What journalism students need to know: New skills for a new model
After attending the C&binet conference in London, which saw an impressive group of media representatives and government officials get together to discuss the state of the media and the future of journalism, the importance of passing on this information to the next generation of journalists seemed imperative.
At City University New York, journalism students are taught entrepreneurship and business. Jeff Jarvis is clear a new set of skills for burgeoning journalists is essential for the changing climate of news. Students should learn to be stewards of journalism – learning how to set up hyperlocal sites and invite and train collaborators and turn the news site into a successful business.
Details of the hypothetical news model from CUNY can be found here - and it is in the process of being translated for the UK.
It is clear from developments in the US – which the UK will and is beginning to duly follow – journalism students need to be taught or encouraged to do entrepreneurship to make sure they take off in the new climate – rather than fall flat on their face because their traditional skill-set no longer stands up to what is required. Read the rest of this entry »
What the government should do about hyperlocal news
Prominent voices in the hyperlocal debate gathered at the Department for Culture, Media and Sport today to talk about the changing landscape of news and media and, if anything, what the government should do.
Arranged by Minister for Creative Industries Siôn Simon, and chaired by CEO of GroundReport Rachel Sterne and founder of Talk About Local William Perrin, the conference – called C&binet Seminar – was a collision of talking heads about their experiences and thoughts on the state of local and national news and their plans or predictions for the future of journalism.
Sessions focused on a number of areas in the debate, introduced with a presentation from those with particular knowledge of a field, and were followed by passionate discussions with attendees drawing on their own research and experiences. A number of key issues emerged and over on the Podnosh website will be running a series of blogposts featuring key points which were raised on the following subjects:
- The state of newspapers and the value of news
- Hyperlocal news models
- Council reporting – who should do it?
- What the journalism students need to know
- Freeing up public data
- Libel laws for online journalism
My notes from the Talk About Local Unconference ‘09
Hoards of hyper-local bloggers descended on Stoke-on-Trent for the Talk About Local un-conference on Saturday 3 October ‘09 to share ideas, debate on the future of hyper-local and discuss common problems with a view to solving them. Sessions ran throughout the day in an informal (hence ‘un-conference’) nature – which meant anyone and everyone who had something to say had their chance to say it.
I’ve collated some of my notes from two of the discussions I went to – and some bits and pieces other people have written up from the event.
Newsquest give power to the public with hyper-local blogs, but what about potential problems with this news model?
It’s coming up to the first monthversary of the hyper-local news website I set up for my local area – Bournvillevillage.com – and today Newsquest decided to jump on the hyper-local band wagon and set up a number of local websites itself.
So media organisations are cottoning on to the success of the hyper-local scene. Essentially a hyper-local website is a blog which acts as an outlet for community news for that postal code area – news which is not already being covered by the local print newspaper. It was only a matter of time before local media organisations decided community blogs were the best way of filtering in news which they no longer had the number of reporters to cover. But Newsquest’s simple model for the local blogger threatens to overlook some of the bigger problems which have yet to be worked out in this very new medium.
In some way, Newsquests Northern Echo’s hyper-local model vastly resembles the core structure of many hyper-local blogs – pictures, stories and a basic CMS structure, roughly three posts a week, and the personal touch of the local writer themselves.
But there are a number of issues which arise out of connecting a hyper-local blog to a local media organisation.
Firstly, there is no mention of pay for the local bloggers – who I presume are expected to write and research local stories in their spare time out of love for the community – but running a blog is time-consuming and can be difficult to juggle alongside a job and personal commitments. So where is the incentive for the local blogger to work for Newsquest as opposed to just starting their own blog and avoiding the thrice weekly deadline.
Secondly, corporate media outlets may have had little experience with the hyper-local enterprise, and may be unaware of how the focus of a hyper-local blog changes once the blog is connected to a larger media organisation. Security, for example, becomes a key issue, as well as resources. Here are a couple of questions media organisations looking to take hyper-local blogs under their umbrella might need to consider:
- Will the local blogger be properly protected under libel law? Will they be able to employ the same defenses as staff reporters if they commit libel because, having minimum or no training in media law, they may add quotes/pictures in a blogpost which unbeknown to them are utterly defamatory?
- What happens if members of the public contributing to the site write something their neighbours don’t like? Without the protection of an editor or eyeballs of a subeditor to check for editorial integrity and libel – the local blogger could fall into the same plight as the columnist Liz Jones who has been the victim of violent attacks by neighbours because she wrote about the community she lived in in an unsavoury light (local bloggers take note – slagging off your neighbours won’t make you popular).
News organisations need to work out these legal issues before they commision local writers. If the local blogger lives in the community they are writing about, they run the risk of offending the very people they are providing the news service to. See more comments on the hyper-local safety debate here.
Hyper-local blogs cannot create investigative journalism in the traditional sense – because local bloggers don’t have the protection or experience to go poking around looking for dead bodies or unraveling council controversies. This is not necessarily a negative problem, however, as it means the focus of the hyper-local blog is more on the community rather than generating ground-breaking news. But it is surely an issue the umbrella organisation needs to discuss with the blogger to make sure they know the parameters for their work, and vision for how it integrates into the community and the news organisation.
Talk about Local is a service which helps local people get blogs up and running – but the emphasis is on community empowerment and giving people a voice to talk about what they love – not providing journalism for an umbrella media organisation.
The point is, media organisations need to work out how setting up a bunch of local people with a blog is going to contribute to their website – and how much of the blog will be focused on news, and how much on community, and how this is turn is going to help improve that local area. There must be an awareness of the issues surrounding hyper-local blogs as well as a celebration for what they can bring to a community.
And finally, some of the most successful hyper-local blogs I know have a personal touch which is integral to the feel of the blogger and their community. If the blog is just a modified template of the newspaper website it won’t have the ability to flourish in the same way independent blogs might.
There are other examples of news organisations setting up a list of community or local blogsites as part of their newspaper website, such as the Dorset Echo. The fact news organisations are wanting to create more outlets for getting local news to foreground is, in its essence, a positive step in the right direction. But they must make sure the welfare of the blogger and the community is priority, and not just wanting to appear part of the hyper-local phenomenon.
The new model for journalism: Hyper-local, collaboration and aggregation
We still haven’t found it – the perfect future business model to make journalism work online – but we are still looking and searching and a few blogs and conversations recently have raised some interesting ideas about how the future of journalism might look.
Earlier this week, Paul Carr posted on TechCrunch. He talked about how bloggers aren’t really taking over mainstream media – how UGC can help break news but traditional reporting would always be needed to flesh out a story, but bloggers also seem able to get information the tabloid press also doll out.
He said good investigative reporting would always be needed – the 50-strong crack team who perhaps constitute the phrase “good journalism” were essential to keep the industry alive. But, he said, you always needed people to write the smaller, press-release type stories to flesh out the paper and keep the less explosive news being published.
Carr then goes on the use the example of TechCrunch to see where the industry is going – a small team of niche reporters working hard to deliver top technology news for loyal readership. He writes:
Whatever the cynics might think, it’s a place where sources are built up, facts are checked, lawyers are employed and writers are encouraged to go out and get the real story behind the story.
Other sites popping up around the globe are catering for other niches – farming, music and politics. The new model is an online one – of collaboration with users and bloggers combined with your best editors to create the best news content and linking to other niches you can’t do so well (a method Jeff Jarvis championed a while back).
This leads me onto the next exciting development closer to home, in Birmingham, which is again leading the way in new ideas of doing good journalism online.
Help Me Investigate is a new website (only about three weeks old) which allows the locality to type a question into the website (“How many parking tickets are being issued per month on my road”) and a group of journalists as well as other users on the site work about getting the information back to that person – submitting Freedom of Information requests and collaborating on finding out the relevant legislation. It is time consuming and costly process – which in any newsroom would need a number of resources. But the Help Me Investigate team have managed already to find out some pretty ground breaking facts – like the story about parking ticket hotspots which was recently published (and rightfully attributed) in the local press by the Birmingham Post and the Birmingham Mail.
This is the future of journalism. A collaborative effort with professional journalists, local people and local authorities coming together to make the community more transparent and an altogether better place. It is a source of news as well as a place people who are passionate about where they live to ask others for help with their shared local grievances. It is also the essence of a hyper-local website.
Numerous ones have sprung up across Birmingham (and the UK) – building communities online which reflect the local area. Digbeth, Lichfield and Acocks Green are great examples.
But as Paul Bradshaw today on Radio 4’s Media Show – you cannot make much money form hyperlocal. I am quickly finding this out as I pour my efforts and limited webby skills into making a hyperlocal news website for Bournville – the area I live in in Birmingham.
Bournville has no local newspaper and little going for it on the web – and tons of advertisers who would live to have their services published to the local community. Seems like a sure fire hit? Well it takes time and energy to set up – and it’s only little old me working on it at the mo – albeit with a web of friendly and supportive bloggers in Birmingham and plenty of other hyperlocal experts to take advice from.
But hyper-local, collaborative and aggregation seem to me to be key terms in the future of local journalism online. And I’m excited my home town Birmingham is pioneering such innovative and exceptional work.
Work experience in the media – the interns being exploited
What came first, the chicken or the egg? The ‘news’ work experience people (or ‘workies’ as they are known in the industry) are being exploited is being reported in the press as something new because it is under investigation by the government, but it is being investigated by the government because of reports workies at newspapers themselves are being exploited. So when did this erupt, I must ask? It has been going on for years and years. Who told the government about it? Who told the press? They both are guilty of the exploitation they investigate.
Front page of the Saturday Guardian today – New Enquiry into exploitation of work-for-free interns. Third par – “A Guardian inquiry has also discovered that MPs could be breaking the rules.”
When I started out as a wannabe journalist I decided to also start a blog under a pseudonym which documented my career path. The Reluctant Moralist, it was called, would also moniter my ethical standards – I wanted to see whether they would slip during my journalistic endeavours following a conversation I had on a work experience placement who told me I was too nice to be a journalist.
The blog ticked along, and was mostly taken up with posts about my work experience placements – all under code names (albeit very bad ones such as The Burning Ball of Gas, for the Sun). I got a lot of comments and feedback from other young people having similar terrible/difficult times on placements, or from lower year students wanting advice on how to get work experience when they didn’t have any contacts.
I started the newspaper course at Cardiff School of Journalism and after our Media Law module got underway I soon realised nearly all of these work experience blogposts were entirely defamatory to whatever newspaper I had been on placement with and the people I had worked with - and that I was also jeopardising any hope of future employment with said newspapers when I revealed any of their malpractises with workies. So I took all the blogposts down and pretty much erased the blog.
Now it seems to be erupting left right and centre that both newspapers and MPs are exploiting the work experience conveyorbelt of free graduate labour I feel the issue is pressing enough for me to comment, as a journalist who underwent a string of alternating dodgy and brilliant placements.
Two weeks ago Jeremy Deer, general secretary for the National Union for Journalists wrote a letter to the Guardian criticising exploitation of graduates and undergraduates eager to break into the industry working for free. He wrote:
While on-the-job experience is an essential part of media training, bogus work experience placements are increasingly being used to fill long-term staffing gaps with free labour. The result: only those with the financial security of well-off families or a willingness to build up massive debts can get into careers in journalism. Just when we should be nurturing and supporting the people coming into the industry, media employers are exploiting dreams and excluding new talent.
I have worked on placements where I was filling in for someone on holiday, and didn’t get paid, and I have also worked at newspapers where a fully comprehensive work experience structure was in place to ensure both the workie and the newspaper benefitted. I know friends who have had their dreams destroyed by awful placements, and I know people who have gained jobs through contacts made on superb placements.
The problem, as highlighted by Carli Humpheries (notably a fellow graduate from Bristol University) in the Guardian today, is work experience offered in journalism differs from one newspaper to the next so widely that it is impossible to clamp down on any injustice being done. For example where expenses are concerned, only one newspaper out of seven where I did a placement for two weeks or more paid my expenses and paid me for any writing I did which went in the paper. That newspaper was the Guardian who pays all its work experience interns and contributors. All the others (including nationals and regionals) were for free. In the industry a byline is considered payment in itself, and many are happy with this method of payment as they watch their cuttings grow.
As I emphasised in my since deleted blog, for those trying to get into journalism who know all too well work experience on your CV will increase employment prospects, working for free is just part and parcel of pursuing the dream. We are willing to take whatever comes our way, with or without expenses or fees, because we hope the overall benefits of the placement (contacts, bylines) will eventually outweigh the dent to our bank balances. But if you don’t live in London it can be at least ten times more difficult to deal with long stints of unpaid work. Furthermore, with no money coming in from parental support or loans, work experience students will take out credit cards or increase overdrafts to fund the expensive free labour.
Because (as the media and the government emphasise) this is a ”grey area”, the government cannot force newspapers to pay their workies – and neither should they. Not all work experience interns are on the same level – some are in first year at uni with vague ideas about possibly wanting to be a journalist, while others are on postgraduate journalism courses who can be given a wealth of more difficult tasks and trusted to write and contribute in a more substantial way. Blimey, on my first ever work experience placement I was so incredibly happy just to be physically near other journalists (one of which was a critic I admired immeasurably) that I’d gaily sit a watch the busyness around me and hapily be ignored.
There is therefore no sure answer as to how to deal with working out who should get paid and who shouldn’t. There seems to be some hint of “shadowing” being an acceptable non-paid placement, while any work which is considered to be of employable standard getting paid for. Perhaps work experience candidates should get interviewed? This way section editors could quickly access whether they are skilled enough to get minimum wage while on placement, or whether they would benefit more from shadowing, contributing to research and following other journalists on outtings.
But while it is not clear what exactly should be done, it is acknowledged something must be done. Work experience in journalism is being cordoned off to the lucky few who can finance summers of free work in expensive London, and now it seems having longer and a larger number of placements under your belt is required to demonstrate committment and dedication to your chosen profession. There must be some way of separating those who are committed and talented enough to get into journalism without relying on work experience placements which are only got by having money and contacts.
News Innovation Conference July 2009
News Innovation 2009 will see the top, up-and-coming, and newbie online journalists and innovators coming together to talk about how we can use the web in new and interesting ways to tell news. Follow my live-blogging of the event, along with tweets from other Twitterers at the conference, for the j-school graduates’ take on the afternoon’s talks by clicking on the link below.
