Several journalists said they wonder if their news organizations are still too dependent on their old business models to create innovative journalism. Chris Peck, editor of The Commercial Appeal in Memphis, Tenn., responded that if they feel that way, they should strike out on their own.
In a time when layoffs are plentyful – atleast in the States, but the economic crisis might mean we’ll have our share here in Sweden too – maybe this is the way to go for some of the people that find themselves outside of traditional media. The big media companies here in Sweden seem to be preparing for a model with fewer employees and more temporary hired workers, if Aftonbladet/Minimedia’s new temp agency is anything to go by. We’ve seen independent journalists starting blogs that has become successful enough to relaunch their careers, such as Niklas Svensson’s (et al) Politikerbloggen, now part of TV4. And of course blogging is also an entry point into journalism for people without academic training but with a passion for their subject and the talent of writing interesting stuff.
One of my great sources of inspiration about citizen media and the future of journalism, Dan Gillmor, is now running the Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship, another sign that independent journalistic innovators are needed in the future media landscape.
I’m certainly hoping recently laid off journalists can find the enthusiasm and inspiration to take this step. We need more journalists involved in the innovation online.
Well, back to Angelotti and the Journalism That Matters conference. She points to a set of interviews made by Jackie Hai, a student at the University of Massachusetts. She’s asked a number of the participants what they think is the role of the journalist in this new network of information and community of readers. It’s well worth checking out.
Now everyone can take part of the online journalistic training and resources the BBC has available to its journalists. The BBC blog dot life announces a virtual college of journalism:
“One of the most important things that we need to think about and do is teach journalism to the next generation and to the new leaders within journalism,” said the BBC’s Kevin Marsh, at the DNA 2009 conferenceT in Brussels.
Every aspect of online training that is currently available to 7,500 BBC journalists will be open to the public.
I’ve read a number of posts lately about the education of the public into citizen journalists and educated readers. What do you think, is this the right way to go?
Citizen journalism photo agency Scoopt has shut down. Getty Images, which purchased the site two years back, are letting it go.
In an interview in the British Journal of Photography, PJP, Getty spokesperson Alison Crombie explains that they want to focus on their core editorial business.
- People are now more visually educated, there is more awareness that they can interact directly with the media. Every time something significant happens, you will see the BBC or Sky ask for people’s photos and videos, she says.
The need for dedicated citizen journalism agencies is declining as citizens become more knowledgeable on how to reach out and get their stuff to mainstream media – and get the earnings from it. The rise of social media has to a large extent meant that they have played out their part.
Even Scoopt’s founder Kyle MacRae now think the concept is doomed.
- A smarter model is sucking in hot images from wherever they happen to be posted and shared, whether that’s Flickr or TwitPic or anywhere else, he says to BJP.
There is a truly interesting trend going on in the US, supported by the Knight Foundation. Local media gets the money and support. An important movement in days of economical depression.
”While the Knight Foundation’s endowment has been hurt by the current economic climate, the Foundation is still committed to granting a total of $24 million to local media projects over the next five years.
As the newspaper industry still continues on its downward spiral, with more and more local papers facing bankruptcy, these citizen media projects will be able to fill the need for better local news in quite a few communities around the country. In Connecticut, for example, a new local news site will be staffed with a mix of professional and citizen journalists, after the town had lost both its newspaper and local radio station in the last decade.”
CMW has been writing about Swedish hyperlocal blogging. Maybe this is the way to go? A good mix of citizen contributors and professional journalists. The local content is best found local and it is worth the money.
At Knight Foundation, we firmly believe that you cannot effectively manage the affairs of a community in a democracy without the free flow of information.
That’s why we believe that information is a core community need, as critical as any to a healthy community,” said Alberto Ibargüen, Knight Foundation’s president and CEO.
This is a conversation with Sandra Jakob about online journalism, transparency, the future way of publishing on the web and the need to inspire colleagues to explore and to use the internet.
Sandra Jakob works as an online journalist at hd.se. Helsingborgs Dagblad is a daily newspaper situated in the south of Sweden, in Helsingborg.
CMW: What are you thoughts about the editorial work at HD in the future. Do you think you will have to change the way you work and think differently about the way you are publishing your content?
Sandra thinks that they have to start to think about how to publish the news, based on the type of content, instead of the editorial staff.
– The process of integrating the different channels into each other will be more important. I think that it will somehow be the ultimate test to see which newspaper that will make it out of this big crisis that we are in, that everybody is so afraid of.
– If we are starting to think about how we are going to, all together, work towards a goal of reaching out with our information and news. Then we are going to be successful, Sandra says.
CMW: Why are journalists avoiding to embrace the internet and use it the way it can be used? Is it about fear, laziness or convenience?
Sandra does not think it is laziness and it is not the lack of journalistic confidence. She thinks it is about fear. Not knowing how to use the technical tools and how to communicate on the web.
– You just have to somehow go over the threshold and try it once for yourself and see that you can’t ruin everything. We have backup systems, she says.
Sandra thinks that the biggest challenge of reaching out to a journalist who is not used to working with the internet, is to show them that it is not dangerous. It is not going to make them look stupid. That it is going to help them and that is going to change the way they will go about their work in the future.
– People that are very humble and say that: ”I don’t know this but I’m willing to learn,” that’s an amazing start. If I just get that, I am very happy, she says.
When Sandra teaches her colleagues at hd.se how to use the blog tool, they sit down and walk it through step by step. After trying it out for themselves for a while, they do think it is so much fun and easy. She believes that you should not be afraid of the blogs just because the word blog is misused by a lot of people, it is an information source like everything else.
Sandra Jakob and Joakim Jardenberg had this conversation (in Swedish) on her first day at work.
[Roughly translated]: The conversation, which contained nine parts of laughter and one part of seriousness (before the editing) was about why journalists should blog, why user generated content is a good thing and a little about where Rubbet is heading. [Published at mindpark.se 2008 03 06]
Joakim asked Sandra if she could come up with a more suitable word for the concept user generated content. She promised to think about it.
CMW repeated that question and asked her if she had managed to find a better word for the interchange of content and information:
Sandra has thought about it but she thinks it is hard to find a new word, because it is user generated content. Even though she does not like the word user.
- They are people that we work with, because they send us their pictures and their movies. They call us and give us information, she says.
Sandra believes that user generated content is the best terminology at the moment.
In the Mindpark sofa, Sandra also talked about the need of linking to the blog, as the original source of the news or the conversation.
CMW asked her if she still thinks it is the way to work. Does hd.se link to bloggers and external sites?
– Yes, I still think it is is the only way to go, Sandra says.
Sandra think it is important to pick up subjects that people are talking about and that it is important to give credit to the person that wrote about it on her/his blog. She thinks that if they start a conversation about the subject, it will only benefit the newspaper in the future. Sandra hopes that people will see that the newspaper do respect their work and what they are doing and that they do want to be in contact with them.
Sandra has not yet any example of a local blogger that has been creating any news for hd.se, but she does hope that it will happen soon. But they have been writing about bloggers and the internet.
– Then we are always make sure that we do link back to the person that we are writing about, she says.
CMW: The web is about conversations and expressing personal thoughts. Do you think that journalists should be more open with their personal opinions?
Sandra has an example from hd.se sports blog Sportbloggen. In the beginning they were only linking to funny YouTube clips.
– It did generate a lot of ha ha-comments, but it is nothing that will draw attention in the end, Sandra says.
She advised them to have a personal opinion. If they can have that in a column in the newspaper they can have that on a blog too.
– But, you have to think about it. What am I comfortable with saying? Can I stand for this?, Sandra says.
Sandra believes that you have to be comfortable with what you are saying on the blog. If your are not, maybe you should not do it. They want their journalists to blog, but everybody might not be comfortable doing it.
- If you are open with where you stand and what you think, the audience is going to respect you more, she says.
CMW: How are journalists going to handle transparency? Is there a good transparency level for a journalist?
– There is a bad transparency level, let’s start with that, it is so much easier, Sandra says.
She thinks that a bad transparency is when you tell everybody who gave you that tip. All of their sources are protected by the Swedish law. But a good level of transparency would be to be more open with the process of working as a journalist. It could be as a blog where you write about what kind of seminars and conferences you go to and tell more about how you find information about the subject you are writing about.
– I would love to see somebody who writes about the process and all the frustration there is to be a journalist. It is not always that fun even though we love it. Because there are people hanging up on you, people not liking you. Maybe you get the answers that you would like but it still doesn’t happened. Or you don’t get the result you would like to have, Sandra says.
She believes that bad transparency is when you tell people exactly who told you what, that is gossip. Good transparency is being open with the process, how you think, how you work, how you relate to your readers – both negatively and positively. And It is important to be honest.
– Because if you’re not honest, in the end it is coming back to bite you, Sandra says.
CMW: Do you still think that the internet is something good and useful for a journalist?
As a curious journalist Sandra does think that internet is an amazing way of possibilities and she loves the conversation that is going on out there, even though you have to be critical as usual against information and disinformation.
Sandra talks about the way the Swedish blogs handled the FRA affair. She thinks that it is a good example of a subject raised by bloggers and that ended up as a discussion in old media.
– I can only see the internet as a very positive thing, she says.
CMW: What do you think the newspaper will look like within five years. Do you think that they are still going to exist in print?
Sandra does still believe in the printed newspaper but not the way it looks like today. But she thinks it should be more of a magazine and not be distributed seven days a week. Maybe three days a week, or just over the weekend. A magazine that is going to be customized. More feature, more background and more thoughts.
– I still believe in print in some other way than we have today. The feeling of using print paper and have it in your hand, is something that we can not replace with a PDA or a mobile phone, she says.
CMW: Where do you see yourself with in five years?
Sandra hopes she will be able to dedicate herself full time working with inspiring colleagues to use the internet in a useful way. Integrating and developing newsrooms for the internet. She hopes to be working, not with in the news rush, but with people that works with news and that are interested in new ways to come out with their information and keep track on what is happening on the internet.
– I love developing stuff for newsrooms and news organizations. I hope I will be able to work with something like that, she says.
Sandra Jakob ends our conversation with a request. Sandra would like to have a conversation about online journalism if you are interested, you are welcome to contact her at sandra.jakob@hd.se.
And of course and as always, you are welcome to post your thoughts about this subject as a comment.
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).
Who can we trust in an age when anyone can be a journalist? How do we know? As citizen journalism has taken quite a bit of beef lately, especially after the Steve Jobs supposed heart attack debacle, Dan Gillmor’s new book project couldn’t come at a better time.
He is writing a book to educate not the citizen journalists, but the readers/viewers/users of news, he revealed at the Blogboat event in Belgium. He thinks readers should not just accept what’s written as the truth. They need to do research.
- That’s exactly what the people who sold their stocks after hearing that Steve Jobs had a heart attack, didn’t do. It was their stupidity to immediately believe that false news. Which makes them responsible as well, and not only the citizen journalist who wrote the article, he said, according to the blog Theicecreamdebate.
He also listed these five principles for news consumers:
scepticism
judgement
research
independence
recognize persuasion techniques
In a recent interview at DigitalJournal, Dan Gillmor said:
- We’ve all been consuming news in different ways since the Net came along. We are good at deciding what we trust and what we can’t trust. Everyone needs to learn to be skeptical of absolutely everything. That includes the local or national paper or TV broadcast.
- At same time, people need to go outside what they normally read and look for things that challenge their worldviews. They need to learn media techniques, including how the media is used to persuade the public.
Update: I just remembered that Dan Gillmor actually mentioned his new book project when he spoke to a bunch of people at Aftonbladet in early 2007. Here’s a sound clip. Pardon the bad quality.
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.
If you’re a Swede and interested in what’s happening on the web and in new media, I’m sure you can’t have missed the podcast What’s Next. With a background in radio journalism, hosts Tomas Wennström and Kristin Heinonen are doing a great job keeping us updated about news in this field. They are also very creative in other ways. For instance check out this presentation of their suggestion as to how Swedish paper Sydsvenska Dagbladet could improve their website.
During SIME, the What’s Next duo did several recordings, and Citizen Media Watch filmed this clip from a session last Wednesday. Apart from Tomas and Kristin, the panel consists of Björn Falkevik, Anton Johansson and Fredrik Wass.
For those of you who don’t understand Swedish, you can see this as an example of how you can make a great podcast production with very simple means.
Citizen Media Watch met with blogging veteran, super-entrepreneur and CEO of Creative Commons Joi Ito during the SIME conference in Stockholm. He told us about how he (possibly) made the New York Times change their contract for freelance material, and he sent a message to anyone wanting to make it as a semi-pro or pro journalist or photographer.
Mainstream media is struggling with how to use photos with Creative Commons licensing. The reason is they’re not used to attribution models, but rather to pay the photographer and get the exclusive rights for the photo, says Joi Ito.
But they are starting to learn.
- They’re realising that atleast for certain situations and certain people it’s impossible to get a photograph in time. They’re realising it’s a resource. They’re starting to learn the rules, says Joi Ito, who saw a lot of abuse of the license in the early days.
He reveals that it took him three years of refusing to sign the New York Times’s standard contract after having written an article for them before they gave in – and actually changed it for everyone. At first they simply wanted the exclusive rights, period. Now the contract says they get the exclusives for one month, then you can re-use it in any way you want.
- But they changed. It took me three years of saying no no no. You just have to keep working. Don’t sign bad licenses, advices Joi Ito.
This is part of a longer interview also addressing the need for new business models, why hyperlocal journalism is failing and the two ways for photographers to make money. We’ve made the full-length uncut interview available on our blip.tv account. It is licensed under a creative commons license.
A big thanks to Joakim Jardenberg who pinpointed one of the questions for Mr Ito. And to Björn Falkevik for the filming/camera crash-course.
