While Swedish national papers have moved away from local news initiatives, as local advertising markets are not ready to support costly coverage, there are examples in other countries of how to build coverage by collaborating with local bloggers. The most recent comes from the Guardian, who are looking to contract bloggers in Leeds, Cardiff and Edinburgh. Media and technology reporter Mercedes Bunz reports:
“Guardian Local is a small-scale experimental approach to local newsgathering. We are focusing on three politically engaged cities and we expect to launch in early 2010,” said Emily Bell, the director of digital development at Guardian News & Media. Sarah Hartley, the Guardian local launch editor said: “While researching developments at the grassroots of community journalism, I’ve been impressed by the range and depth of coverage from local websites and blogs. This experimental project reflects both the shifting nature of journalism and the reality on the ground.”
In Sweden we’ve seen several local newspapers/sites collaborating with bloggers for local and hyperlocal news (one recent example is Smålandsposten’s Mitt Lammhult), but the national papers seem less prone to. The largest daily Aftonbladet still has its locally contracted bloggers on the larger cities’ pages on Bloggportalen – for instance Norrköpingsbloggen on the Norrköping page – but with the loss of the local sections on Aftonbladet.se I doubt they get much public or journalistic attention. A lot of them are no longer active.
At the same time there are cities and even whole regions who lack journalists covering them, reports Swedish journalists’ union’s paper Journalisten (unfortunately I can’t find the article available online).
It’s not a problem in itself if national media skip local coverage as long as there are local initiatives – by journalistic sites of bloggers with an interest in these issues. Where they’re lacking, though, there’s a danger that corruption spreads.
We have some very big news today at Pownce. We will be closing the service and Mike and I, along with the Pownce technology, have joined Six Apart, the company behind such great blogging software as Movable Type, TypePad and Vox. We’re bittersweet about shutting down the service but we believe we’ll come back with something much better in 2009. We love the Pownce community and we will miss you all.
We’re very happy that Six Apart wants to invest in growing the vision that we the founders of Pownce believe so strongly in and we’re very excited to take our vision to all of Six Apart’s products. Mike and I have joined Six Apart as part of their engineering team and we’re looking forward to being a part of the talented group that has created amazing tools for blogging and publishing.
So it looks like some microblogging functionality will be integrated into these blogging services. I for one think it’s only natural that we see some microblogging services closing down. There will probably be a concentration to Twitter, Jaiku and a couple others that turn out to be the better ones, or simply where people you know are. Though it’s a piece of cake to automatically update several microblogging sites, there’s little point as long as there are no smart ways to keep track of replies and be a part of the conversation without having to check all the sites manually. If you know of a good service that does that, please let me know.
There are good examples of microblogging serving a journalistic purpose, though these initiative do not necessarily come from professional journalists.
The Twitter Vote Report is one, where Americans across the country made short reports on how the voting in the US election was really going, using hashtags to pinpoint where they were and what their report was about, for instance #machine for problems with the voting machines. They also reported on waiting times. It all ended up on a big map where you could follow the progress in real time.
Live reporting from an event. By using an established microblogging site you get comments from site members and you invite them in a natural way.
Live commentary to tv shows. One example is Drive on Fox.
Coming up with questions for interviews. By asking people what they want to know from a person you’re to interview you get more interesting questions, and you know you’re asking stuff your audience want to know.
Cynthia McCune talks about microblogging as a “21st century police scanner”, listing these uses for reporters: keep up with sources, get quick feedback, get referrals, post live updates to sport scores.
Breaking news. Anders Brenna at digi.no writes: “Twitter is both the perfect journalist tool for being first with breaking news, and the best relief from the tyranny of breaking news.” Super-fast publishing of the latest news without risking that the reader won’t come to your site for the full story. You can even send a message and point to it once it’s out.
Paul Bradshaw has some advice for anyone wanting to use microblogging to cover a topic. Check out the comments too for a few ideas on good use.
Another post on how news makers have to change and use micro-blogging tools.
Do you have more good examples? We’ll collect them and update this list (giving you credit, of course).
Will we see the collapse of journalism as papers fail to take the step over from dead wood publishing? Or are we at a dawn of a smarter news industry? Opinions vary, and we take a look at what some are saying right now.
At SIME, Joi Ito expressed concerns that professional journalism journalism may perish.
- It would be very difficult for a blogger to get a military unit to fly them into Sudan to cover that in first-hand. It would also be very difficult when you write a scathing article about corruption in Singapore to fight the libel suit you get from Lee Kuan Yew and try to stay out of jail. Legal protection against libel suits and also heavily funded first-person war journalism, that’s going to be a while before amateurs will be able to deal with that, he said, and continued:
- I think that everywhere where we’re losing the revenues of physical distribution or transaction costs, whether that’s the financial markets affording analysts or whether it’s academic journalism affording peer review, all these professionals that used to be hired to deal with quality are being put out of business because the distribution can’t afford to pay those guys anymore, they’re all suffering from the same thing. I think bloggers and all the amateurs will pick up a bunch of that, but there’s still going to be this gap. I think it’s going to be a while before we get organized enough. And I’m afraid that professional journalism may collapse before we pick up, and there may be a kind of a “dark period” when we can’t send people to Sudan or we don’t have the ability to fight against the biggotous people that we ought to be going after.
David Sifry thinks the future of journalism lies within the blogosphere.
- I think we actually have a responsibility, given the fact that we are all disintermediating these big media companies, to make sure that we can find a way to help make sure that journalism survives.
Joi Ito and David Sifry in a panel debate about blogging and journalism during SIME 2008.
Yesterday, Joakim Jardenberg of Mindpark wrote a long blog post describing the steps necessary for a paper distribution-dependent local newspaper to make enough money online to be able to survive without the paper edition, should that be necessary. It’s in Swedish, so I’ll take you through his main points.
His solution has three parts: having enough visitors, knowing/keeping track of visitors and using advanced mechanisms to match them with advertisers. Like Jardenberg says, this is no rocket science and behavioural targeting is nothing new. But it hasn’t been evolved enough, and that’s why Jardenberg’s take is interesting. He gives an example with real figures from local paper Helsingborgs Dagblad, and he’s pretty convincing. They need a 40 percent share of the money spent on local advertising in their area to make it.
Though the solution can be explained in a few simple steps, those are not easy steps to take, and Jardenberg is aware of it. He lists these obstacles (my translation):
Technology isn’t quite mature enough. But with baby steps in the right directions we’ll make it in time.
Local sites might lose their relevance. Without an audience the revenue model collapses.
We might not have the stamina. This won’t pay off tomorrow. Count on 5-10 years to reach those 40% in a healthy way.
Our sales force is immature, we still sell paper ads online. Our main advantage, our local sales people, are also those who need to change the most.
A slide in a presentation by Joakim Jardenberg about the decline in Helsingborg Dagblad’s reach.
Jardenberg goes into more detail, and has interesting ideas about data collection and transparency, so if you’re interested, here’s a rough translation of the text through Google Translate. On the whole, he is optimistic about the future of journalism.
The death of local relevance, as mentioned by Jardenberg above, is one of two threats addressed by Jonathan Kay in a blog post at Canada’s National Post’s Comment section’s blog, Full Comment. Kay talks about saving the print media, but this could well be applied to local journalism on the whole.
Kay writes:
The breakdown of Canadians’ sense of community has also contributed to newspapers’ challenges. Slogging through stories about the people who share your city, your province or your country makes sense only if you feel a sense of emotional investment in your neighbours. But in a globalized age, an increasing share of Canadians don’t feel that way. As office-bound yuppies, they commune with their distant college-era friends using Facebook or email, but don’t know the names of the people they pass on their street.
Kay’s other point is the death of spare time. If people don’t have time to read, journalism is in trouble. Print even more so. The three types of print media that will survive are, according to Kay:
(1) Business-oriented media that cater to older, more affluent readers of the type who can justify the expense of long-form news consumption (in both time and money) as a work activity.
(2) Premium publications that cater to the ideologically involved and intellectually upscale
(3) The hyperlocal.
As Kay is talking about the survival of print, I am a bit surprised about his third point. I think hyperlocal is one of the areas where the web can bring so much more than a print product, as it’s all about communication and round the clock updates.
But then, hyperlocal sites are struggling. When Gitta and I talked to Joi Ito a few days ago, he said hyperlocal is failing because local businesses aren’t mature enough online. I think that’s a valid point, and I believe that once they mature and more and more people expect to find hyperlocal news online, this is a very interesting area.
My own take is that journalism will survive and come out stronger and better through this media shift, though it will take a few years of struggle. And it may not look exactly like it does today at the end of it. Which is probably a good thing.
This week it’s the yearly SIME (Scandinavian Interactive Media Event) conference here in Stockholm. Previous years I’ve found it remarkable that a conference about “digital opportunities, technology, communication and entrepreneurship” haven’t given much thought to the audience’s want to communicate and use these “digital opportunities” during the conference itself (no or badly working wifi, no backchannels, no bloggers invited etc). This year there seems to be a change of attitude. Citizen Media Watch is one of 14 invited bloggers who have been given Blogger Press Passes to the event. Many thanks!
This means that we’ll be covering SIME for two days – Wednesday and Thursday this week. We’ll be bambusing, taking photos, possibly live blogging, definitely microblogging, and also making a few video interviews that will appear on our blip.tv channel a bit later on.
Today Gitta and I met to plan our SIME coverage. Here’s what some of it looked like.
Over at Same Same But Different there’s an interesting guest post by politician Camilla Lindberg, the only member of one of the government parties in Sweden who voted against the new and controversial wiretapping law, commonly known as the FRA law.
The debate about the law was a real breakthrough for the Swedish blogosphere (which to a large extent celebrated Lindberg as a hero for voting against her own party), but in her guest post Camilla Lindberg says this does not mean that bloggers can always rely on being taken more seriously from now on.
The blogosphere won the FRA debate because it was right. It was an issue that was pretty much dead everywhere else. It touched a nerve, it made people react. And – although not each individual blogger could get all the technical facts of a very complex issue right – it was possible to discuss it on a fundamental level.
Lindberg expresses criticism against the mass-emailing staged by evening paper Expressen, which urged people to copy a text about the FRA law and send it to all the members of the Swedish Riksdag. She thinks this is a form of spam rather than a good way to communicate people’s opinions to decision makers. There blogs are a better option, and Lindberg stresses their role as opinion media.
She writes (again, my translation):
Blogs are first and foremost opinion based media. When competing with tv or papers that have greater resources for investigative journalism, fact checking and the like, they are underdogs, even if they can compensate for this somewhat through networking. But misconceptions and errors can still spread through blogging networks. In such cases you lose credibility.
And she concludes:
The lesson to learn is that the impact of a medium depends on trust. Trust is volatile. You have to nurture it, or you will lose your readers.
(Video clip from the demonstration outside the Riksdag, which to a great extent came to pass because of activism from bloggers)
On too many blogs written by Swedish journalists you see people commenting but the journalist never replies. They use a platform built on conversation as yet another megaphone, ignoring their readers. What journalists turned bloggers need to understand is that providing a space for comments is not enough – if you want to be taken seriously as a blogger you need to get involved with your former audience, not just invite them to chat amongst themselves.
Over the past week, Paul Bradshaw over at Online Journalism Blog has been publishing a series of posts based on a survey he’s conducted with 200 blogging journalists from 30 countries, mentioned ealier here at Citizen Media Watch.
The aim of the study was to find out how the journalists perceive that their work has changed after they became bloggers. The areas of interest are idea generation, information gathering and production, with the addition of the relationship with the (former) audience and post-publication.
Today the final post was published along with the conclusions from the survey. I do recommend reading all the posts about it. The results shows variations in responses depending on what field the journalists cover and in what medium.
For a summary, what the journalists perceived had changed were:
- their understanding of their audience’s wants and needs (through feedback and stats) and an improved relationship with the audience
- their work-process, which included the former audience in the research phase before a story was published, as a “two-way, ongoing process”, sometimes crowdsourcing
- they thought more about multimedia and interactivity, and published more multimedia material
- a wider range of news sources, and with that a deeper understanding of how trust is built online
- a greater need for speed, sometimes beneficial, sometimes resulting in publishing rumours
- they said they are digging deeper than before
- writing looser, more personal and less formal
- they broke news on the blog first, then followed up in their traditional medium
- possibilities of exploring “minor” stories that barely made it into their traditional medium
- more linking to external sources/stories
- stories last longer, as the conversation with the former audience lives on and generates new angles/leads
- an increased tendency to use microblogging and social bookmarking to draw attention to a story
- they appreciate other bloggers more than before
The ability to enter into correspondence with users, to fix errors and post updates were frequently identified as changing journalistic work, turning on its head Lowrey’s sugestion that bloggers “often emphasise immediacy and opinion at the expense of accuracy” (2006) and that journalism would protect itself by focusing on editing; responses suggest that, conversely, journalists are relying on commenters to contribute to the editing process.
Without an interest in the audience, blogging is not a conversation. Without conversation, you’re missing some of the great opportunities that blogging brings.
Are you a journalist who blog? Check out the Online Journalism Blog’s new survey and help Paul Bradshaw get info for a book chapter he’s writing on the subject of journalists blogging.
1. From a lecture to a conversation
2. The rise of the amateur
3. Everyone’s a paperboy/girl now
4. Measurability
5. Hyperlocal, international
6. Multimedia
7. Really Simple Syndication
8. Maps
9. Databases
10. Just a click away
I’d like to add an eleventh change/challenge for journalists. One that is closely connected to no. 1, but I think it deserves it’s own mention.
11. Personal transparency
As a consequence of blogs, wikis and citizen media sites becoming more important sources of information for the general public, I think we’ll see a new awareness of the importance of trust, and knowing who your source of information is. Bloggers are often open about what their views are and who they are affiliated with. If they’re not, you bet someone else will find out and make it public.
I am convinced this openness will be demanded of journalists as well. You might not need to reveal details about your private life, but you will need to give your readers/viewers/listeners an idea och what you represent. This is an important distinction, since for instance journalists working with sensitive information, infiltrating or walraffing will need to remain fairly anonymous when it comes to for instance how they look and sometimes even what their names are in order to do their job well. But they can still build up trust. Swedish blogger Beta Alfa is a good example that you do not need to reveal your real name in order to achieve this. Being open about your affiliations, for instance, and anything else that might influence or be suspected to influence your work, is a good start. Also simple things like providing a list of links to what you’ve written before on a subject.
I call this personal transparency.
Living in Sweden, and especially taking an active part in covering and exploring social and citizen media, I take many things for granted. One is the right to take photos in public areas, another to report about what I see and opinions and thoughts I have on any thinkable subject.
In other parts of the world, however, those simple actions can get you into serious trouble. I recently read an article in AsiaMedia about the situation in Sri Lanka. The country is the world’s third most dangerous place for journalists to operate, with only Iraq and Somalia being more deadly. Seven journalists were killed there in 2007.
Pedestrians who use their cellphones to film bomb attacks or even everyday events get questioned by police, and it’s not only authorities that pose a threat to reporters or anyone with a camera. There’s a trend of citizens not turning to the tools of citizen media to improve their situation, but instead turning against anyone trying to do this, or anyone remotely suspected of it.
Anyone with a still or video camera in public is immediately suspected as a “trouble-maker.” This endangers our right to click and shoot for personal or professional purposes.
Despite this, however, there is a movement of citizen journalism, though it’s a lonely and vulnerable job, especially with a decrease in democracy in recent years. New media activist Sanjana Hattotuwa is interviewed, and says:
- In Sri Lanka, the significant deterioration of democracy in 2006-2007 has resulted in a country where anxiety and fear overwhelm a sense of civic duty to bear witness to so much of what is wrong. No amount of mobile phones and PCs is going to magically erase this deep rooted fear of harm for speaking one’s mind out.
The article writer, Nalaka Gunawardene, brings up an example which clearly shows the poor state of democracy and the hardship for bloggers in Sri Lanka.
A fellow blogger recently wrote a moving piece about a 65-year-old woman who sells fruits and vegetables at her local market in Colombo. The story behind the story was how the blogger had been surrounded and questioned by four men and the police, who demanded to know whether she had “permission from the municipality to photograph.”
Luckily, the vegetable sellers came to her rescue. “They… said they asked me to come with the camera to take some photographs of them,” she wrote.
But she posed the question: “Do we have to have a camera license like a gun license of yesteryear?”
