The criteria needed for community to take off

What has happened to the deluge of community and local sites taking the place of traditional media?

Paid Content's Patrick Smith writes that

the usual uncoordinated rag bag of amateur and semi-pro bloggers is still persevering around the country, start-ups are even still trying to make a business out of the hyperlocal dream. But there are no such successes in my area, and chances are there aren’t in yours either.

For Patrick things need to be in place for the revolution to occur which include:

1.more partnerships between local amateurs and big-brand newspaper proprietors, who have the platform, technology and commercial clout to create editorial products communities will embrace.

2.The proper rewarding of community contributors by the media groups.

3.The big city papers should stop competing with the nationals.

4.That local contributors should get together instead of competing

5.that they should offer unique content

An informal blogging code?

A survey of 1000 bloggers by researchers in Singapore suggests that most operate some form of code of conduct.

This report from Ars Techia found that

bloggers agreed on the highest ethical priority: proper attribution of information that came from other sites. Personal bloggers(as opposed to news bloggers) appeared to be willing to tell white lies when necessary, as they rated avoiding harm above telling the truth;

Dear despondent journalism student

This is definitely worth a read (via Salon Magazine)

Dear Cary,

I spent the last four and a half years studying print journalism in college and watching vacantly as the newspaper/magazine industry crumbled before my eyes. The decline never bothered me. I always figured I had what it takes to get a job even in an extremely competitive market: Before I ever graduated, I had completed four internships at newspapers, magazines and a Web site, published almost a hundred clips (including longer, high-quality pieces), and left a good impression with everyone I worked with. I knew I wanted to be a journalist, and I knew that I wanted to write for a living.
Now, six months after graduating, my parents still pay my cellphone bill and I am working full-time making ice cream.

As does the reply

Dear Scared Journalist,

If you are a true journalist, the world is going to kick your ass. If you are a true journalist, you are supposed to be having a hard time. This is how the world makes writers. It kicks their ass long enough that they start finally telling the truth. They just finally give up and start bleating out little truthlets.

Ht-Josh Halliday

The anger from the inside of a paper

I am uncertain the author of this piece and will probably want to remain anonymous but for a candid view of the state of newspapers from the inside,this is worth a read

Today I witnessed the ultimate death of my newspapers.
The money hungry whores who pay themselves vastly inflated salaries to run this company have signed the death warrant and now it is just a matter of time before the advertisers carry out their wishes.

The reason for the outpouring is that the company has reduced the paginations over summer,a sensible move to cut costs in the season when there are less readers but,

Instead of a few back of the book pages being dropped, those in charge have fundamentally destroyed the layout of my papers.

The speed of connectivity

Phil Jones,Director and Vice-President of Greater Manchester Chamber of Commerce writes a good blog which often focuses on technology new media and its use in commerce.

Yesterday it looked at how technology platforms are making the world a very tiny place.

If you look at how long communication platforms have taken to attract 50m users. Radio = 38 years. TV = 13 Yrs. Myspace = 2 yrs. (Factoid: If Myspace were a country, it would be the fifth largest in the world). Point being, 50M people suddenly became digitally connected in 2 yrs, that's just for starters. So, the theoretical idea that you can (within six steps) be connected to anyone in the world, doesn't seem so unreal.

Telegraph editor is adamant he did the right thing over expenses

It was interesting to hear Will Lewis' comments yesterday on the Telegraph's exposure of MP's expenses.

The Telegraph's editor clearly believes that his paper has performed a public good by making Parliament more open and giving the electorate the chance to make a clean sweep with the old practices and denying that their publication has undermined democracy.

For my mind there have been two problems in the coverage.Firstly that there was no differentiation between claims that were accepted or rejected.Secondly that the paper has been selective in the members that it has targeted.

In particular the coverage over the first weekend which concentrated on the Labour party.

This gave the weekend papers time to mull over the implications from only one side of the political spectrum.It turned out that many Tory claims were far more outrageous than those of the Labour party.

Whatever the implications of the paper's actions,and its ramifications will be with us for many years,Lewis has set a precedent in publishing.

Now the Morman's accept You Tube

Maybe You Tube's contribution to the information revolution has finally reached its peak when the Mormon's embrace it.

This report from the Utah Herald

BYU students now have access to Dramatic Chipmunk, Laughing Baby, Chocolate Rain and all the rest of YouTube.
YouTube has long been blocked on campus because administrators felt it contained too much questionable content. With the change, however, BYU will tacitly accept the distribution, on its own network, of all the YouTube content it once felt was inappropriate.

adding that

The policy was reconsidered in part because of professors who want access to YouTube in classrooms.
"The overwhelming factor was the educational information and materials that are increasingly becoming available," Jenkins said. "I think there's no other way but to provide all of it."

Ht-Huffington Post

What is an icon anyway?

Mike Hegedus is not happy with the Jackson coverage of the other side of the Atlantic

It's rare that television moves me to take action but it did while I was watching the ABC and NBC "specials" on the death of Michael Jackson. They moved me to take a shower. Made your skin crawl at more than just a few levels didn't it?
First, strictly as pieces of television, the production values were terrible. Doesn't an "icon" deserve better? Secondly, what is an "icon" anyway and who makes that editorial judgement? Is Michael Jackson an "icon" now? Or is he a piece of strange musical and pop culture history to anyone under say 50? Think about that for a second.

Working with and not against

The old means of control don’t work.
The old categories don’t work.
The old ways of thinking won’t work.
We all need to come to terms with that.

Wise words of wisdom from David Schlesinger, Editor-in-Chief Reuters News,speaking to the International Olympics Committee Press Commission on June 23.

David adds that

It means, using all the multimedia tools available and all the smart multimedia journalists to provide a package so much stronger than any one individual strand.
It means working with the mobile phone and digital camera and social media-enabled public and not against them.

Front pages on Jacko's death

I do like the Guardian's round up of front pages from around the world following the death of Michael Jackson

This is an example of one from Portugal

Beware technology in fervouring dissent in Iran

The surprise isn't that technology has given protesters a new voice. It's that, despite all the tech, they've been effectively silenced.

writes Farhad Manjoo over at Slate magazine.

He sees the technolgy as assisting the regime in Tehran

In many ways, modern communication tools are easier to suppress than organizing methods of the past

adding that

Through "deep packet inspection," the regime achieves omniscience—it has the technical capability to monitor every e-mail, tweet, blog post, and possibly even every phone call placed in Iran.

The best use of twitter in search engine optimisation

Writing at Mashable,Mike Dobbs ,group director of SEO at digital marketing agency 360i, gives 10 top tips on how to use twitter to hit those search engines.

I make no apologies in listing them out

1.Be sure to pick an optimal handle that’s relevant to your brand or campaign and easy to remember.

2.Optimize the Twitter account name to best reflect your brand. Your name is what appears next to your profile, which can be different than your handle/URL.

3.Optimize your Twitter page’s “Bio” line so it includes the most important, mission-critical phrases for your brand.

4.integrate your Twitter URL into your website by placing a call to action on the site for your customers to follow you on Twitter.

5.In the account settings, be sure to add your website’s URL or perhaps use it to promote your presence on another social platform,

6.The “lead-in” of each tweet appears to be important for SEO as it will determine what appears in the tweet’s title tag when it shows up as a search result on Google.(The first 42 chractors are the most important)

7.Wherever possible, start your tweet with a primary keyword phrase to theme each message.

8.If you want a message to proliferate on Twitter, it’s ideal to keep it under 120 characters so your followers can easily add RT @YourHandle in front of the tweet.

9.Insert back links to redirect users back to your content. Twitter has proven to be a significant traffic driver for bloggers and others using the space to share links.

10.When providing Bit.ly links or any other URLs, make sure the redirection leads to pages which provide a richer content experience.

How fashion is using social media-Does it spell the end of traditional PR?

There is a good piece by Rob Brown on Pr Blog which looks at the way the fashion world is using social media tools.

He writes that

With the impact of the social web, consumer to consumer communications are edging out some of the traditional brand PR messaging. Consumer opinions are more important than ever in influencing the dreams and desires of the consumer.

For the world of fashion this

provides consumers with front row access to all of the international shows and this enables them to see trends without the intervention of the mainstream fashion media.

thus broadening the range of potential customer in a way that the old media routes couldn't.

So is this the end of traditional PR? Probably not in the same way that social media will never substitute for creative content.But it will form part of a very important feedback loop for all products and services.

Online usage on the rise

An interesting report from Media audit about internet usage on the other side of the Atlantic.

in the past three years, the average U.S. adult has nearly doubled their daily use of the Internet as the average U.S. adult spent 2.1 hours per day online in 2006, compared to 3.8 hours in 2008, an 81% increase over three years. As a result, the Internet now represents 32.5% of the typical "media day" for all U.S. adults when compared to daily exposure to newspaper, radio, TV and outdoor advertising.

reports Media Post

Michael Jackson RIP as Perez Hilton and Twitter let us down

No doubt many thousands of bloggers are writing about the death of Michael Jackson at the age of 50 last night.

It will be one of those where were you moments and I had just come in and saw the traffic on twitter which is going to be the medium for future breaking news for some time to come.

The news was broken by the LA entertainment and showbiz site TMZ closely followed by the LA Times but it wasn't until nearly three hours later that the news was officially confirmed.

This,in our 24 hour culture led to rumour and Mashable turn the spotlight on another entertainment site Perez Hilton which

upon learning of Michael Jackson’s hospital admission, he posted the following, shockingly offensive piece, alleging that Michael was “lying” or “making himself sick”. The post has now been updated on his site to temper this gross insensitivity, but we fear the damage to the blogging community has already been done.

Meanwhile twitter itself was undermined by the sheer amount of traffic with both Jackson's death and that earlier in the day of Farrah Fawcett.

Paid Content report that it

quickly got overloaded and returned results that were increasingly delayed—when it returned them at all. Later Thursday evening, Twitter said it had disabled the search field on users’ home pages entirely, although it did not explain why The troubles don’t bode well for Twitter’s prospects as a “real-time” search engine, which many believe is likely the service’s most valuable feature.

More time to perfect the model

There is a good post from Howard Owens who writes that

if it took newspapers more than 100 years to build the business and content models that we all now cherish, why do we expect a fully formed online model to emerge in just 10 years?

Of course there is one problem with this.

In our current economic society it is doubtful whether the business model will be given time to develop.Nevertheless a good point from Howard

Why is the BBC on the front of the Times?

Both the Times and the Telegraph carry front page reports on the BBC this morning.

The Times' is particually scathing on the corporation with the paper reporrting that

The BBC is to publish details of public money being spent on expenses within hours but is poised to provoke a fresh row by refusing to disclose details relating to its stars.
One week after MPs caused public outrage by blacking out details of their own expenses, the BBC is refusing to reveal how much is spent on hospitality and gifts by its best-paid celebrities.

Is there soemthing afoot.Well the Guardian's Michael White thinks so

At present Murdoch is cross that the Brown government may divert BBC cash to ailing ITV and Channel 4 – but not to Sky, which Margaret Thatcher's favours first breathed into lucrative life. The Murdoch fleet is gently turning back towards the Tories.
So when the Times, Sun, Sunday Times or News of the World attack the BBC and all its works – and they do all the time – or turn up the gas on G Brown – bear in mind they are acting as His Master's Voice to advance Rupert's corporate interests. It is sometimes so blatant you don't know whether to laugh or cry.

Now here is a novel way of using a newspaper for advertising.

Editor's Weblog report that

The Zimbabwe newspaper, the Zimbabwean has taken a truly innovative approach to advertising. Its sales campaign used the troubled African nation's bank notes, rendered almost worthless by extreme inflation, to make billboard advertisements. The project has been honoured with the prize award in the outdoor category of the Cannes Lion Advertising Festival, while the campaign won a Gold Lion in the media section.

Words of wisdom from Jeff Jarvis

who writes that

I’d rather invest in a company that will take advantage of the new opportunities of the internet, not seeing ravages in the future but instead growth and profit. I’ve said often that protection is no strategy for the future. An industry whose strategy for the future is built on trying to keep us from doing what we want to do and resist the flow of the internet is an industry that is merely biding time. That should be the lesson they learn from newspapers and music.

Latest figures show twitter is a key source of traffic to other websites

Some of the latest Twitter results from the people at Hitwise which reports that

UK Internet traffic to Twitter, the “micro-blogging” service and social network, has increased 22-fold over the last 12 months. During May 2009 www.twitter.com ranked as the 38th most visited website in the UK and the fifth most visited social network. Just one year ago, in May 2008, it was the 969th most visited website and 84th most visited social network.

adding that

One consequence is that it has become a key source of traffic to other websites. During May 2009 Twitter was the 30th biggest source of traffic for other sites in the UK, accounting for 1 in every 350 visits to a typical website.

Jay Rosen on trust in the media

Just love this tweet from Jay Rosen

In 1976, 27% had a great deal of confidence in our press; in 2006, 4.5% did. During this time journalists became far more educated. So: WTF?

Wade's new appointment

Rebekah Wade's appointment as the new CEO of News International has been met by surprise not so much because of who,but because of the timing.

It had been assumed that she was stay at the Sun until the next election,but in a sign that the Murdoch's were not prepared to wait another 12 months to develop their new model for news.

As Paid Content points out though,

Wade will certainly have her work cut out developing it

They have identified three areas which she will have to focus on

1.Generating a workable model for paid content.

2.Increasing the return on investment from News International's new media projects.

3.to monetise new readers,paying special attention to those of the Sun and the NOTW who have been lured by discount pricing.

Is there room for more than UK sports pay channel?

Probably not is the answer as yesterday saw the final demise of the UK arm of Setanta after weeks of lurching from crisis to crisis.

Subscribers hoping to watch the channels were left facing a blank screen.

Another victory for Sky then who saw of ITV digital's attempts to broadcast football to the masses earlier in the decade?

The jewel in the Crown for any pay TV operator is the English Premier League.It was the deal that gave Sky its first shot in the arm and unfortunately other sporting events, whilst complimenting the Premier League coverage are not crowd pulllers on their own.

Setanta,a modestly successful Irish broadcaster saw an opportunity to encroach on Sky's domain when the powers that be took away the monopoly of Sky and Setanta initially won two out of the six packages.

They were though the second tear games,broadcst for the most part on Saturday teatime or Monday night leaving Sky with the showpiece events.

That was not enough to draw people to the service.Even US PGA golf,FA Cup coverage and the IPL failed to push subscriber numbers up to the required 1.9m.

When Sky won back one of the packages,it was the beginning of the end.Now 200 jobs and £450 million of investors money is at stake.

ESPN is running to take over the mantle,having already secured Setanta's premier league rights.

But surey for it to work it must form alliances with Sky?

An element of fraud but the whole system of higher education needs to be looked at

One of the themes of this blog has of course been the future of journalism education.

The proliferation of journalism degrees in the UK brokered by considerable demand for the product has coincided with the biggest downturn in the profession.

This will no doubt lead to many disappointed graduates not being able initially at least to pursue their chosen career.

What is the solution?

Well there are too parts to this problem.Universities have a responsibility to tailor their output to the job market.Not just in journalism but across the board.The drive to send as many people down the degree route will result in a generation of dashed hopes.Coinciding with the recession,the market is simply not there.

This has led to the criticism of universities of following the doctrine of bums on seats.The introduction of top up fees in 2006 has extended this philoophy.

As for journalism itself,the universities will say that they are simply responding to demand for courses.

Yesterday saw a controversial article appear in the Times Higher Educational supplement in which Tim Luckhurst, professor of journalism at the University of Kent said that

there was “an element of fraud in journalism education and Universities are conning students by accepting them on journalism courses when they have no realistic prospect of working in the profession.

There is a certain truth to this but that can be addressed by changing the content of courses more in line with the skills that are required.The emphasis on shorthand for example needs to be looked at and the career path of preparing a student for a trainee ship on a paper must also be examined.

These should be replaced by the cottage industry skills of blogging and freelancing as well as using social media for promotion.

Another possibility would be to combine journalism with another skill so that the aspiring journalist is no longer "jack of all trades master of none" but has a subject area with which to write.

Course leaders reading this will say that we are in a employment blip but there are structural changes taking place and universities need to adapt and tailor their output to them.

A Romanian teenager died after twittering in the bath.

According to the Croatian Times

Police said they believed Maria Barbu, 17, had tried to plug in her laptop with wet hands after the battery died during a long session on social networking site Twitter as she took a soak at her home in Brasov, central Romania.
She was found dead by her parents with the laptop lying next to her

Source-Huffington Post

Reporting from Iran

Like other journalists who work for foreign media organizations, I was banned early on from reporting on the protests against the official victory of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. First, the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance sent a fax prohibiting me from reporting on the streets. Then I got a call to return my already annulled press card in person. Next, I received an anonymous phone call from a person with a strangely friendly voice, telling me, "There are powerful forces out there that do not want you to continue your work."

Nahid Siamdoust tells Time the perils of reporting from Tehran at the present time and with many modern forms of communication shut down he had to resort to

regular phone calls and e-mail, then the only means of communication among the majority of Iranians, apart from word of mouth at rallies. I started to obtain information about events from family, friends and people on the streets and in shops and taxis.Re

A lesson on how not to do journalism by the Daily Mail

The Daily Mail's attempts at reigniting the Iraq controversy are frowned upon by John Rentoul writing at Independent minds this morning

You take a magazine interview that is three weeks old, the main points of which have been reported in a rival newspaper, and park the most odious, insinuating form of words as an introduction on top of it, thus:

Utterly unrepentant, a stranger to self-doubt and still insisting his conscience is clear - an unwittingly revealing interview with Tony Blair...

Yes, it is the Daily Mail again.

A Gambian journalist's story

My intention to remain in my home country, to use my pen to correct injustice, and to champion press freedom was aborted by security threats that forced me and my family into exile. I left behind my beloved country and editorial desk in the hands of perpetrators.

The words of Musa Saidykhan,a journalist in the Gambia writing at CPR over the weekend.

He muses on the death of Independent journalism in the country and after being appointed the editor-in-chief of The Independent, a biweekly paper known for being outspoken,the countries security personnel made his life as a journalist very difficult.

He was arrested and held for 22 days following an attempted coup in the country fleeing to Senegal before settling in the US

Tweetdeck is more than an aggregator says founder

Iain Dodsworth,the founder of Tweetdeck gives an interview to the folks at Paid Content and sees the device's

business model not just as a real-time tweet aggregator but of the wider web.

He is relying on its continued growth of users to

find the revenue streams that are small now but have potential to scale

but is not keen on advertising.

Personally I hate that, it’s awful. A lot of people have said ‘just put a big banner ad at the top, you’ve got a great big gap there…’ but that’s horrible for the users… We’d end up with a userbase of 10 people and you can’t monetise that.

Alan Mutter on why we will always need the professional journalist

Alan Mutter asks whether cottage industry journalism can do the job over at his blog.

He writes that

Although a number of do-it-yourself ventures have embraced modern technology to attempt to fill the void created by the retrenchment of the mainstream media, there is scant evidence to date that any have succeeded to the point that they will support the sustained efforts of professional journalists.

and worries that

the time and hard work involved in serious reporting seems to suggest even the most impressive grassroots projects will be condemned to relatively short life spans.

Stephen Glover on why the Murdoch paper's role in the Iraq wqr should be examined

Stephen Glover's media column in the Independent seems to get more and more controversial.

Today he says that any inquiry into the Iraq war should take a look at Rupert Murdoch's role pointing out that whilst much of the press was horrified at last week's announcement

The Times, however, thinks there should not be an inquiry at all. In a first leader last week the paper grumbled that there had already been two of them, and it doubted that a third could tell us anything we don’t already know.

adding that

There are many aspects of this affair that remain unexamined. One of them is the attitude of some newspapers, in particular the Murdoch-owned Times and Sun, in uncritically promoting the Government’s flawed case for war, and defending, or even omitting to report, its mistakes.

A responsibilty on You Tube over Iran

I picked up Jeff Jarvis' tweet on the subject of Iran

YouTube knows which videos come from Iran. It should be curating & featuring those videos. It has a news responsibility in the ecosystem

which he further explains in another tweet

@ascheurer Responsibility meaning what YouTube can - by its position and knowledge - add.

But does that responsibility extend to getting the message correct.That in itself is an interesting concept.Does Twitter have that same responsibilty?

Technology is neutral remember

There is an interesting piece in this morning's FT by John Gapper who looks at the role of technology in Iran following this week's events.

He writes that

The events in Iran tempt us to view digital technology as a purely liberating force. Rupert Murdoch upset China in 1993 when he asserted that “advances in the technology of telecommunications have proved an unambiguous threat to totalitarian regimes everywhere”, but that view is now accepted wisdom.

But a warning it can have the opposite effect

technology is neutral: the power it hands to citizens who twitter about their political activities could in future be used against them by governments. As they broadcast, they identify themselves as dissidents and leave digital fingerprints on networks.

Toby Young apologises for doubting the power of twitter

I would like to take this opportunity to apologise unreservedly to Twitter. Like many of my colleagues, I unfairly characterised it as a vacuous expression of our narcissistic age. In fact, it turns out to be the most effective tool for advancing freedom and democracy since the invention of the internet. In Iran, the anti-government protesters have been circumventing President Ahmadinejad’s efforts to stop them organising by communicating via Twitter. Not only that, but they have been using the social networking site to file pictures and news reports, documenting the government’s brutal attempt to suppress the protest. If President Ahmadinejad falls and Mousavi is installed in his place, this will surely come to be known as the Twitter Revolution.

writes Toby Young in the Spectator this week

The political parties use of social media

PR week has an interesting piece on the online strategies of the three main political parties.

At one end of the spectrum stands US president Barack Obama, a gleaming example of how savvy use of soc­ial media can lead to political victory.

Our three lie somewhere to the middle the article continues with the Tories

having attracted the most plaudits for social media savvy so far

Their verdicts:

1.Labour-

Focused on using social media to formulate policy, run campaigns and raise funds. Making up ground. Thinking reflects the party’s technocratic culture, but it has made a serious effort to understand and deploy social media more effectively. The dissemination of tools and widgets is a good example of this. But it lacks solid strategy to attract undecided voters.

2.Tories-

Splashy efforts have sparked coverage in the mainstream media and position the Tories as the party that ‘gets’ social media.An obvious flair for social media, coupled with evident resources, has resulted in an impressive offering. Doubts about overall strategy are compensated for by a very vibrant blogosphere that, in turn, influences the mainstream media disproportionately.

3.The Lib Dems-

Mainly oriented towards giving tools to existing supporters to spread the word.Outside contenders. Good tools for local activists are let down by terrible design and weak integration. Bloggers fare better, especially at a local level, and overall understanding of social media is impressive

Memo to community sites-put out the welcome mat

Food for thought for those of us looking to expand into community and local sites.

Dan Mason writes that

We all know how social media has changed the goalposts. We all know that good journalism harnesses the power of conversation.
So, what’s the first thing you’d expect to see when you arrive on the doorstep of a local website? A Welcome mat. Right? Come on in. Pleased to meet you. Join the conversation. We’re human.

and takes a look at some sites and how welcoming or not they are?

Ht-Andy Dickinson

Libraries take to twitter

One of the services that are finding twitter useful is that of libraries.

Bookseller.com report that

An estimated 40-plus individual libraries and library services, including Manchester, Devon, Bradford, Edinburgh, Westminster and Leeds are now making use of the site. Many individual librarians are also choosing to register.

and so much so that the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals (CILIP) will be hold a training course, "Twitter for Librarians", this September.

The You Tube of travel writing

Simon Nixon, founder of Moneysupermarket and Travelsupermarket are launched a new site Simonseeks where according to the blurb.

a community of travellers, journalists and celebrities can share their advice and their enthusiasms - giving you the inside story on their favourite destinations – and get paid for it.

Describing itself as the You Tube of travel,it rates articles based on reviews ensuring that the best get to the top of its search engine

An alternative view to Iran on Twitter

Unlike several other technology-friendly journalists, I've found it more noise than signal in understanding the Iranian upheaval. I'm not saying that there is no signal to be found; I'm just saying that my cognitive colander isn't big enough to strain out Iran information I can rely on.

writes Jack Shafer at Slate adding that

If we should be able to criticize Ayatollah Ali Khamenei without fear of being shot, so, too, should we be able to scrutinize Twitter.

Iran and the social media

Some amazing figures from Mashable on the effect of Iran on the blogosphere.

Yesterday saw a peak of 221,744 Iran tweets in a hour and the total figure is now approaching a million or 1 per cent of total traffic.

There are 19m blog posts discussing Iran,with over 2m in the last 24 hours and in the same period over 3,000 You Tube videos.

Digital Britain on local and community

I was quite interested in what the Digital Britain report had to say about community and local media.

Digging into the report there are some exciting points to a hyperlocal future

61. Local websites of all shapes and sizes are providing community news and information to hundreds of thousands of people. Most of these sites are volunteer run, using free publishing platforms like www.wordpress.com with no hard costs. They show that grass roots media can provide an accurate, reliable,popular sources of news and information without regulation or subsidy. Their news values and thresholds are new, reflecting grass roots interests and priorities.

62. Community sites with no costs can serve very small, human news geographies of a single ward or a few streets. Community websites with no old media legacy are able to discriminate between types of media production to suit local needs. The written word and photos predominate, sound and video are in a minority. In some communities with established local sites the readership within the community appears comparable to that of traditional news media.

63. Digital Britain is at the beginning of a new and possibly disruptive wave of local news, generated by communities for communities using free online media. Over the medium term this has the potential to be good for local pluralism and expression as commercial funding for traditional media diminishes. 4IP and Screen West Midlands are making a major investment in Talk About Local to create hundreds of new community websites by giving community activists the simple skills. Digital Mentors are taking a similar approach on a smaller scale.

Ht-William Perrin

A twitter or an API revolution asks Jeff Jarvis?

Jeff Jarvis reflects on the so called Twitter revolution taking place in reporting from Iran.

He though prefers to call it the API revolution.

For it’s Twitter’s architecture - which enables anyone to create applications that call and feed into it - that makes it all but impervious from blocking by tyrants’ censors. Twitter is not a site or a blog at an address. You don’t have to go to it. It can come to you (as newspapers should). Twitter is an outpost in the cloud and there can be unlimited points of access from every application and site using its API, so the crowd can always stay ahead of the people formerly known as the authorities.

Who should control international news?

Is there too much international news to consume?

Well,Charlie Beckett reports from the BBC festival of international news,where he says

it took veteran BBC hack Frank Gardner to suggest that perhaps there is a limit to the number of people who want to devour detailed reports and analysis from far flung corners of the globe.

The truth he adds

is that we have more international news than ever before. Thanks to new media we can also make it and access it by ourselves.

But surrounded by old media executives he felt that there was a reluctance to accept that foriegn news could be entrusted to the new media arguing that

the evidence from Iran at the moment is that freedom of expression is, indeed, a fragile bloom. But the greatest protection for global connectivity and trans-national communication is to enpower the people to participate.

When someone publishes they should expect others to take an interest in their identity

I blogged earlier today about the case of Night Jack and the conflict between public interest and code of conduct.

The Times has come in for a lot of criticism over yesterday's ruling and over at Comment Central Danny Finkelstein puts his case.

Writing a blog is a form of publishing. There is no distinction, really, between a blog and, say, a published volume of diaries.
And when someone publishes then they might reasonably expect that others might take an interest in their identity. This is especially so when they allow their work to go forward for a major prize.
When a public servant decides to reveal the confidences of their colleagues and details of their work, especially on police cases, then their identity becomes a legitimate matter of interest. And other journalists might reasonably investigate the matter.

Digital Britain-a round up

I was out most of yesterday so missed the assault on the blogosphere about the Carter report on digital Britain.

Looking at the headlines this morning it seems that the main issue is over the levy on phone lines to pay for broadband.Yes you would expect it on the front of the Express but not also as the main headline for the Times.

I sincerely hope that this is not the main message that is remembered from yesterday but I fear that it will be.Let's just put in into context,£6 a year,that's about 12p a week.

There are some good reflections in the papers this morning.In the Telegraph Neil Midgley thinks that Lord Carter has missed an opportunity

The unpalatable prospect is that, as the featherbedded BBC continues to steamroller its private-sector competitors, those shiny new fibre-optic cables might end up with precious little commercially produced British content to carry.

Midgley goes onto say that despite moves in the right direction

Lord Carter's report will leave ITV locked in regulatory squabbles, when it should be focusing on making great programmes. The result could be that ITV ends up bankrupt

and with Channel 4

A truly visionary step would be to remove Channel 4 from the advertising market, and give it a big slice of the licence fee instead. That would have made a real difference in balancing the public and private sectors, and forced the BBC to rethink its apparently infinite ambitions.

The FT believes It is time to chop up Auntie.

Lord Carter’s proposal cuts to the heart of the problem: the BBC cannot be allowed to become a monopoly provider of public content and this liberalisation, if extended, would allow plurality of provision without the current reliance on vulnerable cross-subsidies.

The Times says the report

shows an extraordinary willingness to extend government intervention into almost every nook of Britain’s broadcasting and communications industry.

adding that the meddling as it puts it

not only discounts the power of creativity and innovation in the market, it destroys it.

more sketch than blueprint says the Guardian

At 238 pages and 22 "action points", innocent readers may have been reminded of Pascal's rueful admission that with a bit more time he would have written a shorter letter; because this was a publication long on consultation and in many places frustratingly short on conclusion.

and adds that

It deals with structure and delivery of content, rather than the content itself. It worries about provision of local news, but (with the exception of a potentially interesting proposal on a role for new local news consortiums) decides that the main answer lies with regional TV news

For the Independent

For most of us, it is the micro-geography of the digital revolution that has most impact on our lives. The television set is less and less the focal point of most modern homes. In many cases, it is now a flat screen connected to a bewildering array of boxes, consoles and computers, while other flat screens in other parts of the room, or in other rooms, are also used for watching television or YouTube or for switching between reading and watching clips of news on the internet.

Public Interest v Public Interest

With all the attention focused on Digital Britain,I hope that the news about the "outing of Night Jack" is not buried.

Night Jack,you may remember was the winner of the Orwell prize for blogging announced earlier this year.

Nick Jack was a member of the police force who wrote about the every day trials and tribulations of being in the force and wished,not unsurprisingly to stay in the shade.

That was until yesterday when the high court threw out his attempt to stop the Times from revealing his identity.

In what will be a landmark ruling,judges said that blogging was “essentially a public rather than a private activity” thus immediately establishing that pseudonymous web columnists writing the inside stories of their professional lives that they had no legal protection against their identities being revealed.

The Times' rational was that the officer was or could have been revealing confidential information that may be traced back to cases.

For those students of media law,those cases could be dealing with children or others who the law protects.

As Paul Bradshaw notes there is a public interest conflict here

the ruling has enormous implications for whistleblowers and people blogging ‘on the ground’. That’s someone else’s ‘public interest’.

and adds that

With the disappearance of Nightjack (his blog has already been deleted*), we lose one more ‘voice on the ground’.

More on the role of the BBC post Carter report

I wrote yesterday that one of the question's that will arise following the digital Britain report in the future role of the BBC which unfortunately will always distort the market.

Evening Standard columnist Paul Waugh agrees and as a starting point would like to do away with the BBC news web pages.

there is a case that the BBC licence fee should not be spent on websites or any internet activity at all, that it should be restricted to broadcasting alone. There is a huge grey area about whether you need a TV licence to receive broadcasts via the internet rather than a TV set. But although the Beeb wants to reach as large an audience as possible, its main source of funding is a "TV licence" not an "computer licence".

A problem for You Tube

A rather damming take on You Tube from Benjamin Wayne over at advertising age who reflects upon its future prospects.

I think that the real problem is that YouTube is taking all the stuff that's good that they can monetize, and they've already monetized that stuff. If you look at the way in which content is growing on YouTube, the user-generated novelty content and the copyright-infringement stuff is growing much faster than the content they can monetize. So whereas, with most businesses you'd say, well, over time it gets better, I think YouTube has a business where over time it continues to get worse, because the proportion of content you can't monetize continues to outstrip the portion of content that you can.

ht-Adrian Monck

Peston on our media obsession

on the day that Carter's conclusions are published, one question is why the digital industries are more deserving of ministerial attention than - say - pharmaceuticals, or defence, or motor manufacturing, or food and drink, or civil aviation.

Writes Robert Peston this morning,noting that this may well be the first time that the country has seen a white paper on digital Britain.

But is it for the best as he adds

If you work in those industries, you may think "thank goodness ministers aren't meddling with us".

Why Laura Ling and Euna Lee are the victims of the rush for headlines

There is a good piece in the New York Times reflecting on the jailing of the two Current TV reporters in North Korea.

The blame for the incident is laid firmly at the door of the current state of the media which in an attempt to get that news story first is

increasingly sending journalists to the world’s hot spots, putting a spotlight on news stories in new ways. It is, experts say, another consequence of the fragmented media landscape and the declines in international news coverage by traditional outlets.

adding that

reporters lack the backing of large established news organizations that might have the experience and leverage to deal with foreign governments.

A distorting Beeb but is that the price we have to pay?

As we all wait in readiness for the Carter report,Philip Stephen thinks that there is a fairly simple answer to the problems in the media

British broadcasting is sliding towards monochromic mediocrity. Counterintuitive as it may sound, the best way to rescue it would be to cut funding for the BBC and share out the proceeds of the licence fee.

Easier said than done but the point is that the BBC does distort the market.

Whether that distortion is the price we pay for a quality media package is the debate that needs to be had

Advertising downturn will accelerate the move to digital

A rather downbeat report on advertising from Pcw is reported in the FT this morning.

the UK’s television advertising market will resume growth after 2010 but may not surpass 2008 levels until after 2013.

But the report adds the current slump may well accelerate the move to the digital advertising platform but

that will not be enough to offset the decline in traditional businesses.

although

the move to digital advertising, with greater scope for targeting specific groups, allowed advertisers to be more efficient in their spending.

I have control of my online name-I think

Like ,apparently millions of others,I rushed and grabbed my facebook custom user name thus now being the proud owner of NigelBarlow on facebook.

Quite what I have acquired is uncertain.I stopped using facebook after a brief dalliance with it last year deciding that Twitter would give me the cyberspace exposure that I required.

Yes I suppose I have stopped others from hijacking my name but I can't help feeling that this was a massive publicity stunt by facebook.

If anyone can convince me otherwise I would be glad to hear their thoughts

Iran A nation of bloggers

IRAN: A Nation Of Bloggers from ayrakus on Vimeo.

Ht-Andrew Sullivan

Sambrook on Iran and social media-you need an understanding of its power to interpret the facts

Richard Sambrook has been doing a grand job over the weekend monitoring cyberspace whilst watching the events in Tehran.

These are his initial thoughts on how twitter dealt with the weekend's events

If you, as an average news consumer, relied on Twitter you might believe all sorts of things had happened, which simply hadn't, running a high risk of being seriously misled about events on the ground. You might at best, have simply been confused. You probably wouldn't have thought Ahmadinejad enjoys much popular support at all.

but he continues

But if you had a reasonable understanding of social media, how to set up and assess feeds, how to compare and contrast information, if you had a reasonable understanding of news flows, a developed sense of scepticism, and an above average understanding of the political situation in Iran, you would have emerged much better informed than the lay viewer relying on TV or Radio news.

Glover's evidence against the Guardian

Stephen Glover's campaign against the Guardian continues this morning in the Indy.

Having used his Mail column last week to attack the paper over its editorial telling the Prime Minister that it was time to step down,this morning he lays out eight arguments for the prosecution.

One firm bit of evidence seems to be Polly Toynbee who according to Glover

During the six days of the attempted coup (from The Guardian's leader to Brown's addressing Labour troops on the evening of 8 June), The Guardian's Polly Toynbee was probably given more airtime on BBC radio and television than all other journalists combined. This indulgence of her is significant because Toynbee, a former Brown groupie turned bitter renegade, is a far more effective and fearless critic of the Prime Minister than any single Labour MP or ex-Cabinet minister.

Iran is jamming the Beeb's signals

Peter Horrocks writes over at the BBC editors blog

BBC audiences in Iran, the Middle East and Europe may be experiencing disruption to their BBC TV or radio services today. That is because there is heavy electronic jamming of one of the satellites the BBC uses in the Middle East to broadcast the BBC Persian TV signal to Iran. Satellite technicians have traced that interference and it is coming from Iran. There has been intermittent interference from Iran since Friday but this is the heaviest yet.

Journos in a hurry over twitter

Journalists write too much rubbish about Twitter,that is according to former BBC journalist Dougald Hind.

He writes on

how bad the reporting of Twitter has been - significantly worse, I would say, than the equivalent coverage of Facebook, when it made a similar leap into public consciousness a couple of years earlier.

The reasons?

Well firstly let's all blame Stephen Fry

The trouble is that trying to understand social media by looking at the behaviour of celebrity users makes about as much sense as trying to understand society by looking at the behaviour of celebrities.

Interestingly though it is journalists anxiety to jump on the twitter bandwagon that is the real problem

getting the best out of Twitter generally requires the use of an external client such as Tweetdeck, rather than visiting Twitter.com directly. Most non-specialist journalists, like most internet users, are only beginning to adjust to the possibility that the web isn't about going to sites, but about information coming to you.

ht-Martin Stabe

License fee may end up funding ITV regional news

There is an interesting report in this morning's Telegraph which suggests that a proportion of the license fee could be used to fund ITV's regional news.

Ahead of the Carter report it is claimed that Lord Carter will

recommend that some of the BBC's annual revenue should be used to fund regional news services on ITV and broadband for all.

The money will come from the so called digital surplus

the £800 million built into the present six-year licence fee settlement, which began in 2007, to help older and disabled people complete the switch to digital television by supplying them with set top boxes. This is scheduled to be completed by 2012.

The surplus is reckoned to be around £250m

120 million users at Myspace

It was interesting to read this article in Silicon Valley insider which looks at the state of Myspace

Its new new CEO Owen Van Natta and digital head Jon Miller

are beginning to realize they have taken on a much bigger challenge than they initially thought, sources close to both executives tell us.

,the biggets seemingly that

MySpace made a lot of noise in public about its 120 milllion or so unique visitors, but the new team on the scene has discovered that "the true [user] engagement numbers are horrendous."

Ht-Adrian Monck

In memorium-the Tv antenna

With America just hours away from having digital only telly,Elizabeth Gettelman paints a memorial for her rabbit ears.

Hopefully all those government-subsidized converter boxes will keep millions of old-fashioned sets out of electronic wasteland, but what of the beloved antennae? Ever thought of designing a use out of the elegant, retractable numbers? Maybe we could all donate them to music schools to be repurposed as batons. Would they work on drums? As pointers for teachers? Tomato cages?

Mark Glaser's ten steps for saving newspapers

The latest suggestions for saving newspapers comes from Mark Glazer who has recently spent nine days in hospital and had time for some thinking.(Thankfully Mark is on the mend)

1. Do custom small print runs targeted to neighborhoods and interests. Not daily.

2. Support local writers, reporters and bloggers; help market them, sell their ads; decentralize the operation.

3. Replace circulation, printing, print production staff with tech, SEO, community managers.

4. Find out what the community wants in real face-to-face meetings, not focus groups. Then do what they want.

5. Use pro-am methods. Include community-contributed content edited and vetted by pros.

6. Smart multimedia. Don't do it just to do it. Use the right medium to tell the right story.

7. Promiscuous revenues. From ads, niche paid content, donations, non-profit grants to directory listings.

8. Produce mapping and database projects. Employ or train hacker-journalists.

9. Meet regularly with local businesses to gauge their needs. Create online directories of local businesses.

10. Create a bottom-up organization where innovation is encouraged and rewarded at the edges. Use good ideas from anyone.

Some good points of which many we have heard before.

Give is television internet access

With Channel 4's decision earlier in the week to put all of its UK output on its on demand service for free,the lines between your Pc and your television are blurring.

It is nor surprising that this survey from Entertainment Media Research concludes that a significant proportion of consumers want to have web access on their televisions

Digital Spy reports that

According to a survey of 1,512 people aged between 15 to 54 conducted by the firm, 75% of respondents indicated a desire to view internet content on their television screens.

Paper replaces its journalists for a day

Maybe this will catch on.

The New Yorker reports how the Israeli paper Ha’aretz decided to ditch all its journalists for one day and replace them with literati.

The results were interesting.This was the business update written by a cookery writer

Everything’s okay. Everything’s like usual. Yesterday trading ended. Everything’s okay. The economists went to their homes, the laundry is drying on the lines, dinners are waiting in place… Dow Jones traded steadily and closed with 8,761 points, Nasdaq added 0.9% to a level of 1,860 points…. The guy from the shakshuka [an Israeli egg-and-tomato dish] shop raised his prices again….

George Dearsley and his trip to Falsie towers

George Dearsley reminisces in a great post

He was

drawn to journalism as a schoolboy by reading about writers like James Cameron.

so was prepared as he was assigned to go undercover in a transvestite hotel in Oldham.

The story continues

I was on my way to the Victorian terrace house, which was soon to be dubbed Falsie Towers. Rupert, a Tina Turner look-alike, greeted me at the front door and showed me to my room. He advised me on what dress to wear for dinner, applied my make up, then disappeared to prepare the meal.

Read though the full post

The blogging parodox

I do like this Venn diagram



via Andrew Sullivan

A worrying time but take heart

Whilst waiting for my journalism degree results,reading this in the Guardian is rather worrying this morning.

Up to 40,000 of this year's graduates will still be struggling to find work in six months' time, according to figures compiled for the Guardian that reveal the scale of the recession's impact on the class of 2009.
The number of new graduates out of work will double compared with last year if unemployment trends follow those of the last recession, careers experts predict.

But whatever happens and I have some things in the pipeline,I take heart from Seth Godwin who gives some tips for idle hands

* Spend twenty hours a week running a project for a non-profit.
* Teach yourself Java, HTML, Flash, PHP and SQL. Not a little, but mastery.
* Volunteer to coach or assistant coach a kids sports team.
* Start, run and grow an online community.
* Give a speech a week to local organizations.
* Write a regular newsletter or blog about an industry you care about.
* Learn a foreign language fluently.
* Write three detailed business plans for projects in the industry you care about.
* Self-publish a book.
* Run a marathon.

I am not sure about the last one but the others are all good advice and am doing some already.

Too much information and too much technology

The Internet may one day prove to be the most profoundly transformative creation of humankind. There is also the possibility it can turn into a garbage dump of the human mind where the glittering is buried beneath the refuse.

writes James Moore adding that

The overwhelming flow, redirection, and accumulation of information have the potential to render almost everything meaningless. New developments, which are designed to simplify, have often tended to complicate.

Journalists get much criticism though as he continues

Suddenly, reporters and anchors are asking people to follow them on Twitter and Facebook and their news programs have pages where viewers can post comments on the latest stories.

and technology may be to blame

My sense is that for technology to succeed it must be simple and work in the background to perform a task. I want my computer to be an appliance like a toaster. Instead, the net, new applications, smart phones, (dumb users), downloads, uploads, updates, and browsers that are evolving faster than machines in a Terminator flick are complicating what were once mundane, daily tasks.

Before we get obsessed with statistics on twitter

HubSpot previews its state of the twittersphere report here.

These are their findings as they conclude that many of the accounts on Twitter aren't actually using it all that much.

* 79.79% failed to provide a homepage URL
* 75.86% of users have not entered a bio in their profile
* 68.68% have not specified a location
* 55.50% are not following anyone
* 54.88% have never tweeted
* 52.71% have no followers

Before we all start becoming profits of gloom and doom though,Dan Thorton reminds us of the famous 80/20 rule

Vilfredo Pareto, who noticed that 20% of the people of Italy owneed 80% of the land back in 1909, which was then generalised by Joseph M Juran in 1941 into the Pareto Principle, as the common rule of thumb that 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes, i.e. a Power Law with a The Long Tail.

Don't teach social media skills in school

The majority of people don't want Facebook and Twitter to be taught in schools according to a survey by YouGov on behalf of Open Text.

via Computer Weekly which reports that

Craig Hepburn, director of social strategy at Open Text, said, "While people are happy to use social media applications in the working environment, they are unhappy about them being taught in school. However, these tools could well be the future of business, you only have to look at the growth of business social media site LinkedIn - which now has over 40 million members - to see the importance of these applications and the fact they will play a big part in future generations' personal and professional lives."

Ht-Joanna Geary

NUJ proposals-back to the drawing board.

Have juts been reading the proposals that the NUJ have sent to the new culture secretary.

In principle they are good and a genuine attempt to solve a problem, but then you start to think about some of the non competitive proposals.

It seems that the NUJ want to support certain organisations and readers but not support others.

How can you tell the public which newspapers to read,which is what would happen if you gave a tax break to people who read qualities.For that matter,what is a quality paper and who is going to define?

Furthermore,yes it is good that they want to support organisations that supply a community,but the same questions apply.What is community and don't all outlets support community in some shape or form?

Whatever good intentions they have,you cannot control a market in this idealist way.I doubt that even a left wing government would go along with most of the suggestions.

Burying bad news days were not invented by Labour

If you thooght that flooding the media with press releases to cover up bad news was a modern phenonoma then forget it.

Jack Shafer writes at Slate magazine how

Less than a week before President Richard Nixon resigned, White House communications chief Ken W. Clawson was working the phones with a daring plan to save his boss. He hoped that flooding reporters with strategic stockpiles of news from every Cabinet department just might be enough drive the impeachment news off the front page.

A novel idea in charging more for online

The Nieman Lab carries a report of a business model that is rather unusual in the world of paywalls.

The Newport Daily news is

charging more to read the paper online than in print. Quite a bit more, in fact. The idea: Charge enough for the online content that the paper-and-ink product looks a lot more attractive. Don’t undercut your primary product with a free alternative that doesn’t make you money. And provide an online edition for those customers who have a compelling reason to pay for content.

A very similar strategy to that which Simon Kelner was keen to promote when he came to speak at Uclan earlier this year in fact.Will it work?

We will wait and see,there is a 30 day trial at the moment for a free version,the crunch will come when readers see the paywall

Ht-Martin Stabe

How the net changes social and economic practices,

Obvious you would think?

Adrian Monck flags up a good piece by Tom Steinberg writing at MySociety who questions the government's digital strategy.

While it has focused on getting people online,protecting people against its bad points and promoting itself though websites etc they have missed some crucial points

The main one being its economic impact.

He writes that the medium

changes social and economic practices,technology effectively made it possible and much easier to be a big, highly productive company, to gather expertise and capital together and to target markets for maximum yields.

adding that services such as google

are reducing traditional institutions ability to charge for information, seize big consumer surpluses, limit speech or fix marriages. It has, in other words, become harder to be a big business, newspaper, repressive institution or religion.

He ends by suggesting five ways in which the government can contribute in a positive way.You can read all five on the post but I will repeat these

1.Accept that any state institution that says “we control all the information about X” is going to look increasingly strange and frustrating to a public that’s used to be able to do whatever they want with information about themselves

2.Seize the opportunity to bring people together.

Why advertisng is a failure

Jeff Jarvis writes some reflective words on the role of advertising into today's internet business model.

Starting with the premise that advertising is in fact a failure

Ideally, a company offers a great product or service that its customers love, talk about, and sell to each other. It's when that fails that you need to advertise.

the internet means that

Selling scarcity in advertising - limited time, space, or eyeballs - is outmoded now that we have a medium that creates an abundance of connections with people; that enables relationships instead of mere messaging.

The web's evolution

The transformation from 1.0 to 3.0 explained by Amit Argarwal





Ht=Stephen's Lighthouse

The American people are not getting access to international news

When U.S. President Barack Obama spoke in Cairo this week, he delivered a message of openness. "There must be a sustained effort to listen to each other; to learn from each other; to respect one another; and to seek common ground," he told a global audience of billions. But if he convinced his listeners abroad, a lingering irony will catch up with the president upon his return home: Americans themselves are literally disconnected from foreign news; they are not "listening" at all. Foreign news stations are not broadcast in the United States, meaning that for all but the extended-cable watcher, seeing things from another point of view is, well, impossible.

writes Cyril Blet at Foreign Policy (ht-Richard Sambrook)

Americans have displayed for a long time an insulated stance to foreign news.Given that TV news is still the way that most of the population consume news it is worrying that foreign news channels get such little exposure on the cable networks.

The problem is partly due to the cable companies policy.

cable companies claim that international stations simply do not attract large enough audiences for advertisers to be enticed. Offering foreign news in any but the most expanded cable packages would be a profit-losing venture. Instead, cable companies have invited foreign channels to be featured in a pay-extra international news tier, but the international stations balk at that plan, insisting that they deserve to be wrapped in the same package as CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC.

Nevertheless the irony of Barack Obama's reaching out is quite telling

The day the media died

Couldn't help but laugh at this as someone changes the words to Don McLean's "American Pie", to reflect on the state of the media.

Enjoy



Ht-Kristine Lowe

The perils of being a crime reporter in Russia

After the most recent attack on Sergei Kanev — attempted strangulation with a wire, in his apartment’s stairwell here — his editor visited him and delicately suggested that he take a six-month sabbatical from crime reporting, in America.

writes the New York Times

Under Putin as the report continues

the ranks of people willing to hold the powerful to account are thinning. Their work is increasingly marginalized, so that most Russians never learn what corruption or human rights abuses they have uncovered. And while most do not blame the government for the attacks themselves, they say failure to investigate and punish the crimes has set a permissive, and dangerous, tone.

My recollections of being online for the first time

Steve Yelvington's post about "When, how, and why did you "go online?" got me thinking back to my first ventures into cyberspace.

The year I think was 1994-95 and I invested in my first home computer,a Time machine made in Blackburn,I do believe.

I remember picking it up and carefully following the instructions on setting up before taking the plunge and setting up an account.

I think that it was turnpike that I went with,I may be wrong it could have been tiscali but I do remember my first explorations into cyberspace,excitedly finding that I could read papers online.(I am pretty sure that the New York Times was one of the first that I found,)

Then setting up an email account and sending my first email,pressing the send button and wondering whether in that short time it had actually gone.

How times change,in more ways than one.I am sure that the net's potential at that time was not realised.We certainly didn't have it at work at that time.

Steve's experiences were quite different he

"went online" years before there was a Web. In the mid-1980s, I got a computer and a 300-bps modem. I discovered a whole world of online conversation. Before long, I was hooked, and within a year I was running my own Citadel bulletin board.

But I do remember what Steve next refers to

Then came a wave of news companies rushing to get online, without stopping to think about how people use the medium. We wound up with shovelware "online editions" -- boring, predictable replicants of printed newspapers that failed to take advantage of any of the Internet's capabilities.
Most newspapers imagine themselves to have moved beyond that stage. I'm not so sure. "Allowing" comments on stories is hardly innovation.

Marr savaged by the prince of spin

Watching Andrew Marr come up against the prince of Darkness this morning was a lesson to all political journalists when conducting a serious interview.

Marr was,for want of a better expression taken to the cleaners by the man who invented spin.

He missed several opportunities to score hits instead resorting to a diatribe of rumour and innuendo which Mandleson was easily able to brush aside.

To be sat opposite the interviewee being told,quite bluntly "right next question" must have been an excruciatingly awful experience for Marr who has lost his political bite since being propelled out of his political role at the Beeb and becoming 'mainstream.'

Twenty five years is a long time

Great post from Richard Sambrook who remembers the equipment that was needed to broadcast from China in the Mid 1980's




and what would be needed now

The Twitter revolution

If you make the front cover of Time magazine then you have succeeded on the World stage so the guys from twitter must be very happy this weekend.

Under the headline How Twitter will change the way we live,it turns out that it

has unsuspected depth. In part this is because hearing about what your friends had for breakfast is actually more interesting than it sounds.We don't think it at all moronic to start a phone call with a friend by asking how her day is going. Twitter gives you the same information without your even having to ask.

But its power is even greater than this

Put its three elements together — social networks, live searching and link-sharing — and you have a cocktail that poses what may amount to the most interesting alternative to Google's near monopoly in searching.

Print will survive but it need nurturing

San Franciscan literary figure Dave Eggers is far from convinced that print is dead and has written a general email to that effect (via Gawker)

because I work with kids in San Francisco, I see every day that their enthusiasm for the printed word is no different from that of kids from any other era. Reports that no one reads anymore, especially young people, are greatly overstated and almost always factually lacking.

Taking this on board he is soon to launch the www.mcsweeneys.net which will

demonstrate that if you rework the newspaper model a bit, it can not only survive, but actually thrive.

adding that

We're convinced that the best way to ensure the future of journalism is to create a workable model where journalists are paid well for reporting here and abroad. And that starts with paying for the physical paper. And paying for the physical paper begins with creating a physical object that doesn't retreat, but instead luxuriates in the beauties of print.

It is an interesting read as he continues

As long as newspapers offer less each day— less news, less great writing, less graphic innovation, fewer photos— then they're giving readers few reasons to pay for the paper itself.

Joel Simon meets Sami al-Haj

Joel Simon,the executive Director of the Committee to Protect Journalists reports on Norway's Global Forum on Freedom of Expression and his meeting with Sami al-Haj, the Al-Jazeera correspondent who was held for six years at Guantanamo Bay.

I spoke to al-Haj after his presentation and told him that it was a privilege to finally meet him. I said that I admired the fact that he seemed to hold no rancor after losing so many years of his life. He thanked CPJ for the letters we wrote on his behalf, which he said his lawyer delivered to him in prison.

The Orange Jelly gets it

The Telegraph is featuring the high speed photography of Alan Sailor featuring the moment a pellet fired from an air rifle hits an object.

There are seventeen pictures in all.This is my favourite as an orange jelly gets it



Ht-Technical Fault

In that kind of environment, it's pretty ludicrous to think that newspapers could survive.

As Paul Starr has explained, newspapers only flourished during the past few centuries because they functioned as intermediaries between readers and advertisers — fundamentally, they survived because they were institutions that stood between people.

MotherJones' Kevin Drum discusses Craigslist by quoting from Barron YoungSmith who continues

Now, along comes Craigslist, which sees cutting these sorts of intermediaries out of the equation as a form of public service. It considers that mission so important that it is willing to forego huge potential profits and compete against classified pages everywhere while charging virtually nothing for what it offers. In that kind of environment, it's pretty ludicrous to think that newspapers could survive.

12 good points on web economics

A must read post from Digital journalism lecturer Paul Bradshaw who looks at the consequences of how the web has changed news economics.

There are 12 really good points but perhaps this is the most poignant one

Sometimes people need reminding of the basic laws of supply and demand. From a limited availability of journalism to more than you can ever read, any attempt to ’sell content’ must come up against this basic problem.

Martin Belam on the vagaries of our media election rules

Martin Belam writes about the apparent discrepancy in our media electoral laws that led to the BBC yesterday having to turn off its comments on political blogs whereas the Sun continued to be

positively boasting that their 'radio station' was the only place that would be talking politics on election day

As Martin says

fair play to The Sun. They spotted a USP opportunity and seized it.

but as he adds

what does this tell us about our regulatory framework in a converged digital media landscape?

Can it be right that 'a newspaper with a website broadcasting radio' can behave differently on election day from 'a radio station with a website publishing text'? And come the next General Election, will we be talking about how 'It's SunTalk Wot Won It'?

Glug Twitter Glug

The LA Times publishes details of my ideal job,$10,000 a month to twitter about wine for six months.

In a sign of the cyber-crazed times, the Sonoma County winery is on a nationwide hunt for someone to fill its “Really Goode Job.” The successful applicant will earn $10,000 a month to tweet and use other social media skills to generate buzz about its reds and whites.

We are all online journalists now

I was asked to talk about ‘online journalism’, but in a sense, I think there is now no other kind of journalism. By that I mean that anyone practicising journalism anywhere in the world is, in some sense, now conditioned by digital technologies and the Internet. We are all infected, as it were, by conditions or concepts such as citizen journalism, satellite transmission, search, infotainment and hypertextuality

.

This is the opening of Charlie Beckett's speech to the 50th anniversary conference of the Korean Society for Journalism and Communication Studies

Beckett,the Director of Polis who continues to say that

We are a moment of profound change for the news media that raises transformational questions about the ethics, politics and economics of journalism. And journalism itself is a key to answering broader societal and global questions.

I interviewed Charlie a few months ago for a UCLAN project.He is tremendously enthusiastic about journalism and although recognising that the profession faces immense problems he is optimistic of its future.

In this speech he reflects on how the new media can bring hope to areas of the world that were denied access to mainstream information.

Kibere,the world’s biggest slum,on the outskirts of Nairobi where people

have now found a voice through SMS. Through cheap mobile phone texting, its 500,000 people can begin a conversation with the volunteer journalists of a new community radio station Pamoja FM.

The online revolution has created many negatives in journalism,this is happily one of the positives

Who will meet the challenge?

Ray Marcano writes his thoughts about what he calls the newspaper renaissance

We should find out, in the next 12 to 18 months, who accepts the challenge of change, and what steps they take to meet the challenge.

he writes

Amongst his ideas?

1.The Kindle comes to the fore

They'll enter into partnerships with cell or cable companies for information distribution.

2.Companies that own more than one information outlet (newspapers, radio, television, cable) in the same city will start rapidly combining them into one operation that can provide news at a lower cost

3.some newspapers will stop sending news to Google, reasoning that the mostly out of market referral traffic isn't valuale to their local advertisers.