A couple of weeks ago, I finally hit publish on The Social Media Reporter (above). It’s a free online guide for journalists that aims to demystify social media and provide practical, concise tips for navigating through the sea of information - and doing better journalism as a result.

I wrote it because I sensed an urgent need. Social media has become such an important part of the fabric of our culture and society now that it’s key we understand how to sift through, analyse, understand and interpret what it’s telling us. But most journalists still don’t have the tools, training or confidence to do this.

I was working on BBC Trending when I first had the idea of writing a guide for journalists on using social media not for promotion, but as a journalistic research and reporting tool. It was the early days of social media and it felt very much like we were navigating through uncharted territory. Yes, there were some tools, but the overall picture was patchy and confusing.

Then, in 2015, I was lucky enough to be awarded the John S. Knight Journalism Fellowship at Stanford and spent a good part of my time there interviewing fellow journalists, as well as social media companies themselves, and testing out countless tools.

The result is this guide. I decided to write it thematically, i.e. to put myself in the mindset of a busy journalist. What is it I want to do? How do I do it quickly?

It covers:

• How to organise your feeds
• Locating video, images and sources from a specific location, and the ethics of using eyewitness material
• Verification: how to spot fakes and scams
• How to use social media to track people down and for research
• How to find out what’s trending and dig to the bottom of trends
• More resources 

People often ask for my personal top tips. So here are three of my favourites: 

1. Feeling overwhelmed by Twitter? That’s understandable. There are two great free tools - Tame (above) and Twxplorer - that give you a snapshot of the most-shared links and most-used hashtags among people you follow. Better still, you can get the same analysis of any Twitter list you follow.
2. What’s trending on Facebook? Facebook Signal is a free service, designed by Facebook specifically for journalists. You need to request access - and this can take a few weeks - but once you’re in, it gives you access to a much richer source of information on stories trending on Facebook, as well as other enhanced search facilities. And it covers Instagram too.
3. Don’t forget LinkedIn! As a journalist you can get a free one-year upgrade to a premium account after taking a short web tutorial on the LinkedIn for Journalists page. It’s well worth doing as the upgrade otherwise costs $75 a month.

A premium account allows you can to send ‘InMail’ to people you are not connected to - perfect for those times when you are trying to get in touch with a potential interviewee/contributor, but can’t find their contact details anywhere.

There’s nothing more satisfying than finishing up a long project. But unfortunately - or possibly fortunately - this guide needs to be a living, breathing resource. A lot has changed in the period since I first had the idea of writing it. Tools have come and gone, and the role of social media in our lives has become so much greater.

And here’s where I ask for other journalists’ help. The guide will be a much more useful resource if others contribute to it too - with case studies, updates and tips. So, please share with your colleagues, around your newsroom and more widely. The guide is on Medium, so you can add a comment there. Or feel free to get in touch directly at cordeliaheb@gmail.com or @CordeliaHeb.

Cordelia Hebblethwaite helped launch BBC Trending, and now leads the digital and social media operation for BBC Newsnight.

Lamadaar offered her key insights gleaned from working with media companies over the past year:

1. Strong teams win at real-time content delivery

Lamaadar felt that the ability for a team of journalists to instantly communicate with each other is vital because “there is increased demand for everything to be in real time, for content to be generated rapidly”.

“That puts a lot of pressure on you as a team to be able to work together and collaborate, so you need to find ways to enhance that ability,” she said.

Growing use of sharing and communication apps across the industry, to streamline and speed up workflow, certainly bears out the Slack executive's point. For example, journalists have used Trello to create shared online boards to track workflows, Evernote to create and share notes, ideas, research and clippings on any device, WhatsApp to instantly share updates and photos from reporters in the field, and Slack for team communication and producing automated information.

2. Automate tasks for operational efficiency

Automating mundane routines can also make a team more efficient and productive. This could mean setting reminders for people, projects, or deadlines – for example, reminding someone to submit a headline for a story. A team could also set up an RSS feed of competitor’s headlines to be aware of what’s out there.

“You could take newsletters, or Twitter notifications, or whatever is clogging up your inbox, and find a place to automatically produce that information,” Lamadaar suggested.

Bots are certainly one way to achieve the goal she talked about. Simply, a bot is an automated software application that runs on the internet. Bots are often used for crawling through a large amount of information and collecting specified data much faster than a human could, which can be particularly useful for journalists, but can also raise ethical concerns.

Slack allows bots to be created by anyone using their API. Reporters can also use bots for Twitter, bots for web scraping, and some bots can write the news themselves.

For some examples closer to home, on Twitter the BBC has a Weather Bot as well as bots that tell you what songs are currently playing on Radio 1, Radio 2, Radio 3, 1Xtra, 6 Music and Asian Network.

3. Be strategic with your data

Major news organisations publish hundreds of stories a day. How do they decide which are the most important or likely to do well on social networks? 

The New York Times built a bot (shown above) to identify the best stories to promote on social media such as Facebook. The bot uses artificial intelligence to look through data and predict what stories are likely to do well. Their ‘blossom bot’ posts get around 380% more clicks than a post predicted by a journalist. Al-Jazeera followed suit with a bot that looks out for breaking news.

“Be strategic,” Lamadaar said. “You are the only people who have access to your data, so you need to be using it to the most competitive advantage.”

4. Know your audience – and let them know you

Live blogging is a popular way of producing and consuming news, especially as people consume more news at work and want bite-sized content they can access on the go. Research shows that live blogs get up to 300% more page views and 133% more visitors than conventional articles on the same topic.

“When you’re reading a live blog, you’re feeling like you’ve got the inside scoop while the journalists are engaging around a topic. It feels more honest, even though it hasn’t had the same editorial vetting,” Lamadaar said.

(There are now a variety of apps to help journalists get started with live blogging. The Wall Street Journal and the New York Times built Slack live-blogging integrations to make reporting easier for their teams.)

“It’s important to know your audience and understand how their consumption patterns are changing. Make sure you’re tailoring how you speak to them, as well as the ways you speak to them, based on that information,” she advised. 

5. Explore new vectors of engagement

“The most successful teams are taking risks and embracing their role as technologists and exploring how they engage with their audience,” Lamadaar said.

The New York Times built a 2016 ‘election bot’ (below) that allowed teams working in any company to add a live feed to their internal Slack channel. This allowed reporters at any publication, as they were writing a story, to quickly get information such as the latest poll results.

But beyond simply generating the feed, the New York Times made it bi-directional. This meant journalists anywhere could ask the app questions like “what is the historical importance of Super Tuesday?”.

Lamaadar concluded: “We’re all building products or generating content, we’re all trying to understand our audience and give them something meaningful. So that means if you see a challenge, you may have to build the solution yourself.”

All screenshots courtesy of Alia Lamaadar.

The next Digital Cities events will be in Digital Bristol Week 2016, from 9-15 May.

 

Blog: Now news videos can be created by software

Blog: For breaking news WhatsApp can be a strong team player

Instant messaging: BBC News on chat apps

It all started so innocently. My two year old son Leo has an impressive collection of wooden train tracks. Once he’s in bed, I tidy up his playroom.

Usually I just put the train set away any old how, but this time I decided to stack the pieces of track neatly on top of one another. When the pile got too high I took the top curved piece off and put it on the table next to the main stack.

That was when I noticed something strange. The single piece looked longer than the others – even though I knew it wasn’t. I placed it back on top of the pile and, yes, it was the same length. I took it off again, placed it below the stack and it seemed longer again.

Being somewhat addicted to social media, the obvious thing to do was to film and share it. My personal experience of Twitter is that it has a “rhythm”: anything I tweet in the morning tends to do better than anything in the afternoon which does better than the evening. As I was tweeting this little video at 9.30pm, having added some suitably portentous music, I wasn’t expecting it to have much of an impact. 

Pretty soon came the first take-away: the importance of influencers. One of the first people to retweet my video was Joanna Geary, an acquaintance in the social media world and now head of Twitter’s Moments team in the UK and Europe. She can spot something with viral potential, and soon her 21,000 or so followers had seen my video too. 

Another early retweeter was Martin Belam of the Guardian, who also has a good number of socially-savvy followers. 

Pleased with 150 retweets or so, I went to bed. An early start loomed as I was flying out of the country on holiday.

By early on Thursday morning, I was feeling real sympathy for those people who’ve been at the centre of a big news story and whose mentions would have been ten or a hundred times mine, often after a traumatic event, rather than a little video involving wooden train tracks.

The volume of tweets from strangers was astonishing. Initially I tried to be helpful and reply to each mention but I had to give up when that became impractical. Most of them were of the nature of “oh wow...that’s cool...my brain hurts” although a few were more along the lines of “how can you not know this...did you not do maths at school...you must be an idiot”. Again, my heart goes out to anyone who goes viral after expressing a controversial opinion on Twitter (we BBC employees aren’t allowed to have any opinions) as there’ll always be someone who’ll be quick to tell you you’re wrong and why, in no uncertain terms.

The first media request to use the video came via a Direct Message later that morning, in less than ideal circumstances.

I’ve known Blathnaid Healy, the UK editor of Mashable, for a few years now, so I was happy to help, even to the extent of tapping out a quick email about it all as we waited to take off. It soon formed the basis of a page on their site.

Of all the days to be out of contact for much of the day, it had to be this one. I genuinely wasn’t fleeing the country to avoid the attention. When we landed many hours later and I finally found connectivity, my eyes were opened up to the weird and wonderful workings of news sites in 2016.

Broadly, their behaviour fell in to one of three categories:

a)  Journalists working for sites who tweeted me to ask to use my video in some form and to whom I said “yes”.

b)  Those who tweeted me and to whom I didn’t reply for various reasons (more on this in a moment), who went ahead and used it anyway.

c)  Those who didn’t even bother to ask and used it anyway.

And in a special category of their own, come on down Business Insider.

When the mentions are coming thick and fast, it’s hard to keep up and spot them all – especially when you’re meant to be on holiday with a toddler to entertain. Looking back through the replies I sent, the only sites which had my explicit permission to use the video in some form were:

- Mashable

- Vanity Fair Italy

- WSYX in Columbus Ohio

- Netmums

- El Pais

A pleasingly eclectic bunch, I think you’ll agree.

In category B, we find:

- The Daily Telegraph

- The BBC

- Metro

- Buzzfeed

- Mail Online

- Daily Mirror

- The Huffington Post

- WSPA North Carolina

- Essential Kids Australia

Had I seen the BBC request, it would have been hard not to say yes and clearly I don’t mind my employer using it. It’s done pretty well on the BBC too: two and a half million views via Facebook, a million hits on BBC Trending. But I can’t put my hand on my heart and say I would have given the green light to all the others in category B.

The list of those in category C is a lot longer. They included:

- The Irish Examiner

- ABC13 News

- The Independent

- 7 News Australia

- Slate

- Radio Times

- Good Housekeeping

- BoredomTherapy.com

- AOL

- The Daily Express

- Distractify

- Unexplained-mysteries.com

- Aol.com

- Yournewswire.com

- Liberalamerica.org

- Today.com

- The science world

- The poke.co.uk

Just Google “train track illusion” and you’ll find scores more. If this is what websites do with something trivial and ephemeral, imagine what they’ll do with breaking news videos when time is of the essence. 

And, in fairness, this was shareable, but ultimately hardly life and death. That was why I was initially happy to give sites permission; I didn’t want to seem precious – especially when I subsequently found out this was an established optical illusion more than 100 years old.

That was also why I didn’t watermark the video with my name, as some have suggested I should have – which is ironic, as during the training I deliver for the BBC Academy, I teach my students how to watermark a video and to think about doing so. My reason for not watermarking it was simple: I genuinely didn’t think this video would do that well so it didn’t seem necessary. How vain will it seem if I now slap ©Marc Settle on every video I share on social media from now on?

What irked me was the vast number of sites which used my video without even the common courtesy to ask permission. They were getting good traffic and therefore revenue off the back of it. Yes, it’s possible that some had reciprocal agreements with sites to whom I had given my approval, but I’d bet that very few had.

If I hadn’t been on holiday, I would have made it my business to contact those sites and present a retrospective invoice for breach of copyright. However, they have lawyers and large legal departments and I probably would have received the brush-off – if they even bothered to reply. Away from home, I was unable to contact the miscreant sites effectively and unable to stop still others taking advantage of my video.

I’ve hovered on the edges of social media circles for a good few years now, so I’ve long been aware of a number of sites which can centralise this process – for a fee. Storyful contacted me quite early on as this all developed, as did NewsFlare; had I been at work, I might have been more switched on and willing to use their services sooner. Nearly 24 hours after Storyful’s initial contact, I agreed that they could manage the video, meaning that anyone wanting to use it should from then on go via them – “should” being the operative word. Additionally, they would contact unauthorised users for payment on my behalf. In return, they’d split the proceeds with me 60:40 (60 to me, that is).

Was it right to try to monetise (a word which seems less loaded than “make money from”) a trivial and ephemeral video? I would argue that it was: the traffic, clicks and resultant revenue these sites were getting were not through any hard work of an employee or freelancer. Many sites had no doubt just thought “oh this will do well, we’ll have that” and hang the niceties. That just didn’t seem right. Being aware of Storyful and the like, I’m probably in the minority. For others caught up in this sort of thing, to be contacted by a third party offering to manage and monetise a video must be bewildering, even scary.

It turns out I had stumbled across the Jastrow Illusion, first described by the American psychologist Joseph Jastrow late in the 19th century. So it was hardly something unique that others could be prevented from replicating. Indeed, I found that a number of videos also using train tracks had been uploaded to YouTube several years ago. In the last few weeks, at least two dozen more have also appeared, some mere “scrapes” of my video with scant attribution.

The best (or worst) example was Business Insider. Their reporter contacted me but only after Storyful had got involved and so I directed him to them. Rather than doing that, Business Insider (with full marks for chutzpah) made their own version of the video, titled it “this train track illusion is driving the internet insane”, added a short explanation and ran it on their sites where it has received more than 300,000 views, ten times more than my "original" one.

What conclusions can be drawn from this experience?

Firstly, precious few of the astonishing number of traffic-hungry websites out there seem to acknowledge or abide by any rules, conventions or laws relating to copyrighted material in the race to publish.

Secondly, the requests sent to an individual at the centre of a news-story are over-whelming and draining. The issue was discussed at the International Festival of Journalism 2016. The Online News Association offers guidance in the form of a “social newsgathering ethics code”, setting out standards that journalists ought to adhere to in terms of both verification and rights issues. It’s pleasing to see the BBC, the Guardian, CNN, Storyful and others supporting this initiative, but the number of news sites missing from the list is itself instructive.

Thirdly, having an agency like Storyful manage a viral video can be useful. As with many experiences in life, paying for the services of professionals who deal on a daily basis with the matter in question can be preferable to attempting to sort it all out yourself.

I don’t anticipate going viral again any time soon – but then I didn’t anticipate going viral this time around. With a two and a half year old toddler, the next time anything viral happens to him, I expect it to be chicken pox.

 

Our other blogs by Marc Settle

Our section on social media skills

Smartphone training for journalists

The video on Sarah Jones’s phone was Clouds over Sidra, made by the UN to support its campaign for refugees. Even without a headset you can explore the 360 effect when viewing the eight minute film on a computer, by tracking round with mouse or key movements.

So what does 360 mean for news coverage? On the face of it, it allows a more ‘authentic’ story to be told because the viewer can explore in directions that wouldn’t be available in conventional footage, as Sarah Jones explains: 

In the end, says Jones, once the novelty of the 360 experience has worn off, conventional journalistic values will reassert themselves. For news, it still comes down to stories, however powerful the technologies through which they’re told:

Also from the BBC Academy:

360 video: BBC Click's innovative storytelling

Virtual reality, 360 video and the future of immersive journalism

 

Jim Muir’s 11,000-word explainer Islamic State group: The full story is the longest article the BBC News website has ever published. It’s epic, with engagement levels to match. Here’s how he tackled his “monster”:

It was a Friday in January and my phone rang in Baghdad, where I was on assignment. It was my regional boss, Richard Colebourn. Would I be interested in doing a big online take-out on IS – bells and whistles and all, a project suggested by director of BBC News James Harding?

Indeed I would. I jumped at the chance, no persuasion needed. Delivery was due end of February, which seemed a long time away. Luxury.

I'm not sure I realised at the time that it would be in many ways the toughest assignment of my career.

I was excited because there was so much I didn't know about so-called Islamic State, though I'd reported quite a lot of its inexplicable doings. My brief was to make them as explicable as possible. Why do they do the things they do? Why have they been so horrifically successful?

It would be a voyage of discovery.

Baghdad was a pretty good starting point and I was there already. I extended my stay, and talked to as many people as I could who had anything to say about IS.

Hisham al-Hashimi, a widely-quoted expert on radical Islamic movements, set me off on the trail of IS's ideological roots as well as its structure and prospects. I spoke to a Sunni politician friend with an intimate knowledge of the Iraqi environment IS was operating in and to a Shia leader whose Iranian-backed group is heavily engaged fighting the militants on the ground.

I also spoke to two hapless IS operatives (including Bakr Madloul, pictured below left, during his time with IS) who'd been captured by the Iraqi security forces – destined to hang, both involved in the manufacture or placement of car bombs which killed dozens of innocent people. I desperately wanted to know what was in their heads. I came away feeling that they were almost as much victims of circumstance as their own victims were. Neither was ideological. They just got sucked in because IS was the only game in town and it seemed like a good idea at the time. Not now.  

By the time I was back home in Beirut and had translated or transcribed all the interviews, it was already into the second week of February.

But I wanted more first-hand material, and a proper military briefing on IS order of battle. So I flew to Erbil in northern Iraq, capital of Iraqi Kurdistan, where I'd lined up chats with Kurdish and western military and intelligence officials as well as sources from the key IS-held cities of Mosul and Falluja. I wanted to try to get a real idea of what life was like under them on the ground.

And there was another IS prisoner, this time one who really did believe in the cause and was still ready to give his life for it, though there seemed little fanatical or menacing about him.

Back in Beirut, more translating and transcribing, and another big interview, with an American University of Beirut professor, Ahmad Moussalli, who has written extensively on Islamist ideology and politics.

Collecting time was done. A line had to be drawn, though research could have gone on forever.

There now began about a week of intensive processing, cogitation and fermentation, consulting books, discussing with friends, scouring the internet, chasing ideas and trying to pull things together. I sympathised with a friend who's writing a book and confessed himself overwhelmed with the volume of information that gushes forth when you search the web. Managing it, and retrieving glimpsed nuggets that disappear in the torrent, is a real challenge.

Only then could the actual writing begin, a strange process of simmering, synthesising and crystallising a mass of thoughts and information.

The structure fell into place as the story unfolded, from the historical, religious and ideological roots of Salafism through the trajectory of jihadist militancy, from Afghanistan to Iraq to Syria and back to Iraq, and then going global with the ‘caliphate’.

Then there were details of life under IS, its organisation, military prowess etc, the spaces that it is taking up, the impossibility of simply defeating it militarily and closing the file.

The writing took a week and was finished at midnight on the last day of February. Thank goodness it was a leap year. I'd been asked for around 5,000 -6,000 words and I'd done 8,500.

Conference call with BBC News Online and other bosses the following afternoon: they were happy, but instead of wanting cuts, they wanted more. And they didn't seem to care about length. So another two days of writing. In addition to the wanted add-ins, I snuck in a new final section on IS's geo-political role in the strategic, sectarian balkanisation that's going on in the region.

It was now a monster 11,000 words. After a final fine tooth-combing (some nits were found), the result, splendidly embellished by the team in London with pictures, embedded video, hot links, graphics and out-takes, was finally launched onto an unsuspecting web.

The bosses were anxious. It was bigger than anything they'd ever put up before. Would anybody bother to plough through such a lengthy piece on such a serious topic?

Apparently they would. The numbers started clocking up rapidly. In less than a week, more than 1.5 million people had viewed the page. And I was told that the ‘engagement’ factor – the length of time people stay on the page – had broken all records for anything the BBC has ever put online.

It's hard to imagine a contrast starker than that between the magnitude of the response and the manic solitude of composition.

For the media bosses at the BBC, it was a bit of an experiment, and the result a bit of an eye-opener. It seems that, despite the alleged dumbing-down of the press and the supremacy of the 140-character tweet, there is a market out there for long reads on serious subjects. In fact the two things went together, as the link was widely tweeted and retweeted.

After all the head-banging I'd put myself through, the result was obviously gratifying. But equally impressive and encouraging was the fact that the BBC had commissioned and put the thing out there in the first place, and cleared the space for me to do it.

Islamic State group: The full story

Principles of good writing: Allan Little

Online journalism tips

Blogs on long form writing by Hugh Levinson

Writing: The English language

Predictably, perhaps, some critics have already had their say about the ShakespeareMe interactive feature, launched today on the experimental BBC Taster site as part of the much wider BBC Shakespeare Festival.

It invites users to choose emojis to reflect their mood and get a selection of shareable Shakespeare quotes to match. They’ll get lots of online leads to find out more, including on the meaning and context of favourite lines, and links to other BBC Shakespeare content.

When I spoke to the project’s exec producer Dan Gooding ahead of launch, he was optimistic that the mix of social media, personalisation and universal Shakespearean themes would appeal to the target audience of 16-35 year old digital natives (smiley face with sunglasses: “Pleasure and action make the hours seem short” – Othello).

And far from accepting claims by some press commentators of “dumbing down” – or as the Telegraph’s theatre critic Dominic Cavendish had it, risking turning off the audience with a shortage of plays and a “glut of froth” – Gooding was adamant that ShakespeareMe will have the opposite effect on a group whose abiding memories of Shakespeare at school may have been of “complex, impenetrable language”.

“It’s actually the reverse – we’re opening up this wonderful world of Shakespeare to a digital audience, and helping them to see the works as relevant and personal to them. Our target users are more likely to engage from their devices than go to see a play, but the idea is that they’ll discover that this is quite exciting, so want to share and take their interest further,” Gooding said. Playful, yes, but with serious intent.

Salford-based BBC Learning worked with Manchester digital agency magneticNorth to develop ShakespeareMe, one of a number of interactive online elements in the month-long BBC Shakespeare season, including on the BBC iWonder site.  The brief came from creative director Helen Foulkes after some “collaborative” ideas bashing and documentary-maker Gooding came on board later.

A specially designed set of 21 emojis can be paired with the most appropriate of almost 270 quotes from 36 plays and two sonnets, hand-picked by Shakespeare Birthplace Trust lecturer Dr Anjna Chouhan. She was “delighted” to be helping the smartphone generation “engage with his language on their own terms”, she said.

Algorithms generate mood-matching photographs, displayed in split-screen, to help users choose the perfect lines. They can then hit ‘share’ to publish their discoveries, in words and pictures, to Facebook and Twitter or download to Instagram.

The key is personalisation: “Emojis are huge [for this audience]. We’re using them to draw people in so they can make Shakespeare their own,” said Gooding, who series produced BBC One’s Call the Council, worked on Extraordinary People for Channel 5 and is exec producer for the BBC Radio 1 Academy.

He saw no mismatch in the marriage of emojis and the Bard (wide-eyed face: “Though this be madness, yet there is method in't” – Hamlet).

“Shakespeare pushed boundaries of language all the time and now we’re using a new global language to express emotions. In the way Shakespeare connected to a mass audience and was fond of mixing old and new…what we’re doing is a logical progression for me.” 

Despite the doubters (worried face: “What if this mixture do not work at all?” – Romeo and Juliet), the bigger BBC season, marking 400 years since Shakespeare’s death, certainly includes a mix of meaty, traditional offerings.

There’ll be three more episodes of the acclaimed history plays cycle The Hollow Crown, starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Judi Dench on BBC Two; a new Midsummer Night’s Dream adaptation by Russell T Davies for BBC One; a collaboration with The Royal Shakespeare Company to host a celebration of Shakespeare’s work and legacy, live from Stratford on the anniversary (23 April); and a whole weekend of Sounds of Shakespeare Live on Radio 3.

More all-out efforts to bring a new, younger audience to the canon include the children’s online quiz What type of actor are you?, inviting budding players to film themselves in Shakespearean role and upload the results to the BBC website, and How to be Epic @ Shakespeare – pretty much what it says on the tin, complete with tips on how to rap, act, sound and dress like Shakespeare.

Continuing in fanciful vein, I asked Dan Gooding whether he thought the great man himself would have embraced social networks: “As a wordsmith I think he’d have loved social media, had huge fun with 140 characters and used Facebook and Instagram to talk to the Marlowes and Middletons of the age. Shakespeare’s been called a ‘magnet for the zeitgeist of the nation’. You go to Facebook and Twitter to get that these days.”

The ShakespeareMe experience has been user-tested internally by its nine celebrity, social media-savvy ‘ambassadors’, including  BBC Radio 1’s Greg James, BBC Breakfast’s Dan Walker, EastEnders’ actors Harry Reid and Lorna Fitzgerald, with promising results, Gooding reported: “We’ve all been playing it and it’s quite addictive. I’m very proud of what the team has put together.”

So does the ShakespeareMe company have its own signature emoji and accompanying lines? They’d be from As You Like it, the exec producer said, with little prompting: “Live a little, comfort a little, cheer thyself a little.” And a blissful, smiley face. 

BBC Academy podcast: Filming Shakespeare’s Bottom

Young women audiences are telling us what they want, if only we’d listen

Engaging social media audiences

Our section on social media skills

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I knew it was going to happen. Yet hearing it unfold on air, I felt the same shock run through me as did the listeners who for a few minutes sat stock still, their fingers frozen mid-air, unable to type, unable to breathe, as we heard Helen take a course of action that would change her life forever.

Working on social media, you are right next to the audience, listening as they listen, tweeting as they tweet. Fan reactions are a second drama unfolding alongside the on-air one. It has been fascinating, humbling, exciting and emotional to be part of it. Here are five reasons why: 

1. That communal moment

The Archers are notoriously guarded about story lines - spoilers ARE NOT PERMITTED. So nobody outside of The Archers team knew that this was going to happen. As the episode progressed, our Twitter feed and Facebook page began to echo with the sound of listeners’ collective jaws dropping, as they struggled to process what they were hearing... Did that just happen?? Within minutes, #thearchers was UK Top Trend on Twitter and would keep trending for four hours straight. The Daily Mail dubbed it ‘The Day The Archers Broke Twitter’ after a fan on Twitter coined the phrase.

These reactions are not just numbers, marketing analytics. They represent strength of feeling, immersion in the storyline - that moment bristled with power, with shared feeling.

As my timeline grew instantly unmanageable, it was as exciting to watch the listeners’ reaction as it had been to hear the drama that ignited it.

2. The immediate response

Within minutes of the episode ending, a QC had tweeted that he would defend Helen. Listeners flooded onto Twitter and Facebook to support her as witnesses or false alibis. After all, we’d heard everything. Surely the police would listen to 20,000 tweeting fans? Or find everything they needed for the defence from #thearchers hashtag?

If Rob Titchener had been the pillar of the community that some in Ambridge might claim him to be, would he have been rendered thus by Archers spoofers The Plarchers?

Would the serious illness of #FuriousAtRobitis have been diagnosed?

So if justice could be served by Facebook or Twitter, it would be case closed, right? We lived in hope.

And did I mention that Pam Ayres tweeted a poem (with just two characters to spare)?

3. Refuting the doubters

Does this seem strange to you? It’s just a drama. Don’t these people know that?

OK, Helen and Rob might not be real [disclaimer: I don’t really believe this, they are real] but we’ve lived with Helen for years. We’ve sat in the sitting room of Blossom Hill Cottage, in the kitchen, in the bedroom, and listened powerlessly as the Helen we knew crumbled. We worried for her young son Henry. We cried with frustration at Bridge Farm as Rob groomed Helen’s family. Our emotions are real. Our shock was real. And these issues are real. We care. That’s why Twitter ‘broke’. That’s what makes this story work. We care.

Which brings us to...

4. The intense emotional reaction to the storyline

As the story has progressed, listeners have shared their personal experiences of control and abuse, on Facebook and on Twitter. If this has shown me anything, it is that this experience is far from a rarity. It has been a great honour to be party to these confidences and to see The Archers community rally round. A helpline has run alongside the programme since March. I have cried reading these testimonies. I've had strange dreams. I’m sure I haven’t been alone in doing so.

And really, though the jaw-dropping moment might appear to have taken place on that Sunday night in Blossom Hill Cottage, it actually began well before.

In truth, the jaw-dropping moment is: calls to domestic abuse helplines being up 20% in part because of “The Archers effect”. It’s listeners collectively donating over £100,000 to a domestic abuse charity, entirely unprompted by the BBC.

It’s stories like this:

And this:

It’s domestic abuse becoming a national debate as every newspaper covers the story.

It’s a community of listeners mobilising to understand, to feel, to make change. The potential for positive outcomes from it feel huge and important.

5. Welcoming in the new

What’s been really interesting throughout this story has been the influx of new faces to The Archers community. It’s the ‘I never thought I’d listen to The Archers but I’ve just binged on four omnibuses in one sitting’ posts. It’s parents who report that suddenly, to their surprise, they find their teenager is also listening intently/shouting at the radio. It’s as if we have been opening up the doors of Ambridge’s local, the Bull, where our seasoned listeners have been propping up the bar. They are turning round and standing the newbies a pint of Shires. Helping them work out who’s who and what’s what. The directions to the village shop. Who to avoid (Lynda), who to make an immediate beeline for (Lilian). There’s only 65 years to catch up on, shouldn’t take long…

Nickie Latham is director of the social media consultancy Hand in Glove

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As well as lecturing in literature and film, Sarah Dillon presents the Close Reading feature on BBC Radio 4’s Open Book programme and BBC Radio 3’s documentary series Literary Pursuits, which returns on Sunday 29 May. Her double life is a balancing act, she says, between two very different worlds:

I always seem to be in entirely inappropriate situations when I receive life-changing professional phone calls. When I got the call from the University of St Andrews offering me my first academic post I was down on my knees, partially-dressed, halfway up a flight of stairs, scrubbing the banister of my future husband’s bachelor pad. You try negotiating salary without the support of a bra.

When I got the call from the BBC to say I’d been selected as a New Generation Thinker 2013 I was down on my knees again, but this time clutching a trowel, sporting wellies and attempting to turn some waste ground into a semi-believable veg patch. At the same time I was trying to prevent my three-year-old from spoiling his lunch with a soil starter kit and keeping an eye on my 15-month-old who was, mercifully, sound asleep in her pushchair. Little did I realise how useful such multi-tasking skills were going to prove to be.

Now I don’t use the expression “life-changing” flippantly. I’m not talking about finding a potato peeler that actually works, or hunting down a hypoallergenic hairspray which gives me great hair without permanent cold symptoms. I’m talking about a radical alteration to my trajectory in time and space.

Suddenly, I was going somewhere I never imagined in my wildest dreams. Think Dorothy suddenly transported to Oz. In fact, BBC Broadcasting House has become a little like Emerald City for me, a place that gives me brain, heart and courage, and then returns me back home, transformed. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if next time I stepped out of Oxford Circus Tube, London’s Regent Street had been repaved in yellow brick.

The New Generation Thinkers scheme – a collaboration between BBC Radio 3 and the Arts and Humanities Research Council to find academics capable of transmitting their knowledge and passions to radio and TV audiences – launched me into broadcasting. And it did indeed sweep me up like a cyclone.

My time on the scheme was heady and exciting, yes, but also disorienting and destabilising. Because academic scholarship and media broadcasting are radically different enterprises.

The former requires solitude, time, depth of focus, precision of reference and seriousness of argument and expression. The latter requires a certain lightness of touch, a sensitivity to the fashions of the moment, a careful balance of insight and entertainment.

Yet the first time I stepped into a radio studio, back in 2012 for a live interview on BBC Radio Scotland, I discovered a new passion. I guess some academics move into broadcasting for worthy reasons, in order to share their research with a wider audience than conference papers can reach. I’m delighted that that is an outcome of my broadcasting, but that wasn’t what made me want to do it.

For me, it’s more like an addiction: the speed, the demand for concision, intelligence and entertainment, the performance, the creativity, the collaboration – all that gives me an instant high, stimulating the reward centre of my brain, making me crave more.

Quite simply, I love it.

To this day, what I still find most difficult is moving from one world to the other, trying to adjust my body and mind to their different demands and rewards. Try settling back down to hours alone in the library after an intense day travelling with a producer, collaborating on a script in between interviews with amazing people and making visits to literary landmarks I’d only ever read about in books.

But I am beginning to train myself to move more easily from one to the other. I’ve found coffee and herbal stress relief products work best – they are at least legal uppers and downers.

Broadcasting has forced me to decide where my priorities lie and how far I am willing to step away from scholarship – from objective prose, from deferring to senior experts, from referencing, from taking a long time about things. It has forced me to consider how willing I am to give up sub-clauses.

Some academics are not willing to make those changes, to compromise, as they see it, their academic integrity. I see it differently. What works for broadcasting does not work for academia. What works for academia does not work for broadcasting. The trick is to recognise and respect this difference, and not to transfer standards of excellence from one realm to the other. That way sloppy scholarship and boring broadcasting lie.

So I keep them separate. But that doesn’t mean that osmosis between the two does not occur. It does. I couldn’t do what I do at the BBC without the knowledge and expertise I gain from academia. And I know I am a better writer and teacher back at university because of what I have learnt from broadcasting.

Ultimately, it’s a question of balance. Unless you’re Hermione in Harry Potter or have also somehow managed to get hold of a Time Turner – and if you have, please let me know where from – there are only a limited number of hours in the day. Broadcasting takes up time in which I’d otherwise be progressing my research; academic commitments mean sometimes I have to turn down broadcasting opportunities. I am constantly calculating if what gets declined, unfinished or deferred is worth what I’m going to gain putting that time to use elsewhere.

I never did finish cleaning my husband’s banister. You could still see, half way up, the change from cream to dirty black where I’d downed tools the minute I got that job offer. And the veg patch I was working on when I got the New Generation Thinker call? Never finished, because six months later I got my job at Cambridge and we left that house behind. I did take the children with me though – there are some compromises even I’m not prepared to make.

The 2016 New Generation Thinkers will be announced at the Hay Literary Festival, beginning 26 May.

 

Our section on presenting skills

Writing skills

Women scientists: Don’t put them on air unless they’re the best

How can the Commonwealth confront the repression – and in some cases forceful oppression - of independent and critical journalists in some of its member states?

This week Patricia Scotland, a Labour life peer and former Attorney-General, starts work as Commonwealth Secretary-General. Although Britain keeps a rather modest profile inside the Commonwealth, the Secretary-General’s office is in London and the Rt Hon Patricia Scotland QC, Baroness Scotland, takes up her post amid speculation as to whether she can improve the Commonwealth’s reputation in the matter of human rights.

In journalism alone, there is plenty of cause for concern. In Sierra Leone, more than 20 journalists have been arrested in what critics see as a systematic government crackdown on dissenting voices. That was just one example raised at a meeting in London last week of the Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative, attended by representatives of civil society and media organisations.

Many who want the Commonwealth to live by its Charter and the so-called Latimer House principles of democracy are frustrated, complaining that the organisation has opted out of monitoring, let alone policing, serious violations of its rules.

Sue Onslow interviewed all five previous Secretary-Generals for the Commonwealth Oral History Project. She says that the Commonwealth’s human rights unit, set up in 1990, has been stymied by a lack of resources and an unwillingness to work with civil organisations that have played a central role in the advance of democracy across the world.

A high point came with the Commonwealth’s Harare Declaration in 1991, a ringing commitment to dismantle apartheid. But later, Onslow says, its basic stance has been “to leave human rights to member states and the UN”.

The outgoing Secretary General, Kamalesh Sharma, has been criticised for putting his trust in quiet diplomacy, though his defenders claim successes for that approach, such as the creation of national human rights commissions in Bangladesh and the Seychelles.

In 2011 Sharma rejected a recommendation by an advisory Eminents Persons Group (EPG) for the creation of a Commonwealth Human Rights Commissioner with powers to help support human rights and the rule of law. Hugh Segal, a Canadian member of the EPG, says in an interview for the Oral History Project that the Commonwealth was "stepping back at the precise point where it should be stepping up" to help resolve acute problems including allegations of war crimes in the Sri Lankan civil war, and anti-gay laws in parts of Africa.

In Sri Lanka, 30 journalists are among many civilians who were killed, abducted or disappeared between 2010 and 2015 alone. In almost every case those responsible have escaped justice because no serious investigation has taken place.

In Pakistan, another Commonwealth country, more than 100 journalists have been killed in the past 15 years. While UN agencies led by UNESCO have contributed to projects aimed at creating a safe and enabling environment for journalists, critics say the Commonwealth has been conspicuous by its absence.

Now hopes are being pinned on Patricia Scotland, who has already said she intends to take on the task of persuading the 40 Commonwealth states that still treat homosexuality as a crime to decriminalise it and to push for strong action against domestic violence, female genital mutilation and widespread discrimination against women.

Some speakers at last week’s conference suggested that as an experienced lawyer with dual British and Dominican nationality, Baroness Scotland is well placed to effect change. The UN’s Sustainable Development Goals, agreed by the whole international community, include one (Number 16) for access to information and justice for all.

Hugh Segal believes that the Commonwealth can only become more dynamic “if we choose a Secretary General who’s prepared to engage”. Patricia Scotland has stressed that the Commonwealth works by consensus rather than coercion. But her arrival looks like heralding louder demands for the Commonwealth to address the serious human rights concerns facing journalists and others in its member states. 

All writers and broadcasters strive to make the best choice of language: in some parts of the world, making the right choices can be a tricky business. On my latest assignment for the BBC Academy in Bangladesh I had an insight into the complexities of linguistic division that journalists there deal with day to day.

I was in Dhaka to prepare for the launch of the latest new BBC Academy website, aimed at Bengali-speaking journalists. Bengali is Bangladesh’s national language but also the second most spoken language in India. 

As with many other BBC language services that broadcast to wide and diverse audiences, the BBC Bengali service aims to use language which will be commonly understood. But as elsewhere in the world, the same language spoken in two countries (in this case, India and Bangladesh) has different terminology, usage, accent, and pronunciation, depending on where it’s being spoken or heard.

For some context, language holds a particularly important place for the people of Bangladesh. The Bengali people fought long for recognition of their own language – their latest struggle beginning in 1947 when the territory was separated from India. It became part of the newly-created Pakistan and Islamabad made the Urdu language the official language of East Pakistan as Bangladesh was then known.

The struggle for recognition of the Bengali language became part of the battle for independence from Pakistan. The Bengali Language Movement emerged in 1948, just after the division of India, and on the 21 February 1952, students from the University of Dhaka were shot dead by police as they protested in support of language rights. After Bangladesh won its independence in 1971, 21 February was commemorated as Language Martyrs’ Day (Shaheed Dibash). Since Unesco recognised the date as International Mother Language Day, in the late 1990s, Bengalis have observed 21 February as both.

Day to day, the job of the BBC Bengali Service is not only to cater for the two separate countries, but also to bear in mind linguistic differences between the Muslim and Hindu communities in both Bangladesh and India. 

“Language is a very important issue for us,” says Sabir Mustafa, editor of BBC Bangla. “For example, the Muslim community would use the word ‘pani’ for water and the Hindu community call it ‘jol’. So which one should the BBC use?”

BBC Bangla’s approach is to use both, depending on the context, Mustafa says: “What to call water may sound quite harmless, but what about the word God? Which word should we use here – ‘Allah’ or ‘Bhagavan’?” His solution was to use the word ‘Creator’.

Much of this kind of knowledge and nuance is already embedded Mustafa’s team, but having a BBC Academy training site in Bengali, where language sensitivities can be collated and updated, will be a valuable resource, particularly for new journalists, he says.

The site will also have content on journalism skills and news values such as impartiality and independence. “Being impartial and independent is one of the most important qualities we have in the local market – it’s our identity,” explains Waliur Rahman Miraz, the BBC’s Dhaka bureau editor. 

As in some other South Asian countries, journalism is closely associated with activism in Bangladesh and to be impartial is often a difficult concept to grasp. Many of the country’s media organisations follow an agenda – be that the government’s or that of their commercial owners.

“There is no grey area: you are either for or against a view or a stance, with very little room for anything in between,” was how one senior independent journalist explained it to me in Dhaka.

The Academy site in Bengali aims to create vernacular training content that offers a guide to accurate and independent reporting.

And as a bespoke resource, it will reflect Bengali culture in the images we use, as well as the words. What better way to badge our ‘Bitesize’ style guide section than with a photo of a delicious-looking street food snack called Fuchka!

The BBC Academy’s Bengali site will launch later this year. Four other new journalism training sites in Spanish, Somali, Kyrgyz and Ukrainian will also be added in 2016, bringing our total number of international language websites to 23.

 

Our other blogs by Najiba Kasraee

Our international language sites

Our section on writing skills

Independence in journalism

The need to share and crucially to verify real-time information is critical and while we journalists talk a lot about social networks and messaging apps being invaluable tools in the newsgathering discovery process, we rarely focus on the newsgathering teams themselves and how they communicate in a crisis.

For many journalists email is still one of the primary ways they share breaking news but others, often the smaller more nimble teams, are testing newer tools. 

Back in January I was in Singapore running some social media training for newspaper journalists and spent an extra day with the BBC team in their office. Half way through my first training session, news broke that there had been bombings in Jakarta. For a tiny team dispersed across the Asia Pacific region it was all hands on deck, including mine.

As the well-oiled machine swung into gear and everyone got on with their jobs, I scoured social media for eyewitnesses. The professionalism of the team was normal to me - just like the old days working on a breaking story - but what really surprised me was how the team used WhatsApp to communicate. 

“It’s something we've been using for major deployments for some time now.” says Singapore bureau editor Liz Corbin. “It is superb for information sharing and crucially for team morale. I am repeatedly struck by how vital it is in terms of getting a story right and quickly.” 

The chaos of a big breaking story was filtered and controlled by the team sharing and verifying information as they got it. Facts were checked, visuals verified and there was a real sense of a hugely supportive team working together. As horrific pictures emerged the journalists were warned to be ready, which is crucial in helping prevent vicarious trauma.

It was a casebook study in how to use modern technology to break news and build your team. So, could it work in yours?

It sounds obvious but before you start, you need to make sure that everyone is happy to share their number, has downloaded WhatsApp and knows how to use it.

Here’s the drill from then on:

• When a big story breaks, the editor/social media producer sets up a WhatsApp group and nominates any other group admins (who could therefore also add others if they need to)
• Start adding the whole deployed team - correspondent/producer/crew/fixer/translator/editors back at base/programme teams
• Add a senior editorial figure to oversee/add input where needed
• Start sharing but try not to overuse it. Everyone will see everything, but you can still message members directly rather than the whole group.

It goes without saying that if you’re sharing sensitive content, it is essential that you issue a warning first so that people can be emotionally prepared.

And as a rule, content shared in the group should not be used for broadcast without clearing it with the person in charge – it might not be verified or could put others at risk.

Videos and stills from social media may not be great quality but they are very useful for giving a picture of what’s going on and in extremis, can and have been used for broadcast. So if WiFi is down or too slow, then sending video via WhatsApp is a great alternative to official newsgathering tools.

A few more team advantages:

• It’s quick, easy and cheap, more personal than email and less likely to be overloaded
• It’s very simple to share photos and video that others could start to check out and verify
• It’s great for multi-location deployments or where your team is spread over a wide area
• Everyone can see what everyone else is doing so correspondents won’t be asked for ‘lives’ when they’re out of action/busy
• You can turn off group notifications but keep DMs on while you sleep
• You can easily leave the group at any time when you go off shift/no longer need to be part of it (unlike email)
• And it’s excellent for team-building and mutual support.

 

Our other blogs by Sue Llewellyn

Our section on social media skills

Our journalist safety section, including trauma in journalism

WhatsApp, WeChat or Snapchat? A dummies’ guide to the new messaging apps

How BBC News covered Indian elections on WhatsApp and WeChat

How BBC Ebola WhatsApp service is battling virus and finding great stories

Viewing shocking eyewitness media is ‘as traumatic as frontline reporting’

Online advertising overtook public TV in 2013 and commercial TV in 2014. And it’s on track to be the most lucrative sector in this market by 2020 when it will finally overtake subscription TV.

Broughton describes video as a “crucial component of online advertising growth”. Last year, more than half as much again was spent on video advertising than in the previous year.

But the media establishment is not necessarily being shut out. While ‘social video’ typically comes from the big US tech companies, in the UK, both broadcasters (ITV, Channel Four and UKTV) and the press (Daily Mail, the Sun, the Guardian) are also big players in online video.

So how does the money move through this new ecosystem? Well, Broughton went back to the basic economics of YouTube – or at least the way YouTube revenue flows in the age of the MCNs. Remember, the MCN takes a slice of the money that YouTube pays to successful content providers in return for helping those providers maximise their revenues using the MCN’s channels.

When an advertiser pays for their ad being shown on YouTube, the money is shared between YouTube, the MCN and the content creator. Here’s how:

By the time YouTube and the content creator have taken their shares, the MCN is left with a relatively small proportion of the ad revenue ($0.7b out of $5.2b or about 13% according to the above figures).

But now the MCNs are extending their businesses to bring in larger slices from more pies. For instance, they are working directly with brands to create and promote branded content, not just for YouTube, but for a range of online outlets. As Broughton showed (below), YouTube may still be the biggest, but it is by no means the only significant player in online video:

All this has made MCNs the focus of growing interest from big financial and media players eager to own a stake in potentially powerful new centres of media revenue and influence.

Valuations in the hundreds of millions of dollars are the norm for successful MCNs , many of which are not yet household names: Awesomeness TV, Fullscreen and Collective 71, for instance.

If you thought that YouTube heralded a new era in which video makers working with newly affordable kit could bring their work directly to the world without the need for any kind of intermediary, dream on.           

 

Giving momentum to online video: The new world of MCNs 

Now news videos can be created by software

Making great online video: Don’t imitate TV

Filmmaking for the web: New online course 

The business of breaking news remains a key aim of news outlets. But where, how and to whom it is broken to is rapidly changing. In order to stand out from the crowd, media outlets are increasingly crafting journalism in a way that at its best makes the most of popular social platforms to reach new audiences with new experiences.

How to do this, while remembering you have more traditional audiences to serve as well, was the subject under discussion in a recent panel session at Rethink Media 2016 – Birmingham City University’s annual conference that took place during Digital Cities Birmingham.

The university’s Paul Bradshaw characterised the shift as a move from the traditional newspaper or news website model of “one gate, many stories” to “one story, many gates”.  The ubiquity of online news sources –  from eyewitness reports on Twitter to a carefully crafted newspaper report – means that it is increasingly the way that stories are actually told that can be key to hooking in audiences on new platforms.

“Media is the new exclusive,” argued Bradshaw (below), pointing out that social media has become a barrage of calls to action like “listen”, “watch”, “learn” and “talk to”. Audience attention is captured by unique media – an exclusive video or audio clip, or live interactive session – and headlines suggest audiences ‘do’ something rather than just passively experience the story. 

Something that online audiences are embracing more than ever is live content. The appetite is not small: BBC News social media editor Mark Frankel shared the result of a recent study that found that continuously updated live blogs get 300% more views and 233% more visitors than conventional posts.

One tried and tested form of live content currently getting a portable resurgence across social networks and apps is live streaming video – which now just requires a smartphone and an internet connection. Many apps are fighting for dominance, and Facebook has recently entered the fray by allowing its huge user base to live stream on the site via Facebook Live.  

As one of the biggest news brands on Facebook, this was something BBC News couldn’t ignore. So as part of their recent mental health week the team hosted Facebook Live sessions with key correspondents and guests, linking these streams in to the rest of their online and television content.

“When you have 28m fans and you decide to go live on a smartphone, you can reach people very quickly,” said Frankel. “We reached very large audiences, and got some fabulous comments and questions – many of which were fed back into our online journalism.”

Rather than being something that could have also gone out on TV, this was customised content designed explicitly for the Facebook audience and the functionality of the platform. A similar approach applies to the BBC’s Snapchat channel, which the team in the BBC bureau in Washington have been using to cover the US elections.

Harnessing the app’s distinctive vertical video, the team produced Snapchat videos that, rather than a glossy news report, gave quick behind-the-scenes insights from journalists at the bureau. Technically quite ‘lo-fi’, but with some added graphics on top, this quick content complemented rather than competed with BBC News’s coverage on other outlets. 

And Snapchat is just one of an ever-increasing set of social apps, each with its distinctive set of users. The networks formed by these audiences are ‘bubbles’, according to Daniel Noy (above), MD of marketing Agency Think Jam (above).

He argued that changes in technology are changing who we are and how we relate to each other – and potentially creating less community, not more.  “We’re in a culture where if I hear an opinion I don’t like, I’ll unfriend you,” he explained. “We’re putting up a lot of walls – and in news and marketing that makes our job a lot more complicated.”

In order to get messages into these bubbles, and perhaps encourage more of a sense of community between them, Noy argued that content producers need to understand why they exist. Rather than just recognising that people aged 14-19 are on Snapchat and can be reached there, he felt that the question that would yield a deeper understanding and potential engagement would be “why are teenagers associating so closely with visual dialogue?”.

One thing is for sure – it takes effort and insight to craft something that will work on a specific platform, and each demands a slightly different approach. The session’s overall theme could be summarised by a quote from Hearst Magazine’s Troy Young, shared by Bradshaw: “With old media you took distribution for granted, with new media we have to earn that every morning.”

But there may be a different change in store for beleaguered television producers and marketing teams struggling to optimise their content for social. Recent reports that Facebook and Twitter are fighting to be the first to get the rights to stream live television directly on their networks suggest that, for better or worse, the distinctions between television, online content and social media are going to get even more blurred. 

All images courtesy of Birmingham City University, photography by Luke Small.

 

Our section on social media skills

When Twitter’s ahead of the wires, it pays to be live and social

Our blogs by Mark Frankel

Our blogs by Paul Bradshaw

The BBC has already created narrative games such as Our World War, based on TV programmes. Lumb recognises the difficulties of such efforts to bring TV audiences to gaming and gamers to TV-related content.

One hurdle in bringing non-gamers into the world of gaming is that they can be discouraged by ‘failure’ – losing a game and reaching ‘game over’. Lumb says gaming is moving away from such outcomes in a way that’s helpful for introducing a wider audience. 

In future, games will be made with and by their players, rather than being released in a finished form. And the same trend can be seen in TV production too: asking the audience “what do you think of this?” is “crucial now”.