Digital storytelling

I've been having a quick look back at my previous blogs, and realised I could be accused of being fairly negative with a lot of what I've written...it's not intentional, just my natural cynicism shining through.

However, I'm pleased to say that our lecture on Digital Storytelling was not only quite an eye-opener for me, but Daniel Meadows' enthusiasm for his chosen medium proved infectious.

Until now, when I looked at YouTube, I thought 'video clips', but it turns out I should have been thinking 'digital narratives'. The popularity of sites like YouTube, Metacafe, and more recently Qik reflects the growing use of video as a method of expression, and runs parallel with the advances in commonly used technology.

The fact that most mobile phones now come with integrated video cameras means that it's much easier for people to quickly capture video and upload it to their computers. The wider availability of broadband means more people can view the videos easier, so it's only natural that this form of media has become more popular.

Evidence of this can be found in coverage of the current US Elections. Both campaigns have made use of YouTube to get their election message to a wider audience, with Obama and McCain both seeing that they can reach a younger demographic which doesn't always engage in political debate in traditional media. Members of the public have also posted videos which have had at least as much, if not more impact than official campaign videos.

I couldn't finish without a touch of cynicism though...and unfortunately the digital video format was effectively undermined in our Reporters and the Reported lecture on Friday, when guest speaker Nicolas Brett came to talk to us about the future of Magazine Journalism. A number of the slides in his Powerpoint Presentation depended upon video clips illustrating his points. Unfortunately, the University's network wasn't up to playing them, and, despite the best efforts of the tech assistants, turning the computer off and back on again didn't help. Eventually he resorted to describing the videos, which didn't have quite the same impact.

Alas, the future remains the future. Should be good when it all works though!

Losing on aggregate

Until a couple of years ago, if someone had mentioned 'aggregate' to me, I'd have expected them to either be talking about European football results or concrete. Now though, it's a term that's becoming more and more common in media usage.

Today Matthew Yeomans spoke to us about journalism in the future, the shape it will take, and what factors will shape it.

As he said, no-one knows...and if they claim to, they're lying.

But the growing commercial pressures on media outlets, combined with the easier access to more news sources that the web brings with it, mean that news aggregation is a quickly growing trend.

Services like Google News, Yahoo! News, and countless others enable websites to offer a comprehensive overview of news from around the world, without the need to employ a single journalist. They simply take content from other outlets, and put it all in one place.

These, and RSS feed readers like Google Reader, allow consumers to customise their 'front pages' so they can see what's happening on all of their chosen news websites/blogs on one browser.

Matthew explained to us how he had previously been editor of the ag, a blog on Time magazine's website which used RSS feeds to aggregate news on a range of issues from around the world.

Time was able to provide their readers with news which was relevant to them, in real time, and only pay one person for it. Sounds great! Right?

Maybe not if you're a journalist.

And probably not if you're a reader.

If one person is responsible for the entire content of what is effectively an online newspaper/magazine, what happens to all the journalists? Sure, there'll be someone, somewhere, working for a news agency or PR Company churning out the press releases which are being coming through the RSS, but who's going to double check whether the story's true? And who'll be finding the stories that don't simply promote the official line? Who will be digging through the dust-bins looking for dirt? Who'll be finding the stories we're not meant to hear about?

The danger is that the news aggregators and RSS feeds make it even easier for PR companies and governments to manipulate the media and set the agenda, and there are less and less 'independent' journalists to scrutinise what's being said, in which case, we all lose.

Casting a wider net

Network journalism, crowd sourcing, citizen journalism...whatever you call it, we're being warned 'it's coming, fast, and it's going to change journalism.'

These concepts exploit the web to gather news, information, and opinion from a range of people around the world, allowing journalists to quickly build a network of contacts with a variety of expertise, interests and regional knowledge.

But hang on...hasn't networking been used as a journalistic tool since the original pamphleteers?

From what I can gather, networked journalism is simply a logical extension of this process, the key advance being that it provides journalists the means to reach a larger, potentially global number of contacts at the press of a button.

Any journalist will tell you the most important tool they own is their address book. How they get in touch with those contacts is up to them, and largely a matter of convenience and personal preference.

But, the argument goes, these tools are 'democratising' the media, giving Joe the Plumber (who incidently, isn't a plumber) the chance to have his voice heard alongside the 'elite few' in the media. Which is all good and well, except that the vast majority of the public don't even have access to the web, and most who do use it to look at cats falling in fish tanks rather than reporting news.

The problem with the 'democratising' argument is that the people who are vocal online, tend to be the same people who are vocal in traditional media. I.e the campaigners, activists and 'retired Colonel from Tunbridge Wells', as Andy Williams pointed out in his lecture on User Generated Content. If anything it could be argued that this gives an even less impartial view of the news than traditional news outlets (with the possible exception of Fox News)

But, as Alison Gow points out on her blog, networked journalism doesn't just change the newsgathering process, it changes the dissemination process too. Sites like OhMyNews! and NowPublic (and countless others) allow readers to link to articles they find interesting, and share them with an audience they think will appreciate them too.

Rather than threatening the traditional role of the journalist, the use of networking in this way could in fact add a whole new dimension to it. For example, while reporters for regional media outlets will still keep their local audience as their priority, they'll also be aware that what they are writing could be picked up by global audiences who might in some way be affected.

According to Alison, network journalism could impact all aspects of journalism, changing the entire story gathering and telling process.

Whilst her description of the web 2.0 process emphasises the added benefits of using social networking, Twitter, blog translators and the like, I worry slightly that the focus on exploiting all of these tools may leave traditional journalistic values in the shade.

An (admittedly slightly pedantic) example can be found in step two of her revised lifecycle; while 'verification' is explicitly referred to in the 'old' style of researching a story, the 'new' step two instead relies upon crowd sourcing and blog translations to confirm the accuracy of an article. I admit I could be getting hung up on symantics here, but I think it points to a wider problem:

With all the crowdsourcing, online surveys, photo-sharing, social bookmarking, blogging, Dipity-ing, Twittering, pod-casting etc., is there a danger the traditional news values of reliability, accuracy and impartiality fall by the wayside?

Perhaps this will be the defining distinction between 'citizen' journalists and professional hacks.

UGC...Breaking news or shameless plug?

Prospects for Thusday the 2nd October...

• Gordon Brown is about to announce a cabinet re-shuffle
• The global economy faces complete melt-down
• 9 US banks are 'part-nationalised' under part of a $700bn bail-out plan
• David Cameron claims he's a 'man with a plan' at the Conservative Party Conference
• House prices fall for an 11th consecutive month
• The euthanasia debate continues
• Vice-presidential candidates Palin and Biden go head to head in their campaign debate
• North and South Korea open peace negotiations
• Missing explorer Steve Fosset's belongings are found

But wait. Stop press. Hold the front page. All of this takes a back seat on the BBC News agenda, because they've discovered university students drink, sometimes enough to make them sick!

The initiation ceremony story dominated the BBC's news output, getting included in most of the day's TV and radio bulletins and with Victoria Derbyshire's 5live phone-in asking 'Should initiation ceremonies be banned?'

As the day went on, and I saw more and more of this story, I found myself asking 'Why is this story getting so much exposure when there seems to be so much other, more 'newsworthy' stuff going on?' I accept that as a journalism student I don't have the editorial judgement of the BBC Editors, but surely on a day when the world's leading proponent of the free-market has had to part-nationalise huge sections of their finance industry, house prices continue to plummet, and a key member of the 'axis of evil' is tring to get back into the fold, should our attention be focussed on the antics of drunken teenagers?

And then I came across this.

As we were told in our Online Journalism lecture last week, the BBC is going to great-lengths to justify their investment in User Generated Content (UGC), and their UGC-Hub, where BBC staff receive, filter and publish messages, photos and videos sent in by members of the public.

It's an interesting development, the results of which could shape the career path my colleagues and I embark on when we finish our course.

But is it right that the BBC shoe-horn stories into their output because they originated in the UGC Hub?

-----------------------Update 14/10/08-----------------------------

Stumbled across this old, but funny and relevant clip from Charlie Brooker's Screenwipe. Worth a look. (contains swearing)

Kicking and screaming into the 21st Century…

Wikis…rss…blogs…they sound like terms of abuse you'd expect to have hurled at you from 'yoofs' on the back of a bus, but in fact they were the subject of our first Online Journalism lecture here at Cardiff University.

Having avoided the Myspace craze, and rarely using Facebook for anything more productive than playing Scrabulous, I was slightly apprehensive when we were told we needed to sign up to various Web 2.0 and social networking type services.

They're all relatively easy to write-off as passing fads, but on further inspection, it soon becomes clear that Web 2.0 isn't just a way for teenagers to share happy-slapping videos. In fact it's causing what some commentators claim to be the biggest shift in journalistic attitude since the launch of the television.

Over the past few years a growing number of media outlets have been encouraging readers, viewers and listeners to respond to reports and articles using online message boards and forums. The BBC, The Guardian, the Sun and countless others have embraced this form of interaction to engage and gather feedback from their readership, not to mention gathering further revenue from their advertisers. What was once a one way conversation is now an endless dialogue. Links

But this is really just scratching at the surface of Web 2.0. After all, these are just an extension of the letters pages or radio phone-ins.

Where Web 2.0 really comes into its own is when it’s used with a bit of creativity.

With economic doom and gloom currently dominating the news agenda, the Financial Times has been given the perfect opportunity to showcase its webby award winning ‘Alphaville’, a live blog updated by a team of reporters, and added to by a mass of contributors, as and when news happens. With the market tracker displaying the generally downwards movements of the precarious stock indexes, the interaction between the team and their audience proves an informative and (strangely, for an economy dunce like myself) enjoyable experience. Especially if something big is going on, like global capitalism collapsing.

The BBC Sport website exploits a similar concept with its live text feature, which combines with its 606 message boards to provide minute by minute updates and banter between fans and the reporter during live sporting events.

But Web 2.0 is not just providing new ways of reporting the news, it’s also providing new ways of gathering it.
The recent Democratic primaries between Obama and Clinton garnered global attention, with millions of politicos around the world waiting for the results with baited breath. And it was innovative use of ‘social-networking and micro-blogging service’ Twitter that allowed the LA Times to break the news first to their followers. By getting activists at the polling stations to update their status with the results, they were able to be collated and distributed within seconds, far quicker than by traditional means, and to a much wider audience.

But for every benefit provided by these new and ever changing services, there is no doubt a plethora of criticisms which can be levelled at them. Even in its relative infancy, this new form of interacation is plagued by horror stories of Web 2.0 gone wrong. Newsreaders being hounded out of their jobs by blogswarms, Twitter-ers (allegedly) harassing one another, mis-informed ill-intentioned bloggers spreading fallacy as fact and millionaire football club owners taking legal action against bloggers expressing opinion.

But if used properly and professionally, the benefits of these online tools can far out-weigh the drawbacks.

Take ‘churnalism’, the current buzzword used to describe the growing trend of news outlets simply filtering and regurgitating press releases and agency copy. According to research carried out at Jomec for Nick Davies’ ‘Flat Earth News’, in a random two week period, 60% of the stories in four of the UK’s leading (broadsheet) newspapers were entirely or mostly copied from press releases or agency copy (pg 52).

Davies paints a pretty depressing picture of the future of journalism, where commercial considerations and the need for speed leads to quantity prevailing over quality, with reporters chained to their desks sifting through Press Releases and banging out 15 stories a day, leaving no time to source new stories, or even verify the ones they’re being spoon fed by PR and press agencies.

But perhaps Web 2.0 provides a ray of hope.

Maybe 21st century newsgathering will still mean a journalist needs to have many sources, but they’ll be thousands of miles away, blogging about the atrocities of a distant despot. The tabloid journalist of the future might be rummaging through your outbox instead of your dustbin. Technological advances could mean that the commercial model of the future evolves to such an extent that more resources are available to genuine newsgathering, where hacks can go back to digging and investigating, exposing scandal and upholding the public interest.

Or perhaps these are the over-optimistic ramblings of a journalism student, hoping the next year, and all those tuition fees, won’t be a waste.

And just when I thought I’d got to grips with it all…I found out web 3.0 is on the way.