Mary Hamilton

Games, systems and context in journalism at News Rewired

I went to News Rewired on Thursday, along with dozens of other journalists and folk concerned in various ways with news production. Some threads that ran through the day for me were discussions of how we publish our data (and allow others to do the same), how we link our stories together with each other and the rest of the web, and how we can help our readers to explore context around our stories.

One session focused heavily on SEO for specialist organisations, but included a few sharp lessons for all news organisations. Frank Gosch spoke about the importance of ensuring your site’s RSS feeds are up to date and allow other people to easily subscribe to and even republish your content. Instead of clinging tight to content, it’s good for your search rankings to let other people spread it around.

James Lowery echoed this theme, suggesting that publishers, like governments, should look at providing and publishing their data in re-usable, open formats like XML. It’s easy for data journalists to get hung up on how local councils, for instance, are publishing their data in PDFs, but to miss how our own news organisations are putting out our stories, visualisations and even datasets in formats that limit or even prevent re-use and mashup.

Following on from that, in the session on linked data and the semantic web, Martin Belam spoke about the Guardian’s API, which can be queried to return stories on particular subjects and which is starting to use unique identifiers – MusicBrainz IDs and ISBNs, for instance – to allow lists of stories to be pulled out not simply by text string but using a meaningful identification system. He added that publishers have to licence content in a meaningful way, so that it can be reused widely without running into legal issues.

Silver Oliver said that semantically tagged data, linked data, creates opportunities for pulling in contextual information for our stories from all sorts of other sources. And conversely, if we semantically tag our stories and make it possible for other people to re-use them, we’ll start to see our content popping up in unexpected ways and places.

And in the long term, he suggested, we’ll start to see people following stories completely independently of platform, medium or brand. Tracking a linked data tag (if that’s the right word) and following what’s new, what’s interesting, and what will work on whatever device I happen to have in my hand right now and whatever connection I’m currently on – images, video, audio, text, interactives; wifi, 3G, EDGE, offline. Regardless of who made it.

And this is part of the ongoing move towards creating a web that understands not only objects but also relationships, a world of meaningful nouns and verbs rather than text strings and many-to-many tables. It’s impossible to predict what will come from these developments, but – as an example – it’s not hard to imagine being able to take a photo of a front page on a newsstand and use it to search online for the story it refers to. And the results of that search might have nothing to do with the newspaper brand.

That’s the down side to all this. News consumption – already massively decentralised thanks to the social web – is likely to drift even further away from the cosy silos of news brands (with the honourable exception of paywalled gardens, perhaps). What can individual journalists and news organisations offer that the cloud can’t?

One exciting answer lies in the last session of the day, which looked at journalism and games. I wrote some time ago about ways news organisations were harnessing games, and could do in the future – and the opportunities are now starting to take shape. With constant calls for news organisations to add context to stories, it’s easy to miss the possibility that – as Philip Trippenbach said at News Rewired – you can’t explain a system with a story:

Stories can be a great way of transmitting understanding about things that have happened. The trouble is that they are actually a very bad way of transmitting understanding about how things work.

Many of the issues we cover – climate change, government cuts, the deficit – at macro level are systems that could be interestingly and interactively explored with games. (Like this climate change game here, for instance.) Other stories can be articulated and broadened through games in a way that allows for real empathy between the reader/player and the subject because they are experiential rather than intellectual. (Like Escape from Woomera.)

Games allow players to explore systems, scenarios and entire universes in detail, prodding their limits and discovering their flaws and hidden logic. They can be intriguing, tricky, challenging, educational, complex like the best stories can be, but they’re also fun to experience, unlike so much news content that has a tendency to feel like work.

(By the by, this is true not just of computer and console games but also of live, tabletop, board and social games of all sorts – there are rich veins of community journalism that could be developed in these areas too, as the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle is hoping to prove for a second time.)

So the big things to take away from News Rewired, for me?

The systems within which we do journalism are changing, and the semantic web will most likely bring another seismic change in news consumption and production.
It’s going to be increasingly important for us to produce content that both takes advantage of these new technologies and allows others to use these technologies to take advantage of it.
And by tapping into the interactive possibilities of the internet through games, we can help our readers explore complex systems that don’t lend themselves to simple stories.

Oh, and some very decent whisky.

Cross-posted at Online Journalism Blog.

Education, education, education: the political

This is one of a pair of posts. This one looks at the unanswered questions after the tuition fees vote. The other one declares and explains my personal biases.

18 is a magical age. Drinking, voting, leaving home, and exams that have the power to change the direction of your entire life – and the end of free education.

It’s peculiar, how education changes in the August of the year you pass your A-levels. Suddenly education is a privilege, not a right. Suddenly you must justify your choices harder than ever before, make sacrifices, shop around, evaluate the potential quality of your teaching in a way you have never had the chance or obligation to do before. Suddenly education is a marketplace, not a common good.

And it’s about to become more so, thanks to the trebling of tuition fees and slashing of university funding. As part of the cuts to humanities, funding for languages at university has been decimated – even as the coalition tries to push more teenagers to take them on at GCSE. Education is not a life-long concern – and education for its own sake is utterly devalued by a government that persists in painting certain subjects as more worthy than others.

When we talk about the cuts to education, adults tend to forget that many teenagers don’t go to university because of the career options at the end – they go because they care passionately about their areas of expertise and because they love to learn. For the same reasons that 17-year-olds do A levels and 6-year-olds love art lessons. Because of the joy of learning.

At the protest, everyone I spoke to shared a similar sentiment. The protests were about the cuts. The anger is about the lies, the broken promises, the injustices. The coalition’s last-minute attempt to persuade furious protesters that in reality they just haven’t quite understood the implications has done little, if anything, to help – in fact, its list of myths certainly doesn’t cover the main objections I have (though at least it’s provided some great parody ammunition).

Many of the big questions remain, at least to my knowledge (please correct me if I’m wrong) unanswered:

How much is this going to cost the country?
Why are we borrowing more when the coalition’s stated aim is to reduce, not increase, the deficit?
Why the uneven nature of the cuts, aimed at humanities more than science?
Where’s the evidence that humanities graduates don’t contribute to the economy to the same extent as science ones?
Where’s the study that shows what impact the fees and cuts might have on poor students, minorities, students from poorer schools?
What’s going to be done to make the Student Loans Company fit for purpose, if it’s going to be overseeing so much more money?
What is the sale of this debt into the banking system going to do to the economy, in the short and long term?
We’ve seen analysis of EMA and participation – but where’s the analysis of the impact of stopping the EMA on attainment, aspiration, attendance, self-esteem?
Why is debt you have no hope of paying back fine for students but bad for countries?
Whose voices are going to be missing from the wider conversations and absent from our universities in ten years’ time, because of fees, because they’re critical thinkers but not great mathematicians, because they can’t afford college, because they’ve been told their chosen field is worth less than others, because they don’t believe their education is worthwhile any more?
Why are universities covered by the Department for Business and not the Department for Education, anyway?

And the anger is going to get bigger as the injustices are perceived to mount up – the post-Christmas VAT rise coupled with this year’s round of bank bonuses is going to add fuel to the #ukuncut fires – and some of the anger will stop being directed at Nick Clegg and his merry band of pledge-skippers and start to be aimed at others in power. Dumbledore’s Army are already marching, and for all the pearl-clutching about yobs poking Camilla with sticks and the discourse about falling support for students, the narrative has escaped the cosy confines of the right-wing press. Groups of kids are using decentralised technology to organise protests in real time – and making jokes about Godzilla at the same time. They don’t need the support of the Daily Mail. They’ve got their networks, and the Mail doesn’t matter any more.

And bear in mind, while everyone on every medium is talking about peaceful protest, that this is a group of young people who have never seen peaceful protest work. This is a generation of politicians who have never listened to peaceful protesters, no matter how reasonable. Would there have been resignations if there hadn’t been a pitched battle going on outside?

Education, education, education: the personal

This is one of a pair of posts. This one declares and explains my personal biases on this topic. The other one looks at the unanswered questions after the tuition fees vote.

When I was 16 years old I lived in hostels for homeless teenagers. Three of them, altogether, during the years I was studying for my A-levels. At that time – I believe it’s still true now, too – if you were between 16 and 18 and in full-time education you qualified for Income Support, Council Tax Benefit and Housing Benefit. No Jobseeker’s – you weren’t expected to work as well. That was lucky.

I received a grand total of £43.17 each week in cash. I had to go to the post office every Thursday with my benefit book and ID, sign the tokens, and take my money. I had a bank account – half the girls I lived with did not – and I tried to put £20 into the bank for later in the week, for bus fares and food and bits and pieces. £7 electricity, £7 gas, both on pre-payment cards. When the energy company hiked its fees one winter I had to pick one or the other. No hot water or heating for six months. £4 for the nominal rent I had to pay on top of benefits. £5 on food. I walked everywhere I could.

But I went to college. I went, not because I thought it was going to make me richer in the long run or for any sort of gain beyond loving to learn. I wanted to go to university to learn more. But I would have had to choose between bus fare and food, if it wasn’t for the Education Maintenance Allowance.

I was one of the first, a keen member of the pilot group in Birmingham who were given £30 a week to stay in school, and bonuses at the end of each term for attainment. That nearly doubled my income, that £30. I could afford more than one meal a day. I could get the bus to and from college. I could buy pens and folders and paper and books, saving £5 a week for a trip to Waterstones and coming home and laying them out on the floor, thick papery rectangles, full of stories, gateways into worlds. I saved up and bought a phone. I stayed alive, and I had hope, because I had my education and I was going to go to university, in the end, and I could study at night with my belly full.

Maybe my education wasn’t worth it. I didn’t do science or engineering or any of the subjects that are supposed to be valuable to the country, the ones deemed worthy of keeping their budgets. I couldn’t afford the train fare to go to open days for universities but I got into Cambridge to do English. I didn’t go, because I wanted to write. In the end I did American Literature with Creative Writing at UEA – a world-class course. It took two years working odd jobs after my A-levels before I got there, before I’d saved up a pot I could use in emergencies, but I got there. I worked for two of the three years I was at uni to make ends meet. That was just before tuition fees. I wouldn’t have gone if I’d had to pay any more. I couldn’t have faced the debt.

There are figures out there that suggest the EMA wasn’t effective enough, that most kids would have stayed on at college anyway. Maybe I’m a total statistical outlier; that’s fine. But for me the EMA wasn’t just about retention rates. It was about self-esteem. Would I have accessed a “hardship fund”? Maybe, but I would have had an even harder time telling myself I was entitled to it. Would I have got it if it’d meant filling in more forms, more figures, more time spent proving I was poor enough and well-intentioned enough to qualify? I doubt it.

And it was about attainment and attendance, too. Not just going, but paying attention and staying on the ball. Teachers could and did refuse to sign the forms if I acted up. That’s horribly punitive – none of the other kids had £30 taken away for playing up in class – but it got me to do my homework, even at times when there was so much else going on in my world that concentrating was next to impossible.

And it meant being free from fear that I would end up eating nothing but tinned peaches from the hostel donation cupboard for weeks just as my exams started, because my benefits had a hiccup.

Perhaps I would have stayed on at college on £43.17 a week, because I wanted it so hard. But I doubt, with all the extra worry and fear, that I would have gotten the grades I did. And I wouldn’t be here, now.

This blog is a direct consequence of the EMA. Whose voices are going to be missing from the conversation in 10 years’ time, now the EMA is gone?

“This is not good news for anybody”

After work today I went to the student protest. Been itching to get there all day – 20 minutes from the office, and the helicopters buzzing outside the window like wasps, and the constant, hypnotic stream of tweets on #demo2010 and #dayx3. The horse charges covered by the BBC news (though I can only find this one-line mention of it online, now); the baton-beating of a journalist that went unreported on the rolling TV news. And the debate, another stream of words passing hypnotically by. I couldn’t not, at the end of the day, grab my iPhone and go.

I arrived not long before the vote was counted, a few minutes before the news spread that the measures to raise the cap on student fees to a maximum of £9,000 a year had passed by 21 votes. My small corner of the protest was pretty calm, all told, because I was kept outside Westminster Abbey along with a crowd of a couple of hundred newcomers on the outside of the kettle, with a double line of mounted cops and riot police with short shields between us and the massed students filling Parliament Square.

Twitter was light years ahead of the mainstream media. I passed more than one journalist on the outside of the cordon who didn’t have a clue what was going on, and the fact that I had a phone in my hand made me a magnet for people wanting to find out what was happening inside the boundary.

They talked to me, and I talked to others, and though most didn’t want to give their names all were happy to talk. This is some of what was said.

A woman whose 16-year-old son was still in the kettle:

I was here with a friend earlier and we were in the crowd when the horses charged. We just ran away.

I’m so proud of my son. I agree that it’s wrong to raise the fees like this. I supported him coming here – I came myself – but the police were getting so heavy handed in there and I’m scared for him.

I have a daughter who’s applying now to do film studies and you have to wonder what they’d think of that, the Lib Dems. It’s not what they value. But then with the cuts to science, you wonder what they do value, whether they value anything at all.

A man dressed in motorcycle leathers, who wouldn’t take off his helmet after he came out of the demo:

They were using Section 60 and searching everyone. They wouldn’t let anyone out without filming them or taking photographs. It’s not legal to do that. They have no right, but they wouldn’t let people out otherwise. They trapped us in there and now they won’t let people out. It’s not right.

Overheard, from a group of 15- and 16-year-old girls, giggling as they stamped their feet to keep warm:

We need a better chant. It’s so cold. “Freeze the fees, not our feet!” “Should we stay or should we go?”

A police medic, between politely directing lost cyclists and concerned tourists to various destinations via routes that didn’t go through the riot directly behind him:

It’s a long day. We’ve been on the go most of us since about 7am – I was running with the march when it started this morning. I’ve been all over. I spent a couple of hours with someone who was injured, a protestor – hit on the head with a bottle or something like that. People throwing things, it’s bound to happen. I did stop for a Twix and a cup of tea at one point, but I reckon we will be here a while yet. It’s not going to be a nice night.

Overheard, another policeman, talking to a student:

That’s nice of you, but I’m not meant to eat Nik Naks while I’m on duty.

Joey, a 17-year-old girl who’s studying for her A-levels:

I’m waiting for some friends who are still in the kettle. We ran into a boy, he said he was 15 and he’d come here with a group of older students, like 20 or something, but they’d gone off or he’d been separated and he couldn’t find them. He seemed, like, really immature and unsure and we said he could stay with us but in the chaos we got pushed one way and then we couldn’t find him. I hope he’s OK.

Sandra, a retired mum of two students who are studying elsewhere in the country:

It won’t affect me personally, or my kids, but it’s still wrong to expect young people to start life with such a huge debt around their necks. Of course fewer students are going to go to university. No one wants to be in debt the rest of their lives – that’s why the government wants to cut the deficit, after all. But this isn’t the way to go about it. It won’t even help.

Jodie, 14, who cares for her mother, who is scared her disability benefits will be cut due to the coalition changes to the system:

If I can’t get the EMA I can’t go to college. That’s all. I’ll have to work, because mum can’t support both of us on her benefits. So that’s it for me. That’s it. It’s over.

A student from Nottingham, who had missed his coach home because of the difficulty leaving the demo:

Of course it’s been cold and hard, but it’s been well worth it. It won’t stop here – it can’t stop here. It’s not over. You never forget the first time someone breaks your heart. Nick Clegg is done. We have to keep fighting. But this is not good news for anyone.

There’s another post in the works, a more thoughtful one, about the decision the coalition has just made and why I feel it’s so horribly misguided; my feelings on that are inextricably bound up with and informed by the fact that I was one of the very first batch of 16-year-olds to get the EMA, on a pilot scheme in Birmingham, and without that fact there’s no way in the world I’d be in London, a journalist, typing this. I wouldn’t have A-levels. And that changes how I write about it. So that post is for later.

David Cameron is Voldemort. No, seriously.

I’ve lost count of the number of articles on the student demos that start like this: Where did the passion come from? Why are students – schoolchildren – teenagers – taking to the streets in their thousands to protest, all of a sudden? Isn’t this the apathetic generation who doesn’t care about anything?

Frankly – no, no it’s not. I don’t think it ever has been. But the popular media has told itself, and the rest of us, a very sad story about young people that isn’t entirely true, and it’s not a surprise to see the mainstream media startled by a sudden, vocal proof that one of their favourite narratives just doesn’t work.

The mainstream media delights in telling stories about terrifying, terrible youth. Soaring youth crime and inner-city gangs. The fattest teenager in Britain. Pregnant at 13. Asbos. Yobs are taking over the streets. 12-year-olds encouraged to have sex early. Drug-infested schools. And yes, these are cherry-picked, but it’s easy to find dozens, hundreds, thousands of stories like this, many with the same or similar headlines. It’s much harder to find positive stories on youth that feed into such well-known narratives – a good news story about young people is framed as an anomaly, proof that our Asbo-ridden drug-taking pregnant yobbish terrible youth is not quite as broken as we all, of course, thought.

Sure, the media reports prodigies too – and then delights in their downfall. And when a child star fails to fall, there are gleeful attempts to toss them down – vile upskirt photos of Emma Watson on the front page of the Star; jeering at the temerity of Daniel Radcliffe to appear naked on stage. Positive, uplifting role models for our teenagers, that we rip apart for sport. For newsprint.

But for thousands of young people the stories just don’t hold true. They aren’t pregnant at 15, or drinking on street corners, or morbidly obese, or on heroin, or committing knife crimes. They’re just trying to grow up. And for those children – the ones we see marching on the streets now – there’s another story that resonates much more strongly with their lives.

So let’s talk about Hogwarts, Harry Potter and the Idealised Transition Into Adulthood. Let’s talk about the series of books that has defined a generation’s relationship to its school days, to its society, even to itself. The teenagers on these demos are far more likely to have read Harry Potter than any newspaper, at all – not only because the books speak to them but because the media speaks about, of and for them instead, and not in a very pleasant way.

Harry Potter offers an escape. It offers a world where Broken Britain barely intrudes at all, and the realities of everyday life – broken homes, morbid obesity (Dudley), vicious child abuse – are left behind Harry as soon as he enters Hogwarts – as soon as he enters education. And within those walls is a world where bullying is rife and problematic, sure, but teenage pregnancy, drugs, alcohol, knife crime, all the myriad vices that the Daily Mail ensures us are endemic in today’s teenage culture – they simply don’t exist. Here’s a story that helps middle-class kids make sense of themselves without telling them they’re failures. Harry Potter is even a pioneering ground for participatory media – it’s not such a huge leap from fanfic and forum roleplay to the sorts of joined-up stories and easy control of narrative that pervades the UCL occupation.

Most importantly, let’s talk about the Deathly Hallows, the final book in the series, where education (in the form of Hogwarts itself) has finally come under such strenuous and sustained attack that our heroes decide to go rogue. Throughout the whole series politicians are weak, easy to manipulate, refusing to listen to children until it’s too late. They appoint Dolores Umbridge. They fail to notice the return of Voldemort. They fail to act decisively. They fail.

And throughout the series the children’s appeals to authority fail, but hard work and persistence and simply Being Right is enough to prevail in the end. Until the end, when, in a world without Dumbledore’s kindly smile to smooth over the cracks, the teenage heroes – sixth-formers, let’s not forget – must take on the assembled weight of the entire political system to try to prevent that system from destroying itself. For the sake of education, they fight, and they die.

Stories – especially popular, populist, wildly successful books, especially fairy tales and moral tales like this one – are a culture telling stories to allay its fears, to resolve the conflicts it fears will shatter it in two, to make sure there is a happy ending after all. They are like dreams, in that they enable the body conscious to process difficult events, working them into a pattern, a narrative that makes sense and which they can survive. David Cameron is Voldemort. Nick Clegg is shaping up to be Professor Quirrell, but he’s also got a shot at being Snape – in tomorrow’s vote on education cuts and university fees we’re all expecting him to kill Dumbledore, and only time will tell whether he’ll be redeemed by his later actions.

The media and popular politics paints teenagers as bad guys, as problems, as passive blanks or as villains. Harry Potter paints them as our saviours – our righteous, furious, glorious saviours who will do what’s right, even if it looks wrong to us, because it’s what’s necessary. Even if it’s violent. Even if it gets them into trouble. Because the world will be a better place in the end.

Why on earth are we surprised when they take to the streets?

On location

It’s been a little quiet on the blogging front the last month or so. Lots of reasons – a big move to the big smoke, living in the cloud while waiting for broadband and wifi internet to be installed at home, and most of all a job where instead of writing about all the awesome things we should be doing online, I’m getting to actually make them happen.

It’s an exceptionally good feeling, and at the end of most days I’m all idea-ed out – I’ve been throwing myself into getting to know what we’ve got at Citywire, and finding ways to start improving some of the most obvious things. New share buttons have started appearing on part of our site; our journalists are starting to tweet under their own names while I take over our group account, and we have the very lean and early beginnings of a Facebook page. On top of that there’s been a lot of work behind the scenes, nitty gritty nuts and bolts to bring us better data on how well what we’re doing works.

Getting to know London, especially in the absence of a broadband connection, has changed my media and browsing habits enormously. For more than three weeks we didn’t have a TV aerial at home, so there was no TV news for me – and I didn’t miss it, thanks to Twitter. I didn’t go to any one site in particular for my news – the things I was interested in have found me. Perfect.

Newspapers are free here, as long as you commute. I read more papers voluntarily than I ever have – the morning Metro and the Evening Standard, cover to cover, on the train and the Tube. That fills ms in on anything Twitter hasn’t told me – they’re not my main source of news, but they fill in the gaps, and if they’re not there I don’t miss them. I see hundreds of people reading these papers every day – far more than I ever did in Norwich. The free model works, so long as you have your distribution sorted.

I use apps more than browsers, especially Twitter and Reeder. I still use mobile more than static, because much of the time I don’t know where I am or what’s near me. And that’s been a big surprise for me. Location based services have been a godsend.

I know, I know. Foursquare has a problem with checkin fatigue and meaningless badges that reward grind and a game mechanic that isn’t really a game. Gowalla is a loot quest at best, and even with trips and items its fundamental mechanic isn’t entirely satisfying. Facebook Places is stuffed with privacy issues. There’s a study out that shows the number of Americans using location services is small – 4%, and dropping. And until I moved cities, I was one of those who tried for a while and then stopped bothering.

But then I moved, and suddenly instead of knowing my home city inside out and backward, I didn’t know where anything was, or who anyone was, or where to go for a pint of decent ale or a good cup of coffee. It’s an incredible, dislocating feeling, moving to a new city and especially London, and I’m lucky to have my husband with me through the upheaval. But now there’s a layer of information on top of the city streets that just wasn’t there six years ago, the last time I made a move like this. And that, for me, has value.

So being able to find a decent restaurant or a pub from my phone is not only good, but helps me feel a little more welcome, a little more embedded in my new community. What’s better is the added layers of information that some social networks are building on top of location data. Untappd tells me where I can get a well-kept pint of London Pride. The Foodspotting community is perhaps a little richer than me – I’ve looked at some pictures of incredible food but not yet used it to eat – but a service like Rate My Takeaway (complete with hygiene scores and a price list) would be useful regularly.

For that matter, location based classifieds would be pretty handy too. A system of virtual newsagents’ windows where I might be able to pick up a second-hand sofa locally, for instance. So would a deal-finder that would let the local supermarkets – and corner shops, and grocers, and butchers, and so on – compete for my weekly shop by telling me what was on offer today. Not online deals, but real ones. And I could use a “what’s happening” app that tells me, right now, what’s happening at the places I’ve scoped out that might get me mixing and mingling – not reviews afterwards, but upcoming and current events. (I’ve just downloaded the Time Out app – we’ll see if that does the trick.) Not games, but services – not fun, but useful.

Digital people talk about how newspapers missed the boat on digitising classified ads. I don’t know whether location is another space where traditional media is missing the boat – given the low take-up numbers it’s possible there isn’t a boat to miss. But I wonder if the numbers are down to the fact that location services, Foursquare in particular, are still creating an ecosystem, laying the foundations for a whole world of mobile information layers that could, in the end, be a profitable and useful space.

Moving on

I’ve changed my Twitter name – I’m now @newsmary. I can’t be @edpmary any more, because I’m going to be leaving the Eastern Daily Press and Evening News.

I’ll be moving to financial journalism publishers Citywire in London at the start of November, where I’ll be doing social media work, SEO and digital planning, and I hope to be an active part of their currently-forming data journalism operation.

In the last three years I’ve discovered what I love.

Three years ago, I sort of tripped over and fell into journalism. I was six months out of uni after a course in American Literature and Creative Writing – and believe me, no matter how impressive your marks are, that does not give you much traction in the jobs market. I was applying for editorial assistant jobs and design jobs and database admin jobs because of my experience in those areas, and I saw an ad for a local journalist and I applied. A horrendous current affairs exam and a face-clutchingly gruesome interview later, and I’d beaten more than 100 other people to get a job in journalism. The people that hired me saw something I didn’t even see in myself.

That changed, though. I went up to train at PA in the Evening Chronicle and Journal offices in Newcastle and, though I had a hard time with homesickness and loneliness, I grew to love the work. I went from decent-writer-but-scared-of-interviewing to feeling much more confident and happy in my role. And I won an award for getting good at it, and I came back, and I worked for the EDP and then the Evening News when we merged, and I loved it harder and harder every day, even as it became more difficult. I loved the thrill of seeing my name in print, next to my story and my words.

A few months after I started work I discovered Twitter, and it changed everything. I started this blog. I got lots of things wrong, repeatedly, on the internet where everyone could see; discovered Google Reader and used it religiously; fell in love all over again with data and coding and spreadsheets but this time in the service of storytelling and data journalism; played with video and audio; fell in love with the internet, full stop. Started reading Paul Bradshaw and Clay Shirky and Jeff Jarvis and Jay Rosen, and more and more of the many, many others at the coal face. Started getting evangelical about what news can do online and what online can do for news. Crowdsourced. Liveblogged. Livetweeted. Visualised. Wordled. Piped. Started waving my hands in excitement and enthusiasm at things that had very little to do with the day-to-day life in the newsroom of our print-first papers.

That’s where the disconnect began. Bit by bit as I explored this incredible new world, I realised the papers I work for don’t live there. They pass by regularly, sure, and they do some things very well, but they live in print and not in a series of tubes, and in recent times the focus has been unerringly on print. But that’s meant that in the newsroom where I wanted to be working for mobile and for web and harnessing the power of the internet for storytelling in all its forms, it’s become harder and harder to spend any time doing it.

If I was coming new to regional journalism now, I don’t know if I’d have time to explore Twitter and the web and data journalism and computer assisted reporting and fall in love the way I have. It’s something I do in my spare time, at home, at the end of 10-hour days or the mornings before a late shift, on my own. But in a sea of things I love doing, it’s what I love most. I’ve discovered that, for me, what’s better than seeing my name in print is seeing my work sprout wings and fly online, whether it’s got my name on it or not.

I believe, at Citywire, I’ll be in a newsroom that lives on the internet. It’ll be my job to have ideas about what we do online and on mobile and how to make it social. I’ll be throwing myself into social news, mobile news, online news, and I’ll be working out ways to make useful, relevant, awesome journalism. I’ll be part of a team including data researchers, and I hope I’ll be doing data journalism at work as well as working with data behind the scenes.

I’m going to miss the EDP and the Evening News. I’m going to miss Norwich and Norfolk. It’s going to be a huge wrench to leave behind the daily visits to new places to talk to interesting people. I’ll miss court and I’ll miss the buzz of breaking a big story and I’ll even miss council meetings, I expect.

But I won’t stop being a journalist. I won’t stop doing journalism. I won’t stop telling stories. You’ll see me more, not less, because I’ll have support and I’ll have time (and I’ll be in London instead of the wilds of Norfolk).

I want to do online journalism, not journalism online, and here’s a place where even if it’s not my byline, my face at the top of the page, I can help make that happen. I can help build an aviary for journalism and help it grow wings and fly. I can set up camp at the shifting frontier where journalism and the internet meet, and get busy building something brilliant.

Data journalism at the Frontline

Last week I went to a Frontline Club event on data journalism. There’s a live stream of the talks and questions here along with a good brief rundown of who said what. It’s well worth watching all the way through for four good talks exploring four very different aspects of data journalism.

First up, Simon Rogers of the Guardian Datablog, talking about crowdsourcing, wading through the MP’s expenses releases and the Wikileaks Afghanistan files, and working to visualise the data they receive. My highlights:

A huge amount of the hard work done on the MP’s expenses project was done by one person. Some individuals give a great deal.
For the Wikileaks files, they set up tasks and asked people to complete them. Simon didn’t say whether this had much of an effect on bounce rates or completion – but it’s likely that they did. And if so, perhaps the next step is gamifying the process.
But the Guardian hasn’t yet had any useful data come from crowdsourcing. Maybe they’re asking the wrong questions or requesting that people do the wrong tasks; maybe the wisdom of crowds is a different beast from the action of crowds.

Second, Julian Burgess, currently developing at the Times and soon to be off to New York, talking about how to tackle data. This was perhaps the most directly practical talk, with pointers to some great tools and tips on techniques – his slides are online here. My highlights:

When presented with data, don’t panic. Take your time, work through a sensible series of steps to analyse and work out the best approach to what’s in front of you.
There are buckets and buckets of tools out there, most if not all of them free. They’re big, they’re powerful, they’re incredibly useful. I took away the impression that a key skill for data/CAR journalists is knowing which tools are going to be good for handling which datasets – when to use Wordle vs ManyEyes, when to use Freebase Gridworks rather than Google Spreadsheets.
Metadata. This is where my little linked-data brain lit up as a puzzle piece fell into place. Hidden metadata is still part of a dataset – and it can tell stories about how the data came to be in this place, in this way, shape and format. That’s useful.

David McCandless, whose gorgeous data visualisations can be found at Information Is Beautiful spoke about visualising data and the stories it can reveal. My highlights:

Visualising something really well takes a lot of time and a lot of hard graft. It takes – this is going to sound obvious – a vision.
Making something that’s both beautiful and conveys information is hugely difficult and walks a very fine line between appearance and utility, but it’s more than worth the balancing act when it works. Successful data journalism needs to be interesting, easy, beautiful and true.
You don’t just tell stories with visualisation, you find them too. Weird spikes, unusual patterns, data points that look like anomalies – they all prompt further questions. By asking why something is the way it is, you get stories.

Finally Michael Blastland, freelance journalist and creator of BBC Radio 4’s More Or Less, discussed the problems with numbers. My highlights:

Numbers are slippery. Where do they come from and why? Just like quotes from sources, every stat is compiled by someone with an agenda and a purpose and most of them are biased in ways we can’t begin to guess till we start digging. Don’t use data just because it’s convenient.
Sometimes the story behind the number is more interesting – and more in the public interest – than any story based on the number.
I need to learn more maths. Specifically, statistics.

Most journalists haven’t been taught the skills they need to do what these guys do (and they were all guys; that’s not a bad thing per se, but worthy of a note that more women on the stage would be good to see next time). Every speaker told the audience that there’s no special education required to work in their field. We don’t need to be programmers, or designers, or statisticians. But we need to be interested and open-minded and both willing and ready to learn.

But doing this well takes a team, and it takes time. Most journalists will never get the chance to learn or teach themselves. And even if they do – you can be a jack of all trades, you can take a project through from finding the numbers to analysing the data to making it look amazing and simple and easy to use, but it takes a harsh amount of time and is punishingly frustrating to do alone.

Data journalists need support. Time, resources, connections, and people. I’ve not yet met anyone who can do all of this – or even most – alone; certainly not in their spare time, working in the gaps, at the ends of long days. All the people who spoke at the Frontline Club were at the top of the market, doing brilliant work that reaches people, making useful journalism. We need more like them – but we also need the support systems that allow people like them to grow and thrive. Next time, I’d like to see conversations about company culture, about how to evangelise to your newsdesk, about time management and learning and how, exactly, we free up time and space for data work in newsrooms all over the country, from the ground up.

On a related note, the next meetup of Hacks and Hackers London is on October 20. If all goes well, I’ll be there. Come join in.

While We Were Here – turning a festival into a newspaper

What.

While We Were Here is a 16-page free souvenir newspaper with a print run of 4,000. It was put together by a small team of volunteers during this year’s Greenbelt Festival. It included a 4-page black and white comic pull-out in the centre of the paper. You can download a copy of the main paper or the comic in PDF formats.

Where.

Greenbelt Festival takes place over four days at the end of August every year at Cheltenham race course. There’s no accommodation on site that’s not under canvas – so the newspaper team were camping out on the course along with about 20,000 other festival-goers. We appropriated a small box that’s normally used for watching the races and turned it into a newsroom, with two design Macs and three or four laptops at any given time. There were not enough chairs, the carpet went half-way up the walls, and we were constantly watched by pictures of small men on large horses.

Who.

In total there were ten people involved in making the main paper. We didn’t have much to do with the comic guys – they did their own thing and arrived perfectly on time with all their spreads in PDF form. Our team was brought together by Matt Patterson as hands-on managing editor and James Stewart as hands-off. I was the editor. James Weiner and Paul Abbott worked on data and infographics for the paper. Ben Weiner, Will Quirk, Geraldine Nassieu-Maupas and Oliver Mayes made up our design and layout team, and Wilf Whitty dealt with some last-minute front-cover design issues.

The rest of the team were primarily design-minded folks and I was (as far as I know) the only one with newsroom experience. As a result partly of that and partly the fact that I’ll organise anything if it stands still near me for long enough, I took charge of content planning and making sure we had something interesting, well-written and appropriate for print on every page.

Why.

As a tangible souvenir, something to commemorate the experience of being at Greenbelt for those who were there and something to express a little of what it was like for those who weren’t. Something that’s separate from the blog or the Flickr stream or the Twitter conversations, a document that physically exists and can be handed around families, shown to children, given to grandparents, in a way that the internet still can’t.

And, in a very real way, we did it because we could.

When. How.

I was one of the last of the team to arrive on site, on Friday morning. At 2.30pm the team met for the first time and found out our general brief. Over the next four hours we hammered out a page plan for the paper, focussing on what we felt were the major themes and events from the Festival that people would recognise and want to read about. We decided who would be covering what in terms of writing content specifically for the paper. I briefedthe Festival’s photographers about what we’d need and when. We made up a flat plan and stuck it to various pictures of horses, and I wrote up a schedule working backwards from our hard deadline – 6pm on Sunday.

We made the paper in just over two days. The design team did a lot of work on Friday night and Saturday morning putting templates and grids together, while I did vox pops and got quotes from various festival punters. I started to put content together on Saturday afternoon, which is when it became clear that we couldn’t use most of the content from the two people who were blogging the festival over the weekend. One person’s writing was very long-form, personal and intellectual, while the other’s was very short-form and timely – both made for great blog posts but wouldn’t work in print. I started roping in people to write reviews and snippets of content, as did managing editor James Stewart. The infographics team finally managed to get hold of some data they could use and started drawing golf buggies in Illustrator.

By Sunday lunchtime we had about half of what we needed copy-edited and in formats ready to put on the page, and we had two neat infographics ready to place. I spent the next three or four hours writing, helping choose pictures, deciding what content needed to go in which boxes, copy-editing and being very rude to other people’s work so it would fit in print-sized boxes, while next to me the layout team collaborated to pull it all in to InDesign and make it look perfect. By about 4pm we had collected all the content we needed; the next two hours involved me pacing around the newsroom, making sure we had everything in the right place, picking different pictures when the ones we had didn’t work out, and occasionally taking a seat and making changes to the text or the design when things simply wouldn’t fit right.

Matt started uploading it at about 6.45pm. Network sloth meant it finally finished at about 8pm. The printers in Peterborough turned their presses on for about a minute and a half, and we had a print run of 4,000 copies. Four hours later thanks to some strangers who drove through the night for us, it was back on site ready for the first copies to be distributed at the last show of the evening.

Lessons learned.

Planning is vital, much more so for print than for online journalism. If a blog post doesn’t go up or goes up late, few people will notice. If there’s a hole in your print paper, they definitely will. Thematic planning for something like this is crucial too – content should fit together, images should complement each other, pages should balance. That’s impossible to do with slapdash content delivered at the last minute.
Briefing, therefore, is another crucial element. You can’t simply say “Write me 450 words about the music scene.” You need to make deadlines clear and make sure you’ve agreed which bits of the music scene are necessary. You need to talk about tone, audience, readability, style, voice. You need to make clear what’s needed, even when you’re both up against deadline, so that the content you get back is useful and takes the minimum of editing or rewriting.
Build in redundancy. One of the reasons the paper worked well despite some of the content-related setbacks we had is that we did our best to get hold of more content than we needed – about half as much again. If I was doing it again I’d be shooting for twice as much, if not more. If it’s not used in the paper, it could go online; if it’s something that works better online, we wouldn’t have to force it into a print style. And if it doesn’t turn up, it doesn’t matter.
Get data well in advance. Infographics are awesome but they can’t be created without data. If you have a tight deadline and you’re including data-driven charts or graphics, that’s the bit you should sort out first. We didn’t, and that’s why we only have two in the paper.
Basic newspaper design skills are invaluable, even if you’re not a designer. If you’re planning content for pages, you need to understand how boxes fit together on a page, how headline size and positioning alters layout, what a baseline grid is, the difference between a 3-col and 4-col layout for a page, and a dozen other little things that don’t bother you while you’re writing but that become vital as soon as you’re laying out. You need to know the rules, what they are, how they can be bent and when they can be broken. Otherwise you end up coming in and asking questions like “Are we really wedded to a serif font?” and “Do we really need to lock to grid?” half an hour before final deadline. (Yes, this happened. No, it wasn’t me.)
If you’re distributing content across multiple channels, a convergent newsroom is potentially a huge timesaver. This would have prevented completely the problems we had with last-minute content and having to repurpose pieces that were not right for print in their original forms – but it takes a lot of advance planning. Having a pool of writers – not necessarily bloggers or writers for print, just writers – who could be briefed individually by the blog editor and the newspaper editor, and whose work could be pulled to be used in one or both formats, would have been very valuable. Doing the same with images and video could mean a converged team in three parts: content creators at one end, putting their work into a big pool; editors in the middle, picking out the best of the bunch or the most appropriate for their medium; and distributors at the other end, feeding that work into the newspaper, the blog, Twitter, Flickr, Vimeo, the various other channels including feeding out to the magazine shows and round-up events on site – and making it easy for the press office to pass out the best of what’s on offer too. I think this is the biggest thing I’ve taken from the experience – I grok convergence much better now I’ve seen it from the editor’s point of view.

The paywall debate

An interesting post extolling the virtues of the paywall by Julien Rath as part of journalism.co.uk’s excellent TNTJ group blog has really gotten me thinking. Not because I agree – far from it – but it’s finally forced me to put into words my own views on the massive paywall debate. I don’t like them. I don’t think that most papers have ever been bought on the basis of the news content – or even the op-ed and columns. (Sometimes the columns – Bridget Jones springs to mind – but rarely, and certainly not enough to subsidise an entire paper.) Asking people to pay on the web for things they don’t necessarily value enough to pay for in print – this seems pointless to me. There’s a laundry list of ideological complaints about paywalls. They trap journalism behind a wall, cutting off access to information in a terribly anti-open-web sort of way. They create gated communities where dissent is unlikely and where the turbulent streams of the open web can’t intrude – for better or worse. They ensure a sort of private members’ club that cuts off those who can’t or don’t want to pay, which can be a blessing or a curse depending on your point of view.

Ideology aside, my most basic reason for disliking paywalls is business based. We have declining circulation in print, which means very few new paper readers will come to our websites based on what we’ve put in our newspapers. One of the obvious ways to gather new readers therefore is online, getting young people used to seeing our content linked on Facebook, Twitter, social networks they belong to and appreciate, in the hope that we can drive brand loyalty through those platforms and maybe, eventually, a few of those people will start reading the paper. What happens to that model if there’s no accessible content online? It dies. What’s the plan to attract new readers to your brand above all others if it’s all behind a paywall? I haven’t yet seen one that works. It doesn’t matter how well-written or wonderful your editorials are – if no one can link to them they aren’t going to drive new traffic to your site. Breaking news content online will rarely if ever be unique outside exceptionally specialist circles. Commentary, analysis, feature articles are more “valuable”, but very rarely irreplaceable given the vast amount of alternative and specialist content available for free elsewhere. And many news consumers now read what their social circle reads and links. We come through that to like personalities or subject-specific content, but that’s not the same as a brand loyalty – I read Charlie Brooker and the Guardian Datablog regularly, but that doesn’t mean I ever read the Guardian homepage. Paying for the whole Times website when I just want Caitlin Moran doesn’t make a lot of sense to me – especially when I can’t search for Times content using my normal methods (Google) and no one else links me to it because it’s all behind a wall, so I’d have to go hunting for it specifically if I wanted to include it in my daily reading. If many other net users are like me then they won’t be willing to pay for a whole bundle when what they want is one strand. I’m more open to the idea of limited paywalls on sites like the proposed New York Times one, where only very regular readers – the folks who are already brand loyal – get charged for content. I still think they do more harm than good, because at that point you’re essentially punishing people for liking you too much. If the expectation is that content is free, suddenly charging is going to irritate people and drive them away from engaging too strongly. Yes, journalists need to be paid for what we do. We need to eat and live, after all. I’m interested in the idea of micropayment systems that let me pay pennies at a time for content from any one of hundreds of news sources – from specialist science papers via Athens through the Financial Times through the Sun, I suppose, pretty soon. I’m interested in untapped affiliation potential – ticket sales, restaurant bookings, holidays, iTunes links next to band reviews. We can still make money from picture sales, family notices and so on, but we can do it in new ways – like the death notices my paper has set up where a single payment gets you not just the notice in the paper but also a living page that remains as a permanent and changing tribute. And that’s before we get into serious targetted advertising solutions, or the content changes that have got the Mail Online to where it is today. [Edit to clarify: I’m not suggesting that any one of these is a magic bullet that will save the news industry. I’m simply pointing to possible multiple revenue streams that I feel are worth exploring to see whether they could go some way towards paying for news.] I’m not Rupert Murdoch. I haven’t sat in front of the figures or done the maths with real audience numbers, so like most other people I’m just having a good old reckon. Still, I reckon there are better ways forward than paywalls. What do you think?

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What.

Where.

Who.

Why.

When. How.

Lessons learned.

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