Markmedia

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.

how journalism works?

In an age where every thing we say and do is recorded and distributed as soon as it happens, it might be wise not to drink and then talk to the camera.

This journalist makes a number of mistakes. He resigns on-line, makes (what he later claims to be joking) references to cut and paste journalism and reveals his future plans.

It is interesting in many ways. As a reminder that publishing is instant, that not all publicity is good publicity and it opens a debate on the way journalists see what they do. All these aspects are worth discussing and disecting. Its the world we now live in.

Mind your own business

There is a very interesting conversation going on at Joanna Gearys blog on the need for journalists to understand the business models they operate in. Here is my reply.

There is a lot to say on this issue and I will get back to a number of points later.
But for now just a quick reply to Jonathan:
I think you are making it a bit too easy on yourself.
The argument that journalists have no power within an organisation is (I believe) a false one. As individuals I agree we have limited influence and firing off some memos to the MD wont have a huge impact (though it sometimes does, and done systematically often does).
However as a collective we have influence. That is what the whole concept of a union is about. It is here I believe we have failed, both as individual journalists and as a collective entity.

The NUJ is an organisation that should represent the needs and aspirations of its members. On a very simple level, we can not make demands for change (which we want our unions to do) if we do not have a reality-based understanding of the situation we find ourselves in.
This encompasses the economic models and structures our industry operates in. But we have (and I generalise here, I know) abdicated the individual responsibility we have in this area.

The ideology of journalism that allows us to, in Joanna’s words,

“leave the understanding and running of media businesses to financiers and advertisers with their incentives and bonuses. Instead (we) are happy to be striving for the praise of peers of a good story written”

re-enforces that trend.

This would perhaps be less frightening if it were not for the fact that our refusal to learn even the basics of the economics of the industry exactly mirrors the way we have refused to understand the basics of the IT issues we face. Here we have abdicated our responsibilities to technicians. This has led to us allowing the technology to create systems that we then have to suit our content to, instead of our journalistic needs dictating the shape of technology.
There is a pattern here.

I am not saying that journalists should all become economists, nor am I saying that journalists should become IT systems specialists. What I am saying is that we need to have a good understanding of the basic forces that shape the future of our industry and our livelihoods.
Our Unions should be providing us with the tools and information to help us. I fear that won’t happen however (though I may be, and hope to be. proved wrong as I believe we need a strong NUJ and hope more of us join) because they themselves do not seem to understand the issues.

Where is the equivalent to the employer-based think tanks that pump out facts and figures from around the world that would help us make sense of the changes from our point of view? This is not a cost issue. In Sweden, where I am based, there is a think tank [www.mindpark.se -worth a look, use Google translate] that is manned by three people and financed by a number of regional newspapers, which has had a huge informational impact on decision making. We need a similar one from the NUJ.

But no matter what central campaigns are driven, no matter what information is gathered, the responsibility is ours as individuals.
Structural change is occurring all around us. The industry is shifting and the economic models are changing.
They may change to our disadvantage. The new order could be one that makes journalism (as we see it today) even less relevant, less exciting, less challenging and even more commodified.

If we refuse to learn and gather the knowledge that would allow us to mount a challenge to the changes, based on a solid economic understanding of the market place and a vision of a relevant and useful journalism, then we deserve what we (don’t) get.

when a tweet makes a difference

Here is an example of how a listening and conversing journalist can allow the public to make a difference. It may seem a small thing but I dont think so. It represents a shift in mindset, power and ownership. If we wish it to. And if we (journalists/news organisations) can let go.

The Birmingham Post ran a story on how voice stress technology is being used to combat alleged benefit fraud:

A computer listens in on a telephone conversation between a claimant and officials and checks for changes in their voice frequency as they are asked questions, to determine whether they are telling the truth or not.

The original headline - Phone lie detector caught 160 Birmingham cheats - was seen as misleading by a reader who tweeted it. This led to a Post journalist (not the story writer) entering in to a conversation with the reader, an interaction which led to a change in headline to one that more accurately reflected the story content - Phone lie detector led to 160 Birmingham benefit cheat investigations -.

As I said, a seemingly small thing, but indicative of a change in how audiences and journalists can work together to produce a higher standard of journalism.

 

The twittered conversation can be seen in the pics below.

Writing creative headlines: Twitter saves the day

Writing headlines is an art.
We all have memorable ones lodged in our journalistic (sub)conscious. My own personal favorite at the moment is from the South African "Daily Sun" :  Evil cows ate my garden.

A lot has been written about how headlines that work on paper will not work on the web. Amy Gahran, Jakob Nielsen, New.Journalism.Review, Paul Bradshaw et al have written on this. The consensus seems to be (and I agree) that as search engines are such an important driver of traffic to sites then headlines need to be formed in such a way that they give important geographic, subject and object information. Readers tend to scan rather than read, look for names of places rather than puns on places and may not be up on local slang. As Harald Evans wrote: "writing good headlines is 50% of the text editors' skills".

This is where some of the problems arise. In the courses i give there is inevitably quite a bit of push back to this. There is a fear that one of the few areas of joyous creativity in a subs daily routine will disappear. The ability to craft a punny headline is a hallmark of a brilliant sub. If headlines have now to be so prosaic that they will appeal to the pragmatic algorithms of the search engine, then wont that mean that the art will wither and die? It is an argument I can understand (though not agree with). But different platforms need different vocabularies.

And here's the thing. Services like Twitter and Jaiku and others are not the web. They are not search engine dependent. They are more emotional and less analytic. Because you chose to follow to a particular entity (person or service) then the context is already given. So witty headlines will work. Not only will they work, they will be appreciated as the short verse poetry they could be.

So subs, sharpen your similes, ramp up your rhetoric, mix your metaphors and get in the game. We need you. We want you.