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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, 24 February 2013
My 'interesting reads' roundup (weekly)
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."
Thursday, 24 January 2013
Why does live tweeting put councils in a spin?
I've also been ridiculously busy at work, and so there hasn't been much time to blog about local authorities and their varying views on anyone - press, public, councillor, officer - tweeting during the business end of proceedings.
To recap, the Daily Post* sent a reporter to cover a budget meeting at Wrexham Council and it became apparent that a Twitter rule - in place for more than a year but unenforced, in our experience - would prevent real time reporting, and thus impact on our rolling news liveblog.
The standing orders dictated:
"Proceedings at meetings may not be photographed, videoed, sound recorded or transmitted in any way outside the meeting without prior permission of the chair".I've covered council meetings since I was a trainee reporter. I have watched (genuine list alert) snoozing councillors reflex-vote, tantrums worthy of two-year-olds, recommendations voted through because the reporter sat next to me called out "move progress!" and a mayor utter the warning: "Allegations have been made about me, and if I find out who those alligators are..."
I've watched councillors make the most moving, impassioned pleas on behalf of their electorate, block economically-sound but culturally-wrong recommendations, make principled stands against cutbacks or planning outrages, and conduct cut-and-thrust debates that made a democratic difference.
None of the above - good or bad - needs to be reported retrospectively. Google 'council chamber live stream' and see all the authorities who let the electorate watch the democratic process as it happens
Wifi, Ustream and a will to make it happen - that's all our councils need to make a significant contribution to the transparent, open government.
Being more open means more scrutiny, and potentially more criticism, but it also means more feedback, interaction and opportunity to talk to people.
I don't know why some councils embrace opportunities for transparency and others shy away from it. The subsequent fallout is never edifying - at best, it means the kind of nonsense the Daily Post is trying to negotiate a path through, at worst, well, all sense of perspective is lost.
Anyway, there was quite a lot of coverage, not least in the Post, and we've got a Right to Tweet campaign running now that is calling for consistency across public bodies, rather than ad hoc interpretation of constitution rules...
The Twitter ban incident (hashtagged as #twitterban but never to be referred to as #Twittergate) was covered in various media; among the articles were these here and here and here.
We even made the chief executive's weekly email to staff (instantly leaked to the Press, of course):
[Twitter policy] can of course change in time as the Council further embraces technology, it doesn’t however, change as a knee jerk reaction to an editor who it appears only communicates with her readers via “twitter”.The annoying part of that comms is, of course, the "twitter" bit. It's a PROPER NOUN, for heaven's sake, and don't get me started on the quote marks...
Ways to wind up in Rotten Boroughs, No.348
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I don't seek out Twitter spats but I do feel strongly that if reporters and the public can use mobile devices to transmit information from court, there is no reason why they should seem permission to do so from public meetings.
Guidelines can be useful (maybe 'switch off your phone's volume' or 'ensure your behaviour doesn't distract others') but if the Attorney General doesn't think the decision rests with his judges, then why should it rest with committee chairmen?
So, it's an issue we aren't letting subside - there's a Daily Post campaign underway now as a result of us being refused tweeting rights during one council meeting - and the problem is spreading.
Louth Leader reporter Sam Kinnaird was thwarted in a bit to amend Louth town council's standing orders to allow live tweeting, this week and tweeted that fact.
Two councillors backed it out of the whole full council; I see from the report the Mayor took the view that journalists should 'have the courtesy to do it from the foyer'.
Quite how the dignity of the chamber is offended by someone quietly sending texts from a mobile phone escapes me.
In other Lincolnshire news, Boston Borough Council has also banned tweeting of its full council meeting today.
The Boston Standard report says
The borough authority currently only permits people to use Twitter during cabinet meetings and says its constitution will have to be changed to allow the social media site to be used to provide live updates from other meeetings.Constitution, You'll find it in the dictionary under S for Smokescreen.
Twitter is viewed as an appropriate communications tool by the House of Commons - possibly not a bastion of courtesy but certainly the seat of democracy, and tweetin' since 2011 - and at the Senedd.
Welsh Secretary Dvaid Jones believes in it, Obama couldn't wait to tell the world he's secured four more years...
I just wish our locally elected representatives would try to catch up.
* Yes it's a personal blog, but work inevitably bleeds into it sometimes. Like it says here, these ramblings are not the opinions of Trinity Mirror.
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?"
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