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David Higgerson considers some of the (myriad) ways online comments cause difficulties, including giving those characters who prefer not to be held to account by journalists a way to avoid them.... "Unlike a residents association website, newspapers carry with them a reputation of providing news and information you can trust. They’ve traditionally provided a forum for discussion – the letters page – where the rules were simple: Keep it clean, keep it polite, and tell us who you are. Thanks to legal rulings around who is responsible for comments if a website pre-moderates them, the rules for commenting online are effectively non-existent: No obligation to keep it clean, no obligation to keep it polite, and, often, no presumption that real identities must be revealed."
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A robust (justified) dismantling of the 'we don't have the staff' defence.
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Nice bit of dogged determination to get a story out. The amount of times FOIs run into brick walls is very frustrating.
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Heather Champ talks about her time with Flickr in its early days, how the company instilled the Web 2.0 ethos in its employees, and what she thinks about the way things have changed. It's a short Q&A that reveals a lot about the company and online users. " I'm pretty horrified by the current state of life online when it comes to privacy, community, what we share, our photos, and how our images may be used now, or in the future. I would hope that companies would really take stock of the decisions that they're making and what the long term implications are."
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"“Strategy lives in delivery – not in meetings” – Leisa Reichelt" This is from Martin Belam's liveblog of Confab 2013. This point, by Leisa Reichelt, is one of the most strikingly memorable - and true - things I've come across for a while. For anyone who has ever said they want "a more strategic role" or to "become more involved with strategy making" this, more than anything, sums up what matters. Crafting strategy is a pretty straightforward thing compared to the implementation of it. Delivering strategy in the Real World is one of the most challenging, difficult things, a manager can face.
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I found Erin Caton's writings on Medium, and I think she's great. This piece, about how to be a good member of the web community, is spot on "It’s like technology has become a shield that bars emotion from our interactions, allowing a person to passively sit by while the unspeakable happens"
Showing posts with label Diigo. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Diigo. Show all posts
Sunday, 31 March 2013
My 'interesting reads' roundup (weekly)
Sunday, 24 March 2013
My 'interesting reads' roundup (weekly)
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The Financial Brand loves its Google Alerts, and it is Not Happy that they are broken with no fix in sight. In this information packed post, it sets out why we should all be concerned about the latest Google glitch "Google has lost touch with its core business model: search. Searching the internet is what Google is was known for, it is was what Google (once) did better than everyone else. But Google has become distracted with “Shiny New Syndrome,” wasting tremendous amounts of time and energy (yours and ours) on ideas that fall way outside the search model."
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Capzles is a user-friendly, free timeline developer. You can enter text and multimedia, and create a flashy timeline in a variety of preset designs. www.capzles.com/ (Caveat - it's Flash-based. Not friendly for iThings)
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Andy Carvin's insights into how he builds an online network - really useful tips for any journalist.
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WaPo imposes a 20 pages a month limit metered paywall. As (just about every) other commenters have pointed out, this is surely more of a saggy picket fence than a paywall. "The Post has been the most prominent of the anti-paywall US papers, and the last without one, excepting USA Today (all eyes now are on The Guardian). Its resistance spurred unhelpful commentary like Mathew Ingram’s July 2012 “Why the Washington Post will never have a paywall” piece. “Never,” in this case, turned out to be eight months."
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"As PR becomes ascendant, private and government interests become more able to generate, filter, distort, and dominate the public debate, and to do so without the public knowing it. "What we are seeing now is the demise of journalism at the same time we have an increasing level of public relations and propaganda," Robert McChesney said. "We are entering a zone that has never been seen before in this country.""
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From the Guardian. Does what it says on the tin.
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The annual PEW report on American journalism is out - and it makes uncomfortable reading if you work in the industry.
Sunday, 17 March 2013
My 'interesting reads' roundup (weekly)
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This Gawker article deals with the Nate Thayer/Atlantic fallout but also poses a number of questions that pertain more towards the 'free interns' debate. When does work experience become free labour, and how far should you go to prove yourself in your chosen profession before that profession thinks you're worth remunerating? "... it's then incumbent upon all of us to recognize that this is the culture we breed when we offer to pay writers nothing or next to nothing, thereby immediately eliminating anyone who needs a paycheck in order to feed themselves and keep a roof over their heads. Some writers may be able to hustle double-duty for a while, filing short stories during the day while waiting tables at night until their big break hits. But the field will still be overpopulated by people who came into it with money and security behind them"
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A Branch discussion in which a number of writers debate the pros and cons of writing for free, the value of a piece of work, and how circumstances can influence whether they seek payment or not. Interesting range of views.
Sunday, 10 March 2013
My 'interesting reads' roundup (weekly)
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"If the industry has come to learn anything from the Great Recession, it’s that we produce a product, a product that needs to be marketed just as well as — if not better than — any other product. This year’s 10 Newspapers That Do It Right are all prime examples of how newspapers can flex their marketing muscle to take back their place in the community, produce the high-quality products that readers demand, and update their sales tactics to accommodate the needs of modern advertisers. "
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According to a study, uncivil comments can not only polarize readers views but lead to a change in how they intrepret the story... I think the expectation is that we all twitch our skirts in a panic over the findings - but it's not that much of a revelation to learn that our own views can be affected by the forcibly expressed views of others, is it? "In a study published online last month in The Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, we and three colleagues report on an experiment designed to measure what one might call “the nasty effect.” We asked 1,183 participants to carefully read a news post on a fictitious blog, explaining the potential risks and benefits of a new technology product... Then we had participants read comments on the post, supposedly from other readers, and respond to questions regarding the content of the article itself... "the results were both surprising and disturbing. "
Sunday, 3 March 2013
My 'interesting reads' roundup (weekly)
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From The Atlantic's piece on an article by Emily Bazelon' - a good glimpse inside the beast that is Facebook "Sullivan cycled through the complaints with striking speed, deciding with very little deliberation which posts and pictures came down, which stayed up, and what other action, if any, to take. I asked him whether he would ever spend, say, 10 minutes on a particularly vexing report, and Willner raised his eyebrows. "We optimize for half a second," he said. "Your average decision time is a second or two, so 30 seconds would be a really long time." (A Facebook spokesperson said later that the User Operations teams use a process optimized for accuracy, not speed.) That reminded me of Let's Start Drama. Six months after Carbonella sent his reports, the page was still up. I asked why. It hadn't been set up with the user's real name, so wasn't it clearly in violation of Facebook's rules? "
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- owboarding society was recorded in 2011 – months before Mr Swain was elected as student union president.
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Useful round up of case examples detailing where, how and why some Twitter users have fallen foul of the law. From BBC Magazine
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Being reactive, rather than planning campaigns, is the way of the advertising future apparently. I watched the Superbowl live, and saw how Oreo turned a power cut into a masterstroke of social advertising - it's interesting that of all the huge advertising campaigns planned for the event, Oreo is the most memorable for me, and it was done with a simple photo. "The rigid campaign-based model of advertising, perfected over decades of one-way mass media, is headed for extinction. For messages to be heard in 2020, brands will need to create an enormous amount of useful, appealing, and timely content. To get there, brands will have to leave behind organizations and thinking built solely around the campaign model, and instead adopt the defining characteristics of the real-time, data-driven newsroom — a model that's prolific, agile and audience-centric. "
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This is an absolutely brilliant resource - lots of different sites and tools for journalists, which have also been helpfully rated. A real keeper.
Sunday, 24 February 2013
My 'interesting reads' roundup (weekly)
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A while ago, someone who shall remain nameless said to be, about a colleague, "he'll never change". It seems to me that is about the most insulting statement you can make about another person - and also the most inaccurate. People change all the time; the issue is more about how they feel about that change, whether it impacts well or poorly on their outlook, whether it's a temporary condition, and how they deal with it. And then there's the self-awareness aspect. Do you know how you react to change, and how open to change are you really? This isn't an analogue/digital consideration - it would be a massive change, for me, if a paywall went up on dailypost.co.uk. I don't like paywalls, I don't believe they work; how would I cope with that change? Anyway, John Paton, CEO of the Journal Register Company, deals with all these issues in an excellent piece on the Global Editors Network site. Worth a read. "Everyone says they are open to change, everyone says they are willing to make the necessary changes with the technology shifts. But there is a big difference in recognizing that you need to change and actually changing. There are these momentous debates going on in the news community claiming that the demand for new technological innovations are cheapening journalism, and user generated content and social media are cheapening the quality. I think those kind of discussions are based on a false premise, which is that everything used to be better. The question I would pose is “Are you truly adopting change and bringing your skills, passion and dedication to using these new tools to make journalism better?” If you are not, you better get out of the business."
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Nieman Journalism Lab considers the pros and cons would-be buyers of the Boston Globe face. A really interesting read. "Make no mistake: 2013, as your friendly newspaper realtors would tell you, is a great time to sell. The last 18 months have seen the greatest volume of deals in the last five years. And, why not: There’s a mildly up economy, all-access is bolstering revenue optimism, and heck, the Oracle himself, Warren Buffett, is buying newspapers by the dozen. The only problem for sellers is that prices haven’t moved much up."
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Elsewhere in my Diigo bookmarks is a poignant blog post by Mimi Johnson about her husband, Steve Buttry, quitting journalism and how relieved his decision made her. Of course, nothing is forever - even quitting journalism - Steve has returned and become probably one of the best-known people transforming the industry today. But this post by Abigail Rieley, a long-standing court reporter, is worth a read. It's hard to fall out of love with something you have known all your life - maybe she'll find a trial separation was all that was needed... "After almost twenty years I’m getting out of journalism. Years ago, when I was planning on following in my parents’ footsteps and becoming an actor, I eventually decided against it because I knew the pitfalls all too well. There was no idealistic cushion against the hard times I knew damn well would come. I’ve reached that stage with journalism. I’ve always been a news journalist but I’ve been letting my objectivity slip for a while now. I don’t think there’s any getting it back. I thought I’d be a hack till the day I died but not anymore. I find myself dreaming of a job outside the media, away from newsrooms, away from filing copy. I just don’t love it any more and that’s probably the point to say goodbye."
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Interesting question from Martin Belam, who ends his post with the view that he'd love the opportunity to research the WHY of this more deeply. Good point. "The big mystery for the publishing industry though is just why iOS users are so much more engaged and valuable to their businesses than Android users"
Sunday, 3 February 2013
My Interesting Reads
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This is an interesting question from the Post and Courier, Charleston. Do you notify someone if you're going to use their tweet? Industry sites sometimes embed my tweets and I get a surprise when I see them - but I take the view that I've said it in public and so it's fair enough. But what about when it's friends posting tributes on a Facebook wall that happens to have a public profile? These get ripped off all the time. As to whether we should ask people if they post on a newspaper's Facebook wall if they mind being published, I think not, although the Daily Post does tend to say 'we'll publish a selection' when posting something soliciting feedback.
Sunday, 27 January 2013
My Interesting Reads
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The Daily Post website is getting Facebook sign-in later this year for comments. So... this , from TechCrunch, was an interesting read: " The bullies and asshats left our comments sections, but so did everyone else. Now, several years later, after dozens of endless meetings and conference calls, we’ve decided we’re going to try out Livefyre instead of Facebook Comments. "Frankly, our trial with Facebook Comments lasted way too long at too steep of a cost. Sure, Facebook Comments drove extra traffic to the site, but the vast majority of our readers clearly do not feel the system is worthy of their interaction."
Sunday, 20 January 2013
My Interesting Reads (weekly)
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"What do we know about Google+? Google launched it in June 2011, amid much fanfare; the problem was that it looked very like a social network - in which you'd put people into Circles to indicate their intersection with your interest. So you could have a "family and friends" Circle, and perhaps a "Work" Circle, and a "Hobby" circle. "
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"A judge has found that two news organizations improperly used images that a photojournalist had posted to Twitter in one of the first big tests of intellectual property law involving social media."
Sunday, 13 January 2013
My Interesting Reads (weekly)
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"Inside the NYT’s Idea Lab, a team of 10 works to save the banner ad. The lab itself is an offshoot of NYT’s Tk, which was set up to come up with new technologies for storytelling. Think of the three-year-old Idea Lab as something similar, only it works with agencies and brands to help advertisers tell stories in modern, interesting ways. "
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"There are very, very few organizations today that have sufficient leadership. Until we face this issue, understanding exactly what the problem is, we're never going to solve it. Unless we recognize that we're not talking about management when we speak of leadership, all we will try to do when we do need more leadership is work harder to manage. At a certain point, we end up with over-managed and under-led organizations, which are increasingly vulnerable"
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"We’ve built a real-time human computation engine to help us identify search queries as soon as they're trending, send these queries to real humans to be judged, and then incorporate the human annotations into our back-end models. First, we monitor for which search queries are currently popular. Behind the scenes: we run a Storm topology that tracks statistics on search queries. For example, the query [Big Bird] may suddenly see a spike in searches from the US. As soon as we discover a new popular search query, we send it to our human evaluators, who are asked a variety of questions about the query. Behind the scenes: when the Storm topology detects that a query has reached sufficient popularity, it connects to a Thrift API that dispatches the query to Amazon's Mechanical Turk service, and then polls Mechanical Turk for a response. Finally, after a response from an evaluator is received, we push the information to our backend systems, so that the next time a user searches for a query, our machine learning models will make use of the additional information."
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"Free apps are dangerous, yet free is the dominant business model most mobile apps are taking these days. The roadmap is simple: grow as quickly as possible, then insert ads of some kind or get acquired. For consumers it offers a crummy set of choices: either losing the countless hours you put into the app or have your private data sold to marketers — since as well all know, when the product is free, you are the product. So how are we to trust investing time (our most valuable asset) in free apps that seem to inevitably "jump the shark," no matter how cool they start out? Are paid apps the answer, or will we need something more complex to keep developers in business?"
Sunday, 6 January 2013
My Interesting Reads
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Fascinating study of web users and usability - especially around how people are accessing content directly via search. Raises some interesting questions around how we design our home pages (and the diminishing relevance of home pages) among other things. "It seems to me, that for at least for some sections of the web community, the mental model they have of the web toady may be very different to the one they had a few years ago. This could be contributing to an impaired understanding of the structure of conventional sites, and difficulty in using the navigation systems they contain. At the same time, an increasing number of web users are not using internal information retrieval mechanisms to locate information within a site, turning instead to external search engines (mainly Google) as a way of providing quick and direct access to resources deep within sites. A combination of this growing reliance on Google, and the suggested ‘Facebook effect’ may mean that it is time to reconsider some basic usability and accessibility principals, and the potential impact it could have for web users with cognitive impairments and/or limited internet experience. "
Sunday, 30 December 2012
My Interesting Reads (weekly)
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"A solution based on giving people the same thing for a new, higher price only opens you up to disruption. A solution based on providing more value for your users that keeps them loyal to you is going to last a lot longer. "
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"This is all going to turn into B-roll. With each passing day, the filing clerks of our hearts and minds will cart it a little further back, to a dimmer and dustier shelf. But it happened, so that:" This piece of writing really resonated with me. I think beyond the remarkable writing and heart-rending topic, it's an important message for journalists. Not to let an issue become a B-roll.
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Best or worst? Anyway, some of them were new to me. I do like Sweden's idea though - I wouldn't call it fail;I think it's actually quite cool
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I've made it into Hansard, albeit with a sex change. Still, Alison is a pretty easy name to confuse. Sigh. I'd care less if he at least agreed with me.
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- I see I have changed sex. If it's in Hansard, I guess it must be true.
- However, I say to that newspaper editor, and to others who share his view, that we need to consider what that means. In his summary of recommendations, Lord Leveson says:
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Sunday, 23 December 2012
My Interesting Reads (weekly)
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"People have always wanted to involve themselves in great stories. With industrial-age media you could only involve yourself in a limited way - you could read Charles Dickens or Scott Fitzgerald and imagine yourself in the worlds they described. But each new medium has seemed more immersive than the one before - movies seemed far more immersive than print, and in many ways it's easier to get lost in video games or online than it is in the movies. That doesn't mean Gears of War is better than A Tale of Two Cities. It does mean that some people might find it more seductive. "
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A wonderful piece of storytelling
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"We build the world’s simplest and most beautiful storytelling tools, and we offer them for free to anyone who wishes to use them. "When you tell stories on Cowbird, we automatically find connections between your life and the lives of others, forming a vast, interconnected ecosystem, in which we all take part. Our goal is to build a public library of human experience, so the knowledge and wisdom we accumulate as individuals may live on as part of the commons, available for this and future generations to look to for guidance."
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When you read through the inaccuracies surrounding the Newtown shootings, that tried at tested fallback for failures - "Breaking news changes all the time" - starts to look a little ragged. Most of what was published wasn't journalism, it was regurgitation
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" What can we expect in the next 18 months? How can we build upon the inherent (and many) advantages offered by the mobile space?"
Sunday, 16 December 2012
My Interesting Reads (weekly)
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This issue of having reporters respond to critics online is, says Jeff Soderman, one of courage and trust for publishers. I agree. You cannot cheerlead for your staff to get out on social media, and then bust them over the head the first time they make a mistake. But people need to take advice, learn fast and - crucially - not be dicks when they respond. "As far as I can tell, this type of strict ban on journalists responding to complaints is not “commonly used” by broadcasters or other news organizations “across the country,” though we invite you to share examples in the comments if you know of any places where it is policy. But is it a good idea? The decision boils down to two factors: trust and courage. Do you trust your journalists enough to handle these interactions professionally, and do you have the courage to weather the fallout of a mistake or two along the way?"
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Instapaper creator Marco Arment, posting on his blog about his app strategy for The Magazine:"If the App Store gets spammed with hundreds of bad clones, The Magazine itself will lose credibility and potential subscribers as people make incorrect assumptions about its article quality. That’s why The Magazine isn’t part of a bigger strategy: I don’t want everyone to rush into this model, making an app that looks and works just like mine. I don’t want to make “the WordPress of Newsstand”, because I don’t want it to be that easy to copy The Magazine."
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Handy roundup of some of the free tools available
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Henry Blodget does the maths to speculate at what point the NYT becomes supported by digital revenue alone
Sunday, 9 December 2012
My Interesting Reads (weekly)
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"German business daily Financial Times Deutschland (FTD) bade farewell to its readers on Friday in a final edition packed with gallows humour cartoons and melancholy musings on the revolution in the media industry that sealed its fate. Publisher Gruner + Jahr decided to shut the FTD after accumulating what German media said were 250 million euros ($325 million)in losses since its launch in 2000. Around 330 employees are expected to lose their jobs."
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Survey on how users perceive branded advertising content, the value it has, and how it can ultimately damage the title hosting it. Interesting read that will be welcomed by journalists I suspect, less so by advertising teams.
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Cornering the market for advertising spend in elections... "BuzzFeed, potentially, represents more than another destination for advertising. The goal of BuzzFeed content is to thrive outside the website, to be easily readable on mobile devices, and to spread on Twitter and Facebook. For campaigns, that could help extend their reach on social media, which has steadily gained prominence in elections."
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Controversial piece on commercial/editorial convergence and why journalists need to understand the Business of News "The economics of journalism no longer work like they used to. The same holds true for the advertising business. These two clashing industry realities require both print stalwarts and digital believers to get a grip."
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"Boston.com has begun offering advertisers the chance to write their own blog posts, joining a growing list of web publishers pinning at least some of their hopes on a tactic variously known as native advertising, custom content or branded content. The idea is that the same readers who regularly and easily ignore banner ads may actually appreciate sponsored content that resembles a website's editorial approach. Advertisers, in turn, might pay higher rates."
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"A junior reporter on a weekly newspaper has been sacked after naming a man questioned by police investigating historic child sex abuse allegations last week as a well-known entertainer. The journalist, who worked for the Archant-owned Great Yarmouth Mercury, posted the celebrity’s name on his personal Twitter account"
Sunday, 2 December 2012
My Interesting Reads
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Embedded document on Telegraph website. Plus Guardian's more reader-friendly digest of the report http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2012/nov/28/leveson-inquiry-report-essential-guide
Sunday, 25 November 2012
My Interesting Reads (weekly)
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" Kon*Fab, a new project funded by the Knight Foundation, which aims in some small way to inject serendipity, conversation, and physical space into news. "
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"The study finds that Live Blogs are a popular daily component of the news site, used increasingly to cover serious breaking news. Although rarely authored exclusively on location, they may utilise more original sources than traditional online hard news formats. Their frequent updates mean factual verification is cursory, but compensatory factors, including their attribution practices, contribute to a positive evaluation of their objectivity by readers. Live Blogs—with their timeliness, navigational simplicity, and bite-sized content units—suit readers’ consumption of news in the workplace. Live Blogs may increase online news readers’ interest in public-affairs content, and their inclination to participate. ...Live Blogging is uniquely suited to readers’ at-work news consumption patterns and that the format provides journalists with a means to manage the competing demands of their elite and mass publics."
Sunday, 18 November 2012
My Interesting Reads (weekly)
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"For some time now, newspaper people have been insisting, sometimes angrily, that we readers will soon have to pay for content (an assertion that had already appeared, in just that form, by 1996.) During that same period, freely available content grew ten-thousand-fold, while buyers didn’t. In fact, as Paul Graham has pointed out, “Consumers never really were paying for content, and publishers weren’t really selling it either…Almost every form of publishing has been organized as if the medium was what they were selling, and the content was irrelevant.”"
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"Online earnings are falling despite booming audiences at leading UK news publisher Trinity Mirror, caught in a confluence of circumstances that prompt the big question — does content pay?"
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Nice blog post from Storyful, which Includes some handy tips and diagrams for anyone upgrading to 'new' Tweetdeck...
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What is a social network? How is it defined, why do some succeed when others fail, and what make us use them? "The purpose of this is to provide a conceptual, historical, and scholarly context for the articles in this collection. We define what constitutes a social network site, present one perspective on the historical development of SNSs, draw from personal interviews and public accounts of sites and their changes over time...We conclude with suggestions for future research."
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elevision shows will have other types of media like text merged into them, and World Wide Web pages will begin to be temporal entities that tell a story. Another way of looking at this is that both your television and your computer will be running a similar super browser which will allow the same content to be viewed on both devices. Also, to say that the two converge it is not enough to say that you will be able to watch television on your computer-- that merely means that television content is a sub-set of computer content and is already possible today. For the two to truly converge the content that can be received by both devices should be the same"
Sunday, 11 November 2012
Sunday, 4 November 2012
My Interesting Reads (weekly)
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The @ComfortablySmug Sandy tweets were obviously fake, but journalists retweeting without checking the source or facts led to his deliberate misinformation being broadcast as fact on network TV. Salutary warning about the dangers of RT-ing, without checking what is being said. "Tripathi, as an internet troll, was completely in character, and he had no responsibility to the public. But journalists do have that responsibility – and so, if Tripathi's silly tweets made it into the national press, it is the national press that is, at heart, to blame for not protecting journalistic standards as well as they should. It is a matter of a few minutes to call a spokesperson or check a live camera, and that is what journalists get paid to do. Producers or editors should not rush information to air or print until those calls have been made, and answered."
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"Trying to trick his media followers, and their followers and readers in turn, with fake news. He reported, falsely, on a total blackout in Manhattan, on a flood on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, and other things that didn't happen." See also https://twitter.com/breeannehowe/status/263100107942154240 and http://gofwd.tumblr.com/post/34623466723/twitter-is-a-truth-machine
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Love this piece from the Atlantic, on sorting the fake and Photoshopped from the genuine eyewitness images of Hurricane Sandy. Some very handy pointers for journalists dealing with less apocalyptic stories in need of verification, too.
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