NUJ may get ‘first full-time blogger’ member tonight

Posted by Martin Stabe on 12 November 2007 at 18:13
Tags: AOL, Blogs, NUJ, blogging

The National Union of Journalists may tonight admit its first member to list ‘blogger’ as his job title.

The union’s London Freelance branch will tonight consider an application from Conrad Quilty-Harper, who is taking a year out from Hull University and is a freelance contributor to Engadget, the widely-read gadget blog ultimately owned by AOL.

However, Quilty-Harper’s case has also shown an anomaly in the union’s membership rules. Despite his freelance role, the freelance branch initially rejected Quilty-Harper’s application for membership last December on the grounds that he is a full-time student not enrolled on a journalism course.

He has been documenting his efforts to join the union by posting his correspondence with the branch on the photosharing website Flickr.

“I had to tell the guy who phoned up that I’m not going to be a student this year,” Quilty-Harper wrote in a post today showing the letter informing him of tonight’s meeting.

“Turns out I’ll have to phone them up and say I’m a student again next year, at which time they’ll revoke my membership and I’ll have to apply again.”

Writing on his blog last week, NUJ general secretary Jeremy Dear mentioned that he had approved the first membership application from someone listing their job title as “blogger” — apparently a reference to Quilty-Harper.

“Whilst we have hundreds, if not thousands of members who write blogs, this is the first person who earns their entire living solely from freelance blogging,” wrote Dear.

“Who says we’re not attracting new media workers?”

This is not a ‘blog’ (it’s just part of one)

Posted by Martin Stabe on 26 June 2007 at 08:56
Tags: Blogs, blogging

RBI’s blogging supremo Adam Tinworth says he has given up on trying to correct people’s incorrect use of blogging terminology:

In my day to day work, aiding and abetting blogging journalists, and as I read around blogs in general it’s becoming clear that, to most people, a blog is a post on such a site … Yes, each individual entry is a “blog”, and the site is called something like a “blog site”.

Tinworth worries that he is “turning into the electronic equivalent of the old geezer in the pub moaning about kids today and how they don’t understand anything” by trying to insist that a site itself is a “blog” while each story on it is a “post” or “entry”.

I hope he reconsiders and returns to taking a hard line on this. After all, “blog” (both as a noun and verb) has been a proper word in the OED since March 2003. It defines the noun as being short for “web log”, which in turn, is defined as:

“A frequently updated web site consisting of personal observations, excerpts from other sources, etc., typically run by a single person, and usually with hyperlinks to other sites; an online journal or diary” (OED 2003).

Other dictionaries agree that a blog is a type of web site, rather than parts of such a site.
Anyone interested in the struggles to define the term over the last few years should read danah boyd’s article on the subject.

Calling a “post” a “blog” is to confuse the sum and its parts. Pedantic subs wouldn’t stand for this sort of thing in any other context. Right, I’m off to go work on a few “magazines” — sorry, “stories” — now.

6 comments

A role model for blogging journalism students

Posted by Martin Stabe on 13 June 2007 at 10:26
Tags: Journalism, blogging, education

Contrary to the common assumption among some journalists, most bloggers are not wannabe hacks. But some are. And those journalism students who blog should pay careful attention to the story of Brian Stelter.

Just a few week weeks since graduating with his undergraduate mass communications degree from Towson University in Maryland, 21-year-old has landed his first job — as a media reporter for the New York Times’ business section.

Stelter made his name in the US media world while still an undergraduate by becoming a leading blogger covering television news business.

Stelter’s blog, TVNewser, is a perfect example of how aspiring journalists can use blogging tools to establish their reputations as respected and knowledgable correspondents.

Stelter didn’t use his blog to write about his cat, or to opine about disparate world events. Instead, he picked a niche patch and patrolled it like a specialist correspondent. He aggregated all the available nuggets of information about the TV news business and broke stories about that corner of the news business.

In an internal New York Times memo reported by the New York Observer, business editor Larry Ingrassia quoted from a 1,400-word, front-page feature that the paper had written about Stelter and his blog a few weeks before hiring him:

Brian’s blog, as Julie Bosman reported in that page one story, “is read religiously by network presidents, media executives, producers and publicists.” He started the blog in 2004 during winter break, and soon was hired by Mediabistro.com to keep writing it. He made it a must read by getting scoops about the comings and goings in the business. So dedicated was Brian to his blog that he updated it – posting an item about NBC News – between interviews with Times editors in our building recently.

His hiring underscores the expansion of our efforts to integrate what we do online and in the print edition.

I’ve written before that student journalists need to recognise that their professional blogs are journalistic tools, not toys like their MySpace pages or Facebook profiles. As Jeff Jarvis avised journalism students when he beat me to this post overnight: “When I suggest that you blog, this is what I’m talking about.”

Frontline Club event on blogging and journalism

Posted by Martin Stabe on 30 April 2007 at 16:35
Tags: Al Jazeera, BBC, Journalism, blogging

The Frontline Club in London will be celebrating World Press Freedom Day on Wednesday Thursday evening with a very interesting-sounding panel discussion on the role of political blogging in global journalism.

The speakers will be former Guardian multimedia correspondent Ben Hammersley and BBC College of Journalism editor Kevin Marsh. They will be joined on a telephone link by Global Voices co-founder Ethan Zuckerman and the Egyptian blogger Alaa Abd El-Fattah.

The event will be moderated by Richard Gizbert, who hosts the Listening Post media programme on Al Jazeera English.

They will be discussing some fairly loaded questions, if the the Frontline Club web site is anything to go by:

Join us as we discuss the role of blogging on World Press Freedom Day, weighing up whether political blogs are the only platform for meaningful critical discourse or whether they are digital narcissism, insular and error-ridden.

…

So what is the role of blogging? Is it the voice of the future? Are bloggers filling in the gaps the mainstream media cannot address? And is anybody paying attention to what is being said?

On the other hand, the event will likely also shine a light on the important issue of cyber-dissidents who have been persecuted by their governments for exercising their freedom of expression online.

This should be an interesting event: Hammersley’s last Frontline Club encounter with Marsh last September was one the best recent discussions of how blogging and low-cost media production tools are changing journalism in recent months. Sadly the video is no longer online, but Marsh later incorporated some of the ideas that emerged from that evening in his address to the Society of Editors conference in Glasgow.

No doubt some other bloggers and journalists who have given these issues some thought will be in the audience. It should be a very interesting evening.

Update: Kevin Marsh has already posted his initial thoughts on the topic.

How should journalists use social media material?

Posted by Martin Stabe on 20 April 2007 at 09:45
Tags: Ethics, Journalism, MySpace, Privacy, blogging

The Virginia Tech massacre may have made a talking point out of the ethics of journalists’ use material posted on blogs and social networking platforms, but Gary Andrews today highlights another, lower-profile case from the UK regional press where similar issues were raised.

When a student was found dead after a night out in Exeter several months ago, journalists quickly found his MySpace profile, and, in Andrews’ words, “liberally lifted from both his profile and the tributes left by his friends”.

At the time, Cardiff journalism student Chris White pointed out that the Basingstoke Gazette’s coverage had provoked outrage among the dead student’s friends, who felt that the paper had used the MySpace material out of context to portray him as a heavy drinker.

Andrews suggests that journalists must be more careful about how they use such material if they want to avoid alienating the vast user-base of blogs and other social media — which basically means their most engaged readers.

He also suggests should probably treat different bloggers in different ways, depending on how much of a public figure they are within the blogosphere:

While, say Tim Worstall, probably wouldn’t be too upset if a reporter contacted him out of the blue to do a quick piece on a unique bit of economic commentary he’s done on government policy [4], a less high profile blogger isn’t likely to react so favourably.

He is probably right: blogging blurs the line between public, one-to-many broadcast media and private one-to-one or one-to-few communications. The more high-profile the blogger, the more they will think of their blog as a publishing platform. Lower-profile bloggers, like the students in both cases, tend to think of their use of these technologies as a semi-private conversation among their friends, often forgetting that they are actually putting private material into the public domain.

Is this a matter of educating journalists about the changing meaning of ‘public’ and ‘private’ online, or a matter of educating the wider public that everything online is in the public domain and therefore fair game?

9 comments

Media critics look at online Virginia Tech coverage

Posted by Martin Stabe on 18 April 2007 at 08:49
Tags: ABC, Blogs, CNN, Citizen journalism, Ethics, Journalism, Livejournal, Mobile Phones, NBC, New Media, Photography, blogging, onlinejournalism, usa, video

For a second day, there is much analysis from bloggers and media commentators about the online coverage of the Virginia Tech massacre.

Canadian journalism educator Mark Hamilton says it would be wrong to describe the Virginia Tech story as just another “victory” for the development of citizen journalism. We’re well beyond that stage, he suggests.

“What yesterday showed me was the new mediascape in action, a potent mix of journalists, witnesses and aggregators telling the story better than any of them could alone,” writes Hamilton in an excellent roundup an analysis.

Despite isolated examples of terrible journalism and terrible blogging, Hamilton concludes that both the professionals and the blogosphere’s irregulars did sterling journalism.

One particular item from the new mediascape that has attracted a lot of attention is student Jamal Albaughouti’s mobile phone video of the shootings, which was uploaded to CNN’s citizen journalism portal and has been viewed more than 2 million times. Jeff Jarvis criticises CNN’s apparent exclusivity deal with Albaughouti. Jarvis notes that the video is already available on YouTube.

“The value of an exclusive today lasts about 30 seconds,” Jarvis concludes.

NewAssignment.net’s Steve Fox, meanwhile, argues that the video “had no inherent news value and told no story.”

The London bombing showed us how anyone with a cell phone can capture images. But, that was after a news event had occurred. Our heralded citizen journalist captured sounds of people being killed, injured and maimed yesterday as it occurred.

Is this really the type of behavior to applaud, to train citizen journalists to take part in? More importantly, what’s the news here?

Finally, step back for a second. Play the video. And, imagine you have a son or daughter attending Virginia Tech, you can’t get ahold of them and you turn on CNN to find out some information and instead you come across that video.

Much attention is also focused on journalists’ use of students’ MySpace and Facebook pages to to make contact with and request interviews with victims and witnesses.

National Journal blogger Emily Goodin, for example, spots journalists from ABC and NBC television requesting interviews in this way.

Her commenters are very unimpressed. “maggots. feasting off the misery and horror of the families and friends of the victims,” writes Linda.

Journalist and Livejournal user Adam Tinworth, meanwhile, describes it the practice as “digital doorstopping“, and just a new form of journalism’s “long and dishonourable tradition” of treating victims of tragedies in this way.

Livejournal’s community architecture, Tinworth argues, makes it likely to seem like a semi-private place to its regular users, making outsiders’ overtures seem particularly intrusive.

“Barging into that community and asking for comment feels not unlike barging into a pub and asking somebody for comments,” Tinworth writes.

But in Slate magazine, media critic Jack Shafer praises journalists who have coldly pursued the story among the victims. It would be even worse if they didn’t pursue the story, he argues. In fact, he suggests, “viewers would riot”.

Update: Dan Gillmor of the Center for Citizen Media has an essay on his blog which will be published today as an op-ed piece in the Washington Examiner. His eloquent conclusion is worth noting:

We used to say that journalists write the first draft of history. Not so, not any longer. The people on the ground at these events write the first draft. This is not a worrisome change, not if we are appropriately skeptical and to find sources we trust. We will need to retool media literacy for the new age, too.

7 comments

Virgina Tech shooting raises new issues for journalists

Posted by Martin Stabe on 17 April 2007 at 14:06
Tags: Ethics, Facebook, Journalism, MySpace, blogging

The Virginia Tech shootings are rapidly becoming one of those milestone stories that periodically highlights the trends emerging in participatory media — and the new questions reporters need to ask themselves when attempting to use these new materials.

The local paper near the Virginia Tech campus is the Roanoke Times, a US regional well-known for online innovation. It jumped into action right away, posting a blog-style rolling story that noted new information as it came in. Within hours, the site featured audio, video, slideshows and interactive graphics.

Virginia Tech’s student newspaper, the Collegiate Times, has also covered the story admirably. It’s web server inevitably crashed under the sudden influx of worldwide interest, but the student journalists quickly came up with a way to redirect traffic elsewhere.

Video footage shot on mobile phones also became a staple of the coverage. Amateur material became available quickly on Flickr and YouTube. CNN used amateur photos and videos from its I-Reports citizen journalism site in its reporting.

Seeking new information during the shooting and afterward, many students posted their experiences on blogs, as well as social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook.

On his blog, new media journalist Steve Outing wrote:

When traditional media doesn’t serve the needs of the community — in this case, for people involved in the story because they may have friends or family members at the school to learn the fate of those people — then people turn to services that do. In this case, Facebook.

But these sometimes heartbreaking postings also provided leads for professional journalists scrambling to find new information for their reports on the shooting, so journalists from around the world also began posting on these sites urging their authors to contact them.

The reaction from some other commenters on the students’ sites was highly unfavorable to journalists who acted in this way, suggesting that the reporters’ online approaches to the victims was inappropriate. Some even questioned why any reporter from a faraway media needed to report on what was at that point a very local tragedy.

In a valuable post discussing his own approach to one student, the BBC’s Robin Hamman notes that some Livejournal users were less than impressed by journalists’ “clumsy” approaches:

[Y]esterday’s events, and the ensuing media frenzy in the comments of a LiveJournal user and elsewhere, show that where mainstream media does use - and yes, that word was chosen deliberately - content created by bloggers, that the journalists, researchers and reporters do it with sensitivity.

Think when you link. Understand that some content published in public was never intended to be seen by a mass audience.

Another worrying twist to the story came when unverified assumptions posted online began to wrongly identify one Virginia Tech student as a potential suspect. With little reliable information available about the identity of the gunman, web users attention began focusing on the Livejournal page of a 23-year-old Virginia Tech student said to live in the dorm where the shooting started and whose web site showed him posting with a collection of guns.

The student reports receiving death threats as a result of the insinuation that he was the gunman. He eventually posted a statement on his his blog protesting his innocence. ABC News’ blog The Blotter and Wired’s security blog Threat Level both highlighted the case.

Over at his Online Journalism Blog, Paul Bradshaw puts it well. This event highlights trends that will become increasingly common as the generation that grew up with social media ages, and some of the new skills and roles that journalists will have to adopt in covering stories like this one.

18 comments

Is anyone actually in favour of the code of conduct?

Posted by Martin Stabe on 11 April 2007 at 17:21
Tags: BBC, Blogs, blogging

I’ve just had a call from someone on the BBC’s Today programme, who is looking for someone to come on the radio tomorrow morning to comment on Tim O’Reilly’s proposed blogger Code of Conduct.

It seems they are having a bit of trouble finding someone who actually thinks it’s a good idea — and who is in a reasonable time zone for an early-morning slot.

Balanced BBC coverage of course demands a voice in favour to counter all those against, and it seems and the lack of dripping vitriol in my earlier post on the topic has made me a potential candidate for the gig.

I actually think the code is a rather bad idea, but didn’t feel the need to re-hash all the arguments that have been laid out by many, many others already when I posted about it earlier today. Personally, I think Neil McIntosh sums up the arguments against best over at Complete Tosh.

So come out of the woodwork if you’re in favour. The Beeb wants to hear from you. Leave a comment below or drop me an e-mail and ‘ll pass it along.

Update: It seems Tim O’Reilly himself has been tracked down and will be appearing on Today tomorrow morning.

Update, 9am 12/4: Looks like the item didn’t make it onto the programme after all.

3 comments