Markmedia

Timeline: (the threat to) media freedom around the world

Societies, communities, journalists, activists, all of us in fact, face the problem of attacks on media freedom.
The excellent journalism resource Journalism.co.uk has a continuously updated time line of media freedom abuses, using the free timeline service Dipity.

These timelines are easy to do, can be automatically updated through RSS or manually and can be an open resource allowing your community to make updates. And yes, its free.

aggregate collate curate factuate: A future for news?

I am popping up a quick post thats too long for a tweet but too short for a "real" post. See it as a post in development :-)

I have been following two events and the way they have been covered - The Guardian coverage of Iran and the party leader debate at the Swedish parliament. 

The party leader debate was followed live by a group of columnists and pundits [English translation] who gave their take on it. The blurb promised to fact check in real time. What we got was just a number of comments from "experts" posted live as single postings with no links to any background and very little interaction. A laudable effort in many ways but really, just more of the same in a better package.

The Guardian on the other hand tried something new. They colated as much of the flood of info from all available social media sources and then entered into a conversation with the stream. They fact checked, gave background, did "traditional" journalism. 

This could point to a future role for journalists. A partner in the developing stories. The story presents the flood.  People involved can give the individual perspective, the emotion, the powerful inside insight. The "journalist" has the resources to give the "helicopter view", the context, check the facts and linkk to other individuals. Interactive on so many levels.

Its just the beginning of a new era for journalism. A hopeful one I believe.

Axel Andèn has a good article on this in Swedish

Wael Abbas on the rethoric of the west

Egyptian activist and blogger Wael Abbas on the difference in rhetoric used by the West when speaking to/of the Islamic world as opposed to the rhetoric used to speak to/of the Communist states in Eastern Europe

Untitled from markmedia on Vimeo.

Where do we draw the line? On public, professional and personal personas in social media

We have recently seen a spate of stories that touch on the tricky issue of professional and personal persona's in the developing social media space.
One of the first was Adam Smith, the British reporter covering the 2008 Presidential election for the Birmingham Mail who commented to camera while drunk that he was about to resign and that he had cut and pasted his reporting from the BBC. When he saw the video he said:

"I was off duty, I am on official holiday working at the South Beach Miami Barack Obama campaign where I had just done a 18-hour shift trying to make the world a better place. Please check every BBC News outlet and see if I have cut and pasted anything. I have not, it was a joke and should be taken in the spirit it was said."

We then had the case of  James Andrews, (@keyinfluencer on Twitter ) who tweeted the following as he arrived in Memphis:

Andrews was not just anyone, he was Vice President for Interactive Strategy and Solutions at public relations agency Ketchum, and he was flying in to Memphis to coach FedEx in using social media. Memphis is FedEx home town.
Someone from FedEx was following Andrews on Twitter, and that person shared the post among the top executives at the company’s corporate communications office.
They were not happy.
Very not happy.

Here are some quotes from their letter to James Andrews:

Many of my peers and I feel this is inappropriate. We do not know the total millions of dollars FedEx Corporation pays Ketchum annually for the valuable and important work your company does for us around the globe. We are confident however, it is enough to expect a greater level of respect and awareness from someone in your position as a vice president at a major global player in your industry. A hazard of social networking is people will read what you write.
...
Considering that we just entered the second year of a U.S. recession, and we are experiencing significant business loss due to the global economic downturn, many of my peers and I question the expense of paying Ketchum to produce the video open for today’s event; work that could have been achieved by internal, award-winning professionals with decades of experience in television production.
(the entire letter can be read here or here giving alternate views on the situation)

Andrews responded to the situation on the keyinfluencer blog.

A recent iteration is David George-Cosh, technology reporter at the Canadian Financial Post who verbally coshed a marketing consultant from Toronto. Believing she was giving him a hard time he waded into her about a Tweet she made after talking to him: 

[you can read the whole story on Ian Capstick's mediastyle blog from where the screendump originates]

The outburst resulted in an apology from the paper:

An apology

Posted: February 11, 2009, 6:18 PM by NP Editor

Today, a Financial Post reporter responded unprofessionally to another Twitter user on his personal Twitter account.

While the remarks were made on the reporter's personal Twitter account, the conversation first began when the reporter was acting in his capacity as a reporter for the Financial Post.

We hold — and will continue to hold — all our reporters to a higher standard in how they address anyone, in any forum.

We apologize for the reporter’s conduct.

(Bty see comment #4 to the apology which is a good tip when doing one. My note)

All these examples point to one thing:
The major difficulty we are having in managing the new openness of social media.

As journalists (and this applies equally to other professionals) join social networks, begin to try to interact with the community in a new way, start to take seriously the idea that conversation and nurturing networks is the way forward they find themselves on unfamiliar territory. 
Codes of conduct such as "our job is to chronicle the news, not make it. Participation in events such as public demonstrations, where a staff member could be involved unintentionally in making the news, always will be discouraged (*)" have been held as a gold standard for reporters.
Keep yourself out of the story.
David Randel says in The Universal Journalist":

"What the reader wants to know is what you say and what you discovered, and not how you saw it or found it, and certainly not what you ate, drank or felt while finding it" [pp 201]

This advice seems to militate against the constant flow of personal information from journalists using Twitter. I would argue that giving the (personal) context to a story, allowing the totality of the reporters situation to inform the reporting thus increasing the transparency  is a good start to trust building. This does not mean that the published story should be cluttered with ancillary detail. It does mean that the context can be available (and linked to) for all to see/hear/view.

Digital is disruptive. Disruption is difficult, divisive, demanding and  messy. If we are serious when we talk about conversation as a central pillar for journalism then we have to understand the messy nature of conversation.
This means that (news) organizations need to reevaluate concepts like: trust: loyalty: chain of command:
Trust has meant brand trust. The Title is the thing. Now, trust means the individual reporter, the person I talk with. I trust people more the more I know them. Their faults are as important to building trust as their virtues. This puts a new light on "loyalty". In the Adam Smith and James Andrews incidents above their crime was disloyalty to the brand. But in both cases what the brand sees as disloyalty I see as honesty.
I can forgive an individuals indiscretion but not a brands attempt to cover up (as opposed to openly dealing with) what they see as as disloyalty.
As to chain of command, it will not be possible to have a conversation if every word has to first be run by a vetting agency. Employers need to trust their employees to be able to carry on conversations, and to understand that the conversations are held in public. 

(This post was started in Feb and only finished today -May 7. Sometimes life comes between me and my blog :-) I was shamed/inspired back by this post from Joanna Geary))

Press standards, self-regulation and public trust - is the press accountable enough? (Video)

Free Videos by Ustream.TV

Chaired by Steve Hewlett (The Guardian)
With Roger Alton (Editor of the Independent) Steven Barnett (University of Westminster) Albert Scardino (Journalist and MST board member)

According to a report published by the Media Standards Trust, the current system of press self-regulation is not successfully protecting either the press or the public. The current system is not, the report claims, effective enough, accountable enough, or transparent enough, and does not reflect the transformed media environment.
So should Britain's system of press self-regulation be over-hauled and if it is, will it do anything to restore public faith in the press?
Roger Alton is the editor of The Independent and was previously editor of the Observer from 1998 to 2007.
Steven Barnett is Professor of Communications at the University of Westminster and was responsible for the research in the Media Standarts Trust report A More Accountable Press.
Albert Scardino is an independent journalist and commentator for British and American news organizations. Albert spent 35 years as a journalist, including periods as a reporter and editor for The New York Times and as an executive editor for The Guardian. In 1984, he won a Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing at The Georgia Gazette, a weekly newspaper he founded with his wife, Marjorie. He was a judge for the Orwell Prize 2008.
Steve Hewlett is a writer and broadcast consultant and currently presents The Media Show on Radio 4.

How a journalist can use Twitter

Here is another good example of a journalist using Twitter as a bridge between story and community.
Read from bottom upward.
Sometimes it really is that simple. But it wont happen if conversation is not an integrated part of your thinking and work routine.

A trip to London in February

I'm taking a trip to London between February 20th and February 23rd.

Drop me a DM on twitter at @markmedia if you are around. Love to tweet up :-)

Journalists on the new journalism: Joanna Geary

In the second of my interviews with journalists on using digital tools I talk with Joanna Geary.
Joanna is head of digital product development for the Birmingham Post,the major business daily for the Birmingham region in the UK.
Joanna has been at the forefront in creating and nurturing the bloggers network around the paper and is involved in a number of digital developments aiming to help the paper become an active participant in and a vital tool for the varied professional communities in the area.

Joannas blog - JoannaGeary.com- is the site of some of the most interesting conversations available on the future for journalism in the UK regional press, and is a must-read for anyone interested in developing journalism for the digital age.

Stephen Fry on Twitter

Fry is one of the reasons Twitter has had such a huge spurt of recognition and subscribers in the UK over the past couple of months.

He says he now has 50,000 ‘followers’ who give him advice such as how to deal with a bat on the loose in his house… http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/7845823.stm

Twitter age spread

Hitwise reports that the market share of visits to Twitter surpassed Digg for the first time.
That is, in its self, an interesting statistic.
More interesting to me was the following stat:
 
The age spread is noteworthy, particularly to advertisers and PR-people. The 24-34 year olds have yet to have families, kids, morgages etc and the 55+ (a real growth area) have done it. Both groups with more disposable income than all the rest.

I know, its a small sample and we shouldn't draw too many conclusions, but interesting.