Andrew Turner: Beyond Google Maps presentation

Some people might say that I’m geo-obsessed. Since I started geo-tagging my Flickr photos, now about half of my entire Flickr stream is geo-tagged. I use Google’s Latitude, and I’ve written about the opportunities that I see for geo-location and news.

Last week, I met someone even more enthusiastic about geo-data and maps than I am, Andrew Turner. In this more than 200 slide presentation, Andrew presents a treasure trove of mapping concepts and resources. At slide 37, he talks about the near future for mapping and data. Andrew talks even faster than I do after I’ve drunk three cups of coffee, which is saying something so I’m thankful that several of his presentations are on SlideShare. This post is just to highlight a valuable resource.

One of the things I’m thinking about in light of his presentation and my own experience is how to make gathering data - geo-data and other data - easier for journalists. With more demands on our time, the workflow has to be extremely efficient or it won’t get done. I’m also thinking about the stories that benefit from location. One of things implicit in Andrew’s talk is how maps can tell stories, but not every story is best told with a map. The first mash-ups were map-based, and it’s led to an over-reliance on location for data-driven projects. Digital mapping is a powerful tool, but like all tools, digital maps are not appropriate for all tasks. However, the next time I need a map, Andrew’s presentation will definitely point me in the direction of the tools that I need to do the job.

As I wrote in my post from earlier today, I didn’t know if the statistics from the American Press Institute about paid content held up for the UK market. As if on cue, paidContent.co.uk (owned by the folks who pay my bills at the Guardian) have commissioned a survey in the UK by Harris Interactive that track very closely with the US numbers. According to the figures from API, a 2009 Belden survey in the US found that if content was no longer available for free on a newspaper website that 68% of respondents would turn to “other local Internet sites.” The Harris survey in the UK found even worse figures: 74% would turn to another free website.

Robert Andrews at paidContent.co.uk has a thorough run-down of the numbers and looks at age, demographics and geographical differences in the data. One thing that leapt out at me is that London had the highest figures for those willing to pay if their favourite news site began charging, but even in the media capital of the UK, a scant 17% would be willing to open up their pocketbooks.

Another statistic that I found interesting is that 16-24 year-olds were much more willing to pay than any other age group. It’s still not a high percentage, 13%, but it is much higher than the 1-2% of anyone over 35. Is that because younger age groups value the internet as an information source more or because they are more accustomed to paying for content online or on their mobile phones? The survey doesn’t answer these questions although it might be contained in user interviews that are not discussed in the post.

I am sure that people on both sides of the paid content debate will look at these figures and find in them data that supports their position. However, it is difficult to use these numbers to posit a case where paid content online becomes a major source or revenue that will replace the declining revenue in the traditional print business.

As the great paid content debate of 2009 has played out, we’ve had a lot of assertions about what users should pay for without much clarity about what they would pay for or much about their habits. My gut feeling is that users will pay for certain types of content but that it will be extremely difficult to simply monetise existing content or attempt to create false scarcity by putting all content behind a paywall and drive readers back to print.

As a journalist who has chosen to make the internet my primary medium, my gut and quite a bit of my experience tells me that while I may be an early adopter, readers are moving more toward my habits than staying with or moving to print habits. However, I’m very careful not to generalise without data. My friends are all part of what I often refer to as the global geek collective. Our habits are our own and we shouldn’t assume that those habits are common to our audiences.

This week, however, new data appeared that made me feel slightly less like an outlier. The American Press Institute released the results of a survey of 2,400 news executives in the US. The event was invitation only, but Harvard’s Nieman Foundation for Journalism released the 80-slide presentation. It is a treasure trove of data and journalism bloggers have been slowing dissecting the data and the methodology all week.

Steve Outing highlighted a statistic that should give news executives and journalists pause. As Steve points out:

…the graphic shows that 75% of newspaper execs believe that if their content were no longer available on their website, online users would foremost turn to the print edition of the newspaper. Meanwhile, only 30% of online news users said they would turn to the print edition in such a case; the No. 1 choice (at 68% of respondents to a 2009 Belden survey) was to look to “other local Internet sites.”

Steve comes to the conclusion that “newspaper leaders remain delusional”. I might be a wee bit more generous and say that this is a clear message from users to newspaper owners in the US. However, not to put too fine of a point on it: This is a radical disconnect between the assumptions of publishers and the views of people who might have formerly been their audience.

Would the results be the same in the UK or other markets? I’d love to know. Suw and I often bemoan the lack of basic media research in the UK. In the US, the Pew Centers for the Internet and American Life and for the People and the Press do excellent basic research on internet usage patterns, attitudes towards the press and other media issues. The UK could really benefit from similar research.

Returning to the API-commissioned survey, the bloggers at Harvard’s Nieman Lab did an excellent job pulling out key bits of data from the survey.

Again, there is much food for thought. It’s important to note that the API commissioned the survey in the context of the meeting billed as the “Newsmedia Economic Action Plan Conference”, wherein the US newspaper industry tried to buy a clue as to how to survive the recession and rebuild a viable, sustainable business. Of course, Steve Brill and Co at Journalism Online have offered themselves up as the key to the glorious future of paid content online. They were one of several companies that provided proposals to publishers at the event.

Zach Seward provides this caveat about one of the companies responsible for the API survey, ITZ Publishing:

You’ll also want to apply a helping of salt because ITZ Publishing consults for Steve Brill’s pay-for-news firm Journalism Online, which just touted the results as an “API study” without noting its business interest.

The ‘frequency challenge’

The survey highlighted, yet again, what Steve Yelvington has been pointing to for years: The challenge of frequency for news websites.

In nearly all markets, newspaper websites receive 2.5 visits and 10 pageviews for each unique visitor.

Steve’s frequency challenge is this: High monthly (or even daily running average) unique figures for many websites obscure the fact that most of these visitors come infrequently and look at only a few pages. This is one of the reasons why, despite record numbers of visitors to news websites, it is proving difficult to translate this traffic into revenue. The recession and subsequent collapse in online and offline advertising is a slightly separate, but deadly, issue for news organisations.

As the survey found, the 2.5 visits and 10 pageviews a month figure is a pretty consistent figure across the industry. It’s grim, but it really highlights the amount of drive-by visitors coming to news sites via search engines and the high level of long tail activity on most news sites. The head of the tail is about 25% of readership, what the survey calls “core loyalists”. The survey found:

“Core loyalists,” who visit a newspaper 2-3 times a day for 20 days a month, comprise 25% of unique visitors. Not surprisingly, then, core loyalists account for 86% of pageviews and are “overwhelmingly local.”

Steve Outing’s and Zach Seward’s posts and Bill Densmore’s liveblog of the event are well worth reading for more context.

I’d like to see more demographic information about core loyalists. How old are they? Are they heavily weighted in older age groups? Is there evidence that these core loyalists are being replaced by readers over 30? Assuming that core loyalists are older - and there is evidence to support this - should newspapers focus on older readers? Unfortunately, we have good data that says that older readers aren’t being replaced. Focusing on a declining group of older readers is not a long-term strategy and it begs the question: Can news organisations provide compelling services that re-engage younger readers online or offline? Furthermore, if most of these services are digital, not an unrealistic assumption, can they build a business around these services?

The concept of ‘core audience’ as outlined in this study is difficult to translate to the British market because UK newspapers with national circulation don’t really have a loyal local audience unless one considers their London base as local. However, regardless of whether this data is relevant to the UK market, the pain being felt by newspapers, especially regional newspapers in the UK, is similar if not worse.

I’m still digesting these figures. I would say that they reinforce one of the points made by the Internet Manifesto out of Germany that has been making the rounds and some waves: “12. Tradition is not a business model.” As any journalist who gets out of the media bubble knows, the sense of importance, relevance and audience loyalty often expressed in the boardrooms of many news organisations is such happy talk that you have to wonder what’s in the tea and biscuits.

Reconnecting with audiences

Many of us have known for quite a while the problems that this survey flags up. Paid content advocates like Brill & Co will read into this that their promise to get 10% of online news audiences to pay for some kinds of content is achievable. However, this masks serious long term issues for news organisations. Our audiences are shrinking. They aren’t being replaced and while we have business-threatening short term economic issues we will have to quickly pivot to deal with these long term issues.

The biggest long term problem most news organisations have is declining trust and relevance. I have to agree with Michael Skoler, writing in the autumn edition of Nieman Reports.

Journalists are truth-tellers. But I think most of us have been lying to ourselves. … The news became less local and less relevant, and reporters became less connected to their communities. Surveys show a steep drop in public trust in journalism occurring during the past 25 years. … The truth is the Internet didn’t steal the audience. We lost it. Today fewer people are systematically reading our papers and tuning into our news programs for a simple reason—many people don’t feel we serve them anymore. We are, literally, out of touch.

One important step that we need to take to rebuild our businesses is to rebuild our relationship with our audiences. This is why I embraced blogging as a journalist and have continued to embrace more recent forms of social media. I saw an opportunity to improve my journalism and, by opening up to a conversation with our audiences, I saw an opportunity to reconnect with audiences and build a sense of loyalty. It is why I stress when I speak to journalists and editors that it is a mistake to believe that social media is fundamentally a technical problem for news organisations. I’ve seen excellent technical solutions that still fail because journalists won’t engage with their audiences. More journalists will need to take responsibility for rehabilitating this relationship. It’s not just about building a personal brand. It is more importantly about rebuilding trust. Without that, the economic solutions are meaningless short-term fixes.

Technorati Tags:
paid content, media, trust

I’m a big believer in sharing stories about success, failures and even things that are in process. No one has the corner on good ideas, and often opening up the process can help get a wider view. No one has a perfect process, and often, we’re dealing with similar issues. It can feel a bit like the corporate version of group therapy, but it can be very useful, if for no other reason as a means of catharsis. Unfortunately, this happens rarely because most people maintain a relatively narrow view of competitive advantage.

Fortunately, AIGA, a professional design association, has written a detailed overview about the National Public Radio site redesign process. It’s invaluable for anyone looking to redesign and re-architect a news website. It speaks to goals, thinking and process.

They worked with Schematic to “provide the initial visual design and information architecture”. (Disclosure: Suw and I are friends with Dale Herigstad, the chief creative officer of Schematic and Jason Brush, the EVP of User Experience Design with the company. We’ve had the good fortune of swapping ideas with them over dinner, or in Jason’s case, also over blueberry pancakes before I started my US election trip last autumn.)

This post steps you through the entire process from goals to completion. Like many sites, NPR was working with a 6-yeard-old content management system and wanted to update the CMS and the design. My employer, the Guardian, did something similar recently.

One of the things I noticed from the write-up:

(NPR) had two editorial producers embedded in our group for the duration of the project. Their feedback was invaluable in helping us design a system that met the needs of our news teams.

I think this is important, but I would also suggest that journalists are involved in any process to choose or develop a CMS. As an online journalist for more than a decade, the CMS is either the enabler or the roadblock to efficient work. One of the reasons that I’ve been a big advocate of blogging tools is that they are faster and easier not just for the technically proficient but also for the novice. If your CMS trims even just 10 minutes off of every story a journalist writes or produces, that adds up to days over the course of a year. Clumsy tools take time away from creating compelling stories.

NPR also shifted to an Agile development process. That is a major challenge, and we at the Guardian also use Agile. I’m not going to go into the details of Agile here, but Suw and I have long thought that Agile is good for platform level projects like site redesign but not best suited for day-to-day editorial development.

However, in this review, I’d highlight one of the lessons NPR learned that relates not simply to Agile development but to wider issues of major projects like a site redesign:

Each one of us also had to be open-minded and empathetic. When conflicts arose over how best to solve a problem, it was imperative to remember that in the end, we were all working toward the same goal.

The article is well worth reading and digesting. I’m sure that people who have been through this process will see quite a few points they recognise, but this is an invaluable exercise in openness by NPR. It might not prevent you from facing the same or similar challenges, but at least you’ll know you’re not alone. Moreover, when conflicts arise, remember the real competition is down the street rather than down the hall.

Technorati Tags:
news, website, design

Normally, I would just add this to our (almost) daily collection of links, but Vin Crosbie has said something so succinctly and clearly that it deserves a post and a full reading. At ClickZ, Vin says:

…today with newspapers, magazines, and broadcasters who clamor for the “missing” business model that will allow them to stay in business doing what they’ve always done. It will never be found because continuing to do what they’ve done no longer makes sense. There are more quick and efficient ways to produce and disseminate information.

Anyone looking for the silver bullet business model to save their old business needs to read what Vin has to say.

The internet has fundamentally changed the economics of information. Digital distribution has ended information scarcity, and much of the new talk of paywalls isn’t about making money but attempting to recreate scarcity. I seriously doubt this will work, and I seriously doubt that trying to squeeze revenue out of much of the existing information output will work. There is no business model that will allow journalists to simply continue doing what they have done. Journalists, editors and publishers need to accept this and re-make their businesses.

Chris Anderson of Wired points out that the journalism businesses of the 20th Century was built on scarcity and monopoly rents. Newspapers were once the most efficient ways for advertisers to get their messages to the public. This created media empires that could fund huge staffs of journalists. Howeveer, beginning in the 1970s and accelerating with satellite television and the internet, people had more choices for entertainment and information. As I’ve often said, information isn’t the scarce resource now. We’re fighting for attention.

This leads to a host of questions. These are just a few.

• Accepting that information is no longer scarce, what value can journalists add for our audiences?
• If we’re not adding value, why are we doing it? What are we going to have to stop doing?
• What new services can we create that will support journalism?

We really need to be thinking beyond business models to support our existing business and our existing ways of doing journalism. I used to think that the efficiencies of digital production would help existing journalism organisations to jump the chasm. I’m no longer confident that this is possible.

After a very busy summer, I’ve got a backlog of blogging here on Strange Attractor and a backlog of thoughts. In addition to considering the issues of over-supply, I agree with Dan Gillmor, we’ve got a problem with the demand for news. As per usual, Dan is asking some very important questions. I am starting to think of ways that we can stimulate demand by actively working to engage our audiences. I’m excited to be plugging back into the discussion about what we journalists do next, and Suw and I are looking to move this discussion beyond the talking and into doing.

Every journalist learns (or should learn) how to evaluate sources and, as the web increasingly becomes a source for stories, we need to know whether the things that we stumble across there would make a good source. The internet has been an important part of my job as a journalist almost since I took my first full-time journalism job in 1994. Internet journalists have their own investigative skills, skills that will have to become more widespread as the internet becomes part of every journalist’s job.

I mention this in the wake of a hoax last week by Alex Hilton, aka the British political blogger Recess Monkey. For background, I’ll refer to the Guardian, my day job:

Been following the ding-dong over Tory MP Chris Grayling comparing parts of “Broken Britain” to Baltimore, the crime-ridden city shown in The Wire? What about the riposte from Baltimore mayor Sheila Dixon, who has hit back stating that comparing The Wire to the real Baltimore was “as pointless as boasting that Baltimore has a per capita homicide rate a fraction of that in the popular UK television show Midsomer Murders.” If only.

The British press, and to be fair the hometown Baltimore Sun, reported that the mayor of Baltimore rose to the defence of her fair city. The only problem is that she didn’t. The Guardian was one of the British newspapers that fell for the hoax.

I have to take my hat off to Alex. I’ve never had the pleasure of meeting him, but the hoax was very well executed. Alex created a Twitter account to promote the site. He created a YouTube channel and a video.

To create the site, he simply copied the underlying code from a web page from the official Mayor of Baltimore’s site and changed some of the content. This retained all of the links to the official site and the images were simply pulled from the official server. It’s an immaculate hack. He didn’t have to break into anyone’s server, just copy a web page and add his own content.

It’s a similar trick to phishing scams. It looks like Amazon.com or your bank, but you’ve actually just been sent to some mobsters’ site in Russia or a naked IP address. (I don’t mean to disparage the good people of Russia, but a helluva lot of phishing scams are .ru.) You have to be pay attention to the web address to notice that you’ve suddenly been teleported somewhere else on the web.

Alex explains his motivations and the clues that he left to tip anyone off that it was a joke:

So what else did I do to make sure this wasn’t seen as the true views of the Mayor of Baltimore or an attempt to deceive anyone or to smear Chris Grayling? I registered the mayorofbaltimore.org domain in my own name. I squirrelled in the English spelling of “dishonoured” as a clue. I put at the bottom of the page, “Copyright R Monkee Esq” and linked it to my currently decrepit Recess Monkey website. I put the following message on Recess Monkey for anyone who cared to follow the link:

Sorry, RecessMonkey is on holiday in Maryland. Right mouse button click view source (but not on this website) R Monkee Esq.

If you had looked at the source on the site, you would have found this:

OK, so I’m just having a bit of fun at Chris Grayling’s expense. Sitting in the office on a hot August afternoon, I was fantasising that I was Mayor of Baltimore and how annoyed I would be. I hope you very quickly picked up that this was a spoof. Didn’t mean to break any laws or ethical mores - please don’t extradite me if I have unwittingly done so. Hope you appreciate the humour, Alex Hilton, alexhilton@gmail.com - 07985 384 859

Alex expected journalists to spot the humour and the hoax, but it was reported as fact. He rang the Guardian switchboard and was put through to me. He was trying to ratchet down the media furore. The Guardian media desk wrote a brief story about the hoax, and I alerted the news desk so the correction process could begin.

So, what gives a hoax like this away? Here’s your three point guide to spotting when someone’s pulling your leg.

1. Pay attention to the URL
   When a colleague sent me the website address, I spotted the hoax immediately. I didn’t even need to see the site to know it was a fake. How? The URL was mayorofbaltimore.org, not .gov or .md.us. In a UK context, that’s similar to a fake Downing Street site with the address www.number10.org.uk instead of www.number10.gov.uk. Org addresses are for non-profits not for governmental websites.
2. Who owns the site?
   Finding out who owns a site is easy. Do a WHOIS lookup, and you’ll find out not only who owns the site, but sometimes even their contact details. Most of the time this is corporate information that won’t give you a person to ring, but as Alex says, he registered the site in his own name.
3. Hover over the links
   Why? If you hover over the links, you would have seen they went to a different address, not mayorofbaltimore.org. It could save you from a phishing scam and it could have prevented journalists from falling for this hoax.
4. Be wary of a Twitter account with only one update
   Alex created a fake Twitter account, and the only update linked to his fake press release. That’s a big warning sign to me.

Alex also hid a huge clue in the source code, including his mobile phone number and his e-mail address. To see the underlying code of a web page in Firefox, go to the View menu and scroll down to Source. For Internet Explorer, go to Page on the menu bar and scroll down to Page Source. UPDATE: A commenter on Twitter admitted she probably wouldn’t have thought to look at the source code of the page. I looked at the code because I wanted to see how Alex had cloned the page. When things look fishy, the code can reveal a lot. Alex also made it clear on Recess Monkey that there was an Easter Egg hidden there as well.

Much of what I have described were once specialist skills that only web geeks needed to know, but as the web becomes more of every journalists’ job, having these relatively simple skills might be the thing that prevents you from falling for the next hoax. These are not technical skills anymore. They are skills you need to evaluate a source on the web, conduct an investigation and protect your credibility as a journalist.

Chris Anderson, of Long Tail and now Free fame, is obviously getting peeved at the questions he’s getting from journalists. He says as much in this interview at Frank Hornig at Salon.com. Probably the most important line in this rather tedious interview is when Anderson says:

I read lots of articles from mainstream media but I don’t go to mainstream media directly to read it. It comes to me, which is really quite common these days. More and more people are choosing social filters for their news rather than professional filters. We’re tuning out television news, we’re tuning out newspapers. And we still hear about the important stuff, it’s just that it’s not like this drumbeat of bad news. It’s news that matters. I figure by the time something gets to me it’s been vetted by those I trust. So the stupid stuff that doesn’t matter is not going to get to me.

[From Who needs newspapers when you have Twitter? | Salon News]

Like Anderson, I have developed filters to tune out much of what is in the media. A few years ago journalists were decrying the loss of the all (self-)important gate-keeping function that they said they performed. I got to a point where I thought that if that is what journalists think is their unique selling point then they’re doomed because they are doing a lousy job of determining what is really important.

I spend a lot of time sifting through, while ignoring, much of the garbage produced by media to find a few, small nuggets of information that are useful. I can afford to do that. It’s my job. Not only can I not imagine most people doing this, I think they stopped quite a while ago. They realised that the signal-to-noise ratio was so low that they were better served by just tuning out.

I can ignore most of the childish nonsense that obsesses the mainstream media. Honestly, if it weren’t my job, I would pay to filter out much of this noise. I don’t need to read the professional trolls aka columnists who try to tell me what I should be outraged about. I can figure that out for myself, thank you very much. I do pay for insightful analysis. Most of what obsesses the media is remarkably juvenile, and as the media’s fortunes have waned, they have becoming annoyingly shrill in trying to reassert their role in society. Watchdogs? Defenders of democracy? I wish. Mostly of the media operate as little more than professional gossips and hypocritical scolds.

For the last several years, I have said that the network is my filter. Through blogs, social bookmarking services like Delicious, Twitter and even simple things like email newsletters, I am passed incredibly relevant and high quality information. It’s not that I think professional journalists are superfluous. I just find that social filters are providing an extremely valuable service in recommending the best, most relevant information available.

We’re coming to an economic point where we as journalists have crossed a Rubicon where we can’t do more with less, we’re simply going to have to do less. We just don’t have the resources to create redundant content that provides little value to our audiences. We need to start looking to ways to filter the best information. We need to do it soon. We’re running out of time. Our audiences ran out of patience long ago.

Deutsche Welle Best of the Blogs 2008 winners

Bloggers were well represented at Deutsche Welle’s Global Media Forum, in part because it was the first time that they awarded their BOBs - Best of the Blogs - to the winning bloggers in person. The forum was a stark reminder of internet theorist Clay Shirky’s observation that technology that is often used to pass time in the West can be an essential tool for expression and democracy in repressive countries. Blogging has become a powerful means of expression, reporting and organisation in countries around the world.

Blogging and citizen journalism

During a panel on blogging and citizen journalism, Israel Yoroba Guebo from the Ivory Coast said that in his country, “We hope that our journalists don’t end up in prison.” There is only one television channel and opposition political parties have no way to communicate their positions. He used to work for a newspaper, but he wanted an outlet to tell about the everyday life of people in his country.

Ivory Coast was divided by conflict in 2002 as rebels held part of the country. The political conflict didn’t just divide the country but also its people. He wrote on his blog Le Blog de Yoro about life in all parts of the country and tried to show that people shared the same way of life in an effort to bring about reconciliation.

He was asked whether blogging could have prevented the conflict. He said:

“In Ivory Coast, we didn’t see a way to prevent crisis, but if we had the blog, maybe we could have prevented some of the massacres.”

Another person asked him who was the target audience of the blog. Was it Africans, many of whom don’t have access to the internet, or was it audiences in Europe and the US?

He said that it was important to let people in other countries know what was happening in the Ivory Coast, but maybe his blog would also encourage others to take up bloggin. “The more bloggers that we have, the greater opportunity we have to talk freely,” he said.

The problem is that blogging there is difficult and expensive. They don’t have broadband and have to go to internet cafes to post. However, he said:

“You can at least give the world the possibility to express themselves. Something that would never be accepted on the television.”

Iranians do not have to be encouraged to blog. It is often said that Persian is the fourth most common language for blogs. Four years ago, women in Iran gathered outside of parliament to protest a law that prevented women from becoming president, but it was one of many laws unfair to women. The women decided to protest every day of the year against one of these laws, said Nazli Farokhi.

“We realised that 365 days was not enough,” she said, so they started the blog 4equality. It gives a chance for women who support the campaign to write about their experiences. She was asked about the security of the bloggers. Police have arrested 50 of their members, and four remain in prison.

During the BOBs award ceremony, she played the group’s anthem which describes the discrimination that women in Iran face and the hope that one day women and men can be equal there.

Threats to bloggers

A climate of fear due to threats of violence, intimidation or arrest face bloggers in repressive countries. Bloggers from China and Cuba were not allowed to travel to accept their awards, but instead had to record video messages for the BOBs ceremony.

Cuban Yoani Sanchez’s Generación Y won the award for best blog 2008. Appearing via video message, she said that having a blog in Cuba “can drive one to madness”: There are no internet connections in people’s homes, and bloggers are forced to go internet cafes or hotels that cater to tourists. The cost of using the internet for one hour is equal to a third of the average Cuban’s salary.

Zeng Jinyan won the Reporters without Borders best blog award. She’s the wife of imprisoned Chinese human rights activist Hu Jia, and she began blogging after being put under house arrest. She writes about life under constant surveillance by the Chinese authorities. She couldn’t travel to accept the reward, but was able to get a video to the BOB organisers. In the video message, she said:

“Blogging has brought new hope to my life.”

Ahmad Abdalla won the award for best blog in Arabic. When he started writing the blog, he said that he was only writing “about small things” and didn’t think that anyone would care about it. But, he added:

“But these small things are affecting my generation, these small things that we’re missing.”

Blogging in Russia

Eugene Gorny said that two or three years ago, he wouldn’t have predicted that he would be interested in the link between politics and blogs in Russia, but now people who were not previously interested are getting involved in the political discussion.

Most popular media channels or national newspapers in Russia are controlled by the government. They have no chance to report about opposition political leaders, protests or anything that the government doesn’t want known or discussed.

Andrei Illarionov, the former chief economic advisor to Vladimir Putin, says of Russia, “People enjoy a tangible level of personal freedoms, but political rights are almost absent, civil liberties are severely restricted and there are significant limits on personal security.”

The regime is afraid of any political activity of the citizens, and brutally oppresses them, Gorny said.

Russians first started blogging seven or eight years ago, but it was mostly for fun and for the self-expression of the internet elite. As the Russian government has seized control of the media, blogs have become an important alternative to the state media for people to discuss issues that are important to them.

A 2009 report by Russian search engine Yandex found 7.4m blogs in Russian, of which about 1m are active. There are 1m posts in the Russian language every day. Russian bloggers are journalists, opposition politicians or “anyone who has a story or an opinion to share”, he said. Journalists blogging are able to write about issues more freely than in the traditional media. But it doesn’t matter whether a blogger is a journalist or not, Gorny said. Rather, bloggers were judged by their peers about their ability to write about significant topics.

Many blogs have a huge readership and reach in Russia. Free magazine F5 reviews the hottest topics in the Russian blogosphere, coming mostly from popular blogging service LiveJournal. The magazine boasts a circulation of 100,000.

Bloggers write reports on what they see, publish documents such as Amnesty International reports, commentary on current events, coverage of protests and quotes and links to other posts.

Their favourite topics are writing about:

1. The “iIllegitimate, corrupted, aggressive and unjust regime”.
2. The constant search for internal and external enemies.
3. Human rights violation in Russia, Chechyna, Ingushetia,
4. Police mayhem, extreme violence and the “outrageous breach of all limits”.
5. Strategies of resistance.

The last has become important as the authorities criminalise new forms of resistance. Russian authorities have clamped down on flash mobs and, earlier this year, they even arrested members of a silent protest for using foul language. The protestors had tape over their mouths. As more protesters are jailed, blogs from prison are part of a growing trend in Russia.

Blogs are a significant and growing part of the media in Russian, and Gorny predicted that if the political situation gets worse, then that the role of blogs will only increase.

Blogs and democracy in the West

Of course, even in the West, blogs can still be used for democratic purposes. US transparency through technology group, the Sunlight Foundation, won the 2008 Best Blog in English for their Party Time blog. The blog aims to collect information on the lobbyists, corporations and other donors who pay for parties for US politicians.

Nancy Watzman said that anonymous sources, some even in the lobbying groups themselves, offer the group tickets to the parties. The tickets come from sources they trust. They post the information on the Party Time blog, helping to shed light on one of the poorly reported aspects of the game of money, access and influence in US politics. During the political conventions in 2008 ahead of the presidential elections, they went to many of the parties, taking videos and posting them to the blog.

They would like to take the project further and are looking for partners, including the Huffington Post.

Markus Beckedahl started blogging at Netzpolitik to discuss issues of digital rights, copyright and censorship on the internet, pulling together stories in German and from around the world on the subject. He does a lot of thinking about how to change politics. He said:

“Politicians do bills about internet and they don’t really know what they are talking about.”

About 70,000 people in Germany use Twitter, and Markus has found that it’s a good way to quickly oganise and mobilise people. Netzpolitik has its own YouTube channel and video podcasting channel, and this has led to reports in traditional media about their efforts and issues.

He discussed some of their political campaigns. In 2005, the German government began discussing whether to switch from Microsoft’s Windows XP to Linux. The software giant threw a party to lobby the government to stick with Windows, Beckedahl said. Netzpolitik crashed the party in penguin costumes, the penguin being the mascot of Linux. Some of the penguins even managed to send pictures from the party via MMS.

In recent months, Deutsche Bahn, the German rail giant, has been in a “spy scandal with their workers”, Beckedahl said. Someone sent him internal DB documents, which he posted on the internet. Their lawyers sent him a cease-and-desist letter. He posted the letter on the site, asking for advice. Soon, the letter and documents were spread across the internet, making it difficult for DB to get them removed.

Their most recent campaign is against a proposed law aimed at child pornography. Instead of seeking to shut down the sites, the German government is looking to use filtering software, but internet activists fear that government filtering efforts could be used by other industries such as the music industry against file-sharing sites or by the Hessen government to filter gambling sites. Activists would rather the government seek limited action to shut down sites operating outside of the law.

The German government has an online petition system. A successful petition has to get 50,000 signatures. Using Twitter and hundreds of blogs, Netzpolitik managed to get the necessary signatures in record time, getting 110,000 in all.

Final Thoughts on the Global Media Forum

I thought one of the best quotes of the forum came from Laura Pintos, who writes at the blog 233grados.com. (233 degrees being the temperature at which paper ignites.) She was asked during the BOBs awards ceremony what she saw as the future of journalism. She answered:

“It is the wrong question. it is the present. We are living in a digital moment. It is our present.”

It was nice to see that point of view represented at the conference, even if it probably represented a minority view amongst the speakers and attendees. While a lot of people are wringing their hands over what the future of journalism is, there are people Pintos and many of the bloggers and podcasters at the conference who aren’t worrying about the future of journalism and rather simply creating it.

I’ve spent most of my career as a field journalist and, like most journalists, I’d rather not be stuck in the office all day sitting in front of a computer. I live for being as close to the story as possible.

When technologies are first introduced, they often have limitations that impose restrictions on what is possible. Initially, internet journalism was desk-based journalism for all but a lucky few. It was mostly production and re-purposing of content from print, radio or television news. For most of us who saw the journalistic possibilities of the internet, using it simply as a repository for content from other media was akin to using a Porsche to haul manure because, like a cart, a Porsche also has wheels. Yes, the internet can be a simple distribution platform for content, but that entirely misses the point, which is one of the reasons journalism is in the predicament it is today. The internet is a highly networked platform to tell stories using text, audio and video that can connect not only content from almost anywhere but, more importantly, connect people.

I was lucky enough to be one of those early few who could use the internet for original, multimedia journalism, and I remember the limits of what we could do in the late 1990s before wifi and mobile data outside of cities. In 1999, I remember running smack into the limitations of the technology of the time when I was covering Hurricane Floyd for the BBC. As the storm rolled through North Carolina, it knocked out power and communications. My mobile phone worked, but there was no way that I could file the pictures I had because I couldn’t get a data connection. Two months later, I got my first mobile data kit: A cable that connected to my phone. I could at least file pictures and copy back to base. It was slow, but it worked.

Many journalists have a very odd relationship with technology and those who use it. It is similar to executives who have their secretaries print out emails for them to read: Not using technology is seen by some journalists as a sign of their position and importance. They have worn (and many still wear) their ignorance as a tribal badge setting them apart for those who must toil in front of a glowing screen.

For me, technology sometimes frustrates, but more often liberates me in the work that I do. I remember a jaw-dropping moment at the US Democratic Party conventions in 2000. I watched as an Indy media journalist streamed live video of the LA police bearing down on protesters. He was peddling backwards, holding a black PowerBook, a webcam and an early high-speed mobile modem from a company called Richochet. He was closer to the action than the TV camera crews.

Our production technology lagged behind as it required a faster data connection than many of the early data modems, which topped out at 9600 baud, could provide. But I could email my copy in from anywhere. I didn’t have to hunt for a phone socket. By 2001, I was totally mobile. Laptop. Wireless modem. Portable printer. The speeds went up to 128kbps, and I could just about use production tools in the field.

Fast forward to today, and not only do we have 500kbps+ wireless data connections in many areas in the US, western Europe and Asia, but we also have a suite of applications that can instantly upload photos, video and text. As I said last week at media140, the technology to produce the content is there, but the production systems and the presentation still need work. But Twitter is a liberating technology, not a technology that “will keep reporters off the streets and in front of their screens”, as journalism professor Edward Wasserman writes.

And if he thinks that mobile phone technology is just for “the young, the hip, the technically sophisticated, the well-off”, he obviously hasn’t travelled to South Asia or Africa or even to most neighbourhoods in the US. He obviously doesn’t understand the prevalence of pay-as-you-go phones, not only for communications, but also for micropayments and information services in the developing world. This isn’t just about kilobits and data, it’s also about SMS and the inventiveness of the human mind that takes a simple tool and carves out a revolution. When I worked on the World Have Your Say programme at the BBC World Service, we were overwhelmed with text messages from people in who Africa wanted to take part in the discussion.

Wasserman’s implication that technology is to blame for the skewing of news to cover demographics attractive to advertisers is a red herring. The idea that Twitter will chain journalists to their desks shows rank ignorance of Twitter’s mobile functions in the US.

There are no links in Wasserman’s commentary to support his views. Professor Wasserman, links are the footnotes of the internet age. They give you authority by showing that you’ve done your research. The internet isn’t killing newspapers. The internet might be killing the US newspaper model of local monopolies, but that’s the death of an accidental business model not the death of journalism.

Twitter can liberate journalists to stay in the field and cover important stories, as we did here at the Guardian during the G20 protests. Technology isn’t the enemy of journalism, but I’m increasingly of the opinion that uninformed commentary is.

Suw and I both spoke at the Media140 last Wednesday. Suw spoke about how Twitter helped build support for Ada Lovelace Day, the international day of blogging to raise awareness about women in science and technology. I talked about how I used Twitter as a reporting and community-building tool during my trip across the US covering the historic 2008 elections.

As I’ve written before, this was my third trip across the US covering the election and every trip included some experimental element. : In 2000, we focused on webcasting; in 2004, I wrote a blog; and in 2008, I built on blogging with an experiment in highly distributed networked journalism and geo-tagging. I experimented with several different services even after I landed in the US: Video services like Viddler and YouTube, geo-location services such as Fire Eagle and location-based social network BrightKite. In the end, I settled on four which became the cornerstones of my coverage: Flickr, Facebook, Delicious and Twitter.

Building contacts

Twitter often helped me develop better contacts who I initially met using other services. For instance, I posted my images to Flickr under a Creative Commons attribution-non-commercial use licence, which I felt was important because I was using Creative Common licenced photos from Flickr to help illustrate my posts. I contacted fellow Flickr users to let them know I had used their pictures, something I try to do as a matter of courtesy and also as a light-weight way to promote our journalism. Sometimes those contacts developed into stories and contacts beyond the original posts. For example, I used this excellent photo of a foreclosed home in California by Jeff Turner, who organises property shows there. He followed me on Twitter and helped me find local contacts for my reporting on the housing crisis.

Sign Of The Times - Foreclosure, by Jeff Turner, Some Rights Reserved

After writing a post about the crisis, I received an e-mail from Ralph Torres whose father had been in the property business for 30 years. Ralph wanted to give me a tour of his neighbourhood, Riverside, one of the hardest hit not only in California, but in the nation. He told me about the history of his neighbourhood and showed me the foreclosed homes on his street. He told me:

Our family went through a few recessions over the years, but it was always real estate sales slowing down. You didn’t have block after block with three or four houses vacant due to foreclosures.

That story made both an excellent article, and I recorded the tour for one of our election podcasts.

Virtual contacts and face-to-face connection

Twitter helped me organise my first of four blogger meet-ups on the trip. A Twitter contact helped not only arrange the guests but also a venue in LA. Having someone local who knew which venue to use was invaluable - it’s on-the-ground knowledge that is hard for a visitor to find.

Connecting and collaborating with fellow journalists

Twitter also connected me to other journalists. One of the stories I read was how the recession was increasing homelessness and creating tent cities, reminiscent of Hoovervilles during the Great Depression. Blogging and Twittering journalist Monica Guzman of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer told me about a tent city in Seattle. I doubt I would have learnt of that without her help, and she pointed me to details on the Seattle P-I site, saving me valuable time.

Real-time reporting and aggregation

Twitter proved invaluable throughout the trip, allowing me to stay in touch with friends, other journalists and those following the elections. It acted as a real-time reporting tool and, by using Twitpic, it allowed me to tell the story not just in words but also in pictures. It also was a real-time news feed with news organisations and people flagging up must-read stories and must-watch vidoes in the lead up to the election. One of my friends and followers, Adam Tinworth, said during the trip that he hoped I would get up soon because he needed his election news fix. He told me at media140 that my Twitter feed was the most efficient way to follow the elections.

The night of the election, I had planned to go back to my hotel and finish some writing, but I was caught up in the street celebrations in the city I had called home for seven years. On Twitter, I read reports of how 16th Street, the historic black district of the city, was clogged with revelers. I was downtown near McPherson Square and, early in the morning, people of all races were celebrating Barack Obama’s historic victory. Washington can be a very racially divided city, and I had never seen anything like this.

Celebrations in Washington DC after Barack Obama’s election to the US presidency, by Kevin Anderson, Some Rights Reserved.

But everyone told me that the real party was at the White House. I didn’t have to wait until I got back to my hotel to report. I could report live from the streets, providing pictures (albeit grainy) and quoting the crowds as they chanted outside of the White House: “Whose house? Whose house? Obama’s house! Obama’s house!”

At the end the trip on election night, I heard from Ralph in California. He said on Twitter:

Big thanks to @GuardianUS08 for last month’s visit and chat and for pulling me further into the conversation.

That was the goal and a measure of the success of what I had hoped to achieve with my experiment in highly distributed, networked journalism. Despite the pressures of almost constant reporting over two months and the difficulties of driving across the US, more than 4000 miles in three weeks, Twitter proved incredibly useful as a reporting tool, an aggregation tool and as a tool to take part in a real-time conversation about the election.

The trip also proved the effectiveness of networked journalism. I really don’t think I could have achieved a fraction of what I did without Twitter. It is actually part of a larger trend of how mobile phone technology will open up new opportunities for professional journalists just as it has spawned the citizen journalism movement. Camera phones were just he beginning.

As I said at media140, there are still some work to be done to fully realise the promise of these technologies. In working on Twitter and other platforms, tying together all of the content and providing context was only possible through manual, editorial methods: writing posts on the Guardian and weaving a narrative through the tweets, Facebook questions and Flickr messages. That was an imperfect solution. I had to try to reconstruct Twitter conversations and Facebook threads and tie them together. It was easier with Twitter, seeing as most of the updates were public, but Facebook proved more complicated and less satisfying. But we have done a lot of work at the Guardian this spring to help integrate Twitter into the site, such as we did during the G20 protests when we used ScribbleLive to pull together the updates of several of our journalists.

As I have said in the past, I have been frustrated as a field journalist with having to leave the story to report, but Twitter allowed me to stay in the middle of the story while I was reporting. It also provided me with a real-time conversation with people while I was covering the story, something that seemed a dream four years earlier when I covered the elections in 2004. We’re still only scratching the surface of what is possible, and while it’s a challenging time to be a journalist, I still can’t help think we’re living through a revolutionary time for journalism.