Category: Metamedia

Metamedia: writing about journalism and the media generally

Words mean things: no, all journalism is not aggregation

Lots of people today on Twitter have linked to Robert Niles’ post on OJR spanking people for “whining” about aggregation, and reiterating a point he made last month – in essence, along with a lot of other very sensible and useful points, he argues that all journalism is aggregation.

Let’s get one thing clear – I agree with a lot of what Niles says in these two posts, though I’d probably step aside from the aggressive tone of his second piece, on account of how chastising people for being defensive is only going to make them more defensive. He makes some excellent points and I wish more news organisations took them on board.

But claiming that all journalism is aggregation is akin to deciding that Flickr’s homepage list of interesting images is the same thing as taking all the photographs yourself. It’s not. It’s patently obvious that it’s not.

Words mean things. We already have the words “information management and presentation” to encompass the various skills that journalists use, whatever form their journalism takes – that covers both reportage and aggregation nicely. We already have the word “editing” to describe the process of deciding what to put in a newspaper or on a website. And we have the words “curation” and “contextualisation” too, though they’re much more jargon-ish than those others, to describe elements of aggregation that involve editorial decision-making, peripheral research and so on.

Speaking of jargon, though, aggregation has not entirely solidified as a term. The future-of-news field has a terrible habit of taking perfectly good words – like “entrepreneur” – and blurring the definition to include some very different things – like “self-employed freelancer”. Perhaps Niles’ thoughts are symptomatic of this sort of semantic land-grab – is he simply redefining the word “aggregation” to cover all forms of information management and presentation? Because if so, I fail to see much use in the term – it’s too broad to be helpful in understanding the specific challenges journalists and news organisations face.

However we’re defining it, news aggregation is not evil. It’s not the enemy. It’s wonderful that new web-based tools exist now that enable people to do this work faster, better, in new and exciting ways; it’s great that Google and Flipboard and Zite and so on are doing it algorhithmically in such innovative directions. Journalists should welcome the fact that our work reaches more people and that the job of curating content is becoming as valued and valuable a part of the journalistic ecosystem as the job of creating it. @acarvin’s work is just as important in reporting the Middle East uprisings as any single reporter on the ground. At my workplace, the daily newspaper roundups and tips collections and lists of big commodities stories are useful and valuable just as original content is.

But they’re not the same. They don’t serve the same function. And writing a three-line drop intro on a colour piece is not the same thing as deciding to include something in the paper or on the home page is not the same thing as Google News automagically deciding your story deserves to be the first link. Reporting needs different skills, tools and timescales from aggregation. And both terms incorporate multitudes of smaller specialisations.

Aggregation should be valued. I understand and can sympathise with the desire to conflate something that is valuable but not well-regarded with something which is already seen as respectable. But I doubt its wisdom in this case. We need to fight for news organisations to recognise that curation and aggregation are part of a holistic approach to journalism and add enormous value to their work, yes – that I can wholeheartedly and full-throatedly support. But telling them that they’re already doing it is not going to lead to the changes we need, or any greater understanding of the problems we face.

Driving innovation: pie in the sky

This post forms part of the third Carnival of Journalism – a monthly blog carnival focussing on, well, journalism. It’s my first time taking the plunge to properly join in.

This month, the focus is driving innovation, with detailed prompts looking at either the Knight News Challenge or the Reynolds Fellows programme – both fine endeavours aimed at encouraging journalism innovation. But while I was researching them, I fell to thinking what I might do if I had a vast pot of money and was asked to use it to drive innovation.

These are my pie-in-the-sky idealistic naive ideas. This is what I’d do, if I ruled the world.

Training. Fellowships are great at rewarding the very best and the very brightest – the people who’ve already proven themselves. But there are huge pools of talent further down the ladder, people who are hungry and excited and want chances and learning. I’d offer training opportunities, broker partnerships between educators and news organisations, and champion ongoing education in journalism. And of course it’d run courses, my imaginary magic organisation with infinite funds – it’d help fill in skills gaps for older workers and help hold the NCTJ to account when it came to teaching the skills needed in innovative newsrooms.

Partnerships. It’s easy to see where the links should be sometimes, but incredibly hard to make them happen. Individuals benefit from being round the same table with people from different industries and with different viewpoints, at all levels of business. I’d develop a sort of “skills swap” fellowship, encouraging organisations focussing on news, web development, technology, gaming, data and other relevant areas to essentially trade employees for a while, so that their guys learned new skills and their teams were exposed to new ideas. I’d aim for it to spark innovative ideas within larger organisations, and the swappers would have to create a Journalism Thing – in co-operation with each other and with their organisations – as part of their participation.

Intersections. Like every industry, journalism needs injections of ideas outside its existing sphere in order to avoid disappearing inside its own navel. There are dozens of areas with things to teach journalism, and journalism has a huge amount to teach – so one of my organisational remits would be to run events to bring those worlds together. Traditional conferences, hack days, foo camps; strategy events for managers and making-things days for practitioners. All aimed at sparking ideas, creating connections and, yes, driving innovation.

Startup loans. The Knight News Challenge is a brilliant way of getting people started – but they build a competition which necessarily means hundreds of fantastic ideas lose out. We need that, but I think the startup ecology also needs finance options when they hit hard times, or when they want to expand. And with a dramatic lack of lending going on right now, a startup loan fund aimed at journalism projects could help provide short- or even long-term finance to help build a successful innovation ecology.

Resources. Legal support and training. Business information. Links to the academic community, to the business community, to investors of various types; research fellowships, practical workshops, hotdesking office space, a “library” of tech kit (camcorders, laptops, software, hardware) for innovative projects to lease at a smaller incremental cost than buying it out. My magical organisation would be a nexus of conversation about and resources for innovation in journalism, and a big part of our remit would be to not only build those resources but also get them to where they’re needed.

So that’s me. What would you do?

Live tweeting tips

Between the Budget and the march I’ve been doing a fair bit of live tweeting over the last week or so. Here are the principles I follow when I’m doing this sort of live reporting, wbether it’s live on the ground at a breaking news event or curating in front of a screen in the office.

General tips

  • Pick a hashtag. Most big events organically end up with two or three hashtags at least – #march26, #26march, for instance. A few, like the Egypt protests, end up unified behind one (#jan25) with others appearing and disappearing from time to time (#tahrir). Official organisations, if they know what they’re doing, will tend to tell people in advance of an organised event what tag they’re using (HM Treasury used #budget11) but often large numbers of other tweeters will decide to use a different one (#budget2011). Pick yours and tell people which one it is – but don’t be afraid to change it as long as you tell people why.
  • Find sources. Work out who’s there, who’s reporting, who’s involved. If you can get non-Twitter contact details for some of them, so much the better – that way if they suddenly go dark you have another way to find out what’s happened, and you can get in touch directly for more detailed reports if you need them.
  • Know your sources. Finding eye-witnesses is relatively easy. Working out whose reports you can trust is much harder. Try and get some background on your go-to people, understand their perspective a little – sometimes this is as simple as reading a few pages back in their Twitter timeline, or checking their bio, or Googling them. Bear in mind, as you would with sources you’re interviewing, their likely biases and the slant they’re likely to put on information.
  • Use Twitter lists. Once I’ve IDed potential sources I use private lists to curate eye-witness reports. On the ground, there isn’t often time to update these as events progress, but having a go-to list of people whose words you trust and who are reporting live can be immensely useful in making sure you’re up to date. Back at the desk, curating eye-witness lists can ensure you’re among the first to be aware when a situation changes.
  • Use search wisely. If something big is breaking, you can usually pinpoint it quickly using http://search.twitter.com – and if you’re looking for particular pieces of information, or pictures, or opinions, you can use search operators to pinpoint further. For instance, “#march26 -RT” brings back tweets tagged #march26 that are not retweets. “#budget2011 ?” finds questions about the Budget (which you might be able to answer). “libya :(” finds negative sentiment tweets which mention Libya. You can also use near: and within: to get location-tagged tweets. Here’s a complete list of search operators.
  • Stay balanced. Think about your personal biases, whatever they are, and be aware of how they’re likely to affect your reporting. Read up on confirmation bias and think about whether you’d trust something or retweet it if it was saying the opposite of what it says. Think about your use of language and avoid over- or under-dramatising a situation.
  • Attribute. If you saw something yourself with your own eyes, tweet it as is. Everything else needs an attribution. Use new-style retweets for eye-witness information that you can verify or from sources you trust.
  • Verify. And if you can’t verify, clarify. Try not to get carried away with the moment. Remember that if something sounds too good to be true, or too bad, it often is. Beware of tweeting things that agree with the way you want the story to pan out. Be aware of your storyteller’s instinct that will bias you towards neat resolutions (like Mubarak’s resignation, which was pre-emptively reported at least twice). Find original sources, ask for confirmation and clarification, and if you accidentally tweet something untrue, correct yourself.

On the ground

  • Be openminded. Decide where you’re going and why. Think about the issues you want to report, and work out a plan to do that to the best of your ability. But go with an open mind, and be prepared to change your focus if events change.
  • Go well equipped. Spare batteries if you can get them. More pens than you know what to do with. Spare notebook. Spare spare notebook. Chargers, in case you can get to a plug socket. Comfortable shoes. Dress warmly but smartly. Enough food, and then some extra food. And bananas if you’re likely to be on your feet for any length of time (seriously, I learned this by fighting the undead for 8 hours at a time).
  • Have a plan for what happens if your connection goes down. I spent large parts of the march through Whitehall frantically texting my Twitter updates in via SMS, taking pics to stack up for later tweets, and talking to people with my notebook out.
  • Think detail. Think colour. Think little moments that only you saw, snippets of the larger whole. Don’t try to encompass everything; pick out what’s unusual in your field of view and frame it succinctly.
  • Take pictures. Geotagged images uploaded in real time are an easy way for someone to verify that you’re a reliable source. They don’t have to be beautiful, though it helps if you’ve a good eye for an image and you have the kit to take something striking. But iPhone images work just fine, as do most Android and Blackberry models. Look for moments, and capture them. And if that moment is “holy crap the cops are beating up kids”, remember that a picture, however grainy and hurried, is evidence that your words alone can’t provide.
  • Use audio if it’s appropriate. Audioboo, for instance, is a great tool for short snippets of speech with ambient noise. But its efficiency and use depends on how good your kit is (do you have a microphone?) and the ambient noise (believe me when I say that vuvuzelas under a bridge are not conducive to effective audio). And remember upload time, battery life, connection speed. Balance your resources.
  • Think about video. If it’s not your primary task to bring back raw footage, then bear in mind that 30-second snippets of video uploaded straight from the ground can tell fantastic stories – but that comes at a price. It’s likely, if you’re like me, that any decent kit you have is focused on keeping you connected and not on shooting gorgeous scenes, so work within the limitations of your kit. Balance whether the images you’re seeing are worth the trouble, the time and the battery life that video takes, and balance whether it’s worth trying to upload to YouTube or a similar site while you’re on scene. Remember that uploading takes time, too. And bear in mind that if all you have are talking heads, audio plus a picture might be better.
  • Take time out to catch up. You’ll be caught up in events a lot of the time, and that’s fine. But when you get chance, stop and check the hashtag. Stay aware of what’s happening elsewhere – both in terms of where you should be and what people will want to know.
  • Don’t forget the notebook. Tech breaks. Shorthand doesn’t. People who don’t want to be recorded will let you write things down. And a notebook is still a visual shorthand for print journalism, in some crowds – and being visible can be useful.
  • Remember you can’t cover everything. You’re part of the event, and you can only report your part of what’s going on. It’s OK to let go of the bigger picture while it’s happening – in fact, if you want to report well where you are, you have to do it. Yes, it’s hard.
  • Don’t be reckless. Don’t put yourself in needless danger, and don’t charge away from a big story to chase a sexy one unless it’s justified.

At the desk

  • Monitor. Even though you’ll probably only use one hashtag, remember the others. I use Hootsuite or Tweetdeck depending on my mood to set up a monitoring dashboard and keep an eye on incoming tweets, with columns for my mentions and as many other hashtags and searches as I can think of. I’ll also tend to use “-RT” to strip retweet noise out, but I’ll generally include a column specifically for RTs with links, so that I don’t miss big-news images or new sources in the excitement.
  • Aggregate and curate. Collect stuff together, pick the best bits, and re-broadcast them. Add value by providing a stream of the best information available. Think like an editor.
  • Use outside sources. If you’re not stuck in the moment, then you have access to sources who are outside the Twittersphere. That can mean TV news, other journalists’ reports, official organisations, and so on. In Norfolk I covered a breaking news story of a train/car crash in tandem with another reporter – I was at the desk while she went to the scene of the incident to chase quotes. That meant I had access to the emergency services press offices as information filtered out, and could keep the story up to date while she spoke to witnesses and got pictures. There are always people who have interesting things to add to the conversation who aren’t on Twitter.
  • Connect individuals. The folks you’re seeing in your timeline might need information. You might see them ask questions. If you can answer them, or point them in the direction of someone who can, then do so. Be helpful. Be useful.
  • Refute. Sometimes, people tweet bollocks, either because they have something to gain by doing so or because they believed a rumour. (Or, sometimes, for the lulz.) Don’t be tempted to believe something because it sounds like it ought to be true or because you want the story to work out a certain way. If you spot something you know to be wrong, correct it, and cc the person who made the original claim.
  • Keep it factual – at least, during the event. If people are using Twitter to share information, adding opinion into the mix can be confusing and add to the noise. If you’ve got a relevant piece of reporting, a pic or a video or a news item to share, share it, but don’t use (for instance) a hashtag sharing information about the protests in Yemen as a hook for your opinion piece about left-wing support for violent intervention in dictatorships.
  • Question everything. Ask questions on the hashtag about things that aren’t clear. Ask why things are happening. Ask questions of the information that’s streaming past you and of the individuals providing it. Don’t assume.

What do you actually do?

Since I started at Citywire, I’m often at a loss to explain precisely what I do at work, especially in a neat soundbite dinner-party conversation sort of way. My job title is “Digital Media Executive”, which doesn’t honestly offer much help; I’ve taken to saying that I “facilitate online journalism” or – depending on the dinner party – that I “commit random acts of journalism”. And those are both perfectly decent soundbites, in that they sum up the general approach while avoiding the specifics altogether.

But I think it might be time to get more specific – not least in the light of what’s shaping up to be the next very boring gatekeeping argument over whether someone like me “counts” as a journalist. So here’s what I actually do all day.

Data journalism

Some of the time I do stuff that most people would consider journalism. I write short opinion pieces, often casual ones for our forum community. And I research both for my own work and for other people’s – often that involves tracking down data sets and providing background details for newsy pieces, or providing story ideas.

Sometimes I do data analysis and visualisation too – taking complicated numbers out of spreadsheets and running them through spreadsheet programmes on or offline, plugging the numbers into ManyEyes to see what’s possible and then replicating it in Excel or in our own in-house graphing programme. I haven’t done much graphical design in this job yet, but it’s on the agenda.

I sit with the journalists, and I work with them, and they’re my first responsibility. Anything I can do to help them with the tech side of the job, I do. And I do it first.

Web Analytics

This is the flip side of data journalism – it’s the data of journalism, the stats and figures of what works and how. I run our Google Analytics profiles. I spend days sometimes with my brain in the data, trying to work out where our readers are coming from and what they’re doing.

Though I’m not much of a professional statistician, it’s my job to analyse raw data and turn it into insights; this is why we did well, this is the sort of story that works, this home page design is better for retaining visitors than that one, this is what would happen to our traffic if we put all our stories behind a paywall. And this is the work that’s taught me the most, so far, about how web journalism works and the ebb and flow of people that exists behind the traffic stats for any website. Just like data journalism needs to be both about data and people, so does good web analytics – and that’s something I’m only just starting to learn to do well.

Community management

And as well as gaining insight into the tracked anonymous users on the site, it’s my job to talk with our registered users, building a community on the site who congregate around our content. This isn’t just comment moderation, though that’s a part of it; it’s also making judgement calls about appropriate content on our forums, it’s encouraging other writers to get involved and talk to readers, it’s listening when they suggest we do something and being a voice within the company for our community’s suggestions and beliefs and ideas. And sourcing stories from our users, too; I’m a link between reader and reporter, in both directions.

It’s also a strategic role. What tools does our community need, and how will we build them? What will our comment threads and our forums look like in six months, a year? What do we need to change or encourage or punish to make them come good? What should our guidelines look like? Do we want people to be able to partipate without posting? How do people work, anyway?

Social Media

And the community doesn’t just exist on our site. There are communities off-site, fragmented around the web, where we play an important part. So part of my job is participating in those communities and building relationships with people who might want or need to know about the things we write about. This isn’t just promotion – it’s conversation, story sourcing, research, content curation and distillation (which is arguably another journalistic pursuit). And I act as a sort of news canary (another good dinner-party soundbite) – an early-warning system for brewing news, concerns and issues.

There’s strategy here, too. Teaching writers about Twitter, as someone who’s been using it for journalism for some time, and working up participation guidelines for them. Deciding what success metrics are important, and measuring them, and working out whether we’re doing something useful or not. Building a reputation for the whole team, not just for being good at promoting ourselves but also for being responsive, responsible, useful, journalists. There’s a high standard to reach, and hopefully by reaching it we’ll not only do better journalism but also make money at the same time.

Alphabet soup – SEO, IA, UX

The core of this part of my role is search engine optimisation, but it also covers social optimisation and elements of information architecture and user experience design. I teach other people how to write for the web – well, sort of, because most of them have been working on web-only properties longer than I have and have a better idea of how to do it well. I try to draw out useful general principles for keeping our stories searchable and readable, making it easy for readers to find what they want.

But the bigger issues I tackle are to do with site structure, title tags, navigation, taxonomies of information, ease of use on the website. Those aren’t often things I can directly change, but it often falls to me to flag them up and work towards devising improvements. That’s a direct consequence of my web analytics work – when I’m the one finding things we can improve, it also falls to me to work out how and to make business cases for doing the work.

Web design

And because resources are always limited, I end up tinkering around with the back end of the website, tweaking bits and pieces to improve my ever-growing list of alphabet soup wishes. That means HTML, CSS, Javascript, and occasional timid forays into C#. It means getting your hands dirty, getting it wrong, split testing ideas to make sure you get it right next time, making little incremental improvements, and, crucially, ceding control to helpful developers when you’ve done your worst and it still won’t work in IE6.

Reading the internet

Yeah, seriously. I can only do these jobs by staying on top of what’s happening in the world, in all the communities I inhabit for work and for pleasure. I read incessantly, Twitter, Facebook, RSS, new things from new places, and I do my best to stay current with what’s going on in all the industries that impact what I do. (Yes, even the really boring and possibly evil ones.)

I take what I’ve read and I pass the best bits on, because that’s the other kind of journalism I do, and because I hope that my personal Twitter account is just as much a resource and a source as any professional one, and I hold myself to higher standards still. And I keep what’s relevant and use it every day to inform the decisions I make and the way I work, to back up my hunches and make sure I’m always learning more about what I’m doing.

Connecting people, ideas, things

Honestly, the most important thing I do is making connections. Connecting writers with case studies and subjects. Connecting ideas together to make new ones. Translating from reporter to geek and back again. Connecting data to story. Being a link.

And for that matter, this shouldn’t be a list. It should be a web, because everything is linked with everything else and decisions in one area have consequences in others. And it’s by no means comprehensive – the odd jobs and occasional asks are too numerous and disparate to include.

—–

I’m hoping this will kickstart me into posting more often about more practical aspects of my job – I do a great deal across many different skill sets and disciplines, and I’m often learning new principles and testing ideas without much to go on. If I can learn by reflecting, or with the help of comments, and if my experiences can be resources for someone else, then so much the better. (Plus @currybet told me I should blog more, and he is wise in the ways of such things.)

Journalism, entrepreneurialism and failure

I’ve been following with interest some conversations on Twitter about entrepreneurial journalism. @josephstash wrote up his take on the debate, advocating the creation of an “ecosystem of entrepreneurial journalism” – he raises some excellent points about support for new startups and access, and suggests that good graduates should be innovative, should be avoiding traditional media and becoming entrepreneurs. A post on Wannabe Hacks continues that conversation, arguing that fear of failure is a major element holding people back – that it is because new graduates and young journalists are scared that they are not already building the ecosystem Jo talks about.

Failure is a legitimate concern. And fear of failure is actually a pretty healthy response to the statistics – depending on which stats you believe, the chance of a small business surviving for five years or longer is between about 30% and 50%. Add to that the daunting realisation that lots of very smart business people work for media companies, and they’re still haemorrhaging money – so it’s very easy to wonder what on earth you could know that they don’t.

Even among the best and the brightest journalism entrepreneurs in the UK, most do not seem to be making enough money from their journalism to sustain themselves. (I have no stats for this, it’s based on a number of conversations and observations, so if I’m wrong in aggregate please let me know.) That’s not to say that no one is doing well, but that those who do are in the minority.

And I sound like a doom monger, which is sad, because I do think innovative start-ups are necessary for the media to continue to exist. But I also think that fear of failure is absolutely fine; it’s no one individual’s job to fix journalism, and if the risks outweigh the rewards then it is foolishness to plough on regardless.

Perhaps we need to think about what success looks like – is it enough to be writing and doing something you love that gets out there? Or is it also important to not need to take on other freelance projects, or live in your parents’ spare room, or all the other things that entrepreneurs do to get by? How long before you break even, how much do you need? Because I know that what motivates some of my peers is not fear of failure – it’s fear of not enough success. Making something amazing but not being able to monetise it. Living the dream but not being able to pay the bills.

Successful entrepreneurs tend to be older (PDF report; Slate has a US-centred roundup of this point) – in part because they have assets they can put into their business besides themselves, and because they have experience they can draw on. The people currently carrying the can for innovation in journalism tend to be very young, with limited experience, and without assets (though in some ways that makes it easier to try; if you don’t have a mortgage then there is no house for you to be scared of losing). And not every unemployed journalist wants to be – or can be – an entrepreneur (I for one didn’t get into this game because of my business skills, and my startup is neither currently profitable nor a journalism business).

I don’t want to suggest that all entrepreneurship is doomed, or that those entrepreneurs who do fight through are not necessary – they are. We need innovation desperately. But in the process, businesses will fold, and young people will throw their hearts and souls into something they love passionately but that doesn’t have a business model, and some of those people will fail. That’s the reality.

And it is OK to be young and facing your finals and scared of sacrificing years of your life for things that may not work. It’s OK for the risks not to be worth it. It shouldn’t be assumed that being a young ambitious journalist must mean starting your own business or being self-employed, any more than it should be assumed that you’ll work for free for big media companies to get experience, or that you’ll end up with the one job at the Guardian. Everyone is different.

So yes, we need entrepreneurs. But we also need jobs. Jobs for graduating journalists. We need innovation from all rungs of the ladder – older journalists, media business people, people starting small enterprises as well as people going self-employed in self-defence. And we need to remember that we – the (relatively) young journalist types active on Twitter, blogging about journalism, getting excited about tech, talking about innovating, starting our own businesses, making stuff happen – we are still the minority.

Let’s fight to get support for small businesses, let’s encourage partnerships, and let’s try and break down the barriers between the old guard and the young sprouts. But let’s not pretend that becoming an entrepreneur is the only option, or even the best option, for most people; let’s not sugarcoat the potential consequences if it goes wrong. That way lies so much heartbreak.

Unpaid work experience vs market norms

On Monday, Fleet Street Blues posted an argument that the NUJ should not be pursuing their current campaign against unpaid work experience for journalists. Regardless of who’s right and who’s wrong, something I read today shed some light on the whole affair for me. I’ve been reading a book by Dan Ariely called Predictably Irrational: the hidden forces that shape our desires (thanks @lydnicholas for the loan). There’s a chapter called “The cost of social norms” in which he discusses what happens if you take a social relationship – courtship, for instance – and apply market forces. He sets up an experiment which studies how hard students will work at mindless tasks for researchers if they’re asked to do it for no money, 50 cents or $5. Perhaps surprisingly, it’s the students who aren’t paid who work the hardest.

Those who got paid 50 cents didn’t say to themselves, ‘Good for me; I get to do this favor for these researchers, and I am getting some money out of this,’ and continue to work harder than those who were paid nothing. Instead they switched themselves over to the market norms, decided that 50 cents wasn’t much, and worked half-heartedly. In other words, when the market norms entered the lab, the social norms were pushed out.

A whole series of experiments follow, in which Arielly mixes social norms (gifts of chocolate, for instance) with market norms (cash rewards) as motivators and looks at the impact on the work people are willing to do. Money – even the mention of money – always sours the social norm. When the social contract is based on goodwill and barter that doesn’t mention a monetary value, people are willing to work for very little. The minute money is mentioned, people switch to using market norms, and suddenly discover that their reward for working is way under the market rate. So, with the NUJ campaign, the fight seems to be happening between those who see the work experience relationship as a social exchange, where inexperienced journalists gain experience, knowledge and bylines in exchange for their work, and those who see it as a market exchange where the journalist is not being fairly compensated. Just as, in the row over HuffPo bloggers not being paid in the aftermath of the $315m sale to AOL, people who were accustomed to seeing their work as part of a social exchange suddenly, at the mention of money, reframed it as a market exchange and decided they weren’t getting a fair market rate for their work. Suddenly, a lot of ongoing conversations about the value of free work make an awful lot more sense.

Can poetry be journalism?

I’ve been thinking even more than usual about unconventional storytelling in the aftermath of The Story, and ended up back on a question I last seriously thought about while I was at university.

It’s about poetry. Since I came to London I’ve rediscovered my ability to write creatively, and a couple of projects have taken off – I’ve got a poem in this month’s Rialto magazine, and a couple of weeks back I read a few pieces of writing at the launch of Whippersnapper Press, a small press devoted to getting more snappy, exciting work out to more people. It was fun.

The first piece I performed was arguably an act of data journalism. It was born out of an FOI request I put in to Norfolk Constabulary in late 2009 on the subject of big cat sightings – one that yielded some fantastic results in the form of the CAD logs written by operators during emergency and non-emergency calls. Each one of these is a story in and of itself – the two women who sparked a lion hunt at Cromer caravan park after seeing two stone lioness carvings; the South African man who was convinced he had just come face to face with a leopard; the 41 calls received by the police about a large black cat and cub near Kings Lynn in 2001. And the performance piece was an aggregation and curation of those stories.

That taps into a long history of observational poetry and literature, works that take official or historical documents, curating them and reshaping them into a newly readable and accessible (normally) work. I’ve seen examples of this including transcripts of court cases, lists of statistics, and inquiry evidence, juxtaposed and curated to introduce new meanings and ambiguities that are not necessarily evident in the original documents.

One example that has stuck with me for years – but that I’ve so far utterly failed to track down online – was a novel-length collection of real-life stories of work-related accidents, that led to health and safety laws being introduced. I read extracts in the context of a literature course, but it could just have easily been an introduction to the power of journalism, in collating and curating those reports and bringing them into the public eye. I came away with a much deeper understanding of the subject – something that for me is a major function of journalism.

And the cross-over goes the other way, too – something that’s perhaps too easy to forget when you’re concentrating on 15-word intros and the inverted pyramid. The Gravedigger column is not only a fine piece of journalism but an incredible literary work – fantastic writing can be found all over the world in disposable newsprint as well as on bookshelves.

But, given that poets have been turning journalism into poetry for at least a century now, can journalists do the same back and turn poetry into journalism?

With that in mind, this is an experiment.

Yasqot Yasqot

they kill a boy on Youtube and you watch because you barely believe
and facts are few and far between and it matters
that before you pass it on you verify
and they film from a balcony in Alexandria as he advances arms outstretched
on the stone-throwing police
he crumples
and they stop shouting yasqot yasqot

so you Google Asmaa because you don’t know how it started and you watch
the screen flicker and you’ve no way to know if the subtitles
tell her words right or if she’s still alive or where
but trust a pseudonymous someone not to mistranslate
and watch your friends retweet the news that the regime has fallen
again
even though it hasn’t

there are too many faces on the screen and in the end
you can only parse the numbers when they kneel to pray
or in HD for five minutes at a time before you’d have to pay
so you pick the numbers you believe from the nearest journalists
who aren’t being beaten arrested abused or killed
at the time
though they may be later

and there are at least 300 dead when you snatch your headphones
from the desk and load up al jazeera on livestation and listen
as the crowd roars
for fifteen minutes
and your goosebumps
are not enough tribute
and they stop shouting yasqot yasqot

Who can work for free?

Since Arianna Huffington sold the Post to AOL, there have been lots of posts on all sides of the debate about whether bloggers working for free is a good thing, a bad thing or simply an unavoidable thing.

It’s true that many HuffPo bloggers arecelebrities or working people or other types who pure and simple don’t need pay, who do it for the platform. But more are unpaid, community bloggers who write for love, for dedication, and in some cases in the hope that their work for free is a gateway, a way to build their profile and to end up with a paid writing gig. No one’s forcing them to write for free. But to me this issue seems to fit neatly into a continuum with a free guest post on one end and months-long unpaid media internships on the other. Media and writing careers are desirable; people want a way in; editors want a portfolio of cuttings; the only way to get one is, often, to work for free. Online or off.

And that means that media diversity shrinks. There are thousands of aspiring, talented writers who can’t afford to work for nothing but expenses paid; hundreds of students who have to earn money during their summer breaks and can’t take time out to go do unpaid work experience. Very few people can afford to be a journalism entrepreneur or start up a hyperlocal blog, and genuinely spend the time and the money and the energy involved in covering their community well, when there’s rent and utilities and bills to pay.

Further down the line, what about those who can’t afford to drift from freelance paycheck to freelance paycheck, with no sick pay or holiday or job security, in the hope of getting something more permanent? Do they capitulate, go over to much-derided “content farms” like Demand Media or Suite 101 just to get some writing credits and try to earn money at the same time? Or do we lose those voices from the conversation because of the economic barriers to entering a media career?

I’m not saying that the HuffPo can or should solve those problems. But I do think they’re problems that need thinking about when we think about paying writers – because if media businesses don’t pay people with no experience, we’re guaranteeing that the people with experience will be a certain type of people. And that, in the long run, means a poorer public dialogue and a skewed view on the world.

Quoting from Quora – a note of caution for journalists

Did you know it’s possible to mark your answers on Quora as “not for reproduction”? No, me neither.

Thanks to Marian Tobias Wirth (@mtwirth), who made me aware of this after my previous post on Quora’s lack of trust for its community, I’ve now had a bit of a poke at the answer settings and this particular one poses some very interesting issues – and a potential danger for journalists using Quora answers as a source.

Quora’s terms of service includes a paragraph about licences, which says the following (bolding mine):

Subject to these Terms, Quora gives you a worldwide, royalty-free, non-assignable and non-exclusive license to re-post any of the Content on Quora anywhere on the rest of the web provided that … the user who created the content has not explicitly marked the content as not for reproduction …

So what does that mean?

Essentially, it seems to suggest that Quora users have some protection against their comments being taken out of context or used in other places in ways they might not like – including being quoted by journalists without permission.

The setting isn’t easy to find – it can only be applied after an answer has been posted, by clicking on the little grey “settings” cogwheel between the “delete” option and the date at the bottom of your answer. And here’s what it looks like when it’s been turned on:

Quora comment marked not for reproduction
How the “not for reproduction” option appears

Not 100% obvious or clear on the page, and with no immediate hints as to what, precisely, the setting means, or how media organisations or individuals should treat the text. Quora founder Charlie Cheever has indicated the setting may be made clearer in future – but unless/until that happens, this is a potential problem for journalists who might not know what’s expected of them on this new forum.

Quora has said it won’t police the reproduction of content marked this way, and that it’s down to users to seek reparation if it happens to them. And at least one user has already tried to do so: after parts of her Quora answer appeared in a Time article, one user has openly questioned why it was used without her permission. And the comment in question – at least, I believe it is the comment in question, since it contains the same quote, is referred to by several other users in the Quora thread as her answer, and because of this tweet – is now attributed to an anonymous user, raising all sorts of questions about how the quote should, or could, be attributed correctly now.

Quora’s terms of service also stipulate that content must be attributed to Quora itself with a direct link, and that publishers must make reasonable efforts to edit the content or delete it to bring it in line with the most up-to-date version on Quora itself if they are asked to do so.

Given that the “not for reproduction” setting can be added to answers at any time, this could pose an issue for journalists if permission to use comments freely is retroactively revoked. So far, I don’t know of any examples of this being tested – but it may be just a matter of time.

Quora doesn’t trust me – and maybe it’s right

Quora is a question and answer website, recently discovered by almost everyone in the social media business along with a startling number of journalists, apparently as a result of a remarkably complimentary article by Robert Scoble – closely followed by a Techcrunch writeup and a huge amount of media attention. There’s been lots of noise since Christmas about various aspects of the service, with lots of hype touting it as the new Best Thing Ever; I’m sceptical, because it doesn’t trust me. But maybe it’s right.

There is growing friction between what the admins of the site want and what the users and the wider site community want. Moderation processes and rules – like the site’s user interface itself – are hard to find and can be counterintuitive. Questions can be and have been unilaterally altered, not just in ways that change their grammar but also in ways that – perhaps unintentionally – alter their meaning. This has caused some push back from individuals who dislike what they see as censorship.

At other times, flippant, humorous or sarcastic answers have been marked as “not helpful” by admins, essentially consigning them to a greyed-out land of no hope at the bottom of the question page. But at the same time, facetious and sometimes ludicrously broad or specific questions are left up to be answered in all seriousness.

There’s a very real lack of consistency, and perhaps a lack of understanding on some admins’ part that what they personally deem as “not helpful” may in fact be helpful to others. This is, presumably, work that the community editing tools should be doing – and perhaps over the months as the community adjusts to its new popularity, admins will trust – or train – the community to make the right decisions more often.

But without that trust, people asking genuine questions will be upset when they are edited to become something they didn’t want to ask, and people who spent good time writing answers will be upset that their work has been – without explanation – deemed “not helpful”. Or will discover that the question they spent time answering has been summarily deleted and their response has disappeared.

And there’s a very telling language issue. At present, every question (and, as far as I can make out, every answer) has to be in English, or an admin will delete it.

Quora has high aspirations for quality, and needs strong safeguards against spam – but it seems staggeringly short-sighted to open sign-ups to all and then refuse to allow people to participate in their own languages. And it’s handled in an unusual way – rather than making the issue clear at signup, users who want to talk in other languages have their content deleted. That is not going to give these users the warm fuzzy feeling of belonging.

And again, it shows a lack of trust in the community. The implication is that community moderators speaking other languages won’t do the job to the exacting standards required.

Speaking of which – what are the exacting standards required? A surprising portion of admin activity seems to involve telling users who have posted answers to questions that their answer should in fact be a comment on the question, or a comment on another answer. Quora seems to be trying to alter user behaviour away from established conventions – including those of anonymous behaviour – and at times its user interface seems almost wilfully obscure and difficult to fathom. Combined with  admin comments that don’t explain precisely what you’ve done wrong and a lack of easily available guidance on how to get it right, the impression I get is one of a system attempting to resist users, not to accommodate them.

But maybe that’s the point. Maybe Quora shouldn’t trust me; maybe I and every other user is a potential vector for spam, or for self-promoting PR or marketing answers, or for a sarcastic lightness of humour [check the collapsed answer, too] that doesn’t match what it wants to become. The admins and founders of the site seem to strongly want it to be like Wikipedia in its depth, breadth and style, creating definitive pages on various subjects and building a persistent knowledge base. Perhaps it’s right not to trust users who want to use it like Twitter, to have conversations.

Because it’s going to have problems. I don’t know if they’re insurmountable problems or not, but it is going to have issues with spam, and scalability, and evaporative cooling, and brands, and people taking the mickey [check the collapsed answers], and people gaming the influence system, and duplicate content, and provocative content, and anonymous trolling, and controversial bans, and people using it in a whole host of ways the creators didn’t envisage.

So maybe Quora is right not to trust anyone just yet. And maybe I’m right not to like it, given that it seems so keen to push me away.