Polk award winner: ‘I think of us as journalists, the medium we work in is blogging’

Posted by Martin Stabe on 25 February 2008 at 10:16
Tags: Blogs

The International Herald Tribune today profiles Josh Marshall, the blogging journalist who won one of American journalism’s top prizes last week.

Marshall won the Polk Award for Legal Reporting last Tuesday, for his “tenacious investigative reporting” of the scandal that led to the resignation of US Attorney General Alberto Gonzales over the way several federal prosecutors were sacked.

Notably, his reporting wasn’t published by any major newspaper or magazine, but on his own blog-format site, Talking Points Memo.

The site is one of the influential political blogs in the United States. Marshall says site has averaged 400,000 pageviews a day over the last 18 months, and 750,000 monthly unique users.

It has spawned a mini media empire, including a small team of investigative journalists, TPM Muckracker, which had a key role in uncovering the scandal with the help of its audience.

Marshall, a 39-year-old former staff and freelance writer for various American political magazines, is worth listening to for his explaination of the often-misunderstood relationship between blogging and journalism. Blogging, he tells the IHT, is merely a medium that carries his journalism.

“I think of us as journalists, the medium we work in is blogging,” he told the IHT.

“We have kind of broken free of the model of discrete articles that have a beginning and end. Instead there are an ongoing series of dispatches.”

Media bloggers have been eager to point this out as a landmark moment for blogging as a journalistic medium.

Steve Yelvington, an internet strategist for US newspaper group Morris Communications, wrote on his blog: “Now that Josh Marshall’s Talking Points Memo political blog has won a George Polk Award for legal reporting, can we please officially bury the tired old nonsense about blogging not being real journalism?”

Will Bunch of the Philadephia Daily News argued that Marshall’s award was “a landmark day for bloggers and the future of journalism“.

And Dan Kennedy, an assistant professor at the Northeastern University School of Journalism in Boston, wrote that the award recognised the validity of new forms of journalism including what is sometimes called “crowdsourcing”

“You see, the TPM folks did not do that much original reporting. Rather, they relentlessly kept a spotlight on what other news organizations were uncovering and watched patterns emerge that weren’t necessarily visible to those covering just a small piece of the story,” he wrote.

The Homicide Report: Great journalism in blog format

Posted by Martin Stabe on 14 January 2008 at 08:20
Tags: Blogs, Los Angeles Times, data, mapping

US National Public Radio’s On the Media this week had an interview with Jill Leovy, a Los Angeles Times reporter who writes the Homicide Report, a blog that seeks to chronicle every murder in the California city.

The blog tells the story each murder victim in the city — stories so common that before the launch of the blog, they had often unreported. More than 800 stories later, Leovy is turning the blog over to another journalist.

The blog is also gained attention for some attention for its technological innovation. By structuring Leovy’s stories as a database, the paper was able to produce what is probably the most advanced interactive maps of crimes produced by a newspaper — a type of project that at least one UK newspaper has recently attempted.

There is a lot to be learned from the Homicide Report.

Newcastle Journal blog ‘slams’ hacks’ lingo

Posted by Martin Stabe on 9 January 2008 at 10:46
Tags: Blogs, The Journal

A blog by Graeme Whitfield, assistant news editor of the Newcastle Journal, is collecting examples of poor writing by journalists for a “dictionary of journalese”, Holdthefrontpage.co.uk notes.

So far he has taken on words used almost exclusively by journalists, such as ’slam’ and ‘tot’.

(Hopefully JournalLive will fix the incorrect links to its blogs’ RSS feeds soon, so that readers can follow Whitfield’s blog regularly!)

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Bloggers benefit as Bush signs US Freedom of Information reforms

Posted by Martin Stabe on 2 January 2008 at 13:38
Tags: Blogs, Freedom of Information

In a move welcomed by American journalists, President George W. Bush has signed a bill which expands the US Freedom of Information Act into law.

Among other reforms, the bill adds a 20-day time limit for agencies to respond to requests, much like the UK Freedom of Information Act’s.

Also notable about the bill is that the definition “news media” for the purposes of FOI requests, has been expanded in a way that will benefit bloggers and other non-traditional journalists.

US “representatives of the news media” have long been able to claim a waiver from certain fees applicable under the American FOI act. Under the reforms, known as the OPEN Government Act 2007, this is defined as “any person or entity that gathers information of potential interest to a segment of the public, uses its editorial skills to turn the raw materials into a distinct work, and distributes that work to an audience.”

Here in the UK, the Government is working on FOI liberalisation proposals of its own. The Ministry of Justice is currently running a public consultation about which public or quasi-public bodies should be added to the list of organisations that must respond to FOI requests. You have until 1 February to present an argument to the consultation.

Investigative journalists follow the cache

Posted by Martin Stabe on 26 November 2007 at 11:19
Tags: Blogs, Google, RSS, Sunday Herald

Sunday Herald Scottish political editor Paul Hutcheon has an interesting story this week about critical comments that Scottish Labour’s new spin doctor, made on his colleagues on a blog.

“Gavin Yates used his blog to describe Wendy Alexander as ‘abrasive’, labelled shadow health minister Andy Kerr as ’simply uninspiring’, and blasted Jack McConnell for being a ‘lame duck leader’ when in office,” Hutcheon reported.

As Scottish blogger Duncan “Doctor Vee” Stephen points out, the interesting this about this story is how Hutcheon got hold of the embarrassing old blog posts:

His comments featured on his WordPress-hosted blog, GYmedia. A message on the blog page now states: “The authors have deleted this blog. The content is no longer available.”

But the Sunday Herald has uncovered a number of Yates’s postings, many of which portray the Labour leadership in a negative light.

Just how the Sunday Herald obtained the deleted posts is not spelled out, but there are several possibilities. The most obvious is that they accessed the old posts via the Google cache.

One Yates blog quote cited by Hutcheon, about Scottish Labour leader Wendy Alexander, was certainly easy enough to find using this method.

Duncan Stephen suggests several other possible techniques, including the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine (which also produces an occasional cache of material on the web) or using RSS readers to create local archives of blog posts:

If you use a desktop-based RSS reader the files will actually be on your computer. But I use Google Reader, and I have access to every single blog post written by Gavin Yates since the 29th of May 2007.

Stephen also points out that in light of all this, there is little point in attempting to undo what has already been published online:

It is the fact that Gavin Yates felt the need to delete his blog that makes it the story. It has become the forbidden fruit. But in this day and age, once you publish something on the web, there is no going back. I alone have access to 48 of his posts, just by making a few clicks in Google Reader. By deleting his blog, Gavin Yates has created a lot of interest in what he wrote — and access to it is by no means impossible.

Sounds about right…

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?”

A daily newspaper site built in WordPress

Posted by Martin Stabe on 1 November 2007 at 18:18
Tags: Blogs, Drupal, Express & Star, Moveable Type, Shropshire Star, Wordpress

Britain’s largest paid-circulation regional newspaper, the Express & Star in Wolverhampton, is using the free open source blogging software WordPress as the content management system of its web site, which had 162,820 unique users in April.

Its Midlands News Association sister title, the Shropshire Star (95,612 unique users, 4/2007 ABCe) uses a similar WordPress template.

The sites, created by consultancy Design UK, went live nearly a year ago, but I never bothered to look at the sites very carefully until recently. The telltale signs are all there in the source code. Wordpress founder Matt Mullenweg spotted it yesterday, and is very impressed.

The attraction of using blogging software as the basis of a newspaper site is obvious — it’s free, it allows rapid creation of new category structures based on tagging, and there is a robust commenting system built for each story. Furthermore, the Wordpress plugin system means adding on new functionality is relatively simple. The Midlands papers appear to be using a freely-available polling plug-in, for example.

For several months now, Trinity Mirror has also been using blogging software as the backend for some of its local weeklies. Moveable Type is the platform behind Buckinghamshire Advertiser and the Southport Visiter’s Southport Communities site (which was shortlisted for an AOP award this year).

The Press Gazette regional newspaper web site of the year, Gazette Live in Teesside, also uses Movable Type for its hyperlocal site, Gazette Communities (which keeps winning awards).

Lots of sites use MT or WordPress for small blog sections of their sites, I’m not aware of any other daily newspapers using basic blogging tools to run their entire sites, though.

Anyone?

First launch for Messy Media

Posted by Martin Stabe on 24 September 2007 at 16:21
Tags: Blogs, Messy Media

Messy Media, the online publishing company recently co-founded by former Yahoo! Europe director of news Lloyd Shepherd and fellow Yahoo! Europe alumnus Andrew Levy, has launched its first blog.

Westmonster, an irreverent British politics blog written by Sadie Smith, is the online publishing company’s first launch. Smith is blogging live from the Labour Party conference in Bournemouth this week.

Shepherd said: “We believe there’s a yawning gap in British political coverage, between the established media, which have fallen into the “us-and-them” trap, and the partisan political blogs like Iain Dale’s Diary and Guido Fawkes. We want to launch into that gap, combining the professional aspirations of the established media with the speed, openness and smarts of the bloggers.”

Messy Media is hoping to demonstrate that contemporary online publishing tools make it possible to produce “well-written, professionally-executed media” at very low cost.

Advertising on the site will be sold by ad sales house Ad2One.

Blog community doesn’t care for mag’s view of social workers

Posted by Martin Stabe on 17 September 2007 at 16:52
Tags: Blogs, Daily Mail, Daily Telegraph

Community Care has had to close a comment thread on one of its blogs after a string of nasty comments on a post attacking the Daily Mail’s coverage of social work.

The post, by the RBI magazine’s deputy editor Janet Snell, promises a story in this week’s issue that will examine how, from its point of view, the Mail and the Telegraph had “hijacked” the story of an expectant mother who may have her child taken into foster care at birth. The magazine promises to put forward the social workers’ point of view.

Suffice to say that many commenters on Snell’s post do not share the her benign view of social workers.

“I had no idea that there was such a strong and virulent hatred of social workers,” says RBI’s head of blogging Adam Tinworth in an interesting post explaining the rationale of the decision to end the comments thread, a first for RBI’s B2B sites.

The silver lining, Tinworth notes, is that the discussion on the blog has become more active since the “Daily Mail incident”. His theory: the row drew more attention to the blog, and the sight of an active comment thread may have given timid readers the sense that the had “permission” to start leaving comments on the blog.

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.

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