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22 things you should be thinking about if you care about journalism | David Bauer
"The big red button to make the internet go away again: Would you press it?" I wonder how many journalists would.
Sunday, 30 June 2013
My 'interesting reads' roundup (weekly)
Sunday, 23 June 2013
My 'interesting reads' roundup (weekly)
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The Past Can’t Buy The Future | Digital First
JRC Ceo John Paxton ruffles feathers on a regular basis, but he's visionary and always worth a read. Tbh, I think most of the mainstream UK press accept this in their strategies already - I doubt most view digital as a bolt = but this is a good read, with facts both scary and inspiring. "We can no longer treat digital as a bolt-on to our strategy and protect the legacy business. The past doesn’t buy our future."
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Executive summary - Reuters Institute Digital News Report 2013
"news brands still matter but a strong name and long heritage is no longer enough. Our data show that there still is a yearning – in an ocean of content – for trusted news across a range of subject areas, but newer brands like Yahoo and the Huffington Post are also proving they can fill that role alongside a raft of specialist providers, blogs, and social media too."
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UK newspapers' print ad revenue 'to shrink by £400m by the end of 2014' | Media | guardian.co.uk
"Group M forecasts that UK press ad spend "remains under the most pressure" of all advertising sectors in the UK. The total UK newspaper market is projected to shrink by 8.2% this year, or £186m, to £2.06bn. This is an improvement over the decline of 10.2% in national and regional newspaper advertising in 2012. In 2014, total newspaper print advertising is expected to fall 9.8%, or about another £202m, to see the market drop to £1.86bn".
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This is the full announcement by Local Government Minister Eric Pickles, regarding the use of social tools for live reporting
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Sources With Secrets Find New Outlets for Sharing - NYTimes.com
Saturday, 22 June 2013
The council that tried to charge for using social media
This is the full announcement by Local Government Minister Eric Pickles, on a new guide detailing how journalists, bloggers, hyperlocal media and the public can now use social tools and filming for live reporting*.
In Wales it seems to have been chiefly noted for the fact that he criticised the Welsh government - which puts me in mind of that line about the Devil's greatest trick.
Certainly it looks like the central fact of the debate has gotten a little lost amid the sound and fury.
Anyway, there was an interesting discussion about the issue in general on Twitter the other night, that I saved and finally got around to Storifying. The standout point for me is that one about a council trying to charge a newspaper for using anything other than a notepad and pen to report meetings.
Astonishing.
David Higgerson has written a blog post* about the importance of campaigning. If you missed it, I really recommend it as a read.
*The Daily Post gets an honourable mention in dispatches, in the notes.
In Wales it seems to have been chiefly noted for the fact that he criticised the Welsh government - which puts me in mind of that line about the Devil's greatest trick.
Certainly it looks like the central fact of the debate has gotten a little lost amid the sound and fury.
Anyway, there was an interesting discussion about the issue in general on Twitter the other night, that I saved and finally got around to Storifying. The standout point for me is that one about a council trying to charge a newspaper for using anything other than a notepad and pen to report meetings.
Astonishing.
David Higgerson has written a blog post* about the importance of campaigning. If you missed it, I really recommend it as a read.
*The Daily Post gets an honourable mention in dispatches, in the notes.
Sunday, 16 June 2013
My 'interesting reads' roundup (weekly)
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The Year of Mobile really is coming: Mobile broadband to overtake fixed line by 2015
According to Ericsson, mobile data traffic will grow 12 times between now and 2018, driven largely by video. Mobile is soon going to be as big as fixed line internet access and it won't be long before it is the primary way audience access the web.
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Sri Lanka: Using Google Earth as a storytelling tool | Media news | Journalism.co.uk
"By using just two satellite images from Google Earth, taken two months apart, a citizen journalist has been able to tell the story of the end of Sri Lanka's 25-year civil war." Great read; follow the links for an even more detailed analysis on the original source
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Journalists, this is your time | Media, disrupted
Hell, yes.
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Free Arbitration Could Cost Local Papers Thousands of Pounds, MPs Told | newspapersoc.org.uk
This has all the potential of becoming the straw breaking the camel's back for the regional newspaper industry. Worrying that it's still dragging on as a viable proposal. "The industry and its advisers anticipate that allegations of code breach or trivial complaints of the type currently resolved by the editor direct or by the PCC, will be put forward as legal claims for compensation and applications made for arbitration. Even if struck out at the first stage by an arbitrator, such claims will still incur costs for the publisher. It is estimated that around 1000 claims a year would affect the local newspaper industry, with additional claims encouraged by the publicity surrounding the new regulator and its arbitration system and by the professional advice which clients would receive."
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Freelance publishers axed from Local World hyperlocal sites - Journalism News from HoldtheFrontPage
It caused controversy when the scheme was launched ('Journalism on the cheap' was the most trumpeted cry) but the local Northcliffe sites really did seem to gain traction with their communities, I think it's sad to see the site champions being let go, and I doubt users will be happy to lose that point of contact, Community news is not about creating a vacuum for people to fill, and I suspect the people who ran these sites also helped give them a little bit of soul. "A group of 25 freelance community publishers who helped run a network of hyperlocal sites for Local World have left their roles after the publisher decided it now had enough users to sustain itself. Local World has now ended the freelance contracts it had with 25 community publishers"
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Cheaper but edgier: Steve Matthewson on WAN-IFRA in Bangkok
"The point is just that the grand solutions implemented by big Western publishers, that were the bread and butter of such conferences in the past, are seldom the workable, modest, affordable and inspiring solutions the rest of us are looking for." Steve also points out the La Presse app cost R380m and three years to develop. I am absolutely open-mouthed at this. What the hell were they doing for that time and money? Gold plating their laptops?
Sunday, 9 June 2013
My 'interesting reads' roundup (weekly)
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What options do smartphone journalists have if the 3G network is down? · Storify
Mark Blank-Settle (@MarcSettle) posed this question in the wake of the Boston Marathon bombing, when the overloaded network proved challenging for mobile journalists trying to file back to base. This is an excellent Storify of a post-event discussion, problems and solutions on Twitter. Lots for journalist who uses a mobile phone (so, that's all of us, right?) to consider, and some tricks to try.
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When readers attack :: Ryerson Review of Journalism :: The Ryerson School of Journalism
What journalists should do when attacked in comments by readers, and how news organisations (in Canada) are tackling comment free-for-alls. "Human interaction may be the most effective means of taming comments threads, but for the time-starved journalists who populate modern newsrooms, some automation is necessary too. News organizations have begun tidying up by allowing readers to rate comments based on their perceived quality. Readers are realizing that not all comments are valued equally, and that more and more, quality is trumping quantity."
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Report: Reader time on tablets now equals print | Journalism.co.uk
From the World Press Trends report published this week: "Research in the United States, Germany and France has found that people are spending as long reading news on tablets as they are reading printed newspapers."
Sunday, 2 June 2013
My 'interesting reads' roundup (weekly)
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Street photographer Anton Kawasaki posts his thoughts on mobile photography, and what it means to him. This is a fascinating read, illustrated with beautiful photographs - all taken on a smartphone. "I started to play around with my own phone’s camera, began to like what I was producing (others did too), and suddenly I was hooked! Growing up surrounded by the film industry, and also working in comics for so long, definitely helped me in developing an eye for visual storytelling. And shooting non-stop with an iPhone for the last 5 years has really made me adapt to the device’s strengths and weaknesses."
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In the End Was the Word and the Word Was the Sponsor's — BuzzMachine
This speaks to me. Every time I see a news organisation try to ape Buzzfeed or Mashable slideshows I get angry. It undermines the point of having an editorial digital team that can create news content, in my opinion. If you want a team that builds slideshows of lolcats, put them on the marketing budget. "News organizations should not treat people as a mass now that they — like Google, Amazon, and Facebook — can learn to serve them as individuals. Can’t the same be said of the brands that are now rushing to make content? They’re listening to too many tweeted media aphorisms: that content is king, that brands are media. Bull. A brand is a relationship. It signifies trust and value. Advertising and public relations disintermediated the relationship that commercial enterprises used to have with customers over the cracker barrel. Mass media helped them bring scale to marketing. But now the net enables brands to return to having direct relationships with customers. That’s what we see happening on Twitter. Smart companies are using it not to make content but to talk one-on-one with customers."
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The Quality of Offline and Online Friendships - The Machine Starts
Why the friendships we build online are as meaningful and important as any other. A good read, and a good link to send anyone who thinks social media is a little hollow. "Technology can be bad for us, but it can also be very good for specific things. We create frustration for ourselves when we are tricked by technology into thinking it can solve all of our problems in the same way. It can't. But it can likely help us solve problems and foster friendships in different ways, though even then it is only one aspect of the three-dimensional, physical and virtual space we inhabit and should be used proportionately. We seem to always make the mistake of condemning the internet for not allowing us to achieve the same satisfaction that we get from face-to-face relationships in half the time. How churlish. The internet is once again our digital scapegoat. Friendships, like Aristotle's "slow-ripening fruit" remain valuable because of the time and presence we invest in them. "
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Read Me! Glorious Feature Design and the Future of Digital Journalism - The Machine Starts
"For too long some mainstream newspapers and magazines have treated their websites as dumping grounds for the text and thumbnail images associated with their articles. That or, worse, they kept the "web edition" sparse, merely uploading blogs and short pieces as a sort of useless teaser for the print version. New design concepts on the block may, at last, be provoking a rethink. Personally I don't believe in paywalls or a future of digital publishing which ignores long form writing. I think we're way past the legitimacy of either option, to be honest. That's partly because there are already publications proving, by virtue of their profitability, that special feature design is what online journalism has to do next. The trick, of course, is doing it in the right way - and at the right cost."
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