Hammersley on journalistic transparency

Posted by Martin Stabe on 27 June 2007 at 09:34
Tags: BBC, Flickr, YouTube, del.icio.us, twitter

Ben Hammersley, who is in Turkey as part of an experimental BBC reporting project using social media tools, explains why he is producing behind-the-scenes material about his work to sites like YouTube, Flickr, del.icio.us and Twitter.

The modern journalist, Hammersley writes in a piece for BBC News Online’s Magazine, is “a multi-media creature, feeding the beasts of television, radio and the web”. But this, he says, means viewers have far less understanding of how the news is actually produced.

“Many do want to preserve the mystique, but frankly, I think it’s easier, and more productive in the end, to do what my maths teacher was always forlornly begging me to do, and show my working,” he says.

Some new ideas in online news design

Posted by Martin Stabe on 10 April 2007 at 10:58
Tags: Digg, Flickr, Newsvine, Portland Oregonian, Washington Post, design

Two design studios have over the past few days unveiled experimental projects that combine traditional news web site design with social media trends.

Oliver Reichenstein of Information Achitects Japan, who are currently working for a newspaper client on a developing a more” logical and intuitive unity between screen and paper news”, unveiled an reimagining of the Washington Post as a wiki.

It’s an impressive idea which as one blogger put it, combines the traditional and the postmodern by presenting an old-fashioned-looking print design at the top of the page with a radically interactive set of features below the fold.

Canadian internet consultants Hop Studios, meanwhile, wonder what a news sight might look like if it were “built for sharing instead of for telling?” Its design exercise, for a news site called (wait for it) Tickr, is based on the photo-sharing site Flickr. It dispenses with traditional newspaper sections in favour of tag folksonomy. It also adds commenting and blogging features, bookmarking and Digg-style voting.

In other words, it would be a bit like the well-established social news site Newsvine.

Meanwhile, the Portland Oregonian has begun a different sort of experiment with Flickr. The US paper is uploading all of its photographs onto the photo-sharing site. Discussion so far centers on whether this is a violation of the Yahoo-owned photo-sharing site’s terms of service.

More news uses of Twitter

Posted by Martin Stabe on 29 March 2007 at 15:11
Tags: Blogs, Flickr, Journalism, Mobile Phones, YouTube

I have been keeping an eye out for interesting journalistic applications of Twitter. So far it has mainly been RSS mashups that send headlines and a web link to the service, which sends 140-character messages to mobile phones or instant messager applications.

Now that Mario Menti — the developer behind the BBC-to-Twitter mashup — has created a tool that creates RSS-to-Twitter services on the fly, we can expect many more news sites to have Twitter feeds created for them.

There just isn’t very much more you can do in 140 characters.

Unless, of course, you’re trying to present live coverage of a long, drawn-out sporting event in a sport where the action can be neatly summarised in a statistical shorthand understood by the sport’s fans.

As it happens, one such a sport is currently having a rather important competition, and Manoj Kumar is trying to run just such a service. You can subscribe to his over-by-over Cricket World Cup news service by adding the Twitter user CricTimes as a friend.

Even someone like me, who fails to understand cricket, can see that this is a wonderful journalistic application of the service. Those who want live over-by-over coverage over the course of a match, but don’t have time to log onto a web sit will love this service. Just don’t ask about the short-term business case.

It’s worth remembering at this point that editors originally scoffed at over-by-over blogging of cricket matches when the Guardian first tried it a few years ago. It proved hugely popular, of course, because of the community discussion aspect of blogging — and has become a staple of test match coverage. So much so, in fact, that the ICC have been trying to prevent it.

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Naughton on young people and newspaper readership

Posted by Martin Stabe on 12 November 2006 at 20:11
Tags: BitTorrent, Flickr, Journalism, MySpace, Observer, Technorati

John Naughton’s presentation on young people’s media consumption — and specifically, lack of newspaper readership — was one of the highlights at the Society of Editors conference last week (not least because it brought about the revelation that my editor’s Sunday league football shenanigans can be viewed on YouTube).

The Observer has wisely published nearly the whole thing. Some key quotes:

[I]n any other industry, the discovery that your potential future customers weren’t interested in buying your product would prompt an investigation into whether there was something wrong with the product. But what one hears - still - from the newspaper industry is that there’s something wrong with the customers.

…

[L]ook round the average British newsroom. How many hacks have a Flickr account or a MySpace profile? How many sub-editors have ever uploaded a video to YouTube? How many editors have used BitTorrent? (How many know what BitTorrent is?)

And while some of our teenagers’ interests coincide with ours, many do not. Here, for example, are the top blog tags on Technorati last night: Bush, careers, college, comedy, Congress, death, Democrats, elections, Flickr, gay, Halloween, Iraq, Microsoft, money, Republicans, Saddam, Ted Haggard, vote, war, breaking-news, tagshare, YouTube. Some you’ll recognise. But you won’t see much about many of these in the papers.

As the blog cliché goes, go read the rest.