As soon as I saw the news of explosions in Jaipur, India, I headed off to tweetscan to see what it pulled up, finding yet again that twitter is becoming an indispensible tool for journalists and others seeking immediate first hand, eyewitness accounts of of breaking news story.
Twitter user 2s was 20 feet away from one of the Jaipur blasts:
I'm done giving my keynote at (g)local 2.0 in Skopje, Macedonia. I'll upload my notes later but you can find my slides on flickr already. Paul Bradshaw also contributed to the early morning session via seesmic video from the UK - check it out, he makes some good points about creating a distributed web presence by turning processes into content.
Niels Hendriks from Limburg University is giving a presentation about HasseltLokaal, a local citizen journalism project in Linburg, a small city in a largely agricultural area of Belgium. Concentra, the newspaper partner for the project, has always had a focus on region communities - in 1955, Frans Theelen said it should not be a newspaper title, but a programe for the people of the province - eg. community journalism.
The project gets 2200 visits a day, have 30 voluneers and 30 organisations who publish around 7 pieces of content per day. Their policy has been to publish everything, afterall it's tagline was "news for, by and about the people". For contributors it usually starts slowly, publishing text or photos about an event they'd seen. They held workshops to try to help people create more creative content.
One of the problems they had was with contributors wanting contributor cards but then, when given them, abusing those cards by, for example, having a meal then showing the card for a free dessert prior to writing their review.
The project was initiated by the Research and Development department - the IT people at the newspaper group. The journalists didn't respond well, with some feeling their professional status was being threatened, and the project's leaders couldn't find a viable business model. Moderation was costly, funding ran out. Experiments with advertising to keep the project going put them in conflict with the marketing department. BUT, the project did help increase the paper's willingness to accept articles and photos from readers. So some conclusions:
* each individual needs some identification with the brand ( "let them be proud" )
* find correct balance between empowering and empowering citizen journalists
* not every individual has enough self confidence to contribute
* find room for experimentation within traditional media organisations
I've created an aggregation to help track the conference backchannel.
The source is here (and you can subscribe via RSS). If you're not used to pipes, make sure you click on the list tab to see all the content it pulls up - http://pipes.yahoo.com/cybersoc/glocal20
Rangers in the Mara Triangle area of the Masai Mara are rather busy these days - trying to stop illegal poaching, worrying about colleagues shot by poachers and, now, twittering and blogging.
Those of us who have been following them recently got word today, via twitter, that Ranger Leyian, who was shot last week, has been given 6 pints of blood in hospital where he's currently under observation.
They've already got some press for their efforts but certainly deserve more. Follow @maratriangle on twitter or visit their blog to find out what they're doing to save African wildlife and to learn what you might do to help.
[update: Since blogging this, the Mara Triangle rangers have friended me on flickr and facebook. They're really trying to get the most out of social media - very cool.]
Two weeks ago, Mayhill Fowler, who had gained access to a fundraising speech by Barack Obama because she had previously donated to his campaign, rocked Obama's campaign by posting audio of his controversial speech about blue collar Pennsylvanians.
Fowler's recording captured Obama as he "described blue collar Pennsylvanians with a series of what in the eyes of Californians might be considered pure negatives: guns, clinging to religion, antipathy, xenophobia."
Fowler was, it transpires, not just an Obama supporter but was also one of the bloggers following the primaries for the Huffington Post sponsored citizen journalism project, Off the Bus, stirring much debate within journalism about whether some things can and should be off the record, and raising questions about transparency.
In response to this debate, the Guardian organised a debate between Jeff Jarvis, a leading proponent of citizen journalism and journalistic transparency, and Michael Tomasky, the Guardian's America editor. I highly recommend reading the whole debate on Comment is Free but, if short of time, I've excerpted a few of the bits I particularly enjoyed below:
Jarvis thinks we should be concerned about the effect that giving and receiving access can have on journalism:
"I believe the rules you long to carry into the new world are inherently corrupting for journalism: We journalists have long traded in the currencies of access and exclusivity with the powerful. But the price we pay is complicity in a system of secrecy. That's what off-the-record talks and unnamed sources add up to: secrets."
Tomasky argues that, sometimes, keeping things off the recorded and sources anonymous actually gives journalists greater, less inhibited access to stories. And he's not convinced that having legions of people recording and publishing the news is inherently better than the existing model:
"But I admit that I'm a little less persuaded that it's such a great and necessary thing that we know every single word public people utter. People say dumb things and things they don't really mean. They misspeak. Whether constant recording of such missteps, and the inevitable intense fixation on them, will over time serve the public interest and help voters make more "informed" decisions is not yet settled in my view. That it will lead to more "gotcha!" moments on the campaign trail as candidates are caught saying naughty things isn't a particularly stellar claim to make for the blogosphere, which actually does far more important work in the areas of media-monitoring and community-building. "
But Tomasky isn't an old school "mainstream media vs the bloggers" - he sees real value in what bloggers do:
"What I like about the blogosphere is that, at its best, it elevates the debate. Mainstream journalists would think I'm out of my mind to say that, but it's true - there are, for example, all manner of policy experts with blogs who shed real light on substantive questions, or bloggers with the intellectual chops to make really interesting and important observations about something happening in the news."
Jarvis' main argument seems to be that anyone who observes and tells a story can, if they remain transparent about any potential sources of bias within their report, make a positive impact - with the results of their efforts becoming "one more ingredient in what it turning into a bigger and bigger pot of journalism stew." For Jarvis, it's not important who or where the story comes from so long as the highest amount of transparency is evident in it's presentation.
For Tomasky, the fact that Folwer got in the door because she had made a campaign donation and then, once there, began acting as a journalist is problematic. There is, he argues, a difference between being a witness and being a journalist. He doesn't, however, explain exactly what he thins that difference is.
Both Jarvis and Tomasky agree that transparency about any possible source of bias, and of how access to a story or it's actors has been gained, is essential to the validity of the final product. Whether we call that product "journalism" or "someone's account", the crux of disagreement between Jarvis and Tomasky is, to me, entirely academic.
In the run-up to the London Mayoral Election, BBC London has been giving Londoners the opportunity to submit their questions, via youtube video, to each of the main candidates. A selection of questions are then put to the candidates and aired on BBC London's evening news opts at 6pm and 10pm.
It's a nice idea for getting people engaged with politics but I couldn't help but notice that the trailer (below) has had over 68,000 views on youtube whilst the video responses of the three main candidates have had just 16,000 views combined. That said, the television audience for all the clips will have been hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of viewers.
Today I've been working on a tool - I've dubbed it UGC Finder - for journalists that uses Yahoo Pipes to aggregate and filter the results of keyword searches for tagged content and conversations in social networks and media sharing sites.
I'm rapidly developing a serious case of Yahoo Pipes addiction but with good reason - if you've got a good idea it's remarkably easy to knock together an almost working demonstration, which is what I've been trying to do today.
Historically, when a news story broke, journalists either went to the scene themselves or phoned one of their contacts who could go out to confirm the story and gather interviews, photos and other content.
In recent years, the "citizen journalist" model has developed, with journalists and news organisations pro-actively asking their audience to submit their accounts, photos and videos from the scene. The proliferation of cameraphones has led to a dramatic increase in the amount of such content submitted by eyewitnesses, often flooding news organisations with vast quantities of mostly unusuable quotes and photographs.
One way of dealing with this is to return to the old method of going out, finding and speaking with eyewitnesses in the places where they participate online. Or, as Jeff Jarvis brilliantly put it, to keep our antennae up wherever conversations are taking place:
"And so the key skills in a newsroom will not be to get reporters to the scene — that will come later, after the news happens — but to have antennae up to listen and find news reports as they happen, as people link to what’s happening. You can’t possibly have enough reporters, editors, producers to do that on your own. You need to have lots of friends who’ll alert you: When I put up a link here to something I find compelling — or even embed and broadcast it here, live — will I also alert CNN? I don’t know. Would you? Do you have such a friendly relationship with CNN? Maybe that will happen but that, too, is insufficient. So you need to use every tool that’s available — the Technorati of the live video web — to see what’s happening in the world."
Today I've been working on a tool - I've dubbed it UGC Finder - for journalists that uses Yahoo Pipes to aggregate and filter the results of keyword searches for tagged content and conversations in social networks and media sharing sites.
I've set up keyword searches for:
On the following services:
I've truncated the content from each of these, and applied several filters, in an attempt to find a good balance between usefulness and being drowned out by irrelevant results. I’ve set it up so that, where possible, I’ve filtered out non-unique results.
We had the chance to test UGC Finder this afternoon when there was an explosion at a pub in Leeds. It did, as I'd expected, find some reaction on twitter and livejournal but updating with new posts was a little bit on the slow side. But as an easy to use tool for journalists who might not know much about using the internet beyond sending an email and searching on google, it does seem like I've come up with something useful.
One shortcoming I realised when building the tool is that adding more search terms would be arduous but necessary if I ever wanted to be able to track breaking news not involving an explosion, evacuation or bomb.
With a bit of help from Chris and Ryan, I've been trying to come up with a way of taking the BBC News Breaking News RSS feed and extracting key words from that, then plugging those keywords into the tool so as to have new search terms created, on the fly, by our coverage of breaking stories.
I've managed to achieve this with a second pipe which:
What I'd really like to do is figure out a way of combining these so that the BBC News RSS is used to create keywords which are then plugged into the content searches I created for the first pipe above. This would create a tool which would be fairly automated and easy for any journalist to use. On top of this there could be a search box, like the one Martin Belam has used for Chipwrapper (which lets you keyword search ALL UK based news feeds), so that users could configure their own searches as well.
You could also add location into the mix by, for example, combining the above with a geo-annotated news feed , TwitterLocal and the geofeed rss functionality of flickr.
I've just about hit the ceiling of my Yahoo Pipe making capabilities so here's the idea, and above are some links to my demonstrators - now it's over to you to make something really cool out of it. Drop me a line when you do.
I used my camera phone, and a free service called qik, to stream live video of a panel discussion titled "God is a VJ". The panel included:
• Pat Loughrey, Director, BBC Nations and Regions
• Tone Kunst, Editor-in-Chief, NRK Nordland
• Christian Trippe, Brussels Bureau Chief, Deutsche Welle
• Michael Rosenblum, President, Rosenblum TV
• Prof. Adrian Monck, Head of Journalism, City University (UK)
It's a bit shaky, and I had to use the lowest quality setting to keep streaming costs down, but it's still sort of watchable. Or at least listenable. Ok, so I'm no VJ, nor am I God, but at a higher quality, and with the phone steadied properly, the results could be much better.
It took a whole 3 or 4 minutes for Michael Rosenblum, the first keynote speaker at DNA2008, to get to that now quite tired cliche
"if you don't wrap your head around the change your gonna die..."
And the way most newspaper and media companies have adapted to that change?
"I'll have these three fuck ups in the corner to do the internet and it will be fine"
Rosenblum says three things are converging to make an almost perfect storm: video cameras that "cost 800 bucks and any idiot can use", low cost laptops and the internet. He describes that storm:
"In the world of meteorology they talk about storms. There's the 50 year storm and the 100 year storm.... in the world of journalism and technology, there's the 500 year storm.... a giant tidal wave... Guttenberg thought the printing press was about making cheaper bibles... but the invention of the printing press... brought about a whole new world of a free press. We don't live in a world of print anymore, we live in a world of video and online... this technological storm is going to wash away most of what we understand today and replace it with something different. Whether you participate in it is entirely in your hands."
Rosenblum's talk was interesting, well delivered and entertaining but I can't help but think that he's maybe spent too much time whipping up his perfect storm and not enough actually out there in the real world. There's a vast gulf between the media landscape he describes, where media companies put little effort into "the fuck ups" in the corner who run online, and the massive investment and talent being thrown at new media by the BBC (my employer) and many others.
Earlier this week I installed an application that turns my mobile phone into a highly portable, live broadcasting device. There are plenty of video sharing services that can accept uploads via mobile phone including youtube, blip.tv, kyte.tv and others. But qik, the service I'm currently alpha testing, does something very different - it allows you stream video live from a 3G phone to the web.
The potential for this is incredible. From now on, every journalist will have the ability to get usable video content on air almost instantly using nothing but a mobile phone that fits easily in their pocket. Activists will be able to stream live from protests. Concert goers can share their front row seats with friends at home. Privacy concerns aside, the ability to stream live video from a cameraphone, and for that video to be instantly available around the world via the internet, really is awesome.
Here's what the service looks like online:
And a short video I made showing how the mobile application looks on a Nokia N95 handset:
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