This brilliant image was taken by Janis Krums, a Twitter user (@jkrums) who in his day-to-day life works on improving the performance of athletes. But today he produced perhaps the best piece of photojournalism of the Hudson river crash.
Archive for the ‘Citizen Journalism’ category
Awesome cit-journo shot of New York plane
January 16th, 2009Earthquake video back to haunt me
January 4th, 2009Seems Radio 4 did a 2008 Now Show round up and our ‘quake video was on it.
I’ve been trying (a little) to shake off that video for three reasons. First, I sound a bit drunk. Second, its shoddily shot — but that can be blamed on the previous point, rather than poor video skills. Promise.
Thirdly, and by far the most important, I feel the message portrayed in the video doesn’t adequatly describe how I feel about the situation. It seems I’m annoyed at the BBC for not going big on the earthquake like Sky did. Not so. I’m annoyed because it wasn’t mentioned. Equally, Sky’s coverage was a bit over the top.
(On a side point, Sky made a promotional video using my footage – and I understand they’ve used it to promote their breaking news pedigree. Good — I’m very pleased with that. The key fact here is that Sky gave the public what it needed: information. The BBC lead with deathly silence.)
Luckily, some weeks later, I was given the chance to add to my thoughts on the BBC’s NewsWatch program. Sadly I can’t link — it’s no longer online.
Their defence was not that the BBC was slower, but that as it was early in the morning, the coverage on News 24 was in fact BBC World. And, thus, a minor earthquake is not important in the complete international agenda. Can’t argue with that, can you?
Well yes, I think you can.
Firstly, the first comment made by the BBC anchor was along the lines of “We’re just hearing reports…”. This suggests that it’s the first they new about it and it would also suggest that it hadn’t been held back because it wasn’t in keeping with the international news agenda — the reason given on NewsWatch.
If indeed the BBC knew about the earthquake straight away, why did they wait until an hour later to mention it? Surely this ‘unimportant’ story is even less important an extra hour after it occurred? For me it’s a choice of mention it straight away, or not mention it at all. Everything points to the news team being too slow.
I’m convinced that nobody at News 24 knew about it until the very first moment the anchor mentioned it.
But let’s get back to the BBC’s defence. I can see the logistics (and economics) of simulcasting BBC World and BBC News 24. On a normal night, I don’t have a problem with it. But what happened on earthquake night was a sizable amount of people were awoken from their sleep by a large, continuous thud. My first thoughts were that our stairs — already a bit shaky — had collapsed. My second thought was earthquake. When we went outside, a lady was telling us there’d been a bomb. Another said that the pharmacy they were building down the road had fallen down.
All silly assumptions. The point is, though, that we DIDN’T KNOW WHAT HAPPENED. Yes, it was minor. Yes, by midday the next day, it was nothing more than a nib on the national news. But when it had just happenened, nobody knew what was going on.
Sky News told us. BBC News didn’t. Which provided the better service to the public?
“Minor earthquake in Lincolnshire”…. good, let’s go to bed. That’s how it should have all happened.
The irony of all this is that I now work for the BBC. And it’s no exaggeration to say that I love it. Even in my small role, I’m extremely proud of my contribution to the greatest news-gathering organisation in the world bar none.
Plenty of people have used my video to see it as some sort of ammo to fling at the licence fee. Bunch of fools, I say.
The world reports the news, Intelligent Aggregated Editorial reports the world
September 6th, 2008It’s too late for me to write too many words. But here’s an idea I have. It’s called Intelligent Aggregation and I think it could create a brilliant news website.
Very much a work in progress. Please click to enlarge the diagram below.
If only Lamb had an N95: How newspapers can succeed online
August 24th, 2008
At Auckland airport I bought Christina Lamb’s ‘Small Wars Permitting’, a stunning collection of her finest articles, with her own reflective commentaries throughout. Bit like those special features on DVDs that have director commentary over the film.
I have read a few journalism autobiographies now — Jon Snow’s ‘Shooting History, John Simpson’s ‘A Mad World, My Masters’ being my favourite two. They all have a unique quality to them: That tale of the story-behind-the-story being as enthralling as the events deemed newsworthy at the time.
What I like about Lamb’s book is that she seems to hold a deep knowledge of what’s important. By this, I mean she considers her son and husband as a priority over her work. Only just, mind you. But then she wouldn’t have had the success she has enjoyed without the insatiable appetite to be where it matters in the world.
Yet as I read through her memoirs, I long to see what she’s seen.
Travelling Afghanistan, Lamb writes about the groups of women who used to sneak away from the Taliban regime, to meet under the guise of ’sewing groups’. Within moments I felt a whole new empathy with the Afghan culture. These ladies loved a good bit of fun.
In Iraq, Lamb is in pursuit of the action in Basra. She turns down the chance to be embedded — good on her — which brought on new dangers: She didn’t know what either side were doing. On one occasion, on her way back from what she later learned to be beyond the front line, she bumped into ITN’s reporting van. Inside was Terry Lloyd. They had a chat, and wished each other well. Moments later, Lloyd was killed.
It wouldn’t be the first time Lamb would come close to death, and it certainly wouldn’t be the last. When Benazir Bhutto was killed — Lamb was in the SAME bus. Incredible.
There are countless other experiences in her book that I could write about. But the thing that lets them all down — only just, mind you — is that they are just words. I come from a generation where words are only part of the story. I want to see. I want to hear. Hell, someday, I may even demand I touch.
If reporters like Lamb were given N95s, or any other mobile journalism device, imagine what could be achieved. Seriously, take a moment to think how important to journalism these tech advances could be in the right hands.
We often hear that newspapers are under threat from citizen journalists. They’re not. There are no citizen journalists doing the work of Christina Lamb, are there? NO!
The only reason Lamb could afford to be in all these places because it was her job. She worked for the Express and the Sunday Times as well as a few other publications. She was well paid. No distance was a distance too far. Her sole goal was to report.
If newspapers are to become the king content producers on the web, they’ll need to work to their strengths. I can’t see any bigger strength than the example I’ve just given.
You know, if I were a reporter in the back and beyond, I would be filming as much as I could. And, by using the N95, there wouldn’t be much I couldn’t cover.
Why is this not happening?
Why isn’t the Guardian frontpage, or the BBC front page, or the NYTimes front page* full of this stuff? First hand reports from the places where reporting is needed most.
As soon as reporters are given the space to report, then the newspaper v print war will sort itself out — mark my words. They’ll work together in perfect harmony. The beautifully crafted words of correspondents the world over, signed off with the text ‘view the video online’. Wow.
* Special mention for the Baghdad Bureau — that’s pretty fantastic.
Outdated and useless wire services: BE GONE!
June 22nd, 2008
Reuters mobile journalism kit. I really, really want one. Picture: KevGlobal (Flickr)
This post is for the June Carnival of Journalism. Andy Dickinson has posed this question:
Is (digital) journalism better the more local it is and what does that do to growth?
And I’ll attempt to add my views on that question by bringing up an idea that’s been bubbling in my mind the last couple of days. I think this idea will affect growth.
Read on, if you please…
I won’t go into all the reasons why wire services are busted beyond repair. Go and read Flat Earth News.
I also made it perfectly clear — after my time working at Sky News Online — that I think news agency stories should be given the heave-ho. I still stand by that. As Jeff Jarvis has continually said, lets do what we do best, and link to the rest.
Anyway, I left that out there to stew for a while without offering much in the way of a solution to it all. Well now I have an idea.
In New Zealand, the NZ Press Association (NZPA) is in deep, deep trouble. It’s running out of moeny. And with no money, they’ll have no staff. Which, pretty much, is the state most wire services are in now. Minimal staff cover areas far greater than one person can ever cover effectively. Terrible. You can’t turn over well-researched copy when you’re that busy.
Meanwhile, local newspapers everywhere are also running out of money. Reporters are losing jobs left, right and centre. And the lack of adequate pay means good quality local journalists are drifting into the realms of PR. And who can blame them? A stay in one of Auckland’s flashiest waterfront hotels courtesy of Vodafone recently taught me all I need to know about money-printing license many of the top corporations have.
So you’re left to journalists who are not only underpaid, underexperienced and undermotivated, but also overworked: time that should be spent newsgathering is spent dealing with press releases or re-writing wire copy.
Here’s my proposal for how that should change:
Wire 2.0 – the NewsHub
Imagine a service, we’ll call it the NewsHub. The NewsHub acts as a collector of news, gathered in from local reporters up and down the land. It also acts as a distributor of news, sharing it out to other local reporters, who are in turn submitting their own local copy. Big stories will then be shared upwards to the national and international media.
And… that’s it. Simple. The NewsHub concept would improve journalism — both national and local — a thousand times over. Why? Because it will provide capital for more journalists to be hired, and will make it financially viable to send reporters out into the community.
Outlets that opt in to NewsHub would pay a fee — much like they do with current wire services. The difference here, of course, is that the fee would be pooled across the service. The income being spread to local newspapers/websites/whatever on the basis that the more you produce, the more you will earn.
In other words, the more good reporting you do, the more money you will have available to do it. Much like the manner in which a freelance photographer would distribute pictures.
Which would mean good reporters would suddenly become very valuable to local press. It could even mean — gasp — that local media outlets can afford to hire more reporters, knowing that a bigger news-gathering operation could be much more profitable than, say, telling one reporter to write up all those press releases or slave over an advertorial.
Not to mention the positive influence of good, old-fashioned journalism. Imagine a weekly local paper crammed full of insightful reporting, investigations, human interest and community spirit. I know my local papers aren’t doing this at the moment — are yours?
This focus would then filter up and up to the national and international press. ‘Flat Earth News’ stories would be snuffed out and eliminated quickly and effectively. National media could follow leads from local press as to the biggest stories, as local reporters would now be adequately funded to produce 24-hour coverage. They’ll be Twittering, blogging… the whole shebang. And the community will be right in there too, sharing all their content to reporters at a local level who then, through NewsHub, would distribute their content, turning it into what will be a very profitable exercise for all.
We don’t need traditional wire services. They were invented before we could all communicate without help. Example: If an explosion happens in Cambridge, a reporter for the Cambridge Evening News will be right on it. He’ll be monitoring tweets/pictures coming in from the incident. He will report on the situation, and as he does, he’ll be sharing it all via NewsHub. Earning money for the CEN as he goes. At what point does the PA need to be there? It’s a redundant service — only in existence because 1) until now, there hasn’t been a suggestion of an alternative and 2) because editors are too bloody petrified to ditch it. Come on, editors, own up.
As you’ll have noticed, these are skeleton plans at the moment. There is still plenty of thinking to be done, but to return to Andy Dickinson’s question (bet you’d thought I’d forgotten, eh?), by harnessing the power of local digital journalism and turning it into a mutual, lucrative business, local media can grow and grow. Easily. The only limit is in how much brilliant journalism we can, en masse, produce for the benefit of the rest of the world.
The coverage that never was
November 9th, 2007What a bizarre day for news. The top headline on the BBC today has been that a flood didn’t happen. A non-event. A no-show. Mother Nature clearly has a hangover — bold as brass the night before about what she was going to do, but she has opted to sleep in.
Good news for the people of East Anglia. Bad news for my little experiment into flood coverage here in the east.
But let’s see what they got up to anyway. The Mercury is inviting readers to send in photos and videos, but has nothing great to show yet.
The Times wins the award for most over-the-top comment from a member of the British public with this corker from Jane Crowe, 38: “It’s been a nightmare, They’ve not slept, they’ve hardly eaten. I think next time I would rather drown.
Süddeutsche Zeitung has done well — sticking this nice little media package (made by Reuters, it seems) into its article on the flood.
Back in the UK, the Guardian has gone to town. They have a map, a blog, a digital archive… all sorts. But I’m biased: Cheers for the link, James! Jokes aside, with the floods being such a non-event, the Guardian has done its bit to keep us all informed with out too much doom and gloom.
Predictably enough, the BBC has stacks of comments from the man-on-the-street. I really can’t stand those Have your Say pages. Is it just me, or do all the debates quickly descend into a all round slating of either the Government or, more often, the ‘youth of today’?
Flood coverage: Who will produce the best?
November 9th, 2007Let’s see how this pans out. Tonight, the East coast of England is bracing itself for what the Telegraph claims could be the “worst floods for 50 years”.
By 7am on Friday morning, high-tide, banks will probably be bursting all over the place.
Without wanting to sound too immoral, this sorta stuff is a local journalist’s dream. There’s nothing like a flood, or other similar natural disasters, to make your publication the centre of attention.
So I’m gonna see what they’re all doing.
Representing Great Yarmouth in Norfolk will be Archant’s Yarmouth Mercury. Who, I’m pleased to say, seem to be working through the night updating their website. A good start — they’ve hurled themselves directly into a role as a public service newspaper. A list of closed schools takes prominence on the front page.
The Lowestoft Journal, also Archant, is running pretty much the same operation here.
Nationally, The Times is doing its bit by offering a general overview of what’s going on, but little in they way of advice or public service. To be expected from a national, I suppose.
No multimedia from anyone yet. Maybe the tech-savvy Telegraph can impress me? Sadly not, but it’s early hours yet. At least the Telegraph gives us a nice little diagram to show what’s what.
We’re not the only country to be under ‘attack’ (probably the Daily Mail’s headline tomorrow) from the floods. Our friends in Denmark and Germany are also grudgingly awaiting the surge.
Süddeutsche Zeitung covers the story a little way down their home page, much like the London Times. Again, no multimedia here — but that could just be me missing it. I can’t read German.
In Denmark, the Jyllands-Posten (which you may remember as being the paper that printed those poxy cartoons that got the whole Middle-East going spare), has such a hideously designed home page I can barely bring myself to dig out any articles about the potential flood. It seems to be quiet at the moment, but there is some sort of election going on, so that’s taking up the main news agenda right now.
The BBC citizen journalism bandwagon is yet to hurl itself into life. Expect plenty of “Send us your pics!!!!” from them very soon.
I’ll check again tomorrow afternoon to see who has done what. I’d like to think some of the local presses could come out and surprise me, but I don’t think they will, sadly.
If you’ve seen any decent flood coverage, please comment.
TheLincLIVE: Initial thought on the night
October 27th, 2007It’s all done. Perhaps not the type of event that I’d have hoped, but at least that aspect was out of our hands.
From my point of view, I had the pleasure of leading a fantastic team of young journalists. Seriously, take a look at our content. We’ve done well. Photos, audio, analysis. All in the space of two hours. Video to come later next week (and that’s only because we didn’t have the equipment to put it straight onto the blog). I’m very proud.
Our photographer, Ben Reeves, has posted the night’s events from his point of view.
The liveblog format worked well, I think. We were given a room to base our operations from — which we were locked out of at one point — and we flitted between our room and the SU bar where it was all being announced. But, somehow, we had a constant stream of people running upstairs shouting “I’ve got audio! I’ve got audio!”.
Tell me now: How many national newspapers have covered an event in this way?
It’s the way forward, and The Linc team has embraced it with open arms.
Lately, I’ve been linked to by some major blogs. Normally because I’m having a whinge about old journalists or, recently, the NUJ*. It would be great if this effort from Lincoln student journalists could get a heads up out there in blogland.
*Donnacha — thanks for your comment. I’m genuinely impressed by the fact you haven’t just seen the sarcastic nature of my comments and directed a hearty “F*ck off!” in my direction. I’ll be responding to your comments soon. I must say, though, that the comments you’ve made in my last post make much more sense than those in your article that I linked to. I’ve listened to the Media Guardian podcast that you appear in. Again, in that you seem to soften the blow. Either you regret your original comments, or they were shocking for shocking’s sake…
Ridiculous Comment Award 2007
October 25th, 2007Welcome to tonight’s award ceremony. There’s only one category. And only one nominee.
The winner of the 2007 Ridiculous Comment of the Year Award goes to Donnacha DeLong:
There are those who claim that Web 2.0 democratises the media. It would make everyone equal, yes, but should they be? It’s like saying anyone can play for Manchester United. In one of the main examples given to explain Web 2.0, Wikipedia replaces Britannica Online. Is that the kind of democracy we want – where anyone can determine the information that the public can access, regardless of their level of knowledge, expertise or agenda?
Should everyone be equal? Stupid question. Of course they should. And yes, it’s EXACTLY like saying everyone can play for Manchester United. Because everyone can… if they’re good enough. Not everyone has the skill to be a columnist for The Times, but that doesn’t mean we should stop them blogging on their own patch. It’s the journalism equivalent of having a kick about in the park. Just because little Jimmy isn’t good enough to play for Manchester United doesn’t mean the F.A come and confiscate his ball now does it?
You know, I may be cynical here when I say that if Donnacha is worried about agendas or lack of knowledge, then maybe journalists are the main culprits. Newspapers have agendas. TV stations have agendas. In fact, the only type of journalism WITHOUT an agenda is citizen journalism. They’re just taking pictures and blogging about whatever takes their fancy.
Roy Greenslade has given up his NUJ membership after reading that tripe up there. I don’t blame him. Personally, I’m not going to leave the NUJ, but you’ll never find me supporting their causes. They’re there for the limited legal protection they can russle up for me — and nothing more.
