SacredFacts

New Forms of Collaboration

Later this month I've been asked to speak at a seminar organised by the Berkman Center on new forms of collaboration in journalism. It was at a similar event three years ago that Jay Rosen laid to rest the debate about Bloggers v Journalists (although of course some echoes of that false argument still rattle around). This time I would like to lay to rest some of the debate about UGC and citizen journalism - but go further. I have some BBC examples to talk about, but would like to go wider. Where is Networked Journalism taking us? What are the best examples? What new forms of collaboration are on the horizon? What will a data-driven web enable? If you have any thoughts or examples I'd love to hear them - and of course you'll get full credit.

Not yet a two way street..

Neil Thurman of City University has sent me the headlines of a study he has just completed on User interaction with news websites. It will be published in New Media and Society and is available from his University page.

Headlines:

Major news websites are struggling to make the most of readers' contributions due to factors such as the costs of moderation and the varying quality of user-generated content (UGC), whilst in return readers are not fully engaging with the UGC initiatives.

Thurman found that 'popular' debates on the BBC News website's 'Have Your Say' attracted contributions from just 0.05 per cent of the site's daily unique audience, and one fifth the page views of  'popular' news stories.
 
The research showed that the slow uptake of UGC by some editors was due in part to worries over legal liabilities. Furthermore most publications insisted on moderation because of concerns over: spelling, grammar and decency; duplication; unbalanced views; and a lack of newsworthiness amongst contributions. These issues had caused some websites to drop UGC altogether.

 
Allf Hermida discusses the findings at Reportr.Net

I'm not surprised - interaction has always been a minority sport. Reading key news websites it's easy to see there is often a tight community of regular commenters who represent a fraction of the total readership.
But this doesn't undermine the value of news organisations being open and responsive.

[UPDATE: Shane Richmond takes him to task for being out of date....and me for being uncritical!}

News Scrobbling

Here's an idea for all you VC's out there. I was ploughing through my RSS feeds in my newsreader the other day and thought "But this is what RSS feeds are supposed to stop - information overload and time wasted finding the things I want to read". True, I have a lot of feeds and could probably weed them down...but then again I added them all for a reason in the first place. What I need is the semantic web to decide for me which posts of my chosen feeds I'm likely to be interested in - or which my friends might think I'd be interested in.

Which then got me thinking about Last.FM and scrobbling - how it monitors what you play, compiles it, compares it with others and offers you things you are likely to want to hear.

So why can't we have News Scrobbling?  I'm sure the technology exists. I want something on my laptop which monitors which blogs and news sites I visit, the subjects I'm most interested in, and recommends out of my rss feed what I most need to read  - maybe even compiles them into a newspaper screen for me. And perhaps has a "serendipity" option - "others who liked these subjects also read this". Maybe you could have a serendipity dial which you could turn up or down depending how random a selection you were in the mood for. And an authority slider like Technorati used to have.

It's hardly a new idea. Back in the early 90s, when the internet was accessed at 9.6baud dial-up via compuserve  on my first Apple Powerbook 100 (the one with the b&w screen and tracker ball) there was a  program called Dvorak which claimed to compile overnight the news, stock prices and weather you wanted  to wake up to in the morning. It never worked. Then there was the Pointcast screensaver. Drove me mad. Personalisation has consistently overpromised and underdelivered. But now, the technology must be there for something which works, surely? Or do I need to wait even longer until Web whatever.0?

(In the unlikely event anyone takes this idea and makes a fortune from it, all I ask is a credit "From an original concept by..."  -- or maybe a few shares. Actually don't bother. I expect Google have it in beta already...)

China: Demonstration blogged

Global Voices reports a million strong demonstration in Xiamen in South East China against plans to build a toxic chemical plant nearby. There was an official blackout about the demo apparently, but it was organised by bulletin board, SMS and blogs - and live-blogged/reported by the protestors in the same way, including Flickr and YouTube. China's "independent blog collective" Bullog was central to it.  BBC report here. Puts our SMS-organised petrol protests of a few years ago into context...

"Soapboxes in Cyberspace"

Went to a panel discussion organised by Nico MacDonald and the Innovation Forum on political discussion on  the net (with the deliberately clunky title above).
Andrew Calcutt from the University of East London said there were a lot of lazy assumptions around the virtures of online debate. He suggested social change was running far ahead of politics - which led to some people seeking "media representation" rather than "political representation". He was scathing about media organisations surrendering their editorial values to buy into interactivity for its own sake.

Meg Pickard from the Guardian talked about how online discussion was not the same thing as online community. How comments are often poor quality or abusive and she suggested three possible solutions.
1) Human (ie moderation)
2) Technology (Recommendation, flagging etc)
3) Editorial (Framing of the debate, reward for high quality contribution)

A useful quote from Kevin Anderson of the Guardian - "News stories should answer questions and tie up loose ends. Blogs should pose questions and leave some ends dangling to encourage debate."

Lee Bryant of Headshift believed the best communities and debates were those where limitations were applied - constraints, walls were needed for quality debate. He said the online world could learn from TV where there was high quality discussion and interaction on programmes like Question Time - because it was a controlled format and space.

Olivier Creiche of the blogging platform Six APart talked about the use of blogs and political discussion in the recent French Elections.

And the BBC's Daniel Mermelstein talked about the Have Your Say site and some of the issues regarding moderation in particular.

My take - community is something different from online comments and few are yet good at it. Big media organisations can't force community but we can nurture and feed it where it seems to grow naturally (606 on BBC Sport would be a good example of this). ie Instead of insisting people come and have a good time at our place, we need to find out where they are gathering anyway and buy the drinks....

Kevin Anderson blogged the session extensively at Corante

Making sense of the new News

Stephen Coleman, professor at the Institute of Communications Studies at Leeds University, has written a really interesting piece on news and participation for the BBC staff newspaper, Ariel. As it gets widely distributed I'm sure he won't mind me linking to it.

Does web 2.0 News work?

Rich Skrenta, who was at We Media, Miami, has a provocative post. Not only does he say the conference was good, but also suggests that no Web 2.0 news operations have really proven themselves yet.

The dog's breakfast of new media startups includes Gather, Backfence, Newstrust, Daylife, Bayosphere, TailRank, Associated Content, Pegasus News, Tinfinger, Findory, Inform, Newsvine, Memeorandum, NowPublic. The highest distinction on this list is to be one of the few still spoken of in the present tense (or present perfect -- "They haven't yet succeeded...")

He includes Topix, his own company, in this too.

as soon as a new media venture crosses the line and tries to become a business, it either becomes a successful business or a failed one. Businesses aren't about ideology, they're about getting a job done and earning revenue to keep the thing going. Even wild success tends to leave ideology behind. Ideology is the realm of nonprofits and failures.

Duck and take cover Rich....

Stir it up...

Well I seem to have created a few sparks with my comments on We Media - so let me pour a little more petrol on the fire. (Although i will resist Adrian Monck's entreaty to start a full playground bundle as we used to call it!)

A coincidence of comments, observations and conversations are reminding me that social media, citizen journalism and participation alone cannot make things better - and reinforcing that old media view, more appropriate to a man of my age and employment, that what we need are editors, high quality first hand reporting, evidence and verification in "the conversation". However, I'm in good company.

In no particular order, Tyler Brule, about to launch Monocle magazine, calls for more original journalism and less PR.
Craig Newmark in Miami has an "Aha" moment: "The Wisdom of Crowds sometimes leads to mob rule, panic, or bad decisions. We need ‘representative democracy’ on top of that. We need editors."

Last week (and I hope he doesn't mind me saying) I had a great chat with the excellent Ben Hammersley who, having helped launch CommentIsFree, is now keen to assert the importance of first hand reporting. With a blog title like mine I would agree with him, wouldn't I.

And then there's the excellent piece by Bill Kovach in the latest edition of the Nieman Report.

Looking at the content of journalism today ...it is hard to ignore the fact that in many ways journalism is more dependent for its content on the handouts and assertions of ... other institutions than it is on independently verified information. To mention only one obvious example, think of the virtually unchallenged assertions about weapons of mass destruction in the run-up to the war on Iraq, assertions Colin Powell now confesses to be false and a "blot" on his career. This dependence is made all the greater as news organizations, in reaction to shrinking audiences, cut back on their newsgathering resources.

So what this amounts to is this: as we rightly celebrate the opportunities for public participation in, and direction of, "the conversation" we must not lose sight of the need for high quality, evidence based, verfiable information to feed it. Of course citizen journalism allows the expertise and knowledge of the public to do so - but that alone will not be enough. And as media organisations struggle with the impact of the internet and rush to find new ways to engage their audience and take them on board, primary newsgathering is at risk and the dependancy on agencies (of which there are few), PR, and government information departments grows. (See Julian Henry in the Guardian a couple of weeks ago). It's sometimes said that news is now a commodity like water out of the tap. But tap water has been treated. You can choose to do many things with it and use it any way you want - but most people prefer the treated version rather than bathing in a bucketful taken from the pond.
I relish the explosion of comment, discussion and debate - but I want it based on facts not spin.
Of course there have been journalistic and media failings - but that doesn't mean the values of objective journalism (not to be confused with impartiality) are wrong. Far from it - we need them as much as ever. And it's not an "us v them" struggle or an attempt to reassert old media values (sigh). It's saying we need each other. New Media can innovate, strengthen, reinvigorate, open up and enrich our news in particular. I celebrate the way it's transforming journalism. But rediscovering some of those old values can strengthen it even more.

We Media - Groundhog Day?

In 2005 I went to the We Media Conference in New York and thought it was pretty interesting, made some good contacts and formed some new ideas. So in 2006 the BBC, with Reuters, hosted the We Media conference in London. This was less good - although not as bad as some fulminating bloggers alleged. The real problem was a difference of expectation between the blogging-social media community, old media and manufacturers - all of whom were invited and between whom the organisers were trying to build some bridges. Last week, We Media was in Miami. I didn't go. Mark Glaser reviews it here.
The same complaints, and mismatching expectations, it seems from the comments:

Mark... am I right in assuming you feel the 'We' in We Media is really... 'Them'? That this conference, while posing as an opportunity to talk about incorporating the best of soft media into Old Media, is really about how they can retain or recapture the marketplace?

Enough of conferences going over the same ground, enough of bloggers (several of whom make their living from consulting with big organisations) saying big media doesn't "get it" and only they have insight, enough of big media publicly agonising over how to respond to the huge disruption the internet has brought. Enough of the fallacy of thinking there is some kind of power struggle going on. It's about integration, not subsititution...
For me this year has to be less about talking and more about doing.

We Think - about news, and more

Charles Leadbeater came to talk to a group of editors and developers at the BBC about collaboration, participation, his new project, We Think and about news. Robin Hamman has blogged it more thoroughly than I have time to. However I thought I'd post a couple of clips of audio - sorry about the quality.

First up, he spoke aobut the challenge of authenticity for TV News; how the stand up by a reporter outside Scotland Yard or the MOD late at night is ridiculous because there's no-one inside and although it's meant to give a sense of being "on the spot" it's clearly spurious, and how some of the conventions of TV News (the reverse cutaway or the walking shot) can turn it into a "pantomime" to use his word.
Charles went on to talk about the kind of transparency and participation which could help break through this distance between broadcaster and audience:

It wouldn't be a programme to everyone's taste, but it would be good to see it somewhere in the mix. I agree - I think 1980s production conventions have had their day, but all major news organisations, including the BBC, are still wedded to them. Developing a different grammar takes time. "Oh My Newsnight" is a sort of start (although Paxman doesn't approve). "Generation Next" is another example of experimentation.

Later, Charles talked about how all professions could be affected by the need for greater transparency and the desire for participation: