Recent posts in my Media Category

Last week Liz Heron gave the opening keynote address at news:rewired, explaining some of the social media work that the New York Times does, and offering some advice for those who are also involved in doing it. These are my notes from her session.

A flurry of activity around the Guardian last week as we tried out some new things on our Beta site, and had a two day hack day.

At news:rewired today I was part of a panel discussing optimising news sites for social media. I talked about the Guardian’s Facebook app. Here is an essay version of the talks.

There’s been quite a fuss around the latest set of usage figures for news websites, with comScore suggesting that Mail Online has overtaken the New York Times as the world’s leading online newspaper. The Times has taken the odd step of both disputing the figures and the relevance - saying the inclusion of thisismoney distorted the number by adding an extra million or so. Spokesperson Eileen Murphy added: “a quick review of our site versus the Daily Mail should indicate quite clearly that they are not in our competitive set.” The grey lady doth protest too much, methinks

In this month’s Carnival of Journalism, Michael Rosenblum asks why journalists can’t get themselves together and charge more for their work, or take on more of a business and entrepreneurial role. I think the desire to do journalism and the desire to make money may well be mutually exclusive.

Last night I went to the Community Managers meet-up in London. Markham Nolan was talking about how Storyful sources social media content from accidental citizen journalists.

Headlines today have suggested that the murder rate has gone up by 5%, or that knifepoint robbery has gone up by 10% in England and Wales. The figures also show that crime overall has dropped by 4%. Reporting crime statistics is a data journalism minefield however, and last year I attended a fascinating set of talks on the subject.

An Oregon judge has inadvertently sparked a wider debate about the nature of journalism, as Cleland Thom reported for the Press Gazette. I think a public set of principles is one key way for publishers to set themselves aside from the general hubbub of the internet.

The Washington Post’s ombudsman Patrick B. Pexton has claimed that the paper is “innovating too fast.” I should imagine it will be news to many observers of our industry that news organisations are innovating at all, let alone too fast. “I want The Post to continue to innovate” he says, ignoring the fact that many of the things he lists in his post are simply “new”, rather than innovative. And many of the problems he raises have nothing to do with technology.

Last night we threw open the Guardian’s door for “UXmas” - a chance to meet people from the UX and design teams, hear a couple of talks, and eat some mince pies before retiring to the pub.

I’m hosting December’s “Carnival of journalism” on the Guardian Developer blog, so it would be a bit remiss not to join in myself. As neither a hack nor a hacker, I thought I'd take the liberty of answering both variations of the question...

The BBC has been taking a lot pf public stick for their redesign of their web homepage. Here is a quick look behind the scenes at how the design process for the page took place back in 2002.

The Guardian has just published the latest in our Guardian Shorts ebook series - “Who’s Who: Ressurection of the Doctor”. I edited the collection. And just as every episode of Doctor Who these days has a behind-the-scenes “Doctor Who Confidential” to go with it, here is the story behind the editing of the book.

We’ve had a lot of products launch over the last few weeks at the Guardian, including Android and Windows phone apps and our Facebook app, but none have been as high profile as our iPad launch. With a design team of Mark Porter, Andy Brockie, Barry Ainslie and John-Henry Barac, you wouldn’t expect it to be anything other than beautiful, and using it has changed the way that I consume news.

It is just over twenty days since we released the Guardian Facebook app. I’ve been engaged with a lot of conversations with people about it on Twitter over the last couple of weeks, and I thought I might put down a few thoughts on the app, and some of the reaction to it.

I spotted an interesting blog post via Twitter this morning: “Guardian Shorts: The Guardian regurgitates articles on Kindle”, written by Jeroen Kraan on his “My Digital Newsroom” blog. On Twitter he described them as “Not really worth buying, but good effort”. Here are my thoughts.

This is the essay version of a talk I gave this morning at the Content Strategy Forum in London - “Taking content strategy to people who already think they have one”. It covers how the Guardian has shifted from traditional to digital publishing, and talks about our CMS, our metadata, our API, and gives my advice for those entering the content strategy field when dealing with traditional publishers.

This is an essay version of a talk given at last week’s Hacks/Hackers meet-up in London. I presented eight things that I believe news organisations need to stop doing, start doing, or do better, in order to cope with the way that digital has transformed the news cycle.

I happen to think that if you take most community management guidelines or blogging and commenting guidelines for staff, they basically boil down to “Don’t be a dick”. In fact, I think there is quite a simple flow chart to follow if you find yourself on the wrong end of a moderation decision on a news website.

I’ll be speaking tonight at the London Hacks/Hackers meeting, and one of the points I’ll be making is that the digital publishing revolution is a perpetual revolution, one that requires constant learning. That section of my talk is partly fuelled by how angry I was made yesterday by a piece in the Press Gazette, which suggested that editors do not value digital media skills.

It is easy to think of “data journalism” as being about automatic computer analysis of large datasets, but good data journalism has story-telling at the centre. Over the coming days, weeks, and months there is a lot of data journalism to be done about the riots and looting in the UK. It is an opportunity for long-form data journalism, and the responsibility of the media to use this data in a way that helps us understand the riots, not in a way that prolongs their negative impact.

On Tuesday I blogged my notes from my colleague Laura Oliver’s talk about news community management at Hacks/Hackers London. The other talk at last week’s event was from Christopher Osborne of ITO World, about visualising big data.

I’ve said on many occasions that I am genuinely baffled how so many news organisations seem to think they can grow an active community on their website, without investing in any community management. At the Guardian we have several people in a role called “community co-ordinator” who fulfill this remit. One of them, Laura Oliver, spoke at the last London Hacks/Hackers meet-up. Here are my notes on four of the key points that Laura made in her talk.

Andy Rutledge published a fascinating blog post last week looking at the design of digital news, and to illustrate his points he did a redux of the New York Times. Whilst appreciating the visual design, I thought there were 4 key areas where I very much disagree with Andy’s analysis, and think it would fail to engage with mainstream news readers.

The other week I wondered why newspapers still need a distinct name on a Sunday in a digital age. I thought I’d have a look at how the existing titles handle their URL and domain name strategy.

An interesting example of getting analogue and digital news metadata out of sync yesterday. At the moment that last night’s paper reviews were revealing The Sun’s “Brown wrong” front page splash, the online version of the story was bylined Vince Soodin. That wasn’t the case in print.

At the UPA conference Susan Weinschenk talked about the paradox of choice, and that how as humans we often say that we want a wide array of choice, but actually find it bewildering when presented with it. I thought it might be worthwhile doing a quick survey of the level of choice that news homepages present to users. This table shows the number of headlines displayed to readers on the front pages of some major international news sites:

Whilst I was in Atlanta I took the opportunity to take the Inside CNN Studio Tour, and was interested to see how an American news operation gets presented as a tourist attraction.

A Storify looking at the timeline of edits on Toby Young’s blog about Johann Hari yesterday, and what they tell us about “stealth edits” and article metadata

Pride comes before a fall. In the wake of the Johann Hari affair, I boasted that as an amateur blogger I never misattribute quotes. Only, four hours later, to be notified that I had done just that the previous day...

I don’t very often post to this blog just to write “Yeah! What he said”. But this is basically just that...

Yesterday I got involved in a long Twitter conversation about anonymous and pseudo-anonymous comments on news websites involving Adam L. Penenberg, Mathew Ingram, Anna Tarkov, Amrita Mathur and Brad King. It was kicked off as people responded to this piece on the issue by Mathew at Gigaom. I’ve tried to sum up the six main points I was making in bursts of slightly more than 140 characters, and I’ve tried to interweave some of the conversation.

Last night I was at the Hacks/Hackers meet-up to hear Andreas Gebhart, Stuart Myles and Evan Sandhaus talk about the proposed new IPTC semantic metadata standard rNews.

“It is ironic that you have to print the website out” someone said to me at the Knight-Mozilla News Innovation Jam at the weekend, and the Guardian’s 190th anniversary exhibition asks questions about how we preserve our digital products.

A link was doing the rounds today to a thought-provoking blog post by Donald Mahoney about journalism in a “post-content farm” world. Unfortunately, the thoughts it mostly provoked in me were: “You’ve missed the point”.

As I blogged earlier in the week, on Saturday I was at Kings Place, not for work, but to attend the Knight-Mozilla News Innovation Jam. Once the ideas generation got underway, I ended up on a team with Nicola Hughes, Jonathan Austin, David Asfaha and my colleague - and it turned out later judge - Daithí Ó Crualaoich. We ended up pitching four ideas around the theme of community.

Outside of the news industry, it sometimes seems insane that we insist on reinventing the wheel and rebuilding tools when there are free alternatives out on the web. Here are five reasons I think we do that.

The final session at news:rewired on Friday was a panel discussing the medium of live blogging, expertly hosted by Marcus Warren from the Telegraph, and featuring my colleague Guardian Blog’s Editor Matt Wells, Anna Doble of Channel 4, and Paul Gallagher of the Manchester Evening News. It was a really good session, with some good natured rivalry between the Telegraph and Guardian on display, and it really felt like the conversation has moved on from “What is live blogging and should we be doing it?” to “How can we use this new uniquely digital media to its best advantage and develop it further”.

Could it be that having a large American audience online means that the Mail is now treating issues like "The N-word" differently editorially in print and in digital?

On Saturday I spent the day in the Guardian’s offices as a guest at the Knight-Mozilla News Innovation Jam. As a preamble to the actual brain-storming and designing, there were talks from Guardian journalist Paul Lewis, interactive technologist Alastair Dant, and the BBC’s Jonathan Austin. Here are my notes.

I spent a really good day at news:rewired yesterday. With one track dedicated to data journalism, and another to social media, it was no surprise that I found plenty of things of interest. Here are my notes on some of the things that stood out for me.

I recently appeared as part of a panel session at FutureEverything talking about data journalism. I’ve already blogged the four points I was planning to make. Here are my notes from the talks given by those I was sharing the stage with: Chris Taggart, David Higgerson and Paul Bradshaw

My curiosity was piqued by the controversy surrounding the BBC’s decision to drastically reduce the number of characters users could submit as a comment on the BBC News site to 400. And so I thought I'd carry out a quick survey of character limits across a range of UK and US news sites, and compared that with some popular blogs and social media sites.

Alexis Madrigal asked in The Atlantic if it was “the magazine app of the future”, and I’ve been playing around with Biblion, the app produced by the New York Public Library. Although it has generated some rave reviews, I thought there were some flaws and missed opportunities in the app.

Echoing the rather unfortunate incident that turned the “Parents” magazine masthead into “Penis”, I found myself last week looking at this effort from the Financial Times for some time pondering whether it was about suicide or divorce, before noticing the obscured “Sp” in “How to spend it”.

At the last Hacks/Hackers London, Martin Moore and Ben Bradshaw of the Media Standards Trust were presenting their “Manifesto for transparent digital journalism”. Here are my notes from the session.

Guardian Readers’ Editor Chris Elliott recently gave a lunchtime talk to assorted staff about a trip to Egypt, where he was talking to local journalists about journalistic ethics and press regulation. As well as The Guardian’s reporting having an effect in Cairo via Twitter, we were reporting what was being posted from there - and there was a good debate after Chris spoke about the verification standards that you could put to information collected this way, and how it should then presented to our audience via live blogging and other means.

Guardian Readers’ Editor Chris Elliott recently gave a lunchtime talk to assorted staff about his recent trip to Egypt, where he was talking to local journalists about journalistic ethics and press regulation. It turned out to be a timely visit, as Chris arrived shortly after the toppling of Hosni Mubarak, with the press in the country facing an uncertain, but presumably freer future. During it, he discussed how Egyptians themselves see the role played by social media in the events.

Nick Petrie on the Wannabe Hacks blog recently asked why news organisations were only getting to grips with the concept of online community now in 2011. In the course of his post, he said: “What I wonder is - why didn't a newspaper invent Facebook or Twitter?”. He’s not the first to wonder that, but personally, I’m unconvinced that this isn’t akin to asking why the Great Western Railway didn’t invent the automobile.

This is the last of three blog posts inspired by attending Paul Bradshaw’s inaugural lecture at City University. So far I’ve published my notes about what he said on news organisations and online communities, and on the problem of ego in journalism. Today I wanted to look at what I think was the most interesting aspect of Paul’s talk. It was the most passionately I’ve seen someone frame the arguments around net neutrality and issues of ISP regulation directly with regard to the tools and practice of journalism.

“Do we want to be Journalists with a capital J and bathe in the glory of our guild, or do we want to support journalism?”. This was one of the more provocative passages of Paul Bradshaw’s inaugural lecture at City University. Yesterday I posted my notes on what he said about news organisations and communities, and in this blog post I want to look at some structural problems he identified with journalism as a profession.

One of the sessions that I attended at the recent Media Guardian Changing Media Summit was dedicated to the future of the music industry - a subject that has always been close to my heart, and which now has some interesting learning points for other forms of entertainment and digital media. Here are my notes from the event.

The Daily Mail has published vile comments pre-judging the situation involving Iman Al-Obeidi in Libya. It is worth noting that the comments go through pre-moderation and sub-editing.

It is a couple of weeks ago now that I attended Paul Bradshaw’s inaugural lecture at City University, entitled “Is ice cream strawberry?”. Paul has made a multi-part essay version of the talk available on his blog, and you can view the slides on SlideShare. Over the next couple of blog posts on currybetdotnet there are a couple of points he made that I’d like to dwell on, and the first is about users and community.

A rare foray into print for me today, where I’m quoted in a Media Guardian article looking at live blogging news on the web. Guardian Blogs Editor Matt Wells wrote the piece, and he asked me a few questions about my views on live blogging to get those quotes. Here they are.

There was another fascinating round of the debate about anonymous and pseudo-anonymous comments on newspaper websites this morning, which seemed to be primarily kicked off by Times columnist David Aaronovitch on Twitter: “Can anyone think of a reason why commenters on newspaper sites should be allowed to be anonymous, or use pseudonyms? I find the CiF comments system completely pointless, partly because of ano/pseudo-nymity. Same tedious trashers endlessly recycled.”

A couple of weeks ago at The Guardian our SEO Editorial Executive Chris Moran gave a talk about SEO to an assembled bunch of people from around the business. He said: “A lot of the opinions people have about SEO are based upon prejudice and a lack of understanding about how search engines work.”. Here are my notes from his talk.

In just over a fornight’s time I’ll be opening the Polish IA Summit, with a keynote presentation entitled “Come as you are”. It is a reference to the Nirvana track, as an anecdote about the band from my days working in a record shop is one of the elements setting up the talk. It is also a look back at the key things I’ve learned through 13 years of working with websites and digital products, and watching and being part of the disciplines of information architecture and user experience design evolving into the established job roles that they are today. As part of the build-up I’ve been interviewed by Artur Kurasińsk

My first impressions of the Sky News app on iPad have been very positive. They’ve promised that it gives “new ways to deliver news to our users”, and it is a very different visual approach.