Article about mobile journalism
This is a story how a pair of burning trousers inspired a broadcast revolution.
In 2004 Gary Symons was covering a forest fire in rural Canada for CBC, lugging the heavy pack of equipment needed to be a mobile journalist. His pack snagged a tree and he fell 20 metres down a hill. His equipment scattered.
As he rescued his gear in the burning undergrowth his pants caught fire. “That was my Eureka day,” said Symons. “I learned, one, that I needed fireproof pants and, two, I needed a better mobile kit.”
The latter led to the creation of VeriCorder Technology, a start-up that puts a television studio in the palm of your hand. Vericorder started by creating newsgathering apps for iPhone and Android phones that allow people to shoot, edit and package on the phone.
In May this year (2011) Vericorder released its mobile integration management system (MIMS). The system allows media organisations to create, collect and broadcast video content from mobile sources anywhere in the world.
Media houses could have their reporters edit and file on-the-spot video stories or they could tap into Vericorder’s user base to find freelancers and citizen journalists around the world for video content. The beta version of the users’ database, Findstringers, went online in September 2010. The full version became available in April (2011).
Around the world we are seeing a revolution in the way journalists gather and deliver news. The mobile journalist, often abbreviated as a mojo, can report from anywhere with a cell phone provided they have a reliable 3G connection or wifi.
History shows that journalists adopt new technologies for newsgathering if those tools are easy to use, if they enhance the storytelling process, and if they accelerate the gathering of news. The reverse also applies: Reporters will reject newsgathering technologies if those tools are too complicated to use.
Journalists will not waste time with complex technologies. The constant tick of the clock makes editorial staff aware of deadlines, and those deadlines have increased in number with the advent of the 24/7 newsroom. All of the technologies journalism has embraced since the telegraph from the 1860s have reflected the twin desires for speed and increased efficiencies.
Vericorder technologies currently work only with the iPhone and Android operating systems. Technology from Proskope in the Netherlands that works with the Symbian operating system – think Nokia and Sony-Ericsson – was discussed in an earlier edition of this magazine.
Mojos attract their share of nay-sayers. The detractors usually point to the poor quality of images and the lack of depth of field. Recent events suggest these objectors might have to re-think their objections.
South Korean director Park Chan-wook shot his latest movie Paranmanjang almost exclusively on an iPhone. It was released on 27 January 2011. Park’s revenge epic Old Boy won the Grand Prix at the Cannes International Film Festival in 2004 and his 2009 movie Thirst won the Jury Prize at Cannes.
The 30-minute Paranmanjang was mostly shot in black-and-white using up to eight iPhones. It cost $130,000 and was funded by iPhone’s South Korean distributor. Park champions cellphones as a cheap filmmaking tool. “You don’t even need sophisticated lighting. Just go out and make movies,” he told the Los Angeles Times. “These days, if you can afford to feed yourself, you can afford to make a film.”
The biggest difficulties mojos encounter are getting the story back to the newsroom from the field, and the fact that mojo work gobbles up batter power. Mojos need to know where to find free or cheap wifi networks for those occasions when a 3G network is not available. Vericorder technology takes care of the network issues. And seasoned mojos always ensure they have plenty of battery chargers.
In 2008 I pioneered mojo in Australia, working for the Geelong Advertiser. At one news conference in September that year officials said individual interviews would not be available. I approached the talent, introduced myself, and streamed a video interview live to the newspaper’s web site. It was an exclusive. The discreet nature of mojo is one of its main attractions.
In March and April 2011 Ivo Burum trained indigenous mojos in the northern regions of Australia for the Australian government. Burum is a former executive producer with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. The mojos’ work can be seen at http://ntmojos.indigenous.gov.au/
Apart from Vericorder apps, here are some of the iPhone apps I use when working as a mojo.
In Australia an app called Laptop Cafes was great for finding restaurants and cafes with free wifi. Starbucks and McDonalds are usually reliable places for wifi, as are some restaurants, and university and school campuses.
Another way to control access to wifi is to buy a portable wfi router. I have tested a D-Link myPocket router (DIR-457) that costs $200. You need to pay for the data loaded on the router via a SIM card.
If you have access to Ethernet you can buy Apple AirPort devices for between $100 and $400 that connect to an Ethernet cable. These devices create a wifi bubble of about three metres, and can sustain several connections. It is best to password protect these devices to stop people from feeding off your free (to them) wifi.
A metal device called an OWLE Bubo improves the quality of video or stills and the mojo reporting package (available online) includes a small microphone. You can watch a review here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ndXyV3FIP0
Other ways to ensure stable images is through a range of tripods such as the Gorillapod, the Glif and the Handgrip.
For breaking news I use the free Dragon Dictation app for quick bites of text. Once trained to my voice, the app allows me to dictate a breaking news story and then watch as the software transcribe the words. I then email or SMS the news brief to the newsroom.
A free app called AudioBoo lets me podcast from my iPhone (it also works with Android phones). Touch the record button, conduct the interview, and send the sound file to a dedicated AudioBoo site within seconds of completing the interview.
A more professional way to do this, which allows you to edit sound on your iPhone, is with Vericorder’s VC Audio Pro app. It costs $6 and offers broadcast quality audio. In April 2010 I worked with student mojos at the University of Missouri’s journalism program in the US. Erica Zucco and Brian Pellot covered local government elections for the NPR affiliate while I was there. The news director told me the audio from Audio Pro was as good as that obtained from traditional digital recorders. One way to improve audio is to plug a broadcast quality microphone into the iPhone’s audio jack.
Zucco and Pellot wrote a report for their university comparing the time it would take to shoot, edit and produce a one-minute multi-media slideshow using an iPhone against traditional methods. For the traditional report they used a Marantz digital recorder, a Nikon D70 camera, and Cool Edit Pro and Soundslides software. For the mobile reporting approach they used Vericorder’s ShowCase app, an Owle Bubo case for the phone and a VeriCorder microphone. At 14 minutes and 25 seconds the mojo approach took about half the time for the traditional report (25:46). The mojo equipment also cost about a quarter of the cost of the traditional gear.
It would be fascinating to conduct a similar comparison of Vericorder’s First Video app against a traditional television news production team.
Various free or relatively cheap software packages available on the web let you stream video to the web almost live. Best known of these are Qik (www.qik.com), Bambuser (www.bambuser.com), Flixwagon (www.flixwagon.com) and Livestream (www.livestream.com).
I trialled these and others for a report the World Association of Newspapers published in July 2009 entitled “From backpack to pocket journalism”. The downside of using this free software is the fact the video goes to the software provider’s web site. If you have an exclusive the world can see it at the websites of those software companies.
All transfer files, but none provides a mobile editing platform. The best option is Vericorder’s First Video app for $10.
This app lets you record HD video on an iPhone 4 or iPod touch 4th generation, and shoot SD video on an iPhone 3GS. Both record CD quality audio. You edit the video on the screen of the phone with one video and two audio tracks.
Here is an example of HD video shot in Australia with an iPhone and put on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2RNWyhG8c7M
A version of First Video is also available for the iPad. Symons described the app as the “most advanced mobile video editing solution on the market today”.
One possible approach is to have reporters gather news with iPhones, and a producer or editor cutting the pictures on the screen of an iPad. Compare this approach with the cost of an outside broadcast truck. The mojo method costs a fraction of the price.
Apps for mojo work
Other useful apps for reporting include Fluent News for monitoring news via RSS, LinkedIn for research, Wordpress for updating blogs, JotNot Pro for scanning documents, Business Card Reader for scanning business cards and AroundMe for locating things like petrol stations or cafes when on the road. I use Skype on my iPhone for most of my international phone calls, provided I have a reasonable wifi connection.
As of February this year (2011) the number of mobile phones had surged to 5.2 billion worldwide, effectively one for every adult on the planet who has access to a regular supply of electricity. More than half of those phones have a camera. This means potentially a pool of more than 2.5 billion reporters. Obviously not everyone will take photographs, but it means news organisations need to find ways to embrace those potential reporters.
A convergence of cheap technology, fast broadband and wireless networks, and a booming interest in citizen involvement in news could see a revolution in the way news is covered over the next decade.
To quote film director Park: “The technology changes so fast,” he said. “Who knows what’s going to be available next year?”
In April 2011 Vericorder also released software that allows small businesses to create television advertising. VeriTV and VeriLocal lets companies and businesses launch a hyper-local website, making it possible to insert low-cost advertising into news bulletins.
Vericorder’s CEO Symons said that unless newspapers and media chains could lower the cost of production to the same as that of individual bloggers, those media houses could not win. “What is now obvious,” Symons said, “is that the entire news industry is in a state of crisis. Individual bloggers armed with cellphones can produce content at a fraction of the cost of traditional broadcasters.
“At the same time, traditional advertising is fragmenting at an ever-increasing rate. The point of what we’re doing is to create a system that lowers that cost of production so it is virtually identical to that of the individual blogger … and at the same time, we are creating a new method of monetizing news networks that lets them take advantage of both national and very local advertisers. If we can lower the cost of production and administration, which is what VeriLocal does, then large media networks can survive in this new paradigm.”
Want to know more? Two Canadian journalism students, Ashley Rowe and Nick Wynja, used Vericorder software to make a video about how mojo worked at last year’s Winter Olympics in Vancouver. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jbK_OrbKHLM
Vericorder will be showcasing their apps at this year’s IBC in Amsterdam and the Online News Association in Boston in September.
* Professor Stephen Quinn is head of the International Communications division at the University of Nottingham campus in Ningbo in China. Prior to becoming an academic Dr Quinn worked for two decades with some of the world’s premier news organisations. He has written the only book about mobile journalism, MOJO: Mobile Journalism in the Asian Region. The second edition appeared in early 2011. Professor Quinn blogs about mobile journalism at http://globalmojo.org/
* This article appeared in The Channel, the magazine of the Association for International Broadcasting, under the headline “Cool tools for the mojo” in September 2011, pages 42-44.
Web research
Cornell University in the US has some excellent resources for checking the quality of information: http://olinuris.library.cornell.edu/content/skill-guides
Google offers a range of tools for doing better research. All are designed for journalists. Navigation is via the left-hand column: http://sites.google.com/site/aujournalists/smarter-search
Fake photos from 2004 “Boxing Day tsunami” can be found at: http://www.snopes.com/photos/tsunami/tsunami1.asp
Miller internet data integrity scale
Credibility and a reporters’ ability to attribute information to web sites decreases as you move down the hierarchy, according to Steve Miller, recently retired from The New York Times:
Government data (.gov /.govt)
Military (.mil / .mod)
University material (.edu /.ac)
Special interest groups (.org & .net & .asn)
Business and others (.com /.co)
Web resources about convergence
Newsu.org
Poynter.org
Multimedia.journalism.berkeley.edu/
Mindymcadams.com/tojou
Convergence.journalism.missouri.edu
Youtube.com/reporterscenter
Bernama: New tools for reporting
A course for Bernama journalists, in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia on 24-25 November 2010
Overview
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
- Facebook
- LinkedIn
- Fickr
- Twitter (via TweetDeck)
Visual reporting: Panoramas, Soundslides 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 15 books, scores of book chapters and journal articles, and thousands of pieces of journalism. His most recent books are Funding Journalism in the Digital Age (2010) and MOJO: Mobile Journalism in the Asian Region (2009). The first volume of Asia’s Media Innovators and Australia-UAE: Expanding trade and cultural links appeared in 2008. The second volume will appear in late 2010. 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. In the past decade Dr Quinn has presented almost 160 academic papers in 26 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 WAN/Ifra (based in France and 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
Journalists adopt technology for reporting if the new tools – remember that technologies are simply tools – are easy and intuitive to use, and help reporters tell better stories. 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.
Blogs
Blogs and other related media 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.
Australia needs the equivalent of a Pew centre so we can discover similar information 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. 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 new iPhone app called Poddio that turns the iPhone into a broadcast-quality 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 video “Podcasting in plain English,” also by Lee LeFever, at http://www.commoncraft.com/podcasting
Video blogs
Video blogs, known as vblogs, are 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. Thomson 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.”
The Thomson Reuters handbook on reporting that said: “We want to encourage you to use social media approaches in your journalism but we also need to make sure that you are fully aware of the risks.” Read the full section on social media in the handbook at http://handbook.reuters.com/index.php/Reporting_from_the_internet#Social_media_guidelines
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 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 internal wikis that become resources on specific topics. You could have a wiki for each local government election, or major events such as release of a budget, or for specific high school sports. 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.
A program known as a news reader (sometimes called a feed reader or aggregator) checks a list of sites you nominate, 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.
My favourite is Google Reader because it integrates with other Google tools: http://www.google.com/reader/
This video shows how it works http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VSPZ2Uu_X3Y
Demonstrate Google Reader
Watch this 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
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 SocialMention. These bring information requests to you.
Demonstrate http://www.google.com/alerts and http://www.socialmention.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.
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 $18. 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.
SkypeRecorder is slightly more expensive. It comes in PC and Mac formats and is available for download from the web at http://www.extralabs.net/skype-recorder.htm.
Demonstrate Skype and CallRecorder.
Reporting with social networking / media (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, known as social networking (examples are Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn), and audience creation of media, known as social media (examples include YouTube and Flickr). “Web 2.0 journalism” describes the relationship between social networking, social media and journalism.
To learn more about social networking watch this Lee LeFever video on social networking http://www.commoncraft.com/video-social-networking.
Flickr is a great way to generate story ideas. Type in key words in the advanced search section of http://www.flickr.com/ and see what you find.
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 moved past MySpace in the US in terms of users in May 2009, Hitwise reported. Facebook claims more than 550 million active users as of late 2010. The number of active users in Australia rose from more than 6 million in October 2009 to more than 9 million by September 2010. 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.
LinkedIn is probably the best single social networking tool for journalists at media houses whose audience is the AB demographic because of the large number of that demographic who use LinkedIn. Clifford Rosenberg, the company’s managing director in Australia, said Australian membership passed the 1 million mark in late February 2010. At the time LinkedIn had 60 million members worldwide.
Twitter and 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/). 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. You can teach yourself Twitter by going to Twitter’s help page. It is comprehensive. Find it at http://help.twitter.com/.
You need to set up 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. It is a good option for looking at trends at http://www.tweetgrid.com/trending/.
Jeff Turner has produced a video about TweetGrid: http://www.vimeo.com/2356559. To find people on Twitter, here is a new tool: http://tweepsearch.com/. But it is still in beta.
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. Twittervision is a map of the world in which tweets appear from the continent of origin: http://twittervision.com/
Twitscoop shows what the blogosphere is saying. It uses an automated algorithm to monitor hundreds of tweets every minute and extract words mentioned more often than others. The result is displayed in a tag cloud at http://www.twitscoop.com/. Pierre Stanislas, one of the developers in Paris, said Twitscoop crawls 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/.
In June 2009 a Seattle Times reporter also twittered while running a marathon. Details: 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, in September 2009.
Professor 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.
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 locate “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. Run your mouse over the image to see some amazing detail: 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 photo-sharing 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 a 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 and connections 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. Company marketing people wrote those blogs.
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 Internet domains in the bottom two lines.
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 at the University of Florida, has assembled a series of blog posts about multi-media into a free book, available as a pdf: http://mindymcadams.com/tojou/
This site from the University of California at Berkeley’s graduate school of journalism is excellent: 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
Google have assembled a comprehensive site about using Google tools for journalism: http://sites.google.com/site/aujournalists/
Mark S. Luckie writes an excellent blog about multi-media 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
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
Worried about Facebook security? This article helps: http://www.nytimes.com/external/readwriteweb/2009/09/16/16readwriteweb-5-easy-steps-to-stay-safe-and-private-on-fac-6393.html
October Walkley magazine column
The tools available to reporters have changed radically in the past decade, and will continue to evolve. Journalists need to embrace new digital tools to succeed in the multimedia future. It is no longer enough to have native cunning and a word processor.
Journalists tend to embrace new tools if they make the job of storytelling easier – and if those tools are easy and intuitive to use. This article proposes a range of tools that will help the newsgathering process.
Blogs are useful research tools to get a sense of what audiences are talking about. As with newsgroups, the quality of blog information sits on a long continuum from erudite offerings to lunatic ravings, sometimes more often at the latter end of the continuum. As with all information on the web, it pays to be careful.
The Google of the blogosphere is Technorati.com. It works similarly to Google and is a useful way to find out what people are talking about. Think of the content of blogs and podcasts and video blogs as scuttlebutt – like overhearing conversations on public transport or at social events. Sometimes they will stimulate ideas for stories.
Google has a good bog search tool at Blogsearch.google.com.au. 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. So when casting the net wide for information make sure you search both on blogs and search engines.
Blogs blossom so quickly it is difficult to keep up; some analysts suggest 20,000 new blog posts appear each day. A technology known as RSS (“really simple syndication”) helps journalists follow the latest blogs. The technlogy “pulls” content to your computer, as opposed to being “pushed” with email.
Google Reader is a great RSS tool, though you will need to set up a Gmail web-based email account. The latter can be useful when you are on the road. You can have your office email forwarded automatically to a web-based account. A RSS reader checks a list of sites the journalist nominates and displays all updated articles. The software provides summaries of content plus links to the full version of each story. As with email, unread entries are shown in bold.
Google’s Gmail is useful for journalists. The chat option keeps a transcript of all conversations, and if you have a camera on your laptop you can see the person you are chatting with.
Skype offers free software that lets you make free phone calls to anyone who has skype installed on their computer. If you put money into a skype account, you can phone mobiles and landlines. This Poynter column headlined “Skype: Why every journalist should use it” is a helpful read: http://www.poynter.org/column.asp?id=31&aid=155339
Before the spread of the web, broadcast companies controlled breaking news. Now newspapers easily break news online, often ahead of radio and television. Multimedia breaking news builds and holds audiences for web sites.
Call Recorder software ($US 19.95 from the web for Macintosh computers) works with Skype to record any phone conversation in audio and video formats. The local and remote audio is recorded on different tracks.
This is ideal for people who want to make multimedia slideshows. Software for making slideshows is available from Soundslides.com for $US 39.95, or $US 69.95 for the “pro” version with more bells and whistles.
The simplest and quickest way to get multimedia news on a web site is via the mobile phone. Enter the mojo, a mobile journalist armed with only a mobile phone and a 3G connection. At least five companies offer free software for streaming video from a mobile phone. They are Qik, Shozu and Kyte in the United States, Bambuser in Sweden and Flixwagon in Israel.
The process is simple: Register your mobile phone number at one of these web sites. Within seconds you receive a text message with a link to the software. Click on the link to load it onto the phone. Thereafter, clicking one button opens the video software on the phone and one more begins and ends filming. Video is streamed to the company’s web site.
Of the software mentioned earlier, Qik and Bambuser work best for breaking news. My main criteria for selecting the software were simplicity of use and quality of image. Other mojo software for iPhones is available from iTunes. Showcase ($US 9) is the best for making slideshows with a mobile phone.
Most journalists will be aware of Wikileaks, based on the wiki concept. 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 decisions on whether to report based on content found in wikis. Reporters pressed for time to do research might find Answers.wikia.com a useful tool.
Wikis could be a useful collaboration tool for reporters working in different cities, where they pool information in a password-protected site. Similarly, hundreds of thousands of people use the social bookmarking site Delicious to store useful links. These are publicly available on the web, which offers useful research options on specific topics. Type key words into the search box at the top of the screen. Examples of my bookmarks are at Delicious.com/sraquinn/
One of the big developments since early 2008 has been the concept of micro-blogging via the web or mobile phone. Posterous and Twitter were the original tools. Posterous is the simplest to use because everything is done via email.
Free software called TweetDeck offers a powerful tool for working with Twitter. Twitter has become such a large subject that it needs its own column. A site that aggregates all of the photographs put on Twitter can be found at Picfog.com, and the “liveflow” option opens a stream of images.
Finally, all reporters should be using social networking tools like Facebook, LinkedIn, Bebo and FriendFeed, though again these require a separate column.
* Stephen Quinn was a journalist for two decades in five countries with some of the world’s premier media before becoming a university teacher in 1996. Dr Quinn, an associate professor of journalism at Deakin University in Victoria, has written 14 books and has run multimedia courses for journalists in nine countries.
* “In touch and on top” in The Walkley magazine, Oct-Nov 2010, page 47.
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
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
Broadband disrupts business models
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