More on media training
I was asked by Laura Oliver to do a Q&A for journalism.co.uk as part of their "Meet the media trainers" series. However, as I recently moved to Kigali, and I can't realistically train for them from here, the Q&A got shelved. Alors, here is the Q&A, but I am still available for training worldwide - will be in the UK and Austria in November, possibly Nigeria, Liberia, Vietnam and Jordan soon after,
How has online changed the nature of 'breaking news' in your opinion?
Increasingly, news breaks online before it arrives on TV, in a newspaper or on the radio. Facts, rumour and gossip spread rapidly across hundreds of different sites mostly through social networks like Twitter and Facebook.
The problem at the moment is these sites are quite daunting for both journalists and news junkies to navigate. For the most part, these networks tend to self correct rumour quite quickly, but for anyone new to the space something like Twitter must just look like a maelstrom of tittle-tattle that's nigh on impossible to make sense of, let alone verify. However tools like Twitter, or what comes after them, are here to stay and journalists need to learn how these places work and how to utilize their journalistic skills in the online environment.
You can almost guarantee the first question I am asked whenever I discuss Twitter in training is, "But, how do you know it's a real person? How do you it's true?" It's bizarre, so many journalists seem to leave their brains behind as soon as they look at a website. Very few see this as a challenge to find out how you might start the process of verifying information online.
Are their simple changes a journalist can make to their work to better equip themselves for tracking breaking news online?
The first task for any journalist new to sourcing information online is to get involved in the culture of online networks. It's an unavoidable first step as there's really no other way to understand social media tools unless you have used a few of them and understand how they work.
The other key task is to learn how to use an RSS newsreader and subscribe to the RSS feeds of keywords and key phrases across a wide range of sites as soon as a story breaks or even before it breaks.
I remember while I was delivering a Track breaking news online course last year a bomb went off in Bangalore. Using the skills the trainees learned during the day, they were able to find pictures, video, tweets and the email addresses and mobile phone numbers of potential sources on the ground within 20 minutes.
Twitter is the hip kid on the block, but that shouldn't detract from it's usefulness. To paraphrase Alan Rusbridger, if you find the right people to follow it's like a personalized newswire. Although it helps if you learn how to filter it, search it and share information effectively on it.
How do you personally keep up-to-date with the latest tools for tracking breaking news online?
I don't actively go out of my way to find stuff a lot of the time. I tend to pick things up on Twitter. I don't follow a lot of people on my personal account, but most of them are pretty clued in to journalism and new tools and are generous when it comes to sharing links and retweeting interesting tidbits they find.
I use the social bookmarking tool del.icio.us a lot. I subscribe to the RSS feeds of a few good bookmarkers and sometimes their networks and I occasionally subscribe to highly targetted tag feeds in del.icio.us which can be an incredible resource if you learn how to filter it effectively.
Lastly, I use Yahoo Pipes a great deal especially when I need to follow a very specific, often under reported, story. Pipes takes the donkey work out of grouping, filtering and sorting huge amounts of information. The only downside, as far as breaking news is concerned, is that Pipes delivers information quite a bit slower than a straight RSS feed.
I tell all my trainees the key tools they have to really get their heads around are RSS, del.icio.us and Twitter. I also tell them that the course I teach them this month will not be the same course I teach next month. New, useful tools appear all the time and I adapt the course every month.
A key part of an online journalist's job is to know what's new, to try things out and to assess the usefulness. It's also useful to experiment with ways in which you can bundle up a bunch of tools to get a job done for you, like publishing a newswire across more than one site - update: something I'm playing with doing at kigaliwire.com (not quite live yet). More on all of that thinking in here.
Lastly, you have to go where the conversation is. The "conversation" is happening on Twitter at the moment, but that might not be the case in 6 months time. Keeping it with new tools for online communication is a very important aspect on doing online journalism, IMO. The people who make all this stuff work well were all on Twitter 3 years ago or more and not just after Stephen Fry mentioned it on TV.
Media training tips for trainers - part 3
Not so much a training tip as a useful way of "jotting notes down"
I often see what look like potentially interesting links posted to Twitter on my phone when I'm on the move. However, I often don't have the time/bandwidth/inclination to click the link when I notice it. So, I use the favourite function on Twitter to favourite the tweet and subscribe to these favourites as an RSS feed.
The link is far more likely to grab my attention sitting in an RSS reader than it is sitting on a favourites page on Twitter that I never visit."Uninterupted High Speed Connectivity"
The US$133 per month Rwandatel ADSL wires that connect us from Kigali to the rest of the world. Looks like a pretty tenuous connection. And it is.
Media training tips for trainers - part 2
There was a time I'd subscribe to 200+ blogs, but not any more. Apart from a few friends, mostly old blogs I've always read, I simply don't subscribe to blogs anymore. It's been this way for about two years. Boil it all down and blogs were always about finding interesting and useful nuggets of information. These days it's far more efficient to pick up information in places other than blogs. The following are two methods I have used to keep up to date with news on the future of journalism and online journalism training:
- Set up a delicious account.
- Now, you need to find the accounts of the really Obsessive-compulsive journalism bloggers/tweeters/researchers. How do you do this? Some OCD journalism bloggers, like Paul Bradshaw for example, make it obvious on their blogs that they use delicious - see right hand column on his blog. Go to his delicious account, find his network, find some bookmarkers you like, add them to your own delicious network, then search their networks, add more users to your network, rinse and repeat for other bookmarkers. This way it's very quick to build a free research team of like-minded bookmarkers to work for with you.
- Finally, subscribe to the resulting network RSS feed. For me that's at the left hand side of the bottom of this page http://delicious.com/network/noodlepie
It's quicker and easier to read nuggets of "research" in an RSS reader than to lumber through 30+ blog posts or more on the subject. In some ways Twitter is replacing this as many of these same folks post great links direct to Twitter. Or, like me until earlier this week, they publish through several networks simultaneously. However, a delicious network RSS feed is a very efficient way of distilling the information you need into a single place - your RSS reader.
Increasingly, I have found I don't have time to follow news on the future of journalism. At least not in the same depth as I used to do using the method above. Therefore, to tweak this research method yet further I distill all the above a little more,
- Create an account in Yahoo Pipes and learn how to set a basic pipe up.
- Find the bookmarkers within your network who consistently provide good links that target your specific interests. Copy those RSS feeds.
- Send them through a Yahoo Pipe. Make sure to filter for rubbish and duplicates if necessary - using the unique, filter and sort Yahoo Pipe operators.
- Once you're done, subscribe to the resulting RSS feed.
That's what I ended up doing with nine of the journalism bookmarkers I like best with the crude Online Journalism News Wire pipe. In some cases, like bookmark crazed Martin Stabe, I have used the RSS feed of a single tag from his delicious account. Others I take the whole feed.
It takes a little time to set things up this way, especially if you are unfamiliar with the tools. However, once it works to your liking you should find a fine trickle of information you need arriving in your RSS reader every day as opposed to a flood of information you don't really need.
For topics you need to keep a very close and extremely comprehensive eye on this method won't work. We'll take a look at how to do that in a later media training tip.
Read more in Part 1 in this Media trainer training tips series.
Now that's what I call a band
The Jim Jones Review at Garden Nef Party, Angouleme, France, originally uploaded by noodlepie.
I'd never heard of The Jim Jones Revue before yesterday. They're a British rock 'n' roll band with very definite roots in 50's and 60's rock n roll, a smattering of psychedelia and the thinnest trace of late 70's Suicide. In short, they're the sort of band I would have liked to have formed when I was a teenager had I been a) a bit more twisted b) able to play an instrument c) able to play an instrument very, very quickly and d) a bit more twisted. They're without doubt the best live band I've seen in 15 years. I'm not sure the (studio) video below does the live experience justice, but the song Rock 'n' Roll Psychosis was electric at the Garden Nef Party in Angoulême in France this week. I find it very hard to get excited by bands these days - maybe because I listen to so little new music - but The Jim Jones Revue were like hearing Cigarettes and alcohol, Seasick Steve, Apollo, Daniel Johnston or New Ancient Strings for the first time. I will be following, buying and listening from here on in.
Media training tips for trainers - part 1
For every course I teach in online journalism, social media and news tracking I create a highly targetted custom newswire. This a continuously updated website of topical news items and advice I think will be of interest to the people in the organisation I am training. It's a resource I continue to update long after my training session is over. Here's how I do it,
- use del.icio.us to bookmark news items
- set up a specific tag for the organisation you are training
- set up a tumblr for the client
- add the RSS feed of the tag from del.icio.us to the tumblr
- give the client the web address of the tumblr
Here's one example I created for Médecins Sans Frontières recently
- here's one of my del.icio.us accounts
- the specific tag for this particular session with Médecins Sans Frontières is MSF09
- the tumblr is at MSFnewstools
Very useful and easy to create and update, so long as you are in the habit of using del.icio.us and you remember to add the custom tag whenever you come across a suitable news item. I recommend pukka to bookmark in del.icio.us, especially if you run several del.icio.us accounts like me.
You could of course just give the client the del.icio.us tag address i.e. http://delicious.com/noodlepie/msf09 or send the RSS feed into Twitter or another site, which I have done for some clients. However, I find tumblr's are easier on the eye, have some great free templates, you can add as much or as little of your own contact information as you like and you can create a friendlier url i.e. http://msfnewstools.tumblr.com/
I'd be interested to hear from other trainers - do you work in a similar way? do you think I'm giving too much away for free? Are there better ways of doing this with other tools?
Photo: Very Long Cats, originally uploaded by Dunechaser.
Willing to pay for good information
Last week's Guardian Media Talk podcast found host Matt Wells raking over the pay vs. free coals with Jeff Jarvis. There's something of a backlash going on against the 'free' model for newspapers online at the moment, but how many newspapers or news outlets are currently making decent cash from the online subscription model? Not ads, but subscriptions.
Does the paid subscription model only work for niche online publications like some of those below? Or can more general news outlets make it work?
I'll add to this list as and when I find any new additions. For the record, for online news I've only ever paid for Salon.com (back in the day) and AtlasF1.com (also back in the day). I'm now working with the Frontline Broadsheet launched today... (issue 1 pictured above) which is resolutely print only - here's the subscription pdf) The only print subs I hold are; Frontline Broadsheet, Private Eye and Guardian Weekly.
One point to note, a May, 2009 survey found that readers "could be willing to pay almost as much for some high-quality online newspapers as they do for print versions, particularly in specialist news areas"
January 2, 2008 from paidcontent.org: “a new report from Bear Stearns analyst Spencer Wang. WSJ.com revenue is currently pegged at $78 million annually, based on an estimated 989,000 subscribers paying $79/year”
November 5, 2008 from paidcontent.org: “WSJ.com is making more than $200 million from advertising and subscriptions, News Corp Chairman and CEO Rupert Murdoch told analysts during the company’s earnings call. He said the site is making “probably $100 million in subscriptions and certainly over $100 million in advertising.” link
FT.com’s paid content strategy appears to still be paying off as owner Pearson (NYSE: PSO) announces “good growth” in content, subscription and digital revenues at FT Group, despite worsening advertising sales. In a Q109 trading update ahead of its AGM today, London-listed Pearson says that advertising at FT Group accounted for just 16 percent of its revenues and three percent of Pearson’s overall revenue, suggesting that paywall fees, B2B data subscriptions and events are proving enough to drive growth on their own. link
3. Malaysiakini
The site charges $40 a year for the English news, contributing $600,000. Ads brought in $200,000 last year, and an additional $200,000 came from grants. As a result, the site has been breaking even since 2004.
Subscription is at the heart of the business model, said Chandran. It started charging in 2002, even though most people said they didn’t want to pay and only 1% of readers subscribed. Today only 5% pay a subscription.
“People are more willing to pay for independent medium as it will help bring about political change,” said Chandran. link
4. Salon.com - not really making any cash at all...
Salon Premium revenue is recognized ratably over the period that services are provided. This source of revenue has been decreasing since Salon's quarter ended December 31, 2004 when paid subscriptions peaked at approximately 89,100 and decreased to approximately 28,500 as of September 30, 2008. Salon expects this downward trend to continue, as it is placing greater emphasis on its advertising sales to generate revenue. link
Economist.com took a pass on the free-content phenomenon first time around - now, just as flares and yo-yos came back in to fashion, the publisher sees pay walls regaining popularity in an advertising downturn.
The news mag’s site already charges for stories over a year old and, publisher Paul Rossi told our Future Of Business Media conference, that could be just the right model for a looming recession: “The growth in online advertising is slowing. Is this the return to paid content online, because advertising becomes less a driver for the business? It will be be interesting to see if paid content comes back online because the model is changing." link
Frontline: A Broadsheet - issue 1 cover, originally uploaded by noodlepie.
44 tools for online journalists
Don't drive like a twat, originally uploaded by noodlepie.
I have just spent a week with the AlJazeera.net news team in the Qatari capital Doha talking about a variety of online tools, how they work and why they might be useful for online journalists. We looked at a number of examples of some of them being used in the wild by journalists around the world. Below is a list of tools I either taught, demonstrated or just mentioned in passing during this week in Doha,
Blogs
Blog search
Bookmarks
- tweetdeck
- seesmic desktop
- thwirl
- tweetgrid
- twellow
- wefollow
- twitterfall
- bit.ly
- mobile twitter applications
- twitpic
- watwet
- artwitter
- splitweet
- twitterfeed
- twitter translate
RSS
Photographs
Video
Audio
Social networks
Organising the digital desktop
It's not that different a list to Alfred Hermida's from 2008, but no Mac only stuff in here - as I had no Mac users to train - and I've thrown a few Arabic tools into the mix. If you can think of any tools I'm missing do please make suggestions in the comments. For me, the key tools are Twitter, Publish2, del.icio.us and advanced use of RSS.