A one man brand

As someone pursuing a career in journalism to escape the rat-race of Sales and Marketing, I was slightly dis-heartened when our latest guest lecturer started talking brands.

Rick Waghorn, a former Norwich Evening News football correspondent, has set up myfootballwriter.com, a site which allows football fans to follow and respond to what their local football writer is saying about their team as soon as it's written.

This means they get the latest updates, match reports, transfer rumours, national embarrasments (below), and all the rest, without waiting for the next edition of the local paper.

The reasoning behind this venture is that Rick's audience reached the point where they valued his views above those of the paper/broadcaster he writes for. Therefore when Rick parted company with the Norwich Evening News, his audience followed him to his new outlet...myfootballwriter.com.

You see, the journalist has effectively become a brand...potentially bigger than their paper/broadcaster.

Examples such as Robert Peston and Jeremy Clarkson seem to back this up. Peston is now generally accepted as the voice of the 'Credit Crunch', with some going as far as saying he was too in touch, perpetuating the crisis he was meant to be covering. And, argues Rick, the Telegraph's readers aren't interested in the paper's views on motoring, they're interested in Clarkson's views on motoring.

So, logic dictates that if one of these 'brands' parts company with their 'platforms' the audience follows.

We learned how Rick has since mastered the arts of broadcasting (by podcasting), distributing (by web-hosting), managing a community (his readers), twitter-ing, blogging, marketing, search engine optimisation, selling advertising space, hiring, firing and paying staff, managing finances and becoming the managing director of his business. All this on top of bringing his audience the latest news about their cherished football club.

Leaving the "Jack of all trades, masters of none" debate to one side, I'm not sure how accurate Rick's analysis of the brand issue is. Robert Preston is heavily associated with the Credit Crunch because the BBC provided him every possible medium available. He was able to break news of Northern Rock's collapse on TV, radio and online virtually simultaneously.

His contacts, which he spent over 20 years cultivating as a journalist and stock broker, and his talent as an investigative reporter, which was recognised by various awards during those years, meant that he got the story first. The BBC's ubiquity meant he was able to cover the story 'in 360 degrees' for a huge and varied audience.

To me the brands seem to be co-dependent. The reporter builds his reputation on the back of a big media outlet's. He gets access to relevant people on the basis of his association with the organisation, and whistle-blowers are more likely to approach a big media company with a story than an unknown individual. In return, the outlet benefits from the reporter's skill and professionalism. Their ability to tell the story impartially, accurately and quickly.

While in some instances there may reach a point where a journalist is respected enough by his audience for them to follow him to a different publication, the fact remains that the majority of journalists depend on the outlet to provide support, resources, and an existing brand reputation.

After all, if it wasn't for the Norwich Evening Post's advertising budget, Rick's face wouldn't have been on the hoardings at Carrow Road promoting his column to their fans, and he wouldn't have had the chance to build a following.

While myfootballwriter.com may yet thrive because it offers supporters a new, 24/7 way of following their local team, I'm not sure the majority of us will be able to build a sizable brand on the back of our web presence alone.

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.