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Suw Charman-Anderson

Suw Charman-Anderson

Suw Charman-Anderson is a social software consultant and writer who specialises in the use of blogs and wikis behind the firewall. With a background in journalism, publishing and web design, Suw is now one of the UK’s best known bloggers, frequently speaking at conferences and seminars.

Her personal blog is Chocolate and Vodka, and yes, she’s married to Kevin.

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Kevin Anderson

Kevin Anderson

Kevin Anderson is a freelance journalist and digital strategist with more than a decade of experience with the BBC and the Guardian. He has been a digital journalist since 1996 with experience in radio, television, print and the web. As a journalist, he uses blogs, social networks, Web 2.0 tools and mobile technology to break news, to engage with audiences and tell the story behind the headlines in multiple media and on multiple platforms.

From 2009-2010, he was the digital research editor at The Guardian where he focused on evaluating and adapting digital innovations to support The Guardian’s world-class journalism. He joined The Guardian in September 2006 as their first blogs editor after 8 years with the BBC working across the web, television and radio. He joined the BBC in 1998 to become their first online journalist outside of the UK, working as the Washington correspondent for BBCNews.com.

And, yes, he’s married to Suw.

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Tuesday, October 23rd, 2007

When trusted guides don’t guide

Posted by Kevin Anderson

Canyon Country Fire by respres

Canyon County Fire by respres on Flickr, Creative Commons, Some Rights Reserved

I was looking through my feeds and found this on Mashable: This Disaster Will Be Twitterized. Mark Hopkins recalls how more than 10 years ago, he aggregated all of the coverage of the Oklahoma City bombing on his Angelfire page. His page was listed prominently on the Yahoo page showing coverage of the tragedy.

Mark fast-forwarded to the present day and watched the California wildfires unfold in Flickr, Twitter and a number of other Web 2.0 sites. And he makes this observation:

Any news channel or show on the TV is prominently featuring this disaster in varying degrees of detail, but if you reside outside of Southern California, what exactly are you going to learn from the national news reports that will be useful to you in a situation like this? CNN isn’t going to point you to the ten mile long Google Map mashup that shows where the fires are. MSNBC isn’t going to aggregate the links for you.

The question for any news organisation is why not? This isn’t rocket science. There are no technical hurdles to doing this if you have even a half-way decent CMS, and it’s dead easy if you’ve got some blogging software. If part of news organisations’ job is to be a trusted guide, why are so many blind to the aggregating this content and helping their audience navigate it?

Chris Vallance and Rhod Sharp had a couple of great interviews on the BBC’s Pods and Blogs last night. (Note: I used to help Chris and Rhod with the programme, and Chris will be the best man at my wedding.) But I’m still baffled why web aggregation during breaking news with follow up interviews still are the exception not the norm. There are all of these people living through a news event making themselves known through blog posts, photo sharing sites, social networking sites and more, and yet we’re still telling the story through wire copy, agency video and stills. It’s yet another missed opportunity by doing what we do the same way we’ve always done it. Editorial innovation can happen while meeting the demands of breaking news.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 23rd, 2007 at 5:03 pm and is filed under Journalism, Media 2.0. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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2 Responses to “When trusted guides don’t guide”

  1. Jeffrey McManus Says:
    October 24th, 2007 at 4:43 am

    Hmm, not sure what this guy’s point is — the Los Angeles Times is indeed linking to a custom Google map (and I see Google Earth quite frequently; I’d be surprised if they weren’t using it to cover this story).

  2. Kevin Anderson Says:
    October 24th, 2007 at 5:15 pm

    Jeffrey,

    There are quite a few sites using Google Earth/Google maps. But that’s a mash-up. It’s not pulling in all of the observations from Twitter, blogs and Flickr, just to name a few sources. That’s the point.

    To be fair, I did hear NBC solicit users’ photos. However, the point that I’m making and have continually made is that news organisations still are relying on calls for contributions rather than looking to the rich record of the event being created online by people living through the disaster.