Overheard on Twitter

aarons hearing a talk from representative of Foreign Office on getting large, conservative organisations blogging. a very familiar story... #edem08 2 minutes ago from web

The Future of News: BBC Director of Global News at City University

After spending an hour or so with the World Have Your Say programme yesterday, I walked over to City University to hear a talk by Richard Sambrook.

He was talking about the Future of News to an audience that seemed to be a mixture of BBC journalists, a load of City University journalism students and some other (presumably) interested types.

Richard warned us that he didn't have a crystal news ball which he looked into occasionally in order to plot the BBC's advance into the future. I was disappointed - surely the licence fee could stretch to...But took his advice and stayed for the rest of the talk anyway.

(Updated: Richard's own post - always best to go to the original source)

Journalism in crisis?

• Crisis is hardly a new phenomenon but what's changing?
  
• Globalisation
  
• Proliferation of channels
• Closure of foreign news bureaux by media organisations
  
• Technological changes undermining the economic model
• Used the analogy of the music industry where the digital age has massively complicated the marketing of an individual song.
  
• Investment in the Web 'in hope'. Eg Guardian, NYTimes.com running Web operation at a loss.
• Smaller news organisations going out of business
• News sites repackaging agency material - contraction of new content behind the explosion of new sites.
• Old model of limited access and limited resource undercut by the Internet
• Taking the lead from Castells/Beckett, the new model is networked - interactive and interconnecting.
  
• Citizen journalism - what does this mean for standards of accuracy, rigour and accountability? CNN's I-report fails over Steve Jobs.
  

Authenticity

• Identified as one of the new keys to journalism
• Pointed to the differences between the production values of Web video and TV. Thought this would feed back into TV at some point
• Crisis of trust and authenticity in the mass media
• Gave example of a new type of foreign correspondent - Hamed Mottaghi - 29 year old freelance journalist in Iran. Somebody who is embedded in their culture. There is an authenticity about reports from somebody who lives and breathes in the country

Blogosphere and low cost journalism

• Used Technorati survey 2008
• 133 million+ blogs
• 81+ languages
• 6 Continents
• new model of emerging journalism - low cost mobile journalism
• Examples Witness (NGO), Global Post, Global Voices (Richard might have pointed out that Global Voices is run almost entirely by volunteers)

BBC in all this

• 45 International Bureaux
• Network of 650 regular voices/stringers around the world
• Suffering the same cost pressures and vulnerabilities as other media organisations. (Presumably here talking about the BBC's World offering which is commercial)
• Use of Twitter to cover the Bangladesh Boat Trip - pointed out that the audience here was measured in the dozens compared to the radio audience of millions
• How do we use UGC so it doesn't sound crass? Need a new model for this.

The Future

• "Future is local and global"
• Local and highly personalised and the big picture
  
• Social video - Seesmic, Phreadz - but expressed disappointment that as yet there isn't much newsgathering going on using them
• Processing power of the Web will outstrip the human brain
  
• Linking out
  
• Where is the value we can add as journalists
• Last.fm - community style journalism in the social music model
  
• Data-driven journalism - Spectra @ MSNBC
• BBC: My Democracy Now
• Need to make interconnections between different disciplines: "Not enough now to just be a journalist"
• A mash up, remix model

Conclusion
Major issues?

• Personalisation and privacy
• Adjustments - economic and technological

What will still be important?

• Standards
• Storytelling
• Power of pictures
• Analysis
• Mediation - strength of brands still important
• Debate

Happy Belated Birthday to the Blog

My blog reached its first birthday on 8 November. I missed it. I blame it on the fact that there are too many birthdays in November. And there are more important things to remember.

Change we can believe in

Post US election sign spotted outside a café in London by a friend of mine:

One way to make money from blogging

David Brake is a fellow blogging PhD researcher who I must try and get in touch with properly at some point.

Among all sorts of other things, he's looking at why private bloggers do what they do and their relationship with their audiences.

He made a clever move seven years ago by registering the domain 'blog.org'. Now, he's put the it up for auction and has an offer for $51,000.

Wish I'd thought of that, but I'm not sure I had heard of 'a blog' back then. There's two days left so if you want to bid click here.

Telegraph journalist vs the Milbloggers

Over on my Frontline blog I've been looking at some of the military blogging reaction to this article and video by embedded Telegraph journalist Nick Meo. And there'll be more on this soon...

BeebCamp feedback on news and blogging

I was very grateful to receive an email last week from Chris Hamilton who is an assistant editor, production for the BBC website.

In our discussions at BeebCamp last week, news blogging at the BBC ended up being slightly misrepresented.

After reading Roo Reynold's post about the conference Chris emailed me to make an important point about the use of blogging in news and provide some useful links as well. (Chris wanted to come along to the conference but was unable to make it.)

So I've reproduced the email here with his permission and will add it as a comment on Roo's blogpost as well:

Hi Daniel.

I signed up to Beebcamp but unfortunately couldn't make it yesterday [now, last Tuesday]. Was just skimming through the notes at rooreynolds.com and alighted on the line from your bit about Sport's live text commentary and the fact news doesn’t do them. In fact we do run such pages, modelled on the Sport approach, with the most recent last Friday for "Downturn day", though the series done for the US presidential debates are probably better examples. They're also done weekly for prime minister's questions. The next big one is planned for US election night next week. Some links below. They're obviously not blogs in the true sense, and are quite labour intensive, but are popular and now a significant part of our coverage, when the event is right, although we're still feeling our way with them.

Regards,
Chris

McCain v Obama: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/7658160.stm
PMQs 29 Oct: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/7697280.stm
Downturn day: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/7687142.stm

As I replied to Chris, I'm not sure if I said news doesn't do any form of liveblogging. If I did, I was thinking of the sort of liveblogging that you can do with software like CoverItLive. The informal nature of the conference meant that sometimes people brought different ideas of what blogging is to the table (though this in itself was interesting).

I didn't mean to under-acknowledge some of the stuff Chris has kindly pointed to above and thank him for taking the time to get in touch.