Online journalism is in fact about the traditional roots of journalism

The students have gone so I should have more time to be dedicating to blogging here, but unfortunately there always seems to be something sucking my time. This week it has been working on my blog post for Project TOTO. Project TOTO is a fabulous program run by Action Aid aimed at giving communities in developing nations the skills to tell their own stories via social media and other online tools. Do check it out – it’s a wonderful program and of course something right up my alley. I have been shortlisted as a nominee to be the next outreach blogger (essentially the person who will go into a community and help share these skills) and as a result have found myself undertaking challenges to prove myself worthy of the role.

Our first challenge has been to write a blog post linking poverty and climate change. I have spent a lot of time this week wondering why I am doing this. It’s not like I have a shortage of things to do and here I am putting myself in a position to be judged. But then I found myself thinking two key thoughts. Firstly, I am putting myself through this because it is such a wonderful project to support. But secondly, it has occurred to me that it is good to put myself in the position I put my students in. We are required to write a post which  explains “clearly the link between climate change and poverty”, using appropriate facts and figures. The post is meant to, of course, be engaging and not exceed 1000 words. Firstly, let’s just make it really clear that 1000 words is way too much for a blog – reading a block of text that large on a screen just doesn’t work. But as I have been working to try to make a succinct, interesting and factually relevant post it has also occurred to me that while these are the core principles for writing online (I have blogged about this before)  they are also the traditional skills at the core of all journalism. Yes I know, this isn’t an earth-shatteringly new concept, but it is worth reiterating, again and again. So much time is spent lamenting the changes that the digital landscape has wrought to journalism, that we aren’t spending enough time considering the imperatives of online can help focus a journalist to their core skills. A journalist should take a topic (quite often a complex topic) break it down and make it easy to understand. They should collect and present facts and use the most interesting item as the hook to get the reader into the story. This is the process that we should undertake when writing for online, whether that be a factual news story or an opinion-based blog post. And this is a process, that as cursory glance at The Age shows, is sometimes forgotten in the so-called traditional or quality press (50-word convoluted intro anyone?).

So yes, the online medium is changing the method of publishing/broadcasting our news and the skills and role of the journalist, but it is also centrally focused on what I believe is the core principle of journalism: telling a ‘true’ story in a succinct and easy to understand manner, while capturing the reader’s attention and interest with the most interesting/ newsworthy element.

* For all my students rubbing their hands with glee at the prospect of me getting a chance to experience life in their shoes, I am sure the nominee blog posts will be published  and judged on the Project TOTO website soon.

Why should regional media embrace online?

Photo coutesy of PhotoPhreak (@Flickr)

What’s more important embracing change or protecting current revenues?

This may seem like an old question. A question which has been debated in the media industry to death – should we embrace the new opportunities offered by the digital media landscape or protect current revenue makers- traditional media. In fact many have debated that attempts to erect pay walls (comments directed squarely at Murdoch) are an attempt not to save news, but to save newspapers. But when you are a small regional newspaper staffed by one, maybe three or four people if you are lucky, why further overload your reporters when immediate benefit is hard to see.

I am currently preparing a presentation for the Victorian Country  Press Association’s annual conference and it is this issue that I am considering most. Last time I presented at the VCPA’s training day I was asked by an editor: “Why should I invest time and money into something that isn’t even making Murdoch any money?” This is a reasonable question. Most of these operations work on a bare bones budget and are passionate about maintaining a quality local news presence in communities which may not have good broadband internet connections (unfortunately a fact of life in much of regional Australia).

So what was my answer? Well of course there is the obvious adapt or perish argument. But to be honest that doesn’t help. What I honestly believe is that the regional press, more than any other, is best placed to engage in the conversation needed in the future of journalism. They are already deeply embedded in their community. They are regularly conversing on what issues are important to them and importantly speaking directly to their audience about their published stories. They are a long way from the pedestal that metro media finds itself on, megaphone in hand announcing their story then turning their backs on the ensuing conversation. With this in mind, the regional press is well placed to embrace the Pro Am (professional journalists working with citizen journalists to produce better high quality news) revolution, that the likes of  Jay Rosen believe is a viable option for the future of news.

Read more about Jay Rosen’s experiments with Pro Am journalism in the States.

So what do you think? What should I tell the VCPA? Why should they embrace online?

 

Twitter for journalists

I have just returned from the media140 event in Sydney. Margaret Simons gives the perfect wrap up of the mood of the event. I must say that I agree with her that it did tend to get too caught up in nostalgia for the past and not enough on solutions for the future. That said there were a number of interesting points made by journalists for  journalists using Twitter (and to some extent other social media).

This list of tips was taken from presentations by  journalists using Twitter (including Latka Bourke @latikambourke, Dave Earley @earleyedition, Renai Lemay @RenaiLeMay, Leigh Sales @leighsales, Annabel Crabb @annabelcrabb)

1. Be honest – don’t creat a persona, be yourself

2. Don’t just parachute in – join the conversation, don’t just link/image/information trawl and leave

3. Give back – probably in line with the above but make sure if you are using information from these communities you give credit

4. Act with integrity – surely at all stages you should, but the journalists who spoke said it is particularly important within the social nuances of social networking sites.

5. Verify, verify, verify – again, surely this applies to all journalism but a number of speakers talked about the challenges of verifying information on sites like Twitter

What do you think? Are there any other tips for journalists on Twitter or other social networking sites?

How to start your own indie news site

Further to my post yesterday, I found this great post on Mashable.

Maria Schneider, who left mainstream media to start Editor Unleashed, lists great examples of journalists who have started their own sites and gives a step by step how to for getting started yourself.

Journalist as entrepreneur

As is always the case at the end of semester, I am looking at how I can reshape my courses. I am currently considering my post graduate online course and I have had a thought: Why not have students develop their own news website. By this I don’t just mean create and website and whack up some stories – I mean let them run wild and perhaps create the business model of the future. Journalists as entrepreneurs – could this be the saviour of our industry?

Paul Bradshaw has just begun running a whole Masters program on exactly this and I found this interesting site, “Newspaper in a box”, a step-by-step guide to creating an independent news website from scratch. This idea fits with so much of the evidence suggesting that hyperlocal being the future. And hyperlocal is generally started by the small independents not the big players.

So if it’s being talked about, then how exactly do I do it? What skills do they need? And what should I expect from them?

The case for incorporating social networking skills in journalism education

I am hoping to present a paper at the World Journalism Education Congress in South Africa next year and thought I would share my initial thoughts with you.

Below is an initial draft of the abstract, let me know your thoughts.

The traditional role of a journalist was to gather information, shape it into a story and then transmit it as accurately and quickly as possible to an audience via a mass medium. Today, as the mass media is declining in influence, the digital media is providing infinite opportunities for non-journalists to break news. Journalism education, like industry, is struggling to adapt to these structural changes, relying increasingly on expanding technology training. This paper will argue that what is needed is a realignment of journalism education from technology training to online social training. Within an online social training model, it will be argued that the skill of using social networking sites like Twitter to build and engage readership is as important as the traditional news gathering skills. Young journalists will need to understand the nuances and social protocols of these social networking sites to develop networks and broaden the reach of their stories. It will be argued that if journalism in the online medium is to be refocused from a lecture to a conversation, then the skill of engaging the public through networking tools will be a primary one for journalists. Further, traditional journalism defines fact as information from official sources. But this model of news is in flux as social media technologies such as Twitter facilitate the instant, dissemination of fragments of information from a variety of official and unofficial sources. Within this context, an understanding and an ability to help the public negotiate the flow of this information and facilitate the collection and transmission of news is vital for journalists of the future.

Teaching convergence

This semester I, along with my colleague Amanda Crane, taught for the first time a subject called Converged Newsroom. It was a new subject developed to replace the previous advanced print production subject and the advance online production subject.

Essentially, it aimed to have students take on newsroom roles and produce a fortnightly newspaper and sister website. In theory, the online site could be updated at any time and the paper came out fortnightly – in practice a version of the newspaper and online site were produced fortnightly. This wasn’t ideal, but I don’t think this was a result of a lack of understanding of the online medium, but more the result of study pressures of all of their subjects.

Even when only producing content for the site fortnightly a couple of key convergence principles were tested:

• How do you keep the content of the newspaper current when it hits stands on Tuesday and the online content (which is based on similar material) goes live on the Thursday of the previous week?
• How do you adapt content that is written for a newspaper for the online medium (think a 2,000 word feature)?

For the most part, students worked well to find realistic solutions to these issues. They included content in the newspaper which focused more on indepth analysis and incorporated high levels of multimedia content to value add on the web. Sometimes they fell into the trap of shovelling print copy straight online without changing or enhancing for the medium – something that unfortunately they see replicated in industry too much. Check out the results for yourself at City Journal Online.

My question for you readers is: Is that enough? How do we prepare students for the ‘converged newsroom’ when industry itself doesn’t know what that means?

I know many university journalism courses view convergence as just teaching students skills in all mediums i.e. a graduate will be able to produce a text, radio and television story. But is this enough? I don’t think so. I think students need to have all of those skills, yes, but they also need to know how to shoot video and know how video works online (it is very different to what is required for television). They need to know how to select the right media to tell a story – does it suit video best, an audio slideshow or just text? Luckily at RMIT students do get all of these skills (at least we give them the opportunity to)  and I try in the introductory online subject to get them thinking about what the digital landscape means for storytelling. But that still leaves us with the tricky question of convergence and how we prepare students for this new world. What do you think? How do we prepare journalism students for this unknown future?

Why journalism students should blog

It’s the last week of semester so hopefully that means I won’t be neglecting this blog as much in the future. My days have been spent madly marking student blogs, which has resulted in a number of conversations about whether in fact I should have students blogging at all. For those who are regular readers here you will know my answer to that question: “Yes of course”.

The general view in the ‘blogging is a waste of time’ camp is that blogging is not journalism and that it is teaching inexperienced journalism students to include their opinion, when they are still struggling with the concept of objective news. My response to this camp is generally that more and more journalists are blogging – whether it be for a masthead or personally. What easier way is there for a journalism student to build a portfolio than to start publishing their work on a blog? And finally I stress that teaching blogging means stressing that it is a different form of writing than news. I try to have students build informed opinions – that means researching a topic, using multiple sources and backing up opinions with strong facts – all valuable skills for journalists of the future.

There are also numerous other benefits to having students blogging regularly.

• They are actually writing regularly – you’d be surprised, but for students who claim to want to be writers many aren’t crafting words that regularly.
• Engaging with media content – I have my students analyse media coverage and issues as a way to ensure they are actually ingesting news – again you’d be surprised the number of students who want to be a journalist, but aren’t actually watching/ reading any news.
• Getting used to a CMS – I have students use WordPress (for our student publication as well) which is in essence getting them used to a simple CMS – which they will have to do in any newsroom of the future.
• Engaging with their audience – I require my students to comment on each other’s blogs and instruct that they should respond to comments – ensuring they get used to addressing feedback in a public forum.
• Using multimedia to enhance posts – I have students get more advanced with their blogging across the semester with some creating podcasts, vodcasts or using other multimedia to enhance their posts.
• Get a basic understanding of web design – Students can personalise their blogs using themes, but I also ask for a post which analyses a news site’s design.
• Understanding web analytics – I have students analyse their visitation data at the end of semester and present strategies for increasing visitation – an increasingly important skill in the newsroom.

All in all I think this presents a strong case for having students blog. I have also found that once leaving the university they utilise a blog as a personal resume and marketing tool – showing potential employers that they are engaged in the world in which they want to work.

Check out some of the fabulous blogs from my students this semester:

Postgrad:

Hari Raj

Myke Bartlett

Undergrad:

Emma Younger

Julian Bayard

Britney Spears ate my crocodile: An analysis of online content Down Under

Here are the slides and the text of my presentation on ambient journalism at the Future of Journalism conference at Cardiff University:

FOJ09 talk: Tabloidisation of Australian online news media

View more presentations from renbar.

What is Journalism?

A wrap up of the Future of Journalism Conference, Cardiff.

This is being published a little later than I would have hoped, my excuse being a 24-hour flight and some internet issues.

As the title of this post suggests, the main theme of the Future of Journalism Conference was an existential one: What is Journalism? Yes that’s right there were  number of papers that focused on really rethinking our definition of exactly what journalism is.

Alfred Hermida, who  leads the integrated journalism programme at the graduate School of Journalism of the University of British Columbia, delivered a paper which argued that Twitter was in fact a system of journalism. How, I hear you ask? Well start by viewing Twitter as  an awareness system that offers a diverse means to collect, communicate, share and display news and information. The key here, however, is that it isn’t an editor that is filtering the information (i.e. links of articles) but a Twitter user’s network and ultimately the user themselves. Again another model where the top down version of journalism is eradicated.

My paper, which was written with my colleague Mandy Oakham, also focused on rethinking the tradtional ‘norms’ of journalism. Based on sampling of  four online news sites in Australia, we found a definite leaning towards tabloid news values in online copy. But rather than judge this as a ‘dumbing down’ of news content we see this as an example of journalists and content reconnecting with the audience. If you take the idea that a tabloid news story makes no attempt to wrap up a story, as does the so-called ‘quality’ media and the core of online media is its ability to offer readers an immediate forum for discussion –  online media therefore avails itself more to tabloid news values.  It could be looked at in terms of a development which is forcing journalists to focus on the wants and needs of those who consume their news selections. Ultimately, we argue, that news production may no longer be confined to an internal, newsroom, dialogue and further that journalistic or editorial judgement may no longer be the sole determinant of news values. This could be seen in one sense as a rebirth of an old news culture of the afternoon dailies which ceased production in Australia at the beginning of the 1980s.

Other papers presented also kept with this theme. Lisa Lynch’s paper Dangerous pranks or digital sunshine? Wikileaks and the future of investigative reporting found that the website Wikileaks provided a significant contribution to the public sphere by invigorating investigative reporting.

So what does all this mean for the future of journalism? In my mind it is that for us to find a solution to the woes plaguing our industry then we need to throw out all of our existing conceptions of journalism and start from scratch.