Stephen Quinn

New tools for reporting

Saturday September 12th 2009, 1:16 pm
Filed under: journalism tools

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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

New tools for reporting

Friday May 15th 2009, 5:37 pm
Filed under: journalism tools

5 Comments

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

Broadband disrupts business models

Friday April 24th 2009, 11:20 am
Filed under: journalism tools, telecoms, television

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The spread of fast Internet is bad news for the business models of traditional phone and media companies around the world.

Even with slow ADSL I make Skype calls internationally for a fraction of what I would pay phone companies for the same talk time. Skype is free software, downloadable from the Internet, which lets people phone anyone else with Skype for free. In April last year (2007) Skype passed the 100 million user mark. On any given day in early 2007 about 8 to 10 million Skypers were online.

If the Internet connection is relatively fast Skype provides good voice quality. If the other person does not have Skype, it is still possible to phone them cheaply by depositing money into an account via credit card. Calls from Australia to non-Skype users in most developed countries cost about three cents a minute. The $16 I deposited last July has allowed me several hours of talk time all around the world.

The technology behind Skype is voice over internet protocol, or VOIP. US broadband management company Sandvine reports that Skype accounts for almost half of the VOIP calls in North America. Skype also has call forwarding. So when I’m travelling I can still receive calls on my mobile even in areas with no Internet access. Skype is currently working on video phone calls, voice-to-text and voicemail-to-email translation.

Around the world, private companies and groups are setting up free wireless networks in cities or parts of cities. Google has offered to provide a free wireless network over the 49 acres of San Francisco at download speeds of 300 kilobits a second. That’s faster than the 256 ADSL Telstra sells me for $60 a month. In reality for rural folk like me, the 256 kilobits a second is usually 120-140. My American and European friends always phone me via Skype because it is free. Imagine the telephony possibilities when you have wireless Internet.

Meanwhile, media companies are investigating television delivered via the Internet, known as internet protocol television, or IPTV. Last month (subs: Dec 05) Rupert Murdoch swapped his shares in DirecTV, John Malone’s satellite TV company, for more of his own News Corp shares. It was the clearest sign yet of how much Murdoch thinks high-speed Internet will change the television business. IPTV lets people view high-quality video online. Murdoch acquired his interest in DirecTV in 2003 after years of bitter wrangling. Satellite distribution helped fuel the popularity of News Corp’s television and cable content, such as the Fox News Channel. But satellites are expensive. It costs about $US 300 million to build and launch each new one. NDS, a News Corp subsidiary, is developing IPTV technology. It already produces technologies for securing transactions over wireless networks.

Technology also changes the business model for free-to-air commercial TV. Personal or digital video recorders (TiVO is the best-known PVR in the US; Foxtel’s iQ in Australia) allow people to record programs on a giant hard disk. PVRs let audiences skip advertisements as they play back programs. Given that commercial TV and radio get their revenue from ads, the arrival of IPTV or Internet radio makes the traditional business model look ill over time. Late last year channels 7 and 9 in Australia refused to air commercials for a model of LG plasma television screen with a built-in digital video recorder. The Multi Channel Network, which represents the major pay-TV providers, also tried to censor the commercials. When the advertisements were eventually aired, the offending line “And when you replay, you can skip the ads” was replaced with “And when you replay, you can skip straight back to the action.” Colin Segelov, executive director of the Australian Association of National Advertisers, told industry magazine B&T that the ban was “understandable”. But he said censorhsip was contrary to the long-term interests of the advertising community. The industry would learn to live with commercial-skipping technology the way it had learned to live with the remote control, Segelov said.

The business model for music-format commercial radio is also in trouble. Why would a teenager endure advertisements on their FM radio while waiting for a favorite song when they can download music to their iPod? Whither the companies that spent millions for licences a few years ago?

The key unknown is the time frame for the disintegration of these business models. In 1992 Paul Saffo, director of the Institute for the Future in Palo Alto, California, proposed his 30-year rule, suggesting it takes a generation for a new idea to fully permeate a society. It took the Internet, which started in 1964, about a generation to become a part of our lives. But we are living in an age where technology is shortening the time frame.

* Published in The Age January 2008

Power of social media

Friday April 24th 2009, 11:13 am
Filed under: innovation, journalism tools

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Blogs are not a threat to journalism, but an opportunity. So says Kevin Anderson, head of blogging and interaction for Guardian Unlimited, the award-winning web site of The Guardian newspaper in London.

For almost a year Anderson has been responsible for strategy and “leading by doing” for the Guardian’s blogging network. He is helping Guardian journalists realise the power of engagement and the opportunities that social media make available.

“An increasing number of people not only want to consume content but also create and rate content,” he said. “They also want to communicate and interact with people, not only with journalists but also with each other.”

Most journalists saw these changes as a threat. “They have this vision of armies of citizen journalists wanting to do our jobs for free.” But few citizens wanted to be journalists. Most simply wrote about their experiences when news happened, such as the bridge collapse in Minnesota.

These people were committing “random acts” of journalism, Anderson said. “They have a camera phone and happen to witness an event.”

Blogs opened up new ways to partner with audiences, he said. Social networks gave journalists the chance to renew their relationship with readers and viewers because journalists had lost the public’s trust.

“The erosion has happened for a number of reasons around the world, including a general loss in trust in institutions as well as challenges from bloggers who fact check the mainstream media. Social media can allow us to rebuild that trust through transparency and direct connections with readers and viewers.

“At The Guardian we’re trying to help our casual online readers to become committed users of our communities as well as catalysts, recommending Guardian journalism through their social networks.”

Anderson pioneered online journalism at the BBC from 1998 to 2004 as well as reporting about technology for radio and television. In 2004 he wrote one of the first blogs at the BBC and in 2005 he developed blogging and interactive radio strategies for BBC news.

He is in Melbourne to speak at the conference “Digital worlds: Social, virtual, mobile” at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image tomorrow (Subs: August 10).

The conference is organised by XMediaLab (Subs: Organiser’s title has vertical slash between X and Media and between Media and Lab), and aims to showcase emerging forms of community building through digital media.

Anderson said few people apart from professional journalists wanted to be reporters, which was one of the problems underlying news organisations’ enthusiasm for “citizen journalism”.

“News organisations cannot and should not expect crowd-sourcing to replace the work of paid journalists. One of the greatest risks to news organisations is that, in developing channels for user-generated content, they alienate their audiences by leaving them with a feeling of being exploited, that they are doing for free what others are paid for.

“I don’t like the term user-generated content. It’s corporate speak and it creates a wall between contributors and the organisations using their content. Some people are beginning to use the term community-created content, which has a better ring to it.”

Anderson said media companies focused too much on technology. “They believe that all they have to do is make blogs and social networking tools available to their audience and an online community will form on its own.”

Newspapers and their readers needed couples’ counselling, Anderson said. They should ask: What ties your community together? “If you don’t know, that’s your first problem. Get out from behind the desk. Talk to people about what they are talking about.”

Successful Web 2.0 sites were designed so that the value of the site to users rose as the level of participation grew. “How can news organisations design websites and web services that encourage participation through increased value to their users? The future for news organisations lies in both tapping expertise and enhancing their content with community contributions.”

That is precisely what happens at STOMP in Singapore. About 85 per cent of content came from the audience, the bulk from the cameras in mobile telephones.

STOMP stands for Straits Times online mobile and print. The Straits Times is the 162-year-old broadsheet flagship of Singapore Press Holdings (SPH), the country’s major media company.

Editor Jennifer Lewis is another conference speaker tomorrow. She said STOMP was the only platform in Asia that focused on social networking and user-generated content.

SPH editorial managers decided the company’s future was via online and mobile because that was where young readers were. STOMP launched in June last year and within a year was attracting 7 million page impressions a month, more than the hits for the web sites of major American newspapers.

Lewis said Singaporeans lived in a 24/7 world so with breaking news it was inevitable that people would go online.

“Audience-generated content is going to be, if not already, key to how journalists remain relevant,” she said. “Expect to see more pro-am collaborations as professional journalists team up with the community at large.”

“The seasoned journalist would offer perspective and analysis, while audiences provided snapshots of individual experiences. With UGC, the flood of personal experiences will give the journalist an even better understanding of what is going on. UGC is going to make the journalist even smarter.”

Other international speakers at the conference include Dr David Liu, founder of Beijing’s Cyber Recreation District, China’s biggest government-supported digital media initiative, and Professor Lizbeth Goodman, director of the SMARTlab digital media institute at the University of East London.

Film director Shekhar Kapur, co-founder of Virgin Comics and Virgin Animation, will also speak. His first English-language film, Elizabeth, received eight Academy Award nominations, including best picture. Shekhar recently directed a sequel, The Golden Age, starring Cate Blanchett and Geoffrey Rush.

* Interview with Kevin Anderson, blogs editor of The Guardian. Published in The Age August 2007.

Camera phones tell major news stories

Friday April 24th 2009, 10:59 am
Filed under: journalism tools

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Most of the eyewitness images of the Virginia Tech shootings came from amateurs using camera phones. The power of the mobile phone to capture history has been highlighted at major news stories such as the London Tube and the Mumbai rail bombings.

Graduate student Jamal Albarghouti supplied CNN with video of the Blacksburg shootings, taken with his cell phone. The sound of multiple shots can be heard on the video.

Albarghouti was about 60 metres from Norris Hall when the second round of shootings began. “When I saw the policemen taking their guns out, I knew this was serious,” he told CNN.

CNN has assembled a slideshow of eyewitness photographs at http://www.cnn.com/ interactive/us/0704/gallery.ireport.vt.shooting/frameset.exclude.html

Coverage of the London bombings on 7 July 2005 was a watershed for journalism in terms of audience-generated content. Helen Boaden, the BBC’s director of news, said 50 photographs and video clips taken with mobile phones arrived in the first hour of the first blast.

About 3,000 people posted still and video images to a site called Moblog UK in the days after the bombings. Alfie Dennen, co-founder of the site, said it was the first time this form of content had played such a significant part in a breaking news story in the UK.

In South Korea, more than 50,000 citizen reporters with cameras on their mobile phones are able to send live video to the OhmyNews.com site.

Jean Min, director of OhmyNews International, said any of the citizen reporters could shoot video and send it to a server. “From our server we can broadcast live to anywhere in the country.”

Citizen reporting involving images will become increasingly common because of the boom in the number of camera-enabled mobile phones. Research company IDC said a billion new mobile phones were sold in 2006, and almost half (460 million) had a built-in camera. In countries like Korea it is almost impossible to buy a new phone without a camera.

More than 200 million of the billion new phones were sold in China and India. Earlier this year India was reporting 6 million new phone subscribers a month, and China 5.25 million.

Part of the reason for the boom is the fall in prices. Phones sell for an average of $120 each in the western world, and about half that in the developing world. Twenty years ago, the first mobile phone sold in the United States cost $US 4,000, or about a tenth of the average family income.

In situations where nearly everyone has a camera-equipped mobile phone, and where Internet connectivity abounds, people on the spot will be supplying more and more coverage of news events. The Virginia Tech shootings may become recognised as a landmark event for citizen journalism.

Those images will join blog entries, Twitter posts, podcasts, moblogs, Flickr photo collections and YouTube videos as a massive visual record of how society is communicating. Most images that teenagers display on MySpace come from a camera phone.

Elsewhere in the world, journalists are embracing the mobile phone as a newsgathering tool. In the Philippines, all 16 reporters at Inquirer.net, the online site of the Philippine Daily Inquirer, carry a Nokia N80 for taking videos. If the story is urgent they send video wirelessly to the website.

JV Rufino, the site’s editor-in-chief, said multimedia was the future for journalism. Inquirer.net has also set up a video channel on YouTube to display its reporters’ footage.

Multimedia reporter Erwin Oliva did a video interview with me in Manila. Oliva said he enjoyed having access to “cool tools” but believed the bottom line was the need for good journalism. “We get the news out in the fastest way possible in as good a way as possible. But nothing beats good writing.”

Joey Alarilla, Infotech columnist at Inquirer.net, said he was proud of the way his reporters filed scores of breaking news stories a day. “In the near future we have to train them to look beyond the printed word, and think of how they can tell their stories via multimedia.”

The balance between reporter-generated and audience-generated content will provide an interesting study in years to come, as the number of camera-enabled phones continues to rise.

* Published in The Age May 2007 after Virginia Tech shootings

Newsroom of the future

Friday April 24th 2009, 10:45 am
Filed under: journalism tools, newspapers

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Late in 2007 journalists at The Sydney Morning Herald, the Sun Herald and the Australian Financial Review moved into a new building dubbed the “newsroom of the future” on Sydney’s inner harbor. The papers are the flagships of Fairfax Media, Australia’s biggest and most integrated media group.

Phil McLean, Fairfax Media’s group executive editor and the man in charge of the move, said three quarters of the entire process involved getting people to “think differently” – that is, to alter their mindset so they were willing to work with multi-media. Fairfax media had moved from being a newspaper company to an integrated media company, McLean said.

Weekly training courses were introduced as part of the move. The author facilitated two-day multimedia courses from July to December of 2007. Each course involved introducing journalists to a portable digital assistant (PDA) called a JasJam, made by iMate. The rival Murdoch-owned The Australian reported on 23 August 2007 that all Fairfax journalists would be equipped with JasJams. The misleading report speculated on the high cost, given Fairfax employs about 800 journalists on its Sydney daily newspapers and each JasJam costs about $US1100.

Only reporters and photographers involved with breaking news used the device, McLean said. “That’s somewhere between a dozen and 20 reporters at The Sydney Morning Herald and another 15-20 at The Age [in Melbourne, the other major city].” A pool of about 70-80 JasJams would be made available for specific assignments.

All reporters at the Brisbane Times, the online-only daily launched in March 2007 in Australia’s third-largest city, were equipped with the JasJam from the start. The issue was not the technology, McLean emphasised, but preparing journalists for new ways of providing information to audiences. “It’s the JasJam today, but it could well be a different piece of equipment tomorrow,” said Mike Van Niekerk, editor-in-chief of Fairfax Digital, the company’s online arm. McLean said the JasJam was likely be “superseded within the next 12 months” by other technologies.

Australia’s next biggest media company, Murdoch’s News Ltd, has also embraced the multimedia future, though at the time of writing the embrace had been less well developed. The Australian is the company’s Sydney flagship.

In a speech to mark the death of a famous journalist, Andrew Olle, on 19 October 2007, News Ltd CEO and chairman John Hartigan said it had never been a better time to be a journalist. “If you really care about journalism you have to be passionate about re-inventing it in the digital age,” he said. “As journalists we’ve never had more inducements to open our minds, stretch our imaginations or reach more people. We can write, blog, broadcast audio and video, all from the one work-station.”

Hartigan said that for much of his 43-year career most journalists were generalists, “sweeping over any subject with a light dusting of curiosity and a nice turn of phrase”. But he warned that those days were numbered. Journalism needed more specialists, he argued – “more people who can provide compelling insights to what’s going on” because quality was “taking on greater meaning, not less”.

Hartigan said competition for talent was intensifying. “We will need to pay more and offer better opportunities to attract – and retain – the best people”. In other words, quality content was the key. In a world of information overload, audiences return to brands they can trust that synthesize information and make it easy to absorb. That deep skill requires highly skilled and educated journalists. The obvious place to find specialists is at universities and think tanks.

What does Fairfax Media’s move mean for the journalism curriculum in Australia? It means educators have to become more relevant. The industrial-age curricula devised in the 1970s are no longer useful. The key is preparing students for a multimedia future, which means adapting the mindset of teachers so they help their students embrace change.

Mike Van Niekerk, editor-in-chief of Fairfax’s online editorial staff, said newsroom integration depended on changing a newsroom’s culture and mindsets. McLean agreed: Much of Fairfax’s training, instead of teaching journalists specific tricks, aimed “to recalibrate the way people think about journalism”. Training all journalists in multimedia did not mean an end to specialization. “We don’t expect everybody to practice it [multimedia], but everybody must think” in those terms, they said.

The new newsroom symbolised the culmination of a series of major changes at Fairfax. In August 2006 the traditional newspaper company, John Fairfax Ltd, changed its name to Fairfax Media to reflect its multi-platform future. In March 2007 Fairfax launched Australia’s first online-only daily publication in Queensland, brisbanetimes.com.au. In May 2007 Fairfax completed its merger with Rural Press to become the biggest media company in Australasia, with annual revenues of about $A 2.5 billion and market capitalisation of about $A 7 billion.

Two months later Fairfax got even bigger when it acquired at least one radio station in all capital cities and several television studios when it bought Southern Cross Television. Laster this year Fairfax is expected to bid for one of the two digital television licences made available by the changes to media ownership laws promulgated last year.

The aim in moving Fairfax from a print to a multi-platform company was to reach as large an audience as possible. “We have a total readership in print of over 4 million per day and online of over 5 million per month,” CEO David Kirk said at the time of the Rural Press merger. “Our brand of quality, independent, balanced journalism will serve and support more communities than ever”.

Chairman Ron Walker wrote that Fairfax was “evolving into a truly digital media company” in the 2006 Fairfax annual report. Within five years Fairfax would be a significantly bigger Internet company that distributed its content “over more media,” Kirk wrote in the same report.

Kirk developed a three-pronged strategy. The first part of the strategy involved the need to “defend and grow our newspaper publishing businesses” – that is, to consolidate and develop the existing newspapers, whose circulations were holding steady during the week and improving at weekends. The second part involved plans to “accelerate the revenue and earnings of our digital business”. The third part was “to build a digital media company for the twenty-first century”.

Fairfax Media’s embrace of multimedia and its use of the JasJam marks the start of major changes to how journalists work in Australia. The process reflects major changes in newsroom practices around the world. In November 2006 Ifra, the international media research company, asked newspaper executives worldwide about their priorities for 2007 and 2008. The survey attracted 240 responses from 43 countries and results appeared in January 2007.

Integration, editorial convergence and cross-media strategies attracted the most attention. Four in five executives rated it one of their top priorities, and half made it their main priority in terms of allocating “significant” funds.

It seems a likely future for journalism is evolving in Australia. The newsroom of the future has been re-named the “newsroom for now”.

Written for the Convergence Newsletter at the University of South Carolina in the United States in March 2008.

Overview of mobile journalism worldwide

Friday April 24th 2009, 10:33 am
Filed under: cool web sites, journalism tools

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Reporters who carry nothing but a mobile phone, known as mojos or mobile journalists, are operating in Scandinavia, the UK, Europe, the US and even Africa. Stephen Quinn explores. This appeared on the OhMyNews.com web site.

In Norway, Frank Barth-Nilsen trains mojos for NRK, the national broadcaster. “A lot of other broadcasters and newspapers are interested in our findings,” he said. Barth-Nilsen said NRK’s various departments planned to use mojo content for mainstream platforms like televison.

“We’re building a toolkit for our journalists, focusing on speed and usability. We’re also looking into how the new technology will change today’s way of storytelling.” He has established a blog for sharing ideas, called Mojo Evolution (http://mojoevolution.com/).

In London, the Reuters news agency equipped its journalists with a mobile journalism toolkit about a year ago. Ilicco Elia, product manager of mobile and emerging media at Reuters, said this was the start of a future form of journalism and a new way to tell stories. Darren Waters, technology editor of the BBC, has been filing mojo reports from various parts of Europe since late last year.

“Mobile phones allow journalists to change their heavy camera equipment to a smaller device,” Elia said. Reuters’ journalists tested the mobile toolkit at the New York fashion week last year and on the US presidential campaign trail. The company plans to give the mobile devices to citizen journalists.

Over the next few years Nokia would produce mobile phones capable of taking images of the same quality as HD cameras, said Elia. “This will open huge possibilities for journalists.” The Reuters toolkit includes the Nokia N95/N82, a Bluetooth keyboard, a digital microphone and a phone-adapted tripod. [Memo Todd: pix available at http://www.reutersmojo.com]

Ruud Elmendorp, a Dutch mojo, operates out of Kenya in Africa. By mid July his web site offered 133 news video reports from 22 countries in Africa. Reporters at Inquirer.net, the online site of the Philippines Daily Inquirer in Manila, have been filing stories remotely via their Nokia mobiles for more than a year. Reporters at the German international broadcaster, Deutsche Welle, plan to introduce the mojo concept later this year.

Robert Scoble, based in California, has been broadcasting live video from his cell phone using a service provided by Qik since last year. “I’m the top [Qik] user,” he wrote on his blog Scobleizer, noting he had produced more than 700 videos as of mid July.

“Qik has put a TV studio in my pocket. I can get live video onto the Internet faster than I can make a phone call,” he said. Audiences send text messages to his phone while he is filming. Scoble described this process as a kind of interactivity that the world had never seen before.

He has an unlimited data package for his mobile phones. Around the western world, citizen journalists are using their mobile phones on fast 3G networks to surf the Internet and transmit video and images. 3G phone users are charged not for time but for the data transmitted or received. What Scoble and citizen journalists do can only happens in countries that offer unlimited data charge monthly rates.

The potential for mobile journalism remains limited in some developed nations because of the high cost of data charges. None of Australia’s mobile companies offers an “all-you-can-eat” unlimited data package. People are reluctant to surf the Net with their phone because they fear high costs.

Oscar Westlund, a PhD student at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden, researches mobile media adoption in Sweden. Most Swedes own a mobile phone with Internet access but few surf the web. He said nine in 10 Swedes make mobile phone calls each week but only 6 per cent accessed news on the web via their mobile. “One of the reasons Swedes don’t use mobile news is that the price for Internet access on mobiles is high.”

In the US, the fee for unlimited data is about $70 a month. It’s about the same in Europe and the UK, and cheaper in Africa. Australians pay about $67 a month for 250 Mb of data a month, or about 8Mb a day.

Web pages eat about 1Mb of data and a five-minute YouTube clip can gobble up about 3Mb. So a combination of web video and surfing several times a day easily takes Australians over the 8Mb limit. Once individuals exceed the monthly limit, they pay 12 to 35 cents for each extra megabit, depending on their plan. Costs easily escalate.

The growth of the mobile web has occurred around the world because of rising numbers of user-friendly handsets like the iPhone, high-speed networks and unlimited data packages. Studies have shown that people choose a smartphone because they want mobile Internet. Analysts Nielsen Mobile reported this month that almost 40 million Americans (about 16 per cent of mobile users) browsed the Internet while on the move, almost double the number in 2006. The UK and Italy came a close second and third in the Nielsen study of smartphone use.

A quarter of 18-25-year-olds in the UK use their mobile to check social networking sites such as FaceBook. Two in five UK mobile owners surf the Internet on their handsets, mainly via unlimited data plans.

For one in five mobile phone users in Japan, their handset has replaced the PC as the way they go online. Upwards of a third of university students access the Internet via their mobile.

Nielsen found that four in five iPhone owners accessed the mobile Internet.

Not only is the iPhone the most popular phone for browsing the Internet, it is also the preferred phone for uploading pictures. Flickr, the world’s largest gallery of online pictures, measures the number of pictures uploaded by each type of phone.

Over the past year the iPhone has steadily pulled ahead of multimedia Nokia and Sony Ericsson phones, despite the fact the iPhone represents a mere 2 per cent of smartphones worldwide, according to analysts IDC. Phones powered by the Symbian operating system such as Nokia and Sony Ericsson make up 63 per cent of the worldwide smartphone market.

Stephen Quinn maintains a blog about mobile journalism here.