Picking up from Emily Bell’s Thursday keynote, McChesney agreed there were some great experiments being done in the US, but he said he didn’t believe that was going to be enough.

He insisted there was a need for great, independent, critical journalism. While there was no lack of talent, there was a lack of institutions and resources to support journalism

Talking about the poor prospects for journalism graduates, McChesney said there was nothing on the horizon that things were going to get any better. In fact, in 10 years, we might look back on this as a golden age, he added.

Even when journalism was at its best, American journalism had tremendous flaws and these flaws have got worse, he said. It was not enough to romanticise the past.

Elites and the poor

McChesney went over the development of professional journalism as a way of separating the business side from the journalism.

But he said professional journalists came to rely upon people in power to set up the range of legitimate debate, for example around US foreign policy where alternative voices are not heard.

“Our journalism at times like that tends to be propaganda,” he argued.  He recalled how Walter Lippmann argued we needed professional journalists to protect us from lying elites.

McChesny quoted American founding father James Madison who feared that a powerful country could turn into a militaristic society. The reason we need a free press is to protect democracy and prevent a country from slipping into militarism.

Business journalism came under fire, with McChesney arguing it was doing a terrible job of reporting on the sector. For example, business journalists had missed entirely the great economic scandals and bubbles of the past few years.

It was, said McChesney, as if sports reporters had completely missed the World Cup.

He also pointed out how the growth of inequality in the US was largely unreported in the media. “It is barely a news story.”

McChesney argued how the voices of the poor were not being heard.

He cited statistics showing that 85% of the high earners vote in presidential elections, compared to about 20% of the poorest. This is because politicans do not listen to middle and low income groups, and instead represent high earners, he argued.

It was not journalism’s fault, but it was journalism’s role to challenge this and to bring everyone into public life, said McChesney.

In his view, the main issue with professional journalism is how it has developed into a system that lets people in power set the terms of the debate, report that accurately and call it journalism.

Call for public funding

His second main point was about the need for public money to support. Even if all the journalism start-ups succeeded, they would just be “a piss in the ocean.”

The divide here is whether we see journalism as a public good or as a business. If we see it as a business, it is game over, said McChesney.

In his view, journalism is a public good but the market cannot provide it in sufficient quantities or quality. He argued that advertising gave the impression that journalism could be financially viable. But advertisers are not tied to journalism and will go to where they can maximise their impact.

“Journalism is a public good and a public good needs public funding.”

McChesney ridiculed arguments in the US against public funding of journalism and instead pointed to the experience in other countries, which rate highly on democracy indices.

He also pointed out that the freest press systems are also those who enjoyed the mosty public subsidy.

“I haven’t seen anyone hauled out of their house ‘coz they have public subsidies,” he joked.

McChesny also pointed to studies that indicate that increased subsidies of the press can lead to more adversarial coverage of the government.

He suggested a “Write for America” program, that would pay for young people to go and do journalism in communities for a year.

McChesney pointed out how there were precedents for public money for the media. In its first 100 years, the US had ” colossal” press and postal subsidies. The idea was to encourage as much media as possible.

Public subsidy of the media is a “proven path,” he said.

‘We need journalism now’

For McChesney, the crisis in journalism is part of a crisis in the US that is economic, ecological and democratic.

McChesney labeled the political system in the US as a “dollarcracy,” where money dominates. The corporate crowd is very pleased with a journalism-free environment.

Instead, we’re in the era of the “digital sweatshop” for those labouring for outlets like Yahoo and the Huffinghton Post, he argued.

‘We’re always going to have plenty of news, we’re just not going to have plenty of journalism.”

The news is going to be largely spin and fluff, he said, noting that there were currently four PR people to every one journalist in the US.

Doing nothing is not an option, he insisted. ”We need journalism now and we need to figure out the answers now.”

Kostas Saltzis from the University of Leicester looked at how the news story was changing, given a 24/7 news cycle in an online environment when a story can be constantly updated.

He studied the news sites of several UK newspapers such as the Guardian and the Times, and broadcasters such as Sky and the BBC.

Saltzis found that the first drafts of stories and initial updates were very brief. A quarter of updates took place within half an hour of publication, with the figure rising to 60% of updates for the first two hours.

But it was extremely rare for stories to be updated beyond a single day, suggeting the daily news cycle remained in place.

In fact, half of stories finalised with four hours of publication.

Significant differences emerged between newspapers and broadcasters. For example, BBC journalists would spend 6 jours and 28 minutes updating a story compared to Telegraph journalists who spent 2 hours 18 minutes.

Updates were more frequent and intense in broadcasters while newspapers tended to be slower and less frequent in the updating process.

Talking about how we have viewed the profession, Bell argued that journalism is becoming less defined by the businesses that support it than by the activities it involves.

She made the good point that arguing who is a journalist these days is futile. Instead she paraphrased Warhol saying in the future everyone will be a journalist for 15 minutes.

Looking ahead, she said journalism has many futures - as a business, as a profession, as a process – and we are only at the start.

She recapped how some of the previous arguments about journalism tended to frame the future negatively, such as a future dominated by the “hamster wheel” of live coverage and technologists.

Bell argued we tended to see disruption and technology as a bad thing. But in her view, these factors favour good journalism.

“It feels like journalism has been in defence mode for a long time and is now breaking out of its boundaries,” she said, suggesting journalism can learn from other disciplines.

For her, the future of journalism is about understanding technologies and the platforms that support it.

Talking about her journalism students who use technology in their reporting, Bell argued that how to tell stories best is no longer in the hands of technologists, but in the hands of journalists.

She suggested that one emerging core skill is how to make the best of collaboration between journalists, technologists and beyond.

Another idea she contested is that instant journalism is bad journalism. Instead she said the social, real-time web and proliferation of mobile devices had been one of the galvanising elements in journalism.

“Live journalism isn’t hamster journalism,” she insisted.

The live stream of journalism, the use of free tools and the involvement of people who are not journalists per se, is making journalism better, she argued.

Her most controversial point was about the funding of journalism. In her view, revenues and profits did not equate with good journalism.

Now, she said, the primary focus of those involved in journalism is sustainability.

She quoted the example of the Journal Register company with its focus on experimenting with digital, open approaches to journalism. But, she continued, there is uncertainty about whether the experimentation will work.

She also cited ProPublica as an example of what can be done when we go beyond the way we have traditionally thought of journalism.

“There is no clear answer to what a news organisation will look like in five year’s time,” said Bell. “The future of journalism is there to be defined, we have all the right conditions.”

She concluded by insisting that we have a collective capacity to make this all work, but this can only be done by looking outwards and looking at other disciplines.

The keynote speakers this year are Robert W. McChesney and Emily Bell, formerly of the Guardian and now Director of the Tow Centre for Digital Journalism at the Columbia School of Journalism.

The research to be presented at the conference ranges from studies on Twitter to Wikileaks, from foreign news to the business of news.

The abstracts for the papers are online, but the papers themselves are only available to attendees.

I am fortunate to be presenting two papers.

“Tweets and Truth: Journalism as a Discipline of Collaborative Verification” looks at how Twitter is affecting the journalistic practice of verification.

The second, “Your Friend as Editor: The Shift to the Personalized Social News Stream”, presents a study into how social networks are becoming a significant source of news for Canadians.

I’ll be posting the presentation slides later in the week and plan to blog from the conference.

I was honoured to be on the panel to discuss issues of diversity and the future of the journalism industry. In my remarks, I focused on how journalism is changing and how the way we teach journalism is evolving.

Here is the audio of my brief talk:

The ability of anyone to play an active role in the process of collecting, reporting, analyzing and sharing news and information is seen as one of the big shifts in journalism over the past 10 years.

But a growing body of research suggests that the advent of participatory journalism, or user-generated content (UGC), has done little to change the way the media works.

At the recent Future of Journalism conference at Cardiff University, academics presented a series of studies that further illustrated how the mainstream media is trying to tame the phenomenon.

The research paints a global picture of how journalists are seeking to maintain their position of authority and power, rather than create a more open, transparent and accountable journalistic process that seeks to work with readers.

More >>>

Twittering the News: The emergence of ambient journalism

My paper looks at new para-journalism forms such as micro-blogging as “awareness systems”. For this I have drawn from literature on new communications technologies in computer science to suggest that these broad, asynchronous, lightweight and always-on systems are enabling citizens to maintain a mental model of news and events around them, giving rise to awareness systems that paper describes as ambient journalism.

I focused on Twitter as it has become one of the most popular platforms for micro-blogging – in the course of a year, the number of Twitter accounts jumped from 1.6 million to 32 million.

Twitter has emerged as a platform to help organize and disseminate information during major events like the 2008 California wildfires, the 2008 US presidential elections, the Mumbai massacre and the Iranian election protests of 2009.

And there has been a rapid uptake of Twitter by journalists, provoking somewhat of a Twitter frenzy in some quarters of the media.

Seriously though, Twitter has been quickly adopted in newsrooms as a mechanism to distribute breaking news quickly and concisely or as a tool to solicit story ideas, sources and facts.

In the UK, national newspapers have 131 official Twitter accounts – with just under 1.5m followers. In March Sky News appointed a Twitter correspondent who would be “scouring Twitter for stories and feeding back, giving Sky News a presence in the Twittersphere”. And sites such as MuckRack.com also aggregate journalistsʼ tweets.

At the same time, there is a degree bewilderment, scepticism and even derision towards Twitter from seasoned journalists – who often frame Twitter with established journalism norms and practices.

The prominent New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd, for example, described it as “a toy for bored celebrities and high-school girls.”

Setting aside ridicule, of particular concern to media professionals when considering the role of Twitter in journalism is the veracity and validity of messages.

The unverified nature of the information on Twitter has led journalists to comment that “itʼs like searching for medical advice in an online world of quacks and cures”and “Twitter? I wonʼt touch it. Itʼs all garbage”

Concerns by journalists that many of the messages on Twitter amount to unsubstantiated rumours and wild inaccuracies are raised when there is a major breaking news event, from Iranian protests to Michael Jacksonʼs death – and this is understandable.

Fragmented news experience

However, what I suggest is that the institutionally structured features of micro-blogging are creating new forms of journalism. I suggest that micro-blogging presents a multi-faceted and fragmented news experience. But when journalists look at Twitter, they tend to see isolated fragments of information, taking an interpretive standpoint as to utility of a tweet around a news event or topic.

By making a choice as to what to exclude or include, the professional remain the guardians of what content is published. What I am suggesting is that a different approach is needed to unlock the potential of collective intelligence of Twitter.

My aim is to contribute understanding of Twitter by introducing the concept of ambient journalism. I see new media forms of micro-blogging as  “awareness systems”.  In an awareness system, value is defined less by each individual fragment of information that may be insignificant on its own or of limited validity, but rather by the combined effect of the communication.

Considering Twitter as an awareness system offers us a new way of evaluating it as a source of news and information.

Awareness systems are defined as computer-mediated communication systems “intended to help people construct and maintain awareness of each othersʼ activities, context or status, even when participants are not co-located.”

Awareness systems have largely been discussed in the context of Computer-Supported Cooperative Work – some of the early research looked at the impact of connecting remote co-workers by audio/video links. But the emergence of increasingly affordable and ubiquitous information communication technologies have helped foster a renewed research interest in awareness systems.

One focus of research is awareness systems for use in personal settings, where lightweight, informal communication systems help people maintain awareness of each other. The idea is that these systems are always-on and move from the background to the foreground as and when a user feels the need to communicate.

Scholars suggest that awareness systems represent the next step in the evolution of digital technologies:

As this technology becomes more affordable, with greater quality and diversity, awareness systems offer tremendous potential for innovation, with a wide range of forms and contexts for transforming the space around us

The term awareness can be vague and problematic, as it often used in contradictory ways in the literature.

This paper adopts the definition of awareness proposed by Chalmers as “the ongoing interpretation of representations i.e. of human activity and of artifacts”.

Always-on awareness system

This definition can be applied to social media networks such as Twitter – messages considered as both the representations of human activity and as artifacts. Using this approach, Twitter becomes an ambient media system that displays abstracted information in a space occupied by the user of the service.

Here’s a basic example using Twitter search for the term, H1N1. In this system, a user receives information in the periphery of their awareness. An individual tweet does not require the cognitive attention of, for example, an e-mail message.

When we consider Twitter as an awareness system, the value does not lie in each individual fragment of news and information, but rather in the mental portrait created by a number of messages over a period of time.

This is what I describe as ambient journalism – an awareness system that offers diverse means to collect, communicate, share and display news and information, serving diverse purposes. The system is always-on but also works on different levels of engagement in terms of awareness.

In the literature on ambient media, the discussion focuses on how to improve peopleʼs quality of life by creating the desired atmosphere and functionality through intelligent, personalized, interconnected digital systems and services, with intelligent devices embedded in everyday objects

Take this approach to Twitter: if we consider it as a system of ambient journalism, the next stage is to consider approaches that can identify, contextualise and communicate news and information from a continuous stream of 140-character messages.

Implications for journalism

As an initial exploration into the impact of awareness systems on journalism, I am going to explore some of the implications of Twitter as ambient journalism.

The immediacy and velocity of these micro-bursts of data, as well as potentially the high signal to noise ratio, presents challenges for the established practice of relying on the journalist as the filter for this information.

During the Iranian election protests of June 2009, the volume of tweets mentioning Iran peaked at 221,774 in one hour, from a flow of between 10,000 and 50,000 an hour.

This analysis by an interdisciplinary group of researchers based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, shows the rate of tweets – Relevant tweets gradually increased as the events in Iran and the use of Twitter provoked attention.

The need to reduce, select and filter increases as the volume of information grows, suggesting a need for information systems to aid in the representation, selection and interpretation of shared information.

I suggest one of the future directions for journalism may be to develop approaches and systems that help the public negotiate and regulate this flow of awareness information, facilitating the collection and transmission of news.

The purpose of these systems would be to identify the collective sum of knowledge contain in the micro-fragments in a manner that would bring meaning to the data

There are already some web applications that are moving in this direction. Twitscoop aim to detect trends in real-time and visualise the “buzz” on Twitter with custom graphs that display the activity around words and topics.

Another similar web application is NowPublic.comʼs Scan – here seen in a pilot project with The Vancouver Sun.  Scan seeks to track the microblogosphere to “search the conversations on these sites based on keywords” and “find undiscovered news photos and videos by ordinary people and hidden links to breaking news”. Both of these seek to provide meaning to Twitter.

Journalism as a conversation

There are other applications to journalism when we consider Twitter as an awareness system.

The trend to share links on Twitter provides a mechanism for what has been described as a customized newspaper, “compiled from all the articles being read that morning by your social network”.

In this context, tweets provide a diverse and eclectic mix of news and information, as well as an awareness of what others in your network are reading and what they consider important.

The information transmitted is contents-oriented but it also provides a context for the news-seeking activities of others on the network – I suggest this could be a fertile area for research to that could make “visible the structure of implied communities” around news and journalism.

Moreover, the link-based nature of many tweets, and the trend to re-send the links as a “retweet”, can be analysed as both a form of data sharing and as a system for creating a shared conversation.

I suggest that this conversation could be considered a form of ambient journalism.  This is because retweets are not restricted by physical space, time or a delineated group. Boyd et al studied retweeting and suggest that it creates a distributed conversation that allows others to be aware of the content, without being actively part of it.

In other words, the “stream of messages provided by Twitter allows individuals to be peripherally aware of discussions without being contributors.”  This is significant in the context of engaging with audiences particularly in the context of Gillmor’s notion of journalism as a conversation.

Research is needed to determine how far Twitter, as an awareness system for news, is contributing to the creation or strengthening of social bonds and engagement in the news.

As with most media technologies, there is a degree of hyperbole about the potential of Twitter. Social media services are vulnerable to shifting and ever-changing social and cultural habits of audiences. Or at times, becoming overwhelmed – those on Twitter will be familiar with the Fail Whale.

While I have discussed micro-blogging in the context of Twitter, it is possible that a new service may replace it in the future.

I contend that it is important to focus on the qualities of micro-blogging – real-time, immediate communication, searching, link-sharing and the follower structure – and their impact on the way news and information is communicated. Twitter is, due to the speed and volume of tweets, a “noisy” environment, where messages arrive in the order received by the system.

Conclusion

I have sought to offer an initial exploration of the relationship between awareness systems and shifting journalism norms and practices. In these systems, completeness of awareness is not the goal, as it would be if an individual were actively pursuing an interest in a specific news event by following it in print, broadcast or online.

Instead of overburdening an individual with an endless stream of tweets, ambient journalism can be considered as an always-on, asynchronous awareness system informs but does not overburden you with information, and only makes you aware of them when you need them

One new role for the journalism professional may be designing the tools that can analyse, interpret and contextualise a system of collective intelligence, rather than in the established practice of selection and editing of content through the prism of news values.

It shifts the journalistic discourse on micro-blogging away from a debate based on raw data to contextualised, significant information based on the networked nature of asynchronous, lightweight and always-on communication systems.

Presenting at the Future of Journalism conference in Cardiff, they found that the number of business articles that talked about blogs. By 2006, more than 1,000 articles about blogs from none in 2002. More than 20% cited a blog as a source.

But when journalists were asked if they used blogs, 63% said they didn’t reference them.

Only about 4% said they found information on blogs that they use in their reporting.

However, most journalists recognised that it was important for their work to be discussed in the blogosphere.

The researchers concluded that business journalists don’t see blogs as valid and legitimate sources, quoting one journalist who dismissed blogs as opinion-oriented, rather than factually-oriented.

In contrast, more than 50% used wikis as an online source.

Discussing the results of the study, the researchers wondered if journalists were hesitant to say they used blogs as sources for stories, even if they recognised that blogs were part of the media ecosystem.

Ironically, they added that many Swedish journalist have their own blogs.

In her presentation at the Future of Journalism conference in Cardiff, she outlined what skills and attributes were mentioned in job listings.

They found 715 job postings. In newspapers, a third of them for reporters and just 12% for web writers/multimedia producers.

In postings for reporter positions, the most common skill was previous professional experience and strong writing. Around half cited web and multimedia skills.

On the TV side, the most common job posting was producer, around 20% and under 10% of postings for web writer/multimedia producer.

For broadcast, previous experience and strong writing were both highly desirable attributes. But missing from the top five attributes in broadcast were web/multimedia skills.

Web skills were the highly important for newspapers but not in broadcast, found Wenger.

But there are signs of change. For example, Gannett has developed a set of reporter expectations, which included covering breaking stories for multiple platforms, regardless of the type of job.

Overall, Wenger concluded, traditional skills like strong writing and working to tight deadlines remain important to US news employees.

Marcus Messner presented the paper, co-authored with Asriel Eford.  They looked at almost 200 newspapers and TV stations with Twitter accounts, analysing the number of tweets, the news value and the use of links

The study found that only a third of news outlets offered users the facility to share a link on Twitter. This compared to 100% who offered “email this story and 80% to share on Facebook.

They found no different in the adoption of Twitter between newspapers and TV stations, with both around 90%.

In terms of reach, four outlets such as CNN and the New York Times accounted for more than 10,000 followers each, whereas a fourth had fewer than 500 followers.

Despite 180 news outlets with accounts, only two-thirds tweeted on over the period analysed, with an average of 8.7 tweets per outlet.

Most tweets were news related and only just over 5% were personal. Messner said most of the tweets were pitching the news content of the organisation.  Overwhelming, news outlets provided links to their own material, rather than to external sources.

The study concluded that the news media in the US use Twitter as a promotional tool, with extensive linking to their own news content, with newspapers much more active than TV stations.

Messner said more attention needs to be paid to community building, to go beyond shovelware as happened in the early days of online journalism.