Check out this great trailer for the new official Monty Python channel on YouTube.
They’re appealing for people who enjoy the channel to buy their stuff. Would you show your appreciation of good YouTube content by paying out for the products?
You know, I think I just might. Visit the channel here and laugh your tits off.
I don’t think it’s fair that some of the local press is getting in a strop with Sir Michael Lyon’s plans for better regional BBC content.
Read this article in today’s Times for a bit of back story:
Newspaper groups are unhappy about BBC proposals to introduce ‘hyper-local’ news websites, covering a town or county, which they believe will stifle their digital growth, at a time when their profits are crumbling in the wake of the economic downturn caused by the credit crunch. The plans, though, have to be approved by the BBC Trust, which Sir Michael heads.
That paragraph, on its own, seems to present a good point from the regionals. Why should the BBC juggernaut — and it is a juggernaut, despite its well-publicised hardships — trample on the local press with its own hyperlocal offerings?
Chief exec of Trinity Mirror, Sly Bailey, has been doing the rounds lately. She’s been here there and everywhere defending newspapers. Her interview in Press Gazette was especially interesting — but since it’s not online, nobody can read it. Figures.
She pops up again in the Times piece:
Ms Bailey accused Sir Michael of holding “outrageous views” and making “an astonishing attack on the local press” and said that “research shows consumers rate regional press as more trusted than any other media, including the BBC”.
I trust my local paper. Why would I have any reason to disbelieve that a school put on a production last week? Or that someone is now 100 years old? I’m not dismissing local press as being trivial here, but my point is that it’s a lot harder for the BBC to maintain that trust when they deal with far more complex topics.
Here’s my main criticism of Sly and co.’s argument:
If the BBC doesn’t go ahead with its hyperlocal plans, will it mean local newspaper sites will improve?
I think we all know the answer.
My two most local newspapers — The Hunts Post and Cambridge News — aren’t doing nearly enough to engage with their readers online. The Hunts Post is a great newspaper. It has a small team. Too small, I’d argue, but that’s another issue. I don’t blame them for not spending too much time interacting online, because the paper still has a very strong print audience.
But the Cambridge News? Cambridge is a city of early-adopters. I once read that, as a percentage of total population, Cambridge has more people registered on eBay than any other European city. Sorry I can’t verify that with a source, but anyone who knows the city well wouldn’t find such a statement hard to believe.
Cambridge is a home to huge centres for the likes of Microsoft. Does its newspaper reflect that? I’d argue no, not at all. Their ‘blogs’ aren’t even blogs at all. Why is there not a news blog? Or a sports blog? Or, considering Cambridge is a hub for science in the UK, why not a science blog that is written in the same style as Bad Science in the Guardian?
If the paper has a Twitter presence, it’s not publicised enough. If they’re on Facebook, they’re doing a pretty poor job at making themselves known.
Now, it’s all well and good saying what’s wrong with a site. It’s another to prove it can be done better. Well there’s proof in Matt Gooding’s Cambridge United Blog. Matt writes for the Royston Crow — another newspaper starved of any kind of progressive internet publishing. I wonder if they know they have the likes of Matt in their ranks? A waste of brilliant blogging talent.
More to the point, though, if Matt is doing his Cambridge United blog in his own spare time, for free, using tools that are available for no fee, then why isn’t the Cambridge News? They couldn’t possibly complain of budget constraints. You know, even if they just aggregated his blog. Or linked to it. Or ANYTHING that acts as a service to readers to let them know that some brilliant, opinionated writing is out there.
The moral of this whole tale, of course, is that regional press haven’t dealt with the internet. It scares them. They don’t know how it works.
A friend of mine was recently told not to mention the internet in a job interview with a regional because “the editor doesn’t like it”. The editor should be sacked this instant. When I mention this tale on Twitter yesterday, I got a load of replies saying ‘I bet it was…’. All were wrong. But it goes to show that it isn’t an isolated problem.
If I was to meet Sly Bailey tomorrow, I’d tell her to wake up. Rather than have a go at the BBC for moving with the times, why not look into providing better websites yourselves. It doesn’t cost much. The site I created for Whitireia Journalism School in Wellington, New Zealand, earlier this year proves that so much can be done with so little time, effort and money.
I’m biased, of course, but I’d say Newswire.co.nz is a far better local news site than Cambridge News. Newswire’s total cost? About £200, plus my wage. Cambridge New’s total cost? I dread to think.
What will be most telling will be the response to my criticisms. There won’t be any — except maybe from Matt Gooding and those at Newswire. Why? Because they’re in control of their online identities. The likes of the Cambridge News won’t be aware of anything I’ve said. I hope they can surprise me, I really do.
I’ve used the Cambridge News as my example, but to steal a Sarah Palin-ism, I think it’s fair to suggest that Cambridge News is a microcosm of the UK regional press.
Many regional papers would be happier if the internet didn’t exist.
But here’s the good news: There’s still time. It can still be turned around. There is enough money in the kitty, and enough readership to give any regional paper some online success. Whether they rise to the challenge or not is up to them. If they don’t they’ve only got themselves to blame.
In the past week, Paul Bradshaw wrote what he called one of the most important posts he’s ever made. Here it is.
In it he describes how the era of the awkward, socially backward geek is nearly behind us. They’re not geeks, he says, they’re early adopters. And you’d better listen to them if you want to stay a step ahead of the game.
What Paul didn’t mention in his post, and what I feel is worth pointing out, is that as well as being early adopters, geeks are also early rejectors too.
In other words, listen to the geeks. If they use something for a long time, then it’ll slowly become mainstream. If they ditch it, then you should ditch it too.
This theory stacks up for almost any example I can think of. Except one: RSS.
Really Simple Syndication. Now, you and I know it’s brilliantly simple, but for some reason it has yet to hit the mainstream.
So why hasn’t it taken off? I’ll offer up some reasons for debate:
Why can’t feeds just be called ’stories’? Why don’t we ‘follow’ stories instead of subscribe to them?
Why are we relying on explanations like this to educate readers?
Newspapers need to make and market their own RSS readers.
Think about it. Make an RSS reader, and invite people to sign up. Once set up, offer a huge array of simple one-click subscribes, sorry, follows. You could even make this follow list user generated — if you find a lot of people are manually adding feeds, then these can be added to the simple one-click list.
And if you’re wondering how it makes money, then think of it this way: “Hello Mr Website Owner, for £loadsa-wonga we’ll add you to our list of feeds,” you say.
“Wow! Great! Now I have thousands of new readers clicking on my ads!” say they.
What’s more, just think of the hits. Now that your readers don’t need to go to each of their favourite sites to read new stuff, they’ll spend more time on your site. And with all those reading habits you’ll be able to target adverts like never before, right down to knowing if Bob from Newquay keeps making the type bigger. Maybe he wants some new reading glasses?
It solves all the problems I’ve described in this post. First, you’ll have a nice new budget to advertise your ‘Story Follow’ service, thus people will know what it is. Second, because you’ve made the technology you can strip out all the horrible terms like feed and subscribe and replace them with friendlier ones. Words that makes sense. And finally… users will feel at home using a website from a brand they trust.
Everybody wins.
We often see breaking news coming into its own on the internet — there is no better place for it — but sometimes it’s good to see the other side of the journalism world: the diary story.
Gordon Brown’s speech today at the Labour Party Conference, in Manchester, was dubbed the ’speech of his career’. Which is perhaps a step down from Obama’s ’speech of his life’. Life or career? There’s something rather British about the difference in semantics there. Anyway.
We all knew it was going to happen, so how did it play out across the ‘net?
Sky News Online rigged up their fun ‘CoverItLive‘ system which, it seemed, was specifically designed as some sort of vitriol bucket, catching every instance of Labour hate imaginable. ‘Cheryl’ was doing a cracking job of giving running commentary — but this was perhaps wasted. I — and everyone else in the UK — could just watch it live on the BBC’s iPlayer (or, indeed, Sky’s live player. But it was nowhere near the same quality as the Beeb’s). Maybe Sky should consider getting some experts in to participate with these live miniblogs. Guido Fawkes?
The BBC did their usual. And I’m glad they did. As the public-funded broadcaster, they need to just be a platform. No space for ridiculous, over-the-top and uninformed opinion a la Sky. As expected, the live coverage on the BBC News channel was tip top, a good, reliable live stream available online.
While we’re discussing the BBC, it became an ongoing gripe that they kept on suggesting that some of Brown’s comments were aimed at David Miliband. For a media organisation that is so intent on cutting out spin in politics, it seems odd to me that they insisted on towing that particular line.
Twitter was surprisingly quiet. Perhaps in a sign that the micro-blogging site hasn’t really come of age in the UK just yet, there were very few (according to Twitter’s search function) instances of ‘Gordon’, ‘Brown’ or ‘Labour’. I follow 138 people on Twitter, and often the people I followed appeared in the global feed. In the UK, at least, Twitter is a very small community, and should not be overestimated.
The Guardian had a great blogpost providing what they called ‘instant reaction’. Written by Andrew Sparrow — who bears an uncanny resemblence to David ‘Not running for leadership’ Miliband, look! — he didn’t make use of fancy-pants software like Sky, but instead just repeatedly edited a standard blog post with timed updates. It worked well. Special marks to Andrew for his interaction with his readers — it’s great to see a journalist dipping into the comments thread on his posts. It should happen a lot more often.
The Independent had no such web-focused coverage. Their leading piece is this monstrosity of an article that is impossible to read on a screen. I’m sure the article is very good, but at 2,281 words, it’s about 1,800 words too long.
The Times had this cool little word count thingy. A nice touch, but ultimately useless. It tells us nothing we don’t know already. Fun though. On a slightly unrelated note, it does feel like The Times’ site is looking a little dated these days, particularly their blogs.
The Telegraph. Speech coverage FAIL. What in God’s name is this? Quite possibly the most useless piece of video I have ever seen on a lead story. “We need to know what’s going on,” spouts the journalist in the piece. Yes we do. So why aren’t you telling us? We know what a journalist does, thanks. The Telegraph’s video is edited together like a crappy internal training video. Not what I’ve come to expect from one of the best producers of online video news in the UK. Utterly rubbish.
Let’s make this an awards ceremony.
The award for best coverage goes to: BBC
Now while they did nothing special online other than the usual, the live BBC News channel stream offered by far the best quality of broadcast and analysis.
The award for worst coverage goes to: The Telegraph
A un-related video and a one-man band blog do little to interest me. This is all about what the country thinks.
Experimentation award goes to: Sky News
If they can dip in some experts into their online chats, I think they’re onto a winner.
My personal thoughts on the speech…
I thought it was terrific. I’m no Labour supporter, but Gordon Brown did a mighty fine job out there today.
What’s the difference between online and broadcast video?
Plenty, I’d say, but judging by some of the online video published by even the biggest news companies, I’d hazard a criticism that no-one quite knows what should be in a good online video.
Before we look at what we can change, let’s consider what we can’t:
1. Size: For TV journalists, size is determined by the size of the viewers’ telly. No problem there then. For online, the YouTube size has become somewhat of a standard, although some other video providers are now giving us a slightly bigger window. Also, as connections get even quicker, it’s safe to assume web video will get bigger too… but for the forseeable future at least, web video is a helluva lot smaller. Important to keep that in mind, always.
2. Quality: On a TV, you don’t have to worry about filesizes, bandwidth or pixellation. It’s irrelevant. But for web, the quality is, in the present day, not up there. So this leaves out some typical production techniques. Captions, for example, sometimes don’t work so well.
3. Length: The web wins on this account — a story can go on for as long as it’s deemed important, be it thirty seconds or thirty minutes. But, like a news article that is written and then edited, do we run the risk of losing ‘tight’ video journalism? I say it’s a danger – sometimes the harsh realities of having a one minute slot on the News at Ten would be enough to force reporters to cut out all but the most relevant segments.
There will be more, but I think those three are most important. Feel free to add your own.
But what I want to ask the blogosphere is what reporting techniques should be dropped when making video for online, and which should be adopted?
My two pence for to kick things off:
Drop: The piece-to-camera. Needless moments of a story that advance the story no further than if it were a simple voice over with more effective footage being shown instead.
Adopt: Extended content. Who says a video story has to be just one video? Produce one clip that edits everything into bitesize chunks, but the provide the raw material for consumption as well, should the reader want to see it. Full interviews, for example, are interesting if you take an added interest in one particular story.
I’m interested it hear what you all think. Inspired by Gnooze and the work of David Dunkley Gyimah, I feel myself leaning towards the art of VideoJournalism — this is the first stage in collecting my thoughts as to whether I’d make a good one.
It’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.
Back in January of this year I wrote a review of Gnooze, a quirky news site featuring the wonderful Marta Costello.
I remember thinking “she’s really on to something” back then. In a typical late-night surfing session, I decided to check in on Marta. See what she was up to. I wondered what she made of the elections.
I found this incredible report. Watch it. To the end. The final few scenes really are gripping stuff.
I’ll ask you all a simple question: Have you seen a better piece of reporting from any of the major news organisations at the RNC?
I ask you now. When Marta was out there, reporting from the middle of that protest, where were all the major networks? Where were the journalists earning hefty amounts of money to tell us what is going on in the world?
I’ll tell you where. They were in lovely mini-studios, enjoying fine food and great drinks. Patting themselves on the backs for a job well done.
To steal a popular webby sorta phrase: Journalism FAIL.
Honestly, I’m gobsmacked by what gnooze has done. If newspapers around the world were serious about a) good journalism and b) involving REAL young people in their product, they’d be snapping up the likes of Marta Costello in a heartbeat.
Indeed, once upon a time, they did. But Marta left. She could do a better job herself, she insisted, and so went forth and created gnooze.
Scarily, I think she’s proved herself right.
Something to think about, eh?
This is what newspaper video should be all about. Why it isn’t is a mystery to me.
I’ll be posting more about gnooze soon — I believe it holds the key to the ‘how do we monitize all this?’ question that is gaining increasingly important momentum around the web.
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.
(more edits further down: get scrolling)
Russia has attacked Georgia. They are fighting RIGHT NOW. It’s David vs Goliath, and Georgia has requested for US help in defending itself. Should the US accept, we’ll have the US (which may eventually mean UK too) vs Russia. Two of the world’s biggest superpowers.
But hold on, this isn’t big news. Oh no. It’s very insignificant — according to the BBC. There’s an Olympic ceremony going on, didn’t you know, and having spent millions of licence-fee payers’ cash, they seem reluctant to drop the Olympics as their lead story online.
Well it’s not good enough. The BBC, which I was defending all evening a couple of nights back, looks ever more stupid as the hour passes.
Indeed, every other respectable news source seems to have seen how important the conflict is. Over one thousand have died already. And yet, to the BBC, a load of people wandering around with flags is more important. Come on now.
These screen shots were taken at 4:30pm:
The Guardian
Telegraph
CNN
Sky
Even Fox News, for crying out loud!
But not the BBC. I’m gutted.
*sigh*
Sometimes it takes the bravest of editors to stand back and prioritise, even when millions of pounds, and hundreds of reporters, have been dedicated to one story. The BBC editors have a lot to answer for.
I’m pleased to say that the BBC News Channel seems to be reporting on Georgia heavily, with some good analysis. But part of me thinks if they could get away with having on instead they would do. But, alas, it’s all over BBC1.
EDIT:
It now seems that the international edition of the BBC website leads with Georgia. But still not the UK. Why?
ANOTHER EDIT:
This is being debated, a little, on the BBC Editors’ Blog. I have a feeling the second comment maybe from the Guardian’s Matt Wells, but I can’t be sure.
MORE:
The Press Gazette’s Martin Stabe twittered wondering if once the Olympic ceremony was over the Georgia story would take lead. It did:
Katharine Lackey, also via Twitter, alerted me to USA Today. The story is almost beneath the fold. Luckily, their readers are more educated on the importance of world news than their editors: The Georgia story has more reader comments than any other on the frontpage:
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