Last Friday I attended Jeecamp - the Journalism Enterprise and Entrepreneurship Unconference - in Birmingham. The event, organised by Paul Bradshaw from Birmingham City's School of Media, brought together journalists, editors, academics and entrepreneurs for a day of interesting discussion.
It's already, given the subject matter, been blogged to death so I won't duplicate the effort of others here, but I did want to point you to Journalism.co.uk's audio of the panel I was on along with Jo Wadsworth (Brighton Argus), Andy Dickinson (UCLAN), and Robin Morley (BBC) which was moderated by Dave Hart (Digital Birmingham).
For more coverage of the event, see Michael Haddon's posts for the Telegraph or Martin Belam's PDA Newsbucket piece on the Guardian website.
Last week I spoke at one of the strangest conferences, in one of the most far flung places, I've ever been to - the Eurasian Media Forum in Almaty, Kazakhstan. The conference brings together journalists, business leaders, academics and politicians for two days of discussion ranging from news coverage of global events such as the current economic crisis to the implications of the Obama Presidency on East-West relations.
I went, at least in part, in the hope that by talking about the tools and techniques of blogging and social media, I could encourage delegates to think about being more open, transparent and direct in their dealings with audiences, consumers and, for the politicians in attendance, the populaces they govern. It was my usual sort of presentation but in unusual circumstances because, little did I know as I was speaking, something rather unusual was going on outside the building. Dan Kennedy covered the action outside, and what happened in the subsequent panel which we both participated in, on his blog Media Nation:
"The InterContinental Hotel
in Almaty, Kazakhstan, is about as isolating an experience as you can
imagine. The luxurious surroundings — and the ever-present security
guards — effectively separated the several hundred journalists
attending last week's Eurasian Media Forum from whatever was going on outside.
So
it was something of a surprise when that separation was breached last
Friday afternoon. Between a panel on the global media crisis, which I
moderated, and a panel on blogging, in which I participated, several
people approached us with handouts, warning of proposed laws that would
crack down on Kazakhstan's burgeoning blogosphere. We exchanged
pleasantries, and that seemed to be that.
Then, during the
blogging panel, one of them — an audacious 24-year-old woman named
Yevgeniya Plakhina, wearing a shirt that proclaimed "SHHH!" — got up
and demanded to know why six of her friends had been arrested for
demonstrating against the proposals.
The moderator, Vladimir
Rerikh, a Kazakh journalist, clearly wanted the issue, and Plakhina, to
go away. But Danny Schechter, a well-known American progressive
journalist, spoke up on Plakhina's behalf, and she was able to continue
pressing her case. (Here is Schechter's account.)
The organizer of the conference, Dariga Nazarbayeva, the daughter of
President Nursultan Nazarbayev, could be seen talking on her cell
phone, leaving the hall and returning several times..."
Local campaigners fear that the law in question, explains Matthew Collin [on the Frontline Club blog - a Headshift project] who reports for Al Jazeera from Georgia and was another of the panelists in the blogging session, would "put serious restrictions on internet journalists and bloggers and potentially allow the authorities to block sites on political grounds."
Danny Schechter reports that the arrested protesters were later freed by authorities, quoting an email he received from Plakhina, which read “I really appreciate your help. Thanx. My friends are OK. I guess the authorities were afraid of international scandal, so an advisor to the president took care of letting my friends out..."
Needless to say, the panel discussion didn't exactly go as those of us on it had planned, nor - I suspect - as the organisers had intended. But I'm glad it happened - the protest I mean - and hope that, by being one of the many foreign participants in the conference, just being there helped ensure that the protesters and their colleagues both reach a wider audience with their appeal and remain safe from arrest whilst doing so.
The whole incident reminded me that media freedom is a precious, and all to rare, freedom. And blogging is, I think, an important tool for helping those who are brave enough to fight for it to make themselves heard. It's a long long way from the worlds of media and corporate blogging which I usually inhabit to the scenes I at least partially witnessed in Almaty but I hope that, some day, when they've won their fight for rights, blogging will become as everyday and mundane - and safe - as it is for me and most of you reading this.
In July 2007, as I announced here, the BBC/AHRC partnership selected eight projects to go forward. I was, along with Liz Howell and Robin Morley, the primary BBC sponsor for the largest of those projects, the most comprehensive study ever undertaken of User-Generated Content and it's Impact upon Contributors, Non-Contributors and the BBC. The study was awarded £90,000, a clear demonstration of the importance of this piece of research both to the BBC and to the academic community.
The study was completed last summer but, until now, I've been unable to blog about it. Don't read between the lines - the report wasn't buried, I simply didn't feel that I had the necessary permission to blog about it but that all changed yesterday when the BBC and AHRC, who co-funded the research, held an event open to invited members of the public, including myself.
Claire Wardle from the Department of Journalism at Cardiff University, who completed the ground-breaking research along with colleague Andy Williams, revealed in this first presentation of the findings, the following.
The project was truly groundbreaking in that researchers had unparalleled access to BBC journalists, editors and audiences - allowing for:
The access we were able to provide the researchers with was exceptional - no previous researcher or research group had been given such an opportunity, at least not in so far as any of us was ever aware. The main findings of the research were that:
The study also identified a typology of audience material:
The majority of respondents to the MORI poll commissioned had favourable views of user generated content and thought it played a positive roll in reporting yet few have actually contributed.
One of the questions was whether people would take a photo if they saw a fire break out - just 14% said they would, and just 6% of those said they'd send it to a news organisation. Great differences were seen across classes - 16% of higher management would take a photo, with all saying they'd submit it to a news organisation, but in other groups (middle-management to manual laborers) only between 4 - 5% would take a photo.
There's lots of other interesting findings in the full-version of the study which, so far as I'm aware, hasn't yet been published publicly although it's my hope that it will be made available soon.
It pales in comparison to the efforts of Alex Wood and several other MA International Journalism students from City University yesterday who, in the process of twitering, blogging, photographing, streaming and more, got pinned in by the police cordon for several hours. The results are well worth a look.
One of the best things about my job is that I have various opportunities to inform and enthuse people about the benefits of using social media tools and services to support their existing processes. In order for social media to be genuinely useful, it has to become part of a person or organisation's everyday practice. If it's not, then it just becomes an additional burden - something extra they have to do rather than something that helps them to achieve their goals personal or professional objectives.
Readers who follow my twitter feed or dopplr updates will know that I've recently been traveling around the country a lot. Most of this has been to provide the 10 finalists of NESTA's Big Green Challenge with social media training to help them use photo-sharing, video-sharing, mobile phones, social networking and blogging to inform a wider audience about their work, reach out to new supporters and likeminded groups, and to better organise their own efforts. It's been great fun - I've met some wonderful people along the way, learned about some wonderful projects, and seen parts of the country I'd never otherwise have the opportunity to see. Here's a map showing where I've been or will be going over the remaining few weeks of the training:
I've also been authoring blog posts - a sort of beginners guide to using social media - on the Big Green Challenge Blog. Here's an index to the posts I've published thus far:
There are at least two more posts to come - blogging, which should appear next week, and finding and keeping track of content, which will cover social bookmarking, RSS and searching for blogs.
Slideshare doesn't seem to like the Below you'll find the presentation on mobile journalism I'll be delivering to students on the MA Magazine and Newspaper Journalism course at City University, London on Thursday. The presentation looks at:
• service providers - why do companies offer services which enable mobile content uploading and social networking?
• citizen journalism - what motivates people to "report" what they witness; what sort of content do they create and share?
• journalism - how are professional journalists and new organisations using mobiles?
• tools - what tools are available for documenting and sharing content online?
And at some point during the lecture I'm hoping to involve some professional mobile journalists - by mobile, of course....
It appears that conference season has begun.
On Tuesday I moderated a panel about using social media to have "difficult conversations at Social Media Influence in London with panelists Headshift's Lee Bryant (my boss), Andy Hobsbawm from Agency.com and Paolo Valdemarin of Evector.
[Photo by Kris Hoet]
Today, I'm on two panels during the final afternoon of DNA2009 in Brussels. I'll be joining Laura Oliver (journalism.co.uk), Darren Waters (BBC), Katharina Borchert (WAZ) and Bart Brouwers (Spits) for a panel about twitter, moderated by Ben Hammersley and possibly being joined remotely by Jeff Jarvis.
Later I'm on an experts panel responding to questions about social media.
Follow it all on twitter...
update...15.17:
John Thompson, publisher of the excellent Journalism.co.uk, streamed the panel live. Here's the first of his four clips:
Tomorrow will be the second of the four lecture and workshop sessions I'm scheduled to deliver on the City University MA in International Journalism course during the 2008/9 academic year.
I've given plenty of one off lectures at universities in the past but I having to come up with four distinctly different - and hopefully interesting, engaging, intellectually challenging and memorable - topics for lectures, much less turning them into proper presentations, is a bit daunting. Add to to that the two one hour workshops, one for broadcast students and the other for print students, and we're talking at least two, and potentially three, hours of different content each time. That's a whopping 12 hours of social media goodness to come up with, format, and present to a group of MA level journalism students. Not easy.
For the last lecture I asked my twitter followers to help me hone in on the most important topics. I then pebble blasted the students with a broad tour of the social media landscape, focused on the things that I thought might be useful for journalists. This time, I'm going to focus on finding contacts, content and context online.
I. Blogs
II. Twitter:
III. Content Sharing:
IV. Reflection:
And, finally, my first attempts at trying to use yahoo pipes to automate the searching, and some of the filtering, of social media content around breaking news. Also, check out Martin Belam's sport related stab at it.
If you have any links that you think would be useful, or advice I should pass on with relation to the above outline, please let me know. During the workshops I'm planning on having the students actually do some social media searching themselves and start aggregating it using xfruits and yahoo pipes.
I've been really busy speaking at different events the past few weeks.
At the end of October, I spent an afternoon at the News of the World Editors Conference. I'm afraid I can't tell you much more about that but it was a lot more fun "being grilled by Fleet Street's finest attack dogs", as Editor Colin Myler put it in his invitation, than one might initially suspect from an event with a billing like that. They sell 3+ million copies of their Sunday paper in a country of around 60 million people but have, thus far, only made baby steps online.
On the 9th I was at blogboat.be in Ghent, Belgium, to moderate the evening panel debate between Dan Gillmor, newspaper editor and author Henk Blanken and Han Soete from Indymedia. The panel was proceeded by an afternoon discussion about citizen media, blogging and journalism which took place, as the name might imply, on a boat.
Then, on the 12th, I was one of two guests invited to take part "in conversation" on the stage at the Association for International Broadcasting Awards dinner at St. Lukes LSO in London. I was interviewed by Jonathan Marks - video below:
I also did the first of four three hour teaching sessions, each comprising of a lecture followed by two workshops, at the Department of Journalism at City University, London, where I'm teaching on the MA International Journalism programme. I'm back there again on the 2nd of December.
In Mid-December, I'll be in Dubai for the New Media Event which I'm particularly looking forward to as it, potentially, will be an entirely new audience for me and I'm hoping to learn as much, if not more, than I dish out myself.
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