medium of first publication", but are "still using nothing but print formats". 

A live-blog: not a "finished product" but still a product

Adam Tinworth wrote a blog post in reply to my post yesterday about liveblogging.

I hope he won't mind me copying his post in full because it will make more sense and I think there are some interesting avenues of discussion which hadn't at all crossed my mind when I wrote my post:

"Daniel Bennet's posted some thoughts about the art of liveblogging. It's an interesting read but I would like to suggest that there's a false underlying assumption in the post. He seems to be assuming that a liveblog is, once the event is done, a finished product. And in my experience as a liveblogger, that not how it actually functions.

It's pretty rare that a live-blogger is the only source of coverage. When I'm live-blogging a conference, I'm usually part of an ecosystem of bloggers, both live and analytical, people who are tweeting what's being said, Twitter discussions, and then analytical posts that follow on from the liveblog. But that requires a viewpoint that sees all the coverage, not just the coverage on your own site. And not just that that appears on your own site. This is a viewpoint many in the traditional media seems to struggle to adapt to. :-)

In essence, a liveblog is not a finished product - it's the first step towards a record of the event, part of a large pool of raw material that will be collated, aggregated and analysed after the event.

It's all about the ecosystem..."

Earlier I commented on his blog in reply. But as he pointed out it might be better as a blog post so this is it:

"I have to admit I wasn't really thinking about the overall coverage of the event when I wrote the post, although it's probably a more interesting angle(!) and it certainly leads on from what I was saying.

I was rather narrowly looking at live-blogging from the perspective of somebody updating a blog and the challenges of doing the best job that they can. Which I think is still worth thinking about. Even if you are right to point out that a live-blogger is often one of many offering a raw representation of an event, surely, the eco-system will only benefit from some reflexive practice?

And, (although again I'm afraid I can't claim to have been thinking this at the time), I'd like to suggest that you could have used my paragraph about having more than one person to do a live-blog as evidence of an underlying assumption that coverage of an event is better as part of the ecosystem you discuss!

I don't think I was assuming that a live-blog is a "finished" product, but I think I was assuming that it is nevertheless a product.

If we look at things from The Guardian's point of view, surely they have to view a live-blog as a product (even if it's unfinished and part of a much wider record of events). Ideally, The Guardian needs people to turn to the rest of the ecosystem after they've read their live-blog or if they start elsewhere in the ecosystem subsequently come back to and hopefully stick with their live-blog.

Indeed, part of the aim of a Guardian live-blog is collating the ecosystem, (or at least creating the illusion of collating the ecosystem), as a response to the challenge that the ecosystem represents to their coverage of news and events. This also improves The Guardian's product.

So commercially, I think they do have to try to produce a live-blog as a quality product in order to be a key player in the ecosystem. Which is perhaps why it might be worth reflecting on how their live-blogs could be improved. Otherwise they risk becoming just a part of the rest of the ecosystem.

But I ramble on...I'll leave some space to the ecosystem :)

Random quote on rolling news

"When you stand at a distance and survey this level of nitpicking idiocy,
taking in the full landscape of stupidity and meaningless analysis,
it's hard not to conclude that 24-hour rolling news is the
worst thing to befall humankind since the Manhattan Project."

Charlie Brooker, Comment is Free, The Guardian

When is a 'unique' visitor, unique?

Jemima Kiss at The Guardian has sparked off a sharp little debate about website visitor numbers and the popularity of political blogs.

She claims that Guido Fawkes and Iain Dale, two of the more popular political bloggers in the UK, have inflated the number of visitors they get to their websites by inadvertently misrepresenting their 'unique visitor' statistics.

Both Guido Fawkes and Iain Dale appear in the comments section denying the allegation.

I disagree with Derek Wyatt MP

There's no doubting Derek Wyatt's credentials as a commentator on the new media landscape. But that doesn't mean we have to agree with him.

In a letter published in The Guardian today he says the BBC has followed, and not led, new media developments. Pointing to the success of other projects such as Google, Napster, and the iPod, he asks rhetorically what the BBC has added to the cultural space in the last ten years.

It's possible, of course, his letter may have been edited, but it seems odd that he doesn't mention the BBC's website which is widely recognised as one of the best in the business. BBC.co.uk has around 16 million users in the UK, over 3 billion page impressions a month and had the third biggest reach for any UK website in March 2007 (Google 1st, MSN 2nd).

In some areas the BBC has been relatively slow in embracing the new media world, but it's easy to underestimate the technological and cultural challenge of adapting such a large organisation to the demands of the 21st Century. And one can hardly blame the BBC for the bright ideas of other enterprising individuals. The Internet space has, after all, expanded the potential for cultural exchange and innovation extraordinarily.

Whatever the success of the BBC Micro computer and Ceefax, I'm not convinced that the BBC should be held to account for a failure to invent things. Technological innovation is not the BBC's primary role. Wyatt lists new media inventions with consequences for BBC journalists. And if you want to criticise the BBC, you could argue that they haven't grasped these consequences as quickly as they might. But the organisation didn't invent the radio, the television, the satellite or the Internet, (to name but a few) so I don't see why they should be inventing the iPod, or Google, or Facebook or...

(It's not as if other 'big media' organisations are doing a better job of innovating: MySpace was created by a company called eUniverse; Wikipedia by Bomis Inc.; YouTube by three former paypal employees; Google by two PhD students; Facebook, by a Harvard student; and Napster by a student in Boston.)

UPDATE: At least a couple of others had similar thoughts.