cybersoc.com

create your own job

I rarely find myself nodding in agreement with advice dished out by newspaper agony aunts, but Jeremy Bullmore, the Guardian's Dear Jeremy, had me doing exactly that on Saturday with a piece of advice that I think is spot on for anyone trying to kick start a career in journalism, PR, marketing or any other creative industry:

My 25-year-old son has struggled in the workplace since he graduated three years ago (2:1 in English at Cambridge). He has done work for a small PR company and had a stint as a chef, but still does not have any real idea what he wants. He is job hunting and I am keen to help him. He lives between London and Manchester so either area would be good.

I wonder if he's hunting for more or less any job that's advertised, or if he's dedicated himself to something he's deeply interested in. I hope it's the second. He is clearly intelligent and literate and he's interested in food. He also knows something about PR. He should start from there.

He should make himself known to local restaurants: many are struggling to fill tables at the moment. He should start a blog and bring it to the attention of local newspapers. He should write daily about food, restaurants, tips, hints: anything he finds of interest and that is likely to be of interest to others. He'll know better than I would.

If he can begin to make a name for himself, assignments should begin to follow. It's most people's instinct to go searching for jobs, but sometimes it is possible to invent them.

Speaking of Jobs, Headshift (my employer) currently has a range of positions open. Also, the Guardian is looking for a General Manager for the soon to launch Guardian Club and the Houses of Parliament have a number of potentially interesting web jobs listed, including Head of User Experience and Head of Engagement.

journalism enterprise & entrepreneurship unconference (jeecamp)

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.

conferences this week: dna2009 and social media influence

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:

Watch live video from johncthompson's channel on Justin.tv

massive increase in twitter use good for news websites

UK internet measurement agency Hitwise recently announced that Twitter's traffic has increased a staggering 1000% over the past year and now exceeds that to Digg.

The Hitwise report reveals something far more interesting, in my mind at least - the way that twitter is driving traffic to other sites, in particularly those of mainstream media. From the PC Advisor article about the report:

"Twitter is becoming an important source of Internet traffic for many sites, and the amount of traffic it sends to other websites has increased 30-fold over the past 12 months.

Almost 10 percent of Twitter's downstream traffic goes to News and Media websites, and BBC News is currently the seventh most popular site visited after www.twitter.com. A further 17.6 percent of traffic goes to entertainment websites, while 14.6 percent goes to social networks, 6.6 percent to blogs and 4.5 percent to online retailers.

"As a source of traffic Twitter is still in its infancy, but it is becoming more important every day," commented Goad.

"A number of news sites, blogs, and video and picture websites already rely on Twitter for a significant amount of their traffic."

The most popular website visited after Twitter is Facebook. Britain's most popular social network continues to pick up users and is now the second most visited website in the UK after Google UK.

Yeh, you read that right - 10% of twitter's downstream traffic, that is the site that people go to after visiting twitter, is to BBC News. The article, unfortunately, is not clear whether this is a global or UK specific statistic but either way it's interesting because it demonstrates that, far from just chit-chatting the day away, people are discussing news and current affairs on twitter as well.

aib awards video: robin hamman interviewed by jonathan marks

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.

blogboat - citizen journalism: this weekend in ghent

On Sunday, I'm heading to Ghent to take part in Blog Boat 1.0 - Citizen Journalism. As the name suggests, it's an event about blogging and journalism which will take place on a boat but, rest assured, the organisers tell me it's not an us vs them sort of thing, nor will the boat actually move.

During the afternoon, an invitation only "meeting of the minds" will bring together journalists, academics and bloggers to discuss the future of citizen journalism and, in the evening, I'll be moderating a free (registration required) interactive debate with Dan Gillmor and other participants from the day.

Here's how the organisers are framing the debate:

"Over the last couple of years traditional media has tried to formulate an answer to this development in finding a balance between print - and online information, in keeping track with the newest technological trends to present their information and in figuring out how to integrate citizen journalism within their (online) information channels.  What are workable/feasible models for the future? 

In what way technological developments will influence the way we deal with news and information. Will they empower us more, will new constraints appear and will the old once be sorted in time? Is there a possible role for guides/filters and who would these filters be (newspapers, well known bloggers ... ? And in line with the later, is there a possible role for guides/curators guiding non-expert users through the information in an open way build on trust and reputation? What are the possible ways forward for mainstream media in working with citizen journalists?"

Having met Dan and several of the other participants previously, I'm looking forward to a thoughtful, challenging and wide ranging debate.

Although over 100 people have already signed up, registration is still open so if you want to attend, make sure you get your name on the list. See you aboard!

               

bbc blog costs £17 billion...

bbc blog costs £17 billion...
Originally uploaded by robinhamman

Last year, Iain Dale brought us the news that government blogs were costing tax payers many thousands of pounds a month to run. David Milliband's blog, for example, apparently costs over £40,000 a year and the Welfare Reform and Child Poverty blog was revealed, in response to a parliamentary question, to cost nearly £1500 per month to run - equivalent to around £2 per visitor.

For a second or two, when I read the headline "BBC Blog That Cost our Banks £17 Billion" in Metro last week, I thought a journalist had got the wrong end of the stick - afterall, I used to run the BBC's blogs and they didn't cost anything like £17 billion...

Thankfully, that's not what the article was getting at. Instead, it was blaming BBC Journalist Robert Peston, who blogged about the near collapse of a major British bank and a government brokered merger in the hours before the markets opened, leading - some say - to even greater losses in the financial markets.

The Independent recently wrote:

"In recent weeks, as capitalism itself has seemed in peril,, the BBC business editor has hardly been off duty, whether reporting for Radio 4's Today programme, for rolling news and the bulletins, or posting on Peston's Picks, his influential blog.

On 17 September, at exactly 9am, a new entry on that blog opened with the simple but remarkable sentence: "Lloyds is in advanced merger talks with HBOS to create a giant UK super retail bank, I have learned."

Within seconds of posting the story from the PC in his office at home in Muswell Hill, north London, Peston, 48, had walked to the spare room and, via a specially-installed ISDN line, was broadcasting his scoop live on the BBC News channel. In the words of this newspaper, Peston's influence meant that he was "one of the few men with the power to dam the floodwaters heading HBOS's way". This was the same reporter who had already won the Royal Television Society's "Scoop of the Year" award for his coverage of the collapse of the Northern Rock building society.

Peston is perhaps the first senior journalist to publish a major, breaking story on their blog as the first available outlet. My guess is we're going to see a lot more unmediated, unedited journalism like this in the future although there are, it should be said, major risks involved. It's not just Andrew Gilligan who can make a mistake.

speaking at european broadcasting union

I'm going to be speaking at the European Broadcasting Union's International Broadcasting Conference in Geneva on Tuesday.

It was a bit of a last minute booking, and will involve a 4am taxi journey to Luton Airport, but it will be a real pleasure having the opportunity to discuss how social media is changing the media landscape with the leadership of many of Europe's Public Service Broadcasting corporations.

Photos, tweets, etc to follow...

press gazette media law conference

On Wednesday (25 June) I'll be at the Press Gazette Media Law conference in London, delivering what will be my last conference presentation as a BBC person before I leave (on Friday) to join Headshift.

I'm going to be speaking about the sort of risks - primarily, in this instance, legal risks - which arise when news and media organisations encourage or host audience discussion, content submissions and community.

You may be surprised: I've come up with at least eleven different legal issues that online community managers and social media providers need to be aware of.

I'm also going to discuss the different between moderation (policing) and hosting (facilitating), both of which, some solicitors believe, actually increase a website publisher's exposure to liability for libel.

I'll get my slides up on slideshare as soon as I've got better bandwidth than I'm currently getting using a nokia n95 as a bluetooth modem whilst on a train in a 3g wilderness somewhere south of Birmingham.

dna 2008: live streaming video coverage from my mobile

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.