My online identity

I'm speaking at the Art of Digital event in Liverpool tomorrow.
The topic of the learning lab is The Personal which (according to the accompanying blurb) is

"all about the role and influence of people and organisations. We have recently seen the emergence of the self at the heart of online communication, placing the individual at the centre of digital culture."

Anyway, I've been given the theme Identity 2.0, and I have an hour in which to expand my theories. Which is a good topic for me as I'm prone to telling anyone who stands still long enough that journalists must develop and grow their own digital identities if they are to compete in a rapidly expanding arena.

I wasn't going to do a powerpoint, I was just going to talk it through; then I realised my digital life is a bit more eloquent than I am. So I've put a few slides together, and I'm also going to borrow from the 'year of the blog' posts I wrote earlier this year.

My digital identity

View more OpenOffice presentations from Alison Gow.

The slide that sums up the issues around where the professional ends, and the real person begins, I think, is the Twitter one. At 7.18pm I tweet about not giving "a shit about Spymaster", and at 7.19pm I inform the world of the wonderful online election coverage available on our websites. A complete fluke, and I only noticed when I was trawling back through Twitter looking for good and bad examples of my tweeting habits.
Professionalism, ur doin' it rong...

I really hope, I don't mess up tomorrow. Wish me luck.

New Echo tv studio

This is starting to take shape now - we should be filming our first pilot show on Thursday.

Just gimme the facts, ma'am

The last post I wrote about open lines of communication prompted a few comments (thanks all) including a well-reasoned argument from James Goffin that, sometimes, people just wanted the facts. Not interaction, not contribution, just... to know clearly and concisely what was going on. You can find more at his newspaper blog.

And I started to post a reply, James, but it got so long I've ended up lifting it out as a standalone post; I hope you don't mind.
See, I am convinced to the point of being mildly obsessive that open journalism is a vital part of our future.
And I know, when I suggest we should operate wiki principles in our newsgathering and story-presenting, that not everyone out there will want to get involved. Some will indeed just want the facts.
However, the opportunities we can now offer those who do want to interact are now so great that surely we have to take every advantage of them? Even if it occasionally blows up in our faces like this.

I'd be willing to bet a large proportion of people (our potential if not existing audience) do want to be more involved with news-making - it's just that they have little opportunity other than through online commenting, or by ringing the newsdesk to get barked at by someone who equates rudeness with importance.
For many, a newspaper must be a completely unfamiliar and impenetrable institution, possibly to be contacted in extremis, when other avenues have been exhausted. If they're really unlucky they might even have blundered into a newspaper's online forums and been put off for life.

Newspaper journalists who blog about their subjects have a great platform for interaction but not everyone uses it as a way of conversation yet, although I think that will change pretty quickly.
We don't dispute that crowdsourcing is journalism, involving multiple contributors. It means that instead of a reporter setting out with a fixed idea of where the story will go, contributors take control. It can also mean a story becomes something very different to what the newsdesk originally thought it would be - and that's a good thing, I think.

I understand the point James makes when he says "I just want someone I trust to tell me what is going on" - many people who ring a newsdesk phone are essentially saying that. But the whole issue of trust is a tricky one.
How do we trust someone? I'd guess it's by establishing a relationship with them.
Do journalists on your average regional daily have that kind of relationship now?
I'd say not.

We need to be more open, invite collaboration, and earn trust. Existing readers probably do have a fair degree of trust and faith in their local paper but the competition is now so great, and the options for audience to go elsewhere so varied, that we need to be making far greater efforts to connect and set out our stall.
And why should someone trust us? Because we're journalists? Nope, not going to happen. But if what we do is open, visible and open to comment and questioning, and if they are involved, then the dynamic starts to change. It's hard to argue with the success of Spot.us, and I'm excited to see where Help Me Investigate goes.

Anyway, enough. Melanie Sill, of the Neiman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard, says it better than me:

Good journalism should speak for itself, but that only works if people are reading or listening.

We have to have an audience for what we do; the best way to build that audience is to offer people the chance to get involved, and produce great journalism they want to read. Otherwise, we're writing for our newsdesks...

How open are your lines of communication?

And yea, it is written that when four or more editorial execs are gathered together to forward plan the coverage of an impending Happening, one among them will, at some point, spake thusly: "We should do a liveblog".
And everyone else nods while secretly wishing they had suggested it, and the suggestee gains immense Multimedia Kudos and envy points.

Of course, 'we should do a liveblog' is just one of the options when playing Multimedia Newsroom Bingo. Other popular phrases include "Can we make a Dipity timeline", "What about a SurveyMonkey" (it's always 'a' SurveyMonkey - I love that) , "We could do some (ie. any) video" and that old favourite, "Get some comments off the forum" (ie. is there a workie who can translate all that textspeak into English?).

To be fair, I'm as happy to talk to the talk as the next meeting-attendee but there are times when it seems these meeting-friendly web 2.0 phrases disguise a deeper issue.
Because at the end of the day Dipity, liveblogs, surveys et al still come down to newsrooms trying to control what the story is. It's not quite one-way traffic but a contraflow is most definitely in operation and we're the ones in charge of the signals.
What we are really saying is this:

"Want to know the background to this story? Here's our Dipity timeline" (featuring our rss feeds and images)

"Want to take part and get involved? Join our liveblog" (and we'll pre-moderate comments, determine and set the polls and decide when it opens and closes)

Such an approach is massively counter-productive. Yes you might have a Googlemap on your website but will you allow your readers to contribute to it? If not, why not? Suppose you did allow anyone to edit and it backfired - would you risk such a venture again? Or is it a case of once bitten, twice shy?
And another starter for 10: Do you select the 'anyone can edit this' option when using Dipity? If you do, then you're creating an opportunity for collaboration. If not, why not?

These are, I think, important questions we newspaper-types need to ask ourselves not just once but repeatedly. Otherwise, even when we tell ourselves we're trying new ways to communicate, ultimately we're still dictating how news is presented and served up.
We may not necessarily control what happens to it next on other sites but on our own, it's pretty much ours to dictate.

But, look, the tradition model (write content, publish content in paper, sell shedload of newspapers), is gone. The current model of write content, upload some content, publish all content in print, is built on compromise and uncertainty. So where do we go from here? I don't have the answer but I think it might look something like:

Ask people/publish
Expand on what people tell us...
PUBLISH WHAT IS KNOWN allowing anyone to keep asking/adding to content
Conclude findings in print...
... and keep asking and listening because what you end up with may be completely different to the idea you started with

For me what makes a website sticky are the developments in a topic I care about. I go back to take part, see what others are saying, how things have changed, to comment and expand. I don't go back to watch a video of someone talking about a plan for a new housing estate.
I would dearly love to see the traditional newspaper website format replaced with something more akin to wikis and blogs. To have open-ended news gathering and reporting (where we don't close down the comment option after a week whether people have finished talking about it or not), and to have newsrooms embrace an approach where collaboration and partnerships are seen as opportunities.

Joanna Geary's latest blog post struck a chord with me when she said "I began to realise that it was only journalists who thought they always had to finish the stories by themselves".
Too many times we try to finish a story, we present it as a neat package with a beginning, middle and end, and present it to the reader with a flourish. We follow up of course, and we may start a forum thread, or publish readers letters - increasingly reporters blog about their stories too, once they have written them.

But it's not enough. I'd love reporters to spend a week where none of their stories were featured in the newspaper - they would only be able to get their information out online, via a blog, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, a wiki - hell, they could even arrange a meeting at a local cafe and talk to people - anything but the printed page. I think it would be an eye-opener for everyone involved.
The way we currently operate - and I mean our wetware, not a company's hardware - inhibits our ability to share information and our thinking. That, in turn, inhibits our ability to grow audience, reach, reputation and, by extension, revenue. We're bright people; we can be better than this.

The end may be nigh but you don't have to keep telling me...

Chris Brogan is an online social media star who has given me much to think about over the past 18 months or so that I've followed him on Twitter, and subscribed to his blog.
If you don't, I recommend it - it's here. And his latest post is so good I couldn't resist sharing a few (there are many more on this blog) of the points here:

* Stories are points in time, but won’t end at publication. (Edits, updates, extensions are next.)

* Curators and editors rule, and creators aren’t necessarily on staff.

* Media cannot stick to one form. Text, photos, video, music, audio, animation, etc are a flow.

* Everything must have collaborative opportunities. If I write about a restaurant, you should have wikified access to add to the article directly.

* Advertising cannot be the primary method of revenue.

Good isn't it? Makes me think and - more importantly- fires me up to want to achieve things. Which is why his blog remains in my feed reader at a time when I'm having something of a cull.
I was reviewing it recently when I realised that every third feed was talking, in varying tones ranging from glee to sad resignation about the death of the newspaper industry. And it also dawned on me that I could join in on the chorus of what was being written because I'd read it elsewhere, several times before.

Well you know what? I'm over it. In fact, I have a new rule: If you want to hand-wring about the state of the news industry on my time, you also need to have some interesting ideas about the future.
Because if you don't - if you want to blog, tweet or podcast away about doomy, gloomy End of Days-type scenarios, then frankly I'm not interested any more. You see, you're not giving me anything new to think about - you're retreading old ground and you're boring me.

So I've had a clear out of my feeds, ditching some long-followed blogs that I noticed were repeating the same tired old messages six different ways. I'm very interested in what people have to say about the future of news - whether they think the newspaper industry has a future or not - but I'm just not engaged by people wanting to drone on about, for example, the Journalists bad, Bloggers good debate.

Now, the paywall/subscription/free issue, now, I am interested in, and I change my mind about where I stand with almost every post I read. I'm also enjoying opions on the wary circling of the BBC and the major media companies, and UGC is another area I find exciting - there are so many talented people out there and we should be partnering up with them and attempting to share information and knowledge, not ignoring them.

Too often, I suspect eyes roll in newsrooms when a tweet is cited as a potential news source. As Chris Brogan says in his post "Collaboration rules. Why should I pick the next cover? Why should my picture of the car crash be the best?"

So where does the buck stop?

It's not often I hear something that shocks me but it happened this week: I was told that a member of a southern weekly newspaper's digital team is facing a contempt charge for uploading a court case to the website.
The background, as I understand it, is that the juvenille defendant could, allegedly, be identified from the information contained in the website-published story. So, at the urgings of local police, the CPS has brought a charge against the individual who uploaded it to the newspaper's online site and thereby effectively 'published' it.

I don't know many details of the case but it seems to me that the implications of this are far-reaching and very worrying.
From what I know of newspapers being in contempt (I've worked on two where it got further than the judge issuing a stern 'don't do it again' but, of course, there are numerous cases in the archives of Press Gazette and Hold the Front Page) it is always the editor or publisher of the paper who is in the crosshairs.
That means not the reporter who wrote it, not the news editor who approved/rewrote it, not designer who placed it on the page or the the sub who checked it, and not the revision sub who rechecked it. And certainly not the final link in the chain - the inky who scanned throught the first smudged copy that came off the press to check for pagination errors.

I mentioned this case to an editor friend who was genuinely shocked the CPS had chosen to go after an individual, rather than the publisher or the editor. Because in his view (in most editors' views I would imagine) he is responsible for the contents of his brand's websites just as he are for the print newspaper, or any other editorial publication his newsroom produces. And while he's not in any hurry to go to court for a junior reporter's error, he believes it comes with the territory.

I wonder if this case will actually go ahead. Certainly one newspaper law expert I spoke to thought it likely the prosecution would fall over before it got to court, but even that would be a significant decision. With many papers now either allowing or actively working towards letting reporters publish their work direct to the web, through their blogs or otherwise, it throws up fairly pressing questions about the where and how checks for accuracy and legal issues are performed. It also poses all sorts of responsibility and accountability (and even legal insurance?) issues.

So, while it's interesting to debate the vexed questions of paywalls v pay-per-click, Bloggers v Newspapers, or even whether you really would read your Daily News via a Kindle, perhaps we journalists need to take some time to consider what would happen if this did establish a case law.
Because it's not just the reporters working for major news companies that could be affected - it could have ramifications for the burgeoning independent hyper-local set-ups, news agencies, bloggers et al.
As I say, not often I hear something that shocks me, but this case does. How about you?

Reporter tweets being shot

Talk about making your own headlines! It's true; the deputy business editor of the Post & Echo was caught in crossfire this weekend and - like the news trouper he is - tweeted what was happening to him, from the ambulance.

In a nutshell, (teetotal) Tony McDonough was unfortunate enough to be downing a diet Coke in his local Liverpool pub when armed bikers opened fire on the doorway in a “ride by” shooting. Some of the pellets hit him in the face, and he ended up needing an ambulance ride and hospital treatment.

But, in his own words:



He was taken to hospital for treatment, and his updates then continued:



and...



How dramatic is that? Tony isn't the most active Twitter user so I asked him why he'd decided to tweet the drama, rather than texting or ringing friends.

"I just wanted to tell people" he said. "I wanted to say what was happening - I sort of forgot I don't have many people following me!"

There's a lot of information in his tweets - from his own condition...



...to an update on the incident and some background:



His final tweet describes his plan to turn in for the night, having had well enough excitement. If you want to read the news story (and he was today's Echo splash) it's here.

This, for me, is one of the best examples of why Twitter can work for journalists. People are hardwired to want to share stories; at times of crisis we all want to tell someone, and I guess a number of people in the pub that night texted or phoned friends to share the news.

Journalists want to get news out too, and they want to get it out fast and first to as wide an audience as possible (probably so we can then say "I was first").
Tony, as a Twitter user, knew he had a good way to reach multiple people and used it. He also is one of those in the office who really 'gets' liveblogging, and I suspect the two are linked - after all, liveblogging is all about urgency, communication and sharing information.
Oh, and of course, he also has the perfect response next time someone says all Twitter is about is "people saying what they had for breakfast"...