BBC journalist's blog post leads to P.J. Crowley resignation

Last Thursday, BBC journalist Philippa Thomas broke a news story on her blog.

She reported the comments of U.S. State Department spokesman, Philip J. Crowley, who had described the detention of alleged Wikileaks source, Bradley Manning, as "stupid" at a talk at MIT.

Philip resigned four days later, and as he tidied his desk, paused to state that "the exercise of power in today’s challenging times and relentless media environment must be prudent and consistent with our laws and values".

Meanwhile Philippa, who is on sabbatical at Harvard exploring the world of new media, analysed her personal experience of the convergent nature of the media system in an interesting blog post. She may well have "learned at first hand the power of the blog".

But she also wondered whether the key to the story was her role as "a professional journalist for a well-established news outlet like the BBC" and thus has "a voice that can emerge more clearly from the white noise of the blogosphere."

Perhaps, it's both.

But whatever it is, it sure seems like a good way to explore the world of new media.

Journalism students use social media but not to produce "news-like content"

Some interesting conclusions from research into the use of social media by 105 New Zealand journalism students in April 2010.  

• "In general we concluded from these data that our students are accomplished users of social networking and sharing content with their online friends and acquaintances; however, they are less engaged with producing news-like content for an audience outside their immediate peers."

• "This cohort is not comfortable with publicly expressing themselves via Twitter, or blogs, and tends to maintain high levels of privacy in Facebook interactions; for example, being selective about who they ‘‘friend’’ on the site."

• "we also noted only a very small number are building websites, blogging or uploading multimedia content."

• "...Our final question sought responses to the idea that social media sites can be useful tools for journalists. Nearly all respondents answered positively to this question (99 responses; 94.3 per cent). The positive responses can be classified generally in terms of social media providing access to news and news-like information; providing new ways of networking and seeking contacts or sources for stories and social media providing forums for discussion of topical issues."

The paper, written by Martin Hirst and Greg Treadwell, is entitled 'Blogs Bother Me'. It's available with an Athens account or institutional log in from InformaWorld.

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.

"BBC News opinion" on Wikileaks

Regular readers will be aware that one of my interests on blogging and the BBC has been the existence of a grey area between "personal opinion" and "professional judgement".

If you are really underemployed it could form part of a wider exploration of the blurring of news, opinion and analysis.

Here is another little example.

If you ask somebody at the BBC about Jonathan Marcus's latest online article on Wikileaks, entitled 'Bumpy ride for U.S. diplomats', they will tell you that the BBC's Diplomatic Correspondent has written a piece of analysis based on the evidence in which he has exercised his professional judgement. It is his "expert view".

The Small Wars Journal, however, has categorised the article under a section headed "Editorials and Opinion" in its excellent list of links on Wikileaks. In fact, the article is labelled "BBC News opinion" suggesting that one person's "analysis" and "professional judgement" is another's "personal" or "news opinion".

Even if you can demonstrate that the Small Wars Journal is wrong to categorise it as such, it suggests that some audiences are not aware of any distinction.

Plus ça change...?

A mini-nugget from Volume Three of Asa Briggs' History of Broadcasting in the United Kingdom.

Briggs notes that at the beginning of the 1940s the BBC's 9’O clock News reached between 43% and 50% of the population.

In the World's Press News, H.G. Wells, (who according to Briggs "loved generalisations"), spoke out boldly saying "the day of the newspaper was done".

In the same publication, Hannen Swaffer said:

"the defeat of journalism by the BBC continues – and will still go on unless newspaper proprietors take intelligent action".

Worth a footnote on new mediums, the end of journalism, and all that sort of stuff.