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.

Drone Journalism in the UK?

This blog started its life as a way of documenting my PhD project which is now long since finished.

I thought I might know by now what this blog is becoming - if anything - but I'm afraid I'm not quite there yet.

Which means the blog has kind of lost it's raison d'être ...and without that there's not a lot to be said by it or for it.

There are a few potential projects in the pipeline which might give it a new direction and hopefully next time you stop by, there might be something more - I'll keep you posted.

In the meantime, I've written something on drone journalism at the Frontline Club which you can read here if you haven't seen it already.

Enjoy!

Is blogging journalism? A 'celebration' of ten years of asking the wrong question

Martin Belam is off. Leaving The Guardian for something new. Bon voyage sir!

But before he left, he posted a great blog [included especially for Adam Tinworth] about the confusion surrounding journaling and bloggism. 

Martin was so piqued by a recent tweet from Media Bistro asking: "Are bloggers journalists?" that he was compelled to try to find out the first online reference to the great question of our age:

"The earliest explicit mention of the question I have been able to unearth via Google though is from 11th April 2002. 

"On David F. Gallagher’s blog of pictures of New York City, he posted a link to an article entitled “Are bloggers journalists?” with the URL microcontentnews.com/articles/bloggingjournalism.htm. 

"Sadly microcontentnews.com has disappeared, so I can’t retrieve the actual piece."

In other words, Martin notes, we've just celebrated the 10th anniversary of this particular non-conundrum. 

But enough of this already.

Let's just call a blog a blog. 

I'm off to find an ice cream strawberry.

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.

"Inappropriate" to include bloggers in press regulation

The Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt has said that bloggers should not be part of a new regulatory system of the press. 

Speaking to a joint committee on privacy and injunctions he said blogs "perform a different role" from newspapers and bloggers "were often not paid". 

At the same time, he believed blogs were growing in importance to public and democratic debate. 

Citing Guido Fawkes as an example, he said that blogs with large audiences have "huge influence on political discourse" and could do "huge damage to individual reputations if and when they get things wrong". 

Despite their potential relevance to the future of privacy law and the use of injunctions, Hunt was concerned at "trying to solve too many problems at once".

He noted that bloggers are already "subject to the laws of the land" including libel, defamation and data protection breaches. But he acknowledged that the law was sometimes more difficult to enforce if blogs are based outside the jurisdiction of the United Kingdom.

In 2009, Guido Fawkes told the Guardian that it was "a jurisdictional nightmare" to send him a writ as his blog was published by a Caribbean company, had a URL in Germany and was hosted in the United States. 

The joint committee felt that blogging should warrant more attention as some "big bloggers" were making "a lot of money" and that a new regulatory system should not leave an "open door" for irresponsible publishing.   

In a light-hearted moment, Justice Secretary Ken Clarke made it plain that he was "certainly not a blogger", quipping that a "quite disproportionate of nuts and extremists seem to be represented on every blog I've ever known". 

Jeremy Hunt interjected to say he had written a blog post last Friday.

To much amusement, Clarke quickly added: "...with the honorable exception of my friend, the Culture Secretary".

Russian blogger arrested after post-election protests

Russian blogger and anti-corruption campaigner Alexei Navalny has been arrested after participating in post-election protests in Moscow against the Prime Minister Vladimir Putin. 

He was sentenced to 15 days in jail. 

The BBC has a good profile of Navalny which explains how his Livejournal blog gained traction for exposing corruption:

"The popularity of his blog allowed him to start mobilising internet users to take an active part in his anti-corruption campaigns by means of what he called his "unstoppable mass complaints machine". 

"The "machine" worked by getting internet users to send hundreds of online complaints to investigative and oversight bodies demanding that they look into the case that Mr Navalny was pursuing at the time. 

In March this year, the Russian business daily Kommersant was forced to retract an article which attempted to discredit Navalny's exposure of large scale fraud at Transneft, the state-owned pipeline company in 2010.

Russian bloggers complained earlier this week that Livejournal was down for several consecutive days around the day of the election, alleging that a cyberattack had been designed to stop them discussing Sunday's vote. 

The head of Livejournal, Ilya Dronov, believed the perpetrators had "a mountain of money" in order to sustain the distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack.  

Election Monitoring Crowd-Sourced in Egypt

From the New York Times' Lede blog:

"Although some prominent Internet activists decided to boycott Monday’s elections in Egypt to protest continued military rule, many well-known bloggers spent the day working as self-appointed election monitors. Using the same social media tools that helped them to force Hosni Mubarak from office, the bloggers posted images of long lines at polling places and passed on reports of apparent violations of the electoral code."

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."

Voices at the Arabic Bloggers Meeting

The BBC's Jamillah Knowles visited the Arabic Bloggers Meeting in Tunis recently. In this podcast she talks to Egyptian, Iraqi and Palestinian bloggers....worth a listen.

Global Voices has a couple of podcasts too and Al-Jazeera English interviewed a number of bloggers for this article.

So how has social media changed the way newsrooms work?

Last Friday, Kevin Bakhurst, the deputy head of the BBC newsroom gave a talk at the International Broadcasting Convention in Amsterdam.

He asked and subsequently answered: How has social media changed the way newsrooms work?

A good question.

So I thought I'd have a go as well. Not an exhaustive list by any means and you could flesh out a few things but a reasonable starting point...

1. Organisational
a) Digital tools facilitate easier cross-departmental co-operation.
b) Establishment of specialist departments to filter, sift and verify material published and submitted by the 'former audience' (E.g. UGC hub at BBC, Iran Election desk at CNN, 2009).
c) Integration of these departments into wider newsroom. No longer an add-on to traditional newsgathering but essential and central part of that operation. (E.g. BBC's UGC hub moves from 7th floor at Television Centre to main newsroom area 2007-8).
d) Creation of new roles - social media editors; community managers; interactivity editors; UGC journalists; livebloggers.

2. Newsroom culture
a) (Easy to forget these days....) Acceptance of digital sources as legitimate places where journalists might find valuable news and information that can be incorporated into news stories.
b) Emergence of a spirit of journalism which views autonomy as shared with the audience rather than the result of independent inquiry. 'Shared' and 'independent' understandings exist alongside one another in newsrooms...
c) ...so first-hand journalism is coupled to newsroom journalism which benefits from hundreds of online sources. 
d) Efforts made to be more transparent about the process of journalism - explanations of editorial decisions and the limitations of news reporting.
e) Speed of news cycle deemed to have increased.
f) Personal public profile of an increasing number of journalists important to maintenance of news brand (E.g. Previously off screen producers now highly visible on Twitter).
g) Aspiration for a model of conversational/interactive journalism despite difficulties of making it work in practice.
h) Creation of new editorial guidelines for online content.
i) Greater awareness of instant audience feedback to journalism

3. News content
a) Adoption of social media platforms as outlets for traditional media content. Blogs, Facebook pages, YouTube, Twitter, Liveblogs, Flickr, Tumblr, etc etc...leading to...
b) Exploration of different modes of online reporting. Shift from 'inverted pyramid' model towards 'live updates'. Increased incorporation of audience comment. "Data journalism" sourced from the 'former audience' and subsequent visualisations (E.g. Ushahidi, #uksnow map). Convergence of genres and establishment of multimedia news as the norm.

4. Shifting values
a) Immediacy and accuracy vs speed - speed of news cycle and the ability of individuals to publish immediately leads to new understandings of accuracy and processes of verification...
b) Verification I - a move from 'verify, then publish' towards 'publish (with attribution to the source) then verify'. Increased online engagement with rumour, half-truths and emerging reports. Establishing the 'truth' is an evolving potentially participatory experience.
c) Verification II - development of "forensic" analysis of social media content as well as collaborative and 'crowdsourced' models.
d) Transparency as 'objectivity'? The hyperlink and an increased 'news hole' on the Web allows space for openness about sources and transparency about biases. But resisted by news orgs - volume of links out limited as news sites want visitors to stay on their own site. Some news orgs have retained emphasis on value of 'objective' and/or 'impartial' approach (see below).  

5. A few limits
a) Public emphasis on adherence to traditional journalistic standards and practices to safeguard the professionalism of journalism.
b) Maintenance of robust understandings of what is deemed to be newsworthy in traditional media.
c) Restraints of time, money and scale limit the interactive potential of conversational news. Audience members tend to interact with each other rather than with journalists. (E.g. Twitter hashtags).
d) Various news organisations steer clear of the embrace of subjective content retaining an emphasis on 'objective' and 'impartial' news (Economist, BBC). Although the proliferation of partial, opinionated journalism challenges these organisations for attention, it also strengthens their USP.

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...

End of BBC News 'Blogs' signals new era for blogging at the BBC

The BBC is in the process of launching 'Correspondent Pages' which will aggregate all the content of a BBC correspondent on one page.

They will replace BBC News 'blogs' and pages for Peter Hunt, Torin Douglas and others have been running in stealth mode since the end of March.

The change to the new format is explained in a blog post published today by News Blogs Editor Giles Wilson. He describes the move "as a pretty fundamental reinvention" of how the BBC's news "blogs operate".

The pages will collate all the content correspondents produce, including their articles for the BBC website, their radio and TV reports and their Twitter feeds.

The new Correspondent Pages were indicated as part of a broader set of changes outlined recently by the Editor of the BBC News Website, Steve Herrmann.

The BBC is not going to call these new pages 'blogs' and BBC blogger and Northern Ireland Political Editor, Mark Devenport, has already said farewell to his old blog format.

In a post flagging up his switch to the new format entitled 'Devenport Diaries RIP', he said he "fought long and hard" for the retention of his alliterative blog title but the "powers-that-be wouldn't budge". His Devenport Diaries blog is now archived here.

Devenport has been using his new Correspondent Page to report on the recent elections in Northern Ireland. 

The BBC's big blogging correspondents, such as Nick Robinson and Robert Peston, will be moving over to the new format soon so the 'BBC blog' label will be significantly diminished. 

The BBC has always had an uneasy relationship with the word 'blog' because of its association with partial comment and opinion.

Blog-like formats were often called 'logs', evident in Nick Robinson's 'Newslog' which first appeared on the BBC website in 2001 or 'diaries', like Jeremy Bowen's coverage of Gaza in 2009.

In 2005, former editor of the BBC News website, Pete Clifton, temporarily banned the word 'blog' from the website until the BBC had the "tools to produce them properly".

The BBC's live page updates or live text commentaries are also never officially described as 'live blogging'.

Nevertheless these new Correspondent Pages unmistakably draw on the blogging format. They offer a more comprehensive stream of news for a single correspondent. 

The incorporation of Twitter updates means correspondents can offer more regular and shorter updates.

And the pages continue a shift towards news content being organised around an individual personality as well as a news index.

In effect, the personal brand is becoming increasingly important in establishing the authority of the BBC's news online.

Giles Wilson notes that the BBC's decision to move news blogs from Movable Type software to the BBC's main production system enables the BBC's "top correspondents' analysis" to "feel much more like an integral part of the website."

Blogging will continue to underwrite the BBC's approach to online news output even if it looks as though a first era of 'blogging' in news at the BBC is coming to an end.

Russian bloggers acting as a 'Fifth Estate'

Kommersant, the Russian business daily, was forced to retract an article which criticised an anti-corruption blogger, Aleksey Navalnyy, earlier this month.

The article had attempted to discredit Navalnyy's investigation into fraud at the state-owned pipeline company, Transneft last November.

Bloggers pointed out a number of inaccuracies in the Kommersant piece which forced senior management to issue an apology.

BBC Monitoring Stephen Ennis has the full story. He concludes...

"The incident...illustrates the shifts of power and influence on the media scene in Russia. First, it shows the authority commanded by Navalnyy and the fact that he cannot be attacked with impunity. 

Second, it demonstrates the ability of the online community to police the activities of major players in the mainstream media. None of Kommersant's rivals on the newsstands touched the story. It was left to bloggers to hold the paper to account. 

For media commentator Andrey Miroshnichenko, the episode was an illustration of how the online community can act as what he calls a "viral editor".

BBC closes Have Your Say

BBC News is to close Have Your Say - its comment and debate page for topical news stories. The exact closing date is not yet known, but the BBC say early April is "most likely".

The news was revealed in a blog post by social media editor, Alex Gubbay, which outlined the future of the social experience on the BBC website.

Rather than have "silos" of interactivity on individual webpages, the aim is to feature comment across the news website. The BBC is introducing Editors Picks and an option to recommend comments, which will "showcase interesting additional insight and perspective".

These changes have been in development for some time. In June 2010, Assistant Editor of Interactivity, Matthew Eltringham, told a News Rewired conference that the BBC was considering the introduction of Editors Picks and a Daily Mail style comment system with the ability for users to recommend comments.

Eltringham also indicated that Have Your Say, having moved to a BBC blog format, was in a "transitional phase". It appears that there might already have been talk of phasing it out.

It signals the next stage in the evolution of the BBC's approach to interactivity and the move is part of a broader range of changes to the BBC news website outlined by the editor, Steve Herrmann, on Wednesday.

Displaying audience comment has been a technical and editorial conundrum for a number of years at the BBC. Comments on blogs were strangled by spam in 2007 and various elements of comment moderation have been outsourced to Tempero.

The level of abuse in comments and the sheer volume that the BBC receives has also led senior correspondents such as Jonathan Agnew and Nick Robinson.

(And finally...the closure of Have Your Say means the people at Speak Your Branes, a blog that would sarcastically shred some of the more "interesting" contributions, will have to find themselves target.)

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". 

'Convergence' is dead. Long live convergence.

This post is a copy of an answer I gave to a question posted on Quora - the latest social media time sink - by Marie Kinsey, the chair of the Broadcast Journalism Training Council Glyn Mottershead, a tutor in digital journalism at Cardiff University. (I clearly haven't quite got the hang of Quora yet...)

He asked: "Have we gone beyond the shelf life of convergence in journalism?" This is a slightly edited version of my reply...

A few years ago, I seem to remember we spent some time discussing what convergence would mean for journalism in the context of the convergence of print, audio, and video on the Web. I'm not sure we need to do that any more because it has actually happened. 

I think there was also an inevitable (and perhaps unavoidable) weakness in starting from the perspective of: This is a newspaper article: how do we put it on the Web? This is a piece of radio: how do we put in on the Web? This is a piece of TV: how do we put it on the Web?

Four years ago, the tools I was using as a trainee broadcast journalist were all geared around putting traditional radio, TV and newspaper pieces online. But even then (and much more so now), there were tools available that had been designed to take advantage of the Web as a medium - the hyperlink, blogs, Twitter, Dipity, Audioboo, Youtube, audio slideshows etc. (Though you can argue using these tools still draws on traditional skills.) 

Today we can say: This is a story: how do we use the Web to tell that story? If you're into programming why not even design your own tool to present the news in a more interesting and engaging way on the Web?

I think the current interest lies in other 'convergences'. 

First, the convergence of online genres. Blogs and websites have merged. Twitter is fed into blogs and vice versa. Youtube has a forum underneath it. Facebook can be used as a blog or a Twitter feed or a forum and so on. 

Second, there are much larger questions around the convergence of private and public, brand and individual, as well as online and offline.

The BBC's blogs in numbers as of December 2010

Some say I've spent the last couple of days stealing snowmen...but in reality life is more mundane.

I've been putting on some layers, editing some chapters, putting on some more layers and trying to draw the thesis together.

During the most recent chapter re-draft, I felt I needed a line saying: 'The BBC now has x number of blogs...' and realised I didn't know the value of 'x'.

So some numbers for you taken from this index on the BBC news website. I suppose there may be other blogs lurking in the BBC blogosphere that haven't been added to the list but it looks like a fairly comprehensive round up to me.

BBC Blog Network: Number of Blogs

News - 90
Sport  - 47
TV - 19
Online - 4
Radio - 42
Other - 7
Total - 209

In the spirit of the 'data journalism' age, I've uploaded this data with links to all the blogs in a Google spreadsheet.

Although there had been earlier blogging experiments, Nick Robinson's blog was the first one launched on the dedicated BBC Blog Network in December 2005. 43 blogs were set up within the first year.

Links for October all in one go

Sorry good people - not much blogging here this month. There are a couple of my posts up at the Frontline Club on Wikileaks and the U.S. Navy's social media manual if you missed them and you're into that kind of thing.

Expect a few more thoughts on Wikileaks at the Frontline Club or elsewhere soon...

Here's a round up of links that have caught my eye while I've been writing the conclusion to my thesis. (One day, I tell myself, it will end).

Blogging and the BBC

• BBC Political Editor, Nick Robinson wins blogging comment award. But Left Foot Forward is not convinced...

Blogging and Murdoch

• For what it's worth, Rupert Murdoch on blogging and journalism:

“Now, it would certainly serve the interests of the powerful if professional journalists were muted – or replaced as navigators in our society by bloggers and bloviators. Bloggers can have a social role – but that role is very different to that of the professional seeking to uncover facts, however uncomfortable”.

Blogging and the truth

• MP Nadine Dorries explains that her blog is "70% fiction and 30% fact", but also argues that it is a tool for her constituents to get to know her better. I wonder how that's going...

Blogging and Andrew Marr

The BBC's Andrew Marr describes bloggers as though they are some kind of obscure mammalian curiosity being uncovered in a wildlife programme by David Attenborough:

"A lot of bloggers seem to be socially inadequate, pimpled, single, slightly seedy, bald, cauliflower-nosed, young men sitting in their mother's basements and ranting. They are very angry people.

Moving to a national level, most Brits, we discover, are angry (and some drunk)...

"OK – the country is full of very angry people. Many of us are angry people at times. Some of us are angry and drunk. But the so-called citizen journalism is the spewings and rantings of very drunk people late at night.

"It is fantastic at times but it is not going to replace journalism."

A section on guidelines, guidelines and guidelines (not necessarily in that order)

• The BBC's Editorial Guidelines are launched.

• The Guardian publishes some new social media guidelines for their journalists...

• ...while the BBC's Helen Boaden has to point out in an email to staff that Twitter is not a place where BBC journalists can express their political views on this, that and the other. Melanie Phillips is hyperbolically outraged in a way that only Melanie Phillips can be:

"I remember a time when it was considered a hanging offence for a BBC news operative to express a political opinion in public. Ah, those were the days, eh. Different country."

Rare gem of useful research material

• More practically, this is a great round up of research into linking by traditional news organisations.

Comments

• Reuters tries to improve comments by bringing in points (and prizes?)

"Our new process grants a kind of VIP status on people who have had comments approved previously. When you register to comment on Reuters.com, our moderation software tags you as a new user. Your comments go through the same moderation process as before, but every time we approve a comment, you score a point."

And finally...

We'll end on the kind of disconcerting note you only get when you accidentally sit on a piano with this article on the troublesome world of blogging the drugs war in Mexico.

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 :)

All eyes on Ed Miliband? Some thoughts on live blogging.

This is no criticism of Andrew Sparrow personally, who is an expert in the art of live blogging for The Guardian, but, if you've ever tried live blogging, you'll discover that it's pretty hard work and not without its difficulties. Even for journalists who have racked up a number of live blogging marathons like Sparrow.

During his latest effort, blogging Ed Miliband's speech at the Labour Party conference, the Guardian journalist offers some "3.40pm instant analysis". Sparrow says he found the speech "less inspiring than I expected".

But he then highlights some of the problems of making an assessment about quite how inspiring the speech was given his preoccupation with frantically tapping out a live blog:

"...although I admit, not having watched it properly (I've just had my eyes on my keyboard, for obvious reasons) I'm not necessarily. (sic)"

Which rather sums up one of the key challenges facing a live blogging journalist. (Perhaps we could finish the sentence for him "...in the best position to make a judgement" or "able to take in everything while trying to write everything". [In fact, the update was subsequently corrected and now reads: "...the best judge"])

Personally, whenever I've done some live blogging I've always felt it would be better if there were at least two people contributing to it to compensate for my own live blogging inadequacies. One blogger could get down the outline facts and key points, the other could provide instant analysis and comment. Perhaps even a third could pull in information from other sources.

But Sparrow told me that he writes most of the material for his live blogs himself. He says that sometimes others do contribute, particularly if a live blog lasts a long time and that a Guardian editor will actually post his copy to the blog. (Presumably the editor does some quick checks before posting.) But in terms of writing the thing, an Andrew Sparrow live blog is essentially (a rather impressive) one-man show.

The advantage of this approach is that it gives the blog a clear voice, and allows one journalist to retain control over the direction of the blog. But I would still question whether there are not occasions when it might help to have more hands on deck throughout a live blog.

Of course, there is also a question of resources here and I wonder how often The Guardian can afford to devote more than one staff member to writing lengthy live blogs especially as they seem to be running them on a regular basis and for all sorts of events.