You know what, I think they’ve cracked it.
Last night, I had just returned home from another cracking Journobiz drinks night, and was just in time for the third and final US Presidential Debate.
Since I don’t have the luxury of digital telly in my bedroom, I turned to the web to follow what was going on.
My first port of call ended up being my only port of call. The BBC’s online coverage of the debate was the best I’ve seen. Take a look.
On first glance, you’d be forgiven for thinking it was a bog standard liveblog. In many ways, it is, but look closely and you’ll see some brilliant additions to the format.
Most noticable is the video panel at the top. Nothing exceptional here — it was a live stream of the debate. Refreshing, I thought, that there were no tickers, timestamps or distracting logos anywhere.
Beneath was the live blog. We’ve all seen the format before: writer timestamps each snippet, and places it in an existing post. The same rules applied here, but with one subtle difference: you didn’t need to refresh to get the updates. Why is this significant? Well, bear in mind the video stream is on the same page, it would be very frustrating indeed to have to refresh and re-buffer the video just to see the text comments. Chances are you wouldn’t bother… you would just watch the video.
So far, so brilliant. It worked beautifully. The script was smooth, seamless and — with it’s tasty fade-in style appearance — was somewhat classy. By far the best I’ve seen. It was active and quick, but if you wanted to ignore it you easily could.
A few days ago I posted about how journalists should be using Twitter. That post focused on how journalists should be using Twitter themselves. Perhaps I should have written about what we should do with other people on Twitter. In other words, those thousands who are posting their opinions by the second. Surely it can be channeled into something useful?
Why yes! Yes it can. Someone at the BBC had the task of cherry-picking the best, most relevant tweets.
And I can say it was a success. It’s a shame that they didn’t make it more clear how to get involved in the discourse, however. There were no addresses to email, or numbers to text, and although I’m assuming that the moderator was following hashtags (#debate08), we weren’t told which tags they were.
Other improvements could have been a little more linky-love, as some call it. We got comments from bloggers — but none of them were linked to. Would it have been unfair to expect the BBC to publicise the authors of the comments deemed interesting enough to go on their site?
This is a format that can trump television. It’s engaging and polished. And, above all else, it packages social media in a way that goes beyond simple “Bill from Stoke says ‘It’s political correctness gone mad’” comments. Now we can enjoy thoughtful, intelligent reaction. Social media is coming of age and maybe, just maybe, it’ll save mainstream media.
A week or so ago I wrote a blog brainstorming a few ideas for a young journalist blogging ring. It was inspired by Jessica DaSilva, the rather brave intern who blogged her way into a bit of a nightmare, but then pretty much blogged her way into a glistening career at the same time. Wonderful, I thought.
Anyway, it made me realise that I don’t really know many young journalists that are bloggers. Apart from either friends who I’ve bullied into starting blogs, or some of my NZ students…. who I’ve bullied into starting blogs too 
So here’s the deal. John Thompson, from journalism.co.uk, has set up a new section of the site for our ring. It’s a Wordpress-powered site (woo!), which we can all sign up to and post to.
Now I know what you’re thinking: Can’t I just post on my own blog and then get the lovely link traffic?
Feel free — I’ll be doing it with my posts, for sure. However, by posting onto journalism.co.uk I think this will become an effective, managed resource that can be searched and archived in one sole location, thus making a sort of young-journalist knowledge bank on the web. And of course, let’s not disregard the clout journalism.co.uk has in the online journo world. There are few places better suited to hosting all of this stuff.
One of the concerns from my original post was exclusivity. I suggested — wrongly — that I (and others) pick and choose bloggers who had already made a name for themselves on the web. Wrong. How would that work? The whole reason for this idea coming into existence was because of Jessica…. who I’d never heard of. So to exclude bloggers who weren’t already famous from contributing is just a really stupid idea. Thanks to all who made the point perfectly clear via comments and emails. We’re debating already!
But there will be some restrictions. We need to keep this focused in order to make it useful and interesting.
So, to take part in the Journalism.co.uk Young Journalist Blog Ring, you will have to be:
a) Under 30-years-old. I know there will be a couple of disappointed people out there with this restriction, but without it I feel we lose the point a bit.
b) You blog (or plan to blog) about journalism in some shape or form. Bit of an obvious one, this, but I think it’s important that we’re all coming from the same place here. I’m not bothered what stage of you’re career you’re at, so long as that career’s journalism.
c) You promote the ring! If we all bring attention to this by shouting it from the rooftops, then there’s no reason why this can’t become the best point for young opinion on the media on the web.
Finally… I can’t write ‘the ring’ without thinking of that horrible Gollum chap. So, anyone who can come up with a good, catchy name wins… wins… your very own DVD copy of Batman: The Dark Night!* Wow!
So, if you’re interested, please email me: davelee.mail@NOSPAMgmail.com . Obviously, want to be removing that NOSPAM bit. If you’ve already emailed me, please do it again… I don’t want to miss anyone out, and my Gmail inbox is busier than a Barack Obama gig campaign rally.
I’d like to add, of course, that any suggestions are still very welcome as to how the ring should work. I’ve set those three requirements as a means of getting the ball rolling. But please, ideas wanted!
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