Me, Myself and I

'My Telegraph’; part of the Telegraph website exemplifies perfectly the new wave in modern journalism. It’s a portal which is completely adaptable to an individual’s interests and tastes. No two ‘my telegraph’ sites are the same. This is the way news seems to be moving in the present day. With RSS feeds dropping personalised news straight to your desktop, users can get their news that they want, when it happens. As great as this sounds, it’s also, a little worrying. If individuals are allowed to decide what new they want, or think they want, there’s a very real danger that they’ll be missing out on much of the information, that they really need. This is a particular worry, I think with RSS feeds; selecting just certain types of news for example just education, health or sport, then many people really are not consuming as much news as they should.


I certainly don’t think that we need to go back to the ‘good old days’ of journalism with the journalist being the all seeing, all knowing dictator. But surely there must be a limit to how much news consumers can control what they want to know.


Shane Richmond from The Telegraph made some excellent points about online journalism, particularly in regards to legal worries. It’s a known fact by now that anyone can publish information on the internet, so for high profile court cases, such as the case of ‘Baby P’, it’s difficult to moderate what people put on the internet and Shane pointed out that the law is going to have to change to keep up with the massive expansion of the internet. The web is a global medium, not bound just by U.K. jurisdiction and successfully moderating content is almost impossible. The ‘don’t read it all’ attitude to blogs and comments is certainly not something I completely agree with or comfortable with, if users are going to be given the freedom to say what they want, we still need responsible journalists to moderate this effectively to protect individuals. But it’s a great and exciting time for newspaper journalists – being given the freedom to really engage with what your readers think is what journalists should be doing.

What's it all about?

Search Engine Optimisation or SEO sounds fancy - and for once, for a technical term, it is. It allows those entering information onto the internet to have this information sourced and found easily by others. Huge search engines like Google will pick up on articles, data, videos, or other material if keywords have been tagged along with this information. This naturally leads quite well into journalism; a journalist’s job, is fundamentally to educate and inform. So with the increasing number of media being put online, it’s vital that journalists know how to attract people to their material.

Take Flickr, for example. I needed to use this tool yesterday to find a picture and searched several different keywords to find what I was looking for – the result? Most of it had nothing to do with what I was actually looking for. The tags had all been attached by users of the site, and from what I found pretty much included any tag to any random image, just to have their picture flash up to anyone and everyone. This isn’t particularly useful. It’s vital therefore that journalists and people putting information on the internet use the right ways to attract attention to it. There’s no doubt that the internet provides a sea of information, but if anyone is allowed to access and change this, then it’s impossible to swim seamlessly through the information.

But for huge media organisations, such as the BBC, it’s a necessity to flag up articles in the right way in order to attract traffic to the website. So, if the Pope died and someone wanted to Google this, then keywords such as “pope” and “death” would need to be included, it seems fairly simple. But getting it right is crucial in pulling more people into your website and allowing the user to navigate around it.

All this, is of course, tied up with the previous lectures on network journalism – tools like SEO need to come together to make online journalism work.

Stop, Rewind, Play.

So once again we hear about how important blogging is in the media, and how it’s becoming and important tool for journalists. Adam Tinworth is someone who clearly believes in the value of blogging; he has several himself. There clearly is a very real value to blogging, it allows for commentary and discussion on news stories, rather than just chucking the facts at the consumer. The phrase ‘two-way conversation’ definitely has a place here. It allows healthy debate and awareness of issues surrounding stories, rather than just telling the bare facts. This then follows on to making people more culturally aware and maybe even more sensitive to certain issues.

However, I think their importance and how popular they are is being exaggerated by some. Do people really have time to ready X,Y and Z’s blog? Do they really engage with it to a great extent? Or do they just scan through them to get a general overview? Does any of this even really matter?

Also, is this really that new? Newspapers have carried commentary and letters pages pretty much since their birth – the only real difference now is that the feedback by consumers is much more instant and the writers have to sit up and take notice. The comments are right in front of their screen; they can’t hide from them.

However, I particularly took issue with Adam’s comments that ‘now we can break news when it happens’. Well, broadcast news has always done this.

Rolling news channels were a great step forward in providing 24/7 news but radio bulletins before this were even more up to date than print media. With bulletins on the hour, half hour and during peak times, headlines every 15 minutes, broadcasters have always been able to break news as it happens. I understand that he’s coming from a print background, but this newspaper-centric view, is perhaps a little naïve. Online media and websites are revolutionary for print journalists, because they really can now break news stories much more quickly than they ever have done – but this isn’t new for everyone and its importance shouldn’t be overplayed.

The Power To Publish

Everyone’s now a journalist. The internet has created a phenomenon in which everyone has the power to publish, apparently. Replying to blog posts, submitting UGC, uploading a YouTube video; all of these are mediums through which anyone and everyone can publish.

As young journalists starting in this industry we increasingly need to become facilitators of this content and be able to sift the wheat from the chaff. As I’ve discussed in previous blogs, this is a great thing. The two- way storytelling is something journalists should do more; let the public tell their story.

However, we also need to be careful about how often we use this content. As this website mentions we’re not all really journalists. There is still a great need to have people who know what they’re talking about, and can communicate in an effective manner. It also goes without saying that these posters and contributors, largely, operate outside a legal framework.

A large amount of this communication is also about ‘knowing your audience’. As Matthew Yeomans says on his website, ‘Custom Communication’, internet publication is about knowing how to use the right media to connect to your audience.

I still maintain that this type of online publication has a long way to go, and it’s very much a generational thing.

My parents and extended family members for example still turn to their T.V., radio or newspaper to get the information they want. In all honesty, I do too. This is because I trust the people telling me these stories.
It’ll take a long time to convince many of these types of people to use ‘new media’ and to fully embrace these new tools.

No-one, it seems has any idea where the media is moving.

Images thanks to : http://www.masternewmedia.org/