How the BBC developed its UK election coverage online

In: BBC|academics|internet|journalism

22 Jul 2010

Einar Thorsen of Bournemouth University, UK, was one of the final presenters at the IAMCR 2010 in Braga.

He looked at how the relationship between BBC online journalism and ctizenship during the 2005 and 2010 UK General Elections.

In a quick presentation, Thorsen explained how civic engagement as a key of the BBC mandate reflected in its election coverage online.

For the 2010 election, the BBC viewed election news as a product. He described how the 2010 election website was a pan-BBC project, compared to a more fragmented approach in 2005.

One of the aims was to distinguish web coverage from broadcast output as user research had shown that audiences were unaware of original features online.

Another issue was a strategic discussion of how the BBC covered politics online in an attempt to attract more people to politics.

Thorsen showed a BBC live updates page, incorporating reports from BBC journalists, user emails and tweets. But it was based on a manual process, with an individual cutting and pasting bits of HTML content into a static page.

Everything was verified and checked by a second pair of eyes, said Thorsen, usually a person looking over a journalist’s shoulder.

For the 2010 election, the BBC outsourced the moderation of comments, with the BBC monitoring the debate online to select and highlight some comments.

Thorsen highlighted the tensions at the BBC over user contributions.

He found in some BBC journalists that some described UGC and comments as an example of civic engagement online, while other described it as “utter shit” and “a complete waste of time”.

Similarly, the team behind video contributions If I was Prime Minister saw this as the pinnacle of an opportunity for citizen to express their political views. But others were more sceptical.

This was a brief but fascinating insight into Thorsen’s research.

IAMCR 2010 talk on journalism education at UBC

In: academics|education|innovation|internet|journalism

21 Jul 2010

On Wednesday 21 July, I’ll be talking at the IAMCR conference in Braga about our integrated journalism programme at the Graduate School of Journalism, University of British Columbia.

Here are my slides:

Lessons from integrated approach to journalism education

Journalists value writing but not multimedia skills

In: academics|education|innovation|internet|journalism

20 Jul 2010

Henrik Ornebring of University of Oxford gave a quick overview of his six-nation comparative study of the skills of journalists at the IAMCR 2010 in Braga.

This is a three-year project, running from 2007 to 2010 and covering six countries: UK, Germany, Italy, Sweden, Poland and Estonia.

Ornebring conducted a non-representative online survey with 2,200 respondents and a response rate of 4.3%.

He also conducted qualitative research with 62 interviews of journalists.

Among the top skills rated by journalists were writing and working independently. In Italy, Poland and Estonia, networking was also considered a top skill.

As for the lowest skills, all journalists agreed that they did not need management skills.

But the biggest surprise was that multimedia production skills were not valued by journalists.

Journalists tended to see multimedia production as a manual skill rather than something that helps them tell a story.

The challenges journalists face covering innovation

In: academics|innovation|journalism

20 Jul 2010

I am at the IAMCR conference in Braga this week and plan to blog about the latest in journalism research.

In a session on journalism and innovation, David Nordfors of Stanford University raised questions about journalism’s ability to cover innovation and its relationship to society and democracy.

Nordfors framed innovation journalism as a field of journalism in which we study to cover innovation

He argued that innovation was about technology, business and politics, rather than fitting within traditional news beats such as politics and entertainment.

Nordfors argued that journalism plays a key role in connecting the innovation economy and democratic society. In the innovation economy, citizens power lies with money, in a democratic system, it lies with votes.

In his view, innovation is a significant area to cover, pointing out that economic growth now comes from doing new things. He cited OECD figures that 70% of economic growth is connected to innovation.

Nordfors went on to connect innovation and journalism. He described the innovation economy as an attention economy, But attention is a scarce commodity which is usually mediated by attention workers.

Attention workers are journalists, who have a mandate from audience. On the other side PR, marketing, lobbying workers, who have a mandate from sources.

Nordfors outlined how journalism fits in an innovation communication system. Innovation requires communication. Something new needs a new language and narratives in order to be discussed by the public.

Journalism plays key part in this process, he argued, as there is a vital link between innovation itself and language innovation. Nordfors stressed that we need a new shared language to discuss and critically assess innovation and its impact on society.

He ended with a plea for journalism that is horizontal that can tell stories across silos of established beats, rather than fit within established vertical silos of beat journalism.

Five free SEO tools for journalists

In: internet|journalism|new media

8 Jul 2010

SEO tends to have a bad reputation among some journalists. Many tend to see search engine optimisation as the equivalent of writing headlines for robots.

But SEO isn’t about turning out bland headlines for Google. It is about helping readers find what they are looking it. It is about matching readers searching for specific news and information with the content on your site.

Here are five free SEO tools can help journalists make their work more findable on the web.

  • SEOMoz Term Extractor: This tool analyses the content of a page and extracts the terms that appear to be targeted at search engines. It is a useful tool to gain an overall perspective of the keywords in the text.
  • Wordtracker FreeKeywords: A tool to suggest alternative keywords with a weighting to indicate their use.
  • Microsoft Keyword Forecast: A tool from Microsoft adCenter Labs that aims to forecasts the impression count and predicts demographic distributions of keywords.
  • Google Trends:  This Google tool analyses a portion of Google web searches to compute how many searches have been done for the terms you enter.
  • Google Insights for Search: Another Google tool that enables you to compare search volume patterns across specific regions, categories, time frames and properties.
If there are other tools you can recommend, please add them in the comments.

Teaching Twitter in journalism schools

In: Twitter|academics|innovation|journalism|social media

7 Jul 2010

The World Journalism Education Congress is taking place in South Africa with the theme of “Journalism education in an age of radical change.”

Unfortunately I could not attend but I am following the sessions on the conference’s site and through the Twitter hashtag #WJEC2.

One of the areas of discussion is the place of social media in the journalism curriculum, and more specifically Twitter.  One of the j-prof talking about this at the WJEC is Julie Posetti from the University of Canberra.

In this clip, she explains why Twitter should be taught in journalism schools.

How people love but worry about social media

In: internet|social media|trust

29 Jun 2010

The report by Fleishman-Hillard into the Internet’s influence in seven countries reveals a paradox when it comes to social media.

While more users are embracing social media, they are also concerned about sharing too much information.

The 2010 Digital Influence Index Study found that more than half (53%) of the study’s respondents thought they were revealing too much online.

Canadians were the most likely to express concerns about TMI. Yet, Canadians are also the most engaged with social media, mostly through Facebook.

More than two-thirds of consumers in Canada are on Facebook, compared to around half for the other countries in the survey.

There was also another paradox when it came to microblogging services such as Twitter.

The study found that Canadians were the most knowledgeable of microblogs. They were the most likely of the Western countries to have an account, but also the most likely to have an inactive account:

  • 85% have heard of microblogging
  • 18% have a microblog account
  • 33% have yet to microblog
  • 26% microblog less than once a month on average

And Canadians showed the lowest level of trust in companies that microblog, together with Americans and the British.

There is much more in the full report, which is available as a PDF download. Gillian Shaw has a good write-up in The Vancouver Sun.

Pew Internet on how media habits have changed since 2000

In: internet|journalism|media|online

25 Jun 2010

This presentation by Lee Rainie, director of the Pew Internet & American Life Project, highlights how media habits in the US have changed in the past 10 years.

It highlights how internet use has changed from being based around a stationary and slow computer to mobile connections built around storage and services in the cloud.

The presentation was delivered at the Newhouse Monetising Online Business conference

How Media Consumption Has Changed Since 2000

How news of the Canadian earthquake broke on Twitter

In: internet|journalism|social media

23 Jun 2010

News of the 5.5 earthquake that hit the Ontario-Quebec border broke on Twitter. The snapshot from Trendsmap, taken shortly after the quake, highlights the stream of messages.

People were tweeting about what had happened and searching for more information about the scale of the tremor.

Within minutes, there were dozens of reports of a quake from across the eastern seaboard on Twitter, providing an idea of how widely it was felt.

And all this was taking place before the media or the US Geological Survey had any information on what had happened.

The volume of tweets about the earthquake are related to the timing and location of the event.  The quake happened in the middle of the work day on the east coast – 1:41 p.m. Many people would have been in offices, likely at a computer and online at the time.

Additionally the quake was felt in major urban centres, from Montreal to Ottawa, as well as in east coast cities in the US. The Trendsmap of the #earthquake hashtag suggests the largest number of tweets were coming out of Toronto.

Like I suspect many others, I turned to Twitter when the Toronto building I was working in started to sway, searching for an explanation.

The incident highlights once more the journalistic value of a real-time, distributed and collaborative platform such as Twitter.

Word clouds of official G20 messages

In: Web 2.0|innovation|journalism

21 Jun 2010

With the G20 summit almost upon Toronto, here is a word cloud of the message to residents from the federal government and the City of Toronto:

And here is one of the information for demonstrators from the G20 Integrated Security Unit:

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This blog is run by Professor Alfred Hermida, an award-winning online news pioneer, digital media scholar and journalism educator.

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