07 February 2014
St Pancras Intelligencer no. 4
Welcome to the latest edition of the St Pancras Intelligencer, our weekly round-up of news about news - stories about news production, publications, apps, digitised resources, events and what is happening with the newspaper collection (and other news collections) at the British Library.
The year Facebook blew past Google: Peter Kafka notes how Facebook is now outstripping Google when its comes to referrals for Buzzfeed, which could have important implications for how web journalism works. Anyway, it's a great graph.
How I learned to stop worrying and love bite-sized news: Josh Stearns looks at short-form news services like Instafax, Circa and NowThis News and reckons they have their part to play in how we find news - "sometimes small pieces loosely joined can add up to more than the sum of their parts".
How the BBC and Guardian are innovating on Instagram: More on the use of Instagram by news outlets, with Rachel Bartlett reviewing Instafax and GuardianCam.
Help us improve the British Newspaper Archive: The BNA has a survey, asking you how you use the historical newspapers site and what you would like to see more of.
News Archive Connected Studio: Interesting things are being plotted at the BBC to open up its news archives. Peter Rippon reports on ways they might connected news archive to audiences.
UK Parliament considers allowing secret courts to issue orders to seize reporters' notebooks: The Deregulation Bill could lead to the seizure of journalists' notebooks, photographs and digital files in secret hearings, as opposed to open court as is the case now. Cory Doctorow is alarmed.
The secret to having a successful paywall around your news is simple - it's about community: Mathew Ingram looks at the success of Dutch crowdfunded journalism site De Correspondent, which is bringing in almost $2M per year in subscriptions.
News UK boss critical of Mail and measurement: It's been a week where those who see paywalls as the future of news journalism have been having their say. The Media Blog reports on Mike Darcey, CEO of News UK, criticising the Mail Online business model:
The Mail Online is the embodiment of the school of thought which says flooding the internet with tacky clickbait to attract huge audiences can be profitable while Darcey is clearly a man who believes in ringfencing smaller, more identifiable audiences behind paywalls, such as those imposed on The Sun and The Times.
Tim Franklin, incoming president of the Poynter Institute likewise praises the paywall models of the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal.
Have 24-hour news channels had their day?: This Guardian piece by Richard Sambrook and Sean McGuire makes some familiar arguments against 24-hour TV news (filling time when there is no news, becoming out-dated by social media, not really 'live' etc). Sky News' Adam Boulton tweeted angrily in response: "@sambrook's @mediaguardian blog on 24hr news: shoddy inaccurate generalizations timed for @SkyNews 25th but can hardly bear to mention us".
The Syrian opposition is disappearing from Facebook: Facebook's decision to shut down some pages of Syrian opposition has "dealt significant blow to peaceful activists who have grown reliant on Facebook for communication and uncensored—if bloody and graphic—reporting on the war’s atrocities", reports Michael Pizzi at The Atlantic.
How do hyperlocals contribute to local democracy and what do they need?: Those watching new news trends in the UK are excited by the hyperlocal trend for community-based websites. The Creative Citizens project at at Cardiff University and Birmingham City University has launched a survey aiming to learn more about the pratice and needs of neighbourhood websites.
Over one million TV and radio programmes now available for education: Previously we used to be thrilled when thousands of items were released online - now everyone seems to deal in millions. So one million TV and radio programmes are now available from the UK higher education service BoB National, thanks to collaboration with the BBC. Not available to general users though, alas.
31 January 2014
St Pancras Intelligencer no. 3
Welcome to the third edition of the St Pancras Intelligencer, our weekly round-up of news about news - stories about news production, publications, apps, digitised resources, events and what is happening with the newspaper collection (and other news collections) at the British Library.
Ezra Klein (Wikimedia Commons)
Vox is our next: Generating much discussion in America has been the move of celebrated journalist and political blogger Ezra Klein from the Washington Post to Vox Media with plans to develop a news site that (so far as one can tell from the sketchy ideas offered so far) will draw out the historical content behind news stories from content online. The New Yorker lauds the rise of the digital journalist (Klein is 29); the always interesting Mathew Ingram at Gigaom looks at the advertising model that could support it.
The newsonomics of why every seems to be starting a news site: Ken Doctor looks at the economics of why Klein and others are getting into the online news game and hiring journalists. Essentially the risks are high but the entry costs are low.
Q&A with newspaper researchers: Leon Saltiel: The latest in Europeana Newspapers' fine series of interviews with researchers using newspaper archives is with Leon Saltiel, who is researching World War Two in Thessaloniki
So much for 'news without the boring bits': Trinity Mirror's The People set up a Buzzfeed-style site with aim of publishing news without the boring bits and with ambition to be entirely funded by "native content". It lasted three months
You won’t believe why the Victoria Line is currently suspended: But Trinity Mirror's other Buzzfeed-style effort, UsVsTh3m is flourishing with such viral stories as fast-setting concrete in the signalling room holding up the Victoria Line
Introducing #GuardianCam on Instagram: Guardian journalists will be taking over its Instagram account each week to showcase stories from around the world
World War One: The British Library has published its World War One resource, based around key themes from the war, and amply illustrated with over 500 digital objects, including manuscripts, illustrations, photographs, maps, letters and newspapers
LBC to go national: On 11 February LBC will go national and become the UK's first commercial news talk radio station.
What is the news? Philosopher Alain de Botton argues in this video (and in a Newsnight discussion) that the news is a "powerful questionable art form" the comprehension of which needs to be taught in schools (thereby annoying the media studies community who are dedicated to doing just that). De Botton has a book out on on the theme, and Ian Jack's review in The Guardian is scathing ("A kind of fluent ignorance is at work that might be innocence in disguise." Ouch)
Cardiff Uni to run free online community journalism course: Hyperlocal news sites now being all the range, Cardiff are going to offer a free MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) in community journalism
Facebook announces Paper: Anyone can publish their own version of what's news, and attractively so. On February 3 Facebook launches the nostalgically-named Paper, a customisable news reader app similar to Flipboard
The News Academy: News UK (News International as was) has launched the News Academy to train teenagers keen to become journalists
A faster, easier way: Twitter, CNN and Dataminr are working together to develop an alert system for journalists, reports the Twitter blog
Hacking trial: The sorrier side of the news was laid bare once again with the evidence supplied by self-confessed phone hacking journalist Dan Evans, formerly of the Sunday Mirror and News of the World. Even the "office cat" knew about what was going on, he claims
Broke French crime reporter turns to hold ups: The news about news story of the week has to be the tale of Jean-Michel, the former crime reporter who tried to turn his knowledge to bad use when he turned criminal (unsuccessfully). The story was reported by his former newspaper, naturally.
29 January 2014
New ways, old ways
'New ways of doing journalism' was the enticing title of a seminar held last night at City University in London. It brought together leading practitioners in the new modes of web-based news production whose success (social, and in some cases commercial) is challenging existing models and exciting a lot of people in he news world. The room was filled with journalism students (and some journalists) aware that they were joining a profession that is on the verge of something very exciting. The question was, how to sort out the excitement from the journalism, the tweets from the passion for truth.
The speakers were Andrew Jaspan, founder and CEO of The Conversation, a site publishing news and commentary by academic experts; Annette Novak, ex-editor and CEO of Sweden's Interactive Institute, which experiments with interaction design and data visualisation; Sarah Hartley, journalist, blogger and co-founder and editor of Contributoria, the recently-launched crowdfunded, collaborative journalism platform; and Luke Lewis, editor of the British branch of the site that is doing the most to overturn accepted news models, Buzzfeed. The chair was Professor George Brock, who has written so illuminatingly about the new journalism, both its refreshing aspects and its challenges.
Not the Sphinx covered in snow
To be honest, the seminar didn't quite live up to its billing. One did not get a great sense of missionary zeal, with the talk on Buzzfeed in particular offering more amunition for its detractors than encouragement for its advocates. The site, if you don't know it, specialises in witty, illustrated lists (e.g. 35 Frustrating Things About Playing Video Games In The '90s) with occasional forays into harder news territory - stories which are then driven worldwide by social media. Buzzfeed has a following of many millions, it makes money, and it is hiring journalists - and many others are trying to emulate it. Hence the enthusiasm. But tales of how Buzzfeed pointed out that a viral image of the Sphinx in snow was in fact a half-sized model from a Japanese theme park don't really suggest strong journalism, but rather how revealing the truth behind a viral image is shutting the barn door after the horse has bolted.
Instead the event was notable for how many were expressing unease at the world of web news, and calling out for informed journalism - and the time to compose such journalism - to fight against the tsunami of uniformed opinion, half-truths and untruths that too often pass for information in the social media world. Andre Jaspan's The Conversation publishes news stories written by academics and issued for re-use under a CC licence. Based in Australia, and with a British outlet now opened (located at City University), the site is home for serious news analysis, but with nil marketing budget is has managed to get 1.6M unique visitor hits per month. Jaspan warned that where we have fewer journalists, "PR moves in to fill the vacuum", and sites such as The Conversation and Contributoria (a sort of Kickstarter for community funded, collaborative journalism) are defending traditional, idealistic journalism, producing a news you can trust. Trust was the key word throughout the event. Where does trust lie in the world of online information? If we can't trust it, how can it be news?
The new journalism seems to be going in two different ways. One is following the tweets and the likes, placing value on stories which will be shared. Luke Lewis was keen to stress that Buzzfeed is not only committed to stories that are shareable but stories that have value because of the truths the reveal. Hopefully this will remain so, particularly as such sites start to develop roots and offer a more rounded, less transient news offering. The other is a reaction to the overwhelming volume of information and disinformation to be found online by reinvesting effort in "value-based journalism" (Annette Novak's phrase). This form of new journalism finds its inspiration in old journalism, or a belief in what old journalism has been at its best.
So the platforms are changing, but the idea of news and the role of journalists seems to be much as it has ever been - torn between truth and the marketplace.
All of this matters to what we are doing at the British Library, where we collect news for the benefit of researchers today and in the future. We are in the process of developing a news content strategy, one which looks beyond newspapers (which we have always collected) to all of the news media published in the UK - print, web, TV, radio. To collect news, we have to know what news is. Just now news is in a melting pot, uncertain of the ways in which it will exist and how it will look in the future, but there is great excitement in the air about the possibilities. It's just that there are great fears too.
14 January 2014
The new new journalism
I am, in fact, extremely optimistic about the future of journalism. I have real confidence in the prospects for the news media. And if you ask me that annoying question, whether I see the glass half empty or half full, I’d say two-thirds full. In fact, I think this is the most exciting time to be a journalist since the advent of television.
Yesterday James Harding, Director of BBC News, gave the inaugural W.T. Stead lecture at the British Library. The renowned 19th century campaigning journalist William Thomas Stead established a new form of journalism, dubbed 'the new journalism', which laid the foundations for the populist, inquisitive and crusading style of newspaper production which has proved so enduring. Stead helped bring about a revolution in journalism; Harding pointed out that we are in the throes of a another news revolution today.
James Harding
Harding's argument was that the era of news journalism that Stead ushered in is coming to an end. He said:
The case I would like to make to you tonight is that the era that started with Stead – the era in which the Press had a legitimate claim to be a unique check on the powerful and the sole interrogator of the establishment; the era in which editors had unrivalled power to command public opinion and shape the political agenda; the era in which the Fourth Estate was a clutch of established institutions run by identifiable individuals in control of the news – that era is over.
By this he meant that the era in which the established news media (print, TV, radio) dominates and determines the production and distribution of news is over. The digital revolution has brought the power of information and the tools to distribute that information into the hands of anyone. This changes journalism, changes the news agenda, changes the relationship between producer and consumer of news, changes the business models on which news production has depended.
You don’t have to work in news to be alive to the issue: the pool of labour correspondents who reported working life in Britain, the training ground for journalists such as the late, great John Cole, has disappeared; the numbers of foreign correspondents have been hacked back, notably by the US TV networks; and, most alarming has been the collapse of the classified advertising market and the impact it has had on local newspapers: The Press Gazette has reported that 242 local papers shut between 2005 and 2012; the latest company results from Johnston Press state that it cut 1,300 jobs in 2012, some 23 per cent of the workforce; almost half the employees of Northcliffe Media went between 2008 and 2012, falling from 4,200 to 2,200 according to its owners the Daily Mail & General Trust. Claire Enders, the media analyst, has calculated that 40 per cent of jobs in the UK regional press have gone in the course of five years.”
But these changes did not make him pessimistic. Indeed, as quoted at the top of this post, he said this was the most exciting time to be a journalist since the advent of television.
Professional journalists cannot expect to have the influence we once did, but, if we’re clever, if we’re innovative and if we’re trustworthy, we can earn it. This is because we live at a time when there is an unprecedented hunger for information and ideas, because the proliferation of new news providers means the number of working journalists is, actually, rising, because the tools available for story telling and story getting are more powerful than ever and because, as I hope to make clear, the new technologies have unexpectedly revealed the enduring value of some old principles in journalism.
He relished the challenge that the new news environment promises, with new services such as BuzzFeed, Vice and Upworthy challenging the models of how news is produced and distributed, indeed what news is (he pointed out also that such services are busy hiring journalists, so there is hope for the profession, but where it may be practised is likely to change). He also felt that these challenges would help bring about a re-focussing on what the principles of journalism should be:
At such a time, there has never been a greater need for original reporting, insightful analysis and challenging opinion. People making choices need information and intelligence. We need journalism. And, in Britain, we are extremely fortunate to have a boisterous, curious and courageous Press.
There is a contradiction here: welcoming the disruption to existing models of news production that the upstart newcomers are delivering, while at the same time speaking up for the value of traditional journalism values to deliver "a voice you can trust". This naturally led to a strong defence of the BBC's news services, and to his assertion that - in this world of shareable information and digital power placed at the fingertips of anyone with an opinion - the BBC's great asset is the trust with which it is hel. However, this had to be rooted in "uncompromising commitment to accuracy, impartiality, diversity of opinion and the decent treatment of people in the news".
There was some irony, therefore, that the questions afterwards focussed strongly on matters of trust in how the BBC manages the news, questions which also revealed that though the choice of news sources and services is huge, many people still take in the news in quite a linear, time-tested way. Complaints about privileging one sort of story above another, or the positioning of news stories, ought to be irrelevant if we are all selecting the news stories that most interest us by using the online and mobile tools available. But most are not doing this. Some seek out the news wherever they can find it; others expect it to come to them in the familiar, trusted form. Marrying the expectations of different audiences with the digital opportunities available, so that all feel included, is going to be the great challenge for any news provider.
The full text of James Harding speech, entitled 'Journalism Today', is available on the BBC Media Centre site. It refers to a great many news-related services which many will be keen to try out for themselves. This is a list, with links, of some of what was mentioned (with Harding's comments):
- BBC Trending - "BBC now has more people following its @BBCbreaking Twitter feed than watch the 10 o’clock news"
- Buzzfeed
- Chartbeat - "track, second by second, story by story, who is viewing what"
- Daily Beast - "have been hiring outstanding journalists from The Times and The Guardian"
- Dimblebot - "an imagined robot version of Dimbleby with its own Twitter account and a devoted fanbase"
- Geofeedia - "enables you to follow a story on Twitter by the location of the tweeter"
- Now this News - " delivers the news in 6,15 and 30 second videos"
- ProPublica - "US investigative journalism venture"
- Reddit - "has an algorithm that drives up stories based on popularity with readers"
- Storify - "allows users to collect social media and curate their own stories"
- Touchcast - "creates a Minority Report-style smorgasboard of interactive screens on the iPad"
- Upworthy
- Vice
Update (22 January 2014): We have now published a podcast of James Harding's lecture, available here.