Posts Tagged ‘Journalism’
April 8th, 2010
This morning I heard the sad news that technology journalist Guy Kewney had passed away following a year-long battle with cancer of the liver and bowel. I remember him calling me in May last year when I’d just given birth to my daughter Isabella, to congratulate me and let me know about his diagnosis.
I’m not going to try and write an obituary as some lovely ones have already been written, and I merely wanted to write something short as a sign of respect for Guy who was a truly great journalist, who I had the priviledge to work with for a few years at Ziff Davis and ZDNet, and who remained a trusted friend.
During his illness, Guy kept a daily online journal The Hunkymouse - his honesty and bravery was an inspiration, and the number of comments that people have left through his journey is testimony to how loved and respected he was.
If you would like to read more about Guy’s life, here is a touching obituary by his great friend and colleague Manek Dubash, and another by Iain Thomson.
I will always remember Guy by his trademark sandals and branded fleeces! As Manek says, “he was an inspiration to two generations of journalists and PR flacks over the decades of his working life.”
Bad news sells. Is social media changing this?
February 12th, 2010
This week I caught an interview with Alastair Campbell on ITV’s Loose Women, promoting his new book Maya. Within the interview Campbell (who formerly wrote for the Daily Mirror) suggested that social networking is inverting the core principle of newspaper journalism, i.e. bad news sells, and replacing it with a more balanced view of the world.
In my view he’s right. Traditionally we might have bought our favourite tabloid or broadsheet on the way to work, or selected the paper with the most grabbing front page headline. Pre-social media, we’d have been blissfully unaware of how our intake of news was being controlled by an editorial agenda that dictates bad news sells. Journalists are trained in how to tease out of any story an angle that conveys fear, sex, drama etc. A story that simply reports ‘good news’ would never get past any half-decent news editor.
Today however, ’social’ media means that we have access to news that has not been written by journalists or broadcasters. Many high profile bloggers have no journalist training, and so take a much fresher, unbiased approach to news reporting.
Websites such as Delicious and Digg enable people to bookmark and share content from the highest profile blog through to the most obscure and niche. It’s human nature to want to share good news, and so with no motivation to ’sell’, those consuming news through social sites are likely to be faced with more ‘good’ news that then would have been traditionally.
This is good news for brands and the PR industry as a whole. It makes it more possible for a brand to communicate its good news, and if it is liked by its community, the news will be shared. This doesn’t remove the need for a strong news hook, but that hook can now be a positive one.
Is journalist experiment to write news through Facebook and Twitter irresponsible?
January 22nd, 2010
A journalist-style Big Brother has today been announced, whereby five journalists will lock themselves away in a French farmhouse for five days, with access to only Facebook and Twitter as their news sources. The experiment will test the quality of news from the social networking and micro-blogging sites as access to all other areas of the Internet will be banned, along with smartphones, TV, radio and newspapers.
The journalists from Canadian, French, Belgian and Swiss radio stations will be expected to go on the air on their channels to comment on news they have found. But without being able to corroborate their news through usual sources and channels, it remains to be seen whether they will have any news to report!
The RFP French-language public broadcasters association has organised the event, and claims: “Our aim is to show that there are different sources of information and to look at the legitimacy of each of these sources.”
The stakes are high - the experiment is likely to attract a lot of media attention and so the journalists will be under pressure to deliver ‘news’…but at what cost? Will they take the risk of reporting news that has not been properly corroborated by multiple sources? Surely that would be highly irresponsible behaviour for a news organisation.
As I previously documented in a post last year entitled: “Mzinga backlash: Is Twitter a reliable journalist/blogger source?“, Twitter can be an unreliable and liabellous source of news, and hoaxes are commonplace. While it will be interesting to follow the journalists’ findings and experience, I’m not sure I even agree with the point of the experiment as it completely contradicts with the principles of quality journalism.
I imagine it will be very time consuming for the journalists to try and validate stories, and so in particular I will be watching to see whether they are able to deliver ‘breaking news’, or whether it will just be commentary after the event. It will be interesting if the journalists share the criteria they used for corroborating stories i.e. volume of Tweets on the subject.
I’m sure there will be a follow-up post from me when the experiment concludes!
Trade press concerns about blogging
April 17th, 2009
The digital marketing trade press has embraced blogging to varying degrees. While Haymarket has recently relaunched many of its magazine websites and simultaneously stepped-up the intensity of its blogging, other publishing houses are yet to rollout blogs for their flagship titles. Magazines such as NMA and Marketing Week, for example, are still without blogs.
What’s apparent is that some trade publishers have been nervous about blog content undermining the value of their magazine and online editorial, often failing to grasp where blogging can add value.
Having been following the progress of the Haymarket blogs and watching what other trade publishers are doing, as well as discussing the practicalities of blogging with journalists in our sector, I thought it might be helpful to offer some insight into some of the shared concerns, and for what it’s worth, my views on how these problems can be addressed…
* New demands for journalists to produce magazine and online content are high enough. Adding blogging to the list will lead to poorer quality of writing and less time for investigative reporting - this is a genuine concern that is shared by every trade editor I speak to, and journalists are similarly reluctant to take on extra writing responsibilities. Compile this with the recent redundancies that have taken place across most trade media, and the average journalist is over-worked and over-stressed.
However, this line of argument is missing the point about the role blogging plays in news consumption, and failing to acknowledge what magazine audiences want nowadays. Blog content can be equally as important as magazine coverage, if not more. Now is the time for publishers to be re-evaluating their content priorities.
* If content is now being broken online and followed-up in the magazine, what can we write about in a blog?- every new blogger worries about finding subject matter to write about, but journalists shouldn’t really have this problem! As a former trade journalist I know so many stories never make it into the magazine, or you have fascinating conversations with contacts that you wish you could do something with editorially. A magazine blog can be the perfect place to write about titbits of information that might otherwise get lost, or to start debate on subjects that you might feel passionate about. Although magazine editorial guidelines will most likely still need to be adhered to, the blog should be a place where journalists can publish independently and have a bit more freedom with subject matter.
* Blogging just doesn’t draw in the level of traffic that we’d like -magazines that have tested the water with blogging, but not dived in wholeheartedly, often cite this as a reason for delaying the launch of a proper blog. There can be many reasons for a magazine blog not taking off properly, but frequently the reasons are that the blog is hidden away on the website and not signposted clearly enough, that content is not interesting or updated frequently enough, and that measures have not been put in place to share the content socially or allow for comment and conversation.
* There’s no budget for professional blog set-up or consultancy, so we’re looking into it ourselves - it’s clear that times are tough for the trade publishing industry, and having worked on a trade magazine, I know what a battle it can be to make money available for these sort of projects. I would argue that this is a sign of a blog not being given the priority it should be, but that isn’t offering a useful solution to the problem.
Launching a magazine blog is a serious business (well it should be) and it’s important to bring in experts who know what they’re doing. It’s crucial that you have advice on the platform you’re going to use, as well as how it’s going to be designed and optimised etc. Particularly within the digital marketing industry, I’m sure there are companies out there who would be willing to advise the likes of NMA etc on a blog strategy for free. Now is a time to make the most of your contacts!
* We’ve already added ‘comments’ to our stories, so why do we need to blog? -this is probably the lamest excuse that I’ve heard for not blogging, but it’s come up a lot in conversations that I’ve had! If you’re a reader of sites such as NMA.co.uk and Revolutionmagazine.com etc, you’ll know that stories very rarely receive comments. Ticking this box is not a reason to delay launching a blog.
Will PRs and journalists own natural search?
July 23rd, 2008
You might say, “who cares?”, but for me this is a refreshing new angle on the ‘who owns online PR?’ discussion that has been going on within the social media industry for a while. Of course I’m going to like suggestions that PRs might be in line to own SEO, but setting my vested interests aside, this line of thought helps explain why it is crucial that journalists and PRs understand the long-term trends that are happening in natural search.
Guardian columnist Charlie Brooker made his own rather crude observations on the subject on Monday, in his overly optimised article, “Online POKER marketing could spell the NAKED end of VIAGRA journalism as we LOHAN know it.” He doesn’t say anything new - online headlines have always been important for driving traffic and natural links, and the only difference is that journalists are waking up to the impact optimised copy can have on their authority and popularity rankings - but the article drives home the SEO control that journalists have at their fingertips, should they choose to use it intelligently.
Similarly, Leon Bailey Green has today contributed a post to the E-Consultancy blog entitled: “Is the role of the SEO dead and should PRs own natural search?“, where he argues “off-site optimisation, link building or link baiting, should actually be in the domain of PR professionals”. He concludes “so if a web developer can build a search engine friendly website, a content writer knows how to write search engine friendly copy and an online PR guru can get blogs/websites/forums to link to that content, where does that leave an SEO?”
Regardless of who might own SEO in the future, or whether anyone will, it’s becoming more and more important for PRs and journalists to have a basic understanding of how relevancy, authority and quality of content will increasingly be the metrics used by search engines to rank sites. In addition, social networks are in some cases beginning to displace search, by creating trusted networks of relevant recommendations - which will make the role that PR plays even more important.
The tactics of PR and journalism don’t necessarily need to change, but individuals working in these sectors will have to be very good at what they do.
Natural search can appear very scientific, and I personally am on a mission to understand the techniques as well as I can…but ultimately, PR as an industry needs to focus on the quality of its output. There’s no place for fakers!
What’s wrong with digital agency comment?
July 1st, 2008
“Client side comment only please…no agency comment needed at this stage…desperate for brand-side comment – can you help?”
In recent weeks we’ve spotted a growing trend in such requests from digital trade journalists, either directly or through feature tracking services that we subscribe to. It seems journalists are increasingly less interested in digital agency comment, and more and more focused on brand-side opinion only.
As an ex-journalist for New Media Age, I can appreciate the need for big brand comment, but what I don’t understand is why those at the coalface, the specialists in digital marketing, creative and design, are being sidelined?
I thought a story always had two sides?
Reading between the lines, the problem is being compounded by an absence of readily available client-side comment on digital matters. From my experience this is either down to a brand not prioritising a digital trade comment opportunity, or acknowledging that the subject matter might be out of their depth.
At Liberate Media we’re always willing to do a journalist a favour and help out with these sorts of requests, but it’s getting increasingly frustrating to have to battle to offer the agency side of the story. If you want to talk to a brand about their digital investment, why not also speak to the agency in charge of their digital strategy?
I’d be really interested to hear what features writers/editors think about this. Is it a growing trend, or merely coincidence?
Newspaper editors show the way forward
May 7th, 2008
The second Newsroom Barometer, which is the largest survey of the worldwide news industry compiled by the World Editors Forum , has been published and it shows a continued change in the way newspaper editors are viewing the web.
Here is a quick rundown of the highlights:
- 86% of editors believe that integrated print and online newsrooms will become the norm
- 83% of editors believe journalists will be expected to be able to produce content for all media within five years
- 58% of editors think the decline in young readership is the biggest threat for the future of newspapers
- 44% of editors believe online will be the most common platform for reading news in the future. 31% voted for print, 12% mobile, 7% e-paper and the rest were not sure
- 35% of editors said training journalists with new media skills would be their first action if they were given resources to invest in editorial quality
- 31% of editors said their priority was recruiting more journalists
These results show that the newspaper industry, or editors at least, have woken up to the reality of the revolution in the way we consume news. Putting new media training as a top priority for journalists is a clear sign of the need to adapt, and understanding that future readers are falling away at an alarming rate, although a very obvious indicator of impending doom, shows an awareness of the issues at hand.
These figures show that the newspaper industry does have a good chance of surviving and perhaps even prospering, if it can act now and evolve its offering to suit readership trends. Focusing on opinion/analysis-led journalism is not a new idea, but implementation of these ideas, along with the acceptance of news for free, is a major step forward considering where we were a few years ago.
Checkout the Editor’s weblog for a full run down of the results available to date.
Personality versus brand on Twitter
April 24th, 2008
There’s no denying that over the past month or so, Twitter has increasingly become a brand promotion tool. On the media side in particular, journalists, newspapers and magazines are using the communications tool with increased frequency to break their stories.
What I’ve noticed is that subconsciously I’m paying far more attention to some media Tweets than others…while some are very useful and time-saving, others are admittedly going straight into my mental ’spam’ folder. I thought it might be interesting to share my views with you on why I think this is, and seek your feedback…
It appears the most useful Tweeters are those who are using the platform under their own name, sharing not only their breaking news as it happens, but also their personal views on issues within their sector. Jemima Kiss is a great example.
On the other hand, journalists Tweeting under their newspaper or magazine brand are having a tougher job of attaining ’stickiness’ with me. If the tool is only being used to promote stories, with no individual voice coming through, the Tweet is of far less value. I’d much rather receive news roundups as a daily email, than eight Tweets in a row. This is particularly aggrevating when the news isn’t exclusive or breaking, but rather something that is all over the news already.
Media Week has been making great strides on the social media front recently, and I was encouraged by its Facebook message on the subject of Twitter today:
“The twittering is also coming along nicely. So far we’ve been posting headlines and links, but we’re going to be flexing our gossip glands a little more in future so feel free to sign up for tip-offs on the stories behind the headlines - we’re at twitter.com/mediaweek if you want to keep an eye on us. If you’ve got any suggestions on what we should be sending out, just let us know.”
It will be interesting to see if Media Week can effectively combine personality with brand. Travolution is incidentially doing a very good job of this.
It would be interesting to know whether people agree/disagree with me…
Stunning journalism meets equally stunning famous photography
April 2nd, 2008
You may or may not be aware that one the directors of Liberate Media is a well-respected former NMA journalist - Wendy McAuliffe. So this post is for her and anyone who wants to see quality journalism in action.
The site I am going to share with you is FRONTLINE.
Frontline has served as American public television’s flagship public affairs series since 1983 and has won many awards and accolade.
The great thing about this site is the Watch Online page, which shows its back catalogue of programmes in full all the way back to 2001. Scrolling through that page evokes a lot of memories and important landmarks in time.
To complement the stunning journalism you need stunning photos. Look no further than worlds famous photos - who doesn’t remember the Tiananmen Square photo? Each photo has an amazing story to tell.
The site has some nice social feature too.
- Rate the photos - highest ranked of which will feature on the home page.
- Leave your thoughts and comments under a selected photo - which seems pretty popular.
The Madeleine McCann blogging stats
October 23rd, 2007
Barely a day goes by without my RSS feeds for Sky News, BBC News, The Telegraph etc leading on a story about Madeleine McCann…and I think it’s fair to say this has been the case for the past three months.
The story is a PR phenomenon, and the traditional news organisations have gone for it hook line and sinker. But I wanted to see if the same was true of the blogosphere.
The below graph shows the number of blog posts on Technorati mentioning ‘madeleine mccann’ over the past 30 days, and the figures are clearly beginning to dip in comparison to the number of journalist stories on the subject. Google News reports more than 4,500 articles on the issue over the past month.
However, a search for ‘madeleine mcann’ on Icerocket over the past three months pulls up quite different results. On average, 217 posts a day have appeared on the subject, for the past three months.
There is an obvious obsession with the story, among journalists and bloggers alike, but it seems the blogosphere has tired of the story a little more quickly than traditional news outlets.
Could it be that the blogosphere is realising that a very different ’stickiness factor’ applies to blogs, than to tabloid newspapers or online news channels? It could well explain why the blogosphere has moved on more quickly from the Madeleine McCann story, in order to keep readership.
Technorati tags: madeleine+mccann, icerocket, technorati, news+agenda, journalism, blogging, pr