Journalism
Ian Tomlinson, interactive maps and digital journalism
How interactive maps are being used in today’s journalism
Last week, Paul Lewis, a Guardian reporter, linked to a piece of collaborative journalism that he had been working on and had just been published. ‘There can be no better example of how digital technology can hold the state to account than this,’ he wrote on Twitter.
The link in question directed readers towards an interactive map, depicting the movements of the newspaper seller, Ian Tomlinson, who was unlawfully killed during the G-20 Summit protests in the City of London in 2009.
The interactive map is a clever, clear, accessible piece of journalism. The protestors and police are plotted, mostly huddled about Bank tube station; Ian Tomlinson’s path is shown, zigzagging along St Swithans Lane and on his ill-fated route to Cornhill. PC Harwood’s numerous scuffles with protestors are also documented, starting in Cornhill and extending out to Threadneedle Street and into a side road, where he met with Ian Tomlinson at 7.20 p.m.
Twenty different interactive boxes, beginning before and concluding after the incident between Tomlinson and Harwood, annotate the two men’s paths – all numbered in chronological order. The boxes contain captions, snippets of mobile video clips, CCTV outtakes and snatched photographs taken by protestors.
This is one of the most effective map mashups that I have seen. It portrays a clear yet raw account of what happened on 1 April 2009, using material from a range of non-traditional sources and stitching them all together with code and graphic design. The videos convey the brittle, hostile atmosphere of the day with an immediacy that is difficult to replicate with words. They also carry the additional benefit of being more faithful and incorruptible than human memory. When Paul Lewis claims that there is no better example of how digital technology can hold the state to account, I know what he means.
Interactive maps are a useful tool for journalists, for digital storytellers or for simply setting data out in a digestible way. It’s now more than six years since Google Maps launched and in that time they have been used for all manner of purposes with a steady stream of the latest creations featured on a site called Google Maps Mania.
Still, I wonder if journalists could make more use of these maps. Last week I saw Joseph Stashko give a great example of how a Google Map could be used to visualise the results of local elections in Preston. And there are other tools too, such as UMapper, which allows users to create maps with more flexibility – from basic embeddable maps, to maps of tweets, to specially-tailored weather forecasts and so on.
I’ll finish this post off with a nod to the British Library. Though not a journalistic outlet, they seem to have taken to digital with surprising comfort over the last few years. At the last count they had something like 16 blogs from experts that covered a range of topics. They have released a beautiful iPhone App, which includes material from their ‘treasures collection’, and, during the last of their exhibitions, they produced an interactive map of their own.
The Evolving English Voice Map is a patchwork of different Audioboo recordings, all geo-plotted, that demonstrate different accents from around the world. Is a clever mix of new technology and ancient habits (the pleasure of looking over a map), and it works well. All those who participated were asked to read an extract of a Mr. Tickle story – recording it on their iPhone or computer. The result was a mass of submissions from all around the world, including one listed as Abbots Bromley England 1983 Male – I’ll let you guess who that is.
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Image credit: Chris JL on Flickr – Note, the photograph of the policemen above is not from footage of the G-20 riots in 2009.
The Decisive Moment – Flickr, the Royal Wedding and the Death of Osama Bin Laden
Night and Day
The royal wedding and the execution of Osama Bin Laden are a good reminder of how far the news agenda can lurch in the space of a couple of days. On Friday and during the weekend, the run was all for images of expensive dresses, dashing Rolls Royces, cheering crowds and flapping plastic flags. By Monday morning these pictures had been replaced by other more grisly ones, of Bin Laden’s very odd, stark hideaway in rural Abbottabad – his old rooms upturned in the chaos of the gunfight, his carpet smeared in blood, a smashed clock and half-full medicinal bottles on an empty shelf.
Among all the interesting coverage of both these stories are a number of images on Flickr. For some years governments, organisations, political parties and so on have been using Flickr as a medium to publish official photographs and images. A British Monarchy Photostream documents the doings of the royal family and, over the weekend, they uploaded a wide-range of wedding shots that include sets devoted to the balcony scenes, the RAF flyover and a specially-commissioned McVities Cake, which had been requested by Prince William.
More interesting than this, for several reasons, is the Official Whitehouse Photostream. The photos published here are the work of Pete Souza, a photographer who travelled across the Hindu Kush in 2001 to cover the fall of the Taliban and, in 2009, was appointed Official White House Photographer.
Pete Souza’s photographs are remarkably revealing and candid. They give a glimpse into the day-to-day life of the President and his aides, and also the decision-making processes behind important acts of government. The photo at the top of this piece is taken by Souza. It shows Obama, Vice President Biden and other senior members the administration receiving a briefing on Sunday night, a time that was described afterwards by counterterrorism adviser John Brennan as ‘one of the most anxiety-filled periods of time in the lives of the people who were assembled here.’
Souza’s photograph has appeared in the world’s press over the last few days. On a macro level, it is a perfect example of what the French photojournalist Henri Cartier-Bresson referred to as the decisive moment. Obama is hunched forward on his chair, cold eyes on the screen. Hilary Clinton covers her mouth with a hand, concealing an expression which might either suggest shock or concentration. It feels like a decisive moment because the fate of the mission is not yet determined and, on a grander level, Obama’s hopes of re-election next year might even rest on its success.
Social media is helping to expose these moments, even at the top of society, and more transparency can only be a good thing. It connects people to the political process; shows the care and concern of those in power and encourages interaction. I’m writing this at a quarter to twelve in the morning of 4 May and, over the past few days, 1,621,516 people have viewed the image on Flickr – a staggering number.
Just about all of the White House’s images are available to be re-published by others, being licensed under a special category United States Governmental Work. In the UK all of the royal family’s photos and most of those from the Prime Minister’s Official Photostream are produced by the PA, and are therefore protected by copyright.
While I’m going with Flickr, I thought that I’d list some of the other interesting photostreams that are currently being updated. There are four here which are particularly useful for journalists, as they are licensed to be reused:
Metropolitan Police – Great images of events, vehicles and so on.
Cabinet Office – Good quality photos. They include useful profile shots of various politicians like Nick Clegg and Francis Maude
UK Home Office – Day to day work of the department.
HM Treasury – Really useful. Not just day to day work of the department, but also official graphs and stats.
And some others: (mostly unlicensed)
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Image credit – Official WhiteHouse on Flickr
The Journalist and the Murderer – the art of interviewing
Interviewing and ethics
“In The Journalist and the Murderer (1990), [Janet] Malcolm described the inevitable betrayal involved in the journalist-subject encounter; the subject will regress like a patient in psychoanalysis, childishly trusting their questioner, only to discover that the journalist is not a compassionate listener but a professional with an agenda and a story to construct.
Thus, according to the book’s oft-quoted opening: “Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible.”
(Taken from The Journalist and the Biographer – Sydney Morning Herald)
Frost Nixon
This snippet of the Nixon interviews with David Frost in 1977 (sorry – it can’t be embedded – you have to click on that link) encapsulates the point perfectly. It shows Frost poised, concentrating. Head down a touch, eyes up. Meanwhile Nixon’s body language is defeatist: shoulders thrown back, head bobbing about, hands outstretched before him.
It’s a fascinating snapshot of the journalist at work.
Interviewing as an art
Interviewing is a learned art as much as a natural-born skill. I thought I’d add some examples below of encounters – some famous, some not – that have stuck in my mind.
All of these interviews throw up different challenges. Some have more successful outcomes than others.
1. David Dimbleby runs into a grumpy Gore Vidal on the night of Obama’s presidential victory in 2008.
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2. Devina McCall in caught wretchedly in a clash of style – between pop tv and rock music in this interview with James Dean Bradfield.
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3. Al Capp takes on John Lennon at his Bed-In in Montreal
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4. Jeremy Paxman interviews George Galloway on election night 2005 – and goes straight for the throat
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5. Trouble between interviewees – a famous incident between Gore Vidal and William Buckley in 1968
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6. And back to Lennon again. This is an old favourite and great work of art: a 14 year-old Beatle fan meets Lennon at around the same time as the Al Capp incident
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image credit: taijofj on Flickr
Journalism Degrees. A failed experiment? Looking back a decade on.
Much maligned: media studies.
One week and one day before 11 September 2001, Michael Hann, who is now Film and Music Editor at the Guardian, wrote a feature: Media studies? Do yourself a favour – forget it.
The best part of a decade on, it’s interesting to have a look back at this. On job prospects, he said:
This autumn, students around the country will enrol for undergraduate journalism degrees, probably imagining that their three years of study will place them in the forefront of those students seeking jobs in the media when they graduate…
…many will face disappointment. Undergraduate journalism degrees are a new creation in this country. Even a decade ago, it was accepted that studying journalism as a student meant one of two things: either the pre-entry courses run by the bodies that oversee journalists’ training, or one of the postgraduate courses run by a number of institutions, headed by the Oxbridge of journalism: the one-year courses at City and Cardiff universities.
It’s hard not to claim cause and effect, when, in the last few weeks alone, there’s been a blog post by Lara O’Reilly on the scarcity of opportunities for recent grads and another on Journalism.co.uk which runs to similar lines by Joseph Stashko.
So maybe Hann was right? Or maybe not. Listen to this:
In their desire to gets bums on seats and fees in accounts, too many colleges and universities are running courses that do not provide students, even after three years, with the skills they need to get a job. Worse, because they need the money the students generate, they fail to identify students who are simply not good enough to work in journalism and warn them of their shortcomings. Why would anyone do a journalism degree if they thought they would not get a job at the end of it? They would not. But don’t tell them that: we might lose the cash.
Every editor who takes work experience students has had the same experience: a student in the final year of a journalism degree who will never get a job. I have seen students who, literally, could not string a sentence together. Not one of their tutors had ever sat down with them and explained the bitter facts of life: you can’t write, can’t sub, can’t interview, won’t ring round – you’re unemployable in journalism.
People like that have always wanted to be journalists and they have always been disappointed. The difference now is that they waste three years of their lives and thousands of pounds before they find out. And course tutors collude in it.
This point is more difficult to square – and a decade on Hann will probably have to concede that this was an unfair caricature. Those starting off in journalism today might not be any more or less talented than those a decade ago, but they are certainly much better prepared.
Student media. (c.2001)
Around the same time that Hann was writing his piece, I was about to start my degree at Durham. It was a small, odd place in comparison to the county that I had just left. All crooked houses, towering cathedrals, stone bridges and cobbled streets. After a bit I started writing for Palatinate, the student newspaper – which at the time was about all the early journalism training that we were expected to get.
@rebeccats might well back me up on this, but I confess that we weren’t especially good. None of us had had any proper training in how to give a news story shape; half of the features were indulgent and wore on like a church sermon and the whole thing – a broadsheet paper with accompanying arts supplement – was cobbled together on a doddery Mac by a group of aspiring writers who had all of the design nous of a gibbon.
If you look at student media a decade on, the landscape has changed entirely. Students like Joseph Stashko (who is a journalism student at UCLan) are running hyperlocal sites such as Blog Preston in their spare time. Josh Halliday – who did his BA at Sunderland – has blogged his way to a trainee job with the Guardian, and up at Birmingham City University, Paul Bradshaw has set up a course which is so far in front of the rest of the industry that a good chunk of the media travels up their JeeCamp Unconference each year to see what might be happening next.
While this all might be reflective of a rather jumbled up industry, it is far more democratic than how it used to be. A decade after Hann’s article and journalism grads are unquestionably better qualified and prepared to enter the industry than they were before. Good students are now fully NCTJ trained and in addition they know about design, they know about coding, they know about data and they have the tools – both hardware and software – to get the job done quickly and sometimes brilliantly.
During our degrees we didn’t have any of this training. We just learnt in public by occasionally making a hash of things, knowing that we’d have to go off and do a postgraduate course at some point in the future. With Halliday’s appointment – the kind of position that you’d have expected to go to a breezy-bequiffed English Lit or History grad back in the early 2000s – it’s clear that nowadays the industry is taking journalism undergraduate degrees seriously.
(Have a look at Paul Bradshaw’s list of recent successful grads at the bottom of this post to see more examples of top jobs going to graduating journalism students).
One Blair, one Bush, one photo
One incident from my time on Palatinate sticks in my mind particularly. It was in about 2003, in the aftermath of the invasion of Iraq, when President George W. Bush arrived to visit Tony Blair at his Sedgefield home. Bush ate a pub lunch while surrounded by a scrum of security and then disappeared off the sky in his helicopter.
The most we managed on the event was a grainy photograph at 150 paces and a short news piece. I wonder how that story would have been reported now with trained bloggers and teams of student journalists: Twitter, AudioBoo, Posterous and all the rest of it. It’s would be a good measure of how student reporting has moved on.
But where are the jobs? There has been a 24% increase in applicants for journalism courses over the last year and the industry is being squeezed. You can’t help get the feeling that trying to get all the journalism graduates into relevant jobs is like trying to jam an elephant into a thimble. So on that count, I think Hann’s first point stands – and that journalism educators and universities should make this fact as plain as possible to student applicants. After all, no torture is equal to that of encouragement of hope.
I still think, though, that the good grads (have a look at Lara O’Reilly if you want an example of one) will still do well and find their way. They’re already better prepared than a load of us lot were back in the summer of 2004 and what the best ones need now more than anything is a little luck.
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Paul Bradshaw has recently begun a series on successful journalism students who have gone on to great jobs in the media. To see all nine of those profiled so far, have a look at the New Online Journalists.
(Image: Prebends Bridge in Durham, by BigBadsWorld on Flickr)
Raoul Moat and Nineteenth Century Newspapers
Nineteenth century newspapers
I spent Saturday searching through newspapers at the British Library branch up in Colindale. It’s an odd enough place with pale blue walls, stiff wooden doors and an atmosphere that is best described as a mix between a 1960’s comprehensive and an old village hall. It’s not too difficult to detect that the old building will be closed in 2012 and that – in the meantime – it is more lingering on than existing outright.
Still, the newspapers are what make the place and there are some fabulous collections stored there. I’ve always enjoyed reading 19th century newspapers. They’ve a knack for savage clarity and pithy expression. Of course, they might be inaccurate, prim, judgemental and filled to the rafters with quack medical adverts, but nowadays, while browsing through them, these are things to enjoy rather than endure.
Best of all, of course, are the news snippets. Something like NIBS, I suppose, published weekly in a section usually titled ‘Home News.’ Here’s an imagined version of how they might have reported the Raoul Moat case. It’s a bit of a tonic from all today’s over-reporting.
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Manhunt
Saturday evening last. In a most calamitous incident Raoul Moat, of Newcastle Upon Tyne, did shoot dead with a shotgun one Chris Brown of the same neighbourhood. Moat, aged 37, a known villain, did, by the same weapon, moments after, shoot a subsequent victim, Samantha Stobbart, through a window, causing near fatal bleeding. A terrific chase was made after Moat by the town magistrates until the wretched criminal was discovered some days afterwards near a river in the village of Rothbury, close to this city. Moat, who exhibited many signs of rough living, held a shotgun to his temple in the most violent and effecting manner for a period upwards of six hours, raging wildly at the magistrates and agents of the law who had beset him on all sides. At a little after one o’clock in the morning, the lamentable man, who demonstrated very many signs of the hardest sorrows and most deranged ravings of the mind, did launch himself forever into eternity with the aid of his gun. An inquest was held on the body the following day by Ms Sue Sim, JP, Coroner. Verdict – lunacy.
Image credit:Effervescing Elephant
Andrew Sparrow on Live Blogging the General Election
14,000 words per day
It’s worth taking a moment to thank Andrew Sparrow for locking himself up in the Guardian’s offices for the last month and producing a great live blog of the General Election campaign and the eventual change of government.
He’s written an interesting piece on the practicalities of live blogging and how writing up to 14,000 words a day gave him a unique insight into the campaign. Sparrow’s a fan of the art and so am I. Live blogging is another skill that should be incorporated into practical journalism qualifications.
Interestingly, he writes:
“If journalism is the first draft of history, live blogging is the first draft of journalism.”
It’s a great line, and it certainly has merit. But Sparrow’s blog was also a collection of information from elsewhere: quotes from MPs on Twitter, the recording of Gordon Brown and bigotgate on Audioboo, the photos of Cameron and the Queen on Twitpic and so on.
Therefore, perhaps I could amend Sparrow’s statement slightly and suggest that social media is the first draft of journalism?
Anyway. Here’s a very quick sketch of how news was reported throughout the General Election campaign.
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Image credit: C4Chaos
The General Election 2010. Ha ha ha.
Image credit: My David Cameron
How to laugh at a politician
On election morning I thought it’d be a good idea to look back at the last few months’ online political satire. I’m not sure that it has been quite the digital election that I was anticipating, with TV being, if anything, the defining medium, but the Internet has certainly added something.
And here is a quick round up of the best digital satire.
1. My David Cameron
A website set up in January this year by by Clifford Singer, creative director at Sparkloop graphic design agency, shortly after David Cameron’s heavily airbrushed face appeared on 759 billboards about the country.
The site received 90,000 unique visitors in two weeks, with anyone able to share their version of the Cameron poster.
2. #itsnicksfault
After a furious press turned on Nick Clegg for daring to become popular without their support, their negative headlines were ridiculed on Twitter as Rory Cellan Jones explains in this blog post. Some of his highlights being:
“Just had a giant chocolate eclair with cream. All #nickcleggsfault”
“We’ve run out of houmous #NickCleggsfault”
“Pompey not being allowed to play in Europe. #nickcleggsfault”
“Got rid of the wasp and a new wasp has arrived. #nickcleggsfault”
“I got my debit card stolen #nickcleggsfault”
3. Charlie Brooker in the Guardian
Charlie Brooker has been on enormously good form in the last few weeks. I think my favourite paragraph of his was this, just after the final leaders’ debate:
According to some polls, Cameron won, or at the very least tied with Clegg. Which is odd, because to my biased eyes, he looked hilariously worried whenever the others were talking. He often wore a face like the Fat Controller trying to wee through a Hula Hoop without splashing the sides, in fact. Perhaps that’s just the expression he pulls when he’s concentrating, in which case it’s fair to say he’d be the first prime minister in history who could look inadvertently funny while pushing the nuclear button.
[Charlie Brooker - BBC debate was a cross between Songs of Praise and Over the Rainbow]
4. The Daily Mash
Odd and shocking as ever, the writers at the Daily Mash have obviously enjoyed the fact that there is an election on:
Clegg to clean up politics using his personal bank account – [link]
BNP launches aryan spread – [link]
Brown to be turned into glue – [link]
5. The election debates and social media
As Shane Richmond explains here, watching the leaders’ debates with Twitter added an extra dimension to the whole thing. Facebook was pretty good too.
6. Matt on the General Election
A cross over from the mainstream media here, but it’s well worth checking out Matt’s bank of General Election cartoons at the Telegraph. There’s a particularly good one of David Cameron pestering a sleeping couple.
7. Nope
Currently doing the rounds on Twitter. Published in response to the Sun’s front page.
Image taken from Mattlays’ Twitpic.
UPDATE 8am: It’s only an hour since I posted this, but already Liberal Conspiracy are publishing lots of different variations of the Cameron frontpage. It’s an echo of the airbrush moment, and it’s interesting to wonder what effect it will have – if any – on polling day.
8. The Peter Mandleson Experience
And, lastly of all, this video of Peter Mandleson and Gordon Brown having a jam is quite brilliant.
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Right. Enough silliness – I’ve got to decide who to vote for.
Five reasons to be suspicious about any data published by You Gov
For the past few weeks it has felt as if balanced journalism has taken a break and that everything is propaganda.
I suppose it’s wise to be suspicious of everything until 6 May has passed, and in particular it’s a good idea to question any information published by the opinion pollsters You Gov. Here’s a five reasons why.
1. Loaded questions
Here’s an example of a You Gov question, posted on a Digital Spy forum two days ago. In the words of the author: ‘Notice anything missing?’
27 April 2010 – Still No Lib Dems?
Click image for full-size – original can be seen here
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2. More loaded questions?
It’s difficult to tell how balanced You Gov’s questions are without going through them all, but from the evidence of this Twitpic image and the comments beneath, well – you can make your own mind up.
“Everything scares me about the Liberal Democrats” – 22 April 2010
Click on the image to view full size. Original posting can be seen here.
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3. Fixed debate polls?
As Michael Crick explains in this blog post, You Gov ran their post-debate poll following the second televised debate at a rather curious time. Between 9.27pm and 9.31pm, to be precise. The debate finished a 9.30pm – meaning:
In Crick’s words:
This may explain why Yougov gave David Cameron a better rating than the other post-debate polls did last night. For Nick Clegg ended the debate with a very powerful closing speech, probably the best of the evening.
According to the BBC video system Clegg didn’t start speaking until 9:29:18 and finished at 9:30:47
So many of those polled by You Gov last night must have voted without seeing his final speech. [link to Crick's blog]
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4. Stephan Shakespeare (the CIO)
You’d think that the most important aspect of any poll is that it is unbiased. And who’s You Gov’s CEO – the man ultimately responsible for making this so? Stephan Shakespeare, an ex-Conservative parliamentary candidate for Colchester and the owner of Conservative Home.
Perfect. Craig Murray offers his description of Mr. Shakespeare here but if that is a little too, er, biased then you can have a look at his Wikipedia entry.
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5. Nadhim Zahawi (the founder)
A follow on from the last one. Nadham Zahawi founded You Gov 10 years ago and was its CEO up until February this year when, of course, he stepped down to stand as the Conservative parliamentary candidate for Stratford.
It’s just the type of business arangement that I used to experience during my time in Madrid. Florentino Perez would be proud.
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Still, I wouldn’t go so far as to say that any information published by You Gov was false is any way. They might send me a letter or something.
Image credit: secretlondon123
On why Gordon Brown calling Gillian Duffy ‘a bigot’ sparked a perfect social media story
The perils of going out for a loaf of bread in Rochdale
Yesterday was an unusual day and one that Gordon Brown will never forget. Personally, I feel quite sorry for him. You can accuse him of being short-tempered, autocratic and blinkered if you will, but one thing that I don’t think Gordon Brown is, is disingenuous. Today that’s exactly how it looks and I hope it doesn’t become the slip that characterises the end of his career. That would be unfair.
As some people have already pointed out, Brown was dreadfully unlucky yesterday. The audio fell straight into the Rupert Murdoch’s hands rather than anyone else’s; the sound was sweet and crisp and Gillian Duffy turned out to be a respectable lady with the perfect background for the Tory press to exploit.
But there was also some other factors that combined to make the incident into a perfect social media story. Here they are:
1. Time
Brown closed his car door a little after midday and Andrew Sparrow reported that ‘Gordon Brown has been caught on a microphone…’ at 12.18pm.
Britons were sat before their computers with their lunch hours approaching – time to discuss, blog, tweet or whatever. For Gordon Brown there was another seven hours of campaigning to go before the evening, and the story had the whole day to play out.
2. Quality content
Shortly after Sky News producer Tami Hoffman had noticed, analysed then broadcast the audio it was being uploaded to streaming sites across the Internet. What’s more, it was high quality.
Within half an hour the video was featured on Brightcove and shortly after that it was uploaded to Audioboo and any newspaper or blogger could feature. With content to link to, people linked – circulating the story far quicker that the television could do alone.
3. Exposure
Social media excels when exposing perceived wrongs. Look at the Trafigura case last September or Jan Moir’s article about Stephen Gately’s death. Now here was the Prime Minister using scandalous language to describe a potential voter.
Just the type of thing to tweet about.
4. Narrative
The story lingered. First Gordon Brown was in Jeremy Vine’s radio studio, then he was back on his way to Rochdale, then he was in Gillian Duffy’s house and then he was on her doorstep, smiling like a Cheshire cat. Many newspapers live-blogged the whole thing and evening into the evening people were still tweeting about whether or not the Sun had paid £50,000 for a story.
It was very much like watching a long episode of Neighbours, albeit with deeper, Scottish accents. At 3.42pm, when Gilliam Duffy’s door swung open, Andrew Sparrow wrote something on the Guardian blog that summed it all up:
“Everyone: the door has opened. This is live blogging at its best. More follows.”
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Image credit: Downing Street
BBC News: one headline, seven nouns
Headlines and Googleability
Just a short one. I’ve blogged before about Googleability vs. Creativity in print and web headlines, and how search engine optimisation is currently doing to the English language more or less what Doctor Beeching did for the railways 45 years ago. This is an interesting case in point.
Yesterday evening the BBC News website published a piece on the government’s evacuation plans for Britons stranded due to Iceland’s volcanic eruption. The title for the article, impressively enough, was
‘Ministers mull volcano ash cloud flight chaos measures.’ (visual)
Yes. That’s one headline with seven nouns, leaving BBC News journalists looking like they had been instructed to shoehorn as many keywords into the headline as possible. Is it really necessary? Do the BBC – who already have such strong web-presence and brand identity – need to pander to the search engines in this way?
Still, perhaps one of the subs realised that they had got carried away, for when I looked this morning they had changed the headline to ‘Volcano cloud Britons could return via ‘Spanish hub’ – almost equally ugly, but at least down to four nouns. (Which is plenty).
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Image credit: atibens
Original story via @Sarah_Bakewell
Newspapers, reflections
Some notes on the newspaper
In the early years of the twenty-first century a newspaper looks like a clumsy thing. Outdated within hours, virtually worthless after its first purchase, expensive to produce, impossible to correct, difficult to distribute and, shortly afterwards, to destroy.
Not so 300 years ago. While everyone is arguing over the end of newspapers, it is quite interesting to also have a look at their beginnings.
At the start of the 1700s the newspaper was considered a great technological step forward. London led the way and by the middle of the century there were as many as 130 regional publications in circulation across the country. The newspaper had become an institution.
More than merely reporting happening events, newspapers provided useful information about meetings, prices – especially of corn and wheat – trade returns, bills of mortality and adverts.
Here’s an article from early on in the century, describing the bizarre effects that newspapers had on some obsessives:
(From the Bristol Mercury, 2 Aug. 1712)
About 1695 the press was again set to work, and such a furious itch of novelty has ever since been the epidemical distemper, that it has proved fatal to many families, the meanest of shopkeepers… spending whole days in coffee houses to hear news and talk politics, whilst their wives and children wanted bread at home, and their business being neglected, they were themselves thrown into gaol or forced to take sanctuary in the army.
By the end of the century, the newspaper’s place was so entrenched in society that the poet and naturalist George Crabbe was motivated to write a nimble poem in their honour:
I sing of NEWS, and all those vapid sheets
The rattling hawker vends through gaping streets;
Whate’er their name, whate’er the time they fly ;
Damp from the press, to charm the reader’s eye
- G. Crabbe – the Newspaper (1785)
A flaw, perhaps?
But at the same time other were noticing that newspapers were not without fault. The fact that each day they had to be filled to the same degree and length was seen as clumsy by some – one of whom was Henry Fielding, who wrote early on in The History of Tom Jones (Book II, Ch I)
Thought we have properly enough entitled this our work, a history, and not a life; nor an apology for a life, as is more in fashion; yet we intend in it rather to pursue the method of those writer, who profess to disclose the revolution of countries, than to imitate the painful and voluminous historian who, to preserve the regulatory of his series, thinks himself obliged to fill up as much paper with the detail of months and years in which nothing remarkable happened, as he employs upon those notable areas when the greatest scenes have been transacted on the human stage.
Such histories as these do, in reality, very much resemble a newspaper, which consists of just the same number of words, whether there be any news in it or not. They might likewise be compared to a stage coach, which performs constantly the same course, empty as well as full. The writer, indeed, seems to think himself obliged to keep even pace with time, whose amanuensis he is,
Now it is our purpose, in the ensuing pages, to pursue a contrary method. When any extraordinary scene presents itself (as we trust will often be the case), we shall spare no pains nor paper to open it at large to our reader; but if whole years should pass without producing anything worthy his notice, we shall not be afraid of a chasm in our history; but shall hasten on to matters of consequence, and leave such periods of time totally unobserved.
My reader then, is not to be surprised, if, in the course of this work, he shall find some chapter very short, and others altogether as long; some that contain only the time of a single day, and others that comprise years; in a word, if my history sometimes seems to stand still, and sometimes to fly…
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These are some notes from an essay I have to write on the earliest days of the newspaper. Most of the examples come from Asa Briggs’ book – How They Lived – and the photo at the top is from mofotos‘ Flickr stream.
SEO What?
Just as the English talk about the weather, everyone in digitaldom talks about SEO. A brief overview of search engine optimisation is included in this presentation along with a number of the most popular viewpoints.
As ever, comments welcome.
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Sources Used:
“Daily Mirror’s Matt Kelly puts SEO in its place” by Robert Andrews [link]
“Google’s secret algorithm revealed” by David Douek [link]
“How SEO is changing journalism” by Shane Richmond [link]
“A journalist’s guide to SEO” by Kevin Gibbons [link]
Posterous, the iPhone and micro journalism: how to live-blog a rally (or something similar)
And the walls fall down
Digital publishing has come a long way. Six years ago (or so) all websites and blogs could only be updated from computers that were connected, with long lengths of cable, to the nearest telephone socket.
But then along came Wi-Fi. Suddenly the Internet was in the air all around us. You could hook up your laptop or, more recently, Smartphone, whenever you got a sniff of it and suddenly all the old boundaries of digital publishing tumbled down.
The mobile Internet meant that people to could publish on the fly from almost anywhere. And when I signed up to the Africa Rally – sometime early on last year – I wanted to do just that.
The Africa Rally
The Africa Rally is best described as a charity touring event, which is organised by a company called the Adventurists. The aim of the rally is to successfully drive from England to Cameroon in Africa in an old, unsuitable or amusing vehicle. I signed up with two old friends and we decided to have a go in an old VW Beetle. Our team name was to be Camervroom.
Blogging it – (problems)
Such a long and peculiar journey immediately struck me as excellent material for a blog. A blog would help us to stay in touch with family and friends at home, it would remain as a record of the trip after we had finished and it would serve as a new publishing challenge – just enough to satisfy my ongoing Internet addiction.
But there were lots of problems. The journey was (at best) going to take a month and to stop each evening and compose a reasoned blog was going to be too time consuming. Even if we did find the time and my two friends did have the patience (which they wouldn’t have had), the likelihood of finding an Internet cafe whenever I wanted one in various corners of Africa was low.
The obvious solution was to cut out Internet cafes and blog via telephone. There are lots of powerful telephones available at the moment and, in particular, the iPhone has about as much publishing clout as an entire newsroom would have had just about a decade ago. You can take photos, shoot video, record audio and send email on the iPhone, all in a few jabs of the finger. In addition it records useful meta-data as you go, including geographic location, local times and date – all of which comes in useful if you want to do some data mashing later on.
Still, taking an iPhone along to Africa is certainly about as stupid as it is clever. On the rally we were passing through 12 different countries, each of which had perhaps two or three different mobile service providers. Any concoction of these may or may not work, depending – or so it seemed – upon a million different capricious factors.
On top of this you have the problem of cost. Everyone has heard horror stories of enthusiastic holiday makers generating enormous telephone bills in just a few short days in Mallorca. Add on to this the fact that an iPhone is just the sort of expensive, desirable object that you shouldn’t carry out of the country, and all things considered it could end up a dysfunctional waste of space.
Blogging it – (solutions)
Enter Posterous
Posterous hasn’t been around that long but it has quickly grown in popularity as one of the best platforms for mobile blogging or, more fashionably put, lifestreaming.
The idea is simple. All you have to do is send emails to Posterous and thereafter it is the software’s job to make sense of the message’s content and cobble it together into a post.
For example if you take a picture on your telephone and then email it to Posterous, within a minute that photo will have been blogged alongside any accompanying text that you include in the body of the email.
Here is a good explanation of how to get the most out of Posterous.
All in all, a blog can be prepared, posted and published within about two or three minutes and you can post to Posterous from wherever you phone allows you to connect to the Internet. A decade ago people wouldn’t have believed it.
Connectivity
So Posterous worked for the blogging software, but what about connectivity? Well, I called O2 who are my mobile service provider and told them that I was going abroad and that I wanted to use my iPhone to connect to the Internet. For £50 a month they set me up with a bolt-on package called Date Abroad 50, which allowed me 50 Mb of data, downloads every month while I was out of the country.
(For a full-scale blog for a month, this isn’t quite enough. But if you are careful (you can monitor how much data you are downloading by studying your telephone settings) and just use the phone to send emails then it should be a good amount to start off with).
Connectivity Again
So. I had a phone with the potential to write emails, record videos and sound and take photos. I had Posterous which had the ability to take all of this information and process the code into a meaningful post and I had a bolt on package from O2 that allowed me to send data while abroad at an affordable price. All done.
Or not.
The iPhone worked perfectly in France and Spain and fitfully in Morocco. After that the cellular network quite predictably fritted in and out continuously. It didn’t work in Senegal, worked a little bit in Mali, failed totally in Burkina Faso and Benin, reappeared dramatically in Nigeria before vanishing again in Cameroon.
In countries without sufficient network coverage I was forced to resort to WiFi. This was a more tricky task, but luckily West Africa has an enormous number of unsecured wireless networks that usually pop up at opportune moments, most of them in hotels, banks or on the streets outside governmental buildings. Three minutes stood outside one of these buildings in Senegal, Burkina Faso, Benin or Cameroon was long enough to post a brief update. And usually that was all that was needed.
Real time rally – some observations
I posted 84 times on the Camervroom blog – most of these coming on the road and in the last month it has been read by around 4,000 unique visitors.
I’ve always thought that a good definition of a successful blog is one that has more total comments than total posts – and Camervroom, with more than 100 different comments, passed this test easily.
There were many benefits of using Posterous – its ease of use and reliability were the main ones, but another little quirk that worked particularly well was its ability to detail the geographic location of a post, making it easy for people to see exactly – to the very spot on a street – where we were.
Lesson learnt
For me, working in digital media, there are a couple of lessons to be learnt here. Firstly, people want to know what is happening in real time: writers, content producers, journalists and whoever else should be willing to occasionally substitute the overall quality of a piece for the amount of time that it takes them to get it out.
This change can be reflected by the frequency of posts, but also in the style and mindset of the writer. An author can write in the present tense instead of the past tense to give a sense of an ongoing journey, they can end a piece without reaching a conclusion or post a picture without an explanation.
All of this flies, of course, in the face of creating a fully coherent journalistic piece, but lifestreaming is something quite different to that. Simply put, you don’t always have to finish with a conclusion because your reader will know that you are going to be back soon.
Secondly, if you are going to have a go at lifestreaming then it is a good idea to experiment with different types of media. By this I mean audio (podcasting), visual (photographs) and video, and the very best applications to use for anyone with an iPhone are Audioboo and You Tube to help you do this.
Thirdly, think about your readership. Posterous is very good at sending out automated updates across a host of different platforms: Twitter, Facebook, You Tube and so on. But does everyone in all of these communities want to know about what you are doing three times a day?
The best bet, until you know otherwise is to manage this yourself manually otherwise over-publishing will be seen as spam and any effort that you are putting into doing something may well have negative consequences.
Micro journalism
I attended Journalism.co.uk’s News Rewired event on Thursday and was interested to hear Greg Hadfield, someone that I hadn’t ever heard of before, say something that I agreed with completely.
He said, journalism is now much more about individual journalists doing little projects than large organisations and enormous projects. And I think that using Posterous for little projects like this is a perfect example of that.
Ok. This was a rally and a holiday, but the same methods that I used on the Africa Rally could easily be used by journalists on projects abroad, by aid workers at the height of a crisis, by managers at a business conference, or by a music journalist on the road with a rock and roll band. You could imagine each of these resulting in excellent pieces of journalism – micro journalism if you like.
Ingredients for a lifecasting blog
- Download Posterous, set up your email to post directly and Google Analytics (optional)
- Get a Smartphone with the ability to connect to the Internet
- If you are going abroad you need to agree a roaming bolt-on with your mobile service provider
- You need a USB cable to connect your telephone to fixed computers when you get the chance (in Africa I took my USB cable everywhere and it acted like a wonderful umbilical cord between this world and the virtual one)
- Make sure you have some good telephone insurance
Cost
All told, in one month Camervroom cost about £150 in additional telephone bills. Just about everything else was free and as it is going to be staying around for as long as the Posterous servers exist (fingers crossed), then I don’t think it is a bad investment at all.
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Links: The Camervroom Blog
An introduction: Journalism in the Digital Age
Given at City University London on 16.11.09.
As the You Tube videos don’t seem to work, I’ll add this excellent one below:
A brief history of breaking news
The Message and the Messenger
Here are a few different examples of the varying ways in which news has been broken over the past 250 years.
For the most part this is a visual/interactive list. It’s intended to be illustrative rather than exhaustive.
1. 1762: War between Britain and Spain (the news took seven months to reach the Philippines by ship)
“In 1762, when the Seven Years War widened into conflict between Britain and Spain, the enterprising British Admiralty sent a message to British forces in India to set off immediately to attack the Spanish colony in Manila in the Philippines. Arriving seven months after the original message had been sent from London, the British achieved the ultimate surprise attack, since word had still not arrived from Madrid that war had been declared at all. Their ship sailed under the Spanish defenders’ guns unchallenged before launching their successful assault.” –
(From William Hague’s biography of William Pitt the Younger (2004))
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2. February 1830 – The Oddingley Murders. Reports were spread across Britain by newspapers and also street-corner ballads in the month after the story broke.
Here are the first two verses of one:
The greatest of all miracles is going to unfold,
I’m going to unfold
Of two atrocious murder
As true as ever was told.A horrible band of miscreants
A cruel plot did lay
‘Gainst Parker this Church Minister
To take his life away…
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3. 16 April 1912 – Reports of the Titanic’s Sinking (the news took around 30 hours to appear in the newspapers)
Here Stephen Bottomore explains the role that photographic images were beginning to play in breaking news events.
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Since mass-media became a major industry in the late 19th century, whenever there was a major news event, there was an accompanying scramble by journalists for all and any information about it.
When the Titanic went down the scramble became a positive melee, which reports and photographers hunting out any information that they could relate to the ship and its passengers.
This frenzy shook Bert Garai, later one of the great pressmen of the twentieth century who was starting out at the Havas news agency in Paris when the Titanic story broke. ‘It was most impressive and it gave me a glimpse of the speed, efficiency and enthusiasm such work entailed’, he later recalled.
Indeed in the immediate aftermath of the Titanic disaster, the press demonstrated just how quickly and pictorially it could cover a news story pictorially. Within a day or two of the sinking, newspapers and periodicals published artists’ impressions of the disaster, along with numerous photographs of the victims and other aspects of the story.
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4. 1 June 1953 – The conquest of Everest (the news arrived in London one day later)
There is a fascinating story behind James Morris’ (now Jan Morris) scoop for the Times. The news of Hilary and Tenzing’s successful summit attempt was broken by the newspaper, but only after the reporter had foolled other journalists who were trying to intercept his message> He used the following coded communication:
The full story is recounted in the Press Gazette
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5. 22 November 1963 – Assassination of President Kennedy (there was only a slight delay due to overloaded telephone exchanges between Dallas and the other parts of the US)
It is interested to see how these journalists received and delivered news back to their audience in the minutes following Kennedy’s assassination in Dallas. Jammed phones and unreliable testimony hampered their attempts to fish out the facts.
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6. 31 August 1997 – Death of Princess Diana (no delay)
By the time of Princess Diana’s death in 1997, what we have is a smoothed, colourful and evolved version of the JFK video. This and the 11 September attacks might have been the last enormous breaking stories to be covered – almost unopposed – by the traditional media.
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7. 7 July 2005 – The London Bombings (reported by “citizen” journalists on the spot)
July 2005 was a big milestone for bloggers and the Internet. All of a sudden breaking news was being reported differently – by people with personal experience. Accidental journalists.
To look at the role of the Internet in breaking news, there are two very good starting points. Paul Bradshaw and Mindy McAdams.
image credit: alfie
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8. 2 October 2009 – The Rio Olympics
The story was reported within seconds across all broadcast mediums – this is how I received the news via Twitter
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Top image from Flickr
The Battle of Trafigura
A memorable day for the British media
A good day for the British media. A good day for press freedom. A good day for the Guardian and, especially, its editor, Alan Rusbridger.
Briefly written, here’s what happened.
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I’ve little to add that hasn’t already been mentioned elsewhere, but here’s a thought.
Today we saw old and new media working together. Newspaper editors and journalists were interacting with bloggers and twitterers. There were articles, blogs and tweets – all repeating the same message over and over and over again.
There was an unfamiliar sense of unity. The idea that if the media worked as one it could defend a principle that it felt strongly enough about.
And after years of new and old media growling at each other from different corners of the same room, this was something new.
An important principle has been defended – and that is the most important point of all. But perhaps it is worth noting that some bridges might just have been built in doing so.
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image credit: Ricky David
The Pleasure of Books
Burning Books
William Lyon Phelps delivered the following speech in a radio broadcast on 6 April, 1933, just one month before the NAZIs burnt around 25,000 books in a single disquieting night in Berlin.
The speech documents his reverence for books and the fundamental place that they had in his life. Phelps spoke of his strong emotional attachment to books as live objects: they could be held in the hand, filed away or arranged on a shelf for aesthetic pleasure.
For Phelps, referring to an old, pencil-marked book in later life was like ‘visiting a forest where you once blazed a trail.’ ‘You have the pleasure of going over old ground… recalling both the intellectual scenery and your own earlier self.’
It’s a strong argument for the important place that books, as tangible objects, have played in society over the past five centuries.
William Lyon Phelps – The Pleasure of Books
“The habit of reading is one of the greatest resources of mankind; and we enjoy reading books that belong to us much more than if they are borrowed. A borrowed book is like a guest in the house; it must be treated with punctiliousness, with a certain considerate formality. You must see that it sustains no damage; it must not suffer while under your roof. You cannot leave it carelessly, you cannot mark it, you cannot turn down the pages, you cannot use it familiarly. And then, some day, although this is seldom done, you really ought to return it.
But your own books belong to you; you treat them with that affectionate intimacy that annihilates formality. Books are for use, not for show; you should own no book that you are afraid to mark up, or afraid to place on the table, wide open and face down. A good reason for marking favorite passages in books is that this practice enables you to remember more easily the significant sayings, to refer to them quickly, and then in later years, it is like visiting a forest where you once blazed a trail. You have the pleasure of going over the old ground, and recalling both the intellectual scenery and your own earlier self.
Everyone should begin collecting a private library in youth; the instinct of private property, which is fundamental in human beings, can here be cultivated with every advantage and no evils. One should have one’s own bookshelves, which should not have doors, glass windows, or keys; they should be free and accessible to the hand as well as to the eye. The best of mural decorations is books; they are more varied in color and appearance than any wallpaper, they are more attractive in design, and they have the prime advantage of being separate personalities, so that if you sit alone in the room in the firelight, you are surrounded with intimate friends. The knowledge that they are there in plain view is both stimulating and refreshing. You do not have to read them all. Most of my indoor life is spent in a room containing six thousand books; and I have a stock answer to the invariable question that comes from strangers. “Have you read all of these books?” “Some of them twice.” This reply is both true and unexpected.
There are of course no friends like living, breathing, corporeal men and women; my devotion to reading has never made me a recluse. How could it? Books are of the people, by the people, for the people. Literature is the immortal part of history; it is the best and most enduring part of personality. But book-friends have this advantage over living friends; you can enjoy the most truly aristocratic society in the world whenever you want it. The great dead are beyond our physical reach, and the great living are usually almost as inaccessible; as for our personal friends and acquaintances, we cannot always see them. Perchance they are asleep, or away on a journey. But in a private library, you can at any moment converse with Socrates or Shakespeare or Carlyle or Dumas or Dickens or Shaw or Barrie or Galsworthy. And there is no doubt that in these books you see these men at their best. They wrote for you. They “laid themselves out,” they did their ultimate best to entertain you, to make a favorable impression. You are necessary to them as an audience is to an actor; only instead of seeing them masked, you look into their innermost heart of heart.”
Wikipedia and Journalism
image credit: the bbc and wikipedia by bowbrick
At the beginning of a piece of journalism
It is impossible to know how many of today’s pieces of journalism begin with a visit to Wikipedia, but I would estimate that it is a majority.
Statistically the site is impressive and comprehensive. As of today, it contains 2,908,083 articles which have been edited an average of 18.33 times by a community of some 9,843,756 registered users.
These facts combine to leave Wikipedia’s position at the top of Google’s organic search rankings about as assured as Big Ben’s position at the top of Saint Stephen’s tower.
Wikipedia’s popularity and usefulness for journalists means that it deserves a little closer scrutiny. Just how can journalists get more out of the site? What are the dangers that is poses to the growth of knowledge?
Here are a few tips and a few observations.
Related sites and journalistic techniques
Brainstorming:
When you are approaching an article of anything longer than 600 words you are going to need to think about structure. For long articles of several thousand words this is essential.
For brainstorming, Wikimindmap is useful. It returns results in the form of a mind map, allowing you to assess and decide which points are useful and in which order they should be structured.
Here is an example of what you might see for a search for Hitler’s Beer Hall Putsch:
Story generation:
WikipediaVision allows you to watch real-time updates to Wikipedia. A selection of amendments and additions to the site are plotted on a global map, allowing you to track topical news by region.
Often the updates that are plotted on WikipediaVision are related to breaking news, and studying the map carefully for two minutes is likely to yield at least one good idea for a story.
Topical News:
Two particular sites are useful for allowing you to track topical news stories and popular articles. Firstly you have WikiRage. This site allows you to browse the top edited posts over periods of hours, days, weeks and months, as well as showing a list of Wikipedia’s most active editors.
WikiRank gives you much of the same information, albeit in graphic form. A useful feature of this site is that it allows you to view a graph of the popularity of a page over a period of time. Allowing you to chart the rise or fall in popularity of a person or a topic using a quantitative measure.
Here is an example for Dwight D. Eisenhower:
Interesting Facts and quirky information:
Readers thrive on odd stories and interesting facts. For years before the arrival of the computer, journalists and writers kept lists of quotations, superstitions, ideas, misconceptions and such like for future reference or use. A good example would be Thomas Hardy’s ‘Facts’ notebook.
People obviously do still keep their own lists, but it is hardly surprising that one of the most popular Wikipedia articles of all is a list of popular of common misconceptions. It is one of the most useful entries in the site’s directory and a bran tub of ideas for a writer looking for inspiration.
Another entry which is just as useful is the Wikipedia list of ‘Unusual articles’.
And the bad…
The dangers of an over-reliance on Wikipedia are well documented. As it is open to a constant stream of edits from a global network of editors it is susceptible to abuse. It is vital that facts are checked elsewhere.
There are, however, numerous examples of where they are not. In one recent case, Siobhain Butterworth, the readers’ editor of The Guardian, was forced into an online apology after the paper’s obituary for the French composer Maurice Jarre was found to carry falsified quotes.
Jarre’s Wikipedia page had been vandalised shortly after his death by a 22 year-old student Shane Fitzgerald of University College Dublin. Fitzgerald had wanted to prove how easy it was to spread a lie with the assistance of the Internet.
The Guardian was not the only paper fooled by Fitzgerald’s hoax, but Butterworth’s response was the most interesting. She wrote:
“Fitzgerald’s fakery was not particularly sophisticated. All he did was add a quote to Jarre’s Wikipedia page and he provided nothing to back it up. The absence of a footnote containing a reference for the quote ought to have made obituary writers suspicious.
Wikipedia editors were more sceptical about the unsourced quote. They deleted it twice on 30 March and when Fitzgerald added it the second time it lasted only six minutes on the page. His third attempt was more successful – the quote stayed on the site for around 25 hours before it was spotted and removed again.
The moral of this story is not that journalists should avoid Wikipedia, but that they shouldn’t use information they find there if it can’t be traced back to a reliable primary source.” – (Link to full article)
WikiScanner
A tool named WikiScanner is very useful for revealing potential cases of malicious use. It tracks changes to pages by certain I.P addresses and pinpoints potential instances of abuse – or conflicts of interest.
Without wishing to unduly single out The Guardian here is a list of Wikipedia articles relating to that newspaper which have been modified in a potentially unethical manner.
An interview between Laura Oliver and Virgil Griffith of WikiScanner reveals more about the service.
Wiki Facts – Being careful with the truth
Journalists should be wary of any information contained on Wikipedia. A truthful fact can distort an image just as easily as a falsified one – something which should be understood. The danger is that journalists, and the world that follows them, will, as time passes, become more reliant on Wiki Facts.
A Wiki Fact is a fact or snippet of information that is featured on Wikipedia. They are not the sum of all human knowledge, but rather the sum of all our knowledge as reported on Wikipedia. These Wiki Facts are as much as a constraint to a piece of journalism as a speed restrictor is to the speed of a car’s engine.
The rate of Wikipedia’s growth has slowed in the last few years. The days when important entries were hurriedly and inadequately completed is now behind us.
Now, most of the articles have now reached such a level of quality that they allows us to be complacent, to rely on Wikipedia as a ‘good enough source’.
Good and interesting these articles may be, if journalists rely upon them for research they will finish up reporting certain Wiki Facts disproportionately. With these facts promoted over others, readers will essentially be left with the re-reporting of identical facts leading to the distortion of a subject, the diluting of knowledge and – most dangerously of all – the narrowing of minds.
This is the irony of Wikipedia. A website that began a number of years ago, armed with the open eyes of the world and equipped with high ideals and values. It began as a digital reflection of the sum of all human knowledge and its success has been so complete that we are now threatened with the prospect of all general knowledge being the reflection of the knowledge of Wikipedia.
One of the great challenges for good journalists and good journalism is to ensure that this does not happen.
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Headlines and SEO
Outside Euston Square station this morning stood a model with blue eyes and a big smile. She was selling copies of today’s Sun newspaper, upon the front of which was the headline:
“Jordan jumper: I didn’t hump her”
The editor, probably happy with his splash, had decided to be proactive. They had sent people out to sell their Jordan and Peter Andre story directly. It was later pointed out to me that inside the paper was another headline:
“Sex with Jordan? That’s out of the equestrian.”
Tabloids have long been famous for their inventive headlines and today it was nice to see that the paper was being bold and creative with their front page. Two features of newspaper journalism that are becoming increasingly scarce.
It reminds me of a long list of such headlines, a few of which I’ll add here:
- “Super Cally Go Ballistic Celtic are Atrocious” (A Scottish newspaper in response to Celtic’s defeat by Inverness Caledonian Thistle in 2000)
- “Nut Screws Washer and Bolts” (A report of a mental patient who raped a cleaning assistant at an asylum in California and later escaped)
- “Slumdog has the Pedigree to Winalot” (On a portentous opening weekend for Danny Boyle’s film Slumdog Millionaire in the UK)
- “Elton takes David up the aisle” (Elton John marries long term partner David Furnish)
When I look at such headlines I always recall an excellent article that was written by Shane Richmond in the British Journalism Review. He looks at the example of The Sun’s famous ‘Gotcha’, headline during the Falklands conflict and reasons why such a headline would be highly unlikely today due to the importance of SEO and page views for journalists. He wrote:
“The “Gotcha” headline on a Sun front-page splash about the sinking of the General Belgrano is one of the most famous, or infamous depending on your taste, in the history of British journalism. Yet no web producer with any experience would consider a headline like that today. The reason is search engine optimisation (SEO). SEO has been around almost as long as search engines themselves, but journalists were quite late to cotton on. It didn’t really reach newsrooms until a couple of years ago.
The concept is simple. It’s about ensuring that your content is found by the millions of people every day who use search engines as their first filter for news and those who don’t search at all but trust an automated aggregator, such as Google News, to filter stories for them. These people are essentially asking a computer to tell them the news. If you want your story to be read, you’d better make sure the computer knows what you’re writing about.”
Keyword journalism
SEO is important to journalists today and everyone should have a basic understanding of it. If The Sun were concerned solely with drawing the maximum number of searcher into their websites they should used tools such as Hitwise or Google Trends to give keyword information about relevant searches. Most likely the SEO headline that would have resulted would have to be to the order of:
“Jockey speaks following Jordan and Andre’s spit”
Which is obviously very different to:
“Jordan jumper: I didn’t hump her”
I’m glad that The Sun have decided to swap Googleability for creativity. It’s two fingers up to the people that think SEO and page views count for everything – and, if nothing else, it’s earned them a blog post.
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Update:
As Martin Belam points out, it’s not quite the two fingers up to SEO that I was imagining earlier, as the title tag (the bit up in the left hand corner) for the article on The Sun’s website reads: “Jordan’s horseman friend denies fling” - which is far more palatable for the bots.
Different headlines for different mediums – another journalistic lesson.
Happy times in the office
Good news in digi-land
Five years ago Net Media Planet consisted of a laptop computer. And a desk. Today we’re up to 24 people and New Media Age has just listed us as the fourth biggest search agency in the country.
Some thoughts on the future
So, what’s next for digital media? Could search agencies start to work (or merge) with struggling online publishers in the next year in a new, digital alliance? I suppose the question is ‘how much’ do we need the quality, and ‘how much’ do they need the money?
Something to think about.
Meanwhile, elsewhere…
An overcooked moral panic?
Yes. 150 people have died from swine flu. But, amongst the panic, I thought that it would be a good idea to note that at least three other things that are happening in the world at the moment. It would be nice if just one newspaper, or one television station devoted a similar amount of coverage to how…
The Sri Lankan government continues to kill Tamil civilians
A New York-sized ice shelf collapses off Antarctica
Obama taps HIV specialist to head AIDS fight
(Feel free to add to this list – it’s quite a quick one…)
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Digital Times: new media, same problems
Media Problems: 1833 – 2009
Here are some extracts from an article that appeared in a publication named the Westminster Review in 1833; a year before the twenty-one year old Charles Dickens became a political journalist for the Morning Chronicle, and when Queen Victoria wasn’t a queen at all, but a princess of the awkward age of fourteen.
The terms ‘journalism’ and ‘journalist’ had only recently been coined, but some of the problems that the author notes are still lingering today – 176 years on.
Information Overload:
1833: ‘Newspapers are everywhere a necessary of life; multitudes of men cannot breakfast without them; after breakfast other multitudes of men resort to the club and the reading room for their perusal, with an appetite with which the hard working man seeks his dinner. Numbers of persons, both of fortune and supposed education, converse solely by and from the newspapers; and the fact of a barren journal even assumes to individuals so situated, the shape of a serious misfortune. It has even been said that suicides have been committed from a constant repetition of the announcement that nothing new had occurred – in other words that newspapers of the day were barren.’
Today:
2008: Daily Mail: Information Overload
Who Blogs Too Much? Unqualified Offerings
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Not staying on topic:
1833: ‘The Morning Paper of London aims at everything, and this may be the reason why it does nothing well. No transaction takes place which it does not perceive itself competent to report; and for reporters it is lamentable to think that it relies much on the itinerants above spoken of – persons who, if they had no inducements to be false, have no faculty enabling them to be true. The absurd style, the bad English, and the curious phraseology of that abundant crop of small and long paragraphs to be found in the morning papers, and which so often have been so often the subject of ridicule, are altogether attributable to that class of news-purveyors on whom a morning paper principally depends for its supply of facts as they are facetiously termed. The penny a line men are generally persons who are by no means qualified to report common proceedings – persons who have not had the education of decent butlers; but such is the constitution of the morning newspaper, that in these hands are the names and the characters of a large portion of their countrymen daily and hourly placed. It is they who supply the whole of that portion of the paper that comes under the head of domestic news. It is through the habit of relying on such accredited agents as these that the London newspapers are liable to be hoaxed, as they so frequently are, by pretend information…’
Today:
When good blogs go bad – Problogger
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False pretence at authority:
1833: ‘The whole of this mess is placed under the superintendence of an editor – the same person who is expected to write the dicta that are to guide the opinions of the British world for at least a day. He is to be responsible not merely his own opinion on events – event on which a secretary of state, with all the facts before him, would often find it difficult instantly to write an article for the nation… – and all this in the dead of night, when the small hours are increasing fast, in a heated factory redolent of oil and printer’s ink…’
Today:
‘Newspapers have a tradition and authority that the online world cannot yet match’ (Simon Kelner). (An article from 2006, The Future of Newspapers – The Independent)
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Burn out:
1833: ‘It is not to be denied that many of the daily papers contain articles of ability, – that some of their editors are writers of acknowledged talent; but can one man do everything? Has he the power of writing with effect daily and for ever? Is he never to read? Is no time to be given to society, to recreation, to the laying in a fresh stock of experience, to encouraging and cultivating new impressions or removing the old? So tasked is the editor of a morning journal, that he must necessarily soon be driven to the lees of his brain, and be content to foist his intellectual dregs upon the gaping world in lieu of the wisdom they have the right to expect from the pen of a public instructor…’
Today:
Blogging Burnout Prevention Tips: The Blog Herald
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The full essay can be found in this Google Book, on page 450
Images, Right? From Flickr to Photojournalism
Point and Click
It’s all too easy to equate online content to online writing – but there’s much more to it than that. Today you’ll find that the best sites have a good mix between both static and dynamic content, video, podcasts and images.
Fantastic images can lend a site a real edge. Best of all for social media is using your own photos and thereby adding to your own narrative. But if you don’t have the time or the equipment, there is nothing wrong in tapping the Internet’s goldmine of free resources.
So, in the spirit of usefulness, and without further ado here is a post filled with links: (thanks to @noodlepie for pointing some of them out and @mattparsons for the logo site)
Seven image banks that every web-designer could use daily:
- Flickr – The best known and most useful. Contains more than 100,000,000 images with a Creative Commons license.
- FreeFoto – A website that bills itself as the largest collection of free photographs on the Internet
- Free Digital Photos – Good for wildlife and nature, also free
- Sport gfx – Probably the best bank of football photos from the Premiership, European and International matches
- Wellcome Images – All with a Creative Commons license – some excellent science photographs
- OpenStock Photography – A wide variety of photography all licensed under the Wikipedia Commons
- Best brands of the World – Image bank containing a good number of the world’s most famous brand logos. – You’ll need to get permission to use them.
(If you do use any licensed images, make sure you don’t stray outside of the boundaries of a specific license and it is important to check. Also, why not let the photographer know? They’ll probably appreciate it.)
Four useful online tools and applications:
- Tin Eye Reverse Image Search: Allows you to trace images across the net, and see where they came from originally, and if they have been copied or modified. Potentially very useful.
- Multicolour Search Lab: Excellent. It allows you to search for images by colour, and only returns results equipped with a Creative Commons license.
- Splashup: Probably the best substitute for Photoshop if you can’t afford the Adobe license.
- Photoshop Express: Touch up, tune, tweak and tint your photos. Or so it says.
Six examples of photojournalism:
The Internet and photojournalism seem to go together particularly well. Here are six examples of excellent photojournalism in newspapers and personal blogs that I’ve noticed recently:
- Gideon Mendal – A Deadly Cargo – documents the desperately sad fight against Aids on the Zambian, Zimbabwean border.
- Erik Gauger – Notes from the Road
- The Boston Globe – London From Above | Pirates of Somalia
- The Guardian – Charing Cross Bookshops - image-led, interactive feature
- Glenna Gordon – Scarlet Lion: Liberia
- Maladia – Maladia
One way in which designers can save the world:
And, I’ll finish this birthday party of links off by sending another one out, this time to Adam Blenford, another very talented photographer who appears to have been racking up some air miles.
And the future?