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Conference asks: Can we trust our news?

Media experts were not in short supply in Dublin City University (DCU) on Monday, as they gathered to discuss the future of their industry and address the title question of the conference – ‘Can we trust our news?’. The DCU media conference was co-organised by the host university and Arizona State University (ASU) and featured big media names from Ireland, the UK and the US.

The Helix theatre in DCU hosted the conference. Photo by Cian Ginty

The Helix theatre in DCU hosted the conference. Photo by Cian Ginty

The first panel to address the crowd of hacks, PR professionals and academics was made up of Leonard Downie, Esra Dogramaci, Kevin Bakhurst and Stewart Purvis. Downie is a lecturer at ASU but is also VP at large of the Washington Post and has worked for the paper for 44 years. He had some interesting insights on where the industry is going and insisted that the Graham family had to sell the paper to Jeff Bezos as the Post can now afford to make a loss as it searches for new creative solutions. Dogramaci gave a colourful description of the media coverage of Turkey’s 2013 Gezi park demonstrations, ranging from the western media’s misguided portrayal of the protests as another ‘Arab Spring’ to Turkish televisions decision to ignore the events entirely and show a documentary about penguins instead.

Kevin Bakhurst delivered a frank review of his first year or so as head of news at RTE, claiming that Prime Time’s creche program restored the reputation of investigative journalism at the broadcaster following a number of recent controversies. Former regulator and news editor at ITN and Channel 4, Stewart Purvis wrapped up the session talking about the challenges facing the regulation of the industry. An astute member of the audience pointed out that TV may struggle to compete with the likes of Netfilx, currently producing only drama but could easily move into news, who are not governed by any regulation at all. Purvis managed to lift the spirits of the journalists in the room who may have been thinking about their own editors when he regaled them with an anecdote about impaling himself on a spike!

The finali panelists of the day (L-R) Andy Carvin of NPR, Paul Staines of Guido Fawkes, and DCU's Jane Suiter with moderator Sarah Carey

The finali panelists of the day (L-R) Andy Carvin of NPR, Paul Staines of Guido Fawkes, and DCU’s Jane Suiter with moderator Sarah Carey

A constant theme that came up throughout the day was the importance of trust. Most speakers suggested that the trust of the audience is the journalist’s most important asset but others insisted that audiences no longer care about trust and just want something interesting whether it’s founded in reality or not. In his keynote address, event co-organiser, ASU’s Dan Gillmor, suggested that we need a more educated audience who are more skeptical of everything they consume. David McRedmond, CEO of TV3, livened up proceedings during the next panel discussion about partisan news. Despite praising the work of his RTE colleagues he criticised the national broadcaster a number of times regarding allocation of funding and with regard to his own station’s coverage of the late Brian Lenihan’s cancer diagnosis at Christmas in 2009 said that instead of blaming TV3 for being insensitive people should have been asking why RTE didn’t cover the story.

After lunch Peter Horrocks, director of the BBC’s Global News division, gave the second keynote address of the day entitled ‘The battle for trust – the BBC experience’. Horrocks discussed how the organisation has battled to regain trust lost during the Jimmy Saville and BBC executives payoff scandals and how with such a massive worldwide audience it is difficult to retain everyone’s trust. He highlighted for example how during the Arab Spring Egyptians saw the BBC as a friend helping them to oust Mubarak but now as the country struggles for stability the locals are beginning to view the foreign press with growing cynicism. The final session of the day focussed on social media’s growing role in the industry. The changing nature of news was displayed perfecting during Andy Carvin’s speech. The NPR (National Public Radio) social strategist was explaining how his unique technique of using his dedicated twitter followers to tell and verify the news has seen him described as a one man newsroom and revolutionised the coverage of the Arab Spring when he was interrupted. Carvin stopped mid presentation to speak about the breaking story of the shooting at a Navy yard in Washington DC as it unfolded on his Twitter stream. After much fumbling at smart phones as the room came up to speed with the story Paul Staines a.k.a. Guido Fawkes described the emergence of his political blog and how social media and the Internet has utterly changed politician’s relationship with the press and the public.

Dr. Michael Crow, president of ASU, closed the conference with a positive speech about the future of news and despite the problems facing the industry most of the speakers and delegates echoed his view all day. Everyone that I spoke to all day agreed that the industry faces huge financial problems but most believed that the current changes weren’t necessarily bad for journalism and that new business models will eventually be found, it may just take a little time to get there.

Muckraking a path to a career in journalism

Newspapers are in decline, broadcasters are cutting budgets, online doesn’t pay, so who’d be a journalist these days? Despite the black clouds hanging over the industry there seems to be no shortage of would be journalists willing to give it a go. 23-year-old Belfast native, Lyra McKee, was bitten by the journalist but at an early age, and with the job market tightening has decided to take matters into her own hands and start her own magazine.

Belfast native Lyra McKee, creator of The Muckraker Report

Belfast native Lyra McKee, creator of The Muckraker Report

The Muckraker Report, launched earlier this month, is an online magazine featuring investigative journalism dedicated to holding the powerful in Northern Ireland to account. The first issue addresses the story of Northern Ireland’s only Rape Crisis Centre and how its government funding was dramatically stopped in 2006 and the battle the centre’s founders have been waging ever since. The time required to investigate this story (five years) and the length of the article (3,300 words), mean it would be virtually impossible for a newspaper journalist to produce this kind of investigative piece but McKee believes there is a demand for long-form investigative journalism and with the price of publishing plummeting thinks there is a sustainable online business model.

I realised that if I wanted to do this I had to create my own job

McKee’s love affair with journalism began when aged 14 she started a newspaper at her school in the Ardoyne area of Belfast, although it was probably doomed to failure from the start. “Staring a newspaper at a school where a lot of people are illiterate probably wasn’t a great idea,” she admits, but her interest piqued. In 2006 she won the Sky News Young Journalist of the Year award for an investigation into suicide in North Belfast and has been writing ever since. “One of the early stories I wrote was about a photography exhibition in Jordanstown University called ‘Positive Lives’”, says McKee. “At the event a HIV survivor said that ‘a fight against HIV and AIDS is a fight for the hearts and minds of the community’. I remember the hairs on the back of my neck stood up and I just couldn’t wait to write those quotes up.” She immediately knew she wanted to do this for the rest of her life but the career path was unclear. Her local newspaper told her at a careers day that they don’t hire investigative reporters anymore. “I realised that if I wanted to do this I had to create my own job.”

Muckraker blog
Muckraker

Muckraker blog logo

Her first entrepreneurial foray was an ill-fated auction website for investigative stories which she ran for just over a year between 2009 and 2011, where she ended up working on the business side instead of pursuing her real passion which was investigating. Luckily she was able to pursue this in the guise of a job for US website Mediagazer.com where she works to this day, and then in December 2011 she started the Muckraker blog. “It ended up taking off, which really shocked me”, said McKee. “I wrote a big story that had just fallen into my lap and it was picked up by GigaOm and CNN and from there things really took off.” The story was an expose of a convicted fraudster who was posing as a venture capitalist. He had an elaborate scam to con start-ups out of £10,000 by wrongly charging them a break-off fee. The Muckraker blog gained further prominence in October 2012 when a post exposed gross inefficiencies in the government job creation organisation Invest NI.

The blog was beginning to get so popular that McKee knew she needed another publishing forum. “The magazine really came because the cost of the site and the investigations were going up,” she says. “Investigations had become much bigger than just requesting an FOI (Freedom of Information) and revealing some embarrassing figures, it was a lot deeper. I needed to find a way of offering something premium, a way of funding the site.”

Lean-back experience

The idea for the magazine had been evolving in her head for four or five years but the conditions hadn’t been right until now. Now that people have tablets there’s more of an appetite for long reads online where people can take their time to consume content. “When you’re not at your desktop, when you’re leaning back and reading something, the experience is totally different. Investigative and news journalism can be very boring, we’re not very good at telling stories and I don’t think that works for the web anymore, so I really wanted to experiment with narrative journalism and create a lean-back experience.”

The availability of cheap online publishing tools has allowed McKee to create her magazine relatively quickly and for a small amount of money, something that would have been impossible just a few years ago. “You can produce something that looks pretty good fairly easily now, where a few years ago you would have had to hire a designer. Also nobody was thinking about online magazines, it’s really only with sites like Longreads, Matter and Grantland where we’ve started to consider this.”

The Muckraker report issue one (available here for just £3) looks pretty well though Lyra insists production values will be going up for the next issue and she also wants to try serialised investigative reports. “We’re aiming to publish every two months and I want to experiment with serialised investigative journalism. You’re only going to have so many answers at the end of two months so with serialised pieces I’m hoping to take the reader on the investigative journey with me.”

All revenues from the first issue went to the Belfast Rape Crisis Centre  and 10 per cent of future revenues will still go to charity but the rest will be put towards investigative expenses. McKee still earns her living from the two days a week she edits Mediagazer but believes that Muckraker could eventually turn a profit and is exploring new revenue models: “Next month we’re launching crowdfunding. It’s going to be crowdfunding by subscription. I’m aiming to get to 700 subscriptions where the money (£3) will be deducted every two months when the magazine is published. “

Arthur Guinness Project
McKee is writing a book about the murder of UUP politician Reverend Robert Bradford (pictured)

McKee is writing a book about the murder of UUP politician Reverend Robert Bradford (pictured)

As if she wasn’t busy enough, McKee is also writing a book and is currently competing for a €50,000 bursary from the Arthur Guinness Project to help fund the enterprise. The book is about the last few months of Reverend Robert Bradford’s life, a UUP MP who was murdered in 1981. The book will attempt to clarify some of the unanswered questions about his death. It was a murder that had no logic to it, he wasn’t a hate figure at the time in the way some other politicians were.

She came about the story when a former journalist friend who had family in the UUP brought the details to her attention. The Arthur Guinness Project winners will receive €50,000 which will fund the writing of the book but also by proxy will help her to continue to write the blog and magazine. You can vote for the project here.

McKee is committed to this project of investigative journalism and promises to see it through. When asked if she would go work for the New York Times or The Guardian if the call came, she said that of course she’d be tempted but would feel that she was letting people down if she abandoned the work. Lyra says that newspapers are no longer run by journalists but run by short term thinkers who are worried more worried about government funded job ads than the importance of investigative journalism and therefore it’s left to sites like Muckraker to carry the baton. The second issue of The Muckraker Report is due to be published on October 31st.

Inside RTÉ’s Digital Archive

Thanks to Google search and YouTube, these days we expect to be able to call up pretty much any image or video with a simple search and a few clicks of a mouse.  However, all the data accessible online doesn’t just appear there by accident. Sometimes it’s hard to believe, but there was a time before the Internet and protecting the collective recordings of the human race is the daily challenge facing the digital archivist.

From baking video tapes in ovens to incorporating linked data and the semantic web, digital archiving has come a long way in RTÉ over the last 20 years or so. We spoke to Bríd Dooley, RTÉ’s head of Archives about the changes over the years, the biggest challenges her department faces today and how new technology could help open up the national broadcaster’s vast collection of archived images, audio, video and documents to a whole new generation.

Preserving our cultural heritage

Bríd Dooley, Head of Archives at RTÉ

Bríd Dooley, Head of Archives at RTÉ

Digital archiving is vital for the preservation of our cultural heritage, yet it’s an area that people understand very little about. People generally understand that analogue material must be translated into digital but many, including this writer, are totally unaware of the scale of the work and the different challenges facing the industry from conserving old material to trying to put some order on the avalanche of digital material being created every day.

These days RTÉ’s archiving process is very high tech but it wasn’t always the case as Dooley recalled one of the first preservation projects in the television archives during  the mid-nineties. “One of the major projects was to reformat the very earliest open reel video tape, the 1 inch and earlier large 2 inch open reels totalling about 25,000 hours of material”, recounts Dooley. “The 1 inch tapes were highly vulnerable due to condition called “sticky shed” which resulted in them having to to be baked in specially created low temperature ovens order to safely play-back  the video reels . Those early television archives projects demonstrated an example of how vulnerable formats can be.” Thankfully this process ended in 2004 and all those tapes have now been migrated  to what was then our standard digital tape based format.  But that now too is legacy and has to be migrated again to up to date digital file based standards to safeguard them for the future.  Other formats such as film and later cassette type video tapes are also vulnerable to age, storage condition and general decay.  Dooley is keen to highlight that digital archiving is not a linear process with a start and an end point, new formats are constantly emerging in the  broadcast and production sphere,  and old content need to be reformatted to be made accessible while  at the same time as ensuring that current content is safety stored correctly and easily searchable.

“It’s difficult to say that there’s one project on the digital road and you’re starting at one end and finishing at the other,” she says. “Work is ongoing and we always needs to be proactive to maintain and keep the archives, with a constant focus on the long term preservation as well as immediate needs and access. Our aim is to secure the archives, maximise access for all users, and minimise risks of loss or decay at all times. Digital archiving is a constantly changing operation because you have to continually move and adapt to the technologies and the ever changing formats as they emerge, particularly in the broadcast industry.  So even as it stands, capture of content happens on very many types of formats and that all has to be transcoded when it comes into the broadcast environment in order to saved, documented archived, stored and retrieved at any time”.

Archiving digital content even more complex

RTE tapes small

Physical tapes in the RTÉ archive

Despite the difficulty of baking tapes  form the earliest days of television to access material, Dooley says archiving of the digital broadcast and production world is much more challenging much, much, more complex. “The whole area of digital files capture has created volume as well as complexity in a way that wasn’t really possible with a lot of the discrete media. It is possible to shoot and record more, on many different formats. There are more distribution platforms some of which may have multiple distribution points for the same content, often different versions and editions. Consider the move from SD , (standard definition) to HD and the emergence of 3D and so on. She cites the 2012 London Olympics as an example where there were multiple events & versions being recorded simultaneously, some of which may never have been broadcast but will still have had to be archived. Standards for digital preservation are much more onerous to achieve and we see the emergence of “Trusted digital repositories” of the future as a way in which data preservation can be assured through standards and certification.

It’s very easy to capture content digitally but it’s also extremely easy to delete it or lose it, so you do have to have strict procedures and rules in place to guarantee that you can capture that not just the content but the metadata to make sense of it , and not just from the broadcast output but also from the production process  itself.  Broadcast  archives have to be very  involved in the start of production process at all stages, from  acquiring, capturing, documenting and ensuring business rules  are in place to capture and retain content & information  for archiving purposes.

Today  as broadcast material is recorded the archives team is  also responsible for ensuring that the content is captured, catalogued,  properly stored and secure. “While our production process and increasingly all aspects of our transmission have and are becoming  tapeless across all areas of broadcasting, video material in particular as of today is  still be  recorded onto discreet carriers such as tapes or disks for secure storage and access purposes. This is because we have yet to be in a position to make the investment into a fully end to end networked digital archiving process at RTÉ. Obviously it’s on our road map but the costs are high and we have to invest in it incrementally as business needs and resources allow.

Funding

This is where Dooley points out the biggest challenge facing all archivists today – funding. The sheer size and scale of an archive of RTÉ’s historic complexity, which contains hundreds of thousands of hours of moving image & sound as well as photographs and documents,  presents major challenges in terms of costs to both digitise the legacy and capture and keep that which is created digitally. RTÉ’s counterparts worldwide face the same issue.   “Legacy carriers such as video, film, acedtate, ¼” reels  tapes and formats  are  all subject to decay & loss so that even the cost of securing the proper storage environment to stand still is quite high. You’ve got to arrest the decay before you can digitise and there are standards on how you store audiovisual and audio material which also require considerable investment and constant monitoring and reviewing.”

“Perception and understanding of what is digital is a big challenge. Just because something is published on a website doesn’t mean it’s preserved and it doesn’t also mean that it’s going to endure”

The RTÉ Archives as part of  RTÉ digital  is working to change that public perception. The archives website makes some archived material available to the general public and as well as providing an invaluable service the site hopes to raise people’s awareness of the importance of archiving Ireland’s digital cultural heritage

Collaboration with Insight Centre

A new collaboration between Insight@ NUI Galway (formerly DERI), DRI and RTÉ Digital aims to  develop  new and innovative methods of discovery of RTE Archives. The size of the archives is such that cataloguing and making all this data searchable is a huge challenge. Insight@ NUI Galway’s expertise in Linked Data and the Semantic Web is being sought to help make this task more manageable. It is hoped that this modern technology will eventually allow RTÉ to offer extensive and richer discovery of its archives to the public,  as well as linking it to the wider body of digital heritage archive.  “The expertise that DERI and the DRI bring to the table is something that we can’t do on our own”, says Dooley.  “The collaboration itself is about a journey of learning as well and about figuring out where it is we as archives need to be in terms of that digital landscape of the future. Not just in terms of content and what it is but actually how you get at it and how you make it discoverable.”

(L-R) Brid Dooley, Stefan Decker, Director of DERI, Sandra Collins, Director of the Digital Repository of Ireland and Alan Shatter, Minister for Justice at the launch of the new project

(L-R) Brid Dooley, Stefan Decker, Director of DERI, Sandra Collins, Director of the Digital Repository of Ireland and Alan Shatter, Minister for Justice at the launch of the new project

“Projects like ‘The Digital Public Space’ in the UK and a number of others around Europe show that this is the direction archives are moving in. What we want to do is see how we can better link the data from our existing catalogues and find a way of publishing those that then enables them to be discovered so that we can more easily curate from across the collections, in effect semi-automating the curation processes. And that in turn the tools that Insight@ NUI Galway and DRI bring to this table will enable it to coalesce together and become something new and exciting.

Although the project is still in its early stages Dooley hopes it will help open up the riches of the RTÉ archive in new ways to a whole new generation of people and says that the public’s appetite for archives is only increasing. “I think that one of the really great things that’s happened in the mushrooming of the digital age in Ireland is  the growing awareness  & engagement with  history, whether political, popular or cultural, through the digital medium.   We have found a growing appetite for the stories we tell from the archives published on our website as well as engagement with partners in other areas of cultural heritage such as recent RTE JFK Homecoming exhibition and nationwide events.  We are constantly developing and looking at new ways to engage with our audiences through social media networks and online tools. This has seen a huge increase in the interaction between archives and the public on a daily basis.

Overall it seems RTÉ’s digital archive future is in good hands, Dooley has a clear passion about her work and despite funding issues she and her staff are determined to work towards the development of  trusted digital archiving repositories for the nation and ensuring that our digital cultural heritage legacy will exist 100 years from now and longer.

Brid Dooley is a media archive professional with over 25 years of experience in the audiovisual sector in Ireland and the UK . She joined RTÉ  in 2000 as Archive Project Leader for the Television Archives and became Head of Archives and Library Services for Television in 2003. She was appointed as head of the newly integrated RTÉ Archives Department, part of  RTÉ Digital,  in 2012. She is also a  serving member of the Executive Council of the International  Federation of Television Archives FIAT/IFTA and former  General Secretary from 2008-2012 .

Why did Jeff Bezos buy the Washington Post?

Last week many mourned an end of an era, as the Graham family sold the Washington Post to Jeff Bezos, owner of Amazon.com for somewhere in the region of $250 million. For the mourners it signalled the end of a golden age in American journalism, during which the paper’s stories managed to bring down a sitting president (the Washington Post’s Woodward and Bernstein’s coverage of the Watergate scandal is forever immortalised in the movie ‘All the Presidents Men).

The New York Times is now the last high profile US newspaper still being run by a family trust as the Post joins the Wall Street Journal, the Boston Globe and the LA Times in being bought out by wealthy benefactors. But is this necessarily bad news for the industry? The Grahams only sold the Post because they didn’t believe they could turn the fortunes of the paper around. The current business model is completely unsustainable. The post has made increasing losses over the past few years (44 per cent drop in revenue over the past six years) which led Donald Graham to admit that he couldn’t bring the paper any further.

Graham claimed last week that he only sold the Post to Bezos because he trusts Bezos “to do the right thing: Invest for the long term in real journalism.” I have no reason to doubt Graham’s motives for selling but there’s no denying Bezos has paid above market value for the Washington Post. The €250 price tag is 17 times adjusted profit, or about four times what major metro dailies usually fetch – John W. Henry, the owner of the Boston Red Sox and Liverpool Football Club, just paid $70 for the Boston Globe.

$250 million may not be very much money to Jeff Bezos, but he didn’t get rich by giving money away, so why did he pay so much for a failing business? Since the details of the sale were announced last week many theories have abounded from it being a rich man’s toy, to the new mouthpiece for Bezos’ presidential campaign or a channel to promote Amazon’s interests, but in truth, nobody really knows.

We will need to invent, which means we will need to experiment

Bezos says he will no exert any editorial control over his new purchase and he has proved in the past that he is a long term investor. In a brief letter to employees, Bezos said: “The “values of The Post do not need changing. The paper’s duty will remain to its readers and not to the private interests of its owners.” Perhaps his most telling comment came in a piece he wrote in the Washington Post. “There is no map, and charting a path ahead will not be easy,” he wrote. “We will need to invent, which means we will need to experiment.”

This experimentation could be the key. Under Bezos The Post can afford to try new things and if they fail then the owner’s pockets are deep enough to support this. Bezos’ is unlikely to be concerned with short term losses and surely if anyone is going to save the newspaper industry then the man who has redefined retail over the past decade or so would be a good candidate for the job. Over the past decade he has redefined how books are distributed so who’s to say he can’t do the same for news. Bezos has expertise in digital content, paywalls, delivery, mobile, local, and advertising — all the problems and conundrums that face The Washington Post, as well as every other legacy print newspaper. He’ll innovate and hopefully help the paper find its way to solvency.

Nobody knows Bezos’ plans for the venerable newspaper but his track record would suggest that he has a plan and he’s not just buying a toy to play with.

Image courtesy of Esther Vargas

 

Research Assistant vacancy in Social Semantic Journalism on a project in collaboration with RTÉ

 

The Digital Humanities and Journalism group at the INSIGHT National Centre for Data Analytics @NUI Galway is seeking an outstanding candidate for a Research Assistant position in the Social Semantic Journalism realm. The successful candidates will work on a project in collaboration with the Irish national broadcaster, RTÉ, on ‘social news detection and contextualisation’. The project is jointly funded by RTÉ and the Science Foundation Ireland.

The successful candidate will be focusing on topics such as the Social Web, the Semantic Web, Social Networks Analysis and Citizen Journalism. She/he would have a passion for Social/Citizen Journalism and the News and Media industry. She/he will be expected to participate in research activities and play a strong development role in the project.

Essential criteria for the applicant:

  • Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Informatics, or relevant subjects.
  • Strong Java or Python programming skills.
  • Minimum two years software development experience.
  • Knowledge of software design, development and maintenance processes.
  • Have experience in some, if not all, of the following:
    • Semantic Web and Linked Data technologies
    • Applied knowledge of the Social Web and online communities
    • Social Network Analysis
    • Stream processing
    • XML, OWL, RDF, SPARQL
  • Proven ability to work independently or in a team environment.
  • The applicant should be creative and enthusiastic, with excellent communication skills.

Desirable – It is desirable that applicant will possess:

  • A Masters or MPhil degree in Computer Science, Informatics or relevant subjects.
  • A Masters degree in Journalism, Cummunication, Political Studies or relevant subjects.
  • Familiarity with the news and media industry, knowledge of the news production process and preferably having worked in/with such organisation.
  • Strong background in front- and backend Web application development.
  • Experience of developing applications for news and media industry.
  • Two year experience in a research group.
  • Experience in / familiairity with the following is highly desirable:
    • Digital/Online/Citizen Journalism
    • Natural Language Processing
    • Text Mining
    • Data Visualisation
    • Data Verification
  • A good record of theoretical and applied research on the Social Web and the Semantic Web, warranted by a scientific publication record in workshops, conferences, journals and book chapters and/or awards in national or international challenges.
  • Industrial experience and the ability to collaborate with industry partners.
  • Experience in Web-related standardisation activities (including W3C) as both author and editor.
  • Excellent interpersonal communication and scientific writing skills.

Salary range: €25,425 – €32,173 per annum.

This post is available from 1st October 2013 and is fixed term for 24 months.

For informal discussion about this post please contact: Bahareh.Heravi@deri.org.

To Apply: Applicants should include a cover letter, curriculum vitae, a list of publications, a research statement and the names and addresses of at least three referees, via email (text, postscript or PDF only) to: hr.ie@deri.org

Closing date for receipt of applications is 8 September 2013.

Skeptics, conformists & activists: how and why journalists use social media

When it comes to using social media, there are three main categories of journalist suggests a recent paper published in the journal Digital Journalism. These categories provide insight into why journalists use tools like Facebook and Twitter and why social media may be creating a new professional digital divide between users and non-users.

There are the media professionals who wholeheartedly and enthusiastically embrace social media; those with a practical view that social media are necessary tools for the job of a modern journalist; and the “skeptical shunners” who remain unconvinced.

Titled The Social Journalist: Embracing the social media life or creating a new digital divide?, this paper was authored by researchers Ulrika Hedman and Monika Djerf-Pierre at the Department of Journalism, Media and Communication, University of Gothenburg, Sweden. It arises from a survey of 2,500 Swedish journalists conducted in 2011/2012.

Continuously Reinventing Itself

The paper begins by looking at the existing literature on the role of the professional journalist in the context of social media. Platforms like Facebook, YouTube and Twitter can be seen as hostile ground for the media professional, where “traditional journalistic values are questioned” in the face of an emerging grassroots network of citizen journalists; anyone can break news using their mobile phone.

On the other hand social media can augment the journalist and the newsroom; it can become a new space within which to operate and even help redefine what it means to be a journalist. Ultimately, the existing literature points to the notion that “journalism continuously reinvents itself” (Deuze 2005, p.447) while normalising social media activity to conform to existing professional practices i.e. act like a tech geek but think like a journalist!

In fact, a 2005 content analysis of US political journalistic bloggers found that in terms of how these writers view themselves, it’s business as usual but using a different medium. This is interesting because it points to an ideological distinction between a journalist that blogs on a topic and a blogger that writes on the same topic.

transparency is described as a new norm, if not *the* new norm

So what has really changed? The authors say “transparency is described as a new norm (if not the new norm) in journalism” now that interaction with the public, time stamps and other factors that expose previously hidden journalistic practices have become the norm.

Blurring of lines is also a key theme here. The line between producers and consumers of content is blurring with the advent of UGC (User Generated Content) as is the line between public and private personas as journalists often mix social media updates on news items with personal comments, and finally, the line between work and leisure hours has been removed with internet-connected mobile devices and the demands of the 24/7 breaking news cycle.

Survey Findings

This was a postal survey carried out into conjunction with the SUJ (Swedish Union of Journalists). Out of a total of 17,500 members a random sample of 2,500 was selected. The survey contained questions across a range of topics including: age, gender, education, income, professional values, work experiences, political opinions and social media use. The net response rate was 60%.

 Highlights:

  • Private social media use (at least a few times monthly) – 90%
  • Professional social media (at least a few times monthly) – 85%
  • Private social media (daily basis) – 65%
  • Professional social media use (daily basis) – 44%
  • Professional social media use “all of the time” – 10%
  • Compose Twitter posts (at least a few times monthly) – 26%
  • Read Twitter posts (at least a few times monthly) – 55 %
  • Use of networking site e.g. Facebook (at least a few times monthly) – 83%
  • Read blog(s) (at least a few times monthly) – 89%
  • Write blogpost(s) (at least a few times monthly) – 20%

Significantly, the survey found that only 1% of all journalists were blogging “all the time” and only 2% said they were tweeting “all the time”. But who are these social media savvy journalists? Is there a typical profile? Predictably it was found that the youngest group of journalists (29 and younger) were most active; 60% of this generation are daily users of social media whereas roughly a third of those aged 60 years and above claimed to be active on social media.

Gender and location is also a factor with regular social media users tipping slightly in favour of women and urban dwellers, although the latter wasn’t found to be statistically significant. In terms of the category of journalists it was found that tabloid press journalists are more likely to be 24/7 social media users than other print journalists. This said, when all of these factors are fed into a single model, the authors found that “only type of work and age have significant effects on the level of social media usage”.

FIGURE 1: The usefulness of social media for different purposes: the proportion of all journalists who regard a specific form of usage as at least somewhat important (%). The full sample of journalists is included: N = 1412 (including those who do not use social media). Adapted from “The Social Journalist: Embracing the social media life or creating a new digital divide? ,” by U. Hedman and M. Djerf-Pierre, 2013, Digital Journalism, Published online: 07 Mar 2013.

Ambient Journalism

At the beginning of this post we mentioned that the paper explores not just the ‘who’ but the ‘why’ of journalistic social media use. Figure 1 breaks this down into distinct categories, the most prevelant being to follow ongoing discussions and find news ideas or angles. The least significant reasons for adopting social media is a requirement from management or editors, or to get feedback from colleagues. The chief reason, it seems, falls within the primary category of “information gathering”, with the secondary reason being purely for the purposes of networking or interaction. The authors claim this fits with the picture of the “ambient journalism, as people contribute to the creation, dissemination and discussion of news via social media services such as Twitter” (Hermida 2012, p.5).

Interestingly, crowdsourcing, or getting help from others in the creation of a news story, was amongst the bottom three motivations for using social media. It could be interpreted that while the “social journalist” likes to use social media for information gathering, it still remains a singular effort, and thus normalises social media use to retain the ideological distinction between journalist and blogger. It would be interesting to see if the ‘whys’ of social media use differ greatly between a web native journalist and one the views herself as traditional or formally trained journalist operating on a digital platform.

Social Media Attitudes

Following on from this, the survey tested 14 different statements related to professional journalistic ideals and norms. These statements gauged levels of agreement from those surveyed on the journalist’s societal role as being variously neutral, critics of those in power, a voice for the people, an entertainer, an educator and so on. It was found that irrespective of the frequency of their professional social media use, the survey participants held the same professional outlook.

Journalists who never use social media are far more likely to feel that User Generated Content threatens the integrity of journalism

Using social media can be a frustrating experience for some journalists. 10-15% actively avoid using social media. (Photo courtesy of Fumi Yamazaki)

Using social media can be a frustrating experience for some journalists. 10-15% actively avoid using social media. (Photo courtesy of Fumi Yamazaki)

Where the difference can really be seen is in the journalists’ attitude towards social media. Frequent users of blogs, Twitter, Facebook etc. are far more likely to believe that “the traditional role of journalists is and must be transformed by social media”. This belief is independent of the age of the journalist, as is the acceptance of the blurring of boundaries between professional and private life in social media. This part of the survey is where one can begin to see the emerging ideological divide between the social media savvy and those who don’t use it at all. Specifically, those participants who never use social media were far more likely to strongly agree with the statement “User-generated content threatens the integrity of journalism” than those who sometimes or frequently used it. The vast majority (80%) of non-users also agreed or partly agreed with that statement that “journalists exaggerate the importance of (pay too much attention to) social media” while only 39% of 24/7 users felt this way.

Three’s Company

With this considered, the authors have created three new distinct categories to describe the various use of and attitude towards social media amongst these Swedish journalists. The minority of those surveyed (10-15%) are skeptical shunners who actively avoid using social media. It was found that this stance was more prevalent amongst older journalists working in print media. The pragmatic conformists use social media regularly but for specific purposes such as information gathering. They are more likely to be lurkers, reading and consuming streams of online information without contributing much themselves. From a professional standpoint they understand that social media has its uses but are conscious of the hype surrounding these new technologies and platforms. Finally, the enthusiastic activists are submerged in social media; they are more likely to be digital natives who spend much of their private and professional time updating Facebook, tweeting people, uploading to Instagram and so on. They “have fully embraced and/or submitted to the inevitability of a social media life”.

The conclusion? The journalist’s relationship with the audience has changed but her view of her profession and its role in society has not.

References

Deuze, Mark. 2008. “The Professional Identity of Journalists in the Context of Convergence Culture.”Observatorio (OBS) Journal 2 (4): 103–117.

Hermida, Alfred, Fletcher, Fred, Korell, Darryl and Logan, Donna. 2012. Share, Like, Recommend. Journalism Studies, 13(5–6): 815–824.

 

Why do we need an Irish survey on journalists’ use of social media?

National surveys on the use of social media in conducting professional journalism have been conducted for a number of countries, and the findings are insightful. For example, Cision & Canterbury Christ Church University’s Social Journalism Study 2011, that looked at ‘perceptions and use of social media among journalists in the UK’, found that 97% of journalists use social media for work during a typical week, but only 62% agree or strongly agree that social media has improved the productivity of their work. This being said, most journalists agreed that social media makes them more engaged with their audience, and that Twitter was the most popular social media platform. Age and media sector both had significant impacts on social media use and attitudes, demonstrating that a variety of factors influence the way social media is used.

A global study published in 2012 by the same group compared responses from eight different countries across the globe: Australia, Canada, Finland, France, Germany, Sweden, UK, and USA. This study found that Canadian journalists use social media the most, and were the most positive about the impact of social media on a journalist’s work, even if they weren’t the most positive about the impact of social media on journalism as a profession (this fell to Sweden). Other studies have focused the use of social media for sourcing stories, or on how social media has changed the production, distribution, and consumption of news. The results of these studies provide valuable insight into attitudes and practices surrounding social media use, as well as comparisons between national practices.

But what can we glean from this about actual Irish journalistic practices, on the ground, here and now? The differences between attitudes in the global surveys above demonstrate that we can’t make assumptions about the use of social media in Ireland without collecting raw data from professional journalists working in the country, nor can we assume that all journalists in one region follow similar practices. It’s widely known that press freedoms and constraints differ from country to country, but so does culture of journalism. Ireland, as a relatively small European state, is a place where people cross paths more frequently than in places with much larger populations or more diffuse geography. Do these factors matter, or does the journalist’s medium, age, and beat produce the most significant differences? What is the relationship between source, trust, verification, and medium? While a survey about social media practices may not touch on all the ways that Ireland’s cultural uniqueness shapes journalism, it will provide insight into the ways in which social media have affected sourcing, research, contact, and dissemination of news stories, and we expect that the granularity of our questions will provide rich data for analysis.

We’re very excited to see the results, and hope that our survey will add to the growing international body of research around the ways that emerging technologies and new ways of communicating shape contemporary journalism.

If you are journalist working in Ireland, please take ten minutes to fill out the survey.

Hujo launches national survey on Irish journalists’ use of social media

Social media has become a vital tool to the modern journalist. From Syria, to Turkey and Brazil international news stories are being broken by ordinary citizens on social media everyday and it’s not just serious news. The latest football transfer rumours or celebrity scandal is now more likely to break on twitter than by conventional means. The emergence of this new technology is fundamentally changing the way journalists work and source stories.

The Digital Humanities and Journalism group (HuJo) at Insight@ NUI Galway (formerly DERI) has launched Ireland’s first national survey on journalists’ use of social media. The survey is being sent out to journalists across the country working in print, TV, Radio and online for both local and national organisations. Similar studies have been carried out in the UK, Europe and worldwide but this is the first comprehensive survey on Irish journalists’ use of social media. The survey will provide insight into how the day-to-day job of the journalist is changing in this country.

The ubiquity of social media is quickly changing the global media landscape, leading us to query Ireland’s contemporary journalistic practices. This ground-breaking survey will help to not only delineate these practices, but the data collected has the potential to ultimately result in more informed and accurate reporting. The survey, which should take about 12 minutes to complete, questions journalists on the frequency of their use of social media, their reasons for using social media and how it impacts upon their work.

HuJo is calling for all professional journalists in Ireland to participate in the survey here . All answers will be anonymised, but if you wish to provide your email address at the end of the survey, the results will be shared with you.

 

 

Misreporting the Boston bombings

“Something is going on. I want to be precise. We don’t know what it is.” This is a quote from CNN anchor, Wolf Blitzer as he attempted to report on the manhunt for Boston Marathon bomber Dhokar Tsarnaev and was typical of the general chaos that surrounded the media coverage of both the bombings and the search for Tsarnaev on Friday 19th April.

Image posted to Twitter account @Boston_to_a_T by Dan Lampariello just 1 minute after the explosions on Boylston Street in Boston

Image posted to Twitter account @Boston_to_a_T by Dan Lampariello just 1 minute after the explosions on Boylston Street in Boston

On the afternoon of Monday April 15th, hours after the elite runners had finished the race hundreds of amateur runners were still being cheered on by large crowds as they approached the finish line of the 2013 Boston Marathon when two bombs exploded killing three people and seriously wounding many others. Just one minute later at 14:50 local time eyewitness Dan Lampariello posted a photo of the explosion taken from Boylston Street to his twitter account @Boston_to_a_T. The expected wall to wall media coverage ensued but the amount misreporting, false statements and false identifications across print, TV, Radio on-line and social media over the next four days culminating in the capture Dhokar Tsarnaev was surely unprecedented.

Errors across all forms of mainstream and new media

Social media sites like Reddit and 4Chan were blamed for much of the false information that abounded but there were also high profile mistakes from respected traditional media outlets like CNN, the Associated Press (AP) and the BBC. On Wednesday April 17th, CNN presenter John King announced live on air that a suspect had been arrested, citing credible local and federal sources. Fox news picked up the breaking news as did the Boston Globe, the BBC and the AP confirmed that a suspect was “in custody”, but the reports were completely false and forced the FBI to make a statement that no arrest had been made.

Perhaps the most high profile error of all came from tabloid newspaper the New York Post which not only erroneously declared 12 people dead following the explosions but also printed pictures of two innocent men carrying backpacks in the vicinity of the bombing under the headline ‘Bag Men’ implying that they could be the culprits.

‘Me first’ journalism

“So many media failures were driven by the ‘scoop’ mentality, a dangerous relic of the past”, said Mark Little, founder of social media news agency Storyful. “The most dangerous falsehoods about the Boston tragedy gained traction because they had the imprimatur of mainstream news organisations battling for a competitive edge.” Little describes the problem as ‘Me First’ journalism powered by vanity and self-importance whether it’s a TV reporter trying to scoop a story or an anonymous Twitter user rushing to name a suspect.

The ‘Society of Professional Journalists’ warned its members with a tweet saying: “As you report, remember: No one will remember who was “first” this week; we’ll remember who was wrong. (See CNN, AP, NY Post, et al.)”, but it seems this request mostly fell on deaf ears. It’s no longer as important to be the first with the facts, if only for the simple fact that it’s now virtually impossible given the number of eye-witness citizen reporters, but journalists are still struggling to shake of this mentality.

Reddit witch hunt

Still, social media was not blameless in the spread of misinformation. Reddit which operates a system in which readers’ votes push items up a ranking list attracted ‘citizen detectives’ aiming to find the bombers before the police could. A subreddit (essentially a posting board within reddit for users to post thoughts on a particular topic) was set up called ‘findbostonbombers’ which has since been removed from the site. Much of this involved crudely computer-drawn circles highlighting people in the marathon crowd who happened to be carrying a rucksack or, to a Reddit user’s eye, looked suspicious in some other way. It seemed that being non-white was often a cause for suspicion. One bag-toting presumed suspect, named “Blue Robe Guy” by users, was accused of such actions as “trying to look nonchalant”. Similar investigations were happening on 4chan, a pointedly anarchic site which began as a discussion point for Japanese animation.

It was innocent ‘suspects’ identified on Reddit whose pictures ended up on the front page of the New York Post. Atlantic’s Alexis Madrigal was particularly outraged calling it “plain, old vigilantism with no place in our society.” Reddit also incorrectly named Sunil Triphathi an Indian-American student of Brown University who had been missing since March as the marathon bomber. The site’s users were congratulating themselves on Thursday evening April 18th for having beaten the police to the punch and by the time this information was proved to be incorrect Tripathi’s name had already been circulated in the press in India and Britain.

Such was the flow of misinformation that it prompted an unprecedented apology from Reddit general manager, Erik Martin. “We have apologized privately to the family of missing college student Sunil Triphathi, as have various users and moderators,” Martin wrote. “We want to take this opportunity to apologize publicly for the pain they have had to endure.” This was unusual as social media sites have in the past generally claimed that they are simply a medium and cannot be responsible for the postings of its users.

This graphic courtesy of Hilary Sargent from Chartgirl.com gives a handy synopsis of the errors made by various US media

This graphic courtesy of Hilary Sargent from Chartgirl.com gives a handy synopsis of the errors made by various US media

 

Twitter was the source that many looked to for news during the hectic manhunt for Dhokar Tsarnaev that effectively shut down the city of Boston on Friday April 19th. Following the overnight shoot-out between police and the Tsarnaev’s during which resulted in the death of elder brother Tamerlaen, public transport in the Boston area was suspended, businesses were closed and people were urged to stay in their homes. This left little for Bostonians to do but tune into the rolling television news coverage and watch their twitter feeds.

The perils of Twitter

Undoubtedly Twitter is one of the best tools for breaking-news delivery since the telegraph, but it is also a great tool for distributing lies, speculation, innuendo, hoaxes and every other form of inaccurate information. One of the problems with Twitter as a news-delivery vehicle, is that no one can agree on the proper behaviour during such events — or at least not enough people to make it worthwhile. When (if ever) is it too soon to speculate about the source of the attack or details like the number of wounded? Which sources are reliable and which aren’t when it comes to retweeting? Does everything have to be verified? Is it okay to retweet graphic videos and photos?

Deputy social media editor at Reuters, Matthew Keys was fired for his tweeting of inaccuracies from his personal account, whilst on suspension from the news agency. Although the reporter claims his dismissal was related to other events it still highlights the dangers of tweeting false rumours for journalists.

Verification has always been a key role of journalists. But when you publish a paper once a day or broadcast news twice a day, verification is a lot more straightforward. Rumours did not have the life that they have today. Even NPR’s Andy Carvin, well known for documenting breaking stories via Twitter, admitted that it wasn’t the media’s finest week. “We messed up, we didn’t always get the story right, we didn’t serve the public as well as we could have,” he said.

Carvin said the difference between Boston and other stories breaking on social media was the pure scale of information and sophisticated techniques from non-journalists such as live-tweeting of police scanner information but doesn’t think that this need necessarily overwhelm the media and distort coverage. There are many apps now available that allow people to listen to police scanners using nothing more than their mobile phones. These attracted huge crowds of well-intentioned twitter and reddit users to post what they were hearing live but ultimately caused public panic and the further spread of misinformation rather than helping the investigation.

Mob mentality outdoes wisdom of the crowd

The police-scanner and bomber manhunt incidents are examples of where ‘the wisdom of the crowd’ does not apply. They were classic examples where the collective group mentality allows the individual to abdicate personal responsibility. This was coined as ‘The bystander effect’ by Latane and Darley in 1968 after an experiment on Columbia University students. Students were asked to fill out a form some in a room alone and other in groups and the rooms were slowly filled with smoke. The lone students almost immediately noticed and reported the problem but the groups did not as they waited for someone else to acknowledge the problem and often let the rooms fill completely with thick smoke.

High profile breaking news events like those in Boston highlight the need for a new type of journalist but also one that can follow some traditional roles. Technology can play a role and tools are being developed to help journalists find and verify information online but ultimately the basics of good journalism still apply, validate your sources and create an interesting story around the information. As well as first hand reporters of breaking events there is a need for an eye in the sky narrator of events, who can quickly sift through the multitudes of sources and present an accurate picture. “As long as reporters are doing their job and others serve as aggregators, then I think we’ll be okay. But we have to get used to a world with information filters or else we will be hit with [an] information overload,” said Carvin.

Sites like Reddit do have their uses in solving problems like finding a camera lost in the ocean or identifying the make and model of a car involved in a hit and run based on only a photo of a headlight left at the scene. The Reddit Bureau of Investigation subreddit is dedicated to just these kinds of tasks. When it comes to identifying criminals our police force and judicial system follow strict rules to protect us as citizens and we’re probably better to let them do their job.

There was of course some excellent reporting from professional journalists in the mainstream media and even some posters on Reddit, but as the warning tweet said we’ll only remember the mistake. A post user DarrenGrey on a subreddit discussing the misreporting saga summed things up pretty well. “Unreliable crowd-sourced material plus the media’s ravenous desire for fresh information has proved a disgusting mix. Let’s never ever do this again.” Unfortunately behaviour like that seen on Reddit is very difficult to stop on-line and will of course happen again but this did feel like a defining event that could start a sea change in how the media report on unfolding events and treat social media sources.

 

 

 

Can you retweet without endorsing?

Social media and Twitter in particular has become an integral part of the working journalist’s day. As news organisations around the globe struggle to keep pace with changing technology, social media guidelines are often out-dated or missing altogether and it’s difficult for media professionals to figure out exactly what information should be shared and when.

NPRs Andy Carvin at his desk from where he monitors the world's news via Twitter. Image courtesy of Mike Jansson, Current.org

NPRs Andy Carvin at his desk from where he monitors the world’s news via Twitter. Photo: Mike Jansson, http://about.me/mike.janssen

The NPR’s Andy Carvin’s pioneering new social media journalistic techniques have earned him huge renown and much praise but they have also landed him in hot water with some of his professional colleages. Carvin is the new media strategist for Washington-based media organisation NPR which primarily produces public radio but he is better known as a twitter behemoth. His prolific tweeting during the Arab Spring made him a key source of breaking news to many, yet all the time he was thousands of miles away from the action in Washington. Rather than tweeting news first hand Carvin became a one man hub for twitter users around the region to share their stories through. It was largely his focus on personal stories, on individual pain and terror, that made his obsessive tweeting compelling, and that form the basis of his just-published book, Distant Witness: Social Media, the Arab Spring and a Journalism Revolution.

Carvin doesn’t merely report or ‘tweet’ the news for his followers (now at more than 90,000)  to consume but rather wants them to become involved in sourcing shaping and verifying the news. Traditionally journalists have been the gatekeepers only publishing information once it has been fact checked and verifying and then broadcasting or printing that ‘news’ for the audience to consume. Carvin admits that everything he ‘tweets’ isn’t necessarily fact-checked and verified. If he sees something on Twitter he will often ‘retweet’ to his followers in order to verify the information. Carvin argues that supplying this information to the crowd is the quickest way of getting to the truth and simply involves the public in the news making process. He says his followers know his techniques and therefore he is not misleading anyone, but this is where he has received criticism from fellow journalists.

overreached his twitter calling

The sharpest critique to date came from The Guardian’s Michael Wolff who claimed Carvin ‘overreached his twitter calling’ during his coverage of the Newtown school shooting in Massachusetts last year. Wolff wrote: “Carvin applied his you-are-there, or I-am-there-in-spirit, tweeting approach to the school shooting in Connecticut, not just noting each raw increment of the unfolding story, but adjudicating on, and frequently scolding, the rest of the media’s confused accounts.” Wolff criticised Carvin’s early tweeting of misinformation about a second shooter arrested at a purple van, rumours of the shooter’s brother being found dead and a second body found at the shooter’s mothers house saying, “while the guise is to retweet in order to verify, the effect is to propagate.” Wolff also dislikes the way Carvin gets involved in the story himself, tweeting his personal stories where the traditional journalist would keep a distance. “He keeps tweeting and keeps feeling (“unflinching”, according to his publicist), vastly more than the heartless cynics and professional snobs of nonsocial and nonparticipatory media (‘Putting away phone. Gonna go sit in my kids’ rooms for a while – just to reflect on today. You should do the same with yours. Stay safe.’)

Wolff’s article prompted a response from Carvin published here where he refuted many of Wolff’s claims and defended his techniques saying: “Because my Twitter followers know me fairly well, they understand that it takes me multiple tweets over a period of time to flush out the full context. While it’s entirely possible that some people took my tweets out of context, as Wolff does, Wolff doesn’t provide any examples of it. But of all the points he makes in the article, I find this one the most interesting, and it’s worth discussing further.” Jill McAllaster Collins a follower of Carvin’s confirmed his beliefs at least about some of his audience saying: “I never ever think of it as learning the truth at first tweet, but rather gathering of information, sifting, discarding, re-tweeting your requests for sources.” “I never ever think of it as learning the truth at first tweet, but rather gathering of information, sifting, discarding, re-tweeting your requests for sources.”

Carvin mentions that far from tweeting everything he saw that day he ‘sat on’ 75% of the material because it was contradictory only sharing information he thought the crowd could help with. He also defends involving personal stories saying it helps him interact with his followers.  “I’d like to think that whatever voice I have is because I’ve developed an incredible source network thanks to my followers, who have helped me find first-person stories in real time, all over the globe.”

Methods split the journalism community

The two and fro caused much debate in the journalism community with Carvin’s techniques proving divisive. London-based freelance journalist Kate Beavan refuses to accept Carvin’s defence. “Your tweets gave the story legs, added to the noise and the confusion. How is that helpful? That kind of verification process should go on behind the scenes in order to avoid precisely what you fuelled: misinformation,” she wrote. Reuter’s Felix Salmon has no problem with the retweeting of rumours, “one of the things I like about Twitter is that it behaves in many ways a lot more like a newsroom than a newspaper. Rumours happen there, and then they get shot down — no harm no foul. People are human, they believe rumours, make mistakes, jump to conclusions. Twitter is just a healthy reminder of that fact.” Dean Starkman of the Colombia Journalism Review doesn’t agree: “Twitter’s not a like newsroom because those have four walls, while Twitter’s amplification power is potentially very large.  Your “newsroom” has 25,000, sorry, 30,000, people in it.  It’s a lot closer to publishing than being in a closed news meeting.”

Many would argue that Salmon or Carvin or any ‘journalist’ should be more responsible about what they tweet because their status gives their tweets more weight than those of the average user. The question goes to the heart of the idea of news as a process rather than a finished product and probably determines whether you see Carvin as playing an important role in the new ecosystem of news, or being irresponsible and indulging in gossip.