Category: Metamedia

Metamedia: writing about journalism and the media generally

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.

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

The Wall 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?

Greenbelt and Home Sweet Home – storytelling in tiny towns

I’m off to Greenbelt Festival at the weekend, and this year I’m on the team creating a print newspaper for the festival.

I blogged last year (when I was just starting out here) about the newspaper they gave out at the festival – a 16-page freesheet called While We Were Here, made possible only at the last minute with sponsorship from Hewlett Packard. It used content that was already online, sourcing images from Flickr and text from blog posts, in a neat reversal of the print-first view you (still, sadly) often see in traditional newsrooms, and it was available for download for free online as well as handed out on-site. It was – is – a wonderful souvenir of the festival, as well as being an excellent way to convey the intangible experiences of the festival. Because it was created by people right in the thick of things, writing from-the-heart blog posts/I-pieces and not carefully detached articles of traditional journalism, it does a much better job of conveying the atmosphere of the weekend than any events listing or simple description could.

Since reading and enjoying While We Were Here last year, I’ve had some experience creating newspapers from scratch on my own. I made a miniature four-page newspaper as part of a performance/installation/community experiment called Home Sweet Home by theatre company Subject to Change, consisting of a tiny cardboard suburb where people from Norwich built their own mini houses, flats and businesses, using the community billboard, radio station and postman to create stories. I built a tiny Evening News newspaper office complete with tiny clay journalists and mini bundles of newspapers, and I ran a breaking news service (on a billboard made of card and matchsticks) for three days.

The paper itself was a four-hour job in InDesign using the Evening News print templates and masthead to create something faithful to the design of the paper I was representing. The stories were a more complicated proposition. Some folks volunteered bizarre tales and information themselves in letters; others created things I found fascinating, so I wrote letters asking for more information. Many stories came from the community noticeboard, which became an outlet for frustrations and campaigns as well as plenty of advertising. It was important to create a souvenir, something tangible people could take away, and to give people who hadn’t been there a flavour of the absurdity of the event – and part of that was treating very silly stories with the seriousness I would if they were real. The skills you need to gather stories in tiny cardboard towns are, it seems, the same as you need in big concrete cities – sharp eyes, a willingness and ability to engage and converse, the ability to go where people are talking and listen to what they say.

That experiment taught me a great deal about what’s important in newsgathering. I hope the weekend’s antics will teach me something new about storytelling. Greenbelt is an entirely different proposition to Home Sweet Home – many thousands more people and much less clear avenues for newsgathering, for a start, plus the fact that the newspaper is likely to be focussed once again on individual and collective experience rather than hard news. (Though if Peter Tatchell’s talk gets really controversial, that could conceivably change.) Although I haven’t yet had a detailed brief from project leader James Stewart – and I’m not expecting one till I get there – I suspect the paper this year will once again function primarily as a record of the experience of being there – and that means a different set of challenges to what I do every day. I’m looking forward to helping to make it happen.

Three-tier journalism

There are three tiers of journalism in the UK at the moment – national, regional and hyperlocal – but in all the discussion and excitement over open data, the voices of journalists working at the coal-face in the middle tier tend to be absent. That’s a shame, because regional news offers some fascinating and unique challenges for data journalism and computer assisted reporting.

At one end of the scale there’s national journalism, which covers big issues affecting all regions of the country or stories of national interest. In most media national journalism tends to be biased towards the south in general and London in particular, and in newspaper terms there’s a partisan/issues bias too, along with a clear character.

Then at the other end of the scale there’s hyperlocal journalism, geared around my street, my postcode, my community. These are organisations tackling incredibly specific situations, interested in minutiae and detail, as well as the impact of wider stories on the communities in question. It’s all about applying the national news to a very specific set of circumstances.

Somewhere in between, on a sliding scale depending on the size of the news organisation, is regional journalism. At the moment that’s where I fit in – at the city- and county-wide level depending on which paper I’m writing for. The stories I follow up are a mix of both – national stories with an impact on the communities I write for, and street-level stories with wider implications. We also cover wide regional stories with an impact on a substantial proportion of our readers – council stories, crime cases, the sorts of stories which nationals would not cover at all while hyperlocals would cover only the relevant parts.

After a conversation with the BBC’s Martin Rosenbaum at Hacks and Hackers, I started to understand that regional journalism has a particular set of needs and problems when it comes to data journalism. National news needs big picture data from which it can draw big trends. Government ata that groups England into its nine official regions works fine for broad sweeps; data that breaks down by city or county works well too. Hyperlocal news needs small details – court lists, crime reports, enormous amounts of council information – and it’s possible to not only extract but report and contextualise the details.

Regional news needs both, but in different ways. It needs those stories that the nationals wouldn’t cover and the hyperlocals would cover only part of. Data about the East of England is too vague for a paper that focuses primarily on 1/6 of the counties in the region; information from Breckland District Council is not universal enough when there are at least 13 other county and district councils in the paper’s patch. Government statistics by region need paragraphs attached looking at the vagaries of the statistics and how Cambridge skews everything a certain way. District council data has to be broadened out. Everything needs context.

The great thing about that? There are unending opportunities for good data journalism in regional news – opportunities to combine new technology and open data to produce something that’s relevant and useful to as many individuals as possible. The question is how we exploit them. I believe that we start by freeing up interested journalists to do data work beyond simply plotting their stories on a map, taking on stories that impact people on a regional level.

How do school catchment areas affect house prices? Since the county council decided to turn the lights off at midnight on certain streets, has there been an increase in crime? How have mental health service closures hit NHS waiting lists in the region? We should be using open data and freely available tools to do good regional journalism and helping people to find out.

Hacks & Hackers London – a few thoughts

Last night I headed to London for the first Hacks and Hackers meetup in the country. It sprouted out of the Ruby in the Pub meetings and has been organised by Joanna Geary and colleagues at the Times as a meetup for journalists interested in coding and geeks interested in journalism.

It was very well attended – more than 50 people by my count – and full of interesting conversations to be had about what people are currently doing and what they want to move into. I hope it continues and develops into a more structured, regular meet – and that I don’t have to get up at 5.30am to do an early shift every time I want to get there.

A few things I took away:

  • It’s obvious, but it bears repeating: ideas are easy, execution is hard. We need skills as well as inspiration to build what we want to build.
  • The corollary: collaboration is key. We don’t all need to know how to do everything – what’s important is building working relationships with people who can make up for our own shortcomings.
  • Regional data journalism is a massively different prospect from hyperlocal or national. This is something I need to parse out, probably in its own post, but an important realisation – regional data and its implications and interpretations have their own joys and challenges.
  • There are not many regional data journalists, especially in print-first organisations. To my knowledge I was the only person there who works on a regional news organisation, never mind a newspaper. I suspect there are plenty of reasons for this – time, inclination and understanding being just the most obvious ones. If we want to include interested regional print people in these conversations, we might have to take the mountain to Mohammed.
  • Practical beats theoretical. If you want to persuade someone that data journalism is important or relevant, creating something is far more persuasive than explaining it. Don’t preach it, do it.
  • Start simple. Everyone I spoke to who’s played a part as a tech/social media/digital evangelist in their organisation has said the same sorts of things – start with what’s possible right now, and work upwards from there.
  • Not everyone with something to say is on Twitter or participating on blogs. Sometimes if you have a wide circle of social contacts it’s easy to miss voices from outside that circle – and often those voices have something tremendously valuable to contribute.
  • People are amazing. Everyone who was at the meetup last night had some incredible ideas and projects on the go. Everyone had something to offer, something to teach and something to learn. At the risk of sounding completely hokey, it gives me hope.

And here are just a few of the ideas that I heard kicked around for what the group could do in the future.

  • Hour-long lessons in all sorts of subjects – Ruby and other languages, Freedom of Information requests, story construction, search engine optimisation, data cleansing, social media, and so on.
  • Talks or discussions led by people with practical experience covering topics that hit the industry at the moment – monetising online, social media policy (or lack of it), the fallout from the Wikileaks disclosures, for instance.
  • A swap shop for people looking for help with projects or for learning mentors – almost a lonely hearts system for hacks seeking hackers and vice versa.
  • Practical demonstrations and talks from people with proven experience.

Whatever direction it goes in, I’m glad to have been involved and excited to see what happens next.

The NCE News Practice exam: resources

I discovered on Wednesday that I’ve passed my NCE exams – and did particularly well on the News Practice exam, winning the Ted Bottomley award. (I love the name. Love it. Probably too much.)

The examiner [pdf] was very, very nice about my paper, saying:

A textbook example of how to tackle the Newspaper Practice paper. A comprehensive law answer citing relevant cases and law, followed by practice answers that clearly demonstrate the candidate’s imagination and ability. It is clear from this paper that this candidate is already putting into practice the skills that the Newspaper Practice paper looks for. One of the highest Newspaper Practice scores in recent years. A very impressive performance.

I’ve been trying to find the paper I wrote so I could work out what on earth I did right, but so far haven’t managed to unearth it. I’m pretty sure I arrived home and thrust it as far out of sight as possible along with the other papers.

But from what I remember, a staggering amount of what I wrote for the second half of the paper was about the internet. Specific, useful, relevant ideas about how to use it to move stories on, to facilitate comments and let the community take control of the conversation. I talked about topic pages, context as an integral part of news reporting, data journalism in many forms, visualisations, mashups, maps, timelines, social media, FOIs, online reportage in all sorts of guises and the importance of the hyperlink.

Anyone revising for News Practice exams – my best advice is read the links, think about how you can apply the theory to the practical, and good luck. Oh, and know your McNae’s. Nothing can beat that.