Martha Lane Fox's blogging experience

Paul Bradshaw's MA Social media course is starting up and they are blogging regularly

John Hickman has been doing some investigation of the Government's digital inclusion champion Martha Lane Fox and

happened to take a look at her website today, and was a little surprised by what I found. It’s a slick looking site, but it seems to lack some understanding of the digital world which Lane Fox is selling to the public. I find this a little worrying. There are two issues which I’d like to pick up on: technical problems and voice.

The technical being that the site lacks an RSS feed,surely an appropriate tool for people keeping track of postings but also that it is difficult to decide who is actually speaking on the blog

As he concludes

You too can be a champion of the digital world, all you need is the budget to buy a web designer’s time. And an executive assistant.

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.

Mail on the attack over Facebookism

I see that Birmingham University's development of an MA in social media has come under attcak from the Daily Mail.

Senior lecturer in Digital media at the University Paul Bradshaw launched a discussion over its core contents last week and described it as a way to save journalism

graduates should not be going into the industry at entry level (after all, who is recruiting these days?), but at a more senior, strategic level - or, equally likely, to establish startups themselves. I’m hoping these are the people who are going to save journalism.

The Mail no doubt in its Little Englander guise sees it as an MA in facebook and have even got a quote from a disenchanted student who says

It's of no interest to me whatsoever. Virtually all of the content of this course is so basic it can be self-taught.
'In fact most people know all this stuff already. I think it's a complete waste of university resources.'

Online journalism research forum launched

That guru of online journalism Paul Bradshaw has set up a new journalism research.

Paul says

The most obvious way you can use this group is the forums - post a question, or respond to someone else's. I'm hoping this will form a really valuable list of good literature.
From there you might set up a group of people with a similar interest - ethics, for instance, or blogging. Or mobile phone journalism. Or online newsgathering.
Adding events - conferences in particular - will be very useful. Or you might organise an offline opportunity to meet with people in your area

Check it out here

Journalism degrees and jobs-the mismatch?

I am sure that this is a topic that is going to run and run over the dead months of August as Paul Bradshaw has asked the question in a post this morning as to should journalism degrees still prepare students for a news industry that doesn't want them?

The premise is that we could be facing the ultimate ground zero situation in a few years where the economics of the industry could mean that media organisations are shutting to an extent that there will be no jobs available.

I think that there are a number of perspectives to this argument.
Let's start from the point of view of the higher education system.Numbers are too high in many fields as universities are under pressure to perform as a profit centre.The balance between degree and job places is out of sync especially in the art subjects.But it is not just journalism,look at courses such as law and business related studies.

Numbers that are too high place enormous strains on the resources needed to teach,the result classes too large and inevitably the standard of teaching diminishes.It is no wonder that employers are starting to worry about the standards of student education and are bringing in their own measuring devices.

Now let me make that clear that journalism is only one of many subjects that is suffering from those problems.

With regard to journalism courses,I can only speak for the course that I am currently undertaking at Uclan.The journalist needs to be able to master many skills to compete in the real world and the degree generally tries to do that,given the constraints mentioned above.I would hope to come out of it this time next year having mastered the skills of being able to work in the journalism profession,whilst also showing an individuality and ability to think out of the box.
That second skill comes more from the university experience than the specific skills of the course.

Now the other side of the coin,the industry.In a rapidly changing environment,it is increasingly difficult I am sure to match skills to the industry.Courses,as Uclan has done will change to keep up with external developments,but the sheer logistics mean this is difficult to achieve in real time.

I don't agree that we are heading for the ground zero option.The nature and the structure of the industry will change,but jobs will still be there.However higher education facilities need to recognise that numbers will go down and must look at applications and adjust numbers.

Twittering and mashups of the local elections

Paul Bradshaw

is experimenting with the uses of digital media in following today's local and mayoral elections.

Paul explains that he has created a Yahoo Pipes Mash up which is attempting to cover the day's news

Also courtesy of Paul see how people are twittering on Boris and on Ken

As part of our digital newsroom module this term,we have been asked to read Paul Bradshaw's model for the digital news room.

I mentioned it briefly back in September when Paul first published it on his blog,but it has gained fame as the news diamond model.


What Paul proposed was an alternative to the inverted pyramid.

news diamond attempts to illustrate the change from a 19th century product (the article) to a 21st century process: the iterative journalism of new media; the story that is forever ‘unfinished’

Paul continues with the premise that in a world where news generation has been turned on his head,journalists can no longer rely on simply being the processors of information.

the modern journalist’s role needs to move above the content and what this means for the journalist is that

need to collate , synthesise and verify reaction from the blogosphere and other sources. They need to interrogate sources more, to challenge assertions more, and to investigate stories that are going unreported.

and

Some journalists, then, need to develop a community management role, to manage content - to bring together bloggers and sources, to set up aggregation, submission and collaboration systems, and to crowdsource stories that would otherwise be impossible to cover.

This is described as distributive journalism

Hats off for Paul Bradshaw who publishes a chapter of his book on his blog.The chapter entitled The amateur-professional debate makes a very good point.

Blogs’ apparently ‘unchecked’ nature, meanwhile, is misleading. Whereas professional journalism employs editors to check reports before publishing, blogging tends to reverse the process: publishing, then checking. Editing, in this case, takes place ‘from the margins’, as readers and other bloggers check the facts presented in a process of ‘iterative journalism’ (Bruns, 2005). Unlike mainstream journalism, which produces a time-bound product that seeks to be definitive, or at least a ‘first draft of history’, the products of blogging and other forms of new media journalism are forever unfinished:

But go and read the whole thing and leave some comments