Gary Andrews

Newspapers, as I’ve been banging on for as long as I can remember, really need to start embracing and testing out new social media applications, especially Twitter. They’re not difficult to set up, can provide an immediacy their website can’t always provide, and give a great opportunity to interact with their audience and liveblog events.

However, there’s experimentation and then there’s just completely not getting the right stories to use Twitter for. I would dearly love to know what was going through the head of the reporter or editor on the Rocky Mountain News’ head who decided it was a good idea to Live Tweet the funeral of a 3-year-old boy killed at an ice-cream store. Have a read of the reporter’s feed from the funeral – it feels like a Chris Morris satire of social media, or an update of a football game.

It’s great that journalists are embracing sites like Twitter and seeing their potential. But it probably doesn’t hurt to also engage your brain when thinking about the best place to test them out are. Local events or breaking news are probably a good bet. Dead children are usually best avoided for this kind of thing.

If you want a good guide on testing out sites like Twitter, Qik, and Flip, the BBC’s Rory Cellan-Jones has an excellent piece explaining, quite simply, the sites and how he found using them. Any journalist who’s thinking of trying out the sites should have a read.

written by Gary Andrews \\ tags: fail, journalism, liveblogging, QIk, Rocky Mountain News, social media, Twitter

It’s always difficult to gauge exactly how widely Twitter has extended outside of the tech and social media crowd (and, to a certain extent, the media). On one hand, I have Twitter on in the background every day at work and find it increasingly useful. On the other hand, I went out to dinner the other night with a couple of friends who I did my journalism training with and neither of them had heard of it.

But just when I learn to the other hand and start to wonder if it generally has a wider application, something like this comes along.

Essentially, The Chicago Tribute has an online Twitter presence who interacts with other users and it was to this profile that other Twitters turned when a few of them started asking about some kind of panic at a local plaza they were hearing about.

Not only did the Tribute’s Twitter feed reply, it got back to them about twenty minutes later with the full story, verified by the paper’s journalists, before crediting the breaking story to the Tweeter who first told him (or her) about it.

Thanks to the retweeting of the story by other users, it turned into one of the most widely read stories on the site. Neither the story nor the subsequent hits would have been as big had it not been for Twitter.

This small event is the perfect example of how new and old media can work together to create great journalism, and it’s the journalism aspect of Twitter that excites me the most.

At it’s most basic, it’s like the pub, where plenty of conversations are taking place [1]. Some of them are meaningless, but some may be interesting to the journalist and make a great story. Older journalists will have done more than their fair share of pub stories, while whenever I was sent to cover a story in an area I didn’t know, I’d usually head down the pub, as this was one of the best places for background and context.

Twitter can be seen as the pub. Or perhaps a trendy, if somewhat dilapidated, wine bar. That has poor acoustics, and the clientele speak in clipped tones. But is up to date with the latest news from the area.

Twitter, then, goes beyond just searching for people on location for a breaking news event – it allows those users to break the news to the journalists, although that only seems to have happened because of interaction. If the Chicago Tribute’s Twitter account didn’t bother to interact with its followers, then it wouldn’t have got the story (or got the story as quickly).

That, for me, perfectly encapsulates what social media is all about, and why it complements journalism rather than threatens it [2]. And why every journalist should at least be aware of how useful Twitter can be for newsgathering.

It may not have as many people signing up as Facebook did, and nor will it probably take off on such a mass scale as Facebook did. But that’s not necessarily the point. As my colleague Ben is fond of saying, it’s who you follow, not how many you follow.

The next question is how many news organisations have a presence of Twitter, Facebook, Bebo, and other sites, and regularly interact with readers? Those who don’t, or haven’t even considered it, are potentially missing a trick.

It’s why it’s important that Twitter users are able to receive SMS messages in the UK and Europe. The site cut this service due to spiraling costs they incurred from mobile providers.

It’s one of the most useful services Twitter offers, and for journalists is a key part of why Twitter is so useful. Paul Bradshaw has started a campaign to get mobile operators to strike a deal with Twitter – the Facebook group is here.

[1] I have a feeling I’ve shamelessly stolen this analogy from Joanna Geary. Sorry Jo – think of it as social media analogy sharing

[2] Quite whether the same is true, at this current stage, for PR, I’m not so sure. It’s very useful, but nowhere near as useful as journalists are finding it. There’s definitely potential in there though, but as Jaz Cummins said to me at the Shoreditch Twit last week when I mentioned I was using Twitter for PR purposes, a lot of its users are still very much in the London or media-centric bubble and bursting through this bubble is the challenge. At least I think that’s what she was saying. My memory of the night is a tad hazy, but it was along those lines and is a very valid point. It’s certainly a major challenge for PR to work out how best to utilise the potential of Twitter.

written by Gary Andrews \\ tags: journalism, newsgathering, SMS, Twitter

Couple of fascinating posts on citizen journalism on BeetTV and Phil Bronstein on thoughts around citizen journalism. It has not, says Bronstein, taken off on a large scale. He also sums up the current position neatly:

“The whole concept of citizen journalism is still floating around waiting for a good example wave to carry it somewhere, and user-generated material has yet to be a huge hit within the media world unless someone with a Flip catches Brangelina running into a lamp post.”

Let’s up a quick recap first with the Condensed and Possibly Not Entirely Accurate History of Citizen Journalism According To Gary.

So, in the beginning there was the media who had journalists who produced news. There was also the people, and the people generally watched or read the media and the media thought this was largely very agreeable indeed and nobody knew what the people thought because it wasn’t deemed important and those people who did speak were usually retired colonels.

Anyway, then the internet came along and some of the people realised it gave them a chance to say what they thought and a very small percentage of the people tried their hand at journalism and a few of them were actually quite good at it.

Then the media discovered that the internet was important but weren’t quite sure how to handle it because while they were telling because that it was important, they’d noticed a few people were also telling the rest of the people that the internet and other stuff was important. Or, more commonly, telling the media where they’d got things wrong.

Some media tried to engage, others refused but gradually there was a realisation that the people could be useful to the media and that’s roughly where we are now.

The term Citizen Journalism is definitely a little misleading. It conjures up images of wannabe hacks slaving away all day at the internet trying to beat newspapers to the scoop and perhaps for a very short while this was the case. There was even a brief mad scramble by traditional media to sign these bloggers, much like the moment Electroclash was briefly musical genre of the moment and saw Fischerspooner signed to Ministry of Sound for £1m, nearly taking the whole thing down the pan.

That’s passed now, largely (and thankfully). Now the boundaries are a lot less clear. What’s the difference between a journalist and a blogger? Take Shiny Media. These are blogs, but essentially they’re a journalistic outlet that isn’t published in a newspaper or broadcast on the TV. Then you’ve got journalists who specifically work on the web but because it’s on a traditional media’s site it’s classified as journalism and not blogging.

Then you’ve got the bloggers who are definitely not journalists but know more about a specialist topic than journalists and have great contacts, so are essentially out-journalisming the journalists without even intending to.

Then you’ve got the bloggers who aren’t journalists or specialists but once in a while write something newsworthy or happen to be in the right place at the right time (or wrong time, depending on the event) and have something to say which is of interest to everybody.

This is without even touching on the likes of Flickr, Twitter and YouTube for newsgathering purposes. Often these are better than anything traditional media can gather, not because the journalists are bad at their job, but because they happen to be on the ground when the event starts. Jemima Kiss’s post on Twitter and the California Earthquake illustrates this nicely.

Right, so this is where we’re at. Journalism and the web as if painted by Jackson Pollack. Nobody really knows what they are any more, the whole system’s in some kind of blogistential crisis and really, we’d all probably be better off heading home for a cup of tea and a biscuit and forgetting about the whole thing.

But it’s not entirely shot and there a few levellers. Firstly, Citizen Journalism hasn’t killed the media, as was predicted a few years ago. If anything it’s enhanced the quality of news coverage. A Tweet or Flickr picture direct from the scene is invaluable no matter where you’re getting your news from.

Secondly, although you’ll get the odd person trying to make a living out of citizen journalism from the web, the majority of citizen journalists are a one-off. They happen to be by a newsworthy event, they take a picture, Tweet, make a blog post or take a video on their mobile phone. It’s news, and news organisations recognise it as such, even if the person behind it never does another newsworthy thing in their life. 

That its not yet successful on a large scale is not unexpected or necessarily a bad thing. While people appreciate that they can interact with journalists and submit their own ‘newsgathering’ not everybody’s going to want to do it all of the time.

Secondly, although there will always be bloggers and Twitterers writing around breaking news, although they’re not hard to search, it’s easier and less time consuming for the average person having it in a place they regularly visit and, largely, trust. Which is usually the website of traditional media.

Anybody who Tweets or blogs or posts photos about a newsworthy event they’ve seen or are part of are being citizen journalists, yet the term doesn’t quite fit them. They’re involved with the journalism process even if they don’t necessarily know it at the time.

For me, traditional media and citizen journalists have, for the time being, reached a reasonably happy medium. It will change. Things always change, especially when the web’s involved. Who knows, perhaps it will move closer to the traditional view of a citizen journalist. Perhaps it’ll shoot off in a completely different direction. Perhaps not.

But for the time being, we’re all now part of the newsgathering process, whether we like it or not, a journalism s a lot better of for it.

written by Gary Andrews \\ tags: BeetTV, breaking news, citizen journalism, Flickr, journalism, newsgathering, Phil Bronstein, Twitter

It’s hard not to raise a smile at Dave Hill’s gentle fisking of his local newspaper’s rather arbitrary leader on why teh blogging is rubbish. The column is the kind of thing you’d have expected half or dozen a so years ago when blogging wasn’t as mainstream or as popular as it is now, and everybody (read: the media) seemed convinced citizen journalism via bogs was going to take down traditional media and rule the world and journalists were worried they’d become redundant. Or something.

Fast forward to today (or, if you happen to be reading this light years in the future, 2008) and bloggers haven’t exactly killed off the medium of print, although they have changed the nature of journalism, and how that change will finally pan out is unclear.

But the two are sitting, if not exactly comfortably together, in closer proximity than perhaps was expected. Most major papers now have blogs where journalists and, horrors, the great unwashed interact. Even more shocking is the number of journalists who maintain their own blogs. In their own time! Lawks! Who’d thunk it. Look, there’s one. And here’s another. And, my gosh, another. They’re bloody everywhere.

And what’s more it’s not just journalists who can write and have opinions. A lot of other people do it rather well, often in a niche area. One of the trouble with journalists is, unless we end up seriously specialising, our knowledge is spread a little thin and there’s invariably people out there who know more about the topic than we do. Which is, I think, largely a good thing. Holding the fourth estate to account and all that. And, blimey, occasionally you can learn something. Hell, transparency, which is pretty hot on the web these days, is a good thing. After all, journalists call for it all the time, right?

Ok, blogland does have more than its fair share of tub-thumping nutters who do like causing a shit-storm and enjoying the controversy. That’s largely the nature of a free and open platform for publishing. I’d hazard a guess than the majority of the tub-thumping nutters can also be found among the retired colenels in the letters pages of local newspapers. At the very least, they’re no less nutty than some of the people who write in.

But one of the great things about blogs and other social media is how they’ve changed the nature of newsgathering.

Certainly, today’s journalists are as likely to be tracking a breaking story online using Technorati, Summize and Twing as they are door-knocking (and both have their merits and disadvantages, and are best used in conjunction). Similarly, they’re turning into a great source of news as more newsworthy people get blogs. 

So it’s just slightly depressing to read the following comments in the leader column:

“It’s accepted practice – particularly if a public figure makes controversial remarks on a blog – for newspapers to use them as source material for their follow-up story, subject to the paper contacting the person quoted to check that what appeared is accurate.”

“For a blogger to moan that what they themselves put in the public domain has somehow been pillaged because a newspaper hasn’t acknowledged them smacks of breath-taking petulance.”

“Too often, blogs seem like slags or slogs, probably both; disappointing slogs through slaggings off. Perhaps when blogs have grown up a little more they’ll be better. For many, still, maturity seems a long way off.”

written by Gary Andrews \\ tags: blogging, Dave Hill, Hackney Gazette, journalism, Web 2.0

The small spat between Techcrunch and TuneCore has provided a bit of minor entertainment on a slow afternoon, but also acts as a perfect example of getting both initial enquiries and PR strategy a bit on the wonky side.

[For those who don't click the link: Techcrunch intern emails TuneCore press email, gets a slightly curt and defensive email back from TuneCore CEO (Why are you asking? How will this information be used? Who are you? Who funds you?), intern re-emails, gets a bit of a curt reply back].

There’s been a lot of (rather amusing) back and forth in the comment between those who think TuneCore’s CEO committed a howler and those who think the initial Techcrunch query was right to elicit the response it did.

Now the initial query looks harmless enough:

“Hello, I’m currently conducting research for TechCrunch’s company database (CrunchBase.com). Can you give me information on the funding TuneCore has had to date? Can you provide me with the rounds, amounts, dates and investors? Thanks for your help.

Peter”

In honesty, I’ve had a lot vaguer, confusing queries come my way. At least this is pretty easy to understand what they’re after. But if you’re a business and get an approach like this, I could see why you’d be wary, especially if it’s from a webmail account (gmail in this instance). Again, I’ve seen a few similar emails to this in the past which raise a few questions.

So, yes, there’s a web address on there, which helps, but when I was chasing stories or information from people who might not get contacted on a regular basis by the press or I hadn’t spoken to before, then this would all be laid out. And it was largely done by phone and probably still should be, if the person on the other end was contactable or there was a reasonably obvious number.

The web and social media is fantastic for building relationships and developing contacts but sometimes there’s just no substitute for picking up the phone, even if you have to repeat yourself in the email later. At least you get a rapport and can explain yourself and what you need in the first instance.

Now there’s a not unreasonable argument that if you’re a startup you should have heard of TechCrunch, but that’s still an assumption and in journalism and PR you should never assume anything. Just as with PR, the more information you can give, the better the response is likely to be.

But whatever the merits or otherwise of the initial enquiry, it certainly didn’t warrant the response it got. By all means query it but if the email was sent to a press contact address then you’ve got to accept that anything you say could end up in the public domain.

As for the language – fair enough, Jeff Price might not have been too impressed with the initial enquiry (and lord knows I’ve seen enough that make you want to headbutt the desk in sheer frustration) and may have even suspected the email was bogus. But, if it’s come through on the press contact email, as far as you know you’re dealing with the media until proven otherwise.

And, at the end of the day, there’s just no excuse for rudeness. You may think the enquiry isn’t worth your time, you may be in a bad mood, it may have caused you more problems than necessary, but a sarky line will kill any chance of building any future relationship with the organisation. It works on both sides – as a journalist, there were several PR people I’d do my best to avoid because they were more trouble than the story was worth. Similarly, PRs will mentally note any journalist that’s especially difficult to deal with and do the same.

Put simply, even if the person on the other end of the email or phone is making you want to scream, keeping it civil usually pays off in the long term. I’ll never forget the absolutely maddening PR person who rang back a few weeks later with a great lead.

As for setting the press email to send direct to the CEO, that’s just plain daft. Even if you want the CEO to respond to most requests, they’re likely to be a busy person. At the very least somebody should be filtering and responding before it gets there.

The whole Techcrunch post could be printed out and discussed in media training schools across the country, even if it was ultimately a bit unnecessary and achieved nothing bar providing a good giggle for anybody reading it.

As Mark Twain once said, it’s far better to keep your mouth shut and let people think you’re an idiot than to open it and confirm that.

And yes, given that I file anything relating to me under the category idiot, I most definitely would earn the disapproval of Mr. Twain.

written by Gary Andrews \\ tags: journalism, manners, PR, Techcrunch, TuneCore

Very nice piece by Damien McCrystal in the Guardian today. I especially liked this bit:

“Why are people deserting journalism for PR, or going straight into PR from university?

It might be the lure of money, because journalists’ average pay has been in decline in real terms for some time, according to the NUJ. But I don’t think that’s the only reason. Money was certainly a motivator for me, but I would have crossed over anyway to what PRs gleefully refer to as “the dark side”, because PR is more fun than journalism these days, and fun is what we were after (with the exception of a few crusaders) when we became hacks in the first place. It was cool to tell people what you did for a living and see how impressed they were.

It was cool that important grown-ups listened to you and treated your opinions with respect, or at least pretended to. And it was cool to get your own back in print when necessary. It was fun. But where’s the fun in having to produce so much copy that you don’t have the time or budget to meet your contacts? Or in being scared to ask for a pay rise? Or in not being allowed to devote sufficient resources to get your story right?”

Yes. Yes to all. I loved the good bits of journalism but I didn’t enjoy working every hour that god sent, not having the time to follow through a good story and, yes, indulging in Churnalism to make sure there were enough stories for the next day. And pay. Pay is a massive issue with pretty much every single one of my friends who was or still is in journalism.

PR was, to me, never the easy option. Just a different option. And, in my current role, one that allowed me to look at how the internet could be harnessed for all media. The challenges are different, not easier (although having time for lunch is still a novelty). Just as I always had respect for good PR people when I was in journalism (who could be worth their weight in gold at the right time), so I always have respect for good journalists now I’m on the other side of the fence.

Would I ever return to journalism? Possibly. But I like what I do too much to go back at the moment. Anyway, I have this blog and other assorted writings that keep my hand in, and part of my mindset is still set in journalism mode, and I doubt that’ll ever change. That’s probably a good thing.

Besides, both professions are changing because of the web, and that’s the area I want to stay in more than anything else. Ultimately, we’re both storytellers and the way we tell stories is changing. Are you excited about that? I certainly am.

written by Gary Andrews \\ tags: Churnalism, Damien McCrystal, journalism, PR

Now the dust’s settled both around Giraffe restaurant in Exeter and in the general world of breaking news, and yesterday’s events are becoming clearer, it’s interesting to see how the coverage of the event has also settled down both for traditional media and more Web 2.0 sources.

While yesterday the best sources for breaking news were the online Exeter City fans forum Exeweb, and Twitter, today things have settled down somewhat. The thread on Exeweb has slowed and hasn’t been updated in a while, while Tweets on the issue have been restricted to those from traditional media accounts like ITN and the Guardian [1].

Likewise, Technorati and del.icio.us have sporadic entries, but nothing traditional media hasn’t already told me.

[A quick aside here - partly to blow my own trumpet, but partly because it fits in well here - POLIS director Charlie Beckett followed up his very nice comment with a blog post praising what I wrote yesterday, which is as unexpected as it is flattering (and humbling). But where did Charlie find my piece? Via his colleague on del.icio.us. QED.]

But where it gets really interesting is Digg. If you search upcoming stories for Exeter then the majority of articles ‘Dugg’ are from traditional sources: the BBC, the Telegraph, etc. [2].

Now, I’ll admit this has only been a cursory glance and any research I’ve done hasn’t been as thorough as yesterday but there’s still a few strands of hypothesis we can draw from this.

The main point being, when you have a breaking news story, traditional media is a lot slower than online sources and social media tool and, in many cases, less reliable. This also suggests that people are moving towards these tools rather than more traditional sources when they want to find out more information.

However, once the story moves beyond it’s initial ‘breaking’ stage (usually 24 hours, or an overnight gap), traditional media reasserts itself. The posters on Exeweb or Twitterers are likely to have the time or access to compete with media outlets, so at this stage the fastest, most reliable sources online will revert to the familiar brand names. They have the lines to the police, they eyewitnesses, and the politicians and now can be seen to be across the story.

The big loser in all this now is not social media, which can happily exist outside of the mainstream media and isn’t solely news-orientated, but the Express and Echo, Exeter’s local paper.

Yes, the Echo have continued to add updates to their site, but I still can’t read today’s coverage, which is maddening – the message to buy the paper for full information has been on the site since they posted a brief summary of their lead story, and they’re already telling us to buy Saturday’s paper for the update. Which would be great if I still lived in Devon, but I don’t.

Now, the Express and Echo may well have some of the best journalistic coverage on this topic, and today and tomorrow’s papers may well be ground-breaking award-winning stuff, but it’s really too late. Any smart reader, Exonian or otherwise, will have gone to somewhere like Google News, done a search for Exeter and read a lot of the pieces available there, most of which contain not just yesterday’s story but up-to-the-minute articles with today’s events (the Telegraph’s is particularly good). In the meantime, the Echo sits with none of this.

Taking this logically to its conclusion, why would I – the online reader – then need to buy tomorrow’s Express and Echo or visit it’s website when I know there is better information elsewhere? In looking to maximise the paper sales, the Echo could potentially lose out on readers both on and offline.

[By the way, if you want to contact me with any links or aspects of this online case study I may have missed, or anything that may be interesting or relevant to the blog or, for whatever reason, you don't want to leave a comment, there's a contact form on the About Me page.]

[1] Assuming you can actually get onto Twitter – it’s having another bit of downtime/crash. Honestly, it’s more tempramental than all of my ex-girlfriends morphed into one.

[2] Anti-fascist campaigners may want to note the amount of Diggs BNP links are getting (and on Technorati as well).

written by Gary Andrews \\ tags: del.icio.us, Exeter, Exeter bomb, Exeter explosion, Exeweb, Express and Echo, journalism, online journalism, social media, Twitter, Web 2.0