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Sir John Bond: The man who paid £600 to edit his Wikipedia entry

March 10th, 2011

Oh my.

There’s a lot to be said about Sir David Tang’s ICorrect. Sky have given the background. It’s a new website which invites celebrities and other public figures to, the creator says, “correct permanently any lies, misinformation and misrepresentations that permeate in cyberspace”.

Users can sign up, bring attention to a mistake and then write their side of the story alongside it. This is important, they say, as “the likes of Wikipedia and Google searches consist entirely of hearsays”. Apparently, ICorrect lets users permanently “correct” these sites.

That’s an odd claim. It does nothing to change the websites in question, and it comes at an extortionate price: £600 a year, or £3,100 if you’re a company.

Amazingly, it seems to boast top names like Michael Caine, Naomi Campbell and Cherie Blair.

It’s probably the greatest get rich quick scheme I’ve ever come across – an inkling which was confirmed with this priceless correction from Sir John Bond, the chairman of communications giant Vodafone:

I wish to correct my entry in Wikipedia. I was born on 24 July 1941. I am not The Honourable. I joined The Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation at the age of 19, not 21. I have not worked in the Middle East. I was posted to New York, not Buffalo. I spent one year in the USA as an English-Speaking Union scholarship student at Cate School, near Santa Barbara, California, not two years.

Incredible. £600 to correct a mistake on a freely-editable online encyclopedia. Hilariously, the Wikipedia entry is still wrong.

Tell you what, celebs, I’ll charge you £300 for five years to write your corrections to the international media in the comments of this post. Knock yourself out.

30 comments »

Posted in Comment, Multimedia, Newspapers, Social Networking, The Future, The Web

Five reasons why the Kindle is possibly my favourite device ever

January 31st, 2011

I was lucky, earlier this week, to finally get my hands on a lovely new iPhone 4. It is simply the most sophisticated gadget I’ve ever owned – not to mention the most expensive. But while I’m still in the giddy ‘new gadget’ love-in, it certainly won’t take my affections away from the best thing in my bag – the Amazon Kindle.

I bought the WiFi-only version just before Christmas. It was at the time of the massive ad campaign from Amazon – and I’d hazard a guess that there were more Kindle ads than Kindles in London at one point. It worked – curiosity of my fellow commuters meant a lot of “oh… is that a Kindle? How do you find it?” questions on my journeys around the capital. There are less now, I’m assuming that many who’d wondered about the Kindle had got one, or given one, as a holiday gift.

It’s certain that popularity is growing. Indeed, we’re hearing now that in the last three months of 2010, in the US, Amazon sold more e-books than actual paperbacks.

I guess we all have our reasons for liking the device. But here are mine. For the Kindlerati among us, please add your own…

1. It doesn’t do very much

I thought long and hard over whether to shell out the extra few quid and get the 3G version of the Kindle before deciding it wasn’t worth it. I don’t need the internet when I’m reading. If anything, it’s the internet that’s been stopping me reading all these years anyway – a constant distraction, flickery lights that take me away from good old-fashioned literature.

So when people say, “It’s not as good as the iPad, you can’t do much else with it”, I say, “GOOD! That’s the point!”.

Think of it this way: What’s the best book you’ve ever read? Remember how engrossed you were, as if the world could collapse around you and you still wouldn’t notice. Now – imagine missing out on that because you suddenly got distracted by playing a bit of Angry Birds.

Seems crazy to think – but while a device could do a million-and-one things at a time, that’s just a million reasons for you not to read. And for me, the Kindle was about reading. Nothing else.

Nobody has ever criticised a paperback’s inability to send a tweet. So why do people get hung up on a feature-lite device?

2. It’s allowed me to enjoy long-form writing again

Nobody reads anything online. We think we do, but really we read the first few bits of text, skim around, check out the hot pictures (if it’s the Daily Mail…) and move along to something else. That’s not reading.

I guess that theory means you’ve stopped reading this by now, but I’ll trudge on regardless. By using the brilliant Instapaper, I’m able to see something good, interesting and long-form and, rather than stop everything I’m doing right there, I can just click a bookmarklet and send it to my Kindle for reading later. Bliss.

I’m not the only one. LongReads.com is one of a few sites promoting the best long-form writing from around the web. I’m hooked.

3. Project Gutenburg

I can still hardly believes this exists. Project Gutenburg looks pretty naff (if I’m quite honest), but it’s a gateway to a library of some of humankind’s greatest achievements.

The site allows the free download of books in the public domain. Often, this means books which were written so long ago that their copyright has since expired. Selected personal highlights: The Time Machine, Sherlock Holmes and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare.

Project Gutenberg is the perfect way to – if you’re like me – catch up on all those classics that you really should have read, but never got round to.

Worth pointing out too that Gutenberg books work on all e-readers, and come in a variety of languages. Tasty.

4. I don’t have to be its mother

I’ve had the Kindle for well over a month now, and I’ve charged it, er, twice. And that includes when I first opened it up.

Now bear in mind that in that time I’ve read five books, at least 50 articles and endured two 25-hour flights to and from Australia and you’ll start to have some idea of the juice this little thing can hold.

Being able to not think about gadgets is important for me. Sometimes, with my iPhone, I feel like I’m looking after a small child.

Where a mum would do the customary “do you need a wee wee before we go shopping?”, I constantly need to mentally ask my iPhone: “Are you going to need a little chargey-charge before I go out tonight?”

The Kindle… it just is, you know? It’s in my bag. And if I fancy reading, I can.

5. It doesn’t make me want to puke on the bus

Reading in a moving vehicle makes me want to die. Seriously. I lose all the colour in my face (which, as the Palest Person on Earth, is quite scary) and want to vom.

I’ve asked a few people over time and it turns out I’m not the only one. Now this isn’t a problem if you don’t get driven to lots of places – but for anyone who has experience the No. 25 bus from Tottenham Court Road to Stratford will know, it’s a long and bumpy ride.

Imagine how delighted I was, then, to discover that by bumping up the font size a little, I can eliminate the nausea which previous cursed my boring journeys.

9 comments »

Posted in Books, Five Things, Multimedia, The Future, The Web

Tags: amazon apple ipad kindle reading

Audio Slideshow: A heartbreaking night in Brixton (nr Ghana)

December 20th, 2010

Last week, Ghana and Sunderland striker Asamoah Gyan was named the BBC’s African Footballer of the Year.

After having what can only be described as a truly exhilarating World Cup, Gyan has silenced many doubters as he shifted from the mad-dash style of African football into the altogether more rugged world of the Premier League.

I am certain he will go down in history as one of Africa’s greatest ever footballers, if not the greatest. But no matter what he does in the future, he will always be remembered for his part in one of the most dramatic nights in world football.

I was there. Well, I felt like I was there. I think I was in the third most I-was-there-feeling place possible. No, I wasn’t in the stadium. Nor was I even in Ghana. I was instead in a cramped, sweaty bar in Brixton. It had, for that one night at least, a piece of Africa’s soul.

My reason for visiting wasn’t just to soak up the atmosphere. I wanted to produce an audio slideshow of the night as a way of experimenting with some newish equipment of mine: an SLR (bought), a high-quality Marantz (borrowed) and SoundSlides (long fiddled with, never fully utilised).

Sadly, we couldn’t use the slideshow on the BBC site, and it has, until now, sat gathering dust on my hard drive. But, as Gyan collects his well-deserved award, I thought now a good time to relive that night in Jo’burg.

The events unfolded in incredible fashion. Ghana took the lead through Sully Muntari just before half-time, before Diego Forlan – who was later named player of the tournament – equalised in the second half. It stayed 1-1 until the final minute of extra-time when a scandalous handball on the line gifted Ghana with a last-gasp penalty – and the chance to be the first African team to ever reach a World Cup semi-final.

Asamoah Gyan stepped up, but fired the ball against the bar, and with it crushed the dreams of a continent. Ghana went on to lose the match on penalties. It was simply devastating. I can’t describe the emotions in the bar that night, so I’d like to invite you to watch the slideshow below – I think it conveys the hurt pretty well. As one text message sent to the BBC live text team remarked: “Football, how cruel and beautiful you are.”

(Pictures, audio and slideshow production by myself – with a touch of extra audio gathering (and beer delivery) from Ben James and Ben Sutherland. Cheers lads.)

I was heartbroken that night. That game was about more than football – and I hope the slideshow at least gives some idea about what that result meant – or could have meant – to the people of that country.

Brazilian football legend Pele once famously said that an Africa team would win the World Cup before the year 2000. Of course, he was wrong. But it will happen one day, and I believe Ghana have the best shot at it. I plan to be in Brixton when it happens.

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Posted in Multimedia, My Work, Sport, The BBC, The Web, work

Tags: audio slideshow brixton football ghana world cup

Five reasons why Facebook Credits will save newspapers

December 6th, 2010

First things first, I hate seeing the phrase “can save newspapers” thrown around all over the shop whenever a new techy idea comes out.

But, chances are you’ve found this via Twitter and, if you’re anything like me, seeing someone claim they know what will save newspapers is enough to make you click just so you can tell me why I’m so very wrong. Go ahead.

This post is going to simply outline what I think is a massive development for the potential of selling content on the web.

For years, the industry in-joke has been this formula for online publishing success:

1. Publish content
2. Get traffic
3. ????
4. Profit!

Hopefully the following points can explain why I think the ‘????’ in that horrid equation is now obvious: Facebook Credits.

Before we begin, let me add that I’m not proposing all newspapers become Facebook apps instead of standalone sites. Rather, in a similar way to the ‘Like’ button that is appearing all over, it should be a system which is implemented neatly with the individual sites.

1. Social gaming is the new crossword puzzle – and it’s worth $6bn worldwide

Last year, report the NYTimes, the Daily Mail made £12 million through digital content revenues. Meanwhile, Zynga – the company responsible for Farmville – is set to net $500 million from sales of virtual goods.

Virtual goods are every business’ dream. Imagine being able to sell something that essentially doesn’t actually exist. Take roses, for example. Josh Halliday reports in the Guardian that Flirtomatic, a social network which is barely even heard of, sold more virtual roses last year than Interflora sold real ones.

Not only that, but it convinced 100,000 people to pay to ‘attend’ a virtual fireworks night.

But what does this have to do with newspapers? An awful lot.

Jim Tucker, a very good friend and former editor of a national newspaper in New Zealand, once told me about a cunning experiment he devised when he first took over as editor at a newspaper. He took his staff to the streets to find out why they buy the paper. If they said they loved the features, they could put more money into it. If it was more sport they craved, then at least now they’d know.

What did they find? Crossword lovers. Serious crossword lovers. You see, a lot of people who bought the newspaper didn’t give two hoots about the news but, once their beloved crossword was done, they’d give the rest of the paper a read. It was a model that suited everyone, even if it did shatter the egos of Jim and his staff.

Social gaming is the new crossword.

Am I telling everyone that newspapers need to start deploying farm-based games across their sites? No, don’t be silly. What I am saying is that people’s desire to have Facebook Credits in order to play online games is, for editors, a gift from the gods. Suddenly, we’ve got millions of people – young people, don’t forget – who have credits. Credits which they didn’t buy to read news but, now they’ve got them won’t give much thought to spending a couple on content.

The newspaper would, on current rates (dictated by Facebook), take 70% of each credit’s monetary value.

I believe, ladies and gents, that’s what we call a business model.

2. No self-assembly required: let Zuckerberg worry about it

A little while ago, I blogged this:

When you by The Times, do you have to go to a special newsagent which just sells that paper? Do you then have to cross the road to get the Telegraph? No.

My point then was that we need a central payment system which deals with every newspaper and content provider on earth. Problem is, who exactly would do it? If NewsCorp tried, there’s no way the other papers would collectively think “Oh, Rupert’s got a good idea…” and sign up.

But it needed to happen, and Facebook has got there first. This is good for newspapers. Think about The Times, and the money spent on the following:

Designing, developing and implementing the paywall software (and the new look site to put it all on)
Setting up the systems needed to securely and reliably handle the influx of sensitive data now coming their way
Establishing a new customer services team to handle queries (“It doesn’t work on my computer”,”I want my money back” and so on)

I’m sure that’s just the tip of the iceberg. If you use Facebook as your model you can just, erm, sign up. As Gordon Ramsey would probably say, “Payments: done.”

3. Wall? What wall? It may be paid-for, but it’s certainly not hidden

One of the criticisms levelled at The Times is that, due to the paywall, their content is hidden. You may be reading it, but you can’t share it with your friends or colleagues.

Potential customers can’t get to the opinion section of The Times’ site – so it would be a very trusting person indeed who’d take a risk on it, even if it is just a quid. No surprise, then, to see many of The Times’ opinion writers gleefully sharing their links on Twitter when the paywall momentarily stopped working.

With Facebook Credits, the potential to have the best of both worlds is a real possibility. Would “Dave Lee just bought Charlie Brooker’s latest column from the Guardian” look so out of place on your Facebook feed? The entry would have quick, enticing kicker which could potentially lure in a few extra punters.

If a friend of mine pops in to leave a comment – something along the lines of “I loved this, one of Charlie’s best!” – the power of social recommendation will then transform into profits.

Where with The Times you’re presented with a locked door, by using a payment system so tightly incorporated with the world’s dominant social network, you’re working behind a pay window, not a wall.

4. Your mum could do it

I’m not insulting your mum. But I do know she’s statistically unlikely to be able to get her head round something like a pay wall. Or rather, she’d be put off by the technical oddity of it all that she’d be reluctant to even try.

As a person who has their very own mother, I know that the less computer-literate out there want things to be as simple as possible.

Simplicity, in this case, means familiar. It means “set up by my son so I can use it from now on”.

Facebook Credits are going on sale in Tesco. Even if you’re not convinced in my argument so far, that move by the supermarket giant should at least tell you a little bit about why this is going to be massive. Get your head round that for a moment: Tesco expect people to physically go to a shop, buy an actual product (a voucher) and then take it home to buy something virtual.

If someone like my Mum, or my Dad, or even my newspaper loving Nan knows that she can get all the great stuff on her computer just by popping to the shops to get it, they will. Trust me, buying vouchers to use online from the local supermarket is much less hassle for some people than filling in an online form. To you and I it may seem absurd, but I’m right.

And that’s before you get into the promotional possibilities. Every time you spend £20 or more on petrol you get 100 clubcard points and… some Facebook Credits? Automatically deposited into your account?

The disconnection between all our content providers mean this couldn’t happen now. “Spend £10 on beans and get a free day’s trial on The Times’ new website” sounds dull and, ironically, as old media as getting a free CD-ROM on the front of a mag.

Facebook Credits being in Tesco offers the first real breakthrough in which the concept of online currency – something to buy quality goods with online – can hit the mainstream.

5. Selectivity breeds success – without subscription, you can concentrate on added-value

It could be argued that if the Guardian had a paywall, they wouldn’t have got the Wikileaks scoop. Its openness (and political stance, of course), spurs much of its success.

But with Facebook Credits, the Guardian could use these big, unique moments to earn money without killing their audience numbers.

Asking people to pay for hard news is a bad idea, and one that will fail. Information wants to be free, and it always will be. But while you wouldn’t ask someone to pay for this: WikiLeaks cables claim al-Jazeera changed coverage to suit Qatari foreign policy, would it be so unreasonable to ask for a few credits for added value like this: US embassy cables: browse the database? Or perhaps this: Julian Assange answers your questions?

It’s this judgement that makes the difference for me when it comes to successfully encouraging people to pay. Facebook Credits – by nature of being a one-off micropayment – would allow editors to establish which stories would be paid-for, and which ones wouldn’t.

It’s a freedom which would herald the birth of quality, multimedia journalism to our media industry. An in-depth investigation, for the first time in the history of online journalism, would become more profitable than SEO-friendly stories about celebrities. Who doesn’t like the sound of that?

30 comments »

Posted in Five Things, Multimedia, New Zealand, Newspapers, Social Networking, The Future, The Web

Tags: credits facebook guardian micropayments payment rupert murdoch the times

Five things I’ve learnt about… pay walls

February 8th, 2010

Pay walls, micropayments, premium subscriptions… whatever you want to call them, they all have one thing in common: we have no clue what works. Yet.

But we all have our own opinions on what won’t work. The anti-paywall brigade – I’m in it, I think, perhaps, possibly, slightly – will say stacking up all your content behind a big barrier is no way to gain an audience.

And others will add that ‘news’ – whatever that is – can’t be sold. It’s just information. Technically, we’ve never sold news. We’ve sold a newspapers; printed, delivered and physical. But never the actual news itself.

As Jim Tucker once told me, it was a very disheartening experience indeed to learn that his readers – he used to be the editor of a national Sunday paper in New Zealand – got more angry about a crossword being moved than they did about anything else.

Maybe people haven’t ever wanted to buy news? Depressing.

But fear not. Read around a bit on pay walls and you discover some decent initiatives. Yet, to great frustration, we’re sometimes our own worst enemies. Here’s five things I’ve learnt about pay walls – for good or for bad.

(by gyn_ti46 on Flickr)

1. Newspapers are very, very selfish

A few days ago, the Guardian’s legal affairs correspondent Afua Hirsch tweeted that Alan Rusbridger said (possibly paraphrased): “if New York Times goes behind a paywall, Guardian will be most widely read enl-lang newspaper in the world.”

Well congratulations. I don’t think anyone can match the Guardian online right now – it really is a brilliant website which manages to mix normal, hard news with niche industries. Perfect. But Mr Rusbridger is seriously mistaken if he thinks being the most widely read english language newspaper in the world will solve any of his problems.

If you can’t make 30 million visitors work, then I’d argue no amount will turn things round. If anything – it’ll get worse.

And I can’t help thinking it’s a rather selfish response from the Guardian. They’d be much wiser, surely, to just keep schtum and see if Murdoch’s plans work. If they do, it’ll be better for everyone – especially the Guardian who, with a successful pay wall, could really benefit from all those Media Guardian addicts among us.

But, alas, we’ve got to put up with pretty pathetic bitching between each side… which brings me onto my next point:

2. It’s about to get messy

Perhaps it already has. Bullshit, says Murdoch of Rusbridger’s notion that newspapers will “sleep walk into oblivion” if they adopt pay walls.

I’m no Murdoch fan – nothing personal, but his control on the world is scary, no? – but I’m starting to think we should give him a good chance with this. Maybe we’ll look back in ten years and say ‘hey… he really saved the industry’. It’s possible.

But before then it’ll be mud-slinging all round. I can almost sense the excited fingers of comment writers just itching to get stuck in News Corp when the first major pay walls go up. Presuming it’s The Times, what’s the betting that we’ll see a whole heap of bile about the quality of the ‘paid’ Times compared to the free Telegraph? Very likely.

But again, as in point two, we’d be far better off diverting our energy into working as a collective to embrace new ways of paying for news online – rather than picking into each other for some short term traffic gains.

Imagine that. “Our newspaper is out of business because we couldn’t adapt to a new business model. Damn. But hey, on the plus side, in the month we slagged off the other paper we got 800,000 extra uniques!”

Mugs!

3. BBC News Online doesn’t change anything

“Dumping free, state-sponsored news on the market makes it incredibly difficult for journalism to flourish on the internet. Yet it is essential for the future of independent journalism that a fair price can be charged for news to people who value it.”

The words of James Murdoch, son of Rupert, and chairman of News Corp.

It’s an interesting point, and at first glance it appears he may have a point. Right now, the BBC is probably the biggest news-gathering organisations in the world. To be a correspondent is to be at the top of your game. And the website with all this stuff? It’s free.

Obviously not 100% free – there’s a licence fee and all that. But in the minds of users, it feels like a free service. No barriers, no pay walls – you just log on.

So how can anyone compete?

Easily, I say. You see, BBC News Online is all about the here and now. What’s happening today. Yes – that’s the point of a newspaper too – but in a different way, I’d argue.

Newspapers can pile on the analysis. They can doggedly chase stories in a way that is different to the BBC.

Take the expenses scandal as a good example – would the BBC have been able to report that story the same way the Telegraph did? Of course not – it would fall down at the point of paying all that cash for the information.

So my view – a biased one, admittedly – is that if newspapers think the BBC News website completely kills of the level playing field they need to just be more imaginative.

4. It’s a brilliant thing for quality journalism

‘Tits for hits’ is a phrase we jokingly use in our office. It’s true – any story with a promise of some flesh is a surefire way to get hits.

It doesn’t bode well for the future of quality journalism, does it? If all we click on is boobs, then it would be easy for news editors to just save money and make all their stories about Angelina Jolie. Seems like the Daily Mail does that anyway – take a look at their right hand nav.

With pay walls that all changes. I wouldn’t pay to read about Jordan getting married (again), but I would pay for the brilliant One in 8 Million series from the New York Times. I’d pay an awful lot, actually.

This means that, for the first time in our industry’s history, what the journalists want will be in tune with what the bean counters want.

If good journalism sells – which it will – then we’ll be needed to do more of it. Happy days.

5. The makers of Press+ are going to be very, very rich

I prattled on a few months back about how micro-payments could work if there’s a single payment method for every newspaper/news site in the world.

A Paypal for papers, if you will.

I think this is the most crucial aspect of the whole pay wall debate. If there can be one central system that powers it all, for everyone, then we’ve got a system that will succeed.

Put it this way – when you by The Times, do you have to go to a special newsagent which just sells that paper? Do you then have to cross the road to get the Telegraph? No.

Well someone’s only gone and done it. Press+ is touting itself as an out-of-the-box solution for pay walls. From PaidContent:

“Any consumer with a Press+ account should only have to enter payment info once to use the account for any publisher taking part.”

Spot on. So let’s just get on with it, eh?

5 comments »

Posted in Five Things, Multimedia, Newspapers, The BBC, The Future, The Web

Nothing like a bit of passion

May 12th, 2009

I love this. Who wins? I’m not sure.

4 comments »

Posted in Multimedia, The BBC

Tags: bbc carrie gracie expenses Lord Foulkes

Video: The end of the Rocky Mountain News

March 3rd, 2009

Final Edition from Matthew Roberts on Vimeo.

2 comments »

Posted in Comment, Multimedia, Newspapers, The Future, The Web, main, video journalism

NUJ follow up: I’m still not convinced

February 12th, 2009

I’ve been doing some thinking about this whole NUJ thing. My post the other night reads very ranty — indeed, I guess it is very ranty — but I’m pleased to see that many readers of this blog agree with what I’m getting at.

And, from the defence, I received some rather predictable responses against my argument.

I’ll start with this point, from Joanna Geary (formerly Birmingham Post, now The Times):

I have much sympathy with your argument, although £13 a month for legal protection may be worth it and it is for that reason I am still an NUJ member.

Of everything I received (and blimey, there was a LOT) this was perhaps the most useful. £13 a month, as Joanna says, is very good to get legal protection.I can’t argue with that.

But it’s comments like this from ‘Chris’ (no link given) that remind me why I wrote that post:

But you wait till you’re staring down the barrel of redundancy – through no fault of your own, just because it happens that your team is being shut down.

Wait till you’re being forced to accept alternative work in a place you don’t want to live or in an area you have no interest in.

Wait till you’re summoned to meetings for a “quick chat” and end up facing four senior managers using classic intimidation tactics.

Then you’ll wish you had a union rep by your side to help fight your corner.

It’s always good to have a union behind you if you’re facing redundancy. Now, I underqualify myself here, as not only have I never faced redundancy, but I work for a corporation that is arguably more ’stable’. In other words, licence fees are still coming in. While not immune, we are safer.

But my issue is that while the NUJ are fighting a corner, it’s all rather pointless. Take this recent example of an NUJ ‘fight’:

The NUJ has strongly condemned the decision of Independent Newspapers to enforce three redundancies at The Kerryman newspaper in Tralee.

Séamus said: “This proposal represents a direct attack on the editorial heart of one of the oldest and most significant newspapers in Ireland. The inevitable consequence would be a poorer newspaper, which would not adequately reflect the community life of Kerry.”

At a meeting with the union yesterday, management announced its intention to make three journalists redundant. The NUJ chapel held an emergency meeting at which management was urged to rescind the decision, which staff say will have a detrimental effect on The Kerryman and Corkman titles.

My issue with this goes back to my ‘SAVE THE JOURNALISTS!” argument. The NUJ is pouring its efforts into protesting job cuts, when really they should be coming together — as a union — to offer more productive aid to their members. Advice on training, re-skilling and re-deployment.

Ed Hart’s comment:

As an objective observer on this one, I have had good and bad experiences of unions. If I had to sum up what I would want a union to do and be, it is to work on behalf of its members. The problem is that some unions lose touch with what this means, and see themselves as lobbyists, or big movers and shakers; when in fact their remit remains low key, but essential to those who really should matter – their members. Do they occasionally forget who the customer is, and what their customer wants?

Helps me counter this argument from ‘thatstheway’ (uh huh, uh huh, I like it!):

Someone so self-consciously hip like you could have some input into its digital media strategy if you weren’t so busy doing precisely what you accuse the NUJ of doing all the time, which is complaining, and making digital media sound like some big deal that’s going to require your special skills alone.

I feel I could contribute with the NUJ no more actively than I could to ASLEF, the train drivers union. Why? I feel I don’t have a connection with their outlook in any shape of form.

I’m all for protecting the strength of print. By doing so, we uphold the values that have made our profession truly great. But I’m also aware that, like the industry, a union has to change and adapt. Sometimes there are battles that cannot be won by standing outside a building with a placard.

I think it’s time for the NUJ to take a step back and reflect.

It needs to swallow a bit of pride and admit that just because journalism is online, doesn’t make it bad. In fact, it can make it very, very good.

It needs to stop posting videos like this, which show not only a devestating lack of understanding about online media, but also an aggressive “We’re trained and you WILL employ us” attitude that we just can’t afford to have anymore.

Maybe what we need to do is knock our collective heads together and search for ideas of how the NUJ can modernise and become the forward-thinking union we all need it to be.

Because here’s the thing: I want to join the NUJ. One commenter on my last post accused me of having no sense of solidarity which, and I hope my friends would vouch for this, couldn’t be further from the truth. If the NUJ can bring itself up to speed, I would love to get stuck in and get my hands dirty.

I believe in the future of journalism. I believe that journalists will be as important in 50 years than they have ever been. I’m preparing myself, and training myself, for a world without newsprint. It’s time the NUJ got ready too.

13 comments »

Posted in Blogs, Comment, Debate, Multimedia, My Work, Newspapers, Regional, Student Journalism, The BBC, The Future, The Web, main