College of Journalism Feed

Hyperlocal journalism: interviewing party leaders with toddler in tow

2012-03-20T14:46:26+00:00

Richard Jones, founder of the hyperlocal website Saddleworth News, soon found his patch in the national spotlight:

It's January 2011. In a cramped upstairs room at a car repair garage in Oldham, I sit next to a couple of other local journalists as we interview David Cameron about the Conservatives' prospects in the forthcoming Oldham East and Saddleworth by-election. It's my third party leader in a week, after Nick Clegg (above) and Ed Miliband.

A radio reporter asks whether the by-election is a referendum on the coalition. He's interrupted by giggling. It's my daughter, perched on my knee.

"There we are, you had your answer," says the Prime Minister, turning in her direction. "How old are you?"

"Fifteen months," I say.

"There you are, 15 months and laughing at that idea!"

I was covering the by-election for Saddleworth News, a hyperlocal website which I started writing in February 2010.

A few weeks before my wife had gone back to work, leaving me as a stay-at-home dad to our first child. I'd done various journalism jobs in TV and radio, staff and freelance, since graduating from university in 2002. I spent the best part of six years at Sky News. But my wife earned more than I did, which made it an obvious decision for me to give up work to become a full-time father.

I set up Saddleworth News for two main reasons. The first was pure selfishness. I didn't want to leave journalism forever and knew it would be harder to get back in with a gaping hole on my CV. I also thought my brain would appreciate something to think about every day that didn't involve nappies, feeding or 'heads, shoulders, knees and toes'.

The second reason was more public-spirited. We'd only recently moved to Saddleworth, a collection of largely rural Yorkshire villages on the Manchester side of the Pennines. With just one or two articles a day in the Oldham paper, and some monthly freesheets and magazines, there was relatively little news coverage of an area which has a distinct identity. I hoped my skills might be of some use to the local community.

At first I set aside an hour a day to work on the site during my daughter's afternoon nap, and gave myself a target of one post every weekday. The site was established as a blog as I thought one daily update would be enough to give regular visitors something new to look at without putting me under too much pressure to constantly come up with new material.

The site hadn't been going long when a teenager sadly killed himself at a nearby railway station. A passenger on the train involved was posting updates and pictures from the scene on Twitter. After getting in touch and asking if I could use his content, I was able to quickly publish it in articles about the incident.

With the local paper not getting anything online about the story until the following day, my site was the only resource of information about why the trains between Huddersfield and Manchester weren't running. The site's hits increased more than five-fold overnight, mostly thanks to Google searches.

It was an early lesson in the value of publishing content that other media outlets can't or won't produce. Over the following weeks, every time the site had a spike in traffic like that the hit stats always settled back down at a higher level than before, until several hundred unique users became the daily norm rather than the exception.

If publishing stories faster than other media is one service hyperlocal sites can provide, doing issues in more depth is another, and it's surely a more valuable one too.

I've always enjoyed covering politics. Before the 2005 general election I spent months on Sky's election unit helping to prepare its coverage. As polling day approached in 2010, I knew that both the Westminster constituency of Oldham East and Saddleworth and the local wards being contested on Oldham Council would be closely fought, particularly between Labour and the Liberal Democrats.

Pondering how to approach the campaign on Saddleworth News, I mentioned to a newspaper reporter that I was thinking of doing full interviews with all the candidates. He said he'd had a similar idea but had been told by his editor that "there wasn't space in the paper" for it.

Woolas held the seat narrowly after a couple of recounts, but his Lib Dem opponent Elwyn Watkins mounted a rare and extraordinary legal challenge to the result, on the grounds that Woolas had told lies about his character in those campaign leaflets. Over the weeks ahead I wrote lots of articles about this, reporting on various small developments in the saga.

By the time the case ended in a shock triumph for Watkins and bitter defeat for Woolas, Saddleworth News had by far the largest online archive of material about the story. Checking my web stats, I found that people from Saddleworth and much further afield kept finding old articles I'd written, including my campaign interviews with all the protagonists. They were the interviews which didn't exist anywhere else because nobody else had bothered to do them. When national journalists arrived to cover the subsequent by-election clutching print-outs of my articles which they'd read on the train, I had evidence I'd been doing something right.

The depth of my coverage of the Woolas saga and by-election helped to raise the site's profile, and also taught me another lesson about online journalism. The internet is forever. No longer is a news story tomorrow's fish and chip paper, forgotten about within a day of being written. It can be discovered and read months and even years later by people searching on Google. So, if your article is going to have a long life, best make sure it's good.

Richard Jones (@rlwjones) is a freelance journalist, blogger about journalism and visiting lecturer in online at the University of Leeds. In a forthcoming post he talks about whether you can make money from hyperlocal journalism. Saddleworth News is now a part of the digital journalism course at University Campus Oldham.

This article is adapted with kind permission from a forthcoming book, What Do We Mean by Local? Grass-roots Journalism - Its Death and Rebirth, to be published by Abramis later this month.

The bilingual future of BBC foreign reporting

2012-02-28T13:58:51+00:00

As someone who has been involved in the training and development of staff in the BBC's Language Services over the past six years, I have long believed the talent there is one of the Corporation's untapped assets.

At a time when BBC Newsgathering is having to reduce and in some places withdraw international presence for budget reasons, BBC News will be relying more and more on Language Service reporters to fill that gap.

This is already happening. In Baghdad, for instance, the correspondent post is now a bilingual one: from March, Rami Ruhayem of BBC Arabic will be the BBC's man in Iraq. Rami will be filing in both Arabic and English for the whole of BBC News. Later this year the same is likely to happen in Beirut and Colombo, followed by Lagos, Nairobi and Islamabad.

What does this mean for the bilingual reporter, the BBC and its international news coverage? For the reporter it means re-evaluating just who the audience is. While you might not have to convince an Arabic audience of the significance of political change in Iraq, that may not be the same for the BBC Breakfast audience or that of BBC Radio 5 Live.

When I was devising the training for the bilingual reporters, I felt at times it was like trying to build Superman. Not only do these reporters have to deliver on as many BBC platforms as exist, without in many cases any production support, they also have to do their dispatch, online piece, TV track, radio package, two-way, tweet, and whatever else is requested, in two languages - and for multiple audiences.

And they have to do this with an excellent command of English, both for broadcast and writing, and in an accent that will get past the Radio 4 audience.

That is a very tall order.

During the training we mocked up a breaking news scenario. I asked a senior domestic newsroom editor to provide feedback on the reporter's English dispatches. They had also done the same in Swahili and Arabic.

For the BBC itself this is a big step, but arguably one that is long overdue. Take Rana Jawad, for example. For six years she quietly reported from Libya for BBC Africa English, until last year when the Arab Spring changed all that. Notwithstanding her own security situation, who better to report on what the revolution really meant for Libyans other than her? Of Lebanese origin, she could understand what was going on in Arabic; ask people how they really felt. She could read the blogs and tweets and understand the protests outside.

The same goes for Kevin Mwachiro (above) in Kenya or Tomi Oladipo in Nigeria. Not only do they speak the language, they know the region pretty well. The audience there can easily identify with them. This might not matter too much to the content, but it does matter to the image the BBC presents to the outside world. Look at how BBC World has tried to diversify its presentation to better reflect the world we live in and broadcast to.

There will be crunch points. Not least for competing demands on big stories. And we will have to see what is realistic to expect from a bilingual correspondent. But the BBC is in a unique position. It already has a wealth of excellent journalists who, in addition to English, can report in Farsi, Somali, Burmese, Arabic, Urdu, Spanish, among others. They are not there to replace but to work alongside well established correspondents such as Jeremy Bowen and Allan Little, with the added advantage that their language skills - English apart - are likely to be better.

Joanne Episcopo is the BBC's development executive for global languages. She is responsible for the training and development of bilingual reporters. Joanne previously trained journalists for the launch of the BBC's Persian and Arabic Television services.

Print and broadcast media converge on mobile

2012-02-03T15:48:48+00:00

Is the Manchester Evening News still a newspaper? I only ask because I don't think Paul Gallagher - talking to news:rewired on Skype from Manchester - mentioned anything about a newspaper.

He's head of online at the paper and his presentation made clear that the Manchester Evening News is no longer confined to Manchester or the evening, and perhaps it has never restricted itself to news. (In fact, it's "the country's largest circulating daily regional newspaper", according to its parent company MEN Media.)

When online media first came along more than a decade ago, journalists working for broadcasters found themselves writing stories for websites - and needing to check their spelling after deciding on a spelling-free career in radio or TV.

The reverse process, of journalists used to writing for print media moving into audio and video, took a little longer, but there's no question it is now complete.

Gallagher described how, about 18 months ago, all MEN reporters were given Nokia N8 phones and told to go and report in whatever way they could. It seems like a thousand flowers have bloomed:

- Video uploaded by journalists has attracted some of MEN's largest online audiences - 16,000 recently, for instance, for what Gallagher, with refreshing candour, described as "essentially a 30-second clip of some police tape".

It's a slow, two-way pan, to the sound of traffic noise. The reason viewers were so curious is that this was the scene of a gruesome murder.

- Stills from the Nokia phones are another source of content. During recent protests, 16 MEN journalists sent back 109 pictures from across the city, which produced 12,000 online views.

- Live blogging from every council meeting has become a feature of MEN reporting. Reporters can also curate content, pulling in other social media input for their reports.

- Audio can be used for interviews, using Audioboo

- Geotagging allows the tracking of reporters ("not to keep tabs on them", Gallagher hastened to add). But a reporter's live journey through a transport trouble spot, for instance, can be tracked on the website.

And there's still more to come: Gallagher said he wants to develop livestreaming from mobiles using Bambuser. Early experiments have included sending a reporter up onto the roof to film a sunset which people had been commenting on.

"We're only at the beginning of using mobile phones for newsgathering," said Gallagher.

The idea that newspapers and broadcasters are converging in mobile technology was vividly demonstrated when the next speaker turned out to be Sky News correspondent Nick Martin, who gave an impressive demo of how he now reports using... a mobile phone.

Footage from the sessions at news:rewired is being filmed by the College of Journalism and will be posted on this website shortly. You can also follow the sessions during the day on the College of Journalism Twitter account.

Guyana air crash: new media loses out to old

2011-08-05T09:41:49+00:00

Flight BW 523 came to a screeching halt beyond the end of the runway at Cheddi Jagan International Airport, Guyana, at 1.32am. It broke in two. The pictures tell the story.

But all 163 passengers and five crew escaped largely unharmed in this 'miracle'. Just three are still hospitalised.

The reporting of the story makes for some object lessons for journalism.

Within two hours, President Bharrat Jagdeo and an entourage of ministers had arrived at the crash scene to direct operations. So too had some of the local press, woken from their beds.

The first story I can find is timed at 2.12am on the normally excellent Demerara Waves (left). I saw it at 6.30am, followed by brief updates on the websites of the two major local newspapers, the Kaieteur News and the Stabroek News, mainly consisting of a dramatic picture and some copy. The morning editions of both papers managed to get news of the crash in too.

But then silence for the rest of Saturday.

No live blogs on their sites; no updates to the first story. The Guyanese press simply do not yet 'get' the internet. (My new collection of edited papers with the University of Guyana, 'Face the Future Guyana', covers just this.)

It took the world press to run and develop the story. BBC News online led with it all day on its World News. Others far away but entrepreneurial found new angles based on first-hand reporting from Guyana by Bert Wilkinson, the excellent local Associated Press correspondent, and using Google Earth.

But the event which put oxygen into the reporting was the arrival of Trinidad and Tobago prime minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar at the crash site on Saturday evening.

Caribbean Airlines is her national carrier. She was tearful and powerful. More, she had the Trinidad press corps with her. It is sharper and more competitive than its Guyanese counterpart. That was reflected in the Sunday Trini papers, and even more so in the Monday ones, which had up to six pages of analysis, new angles including Trini relatives of the crew and speculation on the cause of the crash.

Guyana's online press was meanwhile all but silent. The printed press caught up a bit on Sunday but limited itself to pure reportage. Monday's was not much better. Some resorted to their default position of blaming President Jagdeo for tardiness. Much of the press in Guyana sees itself as the real political opposition.

It has been intriguing being here at the centre of a world media story. But the lessons are clear: the big boys do it better; they have more skills, more nous and, most important, more ambition. Much for the local media (and others) to learn.

John Mair is a senior lecturer in broadcasting at Coventry University. He is in his native Guyana on an applied research fellowship at the university.

What makes a great newsroom?

2011-04-18T15:08:37+00:00

Big question that.

I started wondering during a recent tour of the stunning new BBC W1 building conducted by the affable Andy Griffee, the BBC Director of W1.

The new newsroom is certainly shaping up, and the first journalists should arrive towards the end of the year. In 18 months, there will be more than 5,000 BBC staff there, including journalists from BBC Radio, TV and Online, serving World Service, Domestic and Foreign News and Current Affairs. The Director-General and the Director of News, too.

Much of the BBC's journalism will be under one roof for the first time. Currently, there is just one huge space - enough for 19 London double-decker buses, we were told - where the nerve centre, the multimedia newsroom, will be, with some more empty spaces above it and off it: for editing, graphics, correspondents, back-up staff and bosses' lairs.

How will the elegant building translate into the news epicentre of the world's most respected broadcaster? And what news will it be broadcasting in the uncertain future? Those are the real questions.

The raw material will come from platforms that are multiplying by the minute: fibre-optic lines, mobile, video, audio, Twitter and Facebook, and whatever replaces them. The panoply of sources and how they are accessed is hard to conceive, and harder to manage. A veritable tsunami of information will have to be turned into journalism which an audience understands.

Who better to do that than an army of well-trained journalists? It's for them to make the calls on the validity and importance of stories and how they should be covered, at what length and by whom.

Any news organisation, however sophisticated, will only be as good as the talent it employs. Broadcast journalism is now a hot-desk trade, and future journalists will be expected to be multi-skilled: adept at video, audio, online and text.

Newsgathering, the 'back-office functions', will be much more rationalised across the whole Corporation in the new W1 world. Nation shall speak peace to nation; programme to programme; and newsroom to newsroom. All will be one, at last.

But the BBC must watch that there is not too much branding and homogeneity in the output because of that big tent. Audiences appreciate subtlety and variety. Rationalise the input, but make sure the output is geared to different audiences.

The new W1 Broadcasting House has spectacular views down Regent Street and over the West End rooftops. It bodes well for the future of BBC journalism worldwide. But, most of all, this big hole will need adequate public service funding plus clear directions of travel from above.

Andy Griffee and the builders have provided the tools. It's now down to others to use them to the maximum broadcasting effect.

John Mair is a senior lecturer in journalism at Coventry University and a former BBC Current Affairs producer.

Journalism and parajournalism

2011-04-06T10:08:40+00:00

It sounded like a neologism that could become common currency in the debate about technology's impact on news, jobs and institutions: "parajournalism".

It fell from the lips of Kevin Marsh, creator of this website and its editor until he left the BBC last week. He was referring to the plethora of news and information sources that threaten the authority and professional skills of journalists in traditional roles.

Marsh was on a panel, chaired by Raymond Snoddy, convened to launch a book on the future of journalism. And he was bullish about its future, with the caveat that the term needs to resist wider and vaguer definitions to fit with technological changes.

For Marsh, journalism is "a very specialised activity", culturally vital but "only a part of the information universe" and characterised by "persistence, honesty, judgment and moral salience" - just as it always was, whatever else is going on around it.

On the other side of Snoddy, and the other side of the debate, sat Laura Oliver, community coordinator for Guardian News and Media, and Judith Townend, a freelance journalist now doing a PhD on the subject.

Oliver works with readers' input to the Guardian, and Townend is up to speed on all the new technologies. But neither claimed to have a vision of how the redefining of journalism, as job, business or creative activity, is going to turn out:

"We need to come up with some solutions," said Townend, "because the ones we have got aren't tenable."

Marsh's characterisation of the output of much new media as "gossip with the volume turned up" chimed with the mood of the assembled company. Newsreader Martin Lewis, in the audience, sounded appalled at the declining audience for the main television news programmes - only a quarter of Britain's adult population, he calculated.

But another audience member, Pete Clifton, former new media boss for BBC News, pointed out that 15 million people turned to the BBC News website on the day of the Japan earthquake.

If it's a question of how to pay for journalism in an everything-for-free online world, Marsh said there's probably Â£10 billion a year in the British broadcast market, which should be enough to pay for the odd piece of solid work. He said too many BBC journalists are run off their feet, servicing so many BBC outlets that they barely have time to gather information.

But Townend could testify to the lack of funds for journalism: she's relieved her main job is now in academia, having witnessed and reported on the economic difficulties the industry faces.

Some of those present in the room above a London restaurant on a chilly Tuesday night were journalists who had contributed the 31 chapters of the book that was being launched. The experience did not encourage them to look to the world of education as a source of revenue or a swanky lifestyle. John Mair of Coventry University, co-editor of the book, had been as good as his word when he cajoled their scripts, promising only a free book and a glass of wine as payment.

But how can research and writing maintain its value when it has become so easy? It took me only two clicks to find that "parajournalism" is not, in fact, a new word. According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, it was first used in 1965, when it meant "journalism that is heavily coloured by the opinions of the reporter". Perhaps Marsh has at least revived it with a new meaning.

Face the Future: Tools for the Modern Media Age, edited by John Mair and Richard Lance Keeble, is published this week by Abramis.

My direct line to Benghazi

2011-02-23T17:49:18+00:00

Last Saturday night I got a Facebook message from a writer living in the North of England. He gave me the number of a contact in Benghazi and asked me to make use of it to help get word out of Libya at the height of the violence, or to pass it on.

I am a freelance journalist but not a workaday news reporter. I record packages for the Sunday Sequence programme on Radio Ulster and write for the Belfast Telegraph. Neither of these outlets were places where I could turn a big fee with a scoop from Benghazi.

I am not instinctively a scoop-grabbing hack, anyway, so I passed the information on, feeling I had discharged my responsibility. Then, thinking that was not enough and not expecting to get through anyway, I dialled the number.

"Hello."

There he was, Ahmed.

Ahmed was in a slightly frantic state of mind because he had watched Libyan soldiers fire heavy machine guns into the crowds of protesters. He had been to the hospital and been told that 120 people had died in the city that day. And he had driven home in fear of soldiers on the streets firing at cars.

I recorded our conversation by holding a digital recorder to the speaker phone, then uploaded the recording, unedited, to my blog, and went back downstairs thinking that this blogging business is a lot easier than straightforward current affairs journalism.

Consider what I would have to have done to get that interview on air as a reporter on a radio programme:

I would have had to consult a producer, who would have asked a few awkward questions like: who is the interviewee? Can you trust him?

The producer would have listened to the recording afterwards and made a few more points.

The sound quality is poor. It is too long.

With technical and scheduling considerations in mind, the producer might have consented to using two minutes of the ten that I had recorded.

If I had been a programme presenter, things might have been different, but I'm not.

And editorial thoughts would have occurred to the producer as well. Do we need to balance this?

Well, perhaps even the objective perspective would allow that an alternative view of the right to shoot protesting civilians is not to be accorded particular respect, but the question would be considered.

I was beginning to think that I work better without a producer.

I had enjoyed the ease with which I had got through to Ahmed and conveyed his story without having to so much as edit a cough out of it. But I had brought journalistic habits to the interview, at first.

I called Ahmed every night after that, and used a recorder taking feed direct from the phone line for better clarity.

I realised quickly another difference between the journalistic and the blogging approach. A journalist will hold a distance from the interviewee. There will usually be a preliminary chat in which the journalist is informal and even jocular, but there will be a designated moment at which the interview begins, and then the journalist will hold personality in check and interrogate. Interviewing for a blog doesn't work like that.

The blogger doesn't have a distinct interviewing persona. Not only does the blogger not answer to a producer; there is no need to even answer to any professional self image.

Still, common sense said this is about Ahmed, not me, so keep him talking; put direct questions to him. Let him say enough for the listeners to make an assessment of his personality, his integrity. For how else are they to judge him?

I, as blogger, had no authorial voice; no institutional reputation or backup. It wasn't only because I was free of scheduling that I could let Ahmed talk; I had to let him talk at length so listeners would get to know him - for the decision on whether to take him seriously or not was going to be exclusively theirs.

And we grew closer. He said he looked forward to my calls.

Comments on Facebook asked me to convey solidarity to him. It isn't for a journalist to join in common cause with a political activist.

Then I hit the drawbacks of the blogging approach.

The myth about blogging and social networking is that an individual at home on a computer can speak to the world. Actually, I would have been reaching a bigger audience on hospital radio.

And that wasn't fair to Ahmed, who was a busy and frightened revolutionary activist with a responsibility for getting news out to the world about life in Benghazi. He had shared the premature celebrations around the 'fall of Gaddafi'. He had described how people were divided on whether they should now return weapons to the commandos and trust them for protection.

Then the big media got interested.

Radio Ulster's Talkback called and asked if it could have Ahmed's number too, and then I saw another difference between journalism and blogging illustrated.

Professional journalists feel ownership of their stories. The producer who asked me for Ahmed did so very sheepishly; expecting to be refused.

I was only happy to pass on my new Libyan friend.

I wished I had done it more effectively when I first got his number. He was entitled to his audience. And there, for all the liberating potential of blogging, was the problem: if you need to get a message to the world, the old-fashioned media still does it better.

Malachi O'Doherty is the BBC Writer in Residence at Queens University Belfast. You can hear his interviews with Ahmed on writerslog.net.

Face the future, at last

2010-11-29T11:25:48+00:00

After my experiences at the Society of Editors in Glasgow, the Coventry Conversations/BBC College of Journalism Face the Future: Tools for the Media Future conference last week was a refreshing change, and felt like the right direction of travel.

Many of the big beasts were there in person or by Skype - Jeff Jarvis, Paul Bradshaw, Steve Hermann - and the afternoon was chaired by CoJo's admirably sceptical Kevin Marsh.

All the modern tools and platforms were used to get it from Coventry to the big wide world: live blog on cutoday.wordpress.com; live tweets @covcons2010 #facethe future; live and recorded webcast at bbc.co.uk/journalism; podcasts at www.coventry.ac.uk/itunesU.

So no excuse not to drop in, then or now. And it works: an extraordinary 35,000 have now downloaded the CoJo/Coventry Conversations Afghanistan conference from March this year.

But what is the digital future for journalism? Truth is, nobody knows; though there are some signposts being built along the way. One thing is near certain: the age of chopping down trees and spreading ink on them is coming to a close, probably sooner rather than later.

The future will be on a screen - in text, in audio, in still or moving pictures. The internet does not have to be a threat to papers. Mail Online has shown that by passing 50 million hits a month.

- And it can be used creatively. Paul Bradshaw demonstrated that with his Help Me Investigate website.

- And for profit, as Marc Reeves does with Thebusinessdesk.com day in, day out in Birmingham.

- And to generate stories, as Judith Townend showed with her presentation on the twitterati, which brought the phenomenon out of the cyber-Hampstead ghetto, away from just journos and their friends.

If you listen to local newspaper editors, some of whom regard the internet as, at best, a necessary evil, then the BBC and BBC News online is the elephant in the digital room. But the BBC was building this room while they were reaping fat profits and not investing in digital.

Steve Hermann, Editor of BBC News online, tried to allay some commercial competitor fears.

Julian March, newly promoted to Head of Digital at Sky News, was simple and straightforward in selling the value of multiplatform journalism. He cited the Sky News series Talking to the Taliban on TV, on the internet, and interactive, as a great example.

Jeff Jarvis, the guru of much modern journalism, was Delphic but inspiring; and the young Oliver Snoddy, just inspiring. Both came live from New York City.

All in all a tonic for journalists of the future.

Now, for me, it's back in time, and technology, to produce the 'academic' book of the conference due out next March (from Abramis).

Face the future, colleagues. It is the only way ...

Video of the sessions can be seen here.

Jeremy Hunt - media ownership and localness

2010-09-28T13:14:32+00:00

A model's emerging for what form future local TV might take, if the UK Government decides it's worth going ahead with it. The Culture Secretary, Jeremy Hunt, will speak at the Royal Television Society conference, and is expected to say that an expansion of super-fast broadband will help encourage enterprises such as Witney TV. Run by four enthusiasts, the West Oxfordshire internet-based video news service started life as a sort of parish magazine on the web. But it came to prominence when one of its enthusiastic citizen journalists scooped an interview with BBC Top Gear presenter Jeremy Clarkson. Hunt was being interviewed by John Humphrys about the Coalition's plans for the future of media - and in particular media ownership - in the UK. The question of whether local TV could be profitable, regardless of which platform it uses, is in dispute. Jeremy Hunt agreed that advertising alone isn't going to generate sufficient income, and goes on to tell Humphrys: "Yesterday I met Jeff Bewkes, the chief executive of Time Warner, and he said that in the US his TV channels only get 50% of their revenue from advertising. They get a lot of it from the fees they receive from cable companies." A lot of income to local TV companies in other countries comes from local sporting rights ... and there is a whole local advertising and support market that we haven't developed in this country at all ... and what we want to do is to try and liberalise the market to allow those possibilities to emerge, to try and get a much stronger local voice in our broadcasting sector." Jeremy Hunt has set up an advisory panel to look into ways of establishing a new generation of grassroots TV stations.

Where is your mobile phone?

2010-09-01T09:20:35+00:00

It's almost certain to be within a metre of you right now, and it's more likely than not that you left it on while you slept last night.

Those are just two nuggets of information I've come across while working at the College of Journalism on a project designed to raise journalists' awareness of the ever-growing importance of the mobile.

Clearly, a high-end mobile is a key weapon in the armoury of the modern journalist, as it can act as a camera to capture still or moving images, a digital voice recorder, and a mobile computer for blogging and checking information on websites. Some journalists are even known to use it to call the newsroom to let people know how they're getting on with their report.

But the popularity of the mobile phone worldwide also has profound implications for broadcasters, changing the way the public consume BBC output and interact with media more generally.

To call the mobile phone 'popular' is something of an understatement; 'ubiquitous' would be more accurate:

- The mobile phone is the most widely owned piece of technology on the planet. Ever.

- Although the first commercially available mobile only appeared around 30 years ago, it has sold in greater quantities than anything comparable - more than radios, more than televisions, and many, many more than computers.

- Figures from Wireless Intelligence - a subsidiary of the GSM Association which represents more than 700 mobile phone operators worldwide - showed that there are now 5 billion active mobile phone connections. (The population of the world is about 6.8 billion.)

- In late 2008 there were 'only' 4 billion - which meant that the next 18 months or so saw a growth rate of 33%. With similar growth predicted over the next 18 months, the planet is likely to see 6 billion active connections by early 2012.

This isn't just a 'developed world' phenomenon. But there are impressive stats for countries like the UK too:

- In the UK, the penetration rate is around 130% - the number of active mobile phone numbers exceeds the size of the population.

- Estonia has 188%, the highest penetration rate in Europe; while the United Arab Emirates has the highest worldwide, at 230% (according to the International Telecommunications Union).

In Brazil the figure is 90%, India 60% and China 55%. The overall figure for Africa, the least affluent continent, is still 50%.

Vast swathes of the planet which largely missed out on both landline phones and home computers have gone straight to the object that can do both: the mobile phone. Some countries are seeing innovations which have yet to take off in many developed countries. For example, in Kenya, where 80% of people don't have a traditional bank account, 10 million transfer money by mobile phone.

And the rapid growth in mobile phones is resulting in a fundamental shift in the way information is accessed via the internet. It has been predicted that, within three or four years, more people worldwide will go to the internet via a mobile browser on their phone than through their desktop computer (Source: Morgan Stanley).

The majority of the population will be able to find out what they need to know, wherever and whenever they need to - not just when they are behind a desk, at home or through their TV or radio. The increasing sophistication of mobiles also means that when they get that information they will be able to share it with friends and colleagues far more easily.

All of this has distinct and important consequences for journalism, which I will cover in a subsequent blog post.

UGC five years on

2010-07-06T19:17:37+00:00

Exactly five years ago, a group of us were sitting in the BBC News website newsroom wondering just what we should be doing.

We were a small team set up to test the idea that there might be some value in tapping into the audience's growing ability to use their mobile phones to send us pictures and texts of potentially significant news events - and then find ways to incorporate them into the BBC's own journalism.

The idea for the project had come from our experience of the tsunami on Boxing Day 2004, when the BBC had received thousands of - largely unsolicited - emails, pictures and videos that were testimony to a dramatic and tragic story.

The proposition - to set up a User Generated Content (UGC) Hub - had met with some scepticism from senior quarters in BBC News and very nearly didn't happen.

But the events of 7 July 2005 proved to be a turning point.

The story infamously started off as reports of a signalling failure or electrical fault on the Tube. We were experienced enough to know that we should start asking the audience if they were caught up in it and, if so, to tell us what they knew. So we 'stuck a postform' on the first take of the News website's story and waited to see what would come in.

Within minutes our email inbox was out of control - it was clear that something was happening, but we had no idea how to manage the huge number of emails we were receiving and the information they were giving us.

Then, slowly, pictures also started to come in. I remember opening one email, late morning, with a picture that was to become one of the iconic images of the day - the picture of the passengers walking down a dark tunnel towards the light (below). I rang down to News 24 to tell them we had this amazing image, only to be told 'no thanks, we've got one like that already'.

By the end of the day we had received several hundred images and videos along with several thousand emails. It was only with hindsight that we were able to make sense of them and the impact they were likely to have on our journalism.

Later, when I analysed what the audience had told us about the momentous events of that day, I discovered we had credible intelligence of every single one of the four bombs by 9:58am - including one that told us of the Tavistock Square bomb by 9:55am; just ten minutes after it had happened. At that time the BBC, and the rest of the media, were still reporting that there had been some kind of signalling or electrical fault. These erroneous reports moved one eyewitness, Lou Stern, to send in his pictures of the bus bomb because, as he put it, it clearly wasn't a signalling fault.

Five years on and much has happened since that day. One of the most iconic images, that to my mind defines where the balance of power now lies, is of a defiant anti-government protester holding up a placard in Tehran in June 2009 (below), warning the Ahmadinejad government that, while they could ban international media, they could not ban "our cell phones and cameras".

And that's the point. Was what happened in Tehran a Twitter revolution? Of course not: no-one ever seriously claimed it was. But mobile phones and social media - in particular Twitter and YouTube - gave the protesters a voice and a platform on which to speak to the global media and tell their story.

For the BBC, that pilot project of five years ago has turned into a 20-plus person, 24/7 team that has developed an incredibly sophisticated and nuanced understanding of the 'who, what, when, where and whys' of 'social newsgathering' or, put another way, 'finding good stuff on the web'.

It's been, at times, a rocky road. We've made a few mistakes, but established some key principles that guide our decision-making when using UGC and working with our audience.

We always check out each and every image, video or key contact before we broadcast them, to make sure they are genuine and to resolve any copyright issues. When it's impossible to do that - such as with content sent from Iran or Burma - when contacting the contributors is very hard to do or might put them in danger, we interrogate the images, using BBC colleagues who know the area and the story to help identify them.

We have stopped many potential contributors from putting themselves at risk in gathering material. In June, we told several people who were planning to go into the danger areas in Bangkok that we would not use any material they sent us if they did, and persuaded them not to go.

Now of course social newsgathering encompasses not just trying to get our own audience to share their material with us, but searching social media and the rest of the web whenever a story breaks.

When the UGC Hub started, social media hadn't taken off, and the focus of our work was exclusively on building links with our own audience. But the power of Facebook and YouTube first became apparent with the Burma uprisings in September 2007 and was reinforced by the role that YouTube played as a global noticeboard during the Iran protests.

Today, as I have written previously, Twitter is an essential tool for breaking and researching stories. Frequently, a story will break on Twitter before appearing a few minutes later on the 'traditional' agency wires.

And in case there was any doubt about how important social newsgathering has become, Peter Horrocks, Head of the BBC's Global News division, reinforced the point earlier in the year when he said controversially, but not inaccurately, to journalists:

"This isn't just a kind of fad from someone who's an enthusiast of technology. I'm afraid you're not doing your job if you can't do those things. It's not discretionary."

He's right of course: the key skills shouldn't just rest with a core team. The BBC is spending a lot of time training its journalists in these skills, as are other news organisations like Sky and Channel 4.

But what about the other side of the equation: the audience, or users, or social networkers, or even 'citizen journalists'?

Citizen journalism was always a difficult term that described everything from eyewitness accounts or accidental journalism, to bloggers. The latest manifestation is the growing hyperlocal movement, or community journalism, or news bloggers - sites like Pits 'n' Pots in Stoke, or the Ventnor blog on the Isle of Wight.

They are building a loyal following in their local communities by reporting on local events and stories, providing a service that many would call journalism. But most of these hyperlocalists angrily deny they are journalists, perhaps understandably not wanting to be put in the same category as some of Fleet Street's finest.

So where are we five years on? The BBC College of Journalism has just published a series of films within its guide to Starting as a Citizen Journalist, offering advice and guidance on how to engage in 'citizen journalism' effectively.

The films cover technical and practical issues as well as legal and ethical ones. They are not designed to tell journalists what to do, but to give them something to think about when they go about their journalism, in whatever form it takes.

The bottom line is that the web and now social media have given everybody the power to tell their own story. That doesn't mean mainstream media is redundant, far from it, but it does mean it has to adapt.

Blogs are not real journalism

2010-04-12T09:47:36+00:00

Once again I've found myself defending journalism against its most ardent critics - journalists.

I was at City University's School of Journalism to present the main findings of the Science Media Centre report on the future of science in the media. Not for the first time I sat next to brilliant science reporters who insisted that any old blogger could do what they do and that the blogosphere is teaming with people reporting, investigating and telling truth to power as well as, if not better than, journalism does.

Despite the fact that most of the panel and almost the entire audience were against me, I'm not buying it. I know I always sound like some ancient Luddite in this discussion (tips on how to sound modern while criticising the blogosphere on a postcard, please - oops, sorry! - posted on my blog), but I think there is a difference between journalism and blogging. And dismissing that distinction when journalism is under threat is not clever.

Don't get me wrong, I love blogs - both as writer and reader. My life is hugely enriched by the daily updates from my own favourite bloggers, but they are not engaged in journalism. Most blogs are self-consciously the strongly held views of opinionated people about their chosen topics.

In fact, that's precisely the beauty of them. In the old days, if the Guardian or Telegraph rejected our rantings, the world would probably never hear them. Now we have created our own medium to get our brilliant insights out there. And of course some blogs may be true, and some may even nod to objectivity and balance, but the blogosphere would be a sadly diminished place if every view expressed had to be balanced, fact-checked, sub-edited and all those other peculiarities of good journalism. In other words, blogs work to a separate set of rules.

The irony is that it's often fans of the blogosphere who end up balking at its extremes and calling for new ways to regulate the web or separate out responsible, accurate blogs from the irresponsible ones - a major preoccupation for those who care about science or public health.

But these calls take us full circle, to why we need something called journalism - perhaps now more than ever. Regulating and policing the blogosphere would kill everything that is good about it. We should simply accept that there is the blogosphere, and there is journalism, and the more sound and fury on the blogosphere, the more need for journalism to do its job - to select, verify, correct, edit, analyse, balance and all those old-fashioned things that journalists are trained to do.

The debate reminded me of the excitement a few years ago about 'citizen journalists'. In the same way that journalists now rush to transfer their job title to anyone with a blog, so ordinary people caught up in often terrible news events - like the 7 July bombings and the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes became 'citizen journalists'.

But there was a fly in the ointment: with seven or eight 'citizen journalists' reporting on the De Menezes shooting, there were seven or eight conflicting accounts. Some of the 'journalists' saw him walking calmly; others saw him running; and one saw him jumping over the ticket barrier. It was left to real journalists to weigh up these different accounts and find other sources to verify the conflicting stories. Thanks to new media, people caught up in these events can transform and enrich journalism in new and exciting ways, but that does not make them journalists

The fact that people can now communicate loads of interesting and important facts and opinions directly to the public is fantastic. In our report for government, we found scientists using blogs in ways that will enhance the public's understanding of and engagement with science. But they are not journalists and, to the journalist in my audience who says that what we call all this stuff doesn't matter, I say words do matter - especially words that denote an entire trade built up around a set of norms.

BBC gives way on local, promising more links

2010-03-08T12:40:05+00:00

Ever since the BBC first mooted plans to move into ultra-local video news five years ago, regional newspapers have been ultra sensitive about the corporation's local news plans.

Like the BBC, local newspapers have to move quickly onto as many media-delivery platforms as possible if they are going to survive. And they see any move from the BBC into more local services as potentially smothering their own video news plans.

So on the whole local press journalists, and journalists from the commercial sector in general, have welcomed BBC Director General Mark Thompson's strategic review.

Local radio news will be beefed up says Thompson, but the BBC will become no more local than it already is.

Similarly, journalists elsewhere in the commercial sector will welcome news that the BBC is to keep its website news output "generalist", rather than going too deeply into the niches that more specialist publishers can exploit.

The danger, of course, is that the areas that the BBC leaves to grow fallow instead become barren.

In 2008, in the wake of huge opposition from the regional press, the local video news plan was scrapped by the BBC Trust.

Then came the recession and, far from regional newspapers ramping up their own video news efforts, there has been a retreat from multimedia over the last year as a reduced number of staff have struggled to get the core print products out.

There is a danger that the BBC will become the only game in town. That's not only bad for the commercial sector, but bad for a BBC which already faces the criticism of being complacent.

So that's why, in my view, the most important part of Thompson's review for journalists was his promise to transform BBC Online into "a window on the web" with an external link on every page and at least double the current rate of "click-throughs" to external sites.

Arguably, this doesn't go anywhere near far enough.

Blogging-influenced story techniques are transforming online journalism, making it far more transparent by providing links through to sources wherever possible and enabling journalists to tip their virtual hat to competitors when they have something useful to add.

The BBC should be peppering its online content with external links and leading the way when it comes to completely transparent online news.

Thompson has said that BBC Online will have 50% fewer sections or "top level directories" by 2012, and 25% less funding.

But I don't think anyone believes that it won't continue to be the pre-eminent UK news operation online.

Thompson has said that making the best journalism in the world is the BBC's number-one content priority, so that has to also mean creating the best news website in the world.

Through more linking out, it can also be a shop window for the best of UK journalism outside the BBC.

Dominic Ponsford is the Editor of Press Gazette.

The future of BBC funding

2010-03-08T10:06:06+00:00

An item on BBC Radio 4's Today programme (Saturday 6 March 2010) provided a possible insight into how the BBC will be funded in the future.

Presenter John Humphrys discussed the pros and cons of a compulsory licence fee with a group of teenagers, who had some interesting opinions.

Listen to the item and draw your own conclusions about how public service broadcasting in the UK will be financed in the future.

The group was split roughly 50/50 in favour of retaining the licence fee.

Here are some nuggets from the conversation:

"Some advertisements are interesting and useful."

"I do actually enjoy watching films on the BBC because ... there are no breaks."

"The TV, that's something our mums found amazing, whereas the internet - we find that amazing."

"It's good to have a TV but you don't necessarily need it."

"You don't really have to watch TV a lot nowadays, because BBC's got BBC iPlayer, so you can just watch that on the Internet ..."

The reality behind 'the new media election'

2010-03-05T09:44:27+00:00

2010's has already been much touted as the 'new media election', and it was the subject of a panel discussion at City University on Tuesday - ironically the day old media announced the ground rules for its own ground-breaking election moment: the leaders' debates.

Evan Davies chaired a lively panel including the BBC's Nick Robinson, Labour and Conservative bloggers and a Google representative. They identified a couple of changes new media has brought.

First, email has massively encouraged activism, both by lowering the barrier to entry for activists, and driving support among existing activists. Obama campaign activist Matthew MacGregor, of Blue State Digital, said one in five Obama voters were on the campaign's email list (although, ironically, most of the Obama email donations were used to pay for traditional television ads).

Second, visual new media - camera phones - can have a sudden impact. Nick Robinson said that, although it's rare for new media to affect news, camera phones are the exception because they capture gaffs and flashes of anger which can instantly change a politician's fortunes.

Google's DJ Collins pointed out that the same could be said for Twitter and YouTube's ability to demolish all the hard work of PR professionals in an instant - as happened with Cameron's "vote for change" slogan.

Robinson was otherwise sceptical. He quoted a recent example of the power of new media for good and bad: for good - the anti-bullying group was instantly taken apart on Twitter; but for bad - at the same time a poll on the Conservative Home website erroneously stated the Tory lead had increased.

But, more importantly, he felt that new media downgrades issues in favour of personal accusation. One could say, of course, that Sunday tabloids already do plenty of this, but he pleaded for media space for voters to ask "what does that mean for me?" and getting an answer. That, he said, was his job.

Also mentioned was the "bubble up" effect of the internet - such as Sarah Brown's website, now a phenomenon in its own right and a way of reaching women voters disaffected by Labour's record on Iraq. Perhaps public anger over MPs' expenses will "bubble up" during the campaign. And the internet will be a vehicle for the continuation of chatter after the television debates, as it was after the Piers Morgan/Brown interview. But it was left to none other than a Lib Dem local councillor to make a vital missing point!

He described how the internet had enabled ordinary people in his area to organise to keep the local library open - thus proving the real political power of new media: its ability to create communities of interest, which in the end is what politics is all about.

Westminster media village eat your heart out!

For another take on the 'new media election', see here. Or here, for a College of Journalism Election briefing event.