And now for the news....

Rory Cellan-Jones is someone who knows what makes good T.V. journalism. His lecture provided a fascinating insight into how television news used to be and makes us even more aware of how far we’ve come with technology and how it really impacts on good journalism.

In the 80’s, there were few moving pictures to help tell a story – they heavily relied on stills to inform the report. . The video Rory showed us wasn’t that dissimilar to the portrayal of T.V. News in the film ‘Anchorman’. Thankfully this didn’t last long and we soon had moving images being used to aid the narrative of T.V. news reports.

Fast forward to 2008 though – and we now have very different tools to make the news. User generated content has been as massive factor in news broadcasters' output. Why wait for a cameraman from broadcasting house to travel twenty miles to a news story, when you could use Joe Bloggs’ pictures – who was actually at the scene? Initially anyway, this is a huge development in broadcasting – if Joe Bloggs was there first, use his material and then broadcast the quality pictures later.

Tools like Twitter enable us to break news stories quickly and for masses of people to have them pop up on their desktops instantly. In fact, during Rory’s lecture, the news broke that Roy Keane had left Sunderland. Now, without a T.V. or radio being switched on in the room, we wouldn’t have known that information. This is how people want the news to be broken to them; as it happens.

I’m not sure it would’ve really mattered if we had found this information out till after the ninety minute session though – perhaps we’re becoming a little too reliant on technology to feed us with a constant stream of information and sometimes it’s nice just to ‘switch off’. Maybe so – but at least these tools give the choice to the consumer, if they don’t want to use them, they don’t have to.

It’s been said several times during our online journalism workshops, that we don’t know in which ways news is moving – but these tools can only help rather than hinder newly trained journalists and it's something we should definitely embrace.

My Brand's Bigger Than Yours

An interesting question has come out of the recent economic crisis or ‘credit crunch’ as was the buzz phrase of the moment: How big a brand is a journalist? Throughout the economic turmoil that’s unfolded over previous months, Robert Peston has become a household name – reporting several times a night on the BBC News, and on Radio 4 and Radio 5Live, his face and voice were rarely off the screen. But – interestingly, he was breaking a lot of the stories he was receiving through his blog, rather than on T.V./Radio. With these mediums, he has to wait for designated slots before he puts the information into the public domain – but with a blog, he can do it instantly.

But how big a brand did Robert Peston actually become?

For many, it reached a point

where he was the story and he has too much power

– many people tuned in to see if Peston would pop up rather than what the latest economic or financial news would be. Is Peston bigger than the BBC though? My guess is not. He’s able to break the stories and find the interviewees that he does because he’s part of such as massive Broadcasting Corporation. If the BBC did not have the platforms for him to break such stories – i.e. a rolling news channel, several national radio stations, and hugely popular network news programmes then ‘Peston: the brand’ certainly wouldn’t have grown to the extent it had.

There’s no doubt that people do rely on high profile journalists to tell them what’s going on in the world. We expect Nick Robinson to tell us what’s happening in the political world, we depend on Julian Manyon to bring us a well put-together, sensitive report from a war zone. They’re faces, names, and voices that people trust. It’s not just high profile journalists though – every word that is written or broadcast, the public rely on to be free from bias and personal views – this is naturally more true for broadcast rather then print media. This is why responsible journalism is so crucial – particularly the ‘power’ it brings with it. However, there is a very fine tipping point between reporting the story and being the story.

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/

Future Stories

We know by now how the digital revolution is becoming an increasingly important part of the media and storytelling. But the whole concept of ‘digital stories’ is something that is, again, fairly new to me.

Daniel Meadows’ lecture gave a fascinating insight into how digital multimedia is being used to tell the stories of the people, who’ve lived them, by the people who’ve experienced them. And it all seems, rather simple. A few pictures, and well written words and the story soon falls neatly into place.

It’s still all wrapped up with the fundamental principles of storytelling though; if the story and the scripting is strong enough then, the production will come together to tell the tale.

And it seems to be a great step ahead in journalism. By allowing the subject to tell their story, in their own way, you’re empowering them and giving them a voice, and subsequently gaining their trust, an important part of journalism. It’s also giving an audience a different way to connect with a story and making it far more personal than a reporter or journalist simply telling them what’s happened. The audience are almost directly engaging with the story in front of them.

However, I’m slightly wary about how often this type of storytelling should be used and how it should be used. It’s very niche and creative and too much of this type of video could be overwhelming and I’m not sure if it would ever have a place in a modern news programme. But certainly for a documentary style programme, it’s a brilliant way to allow someone’s message to come through and it paints a very real picture.

Without a doubt though, it’s another medium through which journalists can say what they have to say and as young people starting out in the media, another digital platform that we must be aware of and can use as another tool of our trade (or profession, depending on your viewpoint).

Is UGC the future?

User Generated Content (UGC) is something that has been an important part of newsgathering and my consumption of news for a number of years. Just by taking a glance around news websites, it becomes evident that many pictures and video in particular have been sent in by viewers and readers. For me, this is a great thing. Many people have questioned the role of citizen journalism and blogging especially. However, I think there’s a lot to be said for UGC. For example, if a huge fire breaks out at a Manchester factory, video content can be sent to a news organisation within minutes, and it could possibly take hours for a news crew to get there and by then the story is already developing. So, there’s a lot to be said for the citizen’s perspective.

Many news programmes now, also see the need for the viewers contribution. BBC Wales Today, for example have been running ‘Your Stories’ for a while and see the importance of involving the viewer in the news running and operation, it simply isn’t a one way street anymore.
Of course, there are negatives though. The moderation of UGC is essential and as this Guardian blog points out, it’s not cheap. Perhaps this will come to turn around? Maybe the costs and implications of UGC will become too great, and journalism will return to a one way street, but for now, it’s here and it’s here to stay and it’s an important part of storytelling.

Furthermore, the BBC is careful to point out their strict guidelines on user generated content, signalling that they recognise its importance.
Some organisations are already going one step further than simply ‘uploading’ your content – The National Geographic for example is even starting to build tools on their website so that users can edit the material they upload.

For me, though, there’s quite an important relationship between the citizen journalist and the professional journalist. Joe Bloggs who sends in his video of the Manchester fire gets a nice ‘thank you’ from the news organisation and a bit of an ego massage by getting his video broadcast on TV - job done. Of course, the relationship isn’t as simple as this, we must, as journalists, be wary of material sent to us, question its accuracy and the motives of the contributor. It is though, an important way to build contacts. If, as a reporter, you know that Joe Bloggs is in a certain area with a camera, then they could be available again to take some shots. Naturally though, it doesn’t replace the professional’s camera or the professional’s take on the story – but for immediacy, UGC has the upper hand.

Without a doubt, I think this two way relationship which has developed is vital, certainly for the time being and although it is constantly changing, we should be aware of it and the challenges it poses.