@DNA2008: Who is getting it in the digital age?

Posted by Martin Stabe on 3 March 2008 at 11:06
Tags: DNA2008, De Persgroep, Drudge Report, Facebook, Financial Times, Japan, Mobile Phones, Online, Reuters, South Korea, schibsted

At the Digital News Affairs Conference in Brussels, Richard Gizbert of Al-Jazeera’s media programme The Listening Post asks a “on surviving the digital news age” to name some organisations that are “getting it right” in the digital age.

Here are the suggestions they came up with:

Drudge Report
A tiny three-man operation that aggregates news now makes a fortune for its creator and drives a huge proportion of the major news media’s online traffic. “He is essentially an online DJ creating online sense of consensus about what the important story is,” says Stephen Marshall, founder and creative director of the Guerilla News Network. Drudge, he suggests understands how audiences want obtain news online.

Schibsted
But Christian Van Thillo chief executive of Belgium’s De Persgroep disagrees, because Drudge is not an example of a big media company succeeding online. The best example of big media getting it, he says is the Schibsted. With its enormous online reach and profits, the publisher of Norway’s leading tabloid VG is a clear leader online. Schibsted, he says was first to market, has great sites, a big team, focussed management, full support of the company. But he warns against extrapolating Schibsted’s success to ambitions for other markets, because, he says, commercial broadcasting is not as developed in Norway as an alternative for advertisers.

Financial Times
Maria Molland, senior vice president and global head of strategy and business development at Reuters, says there are small pieces of larger companies that are doing interesting things. She names the launch of the Financial Times’s exclusive executive social networking site as an example. More specialiast social networks are the future, she suggests. “I think that Facebook is going down,” she says, “Who wants to be on a social network that your parents are on too?”

South Korea
Tyler Brûlé of Monocle nominates a country rather than a company: South Korea (and also Japan). What impact has this highly advanced digital society’s mobile phone culture had on the newstand? “Look at what it’s done for print in thouse countries - it’s made all of those publishers fight back ever harder”.

Journalists’ use of Wikipedia and social networks

Posted by Martin Stabe on 7 January 2008 at 09:01
Tags: Ethics, Facebook, Guardian, Independent, Independent on Sunday, Privacy, Wikipedia, Wikis

In yesterday’s Independent on Sunday, reader’s editor Michael Williams looked askance at journalists’ use of Wikipedia to confirm disputed facts.

After surveying the usual pro- and anti-Wikipedia arguments, Williams concludes by reading the entries about the Independent and Independent on Sunday “a subject I ought to know something about.”

“After the first 10 errors, I stopped counting. You have been warned!”

Meanwhile, Guardian readers’ editor Siobhain Butterworth has looked at how reporters use social networking sites, asking whether Facebook members have a reasonable expectation of privacy.

The issue has arisen again after the paper, along with several others, published pictures drawn from Facebook showing 19-year-old Bilawal Bhutto in fancy dress.

“There’s no call, in these circumstances, for a heavyweight public interest argument to justify publication,” Butterworth concludes.

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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.

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