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.)

How blogs have changed journalism

Felix Salmon, a Reuters blogger, considers how blogs have changed journalism. Among other things, he notes:

• "I find pretty big differences in how I write, depending on whether it’s for a traditional media outlet or for the blog. I have a more conversational voice on the blog — I think of any given post as being part of a much broader conversation between bloggers and between me and my readers."

• "The main impact I think is the way that blog reporting can iterate. In traditional media, you report the story and then you publish it; with blogs, you can start with something much less fully formed and then come back at it over time in many ways and from many angles."

• "Blogging has clearly given readers a much wider range of news sources to choose from, and it’s great that readers are no longer confined to getting their news from a handful of outlets." 

• [Twitter] has "massively increased the velocity of news: people now know what’s going on before it’s formally reported." 

• "In general, news sites are becoming bloggier, with more assiduous editorial standards, while big blog sites are becoming newsier; that trend is likely to continue."

I have just the odd thought tucked away here and there on this issue, but all in good time...

How the BBC challenges censorship in Iran and China

There was an interesting article in The Guardian a few days ago documenting how the BBC is combating censorship in Iran and China using social media (and some good old-fashioned journalism).

At a South by Southwest festival panel, Sanam Dolatshahi, producer and presenter with BBC Persian TV, described an information struggle with the Iranian regime: "they would jam our footage and show their own version of events – using the same UGC, but to tell a different story, a different version of events. They would also try to make us broadcast wrong stuff so that we would lose our credibility."

She suggested that even more emphasis was subsequently placed on "verification and cross-checking of our sources."

Meanwhile, the head of BBC China, Raymond Li, said he uses microblogging websites to publish material. He finds that regulation is less prohibitive on these sites and he can outwit state censors. But he said it required no little skill and plenty of care.

Iran has a history of jamming BBC Persian TV satellites, while China blocks the BBC website every now and then. Like in 1998 or in 2010. 

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.