Category: Metamedia

Metamedia: writing about journalism and the media generally

How do you make local news on Twitter engaging?

Like this:

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This is @eveningnews, and it’s not your average local news feed. Delivering a wry, funny take on the day’s news in Norwich, it’s not scared to poke fun at the newspaper – and the results are a far cry from the sterile RSS-based robots that many news brands use on Twitter.

@eveningnews has, at last count, nearly 3,700 followers – not bad for a local newspaper with a print circulation of 18,923 – and it’s talkative. It doesn’t follow many folks back but it does engage with the followers it has, talking back, retweeting and chatting about what’s going on.

The voice behind the tweeting is Stacia Briggs, current UK Columnist of the Year and feature writer for the Evening News, who also tweets as @womaninblack. She says that far from seeing Twitter as something difficult, it’s child’s play by comparison to traditional writing: “Give me 140 characters in comparison to 1,500 words any day.”

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The feed was originally started by a colleague but quickly taken over by Stacia, and these days it’s very rare that anyone else uses it. Stacia admits being “extremely territorial”, and says that when the account was started she “was one of the only people on my newspaper who had some experience of Twitter – it’s not much of a basis for my unstinting belief that I could do the best job with the account, but it was a start”.

Like many folks looking at local news feeds, Stacia says she struggled to find something engaging out there – a feed that actually made people want to click on links, rather than simply treating the medium as a one-way publishing stream. So she set out to create something different.

“I consider the account to be fairly informal, hopefully amusing and friendly – sometimes a bit edgy and slightly naughty,” she says. “I don’t want bland RSS feeds or po-faced updates that command me to read a story. What I wanted to do is make the feed like a conversation: I’ll tweet a link, and then I’ll sometimes make an observation. Sometimes, the observations are quite oblique – I like oblique observations.”

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“One of the things I feel most strongly about is maintaining a voice, one which people recognise and can relate to,” Stacia says.

“Clearly, there are stories which are serious and which must be treated as such. I don’t post a story about an inquest and then make a joke – if I did, I’d imagine it would be my career that required an inquest after a very sudden death.”

But between the straight tweets that link the reader to important stories and keep people up to date, @eveningnews is genuinely funny and wonderfully compelling. It’s a fantastic mix that makes readers feel they have a genuine relationship and a line into the paper – as is shown by the number of stories that come straight to Stacia via @eveningnews – and it has a nice side line in gently mocking the newspaper’s occasional online mishaps in a way that brings readers into an inside joke.

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Looking at @edp24, a feed run out of the same office by the same team, the difference is clear – the Eastern Daily Press feed is entirely automated, even automatically passing on reporters’ tweets. The Eastern Daily Press has more than three times the circulation of the Evening News in print, and the circulation area is much wider – but it has just a few more followers than @eveningnews.

And despite regular attempts at engagement from the people who follow it, it simply doesn’t talk back. In this, it’s like most other news brands, both local and national – but it’s clear from what @eveningnews has achieved that much more is possible when someone committed and talented takes ownership and makes the news their own.

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Readers tell @eveningnews their stories freely, they pass on ideas, they offer case studies and point out errors – but the open dialogue has drawbacks. Stacia doesn’t stop when she goes on holiday or is unwell – keeping @eveningnews going is a constant task that transcends normal work hours and boundaries. But it’s worth it, she says.

“There’s a mine of untapped data and information on Twitter which hugely benefits newspapers – and I’m trying to access it. I’ve got some great, breaking stories from Twitter, and within minutes we’ve had them on our websites.

“A huge city centre fire was first reported on Twitter and we then followed it with live tweeting, pictures from our photographers and Twitter followers and regularly updated reports. It directed people to our website and was a great example of how Twitter can break the news and we can expand on it.

“I’ve been given feature ideas, news stories, pictures, video, song clips – it’s been like a news sweet shop.”

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And the best advice for people tweeting as news brands?

“Don’t churn out corporate slurry. Talk like a human being. Engage with people. Reply to people who talk to you. Look for the unusual in a story and highlight it. Encourage your reporters to find lots of stories about UFOs, big cats, sharks or local eccentrics – they’re Twitter gold.”

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Full disclosure: I worked for the Evening News from 2008 to 2010, and I am a total Stacia fangirl. Stacia’s job at the Evening News is currently at risk due to Archant Norfolk’s editorial review.

Rewiring the state

Last year I reported on Young Rewired State, when a group of committed and amazingly talented youngsters descended on Neontribe‘s offices for three days of making stuff. (The report’s not online because at the time the EDP’s CMS automatically took everything offline after two months; no, I still don’t know why they thought that was a good idea.) I remember being stunned by the results and by the people involved – the energy, the excitement, and the apps they made.

On Saturday, I went up to Neontribe’s new offices in Norwich along with 14 others to be part of the first regional Rewired State hack day – but as a developer, not a hack. (For the record: I’m no dev, I just mash things together and swear at them till they more-or-less work in a cargo-cult sort of way.) I got to work with three brilliant young people – Callum, Isabell (@issyIO) and Ben. They were all way ahead of me – I can’t wait to see what they make in the future.

The aim of the day was to use local government data to make apps. We started out with a computer each, a list of data sources, a whiteboard full of ideas and a lot of very tasty food (seriously, the catering was amazing). Oh, and 8 hours to go before we presented our work to a room full of local dignitaries. So no pressure.

The team I was working with decided to create Kebab Hunter, an app that mashed together reviews of local takeaway joints with hygiene data from Norwich City Council, then plotted them on an augmented reality Layar that could be viewed on your smartphone. The result was an app you could use to quickly find a nearby takeout that not only serves tasty food but also won’t make you ill. The bits I did were mostly to do with finding, cleaning and mashing data together (I’m indebted to @psychemedia for this timely post). Most of the time (well, when not eating the delicious cake, anyway) I had my head down, so it wasn’t really until the very end that I got to see what other people had been working on.

For me, with my very limited hodge-podge set of skills, the day was exhilarating. The time limit gave it a focus and a sense of urgency, and working alongside such a talented group of people was a pleasure and a privilege – and a very fast and efficient way of learning. I felt like my brain had gone through a wringer at the end of it, but in a very good way. And we had some awesome things to show for the effort.

Here’s what we made (I’ll add links to this list if I can find them, and if there are any mistakes let me know – I didn’t catch everyone’s name):

  • Where does Norfolk’s money go? A map of Norfolk council spending – Sym Roe
  • Bin Posse. Reminders of what goes out when by SMS – Rupert Redington
  • AV findings. Where voted “Yes”, and what were they like? (Apparently Yes to AV is strongly correlated with museum visits) – Chris Heath and Katja Mordaunt
  • Bridge Headroom. How much space is there under Potter Heigham bridge? – Michael Holness
  • Words about Norfolk. What words does Wikipedia link to Norfolk? – Rob Young
  • Festival timeline. The Norfolk and Norwich Festival lineup, displayed to investigate – Harry Harrold
  • Hey Chief! A humourous look at the value for money of Norfolk Fire Service. (Norwich has a lot of cat-related incidents, we learned) – Peter Chamberlin, Heydon Pickering, Michael Holness
  • Kebab Hunter. Augments a phone camera’s eye view of Norwich, with takeaway food safety info and reviews – Callum Weaver, Mary Hamilton, Ben Holloway and Isabell Long.

At the end of the day we presented our creations to local politicians, council staff and each other in the Octagon Chapel, a beautiful and oddly stately venue for such a high-tech day. I hope the folks who saw what we made see what’s possible when you get interested, creative people with l33t skills in a room with their data.

Afterwards, people were talking about the power of open data – its scariness, the fact that transparency can’t be done half-heartedly, the fact it can’t be controlled, but also the freedom to experiment and the excitement of possibility. And the need for devs, designers, interpreters and even journalists to bridge the gap between spreadsheets and stories, between data and people. Those were good conversations, and I hope a lot more comes out of this event.

Very, very good day.

Edited to add: @harryharrold has collected the whole day as it happened. Includes geese.

Failing on your feet

This post is part of the Carnival of Journalism, and the topic for this month is failure.

If I hadn’t failed repeatedly, I wouldn’t be a journalist. This is all a bizarre accident.

See, I never wanted to be a journalist. (Blasphemy!) I remember deciding when I was about 9 that if I did become a journalist I would write for the Guardian or the Independent but definitely not the Daily Mail because it was rubbish, but all that was obviously only a back-up plan. I was going to be a Writer.

So I grew up a bit, wrote a lot, won at school, won at being homeless and failed at being sane, and eventually dealt with that enough to pack up and get to university for a literature and creative writing degree. I did my best to become a Writer by arranging words in attractive orders as much as humanly possible. I held down a part-time job designing books, copy editing, typesetting and occasionally redesigning the perspex plates on the front of all the postboxes in the UK, which at the very least meant that millions of people read my work every day.

And then came graduation, and the growing realisation that I had literally no idea how to be a Writer and still afford to eat. I applied to two post-grad courses, one in creative writing and one in literature, and failed at both. I went for editorial jobs at Oxford University Press and Taylor Francis and loads of smaller places, and failed – in fact I failed at more than 50 job applications in three months, that summer.

Around this time I split up with my long-term partner, and moved out of the house we shared, and while sleeping on other people’s sofas I spotted a job ad for Trainee Journalists for the Eastern Daily Press in Norwich where I was living and I thought, well, at this point, the part time job won’t pay the rent, let’s apply.

When I did the application test – an exam in a room with 100 other people – I was still on sofas and hadn’t seen the news in the best part of a week. That made writing a 200-word news story on a current news issue pretty difficult. Luckily, I blag well, and if nothing else the years of wanting to be a Writer meant I could write well. So I got the call back, and was sure I’d failed the interview (I wasn’t sure what a red top was), and then a few days before Christmas came the job offer. Paul Durrant – he of the most excellent moustache and Brummie accent – phoned me and said: “Got some good news for you: you’re going to be a journalist.”

Man. What a failure.

So that’s me. I failed at Writing and won at writing. I failed so hard I failed myself right into a career that’s perfect for me, right into work I love and an environment I thrive in. I failed so badly that I wake up every day excited about what I do; I failed so hard that if you didn’t look at what really happened you’d probably call it deliberate success.

Since then, of course, it’s been slog and hard graft and an awful lot of trying incredibly hard all the time. It’s been monstrously long days and never turning my phone off and learning stuff in my spare time and making things happen. It’s been – it is – hard, and joyous. And I’ve never regretted the failures that led me here.

That’s my lesson. Sometimes failure is better than success. Sometimes you get better opportunities through failing than you do through succeeding. Sometimes the only way to win is to fall.

Birthers, death and conspiracy

As news of Osama bin Laden’s death circulates and the circumstances become more widely known, we can expect a myriad new conspiracy theories to spring up in its wake. But why? What is it that makes people tell themselves stories of secrecy, cover-up, hidden controlling powers and forbidden knowledge? And what is it that makes those stories resonate across American culture in particular?

Peter Knight, in his book Conspiracy Theories in American History, calls conspiracy theories “part of the lingua franca of everyday American life and entertainment”. He traces their history as far back as the first settlers on the continent, and argues that the country’s diversity combined with American exceptionalism to form a particularly fertile ground for certain types of conspiracy theory.

Popular conspiracies, like best-selling novels, solve problems; cultures talk to themselves, telling themselves soothing tales that may or may not accurately reflect reality. Where off-beat narratives like Roswell or the Illuminati flourish, they do so because they resolve some conflict within society that causes anxiety.

In 1964 Richard Hofstadter wrote a seminal essay diagnosing a paranoid style in American politics. At that time it was easy to characterise conspiratorial viewpoints as being held only by the fringe elements of society; since then conspiracy theories have hit the mainstream again. JFK’s assassination, international banking, the moon landings, alien abductions, 9/11, the birther movement – all these have captured the imaginations of large segments of the American public.

Conspiracies have tended to fall into roughly one of two groups. Some conspiracies involve attacks by outside groups on America – for instance, communists, Jews, Masons, Catholics or, going back before the Civil War, slaves and abolitionists. Others involve attacks or systematic deceptions perpetrated on the American people by its government or by those in positions of power over it – examples include the belief that the moon landings were faked, the various theories that the US government knew about 9/11 before it happened, fluoride in the water, CIA drug experiments, and so on.

If there is one man who combines these two strands of fear almost perfectly, it is Barack Obama. Simultaneously the most powerful government official in the US, he is also perceived as an imposter, an outsider, in large part due to the colour of his skin.

And, for all that the paranoid style seems designed to increase rather than decrease fear and anxiety, its success comes from the fact that it resolves underlying conflicts in a way that renders them understandable to the man on the street, and less threatening. Hofstadter in 1964 ran down a list of reasons why the American right wing felt dispossessed, and had latched on to conspiracy as a way of regaining control; today, the Tea Party and the current cornucopia of conspiracy represent an even stronger expression of a stronger sense of unease and lack of control.

The birther movement is an elegant synthesis of the two prevailing concerns of American conspiracy theories into one hypothesis: if Obama was not born in the US, then his very existence is both an external attack on America and a mass deception perpetrated by those in power on the American people. Obama represents the threat of both in one body; perhaps this is why the theory has proven so attractive to so many people, even to potential presidential candidates like Donald Trump, to the extent that earlier this week Obama produced his long form birth certificate as proof.

(It won’t work, of course. Conspiracy theories interpret inconvenient facts as damage and route around them in much the same way that the internet does.)

And if there was another man who reconciles and combines these threats, it was Osama bin Laden. He was a vanishingly rare example of the conspiracy theory made flesh, a living, breathing individual who was demonstrably guilty of those terrible crimes that conspiracy theorists ascribe to their enemies. To borrow from Hofstadter again:

[He] is a perfect model of malice, a kind of amoral superman—sinister, ubiquitous, powerful, cruel, sensual, luxury-loving. Unlike the rest of us, the enemy is not caught in the toils of the vast mechanism of history, himself a victim of his past, his desires, his limitations. He wills, indeed he manufactures, the mechanism of history, or tries to deflect the normal course of history in an evil way.

Bin Laden, while living, was the perfect pantomime villain in this theatre of conspiracy. He already embodied the threat against America from outside groups, and his actions were incorporated into anti-government conspiracy theories as people sought to make sense of the senseless horror and brutality of the events of 9/11.

His death will not lay conspiracies to rest, because his death does not solve the problems that those conspiracies do. His death will not resolve the insecurities that divide America, the fears that have driven the paranoid style to such great heights and made it a prevailing feature of US politics. And the circumstances surrounding the death – a highly-secretive government mission that has left no body to be examined – leave it wide open for reinterpretation.

Perhaps that’s a wise move from Obama. If Bin Laden becomes the bad guy, perhaps Obama can finally lay to rest some of the conspiracy theories surrounding his own existence. Or perhaps that would be one conspiracy too far.

URL manipulation, libel, and Kate Middleton jelly beans

Regular readers here (all 6 of you) will probably already know about Jellybeangate. Yesterday, a URL from the Independent was rewritten to say something rather uncomplimentary about a PR-churned story on their site, revealing that Kate Middleton’s face had been discovered in a jelly bean. The link went viral on Twitter after several fairly well-respected sources assumed it was the work of a disgruntled sub and not a prank. Then the corrections went viral, along with several other versions of the link. This sort of URL behaviour is remarkably common.

According to the Nieman Lab, there are vast numbers of other news organisations whose URLs can be manipulated in this way (Citywire, my employer, is one of them) – and third parties with agendas could easily make it seem at a casual glance as though their URLs are libellous or offensive. But most URLs – if not all – can be manipulated very simply, using parameters. I can add &this=utter-rubbish after almost any link and the link will still resolve, leaving my additions intact. Thus:

There shouldn’t be any fear of being liable for this sort of manipulation, any more than there is in someone copying a newspaper masthead and pasting their own words underneath. For a statement to be libellous it must have been published, and in this case the individual who wrote, manipulated and then distributed the URL is the publisher. This seems clear for manipulated parameters marked by “?” and I have a hard time believing anyone would find otherwise for parameters within the URL itself.

If I were the Indie’s SEO team right now, I’d be more worried that the doctored URL is able to rank above their original. Might just be a good idea to get some rel=canonical tags on their article pages.

Playing – the future

Games are not going away. The gamepocalypse is nigh.

 

One of the biggest changes in the way we live and socialise at the moment is the rise and rise of game structures in everyday life. I’m not just talking points, badges and scores here – I’m talking about all sorts of game mechanics, the sorts of rich, rewarding dynamics that can help make reality better.

Games engage people. They provide the sorts of work that people want to do, using feedback systems and carefully structured designs to make for a fun experience. They provide a sense of satisfaction that’s hard to beat, from completing simple tasks to seeing a narrative through to its end. They let you explore and experiment, providing freedom within limits, and they reward players for developing skills or for learning information.

When it comes to journalism, stories – neat narratives with a beginning/middle/end or an inverted pyramid structure – are simply not sufficient for explaining most complex systems. They can explain a linear series of events, even one with complex factors, but they’re not good at really explaining how things work in a way that gets into the reader’s head. Climate change, or tax allocation, or the financial crisis, for instance.

Game design can be used to help create original reporting, as well as being a medium for its distribution. They can be used as powerful polemic or educational tools. And they can even be used to explore the process of newsgathering itself, illuminating its murky logic through the procedural logic of the game.

It’s not just video games that are important here, though they do have a wider reach than many other forms. Alternate reality games that merge fact and fiction to overlay a game onto the real world, or use real artefacts in a game environment, are growing as marketing tools. Board games have always had the widest reach (chess, anyone?) and are enjoying a niche resurgence. What could we do with them?

Journalists with game design skills are going to be needed, alongside journalists with data skills and journalists who can do video and code and take pictures. I believe that, once the nascent newsgames industry stops dipping its toes into the water and jumps in, newsgames are going to take off. Because a good game makes money. If we assume for a moment that engagement is king, not content, then games will win the war for our attention: doesn’t that look a lot like the situation we’re already in?

I want to see what we could do if we treated a printed paper as a site of play. If we made it fun, and thought about it from the perspective of someone exploring, learning, interacting with a game. It’s possible to be shocked, dismayed, distressed, saddened, touched, moved, and incited to action by good games that don’t dumb down their subjects. It’s possible to treat difficult subjects with respect within a game; there are myriad bad and good examples of this, just as there are of TV and of radio and of print.

And despite some assertions to the contrary, games are not inherently geared towards those who can’t pay attention (seriously, current 50+ hour game lengths of major studio titles obviously contradict this). Instead, games can make news harder, more complex, deeper and richer – and they might just be able to do all that while making money.

But news organisations aren’t there yet, and it’s not hard to understand why – MediaShift has a great analysis of the cultural divide between editorial and games design that’s proving insurmountable at the moment. As indie creators are creating games that explore the news journalistically, we’re in danger of missing the boat again.

So what I want to do, this year, is get some news people and some game people in a room, together, to see what we can do to bridge that gap. If you’re interested in being involved, let me know in the comments here or by emailing newsmary@gmail.com. Let’s build something fun.

This is the third of (I hope) four posts coming out of the Powerful Voices roundtable I attended earlier this month. The first was a resource-dump for concepts we discussed there and the second discussed the digital divide.


Digitally divided

This is the second of (I hope) four posts coming out of the Powerful Voices roundtable I attended earlier this month. The first was a resource-dump for concepts we discussed there; the third and fourth will tackle major issues raised. This one is about the divide between digital haves and have-nots, and what the future looks like for connectivity.

Back in Norwich, the newspapers where I used to work have just launched a campaign to back a bid for better broadband. Areas of rural Norfolk suffer badly from a lack of coverage – businesses relying on connectivity to function, to process payments or to do work, find themselves crippled by slow or unusable broadband access. Mobile coverage can be patchy. 3G is a luxury. There is an ongoing fight for change.

It can be very, very easy to forget that not everyone is online. When everyone around you is eyeballs-deep in social media and those without smartphones are a rarity, the statistics on digital inclusion are startling. According to the ONS [pdf], 27% of UK households have no access to the internet at home, and 9.2m adults have never used the internet.

Those figures are likely to fall. But they’re likely to fall faster in areas where broadband speeds are high, where there is free internet access for those who can’t afford a home connection, and within certain demographics – people who can afford smartphones even if a home broadband connection is out of reach, for instance, or young people in house shares who can split the costs of connection if not of hardware.

For some rural communities, fast broadband is unlikely to come from the telephone companies. Despite promises to the contrary, a fair few Norfolk businesspeople are bitterly aware that telecoms giants go where the profit is – and that means not laying cables and updating infrastructure in areas where the usage wouldn’t pay for the work to be done.

And that profit motive has other unpleasant effects. The fight for net neutrality is being fought much more loudly on the other side of the Atlantic – but it’s a growing issue in the UK too. The introduction of a tiered system in which those who can pay get their websites served faster than those who can’t threatens the free proliferation of information across the net, and threatens to limit access still further for those who can’t pay. The internet has democratised processes of creation and dissemination; any move towards a tiered web will move us away from open access; and the future for net neutrality in the UK remains unclear.

Already there are communities everywhere taking matters into their own hands. The Open Rights Group is one of several organisations fighting to protect net neutrality and working to protect other digital rights. Remote Cumbrian villages are raising money and building their own broadband networks. And it is technically and technologically possible to share your wifi connection with your neighbours – and to drop free wifi networks over wide areas, like the (now sadly defunct) network that blanketed Norwich with free connectivity a few years ago.

But we’re not there yet. Any project tackling social change – like the ones rising out of Powerful Voices – has to consider the implications of the digital divide, whether they’re trying to solve the problems it creates (by replacing lost library services with online access, for instance) or trying to use digital methods to influence issues that also affect those who find it difficult to get online (like volunteer schemes for the unemployed, or community projects looking for professionals).

It was fascinating and eye-opening that the suggestions that struck home with the Powerful Voices crowd were not so much the online ideas – they already knew they needed to be where their communities are, use whichever social networks they already use, and fragment their work across multiple platforms to reach people. It was the offline thoughts that got a big response. One idea, that if your community hangs out in a coffee shop then you should go put some flyers there for your project, prompted a discussion about how difficult it is sometimes to remember that there are offline ways of connecting with people, too.

There are still ways of reaching and empowering people in remote communities who aren’t online. And local newspapers are still one of those ways. The physical, newsprint paper finds its way into houses where the internet does not; its distribution networks, though they are under threat, already work to put it in the hands of physically and socially isolated people. It’s a symbol, a mark of social belonging, and a link to the wider world. Local papers can and do campaign for their communities, using their established clout and power to fight for what’s right for them.

That means, sometimes, a newspaper fighting for something that could threaten its bottom line – when what matters to its readers is something that could indirectly mean the print paper’s circulation falls. Better broadband and connectivity isn’t going to mean an immediate sales drop – but as more and more remote communities come fully online, the need for the newspaper as a wider community champion link will decrease.

Powerful Voices: useful resources

On Friday I was part of Powerful Voices, an event that helped young people create and refine ideas that would use social media to help effect social change.

By the time I got involved the young people – some university students, some graduates – had already put together four very well-thought-out ideas, refined them and pitched them to a panel of experts. My role on Friday was as part of a round table discussion looking at the future of social media and the wider web, and the funding possibilities that could help keep their projects alive and see them have a real impact.

Everyone involved was hugely enthusiastic and brightly hopeful for the future. These were people for whom the idea of running a non-profit and getting elbows-deep in the business side of things seemed a natural step – people with brave ideas who want to use new media to change the world. Here’s what they came up with:

  • The pop-up library project imagines a future where library services are totally mobile and completely adaptable, bringing very specific services to very local communities.
  • Communiteering is aimed at giving people a simple way to volunteer as much or as little as they wish, and to receive recognition for their work – something to go on a CV.
  • Handshake is a service built on the idea of connecting small projects in need of expertise with experts who can provide it.
  • And the final project hopes to help out unemployed graduates by encouraging creative approaches to getting on the career ladder.

The discussion hit on three big areas where the world is changing – the digital divide, open data, and the rise of gaming. I’ll talk more about these in posts over the next few days, I hope – there’s a lot to be said. What I want to do here is provide a resource for some of the concepts I brought into the conversation. So here goes:

 

Facing the future

I spent a very interesting evening at the Frontline Club for the launch of Face The Future on Tuesday. Judith Townend, Kevin Marsh, Laura Oliver (who’s moved to the Guardian recently) and chair Raymond Snoddy discussed a pretty wide-ranging selection of subjects related to the future of journalism and the tools we’re using to create it.

The evening was an interesting reminder, for me, that those of us who tweet constantly and feel on top of new tech are still, overwhelmingly, the minority. It’s easy to forget, if you spend time learning about social media and talking about new tools for the future of journalism and generally being digitally disruptive, that that’s not the reality for most journalists.The fact that I was the only person tweeting for most of the evening was one small reminder; the demographics of the audience was another; Raymond Snoddy admitting he just about felt like he was on top of the technology until someone mentioned Quora was another.

And there was a timely reminder from Kevin Marsh that in the middle East, where so much information is coming via Twitter at the moment, the same holds true. It’s a specialised tool, and journalists in particular do specialised things with it – it’s relevant and timely and a great way to source stories, but it doesn’t open up access the same way that being there in person does.

But that was another major theme of the evening – that despite major news teams being capable of sending journalists around the world, the pressures of filing to half a dozen places can make it impossible for journalists to do their jobs well. Kevin gave examples from his knowledge of the BBC – journalists doing live broadcasts for the rolling news channels, recorded spots for lunchtime and evening news and possibly breakfast too, tweeting, perhaps doing radio, and blogging too. Where’s the time for journalists to leave their hotels and investigate, go out on the streets and find sources?

Closer to home, too, the debate touched on the problems for domestic reporters – Raymond Snoddy spoke of newsrooms where no-one leaves, not even for lunch, and characterised the reporters as working on “computerised treadmills”, churning out copy to feed the ravenous information machine.

The conclusion was – this type of reporting is not lazy journalism. The journalists involved are working harder than they ever have before, producing more copy, more broadcasts, more information. But the trade-off is in time spent in the field, investigating, asking questions, finding sources, doing the hard work behind the scenes that makes for good journalism. And that’s something I can identify with, too – even in my short career I’ve experienced a newsroom merge and a round of redundancies, and I can vouch for the fact that fewer staff, cutting costs and increasing numbers of platforms for your reporting mean more time at the desk or the phone and less time on your patch or with your sources, no matter how good your intentions.

The panel also agreed that what’s important is support, from editors and from news executives, for the core skills and values of journalism. What’s important isn’t just that reporters want to get out and report – what’s needed is a newsroom structure that supports and encourages that, and a business model that puts this core area of journalism at its heart and gives it everything it needs to thrive.

The discussion wove together issues of verifying information when breaking news is breaking faster than ever before, with the tricky problems of regaining readers’ trust in a world where the phone hacking inquiry is ongoing, with questions of how journalism itself is defined. And in the end, though both Laura and Judith made the point that new forms of information management and presentation have value – that aggregation is important and curation and filtering are vital, in a world where the same sources we use are also open to the audience – it was Kevin’s argument that stuck with me. He said that we have forgotten what journalism is, and in so doing we have allowed it to become devalued.

Kevin’s list of what journalism is and how it works was not exhaustive or scientific. He talked of journalistic values – accuracy, balance, ethics – and of reporters’ traits – curiosity, ability to speak truth to power, perseverance. He talked about a sort of journalism stamp – something that would signal strongly to readers that they were reading something professional, something that adhered to the central values of journalism – a hard task, in a world where no one trusts the PCC and we have no better accreditation. His definition of journalism would cheerfully include a huge raft of bloggers, freelancers and, yes, curators, while excluding half the Daily Mail and all of the Daily Star.

But what wasn’t clear was how we pay for that. One audience member asked, in so many words: where’s the money? And though the response was robust – if the BBC and Sky can’t pay for good journalism out of their enormous budgets, the problem is with the management not the journalism – it was not enough to leave me with any real ideas about how we reach this world where Kevin’s “j-stamp” both exists widely and can be trusted.

Newsroom support, rebuilding readers’ trust, and a journalistic practice that prioritises those core ethics before eyeballs or speed of filing is a lofty aim. There are hundreds of bloggers who are beating “professional” journalists at these things, day in, day out, because they believe it matters. Whether it’s a future that mainstream journalism can hope to achieve  is an open question.