@NMK: Big media and interactivity
Posted by
Martin Stabe
on 13 June 2007 at 12:22
Tags: BBC, CNET, Channel 4, Guardian Unlimited, Journalism, NMK
This morning’s panel at the New Media Knowledge Forum at St Luke’s on Old Street is looking at “how the MSM (Mainstream Media) facing up to the new wave of interest in social media?”
- Jem Stone: BBC New Media
- Tom Bureau: Managing Director, CNET Networks UK
- Meg Pickard: Head of Editorial development, Guardian Unlimited
- Adam Gee: New Media Commissioner, Factual at Channel 4 Television
- Paul Pod: Co-Founder, TIOTI (Tape It Off The Internet)
- Ashley Norris: Co-founder, Shiny Media
- Nico Macdonald: Spy.co.uk
- Jeff Revoy, VP of Search and Social Media, Yahoo! Europe
Nothing really earth-shattering was said in what should have been an excellent panel. Still, some highlights:
Gee: Traditional are media are well-positioned to do public tasks by providing the architecture for interactive projects. He points to a Channel 4 map of public artwork being created by “a willing public” armed with cameraphones.
Revoy: The development of interactive tools online is being driven by the growth of broadband penetration and the wide availability of applications. It’s not a trend, just evolution of the medium. In a few years’ time, it won’t be considered a trend, but will just be the way people interact with the internet.
Bureau: CNET uses “architecture of participation” to solicit and encourage high-value users’ interaction on its web sites and that their contributions are treated in a similar vein as the contributions from the professional journalists on their sites. What professional journalists create is just the starting point, and a challenge is to change the way they look at the world and relate to their users to reflect that. Silicon.com, for example caters for high-level technology executives. The question has to be who knows more about the subject — a journalist or some members of such a specialst audience. When you have a specialist audience, you’ll inevitably have a proportion — perhaps 10 to 20 per cent — who are greater expects. They may not have the presentation skills to express that knowledge as well as the journalists, though.
Pickard: The Guardian is becoming more “granular” in its thinking about user interactivity. She outlined various classes of user interactivity, starting with casual, passive viewers, followed by interaction (such as leaving comments), curation, and finally content creation. Many big media organiations are still only getting the first chunk. The trick is to find ways to move people from being mere consumers to more creators. This should be a fundimental part of the proposition.
Norris: Lot of journalists despise new media, because they are accustomed to delivering tablets of stone, and this is still something that affects most news organisations. He singles out the Daily Mail and the Sun for frequently picking up stories from blogs, but rarely links out from their sites to acknowledge them. Even the BBC, he says, rarely links to the many blogs in the British blogosphere.
Stone: Responding to Norris, he says this may not be because the journalists don’t respect the bloggers, but just because they aren’t aware of their posts. Norris retorts: “That’s like saying journalists aren’t aware of news stories.”
See also: Kevin Anderson, Jemima Kiss, Robin Hamman.
