Newspapers and e-readers

THE world’s largest newspaper printing plant, owned by News Corporation, started production in March 2008. Based in Broxbourne, north of London, it is larger than 20 football fields and can produce 3.2 million newspapers every night.

Most of the national titles in the United Kingdom have purchased new presses in the past five years. Rupert Murdoch’s three plants in the UK cost about $A 917 million.

Assuming the cost of a printing press is amortised over 30 years, the money News Corp spent works out at about $A 30.5 million a year, not counting interest charges. On top of that we need to add the cost of newsprint, ink, and distribution.

By comparison, the cost of hosting a major web site that transfers a few hundred gigabytes of data a day is negligible. Distribution costs for online editions of newspapers are low by comparison. But online advertising has not yet reached a stage where it is possible to turn off the printing presses.

Distribution and printing account for at least 60 per cent of the cost of a daily newspaper in Australia. In the United States, it is 70 cents in the dollar. At a large American daily, only about 18 per cent of the total budget is spent on content.

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos said the newspaper industry was under “significant distress”. “One of the big costs that they have is distribution and printing.” He was arguing that a device like his company’s Kindle could help remove those costs, and would change the economics of the newspaper business. Kindle is expected to be available in Australia this year.

The Kindle is an e-reader, a mobile device designed primarily for storing and displaying digital documents. The best-known e-readers in 2009 were the Amazon Kindle, the iRex iLiad and the Sony Reader. They are used mostly for reading books, but in America they also offer the content from daily newspapers without the advertisements. Other products are expected early in 2010. Rupert Murdoch was in South Korea in October talking to Samsung and LG about their manufacturing re-readers for him.

Newspapers could provide each of their readers who had subscribed for more than two years an e-reader as recognition of loyalty. The e-reader could become a status symbol. Readers could keep the device while they continue to subscribe. This would reduce distribution and printing costs, though managers would need to do the sums to calculate when this approach became financially viable.

A newspaper could negotiate a good price by buying e-readers in bulk. Analysts estimate it costs about $US 650 million a year to print and deliver The New York Times. In 2009 the company expected to pay $US 65 million just for newsprint. As of late 2009 about 830,000 people had subscribed to the paper for more than two years. To give an e-reader to each of those subscribers, at $400 per device, would cost the Times about $US 332 million.

These numbers are simplistic and it would still cost money to close down some printing presses and reduce the number of trucks used for distribution. Plus they still need to serve the other 170,000 people who make up the paper’s 1 million plus circulation.

Some people still want a printed newspaper, and advertisers like the permanency of print. Maybe those consumers will pay a premium for print. And for a media organization starting fresh, or looking for new business models, e-readers offer an option.

But the e-reader has issues that need to be resolved: Content is only available in black and white, which advertisers do not appreciate. The exceptions are Fujitsu’s FLEPia colour reader, which costs a hefty $US 1,000, and Samsung’s Papyrus. The latter is only available in Japan.

Depending on the device they buy, people will find themselves tied to one format that does not read other formats. It’s like buying a car that can only use one brand of petrol.

And e-reader suppliers take a huge cut from subscription fees. In America, Amazon is said to take 70 per cent of the revenues for delivering a newspaper’s content to the Kindle. For example, subscribers pay $US 14 a month to receive The New York Times on the Kindle, but the media house only gets $US 4.20 per subscription.

All e-readers have one major selling point: They are perceived as being greener than newsprint. Don Carli, senior research fellow with the Institute for Sustainable Communication, said that despite the fact that print was based on “comparatively benign and renewable materials” it had come to be seen as wasteful and environmentally destructive.

“The carbon cost of print will soon have to appear on the balance sheets of advertisers, publishers and retailers. It will also appear in the price tags of goods and services. As we exit the global recession we will simultaneously be transitioning to a low carbon global economy that will change the meaning and value of waste and inefficiency,” Carli said.

Almost all e-readers use e-ink, which simulates the look of ink on paper. The technology uses a layer of micro-capsules filled with sub-micrometre black and white particles that create a low-power, reflective screen. These particles form images on the screen like printed text.

For editorial managers, the key decision is when and whether to invest in the transition. Publishers would need to subsidise the cost of the digital devices or include those costs in the subscription the same way that phone companies build the cost of the mobile phone into the contract. Publishers would also face the task of convincing advertisers their products would still be seen.

The debate has only started, but will grow louder as the Kindle and other e-readers become available in Australia.

Words: 932. Published in the newspaper of PANPA, the Pacific Area Newspaper Publishers’ Association.

e-readers and newspapers

The financial argument for e-readers instead of paper as the main publishing medium for newspapers is strong. But e-readers have their limitations. Stephen Quinn reports.

In June 2009 a Moody’s senior analyst in New York, John Puchalla, criticised the American newspaper industry for its “distorted” cost structures. Similar cost structures operate at newspapers in Asia. In essence, too much of each dollar is spent on printing and distribution, and too little on what sells newspapers: the content.

Puchalla noted that 70 cents in each dollar were spent on paper, printing, distribution and corporate functions. Only 14 per cent of American newspapers’ operating expenses were spent generating editorial content. The other 16 per cent of costs were related to advertising and marketing.

The New York Times is one of the best newspapers in the world. It has won 101 Pulitzer Prizes, more than any other newspaper. Its annual editorial budget of more than $US 200 million is the largest of any newspaper. Yet that figure is a third of the yearly cost of printing and distribution: $US 650 million. In 2009 the company expected to pay $US 65 million for newsprint. Many Asian newspapers have the same distorted cost ratios.

Enter the e-reader. It is a mobile reading device capable of storing thousands of digital documents. In the US readers can buy and download content wirelessly. Elsewhere in the world people connect via USB. The best-known e-readers in 2009 were the Amazon Kindle, the iRex iLiad and the Sony Reader. Others were scheduled to appear in 2010.

Newspapers could provide loyal readers – let’s say people who have subscribed for more than two years – an e-reader in recognition of that loyalty. The e-reader could become a status symbol. Readers could keep the device while they continued to subscribe. This would reduce distribution and printing costs.

For example, about 830,000 people have subscribed to The New York Times for more than two years. To give an e-reader to each of those subscribers, at $US 400 per device, would cost about $332 million. These calculations are simplistic, and reduced print runs and fewer delivery trucks would still cost money. But e-readers offer a possible option for reducing costs, once consumers accept them. The paper spends $US 650 million to print and distribute about 1.04 million copies weekdays and 1.45 million on Sundays.

But all is not perfect in the world of e-readers: Content is only available in black and white, which advertisers do not appreciate. The exceptions are Fujitsu’s FLEPia colour reader, which costs $US 1,000, and Samsung’s Papyrus. The latter is only available in Japan.

Depending on the device you buy, you’ll find yourself tied to one format that does not read other formats. It’s like buying a car that can only use one brand of petrol. And e-reader suppliers take a huge cut from subscription fees. Amazon is said to take 70 per cent of the revenues for delivering a newspaper’s content to the Kindle. Subscribers pay $US 14 a month to receive The New York Times on the Kindle, but the media house only gets $US 4.20 per subscription.

Early in 2009 the Hearst Corporation announced it would release an e-reader for newspapers some time in 2010. It would be American letter in size and weigh less than half a pound. In March 2009 the Silicon Valley-based Plastic Logic said it planned to release an un-named e-reader in January 2010. The Plastic Logic product will have a screen measuring about 27cm diagonally, compared with the 15cm display of the Kindle. The Plastic Logic device will weigh about the same as the Kindle (about 300 grams) because it will be made from plastic rather than glass and silicon.

Plastic Logic’s vice president of business development, Daren Benzi, said the first version would have 16 levels of grey scale but his company intended to produce a color device “in the near future”. Eventually the device would show video. Benzi said the time was right for e-readers. They were smaller, lighter and easier to use, but mindsets had also changed, meaning that “people are a lot more comfortable reading digital content, and are more conscious of the benefits of getting their information this way”.

On 7 May 2009 Amazon announced a large-screen version of the Kindle, the DX. It has a 25-cm display, about the size of an A4 magazine, and 3.3 Gb of storage.

All e-readers have one major selling point: They are perceived as being greener than newsprint. Don Carli, senior research fellow with the Institute for Sustainable Communication, said that despite the fact that print was based on “comparatively benign and renewable materials” print had come to be seen as wasteful and environmentally destructive.

“The carbon cost of print will soon have to appear on the balance sheets of advertisers, publishers and retailers. It will also appear in the price tags of goods and services. As we exit the global recession we will simultaneously be transitioning to a low carbon global economy that will change the meaning and value of waste and inefficiency,” Carli said.

Almost all e-readers use e-ink, which simulates the look of ink on paper. The technology uses a layer of microcapsules filled with sub-micrometre black and white particles that create a low-power, reflective screen. These particles form images on the screen like printed text.

The E.Ink company that invented the concept was a start-up based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, that came out of research at M.I.T. The company supplies the electronic-ink technology used in the vast majority of e-readers on the market today.

In June 2009 a Taiwanese company, Prime View International (PVI), purchased E.Ink for $US 215 million. PVI is the world’s largest maker of e-paper display modules. It acquired the e-paper business of Philips Electronics in 2005.

For editorial managers, the key decision is when and whether to invest in the transition. Publishers would need to subsidise the cost of the digital devices or include those costs in the subscription the same way that phone companies build the cost of the mobile phone into the contract. Publishers also face the task of convincing advertisers their products would still be seen.

Words: 1024. Published in Asian Newspaper Focus, October 2009

New tools for reporting

A course held at The Statesman in Kolkata on 5, 7 and 8 December 2009, from 11am to 1pm

Overview of today

Blogs for research and story ideas

RSS feeds for managing blogs

Google tools for reporting

Skype and CallRecorder for reporting

Reporting with social networking (Web 2.0) tools

- Delicious

- Flickr

- Twitter (TweetDeck) for reporting and research

- Facebook

Visual reporting: Panoramas and Wordle

Working with audience-generated content

Assessing information quality

Bio of the teacher

Stephen Quinn was a full-time journalist for two decades until 1995, and continues to practise as a journalist. He has worked for regional newspapers in Australia; the Bangkok Post; the UK Press Association, BBC-TV, Independent Television News and The Guardian in London; the Australian Broadcasting Corporation in Sydney; and Television New Zealand. He was a producer for the Middle East Broadcasting Centre in 2002-03 while running a research centre in Dubai, to re-acquaint himself with new television production technologies.

Dr Quinn became a full-time university academic in 1996. Since then he has written 12 books, scores of book chapters and thousands of journalism articles. The most recent books are Asia’s Media Innovators and Australia-UAE: Expanding trade and cultural links, which appeared last year. In 2007 he co-wrote with Dr Stephen Lamble Online Newsgathering: Research and Reporting for Journalism. He published three books about convergent journalism in 2005 and 2006.

Another two books are due for publication in 2009 and 2010, about mobile phones for reporting and new business models to pay for journalism. In the past decade Dr Quinn has presented 132 academic papers in 25 countries. More than a third have been by invitation.

Dr Quinn contributes to newspapers and magazines, consults for media companies, presents at industry conferences, and conducts research and training courses for media companies. In the past decade he had run more than 100 training courses in eight countries. He is a consultant for the Ifra Newsplex (based in Germany) and Innovation International (based in Spain), a member of the Counsel of the Newsplex, and a member of the international committee of the Online News Association.

Introduction

The history of journalists’ adoption of technology contains a continuing theme: reporters will embrace new tools if they are easy to use (intuitive) and relevant to the job of storytelling. The reverse also applies.

Some powerful tools have become available to reporters over the past few years. This course focuses on some of the latest. Most relate to social networking, also known as web 2.0. Welcome to this course on social media for reporting.

Blogs

Blogs and other related technologies offer new research opportunities for journalists. Blog is a word combined from web and log. The word “blogosphere” describes all the content built by blogs, moblogs, podcasts and video blogs (these are discussed later). Just as the word “twittersphere” describes all of the content built around Twitter.

Why do people blog? Don’t they have a life?

Blogs come in a wide variety of flavours. Many people have opinions they want to express. Others seek a sense of community. These factors partly help to explain the popularity of blogging. Some people write blogs as newsletters or bulletins for their organisations. Academics use them for teaching. Increasingly, businesses are using them to market their products. Sport or recreation clubs publicise their events via blogs.

But probably the biggest group of blogs are personal diaries where people vent their frustrations and offer their oinions about life and the universe. As with newsgroups, the quality of information in blogs sits on a long continuum from erudite offerings to lunatic ravings, sometimes more often at the latter end of the continuum. So be careful.

In July 2006 the Pew Internet and American Life Project released a portrait of American bloggers, based on a national telephone survey started in November the previous year. It reported that most bloggers used their blogs as personal journals. But according to Pew almost a third described what they did as journalism.

Just over a third (37 per cent) of the people in the Pew survey wanted to stay in touch with family and friends, and a third wanted to share practical knowledge or skills with others. Making money was last on the list, with 7 per cent citing it as their main reason for blogging.

Why do people blog, given the vast majority do not want to make money? When asked to list the main reasons, 52 per cent said they wanted to express themselves creatively and half said they wanted to document their personal experiences or share them with others.

Other countries do not have the equivalent of Pew so we have no accurate data about Australian bloggers.

Changing media audience demographics

Research from Zogby International in the United States, published March 2008, suggests traditional print and broadcast news are reaching an ageing (and thus ultimately shrinking) demographic. Almost half of respondents (48 per cent) said the Internet was their primary source of news and information, up from 40 per cent who nominated the Internet a year earlier. Younger adults were most likely to name the Internet as their top source: 55 per cent of people aged 18 to 29 said they got most of their news and information online, compared with 35 per cent of the 65 and older demographic.

Interestingly, respondents to the 2008 Zogby survey regarded both traditional and new media as important for the future of journalism: 87 per cent believed professional reporting had a key role in journalism’s future, though citizen journalism (77 per cent) and blogging (59 per cent) were also seen as significant by most Americans.

In June 2009 Zogby International published reports of two major polls on how Americans got their news and what sources they most trusted. Zogby asked which of the four primary information sources was most reliable. More than twice as many people chose the Internet (37 per cent) ahead of television (17 per cent), newspapers (16 per cent) and radio (13 per cent).

Ironically, most of the news Americans consume online comes from traditional media sources. Zogby offered two explanations: “The Internet allows people to seek information from thousands of blogs, aggregators and social networks, and to migrate to those that share their point of view. The information received may originate from the same old media, but it is wrapped in designer packaging that matches personal tastes and ideologies.”

Research with blogs

Blogs can be used as research tools, but the quality of information varies hugely (we will discuss this issue at the end). Think of them as a convenient electronic tool for listening to scuttlebutt. It’s like overhearing conversations on public transport or at social events. Sometimes they will stimulate ideas for stories.

Use blogs to discover what people in the blogosphere are saying about local businesses or sportspeople or politicians. But remember that blogs are more influential than they deserve because Technorati, like Google, ranks sites based on how many people link to that site. This produces high rankings for bloggers who link to other bloggers. If you find lots of links to a blog, this might mean the blogger is respected and the blogosphere thinks they know a lot about the subject. They might prove a useful person to interview.

Technorati (http://technorati.com/) is the leading tool for searching blogs. According to Technorati, more than 175,000 new blogs start every day. More than 1.6 million blog posts appear a day, or about 18 a second. As of mid 2009 Technorati was tracking 112.8 million blogs and more than 250 million pieces of social media. Five years earlier Technorati tracked a mere 2.4 million blogs. Now the site simply says it tracks “millions” of blogs. It claims to report within eight minutes of a blog being published.

Google also has a good search tool for finding blogs at http://blogsearch.google.com.au/ though it is still in beta, which is geek speak for still being tested.

Also remember that the same search terms typed into a blog search tool such as Technorati will produce different results compared with using those same terms in a search engine such as Fast or Google. So when casting the net wide for information make sure you search both on blogs and search tools.

A good video about blogs

This video by Lee LeFever called “Blogs in plain English” provides good background information about the concept: http://www.commoncraft.com/store-item/blogs

Exercise

Choose a subject you plan to research. It might be a local person or sporting identity or organisation. Or for the exercise you could use your own name. Search for the name in a web-based tool such as Google or Bing or Fast or Yahoo! (putting the full name in quote marks tells the technology you only want mentions of the name that are in a phrase).

Then do the same search in Technorati, the blog search tool. Compare the results. You will note these tools search different parts of the Internet. It helps to research something topical because people tend to blog about current events. For example, you would search Technorati for a local sporting identity or coach close to a major game, or a local politician close to an election.
Moblogs
The word “moblog” is an amalgam of mobile phone and blog. People post content to a blog by sending a multi-media message from their phone. An MMS is like sending an SMS, though with more information. The MMS’s subject line becomes the headline for the posting, and the message text the body of the story. Software nestles the attached photograph into the posting as a thumbnail image, itself linked to a full-size image.

WAN/Ifra is a newspaper research company based in Germany. WAN/Ifra moblogs all its conferences. To see examples of what moblogs look like, go to WAN/Ifra’s home page http://www.ifra.net/. The top of the page contains much useful information about newspapers, such as e-reading devices.

Podcasting

A podcast is a verbal blog. Words are recorded rather than written. Ben Hammersley of the UK’s Wired magazine coined the term, which the New Oxford American Dictionary listed as its word of the year in 2005. Dozens of US newspapers and magazines embraced podcasting from that year. Some summarise the day’s news; others provide radio-style programs complete with interviews of reporters and newsmakers.

Listeners download podcast files onto their music players or computers, often via Apple’s iTunes. Podcasting represents another example of personal media, where individuals choose what they hear when they want it, rather than relying on radio stations. Again, convenience is the key.

Here are videos about a fascinating new iPhone app called Poddio that turns the iPhone into a mobile reporting tool: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sQ1ZmJMIO2E and

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3CKNAt7SFmc

Podcasts offer useful ways to get background information on events and people. You can listen at convenient times while travelling to work or jogging.

To learn more about podcasts, watch this YouTube video “Podcasting in plain English,” also by Lee LeFever, at http://www.commoncraft.com/podcasting

Video blogs

Video blogs, known as vlogs, are the video versions of blogs. People assemble them with common video-editing software, using footage from digital video cameras taken with mobile phones or portable video cameras. Much free footage is available on the web.

The pioneer vlog was Rocketboom (http://www.rocketboom.com) in New York City. It uses TV news as a model – each bulletin runs for about three minutes – and is set in a studio with a presenter. Many vlogs are created with consumer-level video cameras, a laptop, free editing software such as Apple’s iMovie or Windows MovieMaker, a few lights and a spare room.

One of the best examples of a journalist embracing a range of blogs is the work of New York Times technology reporter David Pogue. As with Rocketboom, Pogue builds his videos using a laptop and a consumer-quality digital camera. You can read his blog, listen to his podcast, or watch his weekly video blog at http://pogue.blogs.nytimes.com/.

Wikis

Most journalists will be aware of Wikipedia. Jimmy Wales founded Wikipedia in San Francisco. He envisioned it as a way to capture the knowledge of the group rather than the individual. Journalists will have to make individual decision on whether to report based on content found in wikis. Reuters recently updated their reporters’ handbook and included this advice about Wikipedia:

“Online information sources which rely on collaborative, voluntary and often anonymous contributions need to be handled with care. Wikipedia, the online “people’s encyclopedia”, can be a good starting point for research. But it should not be used as an attributable source. Do not quote from it or copy from it.

“The information it contains has not been validated and can change from second to second as contributors add or remove material. Move on to official websites or other sources that are worthy of attribution. Do not link to Wikipedia or similar collaborative encyclopedia sites as a source of background information on any topic. More suitable sites can always be found, and indeed are often flagged at the bottom of Wikipedia entries. It is only acceptable to link to an entry on Wikipedia or similar sites when the entry or website itself is the subject of a news story.”

An interesting recent development is an audience-focused search tool funded by the Wiki Foundation: http://answers.wikia.com/wiki/Wikianswers

Want to know more about wikis? Watch this YouTube video called “Wikis in plain English” for more information: http://www.commoncraft.com/video-wikis-plain-english

News organisations should consider setting up a series of wikis that become resources on specific topics. You could have a wiki for each local government election, or major sporting event such as the grand final, or for high school graduations. Here is a video about using wikis as collaboration tools. Journalists in different parts of the country could use them for a project http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F7BAU2XX5Ws.

RSS feeds

Blogs can help us do better research and consequently better journalism. But blogs are spreading so quickly it is difficult to keep up. A technology known as RSS is available to help us follow the latest blogs. RSS stands for “really simple syndication”. It means you can have information fed to you instead of searching for it. Technlogy “pulls” content to your computer, as opposed to being “pushed” with email.

A program known as a news reader (sometimes called a feed reader or aggregator) checks a list of sites you choose, and displays all updated articles. As with email, unread entries are shown in bold.

News readers come in two forms: web-based aggregators that gather feeds for reading in a browser, or desktop news aggregators that can be installed on a computer. The latter can be cross platform, or specific to the Macintosh, Windows or Linux.

Aggregators are being built into portal sites such as My Yahoo! and Google and web browsers such as Mozilla Firefox, Safari and Opera. Apple’s iTunes serves as a podcast aggregator or “podcatcher”. Most aggregators are free. I used to use NetNewsWire on my Macintosh, paying $US30 a year until it became free late in 2007.

One of the most popular PC-based packages is Feed Demon. One of the biggest web-based aggregators is Bloglines (http://www.bloglines.com). My favourite is Google Reader because it integrates with other Google tools: http://www.google.com/reader/

Watch this YouTube video to understand the concept of RSS. It’s by Lee LeFever and is called “RSS in plain English”: http://www.commoncraft.com/rss_plain_english

Demonstrate Google Reader

Exercise

Set up a Google Reader account. You will need a Gmail account to log in.

Google tools for reporting

Google’s mail tool (Gmail) is useful for researchers. The chat option keeps a transcript of the conversation, so you have content to use when you write a story. You can use the same log-in for Gmail as for Google Reader. Google tools inter-connect with each other, so you have access to Picasa, the free picture editing software, from the desktop.

I recommend Google Alerts and Trackle. These bring information requests to you.

Demonstrate http://www.google.com/alerts and http://www.trackle.com/

Online video and multi-media

Over the next few years journalism will transform itself from its current print emphasis to a focus on a combination of print and multi-media, delivered online.

As that happens, newspapers will compete with broadcast companies to be first with the news. Before the spread of the web, broadcast companies owned breaking news. Radio could interrupt programs to announce the latest news. Television could go live if executives considered the situation appropriate, but only if they had a camera crew at the location. Meanwhile, newspapers had to wait until they were published. Now we can break news online, ahead of radio and television.

Much research has shown that breaking news drives traffic to newspaper web sites. The most popular form of breaking news, the kind that builds and holds audiences for web sites, is multi-media: news that is some combination of text, video, still images, maps, timelines, chronologies, slideshows and audio.

The simplest and quickest way to get multi-media news on a web site is via the mobile phone. Reporters can also send news back to the office via text messages from mobile phones and via tools such as Twitter (more on Twitter later).

Enter the mojo, a mobile journalist armed with only a mobile phone and a wireless Internet connection. With these simple tools a reporter can get multi-media breaking news onto a newspaper’s web site within minutes of an event being reported, ideally after an editor has looked at it first.

Demonstrate mojo if we have time.

Skype and CallRecorder

Skype (www.skype.com) is free software that lets you make free phone calls to anyone who has skype installed on their computer. It works best with broadband. If you put money into a skype account, you can call mobiles and landlines that do not have skype. The cost is low for international calls, compared with toll calls, especially from hotel rooms. I make almost all my international calls by skype.

Read this column by Amy Gahran headlined “Skype: Why every journalist should use it”. http://www.poynter.org/column.asp?id=31&aid=155339

CallRecorder (http://www.ecamm.com/mac/callrecorder/) costs $US 16. It only works on a Mac running OSX. It links with Skype to record the conversation, using the Mac’s built-in camera. Calls are saved as a QuickTime movie. The local and remote audio tracks of the conversation are recorded on different tracks. So you could select one track to use as the audio for a sound slide. Vemotion http://www.voiceemotion.com/ appears to be a PC equivalent but I have never used it so cannot comment. It ranges in price from $US 19.95 to $US 39.95.

Demonstrate Skype and CallRecorder.

Reporting with social networking (Web 2.0) tools

Web 1.0 was one-way delivery of information to the audience. Web 2.0 involves interaction and connection between audiences, and is also known as social networking. “Web 2.0 journalism” is the term that describes the relationship between the Internet, social media, social networking and journalism. Examples of Web 2.0 tools for journalists include Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Delicious.

To learn more about social networking watch this Lee LeFever video on social networking http://www.commoncraft.com/video-social-networking.

Facebook is an excellent way to find people to interview and story ideas. It has thousands of groups, many of which are useful for journalists. Join a group that relates to your area of interest. Some journalists have found Facebook a quick way to locate a photograph of someone in the news, especially if people being sought are aged under 40.

Facebook officially moved past MySpace in the US in terms of users during the week of May 30, Hitwise estimated. Facebook reportedly has more than 300 million active users. The number of Australians using Facebook rose to more than 6 million active users a month in October 2009. Of those half (51 per cent) login daily, spending an average of 22 minutes per user per day on the site. The average number of visits in Australia is 2.2 per person per day. Source: Matt Hehman of Facebook, 20 October 2009.

Twitter and microblogging

One of the big developments since early 2008 has been the concept of micro-blogging via the web or mobile phone. Twitter was the original tool (http://twitter.com/). Twitter is limited to 140 characters (similar to SMS). A post to Twitter is called a “tweet”.

The Punch (http://www.thepunch.com.au/) covers Question Time live every day Parliament sits. Managing editor Paul Colgan says a “sizeable crowd of readers” joins the discussion.

For the next group of tools you need a Twitter account. I use free software called TweetDeck to monitor Twitter. It has a clean interface and is available for Macintosh and Windows: http://www.tweetdeck.com/.

I think TweetGrid is another good tool for monitoring Twitter. The best option is to look at trends at http://www.tweetgrid.com/trending/. Jeff Turner has produced a short video about TweetGrid: http://www.vimeo.com/2356559

Tweetscan (http://www.tweetscan.com/) is like a search tool for tweets. Insert words that you are researching to see who is twittering about these things.

Here is a map of the world in which tweets appear from the continent of origin (it seems to have a lag of about 40 minutes): http://twittervision.com/

Another way to see what the blogosphere is saying is via Twitscoop. It uses an automated algorithm to monitor hundreds of tweets every minute and extract words mentioned more often than usual. The result is displayed in a tag cloud at http://www.twitscoop.com/. Pierre Stanislas, one of the developers in Paris, said Twitscoop crawls in excess of 20,000 tweets an hour.

This video “Twitter in plain English,” by the talented Lee LeFever, covers the basics about tweeting: http://www.commoncraft.com/twitter

Lee LeFever shows us how to use Twitter for research in this video: http://www.commoncraft.com/twitter-search

Many news organisations such as the BBC are breaking news on Twitter. In April 2009 a CNN producer ran the London marathon and twittered it: http://edition.cnn.com/2009/TECH/04/26/twitter.london.marathon.runner/.

Two months later a Seattle Times reporter did the same. Here is a background story: http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/flatpages/local/rockandrollfor26arunningcommentary.html

American journalism academics Marcus Messner and Asriel Eford of Virginia Commonwealth University looked at Twitter activity at 180 of the top US newspapers and television stations. They presented their findings at the Future of Journalism conference in Cardiff, UK, on September 11.

Messner said 91 per cent of the news outlets studied had Twitter accounts, but only two thirds of those studied actually used Twitter. Almost all (98.5 per cent) of the hyperlinks pointed to in tweets were to existing website content. In other words, Twitter was being used as a marketing tool.

Think of Twellow as the Yellow Pages for Twitter: http://www.twellow.com/.  A journalism graduate student in Buffalo New York, Craig Kanalley, launched a fascinating Twitter project in 2009 called Breaking Tweets. It organises thousands of tweets into a news service. Think of it as “hyperlocal gone global”. Find it at http://www.breakingtweets.com/

For a laugh, watch this mock documentary about a new form of communication called nano-blogging at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BeLZCy-_m3s

And this animated series has become hugely popular on Current TV: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PN2HAroA12w

And here you can pursue “celebrities” via Twitter: http://www.celebritytweet.com/

Delicious

This oddly named site (http://delicious.com/) allows journalists (after they register) to store all their bookmarks in one location on the web. So if reporters are on the road, they always have access to contacts and information.

More importantly, many people make their bookmarks publicly available on the web, which means it is possible to locate ready-made sources of research on specific topics. Search the site using keywords.

You can find my bookmarks at http://delicious.com/sraquinn/. More relevant for journalists is this huge collection of links on the subject of Internet freedom: http://delicious.com/internetfreedom/

This Lee LeFever video, called “Social bookmarking in plain English,” is about Delicious and social bookmarking: http://www.commoncraft.com/bookmarking-plain-english.

Demonstrate Delicious

Visual reporting: Panoramas and Wordle

One new way of combining images online has come to be known as a panorama. A panorama is a series of photographs taken over a short period of time and linked via Photoshop software to produce a continuous single image. Audiences can explore the image by scrolling their mouse around the image.

Here is an example from The New York Times. Click and drag your mouse over the image in any direction to see some amazing detail. It can seem like a rollercoaster ride at first: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2009/06/30/nyregion/20090702-page1-pano.html

Many people store their photographs on the web. Many of those photos are copyright free, so they can be used to illustrate your stories. Here is a Lee Lefever video about photosharing services: http://www.commoncraft.com/photosharing

Wordle (http://www.wordle.net/) describes itself as a “toy” for generating “word clouds” from text. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak the clouds with different fonts, layouts and colour schemes. A wordle is an excellent and simple way to illustrate news stories such as speeches.

Demonstrate Wordle

Audience-generated content

A key skill in the newsroom of the future will be the ability to find ways to report news as it happens by involving members of the audience. Smaller newspapers never have enough reporters to cover everything in their community. But many members of the community can take photographs or shoot video with their mobile phones and send text messages to the news desk. Tools like the mobile phone present an opportunity for an enterprising newspaper to develop connections with their various communities.

Audience-generated content, when managed well, helps newspapers connect with key members of the community – those people with their fingers of the pulse of the community, such as barbers, school administrators, sports club officials, religious leaders and community workers.

Use your newspaper’s web site and blogs to connect with these people. Invite them to contribute to topics you are researching. You will need to word the invitation carefully to ensure you do not give the impression you are seeking rumours or gossip, or just want free content. Many newspapers, for example, invite readers to email story tips. Many major media companies are embracing audience-generated content for a range of reasons.

Take a look at this, I think, amusing segment from the Daily Show about CNN’s iReport: http://www.thedailyshow.com/video/index.jhtml?videoId=127018&title=Headlines—CNN-iReport

Everything on one site

FriendFeed allows you to put all your links on one site. From there links can be shared. Demonstrate Friendfeed: http://friendfeed.com/sraquinn

Training yourself

If you are unfamiliar with new software you could join www.lynda.com, where you can teach yourself. Lynda charges a fee.

Assessing information quality

Beware of blogs used for “astro-turfing”: that’s the Internet term for blogs masquerading as grassroots coverage, usually to sell a product or push a cause. For example, blogs have reported that teenagers love to eat McDonalds hamburgers or will only wash their hair with Loreal shampoo. These blogs were written by company marketing people.

Fisking is a common form of fact-checking on the web. Fisking is reportedly named after Robert Fisk, the Beirut-based correspondent for The Independent. Fiskers are people who check stories line by line to find errors, and then publicise those mistakes. Plenty of people in the blogosphere seem to have lots of spare time to “fisk”.

Anyone can put fake information on the Internet, and it’s sometimes difficult discovering who has. To interpret digital information, journalists need to understand the concept of Internet domains and what they mean, and the structure of online files.

The standards we apply to digital information should be the same we apply to other information. Steve Miller, deputy technology editor at The New York Times, has developed the Miller Internet Data Integrity Scale, or MIDIS. He proposes a hierarchy of information, with credibility generally decreasing as you move down the hierarchy.

Government data (.gov /.govt)

Military (.mil /.mod)

University material (.edu /.ac)

Special interest groups (.org & .net)

Business and others (.com /.co)

Most of what appears in blogs comes from the bottom two Internet domains.

Be careful what you report. In July 2006 Sunday Age columnist Terry Lane fell for the Jesse Macbeth hoax. For more details, read the Wikipedia entry for Terry Lane at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terry_Lane and then read about Macbeth at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesse_Macbeth

In July 2009 two UK university graduates, Rory Crew and Knud Noelle, stopped updating the fake Twitter account they created to pretend to be UK foreign secretary David Miliband. Several major news outlets including The Guardian, AFP, The Times and The Telegraph quoted the fake Miliband’s tribute to Michael Jackson: “Never has one soared so high and yet dived so low. RIP Michael”.

In an email to The Guardian Crew and Noelle said they hoped journalists “learned something” about not taking information at face value. “It does highlight the importance of the verification of sources, which is clearly becoming more difficult in the web 2.0 era,” they wrote.

Remember, wrong information placed online has a long life. Early in May 2009 an Irish student admitted he had inserted a fake quote on Wikipedia about French composer Maurice Jarre some months earlier. After Jarre died in March 2009 the quote appeared in newspaper obituaries around the world.

Shane Fitzgerald, 22 at the time, from University College Dublin, said he put the quote on the web as an experiment. The Irish Times said despite corrections and the fact Wikipedia had dropped the quote, it appeared in dozens of blogs and newspapers. See http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5gQV2LU_QhL5w_BcPY5B6pvuUUMGg

You need to be careful about what you report, especially if it appears under your by-line. Use the RAP mnemonic to remember how to assess information quality. Ask yourself is the source Reliable? Who publishes the information?

Then ask if it’s Accurate. Mistakes in grammar, spelling and punctuation should cause you to question the content. What evidence can you find for assertions made in the text?

Finally, is the information Plausible? What is the tone of the writing? Why has it been assembled? You need to use your journalistic skills to assess web 2.0 content.

Online resources
Mark Briggs has written a free book about multi-media, available as a pdf. It’s basic but includes a good section on Web 2.0: http://www.kcnn.org/resources/journalism_20/.

Mindy McAdams, professor of journalism technologies at the University of Florida, has a comprehensive blog about teaching online journalism. She has compiled a series of blog posts into a free book, available as a pdf: http://mindymcadams.com/tojou/

You can learn much about multi-media journalism at this site from the University of California at Berkeley’s graduate school of journalism. Multi-media journalist Jane Stevens wrote many of the tutorials: http://multimedia.journalism.berkeley.edu/

The fall 2009 edition of the Nieman Report focuses on social media and journalism: http://www.nieman.harvard.edu/reports.aspx?id=100058

Mark S. Luckie writes an excellent blog about multimedia that should be on your list of regular reads: http://www.10000words.net/

The author’s blog about mobile journalism has a range of information about reporting with only a mobile phone. See: http://globalmojo.org

Jonathan Dube of Cyberjournalist provides an excellent introduction to RSS feeds for journalists. Read it at http://www.cyberjournalist.net/news/001913.php. JD Lasica has written a RSS guide for journalists at http://www.ojr.org/ojr/lasica/1043362624.php.

Journalism academic Paul Bradshaw wrote this useful article about much of what we discuss in this course: http://www.journalism.co.uk/7/articles/531343.php

Bradshaw maintains an excellent blog, which often contains posts about teaching yourself multimedia. See: http://onlinejournalismblog.com/

Donna Shaw wrote an article headlined “Wikipedia in the Newsroom” for American Journalism Review of Feb-March 2008. http://www.ajr.org/Article.asp?id=4461

Here is John Sandvand on Twitter: http://www.betatales.com/2009/01/21/5-great-twitter-tools-for-journalists/. The editors’ weblog has also written about Twitter: http://www.editorsweblog.org/multimedia/2009/07/do_journalists_speak_twitter.php

Daniel Bennett has a useful post on UK journalists’ use of Twitter during the Iranian uprising: http://frontlineclub.com/blogs/danielbennett/2009/09/access-denied.html

Last updated 27 September 2009

Ways to develop innovation in Oz

Here is an important paper on ways to build innovation in Australia. The author is Elias Bizannes.

Making money with mobile content

Frédéric Filloux, a Paris-based editor with the Norwegian media house Schibsted, writes a considered piece on how it might be possible to make money from delivering content on a mobile phone. Filloux points out that news-related apps are the fastest-growing segment in the iPhone world.

New tools for reporting

Held at Ateneo University, Manila, 16 May 2009

This course will look at: 

Using blogs for research and finding story ideas

RSS feeds for better journalism

Skype and CallRecorder

Mobile journalism (mojo)

Micro-blogging and using Twitter (TweetDeck) for journalism

Visual reporting: Panoramas, Wordle and Soundslides

Web 2.0 tools for reporting

 

Bio of the teacher

Stephen Quinn was a full-time journalist for two decades until 1995, and continues to practise as a journalist. He has worked for regional newspapers in Australia; the Bangkok Post; the UK Press Association, BBC-TV, Independent Television News and The Guardian in London; the Australian Broadcasting Corporation in Sydney; and Television New Zealand. He was a producer for the Middle East Broadcasting Centre in 2002-03 while running a research centre in Dubai, to re-acquaint himself with new television production technologies.

Dr Quinn became a full-time university academic in 1996. Since then he has written 12 books, scores of book chapters and thousands of journalism articles. The most recent books are Asia’s Media Innovators and Australia-UAE: Expanding trade and cultural links, which appeared last year. In 2007 he co-wrote with Dr Stephen Lamble Online Newsgathering: Research and Reporting for Journalism. He published three books about convergent journalism in 2005 and 2006. Another two books are due for publication in 2010. In the past decade Dr Quinn has presented 123 academic papers in 24 countries. More than a third have been by invitation. 

Dr Quinn contributes to newspapers and magazines, consults for media companies, presents at industry conferences, and conducts research and training courses for media companies. In the past decade he had run almost 100 training courses in eight countries. He is a consultant for the Ifra Newsplex (based in Germany) and Innovation International (based in Spain), a member f the Counsel of the Newsplex, and a member of the international committee of the Online News Association.

Introduction

The history of journalists’ adoption of newsgathering technologies contains a continuing theme: reporters will embrace new tools if they are relevant – that is, they make the job of storytelling easier – and if the tools are easy to use (intuitive).

Some powerful digital technologies have become available to reporters over the past few years. This course focuses on some of the latest. But please note they require a little practice before they become second nature.

Blogs

Blogs and other related technologies offer new opportunities for journalists. Blog is a word combined from web and log. The word “blogosphere” describes all the content built by blogs, moblogs, podcasts and video blogs (these are discussed later).

Research with blogs

Journalists can use blogs as research tools, but the quality of information varies considerably. Think of them as a convenient electronic tool for listening to scuttlebutt. It’s a bit like listening to conversations on public transport or at social events. Sometimes they will stimulate ideas for stories. 

Use blogs to discover what people in the blogosphere are saying about local businesses or sportspeople or politicians. But remember that blogs are more influential than they deserve because Technorati, like Google, ranks sites based on how many people link to that site. This produces high rankings for bloggers who link to other bloggers. If you find lots of links to a blog, this might mean the blogger is respected and the blogosphere thinks they know a lot about the subject. They might prove a useful person to interview.

Technorati (http://technorati.com/) is the leading tool for searching blogs. According to Technorati, more than 175,000 new blogs start every day. More than 1.6 million blog posts appear a day, or about 18 a second. As of early 2008 Technorati was tracking 112.8 million blogs and more than 250 million pieces of social media. Four years earlier Technorati tracked a mere 2.4 million blogs. Now the site simply says it tracks “millions” of blogs. It claims to report within eight minutes of a blog being published.

 

Google also has a good search tool for finding blogs at http://blogsearch.google.com.au/ though it is still in beta, which is geek speak for still being tested.

 

Also remember that the same search terms typed into a blog search tool such as Technorati will produce different results compared with using those same terms in a search engine such as Fast or Google. So when casting the net wide for information make sure you search both on blogs and search tools.

Exercise

Choose a subject you plan to research. It might be a local person or sporting identity or organisation. Or for the exercise you could use your own name. Search for the name in a web-based tool such as Google or Fast or Yahoo! (putting the full name in quote marks tells the technology you only want mentions of the name that are in a phrase). Then do the same search in Technorati, the blog search tool.

Compare the different results. You will note that these tools search different parts of the Internet. It helps to research something topical because people tend to blog about current events. For example, you would search Technorati for a local sporting identity close to a major game, or a local politician close to an election.

RSS feeds

Blogs can help reporters do better research and consequently better journalism. But blogs are spreading so quickly it is difficult to keep up. A technology known as RSS is available to help keep journalists abreast of the news, and also follow the latest blogs. RSS stands for “really simple syndication”. It means journalists can have information constantly fed to them instead of searching for it. Technlogy “pulls” content to your computer, as opposed to being “pushed” with email.

A program known as a news reader (sometimes called a feed reader or aggregator) checks a list of sites the journalist chooses and displays all updated articles. The software provides summaries of web content plus links to the full version of each story. As with email, unread entries are shown in bold.

News readers come in two forms: web-based aggregators that gather feeds for reading in a browser, or desktop news aggregators that can be installed on a computer. The latter can be cross platform, or specific to the Macintosh, Windows or Linux. I use Google Reader because it is part of the Google group of tools, such as Gmail.

Exercise

Set up a Google Reader account. You can use your existing Gmail account to log in. You will need to set up a Gmail account if you do not have one.

Google tools for reporting

Google’s mail tool (Gmail) is useful for journalists. The chat option keeps a transcript of the conversation, so you have content to use when you write a story. You can use the same log-in for Gmail as for Google Reader. Google tools inter-connect with each other, so you have access to Picasa, the free picture editing software, from the desktop.

Skype and CallRecorder

Skype (www.skype.com) is free software that lets you make free phone calls to anyone who has skype installed on their computer. It works best with broadband. If you put money into a skype account, you can call mobiles and landlines that do not have skype. The cost is low for international calls, compared with toll calls, especially from hotel rooms. I make almost all my international calls by skype.

Read this column by Amy Gahran headlined “Skype: Why every journalist should use it”. http://www.poynter.org/column.asp?id=31&aid=155339

CallRecorder (http://www.ecamm.com/mac/callrecorder/) costs $US16. It used to work only on a Mac running OSX. It links with Skype to record the conversation, using the Mac’s built-in camera. Calls are saved as a QuickTime movie. The local and remote audio tracks of the conversation are recorded on different tracks. So you can select one track to use as the audio for a sound slide. More on sound slides later.

A PC version is now available at http://www.callcorder.com/.

Exercise

Demonstrate Skype and CallRecorder.

Online video and multi-media

Over the next few years newspaper journalism will transform itself from its current print emphasis to a focus on a combination of print and multi-media, delivered online.

As that happens, newspapers will compete with broadcast companies to be first with the news. Before the spread of the web, broadcast companies owned breaking news. Radio could interrupt programs to announce the latest news. Television could go live if executives considered the situation appropriate, but only if they had a camera crew at the location. Meanwhile, newspapers had to wait until they were published. Now newspapers can break news online, often ahead of radio and television.

Much research has shown that breaking news drives traffic to newspaper web sites. The most popular form of breaking news, the kind that builds and holds audiences for web sites, is multi-media: news that is some combination of text, video, still images, maps, timelines, chronologies, slideshows and audio.

The simplest and quickest way to get multi-media news on a web site is via the mobile phone. Reporters can also send news back to the office via text messages from mobile phones and via tools such as Twitter (more on Twitter later).

Enter the mojo, a mobile journalist armed with only a mobile phone and a wireless Internet connection. With these simple tools a reporter can get multi-media breaking news onto a newspaper’s web site within minutes of an event being reported, ideally after an editor has looked at it first.

Enter the mojo

At least six companies offer tools for streaming live video from a mobile phone to the web. They are Qik, Shozu and Kyte in the United States, Mogulus in Canada, Bambuser in Sweden and Flixwagon in Israel.

The technical process is simple: Register the mobile phone number with one of these companies. Within seconds you receive a text message with a web link. Select the link and the software loads onto the phone. Thereafter, it takes one button to open the video software or audio recorder on the phone and one more to begin and end filming or recording.

Most of the software is currently only available on Nokia and Sony Ericsson phones and a handful of handsets running Windows Mobile. Newspapers need to consider how to pay for data charges because video and audio generate large files, and phone companies charge for data transmitted, not time connected. The best option is to choose an “all-you-can-eat” monthly data package if they are available.

Safdar Mustafa of Al-Jazeera talks about mojos at his channel. The video runs for 2:47. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2W9q3q_SVZI

In most examples of mojo work, the video is streamed from the reporter’s camera to the software company’s site. Then the newspaper copies selected pieces of video to the newspaper’s web site. A faster option, which would involve negotiations between the software companies mentioned earlier, would be to stream video directly from the camera to the newspaper’s web site. Newspapers considering this option would need to contact the individual software companies.

Recommendations

Of the software tools mentioned earlier, Qik and Bambuser worked best for reporting breaking news as of late 2008. My main criteria for selecting software were simplicity of use and quality of image. Qik is by far the easiest to load onto a mobile phone and use. If the software corrupts, one simply logs in to one’s private section of Qik and requests a repeat of the software. It appears seconds later and takes less than a minute to download onto a phone.

The quality of the video each software package produces varies, depending on how far the phone is from the server, the number of servers the company owns, and the calibre of local wireless broadband networks. Qik’s servers are in California while Bambuser’s are in Sweden. Both offer fast connections, which suggests they have plenty of server power.

Examples of the author’s mojo videos can be found at http://qik.com/mojo1 and http://qik.com/mojo2 and http://bambuser.com/channel/mojo1.

Twitter (aka micro blogging)

One of the big developments since early 2008 has been the concept of micro blogging via the web or mobile phone. Twitter was the original tool (http://twitter.com/). Reporting with tools like Twitter is limited to 140 characters (similar to SMS). A post to Twitter is called a “tweet”.

 I originally used a free tool called Twhirl (http://www.twhirl.org/). But I now find TweetDeck easier to use and it has a cleaner interface. See http://www.tweetdeck.com/. I think TweetGrid is a great tool for monitoring Twitter: http://www.tweetgrid.com/ A video about it is listed in the readings at the end.

Tweetscan (www.tweetscan.com) is like a search tool for tweets. Insert words that interest you, such as earthquake or riot or protest and see who is twittering about these things. Or use TweetGrid. In May 2008 American blogger and journalist Robert Scoble reported the major earthquake in China on Twitter an hour before CNN or major media started talking about it. How did he do that? “I was watching Twitter. Several people in China reported to me they felt the quake while it was going on. Over the next two hours I pointed at anyone who had info about the quake on my Twitter account. It’s amazing the kind of news you can learn by being on Twitter and the connections you can make among people across the world.”

Here is a map of the world in which tweets appear from the continent of origin (it seems to have a lag of about 40 minutes). http://twittervision.com/

Also useful way to see what the blogosphere is saying is via Twitscoop. It uses an automated algorithm to monitor hundreds of tweets every minute and extract words mentioned more often than usual. The result is displayed in a tag cloud at http://www.twitscoop.com/. Pierre Stanislas, one of the developers in Paris, said Twitscoop crawls in excess of 20,000 tweets an hour.

For a laugh, watch this mock documentary about a new form of communication called nano-blogging at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BeLZCy-_m3s

Think of Twellow as the Yellow Pages for Twitter: http://www.twellow.com/.  A journalism graduate student in Buffalo New York, Craig Kanalley, launched a fascinating Twitter project in 2009 called Breaking Tweets. It organises thousands of tweets into a news service. Think of it as “hyperlocal gone global”. Find it at http://www.breakingtweets.com/

Reporting with social networking (Web 2.0) tools

Web 1.0 was one-way delivery of information to the audience. Web 2.0 involves interaction and connection between audiences, and is also known as and social networking. “Web 2.0 journalism” is the term that describes the relationship between the Internet, social networking possibilities and reporters. Examples of Web 2.0 tools for journalists include Facebook, Delicious and FriendFeed.

Facebook is an excellent way to find people to interview and story ideas. It has thousands of groups, many of which are useful for journalists. Join a group that relates to your area of interest. Some journalists have found Facebook a quick way to locate a photograph of someone in the news.

Delicious

This weirdly named site (http://del.icio.us/) allows journalists (after they register) to store all their bookmarks in one location on the web. So if reporters are on the road, they always have access to contacts and information.

More importantly, plenty of people make their bookmarks publicly available on the web, which means that it is often possible to locate ready-made sources of research on specific topics: del.icio.us is an excellent research tool for journalists. Visit my bookmarks at http://del.icio.us/sraquinn/ to see my links about mobile phones and business models for journalism. More relevant for journalists is this huge collection of links on the subject of internet freedom: http://delicious.com/internetfreedom/ Search the site using keywords.

Visual reporting: Panoramas and Wordle

One new way of combining images and audio online is what has come to be known as a panorama. A panorama is a series of photographs taken over a short period of time and linked via software to produce a continuous single image. Audiences can explore the image by scrolling their mouse around the image.

Here are some good examples from The Washington Post and The New York Times. The first was taken at the Pacific Arch, the national World War II memorial on the National Mall in Washington. The $US 172 million memorial was dedicated in May 2008. See http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/mmedia/360/042904-20p.htm

The second panorama was shot on the floor of the New York stock exchange. Vikas Bajaj, who covers finance for The New York Times, describes how the New York Stock Exchange has changed in the age of electronic trading. See http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2008/10/23/business/20081023_NYSE_PANO.html?src=tp

Click and drag your mouse over either image in any direction to see some amazing detail.

Wordle (http://www.wordle.net/) describes itself as a “toy” for generating “word clouds” from text. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak the clouds with different fonts, layouts and colour schemes. A wordle is an excellent and simple way to illustrate news stories such as speeches.

Soundslides

This software, created by American photo-journalist Joe Weiss, has become the default tool for creating multi-media slideshows. Many newspaper photographers take many images at a news event but only one appears in the paper. Slideshows are wonderful ways to publish the spare images on the web, combined with audio. The software is available at http://www.soundslides.com. The demonstration version is free. It costs $US 40 to buy the basic edition and $US 65 for the deluxe edition.

Here is a suggested process for creating a slideshow. Assemble all your images in a clearly marked folder. Number those images in the order you want them to appear. Make sure those photos, already cropped and photoshopped, are in the JPG file format.

Prepare a sound track. It could be a reporter’s voice-over, or music, or an interview, or a file recorded on Skype via CallRecorder, or some combination of these. Make sure you save the sound track as an MP3 file. The sound track is the backbone or skeleton of the slideshow. The duration of the sound track is the duration of the slideshow.

Open the software and select new project. Make sure you know where you saved your project (desktop is simplest), and the name of the folder. You can use the video cited in the references to teach yourself how to use Soundslides. Allow about 5-6 seconds per photo, on average. A slideshow should be about 60 to 90 seconds. So 90 seconds of audio will require 12 to 15 good photos.

Nothing is more boring than image redundancy or repetition. So choose pictures wisely.

Soundslides offers a great way to tell multi-media stories. Sometimes a video of a person speaking can be boring. But that same voice combined with a slide show will produce strong storytelling.

Everything on one site

One good way to remember it all is via FriendFeed, which helps put all your links on one page. Demonstrate: http://friendfeed.com/sraquinn

Online resources

Mark Briggs has written a free book on multi-media for journalists. It’s basic but it includes a good section on Web 2.0: http://www.kcnn.org/resources/journalism_20/.

You can learn lots about multi-media journalism at this site from the University of California at Berkeley’s graduate school of journalism. Multi-media journalist Jane Stevens wrote many of the tutorials: http://multimedia.journalism.berkeley.edu/

Mindy McAdams, professor of journalism technologies at the University of Florida, has a comprehensive blog about online journalism: http://mindymcadams.com/tojou/

The author’s blog about mobile journalism has a range of information about reporting with only a mobile phone. See http://globalmojo.org

Mark S. Luckie writes an excellent blog about multimedia which should be on your list of regular reads. http://www.10000words.net/

Readings

Jonathan Dube of Cyberjournalist provides an excellent introduction to RSS feeds for journalists. Read it at http://www.cyberjournalist.net/news/001913.php. JD Lasica has written a RSS guide for journalists at http://www.ojr.org/ojr/lasica/1043362624.php.

If you use the Pro version of Soundslides, here is a video tutorial on how to use it: http://www.multimediashooter.com/wp/uncategorized/video-tutorial-soundslides-part-1/

Reporters Without Borders has a guide for understanding how people in repressed cultures can publish their blogs: http://www.rsf.org/rubrique.php3?id_rubrique=542

Paris on a budget

It is possible to enjoy Paris without taking out a second mortgage.

Some travellers are avoiding France because of the financial crisis and the low value of the Aussie dollar, also known as the Pacific peso. But with discipline and the information in this article we can appreciate one of the world’s most beautiful cities.

Let’s begin with the basics: accommodation, food and transport. Hotels in Paris are expensive. Instead, I rented an apartment by putting an advertisement on Craigslist.com, paying $70 a night for a double room about 100 metres from the Louvre. Hotels in the area cost triple that even for one star accommodation.

Craigslist is a web site that functions like a newspaper’s classified section. Placing an advert is free and takes five minutes. I received more than a dozen replies to my five-line query.

Beware of scams, though, especially people who require money in advance. I received photos of an alleged luxury apartment in central Paris from a man claiming to be a doctor working in Nigeria. “Dr Smith Mayers” said he would send me the keys after I wired money to his bank account. Victorian police confirmed he is a fraudster.

Parisians who rent rooms in family homes happily accept cash when you arrive. They also let you wash clothes in their laundry, and use their kitchen to make coffee and snacks, which saves money.

French coffee and hot chocolate are delicious, but expensive. I paid $16 for two cups of brown muck masquerading as “chocolat chaud” in a central Paris café. Best to avoid cafes despite the romantic notion, fuelled by the movies, of reading a book while sipping wine or coffee. It looks cool but will burn a hole in your wallet.

Instead, take a thermos of tea or coffee, which you can prepare in the kitchen.

Tap water is safe to drink in Paris, so carry a plastic bottle to re-fill from the many fountains in the city. And ask for “l’eau ordinaire” (tap water) if in a café. Most waiters will try to sting you $8 for a bottle of water available in a supermarket for less than a dollar.

The recession has forced restaurants to lower their prices. Paris has thousands of good restaurants and all display their menus on the street, so window shop to your heart’s content when selecting where to eat. Lunches tend to be large, especially in winter. I found I only needed a snack most evenings after a big lunch. Baguettes cost about $2 from most bakeries and make an ideal snack.

Most restaurants offer a prix fixee as part of their menu – that’s a set price for two or three courses. I had superb lunches in a Michelin-starred restaurant named Les Terrines de Gerard Vie at 97 rue Cherche-Midi in the sixth arrondissement. It cost $48 for three courses, and included a glass of wine. The food was so good I kept the menu as a souvenir and returned the next day.

My first lunch consisted of a sampling of terrines with crusty baguette and creamy butter, followed by a selection of jambon (a chewy dried ham) and cheese. The waiter carved the ham from a leg in the centre of the restaurant. I was full by the time the main course arrived: blanquette de veau (veal stew with carrots, onions and potatoes), washed down with a glass of red from the Corbieres region.

I needed to take a long walk to digest that wonderful meal. I waddled rather than walked.

Paris is a city for walking. Taxis are expensive and get trapped in traffic while the meter keeps ticking. Better to use the underground rail system, the Metro, because it is cheap and free maps are available at any station. Buy a “carnet de dix” – a book of 10 Metro tickets – for $24. Individual tickets are $3.20 so buying in bulk saves $8 each time. One Metro ticket will take you anywhere in Paris – no zoning system of varying prices as in other cities.

Take a sturdy pair of boots and see Paris by foot. Buy a copy of Paris Pratique ($10), a paperback book of maps available at any newspaper kiosk. Apart from the main boulevards with iconic names like St Michel and Haussmann, Paris is a maze of small streets that fan out like spokes from a wheel, often merging into lanes and squares. Streets are known to break, assume another name, and re-join under the original title.

You will need a map in Paris even if your French is good enough to ask directions. Generally I found my attempts to speak French rewarded by small acts of generosity. One old man took my arm and guided me to my destination, seemingly glad to help a lost foreigner.

Paris appears chaotic. It is divided into areas, or arrondissements. These are numbered from one to 21. Do not expect a grid pattern like in Adelaide or most American cities. Arrondissements are sequenced in a spiral shape, like the shell of a snail, with number one at the centre of the city.

And yes, you can eat snails, or escargot, in Paris. But expect to pay at least $2.50 each, or $30 a dozen. They are smothered in garlic and a bright green sauce made of parsley and butter. If you must eat escargot, try them in one of the regional cities serviced by France’s fast rail system. They will be cheaper and fresher.

I took the train to Epernay, the centre of the champagne region. The 100km journey flashed by in about 95 minutes, and cost $40 return. In Epernay I walked the Avenue de Champagne, where all of the main bubbly houses display their wares. It is said to be the most expensive piece of real estate in the world because of the billions of dollars worth of champagne in the cellars, or caves, under the houses.

Most of the prestige-name champagne houses offer tastings: With the basic option for $24 you get to taste two wines. A more expensive option, which costs $50, includes a taste of two vintage champagnes plus a tour of the caves below. Do not arrive at noon because everything will be closed until 2pm. Lunch is a ritual, even a religion. I worshipped with excellent escargot at $18 a dozen, washed down with bubbly.

If tasting at the prestige-name champagne houses seems expensive, visit the champagne bar in rue Gambetta, a 10-minute walk from the railway station. They stock champagne from 43 of the lesser-known houses, and charge $6 to $10 a taste. Plus you can buy from their cellar. I paid $34 for a bottle of 2000-vintage champagne that would cost at least treble that price in Australia.

Winter is the best time to visit Paris because airfares are lower, meals are larger and heartier, and fewer tourists crowd the streets of the popular spots like Notre Dame cathedral or the major museums.

Paris can be very crowded in spring and summer. If you do travel then, and want to enjoy several museums, consider a pass for two, three or five days. Details are available on the http://www.discoverfrance.net/ web site. The pass means you skip the frequently long queues and enter through a special door.

I planned to visit the Musee d’Orsay, a magnificent building that stretches along the Seine river opposite the Tuileries gardens. But the entrance queue snaked for at least a kilometre, meaning I faced a wait of at least an hour. Most museums are closed on Tuesdays, apart from the Musee d’Orsay and the Rodin Muesum. Best to plan something apart from museums on a Tuesday.

Notre Dame cathedral is a must see. All churches are free to enter. Notre Dame has vespers at 5.45pm, and you can usually hear the magnificent organ and choir perform at that time each evening.

One of my favourite places is the cemetery named after Pere Lachaise (1624-1709), confessor to King Louis XIV. Take the Metro to Gambetta and cross the road to the cemetery.

The great Irish poet and playwright, Oscar Wilde, is buried in Pere Lachaise. The sculptor Jacob Epstein designed the grave, and it has become a tourist attraction. Many visitors rouge their lips and kiss the grave. Oscar would have appreciated the attention: His grave is covered in kisses and flowers.

The nearby grave of the great French novelist, Marcel Proust, is more sedate: a black granite slab.

My favourite is the grave of journalist Victor Noir, a famed womaniser. His memorial consists of a full-size brass sculpture of the writer, with the buttons of his flies open. Women who want to conceive are said to rub this part of his anatomy. This area of the sculpture is well worn.

You will need a map to explore the cemetery. They are sold at the entrance for $4. The cemetery is like the rest of Paris, full of irregular streets and magnificent architecture. But unlike Paris, the cemetery is free.

Stephen Quinn teaches journalism at Deakin University. He paid $2,160 for an economy class flight to Paris with Malaysian Airlines, via Kuala Lumpur.

* Published in The Age and the SMH, 14 March 2009

Review of award-winng book Inside Spin

A “culture of secrecy” pervades the highest levels of the PR industry says Bob Burton is his powerful book Inside Spin, which won this year’s Iremonger award [2007] for writing about public issues.

The industry’s peak body, the Public Relations Institute of Australia (PRIA), expects members to adhere to a “strict” code of conduct. But Burton maintains the industry maintains a “culture of secrecy” and estimates only about a quarter of the people employed in the industry are members of the PRIA. Its code of ethics obligates members to disclose sources of funding for campaigns, but another provision in the code requires members to “safeguard the confidence of clients”. In effect the latter provision trumps the first.

The contradictions implicit in this situation are damning, Burton says, especially given the drive from PR companies to promote the notion of corporate social responsibility among their clients. “For many companies, disclosing the names of clients is a balancing act between wanting to impress potential clients with their PR prowess while avoiding debate over some of their less savoury clients and controversial campaigns.”

The book is timely given the boom in the PR industry in the past half decade. In that time it has grown at a rate of 20 per cent, and it turns over more than $1 billion a year in Australia. Despite employing about 10,000 people it is difficult to get a full sense of the industry. “Exactly who falls within the PR profession is something of a moot point, as the boundary lines between PR, marketing and lobbying are often blurred,” says Burton.

The chapters on the relationship between PR and the pharmaceutical and tobacco industries are especially revealing. Globally the drug industry generated $US 608 billion in revenues last year. It is the world’s most profitable stock market sector. Australia’s share of the market is small but still worth $7.8 billion a year in sales. Dr Peter Mansfield from the industry watchdog Healthy Skepticism points out that the anti-inflammatory drug Vioxx killed hundreds of Australians in 2004. ”It killed more Australians than the Bali bombing and we are spending billions on anti-terrorism projects but we are not doing anything about drug advertising.” Ironically, the drug industry sponsors Australia’s most lucrative journalism awards.

Burton identifies the heart of health and pharmaceutical PR as third-party credibility – getting seemingly independent groups to say nice things about drug companies and their products. “Third-party messages are an essential means of communication for validating scientific credibility, for legitimising products, for building brand and disease awareness, and for building differences against crises,” Burton quotes Nancy Turett, president of Edelman’s health practice, as saying. Little wonder, Burton wryly notes, that the tobacco industry has a better reputation in Australia than the pharmaceutical companies.

Last year the global tobacco industry generated revenues of $US 348.57 billion. Smoking was also responsible for the death of 750,000 people, the World Health Organisation calculates. The industry has decided to opt for “reputation management” as part of its campaign strategy. Burton notes that in Australia many PR programs for multinational companies work from a global template. The policy in Australia appears to be based on a commitment to combating under-age smoking, promotion of sensible regulations governing the manufacture and marketing of tobacco products and the demonstration of “good corporate conduct”. Burton joins the dots in showing how in Australia both these industries appear to turn to PR companies staffed by people with links to former government ministers and lobby groups. Burton also shows the links between tobacco and major media companies. He cites a 1985 memo from Hamish Maxwell, CEO of Philip Morris, the world’s largest private tobacco company, saying that media proprietors such as Rupert Murdoch were “sympathetic to our position”. The media “like the money they make from our advertisements”. Murdoch was on the board of Philip Morris from 1989 to 2002.

Burton also illustrates the influence of think tanks. Last year articles from the Institute of Public Affairs, based in Melbourne, appeared an average of almost four times a week in the opinion columns of major newspapers. Most of that content is supplied free. Burton describes the IPA’s role as clearing the way for politicians and officials “to implement policies deemed too politically toxic to touch”. Think tanks are equally secretive about their funding sources, Burton says. He details the involvement of think tanks in major issues of the past few years, including the sale of Telstra, environmental concerns, Australia’s water policy, and free trade agreements. He describes their approach: obscure the funding source, court journalists with impressive-looking research and readily available talking heads, and “dovetail advocacy with allies in the media and politics to develop an ‘echo-chamber’ effect”.

This is a welcome book. It should be on the reading lists for all of the country’s journalism and public relations programs, especially the chapter “It takes two to tango” on the symbiotic relationship between journalism and PR. No hard data are available but the PR industry in Australia is growing – in July this year The Australian Financial Review highlighted the rising demand for graduates – while the ranks of journalists are thinning. The allocation of resources to online journalism, boosted by the growth of broadband, is putting more pressure on daily newspapers, traditionally the agenda setters.

Professor Steve Ross, recently retired from Columbia University, produces an annual survey of journalists’ use of the Internet. He concluded in his 2002 survey that journalists’ use of the Internet for research, especially for breaking news, had become “almost universal”. As journalists look to the web for information, PR companies are content to satisfy their needs behind the safety of online anonymity.

Burton believes the spread of the “invisible” and secretive forces that shape public debate in Australia is bad for society and incompatible with a healthy democracy. Australia’s democracy will be in trouble, he says, if the only voices citizens hear in public debate belong to people with enough wealth to fund PR campaigns, “especially clandestine PR campaigns”. By “shining a light” on the PR industry with this book, he hopes to help citizens, journalists and activists “understand how spin really works and help curtail its seemingly never-ending spread”. As United States Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis noted in 1914, sunlight continues to be the best disinfectant.

Inside Spin: The dark underbelly of the PR industry by Bob Burton, published by Allen & Unwin, 2007, has 313 pages and costs $29.95.

* Review written September 2007.

Media business models need urgent attention

Australia’s mass media need to overhaul their business models if they are to survive.

Managers have neglected business models appropriate for the digital economy, such as de-bundling and re-bundling of content to cater for digital natives. An example of de-bundling would be isolating a single song from a CD, or a single article from a newspaper. Re-bundling involves selling collected pieces of de-bundled content on different platforms.

Professor Arne Krokan of Norway’s University of Science and Innovation said technologies to re-bundle newspaper content and enable micro-payments online or via mobile phones were available “but they have not been embraced”.

Professor Krokan, who consults to media groups in Scandinavia, told the first Australian meeting of the Association of Internet Researchers that newspaper companies around the world had been slow to benefit from the digital revolution.

In Australia media companies move dated content from newspapers and broadcast outlets to web sites. This is shovelling, not re-bundling.

Newspapers also refuse to de-bundle in the physical world. Why not sell separate sections? As soon as I buy weekend newspapers I discard the sports, recruitment, cars and real estate sections without opening them. Why not sell only the business or sports section to interested readers? Just as Apple sells single songs via iTunes.

A song can be replayed and enjoyed several times. Would this happen with single pieces of journalism? Perhaps the answer is a reflection of the quality of some newspaper writing. Or perhaps people perceive newspaper content as ephemeral, the sort of mindset that sees newsprint as wrapping paper for tomorrow’s fish and chips.

Much of the success in the digital world relates to perception as much as reality.

Professor Krokan said convergent technologies permitted new media services. It was important here to understand the whole picture or context. “We need to take into consideration a range of factors including available technologies, changing markets and consumer behaviours, the influence of geography (local is becoming highly popular because of its ability to provide unique content), consumers’ knowledge and competence, variations of culture, and digital business models.”

The main driving forces in the digital economy were convergent technolgies, changing consumer behaviour and deterritorialisation. In the last case, this is where multi-national companies sell into domestic markets. “Amazon sells more books in my country than the combined sales of the three largest Norwegian bookstores. The market is worth about $US 20 million.”

An example of convergent technologies is IPTV, or television available over fast broadband, which undermined the business model of commercial free-to-air TV networks.

European newspapers had started to offer services beyond news to align with changing consumer desires. One of the most popular sections of some papers is a weightwatchers’ club, for example.

Professor Krokan said another feature of digital services was the blurring of the roles of consumers and producers. Consumers were fast becoming producers of content. “In Norway, people take videos with their mobile phones and post them to newspaper web sites.”

Dr Axel Bruns of Queensland University of Technology said citizen journalism provided an example of this blurring of roles, for which he had coined the term “produsage”.

A variety of citizen journalism models had emerged, but “produsage” had some key characteristics. These included content generated by average citizens, limited editorial oversight, continuous updating, more comment and debate than in mainstream media, and multiple perspectives for stories, Dr Bruns said.

Some of the best-known examples included OhMyNews in South Korea, Kuro5hin, Plastic.com, and the Al Gore-funded Current TV. “We see constant and collaborative evolving of content,” Dr Bruns said.

Progressive media such as the BBC were adapting their business models to accommodate changing audiences, and this provided an example of “harvesting the hive” – taking advantage of the vast content that citizen journalists produced. But the long-term economic sustainability of this model remained a “significant question,” he said.

Professor John Hartley of QUT said the business model for broadcasting needed “a makeover”. “Broadcasting as we know it is over.” TV was heading into a post-broadcast phase, driven by the Internet. “Mass media do not last forever. Some simply go away.”

Young people were becoming “produsers” via Internet sites such as MySpace, Flickr and YouTube.

Australia needed faster broadband services to accommodate this change. “We must revise our view of creativity, and revise the broadcast model of creativity, which leaves the general public sprawled brainlessly on the couch.”

* Published in the Bulletin of the Pacific Area Newspaper Publishers’ Association in January 2008.

One of Australia’s greatest journalists

Over the next few weeks China’s main broadcaster will screen almost four hours of a documentary about the great Australian journalist George Ernest (“Chinese”) Morrison.

From 1897 to 1912 Morrison was China correspondent for The Times when the newspaper was effectively an arm of the British foreign office. Because of his position and a series of major political events Morrison became the most recognised Australian in the world.

China Central Television claims an audience of about 1,000 million souls, more than the combined audiences for the United States and Europe. Despite the high regard in China, Morrison is almost forgotten in his country of birth.

A small brass plaque marks his years at Geelong College, where his father was the founding headmaster. In 1932 Chinese people in Australia funded a series of lectures “to honour the great Australian who rendered valuable service to China”. The Australian National University took responsibility for the lectures in 1948 and the most recent Morrison memorial lecture was 6 September 2007.

But little else honours a truly remarkable life.

It would take thousands of words to detail his achievements so this article will only mention some of the highlights. In 1880, aged 18, Morrison walked almost 1,000 kilometres from Victoria to Adelaide.

Two years later Morrison exposed the practice of “blackbirding” in an eight-part series in The Age, after working on one of the ships that lured Pacific islanders aboard and then took them to Australia to work almost as slaves.

That same year Morrison traced the route Burke and Wills had pioneered 22 years earlier, walking 3,254 kilometres in 123 days from north Queensland to Melbourne. Travelling alone and living off the land, Morrison averaged 26.5 kilometres a day. In London, The Times described the journey as “one of the most remarkable of pedestrian achievements”.

At age 23 Morrison led an expedition to walk north across New Guinea, but returned early after being speared twice. No surgeon in Australia would operate and a finger-length spear tip remained in Morrison’s body for a year before an Edinburgh surgeon removed it. Morrison continued his medical studies in Scotland and worked as a doctor from 1888 to 1894 in Spain, Morocco, the West Indies and Australia.

But journalism was his passion. The year of the Adelaide walk, Morrison wrote to his mother that journalism was “the noblest of all the professions”.

In 1894 Morrison’s career moved to a larger canvas.

In February that year, dressed in Chinese garb, Morrison travelled overland from Shanghai to Rangoon in Burma. His diary reports he sometimes walked 48 kilometres a day. The next year his book An Australian in China (subtitled “Being the narrative of a quiet journey across China to Burma”) received critical acclaim in England and Moberly Bell, manager of The Times, offered him a trial as the paper’s China correspondent.

Dr Xuan Doe-Kun has translated Morrison’s book into Chinese and it was launched to coincide with the television program. Dr Xuan is an editor at the Beijing Academy of Social Sciences and wrote her PhD about Morrison. “He was a great man,” she told me in Beijing, “and the Chinese people still respect him highly.”

In his 1967 biography of Morrison, newspaper editor Cyril Pearl noted that one of Beijing’s major streets was named after Morrison. People continued to call it “Former Morrison Street” after it was renamed WangFuJing Street.

Dr Xuan and Li Yan showed me where Morrison owned a house on WangFuJing Street, now one of Beijing’s ritziest shopping malls. Li Yan wrote the script for the documentary and Dr Xuan acted as historical adviser.

Li Yan travelled extensively in Australia in 2007 filming for the program, and is astonished that Australians appear to have forgotten Morrison. “When he was alive he was the most famous Australian in the world, along with Dame Nellie Melba,” she said.

Opera singer Melba was born a year earlier than Morrison, in 1861. She continues to be remembered in her own country. Restaurants have named desserts after her. The first thing people see when they arrive at Avalon airport in Victoria is a sculpture of Melba. Where are the Morrison memorials?

Li Yan interviewed Sydney writer Linda Jaivin for the documentary. Jaivin, fluent in Mandarin, is working on a novel based around an affair Morrison had with an American traveller, “Maysie” Perkins, in 1903-04. Morrison called Perkins “the most immoral woman” he had ever met, and Jaivin has based the title for her book on the phrase. Jaivin described Morrison as “a very complex character”.

Jaivin said Times journalist Lionel James’s description of Morrison resonated with her – he was a man of “many-sided greatness”. James covered the 1904 war between Japan and Russia with Morrison.

A huge department store occupies the site where Morrison’s home stood in Beijing. Such is the pace of progress and the value of land in Beijing that new, large buildings soon replace smaller ones. Nearby is the area where thousands of Boxers besieged a few hundred troops and diplomats for 55 days during the Boxer Revolution of 1900.

Li Yan showed me the place where Morrison was shot in the right thigh while inspecting the defences on July 16 that year. Despite the wound he dragged a severely wounded British officer, Captain BM Strouts, to safety as snipers continued to shoot at them.

Morrison later wrote in his diary that Strouts’ body was soaked in blood but the captain remained conscious. Strouts, who died soon after, asked about Morrison’s wound. “I said mine was unimportant,” Morrison wrote. “Then I fainted.”

That same day Morrison’s paper reported that every foreign defender in the diplomatic area had been massacred. The Times report was based on a telegram from the Shanghai correspondent of the Daily Mail, sent the day before and also published in the Daily Mail. The story was a hoax, filed by an American conman named FW Sutterlee.

The Daily Mail had passed the telegram to The Times in good faith. On July 17 The Times published obituaries of Morrison and senior diplomats, noting that no newspaper had ever had “a more able servant than Morrison”. The obituary described Morrison’s judgment as “extraordinary, amounting almost to intuition”.

This event explains the title of the biography Peter Thompson and Robert Macklin published in 2004, The Man Who Died Twice: The life and adventures of Morrison of Peking. That book has been translated into Chinese and launched in China this year [2008] under the title Morrison of China. Allen & Unwin, publishers of The Man Who Died Twice, will re-issue the English version of the book at the end of this year [2008] under that title.

As a young journalist Macklin became intrigued by Morrison after reading the ground-breaking biography by Cyril Pearl. “Morrison was one of the great journalists, and he deserves to be better recognised. He used shoe leather to get a story, unlike too many current journalists who only use the telephone and email. And he defined what it was to be a great foreign correspondent.”

Morrison served as a cultural bridge between Australia and China, Macklin said. “As China moves more into the Australian consciousness, hopefully Morrison will become more appreciated. It’s sad he’s not appreciated in his own country.”

Macklin suggested the time was ripe for Australian journalism to devote an award to recognise Morrison’s achievements. “Many Australian journalists know little about the history of their profession.”

China’s main broadcaster and a major publisher consider Morrison worthy of major projects. It’s time the man was more appreciated in his own country.

* Published in the Walkley magazine edition on China in June 2008.