International
Advice for German media
Posted on 13. Nov, 2009 by Jeff Jarvis.
I have an op-ed in today’s Welt Kompakt newspaper in Germany giving my advice to a German mediasphere that I see becoming more protectionist. It’s not online (ironically) but so you can see the play, a PDF of it is here and here. This is my original English text:
At the Müncher Medientage, I spoke to 500 German executives from my home in New York and dared to give them some advice about their fate. I urged them to learn these lessons from watching American news companies shrivel and die: Protectionism is no strategy for the future. Every company in every industry (especially media) must be reinvented for the post-Guttenberg age—for the Google era. And the only sane response to change is to embrace it and find the opportunity in it.
I have been impressed with the innovation and openness to change I have seen in German media: Axel Springer shifted a large proportion of its revenue to digital; Bild equipped Germans with video cameras to report news; Burda invested in the networks Glam.com and Science Blogs; Holtzbrinck innovated in its incubator; WAZ created a world pioneer in DerWesten.
But when the times got tough in the financial crisis, I suddenly saw German media looking for an enemy to blame for their problems. The head of the Deutscher Journalisten-Verband called for legislation to condemn Google as a monopoly, an enemy of the press. Dr. Hubert Burda, a digital visionary I greatly admire, urged that copyright law should be expanded to protect publishers, whom he said deserve a share of search engines’ revenue. Chancellor Merkel is considering such changes in copyright. A group of publishers issued the Hamburg Declaration saying that all online content need not be free (though that has always been completely in their control).
Schade. In these pronouncements, I hear echoes of American media’s funeral hymns. I see companies resisting the new reality of the internet age by trying to preserve the old rules of their old industry. Take, for example, Rupert Murdoch vowing to put all his news properties behind pay walls just because that’s how media used to operate—when that will only reduce audience, traffic, influence, and advertising just at the moment when growth is needed most. He is even threatened to block Google. That is simply suicidal.
Though I sympathize with media’s economic nostalgia, I must say that swimming upstream against the internet is futile. The better idea is to go with the flow of the internet, to see and exploit its opportunities.
Rather than fighting Google, learn lessons from it. Google understands the new economics of media. That is why it is successful—not because it exploits old media companies. Those old companies still operate in the content economy, begun 570 years by Guttenberg, in which the owner of content profited by selling multiple copies. Online, there needs to be only one copy of content and it is the links to it that bring it value. Content without links has no value. So when search engines, aggregators, bloggers, and Twitterers link to content, they are not stealing; they are giving the gift of attention and audience. Indeed, publishers should be grateful that Google does not charge them for the value of its links.
This link economy brings three imperatives for publishers. First, it requires them to make their content public if they want to be found. That is their choice, but if they retreat behind pay walls, hidden from search and links, they will not be discovered and they only create opportunities for new, free competitors. Second, the link economy demands specialization: Do what you do best and link to the rest. This specialization also brings a new efficiency that can make publishers more profitable. Third, in the link economy, it is the recipient of links who must exploit their value. That is still the publisher’s job.
Google has earned an estimated 30 percent of online ad revenue because it serves advertisers differently—and better. Here, too, Google understands a new economy, one based on abundance rather than scarcity. Publishers, even online, still sell scarcity as if the internet were print: only so many ad positions for so many eyeballs—what the market will bear. Google instead charges for clicks; it sells performance. Thus Google takes a share of the risk and that is what motivates it to place advertising all over the internet, to create more relevant positions for ads that will perform better for both the marketer and Google. That is why advertising has shifted to Google—not because it is enemy of the media but because advertisers prefer it. We call that competition.
The most important lesson to learn from Google is that it grew huge not by trying to acquire and control content on the internet, as publishers do. Google doesn’t want to own the internet, only to organize it. So Google created a platform that enables others to succeed with technology, content, promotion, and advertising revenue. That is Glam’s model, too, creating networks of hundreds of independent sites and then helping them succeed. I believe that platforms and networks will form the basis of the future of media—and much of the next economy.
At the City University of New York Graduate School of Journalism, where I teach, I am running the New Business Models for News Project [funded by the Knight Foundation], envisioning a profitable future for news if regional newspapers covering cities die. Though national news brands—whether this publication or the Guardian or The New York Times—have a future, regional newspapers across America and Europe are in trouble and some will die. Yet I am confident that journalism in those cities will not die, because there is a market demand for news, which we believe the market can meet.
We believe that news will emerge from ecosystems made up of many players—journalists, citizen journalists, citizen salespeople, volunteers, technologists—operating under different motives and means. Today, in America, we see hyperlocal bloggers earning $100-200,000 a year in advertising; these are real businesses. We see an opportunity to help them make more money by creating local, regional, and national advertising networks. We see the opportunity for a new newsroom to continue beat and investigative reporting and to work collaboratively with these networks. Without the cost of print and distribution, these new news organizations become smaller but profitable.
If you are trying to protect old jobs in old structures of old companies in old industries, then you might see my vision of the future as a threat. But if you embrace change and innovation, then you will see opportunities to reimagine and remake journalism, to find new ways to gather and share news collaboratively, supported by new revenue, reaching profitability thanks to new efficiencies.
Publishers will not get to that bright future by urging government to protect them from innovators and competitors. No, if we want anything from government, it should be universal broadband to encourage society’s migration to a digital economy, and a lack of regulation to assure a level playing field for innovation.
I hope that once the desperation of the current economic crisis subsides, my German media friends will not try to retreat to their old models but will instead continue to invent new ways and to again become leaders in innovation. That is the only sensible path to survival and success.
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Innovation: An interview with GlobalPost.com co-founder Charlie Sennott
Posted on 07. Nov, 2008 by David Cohn.
Chris O’brien writes at the Next Newsroom Project….
Charlie Sennott, a former foreign correspondent for the Boston Globe, likes to say he had one of the last great rides in international reporting. He came up as a metro reporter, got sent overseas, and got to do international reporting for the paper he loved. But when he returned to Boston a couple years ago, he learned the Globe was pulling the plug on its international bureaus.
That set off some soul searching that has turned the career journalist into an entrepreneur who wants to reinvent the model for international reporting with GlobalPost.com. The online only international reporting site launches Jan. 12, 2009 and will have 70 correspondents around the world covering international news from an American perspective.
Sound crazy? I thought so. But I changed my mind after listening to Sennott. I saw him speak at the New Business Models for News Summitt in New York a couple of weeks ago (see the video above). And I got to talk with him last week to fill in some of the details of what he has in mind. Sennott is passionate about journalism, and clearly believes he and his partners have a sustainable model for a new international news organization.
“I’ve covered cops, courts, war zones, huge stories,” Sennott said. “I’ve never done a start-up. I’ve never been so busy in my life. But I’ve never been so excited about an opportunity to try to build something.”
You can listen to my interview with Sennott here:
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Solana Larsen – Global Voices
Posted on 07. Mar, 2008 by David Cohn.
Since the Networked Journalism Summit:
Global Voices created a new website called Voices Without Votes together with Reuters. It’s a pretty massive task to undertake an overview of what world bloggers are saying about the US presidential election, but we are doing it bit by bit with the help of volunteers and colleagues at Global Voices. The project launched on super tuesday, and new content is added around the clock. Reuters are going to be using the RSS feeds on their website election pages, and we welcome anyone (everyone!) else to do the same too.
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International developments
Posted on 10. Oct, 2007 by Matthew Sollars.
10:32 Moderator Neil McIntosh of the Guardian kicks the panel off with introductions of panelists:
Adrian Monck of City University of London’s journalism education program. He has launched a collaboration with Sky News developing a group of citizen correspondents and a resource that allows the public to track their FOI requests.
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Adrian Monck – City University London
Posted on 05. Oct, 2007 by David Cohn.
Your work in networked/citizen/collaborative journalism.
I run City University (London)’s journalism education programme, the UK’s biggest, with over 220 journalism postgrads.
We have two projects that might be of interest:
A doctoral collaboration with Sky News developing a group of citizen correspondents.
Maintaining and developing a database of FOI requests in association with MySociety – allowing the public to track their own FOI requests
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Charlie Beckett – POLIS
Posted on 05. Oct, 2007 by David Cohn.
Your work in networked/citizen/collaborative journalism.
Charlie Beckett is doing Networked Journalism and thinking hard about it. He is an award-winning TV news and current affairs producer and programme editor who swapped the BBC and ITN’s Channel 4 News to found a new journalism think-tank called POLIS at the London School of Economics. Charlie Beckett is also the launch editor for an IPTV project which aims to create an intellectual internet news analysis platform and discussion programme for thinking people in the UK and internationally.
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Simon Bucks – Sky News
Posted on 05. Oct, 2007 by David Cohn.
Becuase of the special election taking place in the UK, Simon is unable to attend the conference.
Your work in networked/citizen/collaborative journalism.
I look after UGC on the Sky News website www.sky.com/news
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Edward Roussel – The Telegraph
Posted on 05. Oct, 2007 by David Cohn.
Becuase of the special election taking place in the UK , Edward is unable to attend the conference.
Your work in networked/citizen/collaborative journalism.
We recently launched My Telegraph (www.my.telegraph.co.uk) a product that aims to give our readers dead-simple blogging, rating and news aggregating tools. It’s about introducing a new audience to blogging – 8,000 registered bloggers at the latest count. The average age of the Telegraph newspapers is 55, and many of them find the blogosphere a scary place. We also have a number of other networking tools: a popular daily debate on our website (www.telegraph.co.uk/yourview) which frequently gets several hundred posts; a daily e-poll on a polemical issue (www.telegraph.co.uk/news) and cross-media campaigns, such as our campaign for a referendum on the EU constitution (www.telegraph.co.uk/eu) – more than 95,000 signatories (2/3 in the newspaper, via a coupon, one third online).
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Paul Sullivan – Orato
Posted on 05. Oct, 2007 by David Cohn.
Your work in networked/citizen/collaborative journalism.
After 35 years in newspapers, radio, TV, Internet and pr in Canada, I designed Orato.com as a way for people with or without credentials to tell/report/share their stories online, making room for them in the scope of the news.
The rules are simple – register, follow the guidelines, post a story, get it through the banned words filter, and it’s online. On Oct. 1, we made it possible for registered correspondents to post video and audio stories. At this point, we’re not so much worried about balanced and accuracy as we are about encouraging people to post their stories.
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Emily Gertz – Worldchanging.com
Posted on 05. Oct, 2007 by David Cohn.
Your work in networked/citizen/collaborative journalism. I’m a freelance journalist and editor, working primarily with web publications. Since early 2004 I’ve been a writer at Worldchanging, a leading sustainability news, views, and information blog; currently I’m the Interim Managing Editor of our “global” site, as well as editor of Worldchanging NYC. I also work as a content strategist with groups and companies to develop and sustain blogs that build communities of interest and action. I was Producer for Environmental News at OregonLive.com for two years in the late 1990’s, where we did some fun early work in proto collaborative journalism: inviting readers to submit photos of Portland events; write training and ride diaries for a big-deal multi-day charity bicycle ride; running bboards where readers could comment on the local news, share outdoors sports info, etc. I got online in 1989 via early bboard systems Environet and Econet, and first became an online community host — helpful experience for networked journalism — in the mid-1990’s on The WELL (where I continue to host today).
What are your goals?
Environmental stories offer many untapped opportunities for collaborative or crowdsourced journalism. I’m especially interested in starting or contributing to projects that provide opportunities to use more forms of media (blogging/microlocal journalism, podcasting, photojournalism, and collaborative mapping).
What are some of your notable achievements?
At Worldchanging, I was part of what was perhaps our finest hour to date: contributors from all over the glob collaborating to cover the Indian Ocean Tsunami. Contributors in India were able to make first person reports based on what they were hearing and seeing, as well as what was coming in on their own collaborative digital networks — demonstrating how important those networks were on the scene. Those of us in other parts of the world pulled together “bigger picture” type coverage on transforming disaster relief, technology to create an early warning network, etc. I wrote about the boundary of environment and economy, connecting the condition of coastal mangroves to the degree of destruction inland. (Where the mangroves were healthiest and intact, they usually absorbed a lot of the wave’s energy; where they were degraded by ag runoff from inland, or simply destroyed to make way for farming shrimp for the export market, there was weaker or no buffering and destruction was worse).
Thus far, the single most famous article I’ve personallly written is “Naughty by Nature: Ever Thought About the Toxins in Your Sex Toys?” for Grist Magazine. It’s a funny and fun piece, but beyond that it’s notable because I successfully took unusual approach to reporting on an environmental health issue (phthlate exposure), such that people would read and enjoy the information, rather than being overwhelmed by it.
Lesson you’ve learned (including mistakes you’ve made)
It is usually impossible to “convince” anyone that this stuff is valuable. The knowledge about the medium and what it can do has to be in place in order to get the support and resources one needs to get it going, never mind pull it off — and if it’s not there, you probably ought invest time in educating the relevant stakeholders before you get too far into it. I’ve made the mistake of entering enthusiastically into a project without ascertaining that there was enough internal support. In these scenarios, success is elusive; existing biases against the medium are affirmed; and one does not come away having accomplished much. I have learned that I have to be more thoughtful and tactical both in taking a measure of the local climate, and judging whether to accept a project. (This can be challenging when you’re a freelancer — since gigs, not tactics, pay the bills!)
Are you getting revenue for this? How?
I earn my living primarily via journalism, including networked journalism, as well as content strategy towards using networks most effectively. If you know any freelancers, you know that’s pretty amazing! As I work on the editorial side of this or that outlet, I don’t get into the revenue side much — but I suspect the revenue being generated varies pretty widely; in the nonprofits, there’s a lot of dependence on grants, donations, and “angels.”
What’s next? What do you need to get to the next level?
I need to work with outlets and projects that are committed — with “moral” support, funding, enthusiasm and openness to creativity — to exploring online/networked journalism and pushing the envelope of what it can accomplish. Potentially I need to found such an outlet myself.
Anyone you’d like to talk with, learn from, or work with at the summit
Jonathan Landman of The New York Times
Jim Colgan and Bob Garfield of WNYC
Colin Maclay of the Berkman Center
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Martin Huber – Myheimat.de
Posted on 05. Oct, 2007 by David Cohn.
Your work in networked/citizen/collaborative journalism.
Myheimat.de combines printed magazines and an online-platform for hyper-local communities. A network of 5.000 contributors (citizen reporter) submit thousands of stories and the community picks stories for hyper-local printed freesheets (monthly, close to 100% UGC) which reach a combined circulation of 120.000.
As founder of a local monthly freesheet in 1994 Martin Huber learned and experienced the need of local media users and what service they expect of their local newspaper resp. media. Major focuses of his research at TUM (2001-2004) have been virtual communities, value-co-production and technology-platforms for integrating customers into the value-chain. (Ph.D. thesis: ”Collaborative Value creation”). 2002 he co-founded a mobile content sharing application (www.mozean.de) where users can publish and share content which is delivered via mobile phone.
2003 he co-founded gogolmedien to build a scalable publishing-platform for converged media products (print&online) and collaborative content creation, driven by users. Since 2003 gogolmedien successfully launched 17 hyper-local so called myheimat-magazines based on this platform.
What are your goals?
Myheimat.de tries to provide a service that helps people make the communities they live in better places. Our service combines online, print and mobile for the lowest possible threshold to participate and the highest reach in the local community.
In Germany there are over 1.800 small cities (between 10-50K inhabitants) which perfectly match myheimat. We want to cover these cities with monthly/weekly freesheets. Therefore we will partner with media-companies and traditional newspapers.
In addition we plan to offer the platform behind myheimat as an innovative tool for media companies to serve their customers on a hyper-local level and to enable networked journalism on a local or regional level. Our goal is to further develop the technology platform of myheimat to give professional journalists a tool for seamless collaboration with an open community of citizen reporters.
Notable achievements?
Back in 2003 myheimat was the first community-to-print initiative (at least we know of). At least in Germany no media company (start-up or traditional newspaper) managed to roll-out successful 17 local free-sheets in 3 years.
Lesson you’ve learned (including mistakes you’ve made)
We regard Organisation/People and Information (Systems) as the key to networked journalism and think that networked journalism is driven and enabled by strong technology platforms specifically designed for networked journalism.
Organisation/People
Our journalists had to learn to moderate the conversation and not to write content themselves. This was (in the beginning) much easier with employees who are not trained in traditional newspaper production, but we now also see a lot of traditional trained journalists who enhance their abilities in moderating and animating user(-communities).
From our experience since 2003 I can only confirm and emphasize how Jeff Jarvis put it: “How does the role of the journalist change? Journalists must now augment their traditional and valued roles of reporter, watchdog, questioner, vetter, investigator, editor. In the conversation, they need to take on new roles, as moderator, enabler, organizer, talent scout, even journalistic evangelist and educator.” (from: http://www.buzzmachine.com
To adapt the media application/the media format quickly to user needs or user feedback, cross-disciplinary teams and co-location helps a lot. We learned to put an editorial designer, a programmer and a moderator together in a team, to deliver fast results the user wants.
Information system
In the beginning (2003) we underestimated how important an agile development process and an agile platform architecture is. We (naively) specified and started coding our Version 2.0 of the platform in a half-year project, but we stopped this project, because we realized that we ran into an architecture which was not agile enough, and the (time-) gap between user-feedback and implementation was too big. Time-to-market of the next feature/version hast to be < 1 month.
We know have a much more agile piece of software where we can react instantly on user feedback, have fast development iterations (“continuously beta”) and can embed experience and user feedback every 2-3 days in our platform.
(more…)
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Martin Huber – Myheimat.de
Posted on 05. Oct, 2007 by David Cohn.
Your work in networked/citizen/collaborative journalism.
Myheimat.de combines printed magazines and an online-platform for hyper-local communities. A network of 5.000 contributors (citizen reporter) submit thousands of stories and the community picks stories for hyper-local printed freesheets (monthly, close to 100% UGC) which reach a combined circulation of 120.000.
As founder of a local monthly freesheet in 1994 Martin Huber learned and experienced the need of local media users and what service they expect of their local newspaper resp. media. Major focuses of his research at TUM (2001-2004) have been virtual communities, value-co-production and technology-platforms for integrating customers into the value-chain. (Ph.D. thesis: ”Collaborative Value creation”). 2002 he co-founded a mobile content sharing application (www.mozean.de) where users can publish and share content which is delivered via mobile phone.
2003 he co-founded gogolmedien to build a scalable publishing-platform for converged media products (print&online) and collaborative content creation, driven by users. Since 2003 gogolmedien successfully launched 17 hyper-local so called myheimat-magazines based on this platform.
What are your goals?
Myheimat.de tries to provide a service that helps people make the communities they live in better places. Our service combines online, print and mobile for the lowest possible threshold to participate and the highest reach in the local community.
In Germany there are over 1.800 small cities (between 10-50K inhabitants) which perfectly match myheimat. We want to cover these cities with monthly/weekly freesheets. Therefore we will partner with media-companies and traditional newspapers.
In addition we plan to offer the platform behind myheimat as an innovative tool for media companies to serve their customers on a hyper-local level and to enable networked journalism on a local or regional level. Our goal is to further develop the technology platform of myheimat to give professional journalists a tool for seamless collaboration with an open community of citizen reporters.
Notable achievements?
Back in 2003 myheimat was the first community-to-print initiative (at least we know of). At least in Germany no media company (start-up or traditional newspaper) managed to roll-out successful 17 local free-sheets in 3 years.
Lesson you’ve learned (including mistakes you’ve made)
We regard Organisation/People and Information (Systems) as the key to networked journalism and think that networked journalism is driven and enabled by strong technology platforms specifically designed for networked journalism.
Organisation/People
Our journalists had to learn to moderate the conversation and not to write content themselves. This was (in the beginning) much easier with employees who are not trained in traditional newspaper production, but we now also see a lot of traditional trained journalists who enhance their abilities in moderating and animating user(-communities).
From our experience since 2003 I can only confirm and emphasize how Jeff Jarvis put it: “How does the role of the journalist change? Journalists must now augment their traditional and valued roles of reporter, watchdog, questioner, vetter, investigator, editor. In the conversation, they need to take on new roles, as moderator, enabler, organizer, talent scout, even journalistic evangelist and educator.” (from: http://www.buzzmachine.com
To adapt the media application/the media format quickly to user needs or user feedback, cross-disciplinary teams and co-location helps a lot. We learned to put an editorial designer, a programmer and a moderator together in a team, to deliver fast results the user wants.
Information system
In the beginning (2003) we underestimated how important an agile development process and an agile platform architecture is. We (naively) specified and started coding our Version 2.0 of the platform in a half-year project, but we stopped this project, because we realized that we ran into an architecture which was not agile enough, and the (time-) gap between user-feedback and implementation was too big. Time-to-market of the next feature/version hast to be < 1 month.
We know have a much more agile piece of software where we can react instantly on user feedback, have fast development iterations (“continuously beta”) and can embed experience and user feedback every 2-3 days in our platform.
(more…)
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Brian Conley – Alive in Baghdad
Posted on 04. Oct, 2007 by David Cohn.
Your work in networked/citizen/collaborative journalism.
Right now we work with locals in Iraq and Mexico, and produce to weekly programs, Alive in Baghdad and Alive in Mexico, We hope to expand to other locations and are currently discussing other projects as well. Alive in Baghdad looks at the impact of the war from the perspective of Iraqi citizens, we attempt to cover all aspects of the war’s impact on Iraqis living in Baghdad, and have also covered the refugee crises in Syria and Jordan. Alive in Mexico was started in November 2006, when I travelled to Oaxaca to cover the ongoing conflict there. I met two Mexicans who were hoping to start an internet television project showing events in Mexico and it was a natural fit. We worked together while I was in Mexico and they have been trained as well. We launched a weekly show about life in Mexico. The new show covers everything from political turmoil to Mexican culture. Our hope is to provide a more interesting and nuanced look at life in Mexico.
What are your goals?
Small World News is a collaborative between a small American team and journalists in Baghdad and Mexico City. We partner our skills and know-how in editing, video-blogging, dsitribution, and knowledge of journalism, accuracy, bias, etc. with teams of local citizens and journalists, trained to use small DV cameras and shoot for the web. In this way we’re able to produce powerful local content that has a global impact. We hope to continue building bureaus around the world and change the way we learn about different parts of the world, providing windows on as many under-served locations as possible.
Notable achievements?
We have produced a weekly program on life in Baghdad for over a year, covering stories such as the Adhamiya Wall, visually and more fully than done in the media before, and the plight of refugees in the Al Waleed Camp on the Iraq-Syria border, which had previously been seen nowhere else. We have also taken the time to look carefully at the plight of Iraqi civilians in a way not possible in the current TV news climate. We swept the first awards show for Video Blogs, the Vloggies, taking home seven awards. We were also nominated for a Webby in 2007. We co-produced a documentary for BBC Newsnight and SkyNews solicited five of our episodes for broadcast.
Lesson you’ve learned (including mistakes you’ve made)
I’ve learned that, as always, patience is a virtue. Also, it is important to consider the business model and sustainability of a project, as well as its importance to society. We’ve also found that unfortunately, video on the web is not paying for itself yet, and there doesn’t seem to be a clear model for monetization. The hardest part has been dealing with companies’ fickle interest in our content, and trying to simultaneously leverage our blog status, while promoting our journalistic credibility.
Are you getting revenue for this? How?
We have had a variety of revenue sources over the last two years. They have ranged from donations from our viewers, to small grants, as well as speaking fees, and the largest contribution has been by licensing our content to old media institutions. We hope that by putting together a solid plan for continuing to license content, we can build a sustainable company. Our latest plan for ongoing revenue has been to offer voluntary subscriptions to our viewers, we are now making around $200/mo in contributions of 5, 10, and 20 dollars.
What’s next? What do you need to get to the next level?
We are looking for mentoring in journalism, as we have mostly learned this by the seat of our pants and reading books. We are also looking to train news companies looking to make the transition to video in how to do it. We’re hoping to make contacts with companies that need this help, but also with entrepreneurs who may want to collaborate in order to find the funding/financing/horizontal income to make our work sustainable. We’d be excited to speak with anyone looking to collaborate.
Anyone you’d like to talk with, learn from, or work with at the summit
David Cohn, Michael Rosenblum, Jay Rosen, Arianna Huffington, Tom Rosenstiel, Bill Mitchell, Andy Solomon, Emily Gertz, Lila King, Bill Densmore, John Bracken, Rory O’Connor, Brian Storm, Chrys Wu, Blake Eskin, Donica Mensing, Tom Whitwell, Mark Lukasiewicz, Robin Hamma, Edward Roussel, Jeff Burkett, I gues we should just say there are many people I want to meet at this thing, I hope there are enough hours in the day…
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Robin Hamman – BBC
Posted on 04. Oct, 2007 by David Cohn.
Your work in networked/citizen/collaborative journalism
I’m a Senior Broadcast Journalist/Producer for BBC English Regions and I blog at Cybersoc.com. At the moment I spend most of my time looking after the BBC’s external facing blog network and giving presentations about social media and blogging across all areas of the BBC.
These days I actually do very little journalism or production but I hope, and the evidence seems to suggest that, my ideas are helping inspire BBC journalists, program makers and editors to embrace social media.
Over the years I’ve worked with developers to create or improve various discussion platforms and have given editorial training for those managing those services or integrating them into their programs.
My primary focus at the moment is looking after the BBC’s network of around 40 blogs, running training courses for those bloggers and encouraging them to think of blogging not just as a publishing tool but as a technique that involves finding, tracking and joining into the conversation with other bloggers.
I’ve also been behind a pilot project in Manchester where we work with local bloggers, helping them to building their audiences whilst, at the same time, giving us the opportunity to highlight and editorialise the very best of their content for use online and on-air.
I’m also involved in a project with BBC Leicester where we’ve recruited members of staff, as well as some volunteer members of the public, to help us create weather content using a clever mix of 3g cameraphones, yahoo’s experimental zonetag software, flickr and twitter. This effort should be launching publicly any day now.
What are your goals?
To help BBC journalists and program makers think creatively about how they might embrace social media, technology and blogging in their work. (Often times a large element of this is simply telling people it’s ok to take risks and it’s ok to use third party services!)
* To encourage BBC people to participate in social media without forgetting that the emphasis is on social rather than media.
* To have fun, and show other peole how to have fun, playing with this stuff!
What are some of your notable achievements?
I’d like to think that I’ve influence the thinking of quite a lot of people within the BBC – in the past in helping them to build and manage successful audience communities on bbc.co.uk and, these days, to get them to think of the whole web, blogs and social media services included, as their canvas (hat tip to Tom Loosemore).
Lesson you’ve learned (including mistakes you’ve made)
I believed, and a lot of others thought, that with the BBC Manchester blog we’d come up with the holy grail – a way to build positive, honest relationships with audience contributors whilst, at the same time, avoiding the usual legal, technical and editorial risks involved with that. I still think the model has some legs to it but we’ve also learned some lessons:
* even cherrypicking content from RSS feeds takes a lot of time
* it’s difficult to motivate yourself to plow through content that isn’t of personal interest, even if that content would be great in the eyes of your audience
* being local requires actually being local (one member of the team, Richard Fair, is based in Manchester whilst I am based out of London)
I think the thing that surprised us most was the reaction from local bloggers who were at first a bit sceptical but who, once they’d seen the model we were using, fully embraced us as part of their community and even helped us where they could.
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Michael Rosenblum – Democratizing Video via Rosenblum Associates
Posted on 01. Oct, 2007 by David Cohn.
Introduction and Narrative: In 1988 Rosenblum left his job as a producer for CBS. He was unhappy, “young and idealistic. I quite this very good job and took the video camerae to see if I could do it myself,” says Rosenblum. Using a small camera and laptop, he went on to become one of the first solo video journalists – producing quality work that was cheaper for network television to purchase. Since then, he has taught newsrooms and television stations across the world to adopt his methods.
Main Goal: To drive the democratization of television and video online. “It’s easy for somebody to start a novel because it does not cost anything to try to write one. Sometimes you get a novel like Harry Potter, sometimes you don’t. In television the industry is not structured to encourage somebody to go out and get a camerae and get a job. There are too many barriers between the technology and the end product at the end of the day,” said Rosenblum. Those are the barriers that Rosenblum hopes to break down.
Notable Achievements: Rosenblum Associates has gone on to change newsrooms around the country: New York One, The Voice of America, Video News International (today New York Times Television), Oxygen, BBC and was an advisor for Al Gore’s Current Television.
Rosenblum has also created DVdojo – a video bar/cafe and Citizen TV (ctzn.com) to create venues for citizen video journalists. And now, the Travel Channel Academy, in partnership with The Travel Channel.
A Surprising Realization:
1. How difficult it was to get it done. “I walked back to CBS and I got a meeting with the chairmen, I thought I would walk in the door, show him a piece and sell it right away,” But the business side of Rosenblum’s work has been slower than Rosenblum himself.
2. The enormous amount of talent that is buried not working for networks.
Biggest Practical Lesson/Mistake:
During a video journalist conversion, it isn’t enough to just train people and send them back to the station. For example, Rosenblum trained 750 video journalists at the BBC, but put them back in the old newsroom systems. “In fact you have to restructure the entire way the network works.”
Money: Money: Training individual video journalists saves a significant amount of money on production. Traditionally, 35 full time employees might only result in 11 cameras, creating a high cost overhang to produce video. After the conversation the station could have 30 or more cameras in the field.
Future Goals: Currently Rosenblum Associates is working on a new project with the Travel Channel, teaching people how to document their travels, which will start airing in November.
Rosenblum also recently created a site Citizen TV (ctzn.tv) – a cooperative of citizen journalism documentaries.
What do you hope to get from people attending this conference?
I’m always happy to listen to other people, you never know whats coming up.
