Gary Andrews

During my journalism training days, we once joked what journalism would have looked like had the internet not been invented. I facetiously commented that some reporters would have to find a method other than using Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V.

Joking as I may have been, with staff numbers down and pressure to produce rolling content on the up, there’s a lot more churnalism and reliance on syndicated agency content. Much as journalists would like to be out and about, exposing wrongdoing and reporting original content, modern demands make this kind of hard.

As such, there’s a lot of copy and pasting from other sources. If one paper, radio or other media source carries a story, others will take the main line and reproduce this, namechecking the original.

Actually, this isn’t a new thing. It’s sort of vital for the news industry to exist. One outlet will look slow if they’re not leading with the line obtained by their rivals, so often they’ll take the main points and rewrite into their own news story. It’s pretty common and generally accepted practice in the news industry. Whether it’s a practice you feel is proper journalism is another question (although it’s quite a skill to be able to rewrite agency copy well).

Where it isn’t accepted is in the blogging community, which is much more open to quoting, attributing and, most importantly, linking back to the original source. As somebody who’s been blogging in various guises since in 2003, this is nearly second nature to me and something I’ve carried into online journalism without any problem.

But when two very different worlds collide, there will be problems, and this was the case earlier this week. Gav Stone, who writes the specialist Les Rosbifs blog, focusing on the careers on English footballers abroad, pulled off something off a coup by securing an interview with former England, FC Twente and Wolsburg manager Steve McClaren about his time managing in Europe.

Let’s just emphasise this. A fully independent blogger who edits his site as a hobby and no typical mainstream access secured an interview with a reasonably recent England manager and who is still active in the game today. Unless it’s part of a PR event, these type of interviews are unusual on independent blogs and rarer still to be in such depth.

Understandably Gav was, to put it mildly, a bit miffed when a chunk of his interview turned up a few days later as a lifted and rewritten news story (“Macca: Twenty joy my career high) on Sky Sports, Team Talk and other sites that Sky had syndicated the story to.

After emailing and receiving no response, Gav called them out on Twitter. The response from the journalists on these sites was a mixture of defensive, patronising, a tad arrogant and one that showed very little understanding of the web.

Chief among Gavin’s complaints was the lack of a link back to the source of the story. Team Talk et al had credited the interview to Les Rosbifs (although with no explanation as to who or what the site was) and hadn’t linked back, and hadn’t asked permission to use the quotes in the first place. What started off as a slightly miffed request from a blogger has escalated into a stage where lawyers are being consulted.

To my mind, there are four different aspects to this: the moral and ethical and legal implications of Sky’s actions, the issue of proper crediting, the issue of hyperlinking, and the general attitude of a mainstream media publication towards an independent blog.

Morals, ethics, and legality

Legally, Sky were probably just about on the right side of the law (although my own copyright knowledge is somewhat hazy). The fair dealing exception, whereby content is used for comment or rewritten is very common in journalism, and largely expected among media organisations – getting a paper or news bulletin out would be nigh-on impossible without it.

It’s also worth pointing out Sky didn’t, technically, steal the interview. The articles – now removed (in itself curious given the robust defence of their methods offered by Team Talk members on Twitter) – did lift several lengthy quotes from Les Rosbifs. However, the news angle was changed, there are some (admittedly, not many) original words in the pieces and much of the context and depth provided by the original interview wouldn’t be apparent without reading the full original piece.

So, setting legal concerns to one side (and it would be interesting to see if any lawyers think Sky overstepped the mark and the piece was problematic legally, the moral and ethical concerns still come into play. And largely politeness too.

Had Sky approached Gavin for permission, it’s likely that the response and conversation would have been much more amicable. But that in itself causes problems. As Tom Phillips commented on my Google+ (subscribers only, sorry), permission is an odd thing. Many bloggers quote from the mainstream press liberally. Should they contact the journalist or publication every time they want to write their own article based around somebody else’s work. The idea seems somewhat absurd when turned around, even if it is good manners.

But it still somehow feels wrong, ethically. This isn’t a writer working in the cut and thrust of journalism, this is a blogger who has done this work in his spare time, and now sees somebody else profiting from the work he has done. The attitude of some of the journalists working for Sky was far from classy and left something to be desired. Gav wasn’t playing with the big boys, who was pursuing an interest.

One final point here. Gavin secured the interview with McClaren on the basis that he was not mainstream press. When McClaren’s quotes (perhaps to be expected, and perhaps a small touch of naivety on both McClaren and Gavin’s parts) found their way onto Sky, that hurts the relationship built up by Gavin.

Relationships between the media and many football figures are touchy at best. By trampling over Les Rosbifs’ interview, Sky have strained that relationship between McClaren, the press and bloggers just that little bit further.

In the credits

From Sky / Team Talk’s point of view, they’d credited Les Rosbifs. From their perspective, that was it. The credit, though, isn’t entirely clear who or what Les Rosbifs is. The credit simply reads “In an interview with Les Rosbifs…”.

Be honest here. Unless you were a football blogger or happened to know Gav personally, would you know what Les Rosbifs was? For all was made clear, it could have just as easily been a French cooking blog that happened to have interviewed McClaren about nutrition, and wider football issues.

Gav himself has said there’s been no real spike in traffic and other articles that have appeared on other sites haven’t even carried Les Rosbifs’ name. That credit may work fine for, say, The Mirror, but again, feels disingenuous in the context of Gavin’s site. Should you wish to find the whole interview, there’s no indication how to go about this (and remember, many readers are lazy).

But where the issue really becomes important is that of hyperlinking.

The links effect

The hyperlinking issue is where we can see clear effects, differences between Gav and Sky, and, on the part of Team Talk, a complete misunderstanding of how the internet works.

Mark Holmes, one of Team Talk’s journalists, first told Gav on Twitter that Team Talk knew how to credit properly, but then went onto express amazement as to why anybody would ever request a link to the source material in a post. This is somewhat staggering from an online journalist.

I’ve written in the past how hyperlinks are one of the most valuable pieces of currency on the internet. From the most basic point of view, it’s just good practice to link back to your sources – it provides an easy way for readers to find the original in one easy click, shows how much has been taken and is an open and transparent way of acknowledging original material.

Adding a link is quick, easy (and wouldn’t, unlike Mark Holmes claimed, add 10% more work to Team Talk’s day) and good practice, and helps deliver more traffic to the original site. Personally, I’d like to see all agency syndication include links to sources in their copy – and it’s up to the site to decide if they want to link or not.

But this is just a small part of the benefits of linking back to the source. Had a site like Sky or Team Talk, with a high trust ranking in Google, linked back to the original article, then this in itself would provide an excellent virtual form of payment to Gav and help boost the SEO for his site and especially the McClaren article.

By not linking to the source, this becomes more of an issue. Some time after publication, the Sky article ranked higher than the Les Rosbifs article in Google. Not only had Sky lifted a chunk of the interview, it was now benefitting in search terms. Even entering LEs Rosbifs into search saw Gav’s site rank lower.

Mark Chalcraft at 2nd Yellow has written about the implications of duplicated content for bloggers in terms of SEO and Google ranking. What, to a big site, may seem like an insignificant link actually has big implications helping deliver hits to smaller, independent blogs (I’m personally of the view that all sites should link to source material, unless there’s a compelling reason not to).

This is why, to me, the issue of crediting online shouldn’t just be a throwaway line about the origin. It should be clear, transparent and include links wherever possible. Not only does this benefit the reader, it benefits and rewards original material with minimum of effort.

But you’re just a blogger…

And this all comes back to the original attitude of several Sky journalists, who seemed amazed that the blogger they’d taken the content was rather persistent in asking for a link.

To say Gavin wasn’t being professional and should be more polite when asking for a link back to content they’d taken from his site in the first place is not just patronising, it’s incredibly arrogant. Without the legwork Gavin put in, there would be no story at all.

We’re frequently told the boundaries between blogging and journalism have broken down. This is true to an extent. When everybody from the BBC to ITV to the Guardian to the Telegraph blogs, you can safely say it’s a valid medium.

The boundaries between bloggers and journalists, though, have still, if this incident is anything to go by, most definitely not broken down. Gavin’s interview is a well researched and written piece of journalism, although he’s not a journalist. The rewrite is only tenuously journalism insofar as it’s published on a journalistic platform. Yet it is the latter who are seen as the gatekeeper still.

Team Talk and Sky will always get the bigger hits, but that’s not what this is about. Les Rosbifs is niche, and makes a virtue of this. The work is just as valid this way (and, if anything, more impressive given it is written outside of a day job). There is a hierarchy in terms of page views, yes, but not so much in status.

Should bloggers expect to be compensated when their work is lifted? Debatable. I’d say proper, fully-linked crediting isn’t a bad payment.

Should bloggers be asked to have their quotes used elsewhere? Again, possibly. These aren’t, strictly speaking, journalistic publications. There is no established culture of lifting and rewriting content, thankfully. There is more of a culture of openness, transparency and respect for source material and this is something journalists would be well advised to be mindful of when using independent blogs as a source.

Was it stealing? In my view, no. I have nothing against the practice per se, even if I don’t necessarily like how lifting is a commonplace tactic in the industry (copy and paste is, after all, hardly journalism). It’s a necessary evil, sadly.

But even though it isn’t stealing, in the legal sense of the word, it is, overall, poor form, and reflects badly on Sky and Team Talk, both for the initial perceived transgression and subsequent attitude towards the complaint. What could have been sorted quickly and easily escalated into something much more unpleasant. Social media crises have been created for brands out of less.

As with so much on the internet, it comes down to a judgement call. It is absurd to request permission from every single source, every single time (although there is absolutely no reason for not crediting and linking to them). But if the site is a small, independent blog like Les Rosbifs rather than one of your main competitors, it hurts nobody to use a bit of politeness.

Who knows, if they’d asked nicely, they may have even got an original piece of content from Gavin, based on the interview, which would have been a win-win situation for everybody (ok, maybe not necessarily with this particular content. But it’s an entirely plausible scenario).

written by Gary \\ tags: blogging and journalism, journalism ethics, Les Rosbifs, Sky, Sky Sports, Steve McClaren, Team Talk

At Exeter St David’s train station last week, I picked up something I’ll never be able to buy again – a daily copy of the local paper, the Express and Echo. It was just under a month ago that the somewhat sad news that my hometown’s paper would become a weekly rather than daily publication.

I say sad for two reasons. Firstly because it’s never fun to see local journalism cut back, even if the economic climate is heading that way.

But it’s also sad because this has been coming for a while, largely due to continually bad decisions from the Echo’s owners, Northcliffe.

I’m not saying that the daily Echo’s demise was preventable – it may well have been inevitable no matter what – but the paper could have been given much more of a fighting chance.

Even when I moved away from Devon, I made a point of picking up the Echo whenever I returned to visit friends and family. The past few times have been painful to read.

The last few Echos I’ve purchased have been a shell of the brash, confident publication that was happy to cause trouble for local politicians and had an instinctive connection with the communities it served.

What was in front of me was like seeing a once-proud athlete towards the end of his life. The only surprise about the Echo going weekly is it didn’t happen sooner.

Let me declare my feelings. I am an unashamed fan of local media done well. That is, after all, my background.

Yes, I’m well aware of the foibles and failures of local newspapers. They can be unnecessarily hyperbolic and trivial, often in the same news story. They can sometimes become parodies of themselves.

They could, as I found out from speaking to various focuses of the subjects of their stories, occasionally play somewhat fast and loose. At my old office, we had an file of some of their worst hits, including one story several experienced journalists were amazed they didn’t get pulled up on contempt charges.

But despite all this, much of the Echo is recalled with fondness. They were terrier-like in holding local politicians to account. When a big story broke, their coverage was never less than impressive. And they knew how to serve the community and readership.

Yes, some stories may have seemed mundane but locals from outlying areas really appreciated the coverage given to these smaller stories.

Given the Echo’s patch took in the regional capital city, seaside towns, rural market towns and sleepy villages, their ability to strike a balance with these readers was impressive.

When I was much younger and dreamt of going into journalism, at that point I always considered the Echo the paper I wanted to work for. And 20 years ago, it had a well-liked reputation with its readership.

Even as recently as six years ago, the Echo was a pretty impressive regional paper. It had a confidence and swagger about it. Yes, that also brought out some of the worst aspects, as detailed above, but it also brought out the best.

Working in a competitor (of sorts) newsroom at the same time, I would frequently roll my eyes, but would frequently be impressed with their scoops and determination to reflect and be a heart of the community they served.

Those qualities have seriously declined in recent years. Journalists were cut back. Fewer reporters meant a restricted ability to embed with the community. It became easier to spot the press releases in the paper.

It made sense, financially, to re-use the same reports from the sister Devon-wide Western Morning News. But this paper served a different audience, and it became harder to find distinctive news in the Echo as a result.

And then there’s the web, something regional media companies never seemed to get or be prepared to get.

For a period, the Echo went big into video, posting clips of any and every story, plus doing a news in 60 seconds, featuring cutaways to the headline in the paper.

It wasn’t particularly well done or thought through. A couple of people I knew there said they were given very little training. But at least they tried something, although it didn’t seem hard to see how this could have been much more focused, and relevant to their audience. And it asked a lot of print journalists to learn a new skill and do it well, with a minimum of training.

But at least it was better than how the web is currently being treated. The pages are, astonishingly, updated from a central location in a different county on the other side of the country.

News is often not uploaded until 10am. Sports reports, one of the key selling points of a local paper, are often uploaded up to two days after the game. By this stage, anybody interested will have found the news elsewhere.

There is little incentive for readers to discover or return to their website on a daily, even weekly basis. It is as if this part of the paper has been deliberately left to die.

Perhaps a weekly Echo will see the paper regain some of its swagger. Perhaps I’m optimistic but I think a daily could work in Exeter. Just not a daily in the current form. And they may need to be more innovative elsewhere.

But, going offline, it’s the local communities who will be hit the most by this. The Office of National Statistics shows that 23% of the UK population have no internet at home. In Devon and Somerset, that accounts for around 750,000 households. In the most rural areas of these counties, the number is, I would wager, even higher.

For the outlying villages in Devon, this means they are even further cut off from the news. One of the strengths of the Echo was balancing the ultra local with the big stories, and knowing each of these communities. What’s more, these were read and appreciated. Will that continue? It’s not as if many rural, elderly households can log online for their information.

Local businesses may also feel the pinch, initially. These small-to-medium size businesses probably don’t have the PR budget to go all out on a campaign, can’t go beyond a certain level of advertising, and often rely on local papers to print their good news stories. Will there be space for these?

I say initially, though, because for businesses there’s generally an opportunity to be innovative and less reliant on the local press.

But the local events, such as fundraisers or community days, may seriously struggle to compete for attention. Granted, these aren’t exactly the hardest-hitting news stories, but they do serve the community.

Sports fans and clubs wanting local reporting will also be badly served. That’s not to say there’s not alternatives online, but local sport is a staple of a local paper, and a key reason for purchase.

How many of those will discontinue reading it because the results are a week late? And how will the clubs reach out to attract new fans or members? The Echo says the coverage will be even better. Many will be skeptical.

Time will tell what effect a weekly Echo will have on Exeter, and East and Mid Devon. It may revitalise the paper. Or it may be a large step towards the eventual collapse. In the immediate term, the main losers are the readers.

written by Gary \\ tags: Exeter, Express and Echo, local news, local newspapers

Nearly ten years ago, the way I first knew about the 9/11 attacks was when I received a text from a friend telling me to turn on the TV. Today, I logged onto Facebook when I woke up, after a push notification to my phone, and saw my news feed filled up with statuses bout the death of Osama bin Laden. Same device, a very different way of receiving the news.

Not that seeing breaking news spread virally on social networks is in any way new these days, but the news of bin Laden’s death shows, beyond doubt, of how integrated Twitter and other networks have become for breaking news and are the best places to head to for updates, if you can work out how to cut through the chatter.

What was interesting about this story, from a news and social media perspective, was the timing and nature of the news. Many big breaking news stories tend to be naturally chaotic as journalists scramble for facts and people Tweet without any knowledge of what’s going on – the on-the-scene Tweets tend to be fairly jumbled and it takes a bit of time to sift and verify, even if it gives you a general picture of what’s going on.

In this case, the news broke late into the evening in America and during the night in Britain, while the actual event happened in Pakistan. Without being awake during this time, I’d hazard this probably made it slightly easier to track, given there would be less people online (slightly).

Secondly, this was an unusual breaking news story insofar as although there were updates on social media from the scene and then from elsewhere as the news leaked out, it was still more of a controlled story than many big breaking news stories.

In this case, journalists were on a surer footing from the off (and probably had several articles prepared), which probably explains why the majority of articles and Tweets I’ve seen shared this morning have been from news organisations such as the Guardian and New York Times, rather than blogs or Twitter users – although Mashable, as ever, features very highly in articles I’ve seen shared.

But despite this, Twitter and other social media has shown itself to be the place to track the news. Sohaib Athar, aka @ReallyVirtual on Twitter, inadvertently liveblogged the US operation against bin Laden, while @Pauliemyers’ Twitpic shows the earliest mentions of the operation via Google Realtime (an increasingly useful search engine).

Elsewhere, the New York Times has detailed how the news and confirmation of bin Laden’s death starting leaking on Twitter, primarily from Donald Rumsfeld’s chief of staff, Keith Urbahn. Interestingly, and showing the importance of a trusted source, although Urbahn wasn’t the first to Tweet the news, his credibility as a source meant that he was credited with breaking the news pr, at the very least, the primary Twitter source being cited.

As the news spread, other aspects of social media came forward. On Facebook, as well as news feeds filling up with the news, the Osama bin Laden is dead group, originally set up as more of a conspiracy theory group, became a focal point for collating updates. Google Maps updated to pinpoint the area where bin Laden was killed, while users of Storify, rapidly becoming an incredibly useful curation tool, started pulling together the strands of the story.

And, as a breaking news story, this has moved quicker than usual from social media to traditional media. The story is no longer breaking, and the analysis from experts begins, as tends to be the case. But, as ever, social media is definitely not something you can view as separate from the story. As the journalists Tweet and collate the information, it’s become a complete part of the fabric of newsgathering and news viewing.

[h/t to @SueLlewellyn, who has Tweeted many of these links I've listed above.]

written by Gary \\ tags: al-Qaeda, al-Qaida, bin Laden, breaking news, Google Realtime, Osama bin Laden, Pakistan, Storify, Twitter, USA

For the last week, like many people I suspect, I’ve been semi-permanently watching the ongoing situation in Japan, from the early hours of the earthquake and tsunami, through to the current nuclear and humanitarian crisis. It’s hard not to get through an edition of the news without a lump in the throat many evenings at the moment.

From a grimly professional point of view, though, I found it fascinating that during the earthquake, the immediate response of some people was to grab a video camera and start filming, before posting the footage to YouTube or other social media sites.

There was a time that most sensible people would run away, while the journalists would be the only ones running towards the disaster with cameras rolling. Yet now recording seems second nature. Perhaps you could go as far as to say citizen journalism as a phrase should be discarded if that’s one of the first instincts. All of us on social media are becoming citizen journalists.

What hasn’t changed, fundamentally, though, is the way the narrative is told. Social media makes it clearer in the initial phase, through the use of YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, but once the often shocking initial footage clears and the basic facts are in place, then the storytellers, the journalists, thread the whole thing together (for better or for worse). As Richard Sambrook Tweeted, the need for foreign correspondents is still there.

This isn’t to say the sources aren’t different or more immediate, especially in the case of Twitter. And social media is also becoming, naturally, the quickest way to reach friends, families and loved ones.

Do users of social media, as Mashable asks, have a responsibility with what they post during times of disaster and crisis? Perhaps this isn’t the first thing on their mind in a situation like Japan or Libya. Although it’s also very easy for rumours and misinformation to spread like wildfire via Twitter. Again, this is where fact checkers are never a bad thing to have.

One final tangental thought. A friend remarked that there appear to be more disasters and the like occurring around the world today. I wonder if it’s more than these worldwide disasters were always there, always happened, but we didn’t hear about them, or at least didn’t hear about them so quickly.

Twenty-four hour global news had already made the world small. Social media has made it even smaller, so we’re now more aware of bad things happening quicker, to put it crudely. And, oddly, you can almost see the same news values an editor might pick, being played out on a more global scale. Bad things attract more attention, generally because they’re so unusual.

Doesn’t mean they’re not heartbreaking though. Thousands of lives lost are still thousands of lives lost, whether we hear about them within five hours, fives days, or five weeks of the event.

written by Gary \\ tags: breaking news, Japan, newsgathering, social media

I’ve never wished to be particularly down on one paper, so apologies to the paper of my hometown, the Express and Echo, but because I probably visit their website more than most, they probably get a lot of criticism. And a couple of days ago they provided another example of why local newspapers are in all sorts of trouble.

On Tuesday, Exeter City met Plymouth Argyle in their first competitive meeting in eight years. Not the most significant fixture in a busy evening of football, but in local sport terms this was as big as it’s likely to get.

Exeter ended up defeating Argyle 2-1 with a dramatic late winner and, like any other exiled Grecian, I spent much of the immediate aftermath reading forums, Tweeting, on Facebook and even on the phone.

I’ve long since given up on expecting any kind of immediate update on the Echo’s website, so didn’t bother checking it after the game, but the next morning I checked. Nothing. The lead football story was how the club’s back-up goalkeeper was hoping to establish himself with a run in the team.

At 11am the next day, a full 13 and a half hours after the game had been played, the match report finally made it to the site. I only found out through an unofficial Exeter City Twitter feed that aggregates City content from all over the web that the report was up.

By that time, the story had moved on massively to the violence in the aftermath of the game, the reaction to the violence from both clubs, and the team looking ahead to the weekend’s game. Anybody with access to the internet could have already read match reports and reaction on the official site, the Western Morning News, the BBC, Facebook conversations and on the unofficial forum, Exeweb. There was no need to read a now out-of-date report at 11am.

The only people who, realistically, would have any cause to buy the paper would be people who didn’t have access to the internet, hadn’t been at the game, hadn’t listened to it on the radio, and hadn’t phoned a friend at the game for a match report. I can’t imagine this number being particularly high.

Sport is a fast-moving commodity that can deliver very good hits if the timing of publication and the SEO is any good. A report over twelve hours after the game had been played – when this was easily a huge sporting story – on a major media outlet fails in just about every sense.

Increasingly, sports fans, with their own community, don’t need their local papers for sport, if the effort put in doesn’t result in a compelling offering. The huge saturation in sports coverage coupled with advances in social media, and the good old-fashioned forums, mean local papers are increasingly becoming irrelevant on an area they should have sown up, given their exclusive access.

At the moment, it feels like the Echo’s site has regressed (and I’d imagine they’ve had budget cuts) and is an afterthought. They will bring in no new readers through the web, as internet savvy news junkies will already have the news from elsewhere. The readership of their print paper is declining. This does not bode well for their future.

(And I don’t say this with any pleasure at all. I would be genuinely sad if the area lost its paper. Even an out of date paper is better than no paper.)

written by Gary \\ tags: Exeter City, Express and Echo, local media, local newspapers

Who would have thought bath screens could start a good discussion on social media? On a National Union of Journalists mailing list, of the reasonably high-up members shared with us an email he’d rather mischievously sent to a DIY store asking for their review rates after they invited him to write a customer review of his purchases.

Although done in semi-seriousness, I don’t necessarily agree that it’s an area where the NUJ should be getting involved in. For me, although the quality of reviews can be variable to say the least, they are still a useful service and the company should be congratulated for trying to engage in a form of a two way conversation and even create a community, of sorts.

From a customer point of view, these visible levels of feedback are useful. Pre-web, any feedback would go deep into the company’s filing system. Even the small step of allowing reviews and comments opens this up to a new level of conversation (although the really good ones don’t just leave it at comments, they host and curate and foster a community as well).

I’m probably doing my manly image little good here by confessing DIY is something I know precious little about. To me, customer reviews from the similarly uninitiated are highly useful. A while ago a friend purchased a cabinet of sorts – several of the reviews on the site said it was a nice item but very fiddly to put together. She ignored the reviews and several hours after the delivery was cursing ignoring the reviews, and talking about adding a review herself.

This is, in my mind, hugely different from a journalistic review. I’d probably look at customer reviews first and, if still unsure, then search out a more professional view. Although whether there’s a publication that has a specific section on bath screens, I have no idea. Does that level of depth exist? I suspect the SEO for the professional publication would be much worse, and harder to find than on-site reviews.

To go further, there’s a strong argument for saying if there are paid reviews, they should be kept very separate from customer reviews on the site. At the very least they should be flagged as such. An unflagged paid review nestling among a group of unpaid customer reviews raises all sorts of questions, none of them good.

This isn’t to say companies shouldn’t include paid reviews on the site. It’s quite useful to have a neutral assessment of the product, especially for more subjective things, such as music. Whether the company wants a neutral, even critical, review of a product is another matter.

User-generated content hasn’t killed journalism, and neither will customer reviews either (you might as well argue that the BBC’s Have Your Say boards constitute opinion columns and should be paid as such). And if a company takes it on itself to create and curate a community of, say, DIY lovers that’s well-taken for the initiative (providing there is a genuine commitment to curating and keeping the community well-managed).

There’s undoubtedly an issue with profitable websites that will happily commission reviews for free when the cash is there to pay the journalist. And you can argue where the line should be drawn. I also appreciate the NUJ needs to protect the interests of its members, but I’m not convinced replacing customer reviews with professional paid-for reviews on every subject would be a particularly good way to go about it.

Others may argue this is just another way of letting amateurs into do reviews for free. I disagree. Although this skirts on area that touches on journalism, communities and the general sociability features of Web 2.0, there feels a world of difference – for the reason outlined above – between getting amateurs to fill in for journalists and getting customers to give feedback and nurture a community that can contribute positively.

The one area I’d definitely agree with the NUJ member on is the original email should have a proper contact (his reply just bounced back). I’d also be curious to see what the response would be, although I suspect we’d differ on agreement of the any reply. There are plenty of good battles for the NUJ to pick to protect the future of journalism. I don’t think this should be one of them, even if was done in semi-seriousness.

UPDATE: Comment from Sian below. I showed her the email, just to get things straight in my own head. I think she makes a reasonable point.

“The thing that bugs me about this, is that it doesn’t appear to be an NUJ stance, yet the guy who sent the email (the NUJ vice president no less) has decided that he’s going to use the weighting of his position to make trouble. “

written by Gary \\ tags: communities, feedback, journalism, NUJ, reviews

I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve read an article proclaiming the death of blogging, for reasons too numerous to mention. But while the independent blogging arena is constantly in a state of flux as it defines itself (mixing Heraclitus and Sartre, if you will), these last couple of weeks have shown how vital and how vibrant blogging can be when applied by the mainstream media.

Over at the Guardian, Steve Busfield’s three days of live blogging the unfolding Liverpool court drama was as good an appraisal and ongoing update of a topsy-turvy ongoing story as you’ll find anywhere, while today’s best coverage and analysis of the government spending cuts has been on assorted live blogs across the mainstream media. And earlier in the year, the G20 protests were well covered by live blogs.

In many respects, this is no different from Nosemonkey’s live blog on the London 7/7 bombings from five years ago, but, as the internet moves in circles, a little, live blogs have come back round into fashion and some. And with and even bigger wealth of sources to gather information from, they’ve become even more comprehensive in the information they provide.

This isn’t dismissing other mediums, both online and off, but none are able to tie all ends together quite like a well-written and curated live blog.

Twitter is still the best place for breaking news and developing stories that are unplanned, but when the story is expected, even if the outcome is not, then a liveblog often trumps Twitter (while drawing heavily from information on it), simply because journalistic resources have already been allocated in that direction.

Live chats, using Cover It Live and similar tools, are a fun and interesting alternative, but, having curated many myself, if the chat is successful then much of the time is spent managing the room rather than searching for extra information. It’s also quite reactive and doesn’t leave much space for analysis.

Broadcast media is still excellent in places. TV is both a fantastic medium for breaking news – after all, nothing quite hammers home a story like seeing it live – but can often be let own by the need to constantly be showing something on screen, hence the hours of filling by reporters at a scene where nothing much is happening (and is one of the reasons I tend to prefer radio at times like these).

But a liveblog can bring in all of the above. It can embed video and audio, it can tap into Tweets, it can easily flag up other relevant blogs and analysis on the subject, and the very best ones use the comments to both flag up points that the writer hasn’t already made, and steer the conversation. They also allow time for reflection and analysis during lulls.

There’s nothing new or revolutionary about live blogs but, as with so many mediums, some times all it takes is a slight improvement on what you’ve already got, rather than trying to reinvent the wheel. And the fact the mainstream media live blogs attract so many hits and comments suggests they’re far from the dying industry some may suggest (although this doesn’t mean it’s an industry that’s overly secure in its future).

If anybody asks about the future of journalism, it’s hard not to get excited about what you can do with a live blog. The medium may have been around for ages but it doesn’t mean the technique is any less fresh.

written by Gary \\ tags: live blogs, livebogging, Liverpool, Liverpool ownership, spending cuts review