A course run at The Age, Wednesday 26 August 2009, from 10am to 1pm.

Overview

Research with blogs

RSS feeds for research and story ideas

Google tools for reporting

Reporting with social networking (Web 2.0) tools

- Twitter (TweetDeck) for reporting and research

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. 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 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). The same for researchers?

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).

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 considerably (we will discuss this issue at the end). Think of them as a convenient electronic tool for listening to scuttlebutt. It’s 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 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 of its conferences. To see examples of what moblogs look like, go to WAN/Ifra’s home page http://www.ifra.com/ and click on the link to “event multiblogs” in the left column.

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.youtube.com/watch?v=y-MSL42NV3c

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. See the final section on information quality for more information. 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? Watch this YouTube video called “Wikis in plain English” for more information: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MpIOClX1jPE

Newspapers should also 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.

Establish wikis when covering a major issue, inviting audiences to add content that other people can then build on. Over time a wiki becomes a resource the newspaper can use.

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 keep us abreast of the news, and also follow the latest blogs. RSS stands for “really simple syndication”. It means you can have information constantly 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. 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.

Aggregators are gradually 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/

If you prefer email, just turn those RSS feds into email summaries and have them sent to you. Feedblitz (http//:feedblitz.com) and RSSFwd (http//:rssfwd.com) do it for free.

Watch this YouTube video to understand the concept of RSS. It’s by Lee LeFever and is called “RSS in plain English”: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0klgLsSxGsU

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.

Also useful is Google Alerts. Demonstrate http://www.google.com/alerts

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 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. 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 $US16. 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 can select one track to use as the audio for a sound slide.

Demonstrate Skype and CallRecorder

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/). 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/

Jeff Turner has a short video on TweetGrid: http://www.vimeo.com/2356559

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.

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.

Watch this YouTube video “Twitter in plain English, by the talented Lee LeFever, to learn more about tweets: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ddO9idmax0o

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

You will note that many news organisations, the BBC among others, are breaking news on Twitter. A Seattle Times reporter ran in marathon June 2009 and twittered it at same time! Two months earlier, a CNN producer had covered the London marathon via twitter: http://edition.cnn.com/2009/TECH/04/26/twitter.london.marathon.runner/

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 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, Twitter, Bebo and Delicious.

To learn more about social networking watch these Lee LeFever videos on social networking http://www.commoncraft.com/video-social-networking and social media http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MpIOClX1jPE&feature=related

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.

Delicious

Watch this Lee LeFever video about social bookmarks and Delicious called “Social media in plain English” http://www.commoncraft.com/bookmarking-plain-english.

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, 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. Delicious is an excellent research tool. Visit my bookmarks at http://del.icio.us/sraquinn/ to see my links about mobile phones and newspapers. 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.

Here is a video about bookmarking http://www.commoncraft.com/bookmarking-plain-english

Demonstrate Delicious

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

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. 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

One good way to assemble all your social media is via FriendFeed, which helps put all your links on one page.

Demonstrate: http://friendfeed.com/sraquinn

Training yourself

If you are not familiar with any of the software you need to know join www.lynda.com, where you can teach yourself.

Assessing information quality

Beware of blogs used for “astro-turfing”: that’s the Net 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. It turns out they were written by company marketing people.

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 domains and what they mean, and the structure of online files. 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. It describes the 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”.

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)

Be careful what you report. In July 2006 in Australia 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

Use the RAP mnemonic to remember how to assess information quality. Ask yourself is the source Reliable? Who publishes the information?

Then ask whether 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 have to use your journalistic skills to assess the content of blogs.

Remember, wrong information stored online has a long life. In May 2009 an Irish student inserted a fake quote on Wikipedia about French composer Maurice Jarre, and it appeared in newspaper obituaries of the composer around the world. Shane Fitzgerald, 22, from University College Dublin, placed the quote on the website as an experiment. The Irish Times said despite numerous corrections and the fact Wikipedia had dropped the quote, it remained intact on dozens of blogs, websites and newspapers. For more information, see http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5gQV2LU_QhL5w_BcPY5B6pvuUUMGg

Online resources

Mark Briggs has written a free book about multi-media. 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 teaching 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 that should be on your list of regular reads. http://www.10000words.net/

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 a good piece from Mark Glaser about Twitter, published at the PBS MediaShift site: http://www.pbs.org/mediashift/2007/05/your-guide-to-micro-blogging-and-twitter135.html

And another here: http://www.betatales.com/2009/01/21/5-great-twitter-tools-for-journalists/. Find a useful list of further readings at the end of the post.

L