This week we didn’t have a guest speaker, instead we learnt all about computer assisted reporting (CAR). CAR is relatively new in the UK, though in the US it is an established part of journalism and is even taught in some universities. It was originally developed from journalists using tools used by social scientists such as spreadsheets and database managers. CAR enables journalists to report with authority – they become the expert rather than asking for an expert opinion. This is all probably not making any sense for those who weren’t in the lecture… Basically, CAR helps journalists find information, evaluate and analyse it and communicate it particularly when it comes to gathering statistics and using them to generate an article.
The Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) is an extremely important tool for journalists. Sites like What Do They Know are useful as well as a new site recently opened up displaying collected data sources from the government.
Some examples of CAR stories can be found on the here where it was discovered in December 2007 that police misconducts cost the forces £44 million. Another example is Stephen Grey’s book Extreme Rendition – Ghost PLan: The True Story of the CIA Torture Programwhere he revealed the CIA was using British air bases to transport foreign nationals to countries where they could torture them.
Some of the skills that CAR Journalists can obtain include data sourcing, data wrangling, negotiation, understanding the legal system and numbers and their ability to express these in a simple way so it can be universally understood. David Donald of the Center for Public Integrity suggested no more than three stats should be used in a story – but it is crucial that the numbers underpin the news. It is also essential that journalists take data back to the people before publication so the numbers can be checked and double checked before they go to print. There’s nothing worse for a journalist than getting a story wrong.
As much as I hate maths and maths hates me, I’m intrigued by CAR and its use of maths to generate good news stories. It is crucial for me to understand numbers if I’m going to use them as fact. Essential tools for the job are spreadsheets, database manager, social network analysis, mapping tools and mashup tools.
CAR I believe is fast becoming an essential part of journalism and we need to learn some lessons from our cousins across the pond and get emphasise to journalists the need for them to be taught in CAR.
Robert Andrews, the UK editor of Paid Content came to talk to us last week. I was really interested to hear what he had to say particularly with the massive debate going on at the moment with whether or not we should pay for content online thanks to Rupert Murdoch.
We will soon be paying for news online
Paid Content was set up in to 2002 by Rafat Ali who started the site because he believed all media would eventually become digital. The site acts as a breaking news site, aggregator and shows regularly updates news stories throughout the day as they progress. It was built on a blog framework which was updated through the day and Robert pointed out that they were increasingly using Twitter for news. Their Headquarters are in New York while Robert is one of two UK editors who work from home.
He was quick to point out that those starting a career in journalism need to be able to multi-task as that is the way journalism is headed. The growth of digital media in the last 10/15 years particularly fascinated him adding that newspapers and magazines were desperately trying to keep up with technology and expanding out to to reach more people. With the current economic climate, newspapers are making a third less than they were this time last year and with online advertising considered the most efficient form of advertising, magazines and newspapers are losing money. They’ve started to question whether or not the advertising market will turn up and if it’s not likely to do so, then they need to use short term solutions to satisfy their shareholders.
This short term solution could be a pay wall. Business titles like the Financial Times and The Wall Street Journal would possibly be very successful using pay walls as their readers are generally wealthy.
But the real question is can the same be said for consumer news? Ft.com has 1.6 million users with 128,000 paying £90 a year. However, KPMG found out that 60% of people would rather see ads than pay for content ad free. Hitwise found that free content sites traffic has been increasing while transitional websites traffic has been decreasing and Lightspeed’s survey revealed that 9/10 people wouldn’t pay for content. In another poll people were asked what would they do if their favourite news site started to charge. The results weren’t all that surprising to me. 74% said they would find another site, which is probably what I would do. 8% said they would use its free headlines only while only 5% said they would continue reading it. Yet another survey found that 72% of people would want to pay less than £10 a year to read content online with nobody willing to pay over £50. All the poll results can be found here.
Will people be willing to pay for national newspapers? If not why would they be likely to pay for local news? Hyper local reporting was extremely popular between 2002-2006 although the only real success was the Trinity Mirror’s Teeside Gazette. A second wave is starting again with Robert emphasising that this was an exciting time for any one prepared to multi-task as the future of journalism is specialisation.
In our last online lecture we had the Web Development editor (business) of The Times, Joanna Geary, come in to talk to us about how she started in the world of journalism and what we could do to embrace all things online. Joanna was very friendly and I identified with her easily making the lecture a thoroughly enjoyable experience.
She took us through how she came to the conclusion she wanted to be a journalist. Aged 5 she decided she wanted to be a newsreader, which was very similar to me because when I was 6 years old I told my parents I was going to be a journalist and here I am 16 years later doing what I’ve always dreamed of doing. Though I didn’t achieve it quite as young as Damon Weaver the young boy who interviewed President Obama.
Aged 12 she wanted to be a war correspondent, then at 14 changed her mind and decided she wanted to be a reporter with a helicopter and a super human boyfriend (don’t we all!).
As she turned 16 she decided she wanted to be a political correspondent which then turned into wanting to be a journalist for BBC Radio 6 years later and finally at 23 she decided she wanted to be a newspaper reporter.
She stressed to us how difficult it was starting out as a journalist when you don’t have any official qualifications. She was always being told she was the second choice for the job. Something I’ve heard myself, though only when I was applying for retail jobs when I was 16, so its not quite the same. She was turned down by Coldfield News, Solihull Time and The Birmingham Post and Mail.
Finally her break came when she got a trial position on the business desk of The Birmingham Post. In December 2004 she was the general business reporter quickly becoming the enterprise editor 3 months later. Then in August 2007 she became the media and marketing editor. Pete Ashton created a blog called Created in Birmingham which was about cultural events happening in and around Birmingham. After discovering this blog, Pete encouraged Joanna to set up her own blog resulting in her setting up blog networks for The Birmingham Post and generating front page stories out of blog posts posted by non journalists. This again emphasizes the importance of User Generated Content (UGC). Joanna also told us that blogging has doubled her income in 18 months which certainly made more students prick their ears up. Personally I’d never even thought that blogging could increase my income in any way.
These days Joanna works for The Times , after being asked to visit the office via Twitter, sitting with the business team. She looks at new digital products, website development, new technologies, event planning and is involved in the paid content issue. Again we were told about the power of Twitter with Joanna saying that social networks were the future of distribution for journalism and I couldn’t agree more.
On the 10th of November we had someone to talk to us who made me quite star struck. Rory Cellan-Jones is the BBC’s technology correspondent and I not only recognised him immediately but his voice was unmistakeable. I remember sitting and listening to him with my grandparents while they nattered about how much technology was advancing and how they were never going to be able to keep up (now not only do they know how to text but they also have a laptop and have successfully sent two emails to date much to their surprise… and everyone elses).
So yes, we were told the day before that we were having a change to the schedule and Rory would be in to talk to us Tuesday afternoon in the lecture hall which made everyone rather excited. So in the afternoon we made our way to the lecture where Rory and our lecturer Glynn were waiting for us. Before we had much of a chance to settle we were told to all smile and wave not really knowing why only to discover this was posted on twitter later on:
I wasn’t looking too great that day because I was feeling ill so I’m pretty grateful I’m at the back hidden!
All in all I found the lecture extremely interesting. Not only is he a very witty man, but he was so ahead of his time in 2008 that the powerpoint presentation he showed us from last year was still completely relevant in 2009, even with the speed at which technology is changing. He started off with the sheer number of people who were often seen hustling and bustling around newsrooms in 1983 when he started at the BBC including producers, reporters, editors and craftsmen including people involved with the cameras, sound, lights, engineers and film editors. The audience in the 1980′s was also very different to the audience we have today. Firstly the news brought in HUGE numbers because terrestrial TV was all people had to watch, there was no Sky and no online TV channels where people could get news anytime of the day. The audience were also pretty ignored. There was no way for them to get in touch with newsrooms such as email, text or comments via the web. Rory even told a very funny story about someone who had once called into the studio with everyone finding it hysterical – calling the person mad.
The landscape today of course is very different. There are now hundreds of channels people can watch, 24 hour news and online news while papers are in retreat and jobs for journalists are quickly disappearing. The audience is also very different with User Generated Content becoming a part of every journalists day to day life. The audience are very much involved and active and more and more raw footage of events is being filmed by so-called ‘citizen journalists’ enabling a story to gather momentum more quickly compared with the 1980′s when a camera crew made up of about 10 people would have to rush to get to a breaking news story as quickly as possible.
He ended the lecture with the ideal journalist for 2009. We have to be multi skilled, interactive with our audience, both a lone wolf and a team player and we have to be willing to be poor.
I’m not looking forward to the poor part…
However my favourite part of the whole lecture was this quote: “Twitter is a platform for news.” This could not be more true. I find out most things these days from twitter because I see it as a trending topic. The Ballon Boy scandal, I found out about that over twitter, as well as the ABC/ Adam Lambert debacle.
Twitter is a way for us to get our voice out into the world. It connects us with people all over the world. People we would never usually talk to. Rory himself told us about how he’d searched for an elderly person to help with a report on computers he was doing over twitter!
I <3 Twitter
So… talking about Twitter this is my niche section of my blog. The trending topics bit! So today there are lots of different topics that are currently trending. Yesterday the number one tweet all day was #happybirthdaymiley for everyone to wish Miley Cyrus a happy birthday.
However, today the top spots were taken by Adam Lambert and ABC with the number one trending topic for the day being #ShameOnYouABC. When I logged on to Twitter I had no idea what this was talking about until I goggled it and found out that Adam Lambert’s performance on ABC’s Good Morning show was cancelled. Although no official reason has been given, the majority of people claim that it is due to his performance on the American Music Awards on Sunday night. Although ABC has not given a reason for the cancellation it seems that the twittersphere is going crazy with people showing their disapproval for what they assume is a backlash of Lambert’s AMA performance.
Another trending topic is Black Friday. This is the Friday after Thanksgiving and is considered the start of the Christmas shopping season. Lots of different stores in the States have sales on and it is considered the busiest shopping day of the year with fights even breaking out between people competing to get the best bargains. I once saw a fight between two women in work, over a £15 dress. They ended up being banned from the store for life…. Is a dress that has 50% off really worth being banned from a chain of shops for life?!
Sorry for the lack of blogging the last few weeks. I jetted off to Lanzarote for a week and therefore missed two Thursday online lectures so I’m starting anew this week.
This week’s speaker in the online journalism lecture was Daniel Meadows who, in my opinion, was an absolute legend. He was a hippy and travelled around the UK between 1973 and 1974 in his Free Photographic Omnibus. This was basically a double decker bus kitted out with a dark room etc for him to take photos of people he met on his travels. As if that wasn’t interesting and unique enough in itself, Daniel went on to tell us about how years later he had attempted to find all the people he had photographed during this tour. Newspapers published his quest to find those he had photographed all those years ago while living aboard the photographic omnibus and eventually he found some. He later published a collection of them into a book called The Bus showing the characters then and now.
One woman in particular made an impact on Daniel and in fact she left a mark on me, even though I’d only heard her story through him. The story of Florence Alma Snoad, a part time cleaner when Meadows first met her in Southampton, was absolutely fascinating.
The whole idea of digital storytelling is one that I find quite scary. I’m not good with technology though I feel I’m more twentieth century now that I have an Apple Mac and a Blackberry but I still lack the confidence to tackle technology head on. When Daniel showed us the videos he made I instantly thought that it was unbelievably complicated and something that I would never grasp. Then he told us all about the project, Capture Wales. This project was set up for those who wanted to learn more about technology and digital storytelling to learn all about it. They were able to create their own videos (some of which were hilarious, such as Elvis Died in my Bedroom.
We were shown a video with people from the course talking about their experiences. The majority of people said they found it daunting at first and, like me, found it hard to believe that they were going to be able to make anything half decent. However, they had great support and help from the team at Capture Wales and the outcomes were fantastic. Some were humorous, while others were a bit more serious but all in all they were great pieces of work – especially for people who had only 5 days to learn the basics!
Anyways now onto the other section of the weekly blog. I recently got a Blackberry (in fact I’ve had it for less than 24 hours!) and one of the first things I did was install Ubertwitter. This is an application available for the Blackberry where you can update your status, location, see other peoples tweets, direct messages, trending topics etc making my Twitter life a lot easier and simple. Now I don’t even have to use the laptop to access one of my favourite sites.
This weeks trending topics have been fairly obvious. I checked them out on Thursday 5th and Friday 6th of November so as you can imagine Guy Fawkes night was right up there as number one on the trending topics due to the fact that it was Bonfire Night. I love fireworks, I usually go to the Swansea display, even before I went to university down there thats where my family and I would go, but this year because of the work load at Uni I was unable to go and had to settle for a nice Curry in Wetherspoons instead.
I am a complete Awards night geek and will stay up until ungodly hours to watch the Oscars and other such shows. MTV shows are some of my favourites because usually the celebrities are filled to the brim with alcohol and will do stupid stuff that you know they’re going to regret the next day (as evident with the Taylor Swift/ Kanye West incident – BOO YOU KANYE!). The MTV EMAs was an event that I had been looking forward to for a while, ever since one of my favourite artists, Katy Perry, was announced as the host being the only person that MTV has asked to host an EMA show for a second time. On Thursday night, the words EMAs, MTV and Katy Perry were all high up in the trending topics. Most people were commenting on the several outfits that Ms Perry had changed in to throughout the night including a West Ham United basque, especially for her footie mad boyfriend Russell Brand.
And for the third week running, Rihanna was in the trending topics yet again. It came after the revealing interview she gave detailing the night that she was attacked by her boyfriend Chris Brown. Unsurprisingly, ever the gentleman, Chris Brown released a statement saying that he was never going to speak of the incident because he believed it was something that was personal and private between the two of them. Personally I applaud Rihanna for having the courage to speak out on national TV and encouraging other women who are victims of domestic abuse to get help.
As the weeks go on I find myself being inundated with work, but in a way I’m grateful as it is making me realise how difficult deadlines can be to meet. It’ll come to a head one day when you’ll find me doing this in the office:
OMG Perks trailer looks incredible. May have welled up watching it - amazing. 3 hours ago
Wish I could stay awake to watch the Live Stream of the MTV Movie Awards but I'm just not strong enough! Fingers crossed for lots of HP wins 5 hours ago
misconducts cost the forces £44 million. Another example is Stephen Grey’s book Extreme Rendition – Ghost PLan: The True Story of the CIA Torture Program where he revealed the CIA was using British air bases to transport foreign nationals to countries where they could torture them.
