Frontline Club: blogging and social media training

Just a note to let you know that I'll be running the Frontline Club's blogging and social media training course on 1 and 2 February 2010.

Hopefully it will be great fun and a really good way to get yourself started in online publishing if you haven't already. (There's funding available as well).

It is a 2-day course (contrary to the current confusion on the Frontline Club website) which will run from 10 - 5pm each day at the Club near Paddington.

Here's a bit about what I'll be teaching on the course:

Synopsis

Aimed at beginners, this intensive two day course will get you up to speed with the social media world. Using tools that are available for free on the web, you’ll learn how to set up a blog, and engage with social media to research, publish and distribute content. The course will also introduce you to several strategies for monitoring news and information on the web as you learn how to use RSS feeds and Twitter. By the end of the two days you’ll preside over the beginnings of a mini social media empire.

Main aims

• Setting up and producing content for a blog.

• Using microblogging for networking, promoting your content and as a personal newswire. Social bookmarking as a research tool.

• Embedding photo and video on your blog.

• Getting the most out of RSS.

• Monitoring and verifying information on the web.

Who’s it for?

• Journalists who are interested in getting up to speed with the social media world.

• Anybody who wants to learn how to publish online.

• People who are interested in monitoring breaking news and information on the web.

If you want any further information about what you'll learn, then drop me a line at daniel.s.bennett-AT-kcl.ac.uk. I'm hoping to be flexible to what people on the course want to know so if you want to find about something that's not there, let me know and I'll see what I can do.

The course costs £265. If you want to book a place or enquire about the Skillset funding available for the course then email: training-AT-frontlineclub.com.

How do journalists use Twitter to break news?

Do journalists break news on Twitter before they break it on their employers' media outlet?

Or do they wait to break the news (say) on live TV first and then tweet it?

Or do they inform their colleagues running breaking news Twitter accounts for media organisations and then tweet on their own account?

Or does it go up as a flash on the website or on TV first before anything else happens?

I could go on with these hypothetical scenarios but the point is: what is the hierarchy of breaking news outlets these days for individual journalists?

I suppose to a certain extent it must depend on what the breaking news is and possibly differing organisational policies.

In other sort-of-not-really breaking Twitter news, Sky is going to install Tweetdeck on its computers so journalists can monitor Twitter and, no doubt, break news.

Maybe this will have an effect on my questions above?

On the gulf between academia and journalism

So it's been a while since I've posted here. 2010 is deadline year and the ratio of PhD to blogging is increasing in the PhD direction each month, week and day.

Which is a shame because blogging is great and many good things have come out of this blog and my Frontline blog.

I often think, too, that far more people will read my blog posts than my PhD. In a way the blog might be more useful to people than the PhD especially as by the time the PhD is published, (if ever), the world will have moved on a-pace and its relevancy significantly reduced.

I wonder if I should have put more of my research out on the blog along the way.

(Although I place the utmost importance on making sure participants agree to publication which does make it more difficult and there are various other contractual issues in my case that might not affect other PhDs.)

Professor Tim Luckhurst, I see, has called for journalism academics* to connect more with journalists by writing short essays rather than writing long papers that they don't have time to read.

This seems fine for established academics, and generally I agree entirely, but I've been told that not being published in the right places, and in the right format won't get me a job in academia come the end of the PhD.

If I say in an interview: I've published a lot of additional research on a blog, I've been told that will probably count for nothing. I might even be laughed at. To be fair, a lot of my blogging wouldn't come anywhere near 'research' but you get the point.

Generally, I ignore these warnings in the hope that they are unfounded (and I'm not certain exactly what I want to do at the end of the PhD anyway).

But if Tim Luckhurst really wants to change the institutional culture of academia then I would suggest there is a hell of a lot of work to do.

It's interesting Luckhurst notes that Piet Bakker's blog is slightly more useful than his recent research paper, because if I really wanted to get on in academia (from what I've been told) I would have spent far less time blogging, twittering and generally engaging with journalists and far more time writing papers that journalists will probably never read.

*I suppose you could stick me in this category even though I'm in a War Studies Department and generally disciplinarially confused.

Heavy duty online distribution

For those of you who are serious about maximising the distribution of your content online you should check out Graham Holliday's excellent slideshare on his Kigali Wire project:

Publishing Kigali Wire

View more documents from Graham Holliday.

Social media roles and anonymous blogging

Media creates social media roles

BBC appoints Alex Gubbay to the position of BBC News Social Media Editor. He'll take up the job in January.

(I notice that Ruth Barnett, former Twitter Correspondent, at Sky News has also had her job title renamed at some point - she's now Sky's Social Media Correspondent.)

Congrats to everyone.

Instant Twitter reaction from past and present BBC staffers on Gubbay's appointment seemed to be positive (although putting out anything else other than that probably wouldn't have been too clever).

A BBC insider (should have) said: "Everyone was pleased that during this particular appointment process Gubbay found out he had got the job before the rest of the world."

Anonymous blogging

After successfully uncovering Night Jack and Girl With a One Track Mind, The Times and the Sunday Times are continuing their campaign to systematically 'out' every anonymous blogger on the Web.

Ok, I jest. That's not strictly true.

In this latest case, Belle de Jour, who led a secret life as a blogging prostitute, did come forward to the Sunday Times voluntarily to reveal her identity as research scientist, Dr Brooke Magnanti.

You do wonder how voluntarily the voluntarily bit was though given that: "...she decided to reveal her secret because it was making her paranoid, and she feared that an ex-boyfriend might reveal Belle’s true identity".

And according to India Knight "nearly every media organisation in Britain has thrown its resources at outing her".

And in a Twitter update Belle de Jour said she went to The Sunday Times "willingly" after the "Mail had their reporters warned off my work premises by the police".

Hmmm...it sounds like Dr Magnanti unmasked herself under no external pressure whatsoever.

It's all making me nervous. How long will it be before The Times family track down my anonymous blog?

Discussing Twitter and Journalism at Reuters

I'm just back from the Amplified 1pound40 conference at Reuters where we were discussing how social media impacts politics, news, and the arts.

Christian Payne (@Documentally) recorded the discussion on our table about Twitter and journalism which included a few thoughts from me and some more interesting ones from other people:

Links from the Archives: 1996 - 2001

So my two day absence at a teaching course turned into a two week blogging absence. Afraid I had an allergic reaction to something I did that day and spent far too many of the following days hardly eating.

Been recovering and catching up in the meantime hence it's all been quiet on the blogging front.

Thought I'd stick up a few links I've saved from years gone by in relation to the BBC, blogging etc over the next few posts. A little history slot if you like.

1996

• The BBC's 1996 budget website. (That's a reference to the Chancellor's budget, rather than the website's quality. Which for the time I imagine was far less 'budget' than it seems now.)
  

1997-8

• Current research: a data set of the emerging links in the blogosphere.

1999

• Dismissed MI6 officer Richard Tomlinson demonstrates the potential of the Web to frustrate existing information gatekeepers by ignoring a government D-notice and publishing a list of alleged MI6 agents on his Geocites website. (BBC website)
  

• A BBC report by 'Internet Correspondent' Chris Nuttall includes a reference to "contributors to a discussion on the Slashdot Weblog". I reckon it's one of the first uses of a weblog as a source of information on the BBC website. If you have any earlier references, let me know.
  

2000

• BBC's h2g2 project invites 'researchers' to keep a blog. The project aimed to "be an unconventional guide to life, the universe and everything, an encyclopaedic project where entries are written by people from all over the world." And it's still going apparently.
  

2001

• While then leader of the Liberal Democrats, Charles Kennedy, is criticised for not updating his website, a commenter on this BBC article called Nick Jordan suggests politicians should start blogging: "It seems to me that many politicians would find a weblog a useful thing. Tools such as Blogger and Greymatter can take most of the pain away from updating regularly."

• BBC news E-Cyclopedia lists new additions to the news lexicon including the word weblog which it describes as: "a log of webpages a surfer has visited and recommends. In 2001 the term also came to mean public online journals where cyber diarists let the world in on the latest twists and turns of their love, work and internal lives. 'The majority...are not all that interesting,' says weblog-tracking psychologist John Grohol."
  

• Political Correspondent Nick Robinson, or somebody on his behalf, explains what 'newslog' is to the BBC's online audience. It was the first major high profile experiment with news blogging at the BBC: "Many [blogs] consist of links to other websites of interest, often with a comment added by the owner of the weblog. But some weblogs adopt lives of their own right, becoming unfolding diaries. Nick Robinson's aims to having something of both of these - news about and links to things that have happened, and his own take on those events."