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.

Teatime reading on the BBC, blogging and the media

BBC and linking

• The BBC will use "editorial justification as our guiding principle" when deciding what webpages to link to regardless of whether they are behind a paywall. Steve Herrmann says the BBC will flag up whether a link requires a subscription in order to access it.

BBC and compliance

• Culture of compliance is damaging to the BBC according to Jonathan Dimbleby: "It risks creating a climate of caution. People are in danger of not thinking for themselves."

Did bloggers bring down the German President?

• AFP reports that the comments which led to Horst Koehler's resignation had received little press coverage before they were seized upon by bloggers even though they were given in a radio interview. There is a great quote from one of the bloggers in this article, Stefan Graunke, who played down bloggers' role as challengers to the traditional media:

'Blogs are increasing in importance, "not because they want to to challenge established media, but because classic journalism is less and less capable of achieving its mission alone," Graunke said. "It's just that with more eyes, we see better."'

Wikio Blog rankings for 2010 (via Online Journalism Blog)

• Interesting to note that a number of the big movers and new entrants are 'craft challenge' blogs like Cute Card Thursday. I don't think I've heard about these before. When did they appear on the scene? I suppose they are a variation on the Post Secret community art project type of blog.
  

We live during "the greatest change in the history of media" (apparently).

• Exciting, isn't it?

BBC's Nic Newman: "better links within blogs amongst the most effective"

Last Friday, BBC Online conducted an open meeting about plans for the website over the coming months. The meeting was held in response to criticisms that the BBC's online services were not sufficiently open and transparent. The talks and discussion are available in a series of videos on the BBC Internet Blog.

I haven't watched them all yet, but I thought this section on the BBC's approach to external linking by Nic Newman, Controller, Journalism, FM&T*, was worth pulling out, (especially as it ties so neatly with last week's wee rant):

"Our aim is not to link indiscriminately, but to link in line with our public purposes and editorial guidelines. So we look to add value through our links. We look to take people to content that further enriches or informs.

"We will continue to use a mixture of manual and automated methods to do so. So we've already talked about Search Plus which is part of our automated solutions but a lot of the evidence points to the focus on editorial linking as being a really important part of the mix.

"One of the most trafficked pages on the Sports site is the football transfer page and the deep editorial links that we've added here in the last few months are responsible for delivering a significant amount of that uplift that you see in the previous graph. [Showing a rise in external clickthroughs from around 8 million a month to over 12 million a month for bbc.co.uk].

"In news, the better links within [BBC] blogs, are amongst the most effective because of the editorial relevance that comes from the authorship of that (sic) blogs and the relationship that people have with that content."

These are steps in the right direction and I think editorial linking, rather than automated linking, is vitally important. Regular readers will know that I wrote a post about the value of link journalism a while back and as I did then, I still think more could be done which would involve some significant changes to the working practices of BBC journalists.

That sort of thing doesn't happen overnight. But the BBC has a responsibility to continue to work on the area of external linking - it's absolutely key to the BBC Trust's aim of the Corporation being 'a trusted guide to the Web'.

*That's 'Future, Media and Technology' for those outside the BBC's jargon-laden walls. Although actually I remember talking about "FM&T" to a BBC journalist who looked at me as if I was talking about a souped-up form of shortwave radio so the previous sentence might be of some use to BBC employees as well!

A rant: adding value by leaving links in comments

I submitted the following comment to the Defence Management website on an article they had written about the MoD's new social media guidelines: "MoD wants personnel to use Twitter". (Something I covered here for the Frontline Club.)

"If you read the guidelines in full you'll see that the remit for using social networks is very narrow, (which is only hinted at in this article.) They certainly don't encourage soldiers to tweet from the field or in fact say a great deal which would be of much interest without permission. I've written a blog post which includes a discussion of the excpetions at the Frontline Club which might be of interest bit.ly/4BiIS."

When the comment was published a couple of hours later Defence Management chopped off the last sentence with the link to my post leaving just the following:

"If you read the guidelines in full you'll see that the remit for using social networks is very narrow, (which is only hinted at in this article.) They certainly don't encourage soldiers to tweet from the field or in fact say a great deal which would be of much interest without permission."

Now, if I was a bot leaving a spam link then by all means edit out my link. But I'm not a bot.

I rarely promote my own blog in this way, because it takes too long. So I'm not one of those people that constantly leaves links in all sorts of random comments sections as a promotion tool.

Of course, I was hoping to push a few readers (probably one or two) my way. But apart from the fact that it's nice for me to think that a couple more people might read my work, it doesn't make much difference to me.

I don't make any money from my Frontline blog. It's not like I need readers for my share of the advertising revenue because there aren't any ads on Frontline.

(Unlike Defence Management, I note. And I wonder how much pressure they are under from their advertisers to keep people reading what their advertisers want people to read on their site and not be directed to anyone else's point of view?)

My main reason for adding the link on my comment was because I thought it might have been of interest to the readers of Defence Management.

I thought this would be a neat way (rather than copying and pasting my whole post into the comments section) of letting people know of a different take on the issue at hand and letting them decide if they wanted to find out more.

In short, I thought I was doing Defence Management a favour by adding value to their content. How naive of me. I won't make that mistake again.

I mean, maybe I'm wrong and my blog post doesn't add any value to the discussion and they were right to edit me out. Or maybe my comment adds enough value without the link to my post and the extra information it provides. You can decide for yourself.

But whatever you decide, that's the last time I'll be commenting on the Defence Management website.

If I'm way off message with this, let me know in the comments or write your own post and stick a link in the comments! Is there an etiquette for promoting your own work in comments? Did I fall foul of it?

Why journalists must understand 'link journalism'

A while back Scott Karp visited the BBC. In some senses it was a sales pitch for his Publish 2 project. But more importantly he came to talk about his vision for 'link journalism' and much of what appears below is based on his thinking even if I have been stewing over it for a number of months. In short, this isn't new but I feel like it needs to be said again.

The link and link journalism

The hyperlink has long been recognised as one of the key features of the World Wide Web, so much so that I don't need to waste time explaining its functionality.

However, it's easy to forget that it wasn't immediately quite so obvious back in the early days of the World Wide Web, and the development of blogging was an important step in the increased use of hyperlinks.

In fact, there was a whole market for a site that actually used hyperlinks to keep sending people away from a website in a useful manner. A market that was almost entirely swallowed up by Google.

Journalists and media companies were slow to realise the value of the hyperlink because the conventional wisdom was that in order to make revenue from advertising people needed to spend time looking at your site.

What they didn't take into account was the counter-intuitive position that if people are consistently sent to interesting news articles from a media site people will consistently come back to the media website for more of the same.

Unfortunately, journalists were so slow to realise this, (despite the fact that Google was staring them in the face everyday on their computer screens), that they got way behind the game. It's only much more recently that linking out has become a regular feature of many news websites.

But journalists are still not making the most of link journalism. Because the practice of providing links for their readers is not fully integrated into their work processes and websites still don't offer spaces for journalists to display their links.

At the Frontline website we have a space for our bloggers (box, top right of the page) to share the links that we are reading. This provides Frontline Club readers with a highly editorialised and specialised 'best-of-the-web'.

If you want to know which articles to read on front line journalism then this is one of the best places to find a regular supply of information, without you having to do any of the hard work.

This is an example of link journalism, which I believe adds value to the website.

Why journalists don't do link journalism

In order for this to take place, bloggers have to be saving links and an editor has to publish them. When I talk about this idea with people, there are various objections from journalists.

First, saving links is not part of many journalists existing work practices. And yes, it does take a little time to set up something like delicious - about 5 minutes, and saving bookmarks can be time-consuming if you become addicted to it, but saving three a day can't take longer than 5 minutes even if you're technologically inept. And you might need a producer/editor to put them together, but there are some of those in media organisations, right?

Second, journalists still don't want to share stuff on the Web. I understand that if you are doing an investigation for an exclusive story you might not want to share links. Fine. I'm not asking people to be stupid with what they share - I don't share all of my links.

But if you save an article to Delicious, for example, from the Washington Post it's kind of out there already. Some journalists might be concerned that saving links reveals the sources they read. And it will do. But then surely this sort of transparency might be something to aspire to rather than shirk from.

Third, journalists think it's a waste of time or not journalism at all. When in fact, it's no different to what journalists have always done. Journalists have always tried to collect information and decide what people should know.

This model has been broken down by the Web because anybody can now recommend information through websites such as Digg. I think this is a positive development because it removes power from journalists. Why should journalists be the only people who decide what is important?

But on the other hand, most people still respect journalists' attempts to make sense of the world on their behalf by sorting through information. Because they don't have time to do that themselves all the time. In this sense, journalists add value to society and it's nothing new - it's a process that has been going on since journalism began.

Why journalists should be doing more link journalism

On the World Wide Web, we are presented with an extraordinary amount of information. I would suggest that helping other people to navigate that information is part of the journalist's duty. (In the BBC's case, part of its remit is being a 'trusted guide to the Web'.)

And if you provide a way for people to access the most relevant, and interesting material on a regular basis then I suggest that people will consistently come back to your website, because a highly specialised, hopefully expert, and ultimately human selection method will have many advantages over Google News and news aggregators.

In addition, if journalists are more pro-active in linking to valuable content then these pages will climb search rankings.

I suggest therefore that journalists must understand the value of link journalism. Many still don't.

Links for today: blogs, multimedia, and linking

• The Guardian is relaunching their blogs.

• The Independent talks to the BBC's head of multimedia, Ian Burrell about the Corporation's multiplatform approach.

• National media outlets fail on attribution and linking according to Adam Tinworth.

• Which is made more interesting when you consider that Kevin Anderson reckons the way to fact-check online is to follow the links.

• What do you reckon? Let me know. Or don't. Your choice.