skip to main |
skip to sidebar
This week the discussion revolves around a case study of what my last two posts have been debating. This comes from a lecture by Shane Richmond called ‘the what, why and how of newspaper communities’. As the Communities Editor for the Telegraph and a regular blogger on the media there surely can be few others better people to talk about this.
Two Telegraph foreign correspondents started blogging in 2005 and now there are around fifty blogs penned by Telegraph journalists. The topics are wide ranging and aim for different niches. Shane Richmond says that the blogs, which work best, are opinionated, for example Damien Thompson’s blog on Catholicism. There is a very obvious niche audience for this blog and it remains popular with readers. However they don’t have to be aimed at such a small community for example the political blog Three Line Whip has a much broader audience with less narrow interests according to Shane Richmond. Yet it is updated regularly and does have a niche audience making it increasingly popular.
Yet it is
My Telegraph which is much more interesting to look at. On the site anyone has the opportunity to blog with a community already provided for him or her. Much has been said about building up traffic to blogs, well with My Telegraph that community is already there. A very recent example is Politics Cymru, a blog on blogger started last week and is promoting itself on Twitter and updating at least once a day.
Therefore, what I find slightly scary is that there is now a group of people blogging about whatever they like (within legal reason), are they doing the journalist’s job? I don’t think so yet although think it is something we need to watch. My Telegraph gives people opportunity to add their personal feeling to the news, this means journalists must ensure that the represent the feelings of the masses. At a recent lecture with Kate Adie she said journalists must ‘mirror’ society – I believe that as long as journalists remember this then the profession isn’t under threat.
The other problem is that of moderation, the laws ruling the media in this country are very strict and online media must also stick to these. Shane Richmond points out that moderators are always at risk however they chose to moderate their sites. Another problem is expense; it is expensive to employ people to moderate user’s content before it is published. The Telegraph combine, reading blogs before posting and more commonly don’t read posts unless they get complaints about them.
Like all other posts, I cannot claim to know where the online revolution will lead us in the media industry (if I did I’d be very rich now I imagine). My Telegraph has an older average of contributors disputing thoughts that only young people are online. Online is definitely here to stay but I doubt anyone knows in what form.
Till next week…
Well we have already looked at networked journalism in the mass media age and how online networks provide contacts to journalists. This time the conversation will focus on how the rise in online networks can help spread news content and get as many people as possible consuming it. The trigger for this entry is a lecture from Antony Mayfield from ICrossing entitled ‘Journalism in the Age of Networks’.
On a personal note I generated ‘traffic’ for this blog simply from a Facebook status update. A friend, Ellie who had no idea that I was blogging and indeed why, found my blog, commented on it thus creating a conversation. She had two ways of taking part in this conversation one being through the blog itself or the other directly to me on Facebook. Whilst this is only minor compared to the vastness of the web and Ellie only heard about my blog as she is a friend it does demonstrate, on a very small scale, how online networks can help to spread news literally.
This year it has been announced that for the first time over 50% of Internet traffic is personal. I am guessing that this is largely due to the popularity of social networking websites such as Facebook, MySpace and Bebo. This must mean that the news media has to be involved in social networking to get their messages across. Many, if not all, have RSS feeds, many have applications on Facebook and profiles on twitter. The problem with this is that these all need selecting by the consumers and users of the Internet so can easily be ignored. Because of this these applications have to be simple to install otherwise people will ignore them.
One of Antony Mayfield’s final points was that media outlets must distribute their content everywhere to get noticed on the web. This is a huge task and I imagine totally impossible to achieve. The way, other than being available on social networks, that media can get noticed on the web is through search engines. I have a feeling that the letters S E O (search engine optimisation) will haunt journalists for the next few decades.
In recent lectures I have learnt that google results show twitter and blog results before standard web pages. Therefore, news can be broken on a blog before a main website in order to generate more traffic from a search engine. Yet, journalists must remember (and I imagine in some cases reform) the way they write for online, as the title of their blog posts must easily be picked up by a search engine. This meaning that their titles must be simple and reflect the headline of the story.
So there are many platforms for news within Internet networks, although I fear that if on every page, visited by the ‘normal’ Internet user, there is a link to a news website or news portal then they might lose interest. People might refuse to enter into conversations if they feel bombarded by them.
…as with all of this who knows?
Yes the art of blogging turned ten at the end of October and this part of my conversation seems the perfect moment to mention it, as this weeks entry is all about blogging. Last weeks lecture was all about the blog and the increase of the use of the web by the teams behind trade magazines. Our lecturer was Adam Tinworth of Reed Business Information (RBI) he is head of blogging at RBI, has had his own personal blog since 2001 (One Man and His Blog) and is key in preparing RBI’s journalists for change. So I guess there cannot be many people better suited to teaching us about blogging.
Although, is there really an art to blogging that is different from any broadcast media? Adam Tinworth gave us two main principles that a blog must conform to and they were -
1. A blog entry must be interesting.
2. All blog entries had to show the idea of a conversation.
Now his first point is surely an essential idea behind anything that is in the media, I would imagine that no one would consume any type of media if they were not interested. Yet, it is the idea of a conversation that is not always possible in all forms of media all of the time. Radio phone ins, newspapers’ comments pages and letters to editors are all ways of triggering conversation with the media BUT not using the internet. Although I am not naïve enough to think that the Internet hasn’t helped in the conversation with the media and introduced other forms of conversation (such as BBC Have Your Say). I am guessing that one of the most popular blogs at the moment is Robert Peston’s. He is famous for using his blog to break news, which is one of Adam Tinworth’s plus points about a blog. This is where a blog then helps boost traffic for the media outlet. Robert Peston does not really have the space to go into in-depth analysis in his blog but can link to other BBC pages and also to news bulletins.
One of Adam Tinworth’s other main points was that to be successful and popular a blog must find a niche, be enthusiastic and have a vast range of idea within its subject area. He used one of RBI’s most popular blogs as an example if this. Flightblogger gets breaking news from inside the aviation industry. This blog fulfils the three ideas mentioned by Adam Tinworth and proves very popular event thought the niche it’s in is considerably smaller than Robert Peston’s.
Well that’s my blog about blogging, some things don’t change, Shakespeare wrote plays within/about plays (for example A Midsummer Nights Dream) and now I have written a blog about a blog! So happy birthday blogs, the advantages of blogs at the moment are clearly obvious although will they die out? Does it matter the word blog isn't in my spell check? Will they still be around in another ten years? Will I still be blogging then? What (if anything) will replace them? No one knows the answers to these questions and how things will turn out, to use an old fashioned cliché, only time will tell…
After what has been a rocky week for broadcasting I was less than keen to listen to Matthew Yeomans’ (of Custom Communication) lecture last week when he started off by mentioning that journalism’s traditional models are “falling apart at the seams”. He mentioned that the American based Christian Science Monitor had stopped publishing in a daily print form and would only be producing a website and a weekly magazine, seemingly due to a lack of demand. Matthew Yeomans also quoted a columnist in the New York Times from the 29th of October 2008 suggesting that for journalism “clearly the sky is falling. The question is how many people will be left to cover it”. However, after this he did signal some hope to a room full of potential journalists, and this hope (yes you have probably guessed by now) is in evolving with the Internet.
He could not say where journalism would end up yet said that the traditional rules were changing. This idea is nothing new and appears in many of my previous posts, although Matthew Yeomans did provide a useful three-point summary of the three points that are at play;
1 - Everyone has the Power to Publish thus creating a Global Conversation.
2 - Anyone has the Power to Participate and share their opinions.
3 - All consumers have the Power to Choose the method of their news consumption.
It has certainly been clear in the past few weeks how immediate and influential the Internet and the advances it has created can be. There are two well-known examples for this. My first one is the interview on This Morning with Kerry Katona (broadcast live on the 22nd of October 2008). Kerry Katona’s health was called into question during the interview and was the subject of many media outlets in the following few days. I watched the interview live before walking into university just 20 minutes later; in that time my friends, already at university, had heard about and seen the interview. No one at university had watched the television program; they only had the Internet and saw information appearing on various websites within seconds of the interview. My other example is the message left by Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand on Andrew Sachs answer-machine. The incident gained a lot of media attention last week and was listened to by many more people than usual as they could access the recording via the BBC website.
Although it is impossible to discern many people would have known about the above examples had there been no Internet it is clear that they would not have been able to access the information and word would not have been able to spread so quickly. I do not however feel that the ages of traditional methods of journalism are dead. Whilst numbers of people buying newspapers may be falling I believe they still will have an influence. I feel traditional media must use the Internet to remain in existence though.
