@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”.

Wired joins rush to Second Life

Posted by Martin Stabe on 18 October 2006 at 09:32
Tags: CNET, Journalism, Reuters, Second Life, Wired

Wired magazine has become the lastest real-world news organisation to establish an office Second Life, the 3D virtual world.

The magazine joins Reuters, which opened a virtual bureau this week, and online publisher CNET, which opened its Second Life building last month.

Last Friday, Wired editor-in-chief Chris Anderson, author of The Long Tail, gave a presentation and virtual book signing in Second Life, and the current issue of the magazine features a trave guide and fact sheet about Second Life.

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Reuters to open virtual bureau in Second Life

Posted by Martin Stabe on 15 October 2006 at 23:01
Tags: BBC, CNET, Journalism, Reuters, Second Life

Reuters is planning to open a bureau in Second Life, the virtual world created by San Francisco-based Linden Labs.

London-based correspondent Adam Pasick will appear in Second Life as the avatar Adam Reuters, reported the International Herald Tribune, following initial reports on the Second Life Herald blog.

More than 850,000 people are registered to participate in Second Life, which was recently the subject of a detailed introduction in the Economist. The in-world currency, the Linden Dollar, can be exchanged for real-world currency on the open market.

As one might expect, Reuters’ Second Life web site tracks Second Life’s key economic indicators, including the Linden Dollar’s fluctuation against real-world currency. According to the Reuters’ site, the rate on Sunday evening was 271.4 Linden Dollars to one US Dollar, and $407,666 had been spent in Second Life over the previous 24 hours. Pasick’s first dispatch as “Reuters SL bureau chief Adam Reuters” was an interview with Nicholas Portocarrero, chief executive of in-world bank Ginko.

Pasick told the IHT: “It’s not any different than when Reuters opens up a bureau in a part of the world that has a fast-growing economy that we weren’t in before. The laws of supply and demand hold true, it has a currency exchange, people open businesses and get paid for goods and services.”

Reuters’ virtual building will appear as a hybrid of its Canary Wharf building and its equivalent in Times Square, New York. Reuters is the second news organisation to establish a presence in the virtual world — after CNET News.com, which unveiled a virtual version of its San Francisco headquarters last month — but it appears to be the first to dedicate a correspondent to report on the phenomenon.

The BBC has also shown interest in Second Life. It has already presented a concert in Second Life, and director general Mark Thompson and new media director Ashley Highfield met with Linden Labs on their recent US “fact-finding mission”. Last week Chris Vallance of BBC Radio FiveLive’s Pods and Blogs conducted an interview in Second Life.

The journalists are late to the game, though — technology PR consultancy Text 100 is already offering virtual spin in-world.

Hitwise: Journalists’ attention is only one cause of blogs’ traffic increases

Posted by Martin Stabe on 24 August 2006 at 13:38
Tags: Blogs, Journalism, Reuters, Sunday Times

Attention from mainstream media is only sometimes the major cause of increased traffic to a blog, according Hitwise UK director of research Heather Hopkins.
Today Hitwise released some of the traffic data for the week ending 19 August, which Hopkins referred to in her case studies earlier this week.
Three of the blogs posting major week-on-week gains in that week were involved in stories that garnered significant national media attention:

• Girl with a One-Track Mind, an erotic blog which has been made into a book, drew extensive media attention after the Sunday Times unmasked its pseudonymous author as Zoe Margolis, a film assistant from north London. he increased attention lead to an eight-fold increase in visits to the blog in the past two weeks, making it the second most-popular UK blog being tracked by Hitwise.
• Little Green Footballs, the US-based blog that exposed Reuters freelance Adnan Hajj’s manipulated photographs from Beirut, saw its market share of visits in the UK increase 88 per cent week-on-week.
• EU Referendum blogger Richard North, who posted a critique of photographs taken at Qana in Lebanon, also saw an increase in traffic, becoming the 10th most-visited site among UK blogs being tracked by Hitwise. Journalists have strongly disputed North’s allegations.

However, the most popular UK blog being tracked by Hitwise, Fugufish, appears to have drawn most of its majority of the visits to the site from e-mail services, online communities and chat services

Fugufish rose to fame after posting several viral videos, including one of the band OK Go and one of David Bowie in the film The Labyrinth.

In a statement today, Hopkins said: “Whilst the mainstream media can be an important catalyst for growth, links from other blogs, email and social networking sites can also drive growth. This reflects the community around blogging and a maturing of the medium that now can create its own celebrities.”

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We Media: Where does citizen journalism emerge?

Posted by Martin Stabe on 4 May 2006 at 10:07
Tags: Blogs, Citizen journalism, Journalism, Reuters, We Media

Speaking on a We Media panel about participatory media in Asia and China, Rebecca Mackinnon just made a very interesting point.

Mackinnon, who heads Global Voices, an initiative based at the Berkman Center at Harvard University which seeks to bring bloggers from around the world to a larger overseas audience (and which recently linked up with Reuters), was previously an East Asia correspondent with CNN.

She recounted reporting on the emergence of Ohmynews, the South Korean citizen journalism site which remains the most significant project of the sort in the world.

Mackinnon argued that Ohmynews emerged out of specific socio-political conditions that existed in South Korea at the time. South Korea was an emerging democracy, but one dominant, conservative party controlled the media. At the same time, the country had among the highest rates of Internet penetration in the world. A whole generation, she said, felt an impetuous to participate in a way the existing media configuration

This is why something like Ohmynews emerged in Korea, but not in Japan. Another fact, Mackinnon argued is simply cultural. In Japan, she said, people view the relationship between individual, government, and the media differently and are less inclined to participate individually. The system was also more established and stable, with no impetuous to encourage the development of a new media configuration.

These are interesting points to consider. Over the past year, British bloggers have periodically wondered why no robust and rambunctious political blogosphere has emerged here the way it has so quickly in the United States. This periodically recurring theme re-emerged this week when Reuters reported:

… unlike in the United States, where bloggers have claimed credit for major political upsets, including the resignations of broadcaster Dan Rather and Senate Republican leader Trent Lott, British newspapers remain in charge for now of exposing the misdemeanours of public figures and institutions.

Leaving aside the question of whether number of political or media scalps claimed is the best measure of a successful blog subculture (short anwer: it is not), could similar confluences of economics, politics and culture hold the key to understanding why blogging and other forms of participatory media take off in some parts of the world but not others? Why is “mobloginng” a hit in Asia but nearly non-existant in North America?

There is certainly nothing inevitable about it. The mere existence of a technical infrastucture is a necessary but insufficient condition for the emergence of particular practices of participatory media.

Update: See also Alfred Hermida’s take on this, over on the BBC’s blog. He writes: “Would something like OhMyNews work in countries like the UK? It strikes me that we may be some way off from this happening here.”

We Media: Hope for a better day

Posted by Martin Stabe on 4 May 2006 at 09:06
Tags: Journalism, Reuters, We Media

It’s Day Two of the We Media Global Forum extravaganza, this time at the Reuters HQ in Canary Wharf. It’s all being webcast again.

It’s fair to say that yesterday’s first day failed to impress everyone in the room. As the event dragged on, the knot of bloggers I was sitting in grew noticeably bored, restless, and irritated by what many percieved as the arrogant and unresponsive tone of some of the speakers on the stage.
It was not entirely clear what the collective pronoun In “We Media” referred to. Certainly it couldn’t have referred to the non-professional citizen journalists, bloggers and other participatory media enthusiasts that all of this is supposed to be about. The $800 price tag alone ensured that all but the working journalists and a few lucky souls with fellowships were representatives of large organisations.

Many people noticed the increasingly negative tone. Kevin Anderson was unimpressed by the views expressed by Helen Boaden, who he described as someone “several levels of bureaucracy above my head at the BBC”.

Rachel North, the only blogger who actually made it to the stage amidst the sea of suits:

I was struck by the sense of Them and Us, the ‘old media’ wary but seemingly wanting to engage with the new, and the new media frustrated, sometimes chippy, often passionately challenging. Why the tension, I wondered? It’s all content, wherever you source it from, and you choose what you consume and how much faith you put in it.

The discontent was apparently most strongly voiced on an unofficial IRC channel, and came to it’s most frank expression at last night’s excellent We Media Fringe event, which was masterfully organised on short notice by Robin Hamman, the discontent continued. Suw Charman used her speech to issue a call to action for a more critical response to today’s sessions. PaidContent.org has a good summary of her views.

It seems to have worked. The first question fielded by Reuters chief executive Tom Glocer this morning was one demanding how traditional news organisations would change their behaviour from merely worrying about how best to “incorporate” so-called “citizen journalism”.
Glocer responded that Reuters journalists have already changed their reporting behavour to include tracking blogs in addition to companies’ official statements that they traditionally relied on.

We Media: Trust in ‘media’

Posted by Martin Stabe on 3 May 2006 at 10:39
Tags: BBC, Journalism, Reuters, We Media

I’m blogging this morning from the We Media Conference in Studio 1 at BBC Television Centre in White City.
Opening the first session on trust in the media, Jeremy Vine used the set that the BBC will use to present the results of tomorrow’s local elections to reveal the findings of Globespan’s media trust survey. It all sounds very gloomy for British media, with less than half of respondents — 47 per cent — saying they trust media, a figure well below gloabl averages. But all of this needs some historical perspective: trust in UK media is has actually grown over the past four years.

There was some criticism of the survey’s methodology, particularly the discussion of overly broad categories like “media” and “blogs”. Some mainstream media are trusted and othes are not. Ditto blogs. Jeff Jarvis (one of the conference’s so-calle We-Jays along with the Guardian’s Emily Bell) has already posted to his blog about this.

Reuters teams up with blogger network

Posted by Martin Stabe on 13 April 2006 at 11:44
Tags: Blogs, International, Journalism, Reuters

Reuters has made a donation to the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University which will allow Global Voices Online, the international network of bloggers based at the university, to hire a full-time editor.

A statement from the newsagency said that the move was part of “efforts to invite a wider set of voices and viewpoints into the news discussion”.

Reuters says it will make material from Global Voices available on its websites.

Rebecca MacKinnon, the former CNN correspondent in Asia who is one of the co-Founder of Global Voices, said she hopes the partnership with Reuters will enable interaction between perspectives coming from citizen and professional journalists.

“We believe that bloggers and journalists share a common goal of informing an engaged global citizenry,” she said in a statement distributed by Reuters.

Times Square honours for journalists killed in Iraq

Posted by Jeffrey Blyth on 21 March 2006 at 13:29
Tags: Journalism, Reuters, United States

As a tribute to the journalists who have died covering the war in Iraq, Reuters is devoting space and time on its super-size advertising billboard in New York’s Times Square to remind Americans of the sacrifice journalists have made.

Until the end of this month, the 7,000-square-foot electronic sign will run non-stop the names of the 67 journalists who have so far died, plus some of the harrowing pictures out of Iraq, Four of the 67 who have died worked for Reuters. A fifth died in a car crash.

Altogether Reuters has had more than 50 full-time journalists assigned to Iraq over the past three years, and nearly 20 part-time journalists, Plus numerous support staff such as drivers and interpreters.

Do old media risk becoming irrelevant?

Posted by Martin Stabe on 10 March 2006 at 09:44
Tags: BBC, Blogs, Citizen journalism, Financial Times, Journalism, Mashups, Podcasting, Reuters, Wikis

On the essential reading list this week is the speech by Reuters chief executive Tom Glocer at last week’s Online Publishers Association conference. In the speech, which was later published in the Financial Times, Glocer explained why “old media must embrace the amateur“. (Also available from Reuters as a Word document [DOC])
Refering to Daniel Defoe, Samuel Pepys and James Boswell, Glocer argued that people akin to today’s bloggers or “citizen journalists” have always existed: “The difference now is the scale of distribution and the ability to search”.

Glocer advises media organisations to become “seeders of clouds” who produce high-value new content, “providers of tools” that allow news consumers to recombine disparate content as they see fit, and become better “filters and editors” who provide a valuable service by finding the scarce valuable droplets in the information deluge.

Old media, Glocer says, have a choice: “integrate the new world or risk becoming irrelvant”. FT.com will be holding an online Q&A with Glocer about his views next Wednesday and are currently inviting readers to e-mail their questions for Glocer to ask@ft.com.

In a related item on on the must-read list, journalism’s best-known advocate of these participatory media, Dan Gillmor, has begun writing a series of articles for BBC News Online. The former San Jose Mercury News columnist, author of We the Media, and director of the Center for Citizen Media explains the tools whose widespread diffusion he sees as the democratising of media production: blogs, podcasts, wikis, discussions, multiplayer games and mashups. It’s a nice overview of these terms.