1. The End of Fortress Journalism
By Peter Horrocks
Peter Horrocks was appointed Director of BBC World Service in
February 2009. He had been Head of the BBC's Multimedia
Newsroom since 2005, and previously the BBC's Head of Current
Affairs. Since joining the BBC in October 1981 as a news
trainee,
he has been the Editor of both Newsnight and Panorama, the
BBC's domestic flagship television current affairs programmes.
Peter won BAFTA awards in 1997 and 2005 for his editorship of
Newsnight and for the documentary series The Power of
Nightmares respectively.
Most journalists have grown up with a
fortress mindset. They have
lived and worked in proud institutions
with thick walls. Their daily
knightly task has been simple: to
battle journalists from other
fortresses. But the fortresses are
crumbling and courtly jousts with
fellow journalists are no longer
impressing the crowds. The end of
THE END OF FORTRESS JOURNALISM
7
fortress journalism is deeply
unsettling for us and requires a
profound change in the mindset and
culture of journalism.
Fortress journalism has been
wonderful. Powerful, longestablished
institutions provided the perfect base
for strong
journalism. The major news
organisations could nurture skills,
underwrite risk and afford expensive
journalism. The competition
with other news organisations inspired
great journalism and if the
journalist got into trouble – legally,
physically or with the authorities
– the news organisation would protect
and support. It has been
familiar and comfortable for the
journalist.
But that world is rapidly being
eroded. The themes are
familiar. Economic pressures – whether
in the public or private
sectors – are making the costs of the fortresses
unsustainable.
Each week brings news of redundancies
and closures. The legacy
costs of buildings, printing presses,
studios and all the other
structural supports of the fortress
are proving too costly for the
revenues that can now be generated.
Internet-based journalism may be the
most significant
contributor to this business collapse.
But the cultural impact on
what the audience wants from
journalism is as big a factor as the
economics. In the fortress world the
consumption of journalism
was through clearly defined products
and platforms – a TV or radio
programme, a magazine or a newspaper.
But in the blended world
of internet journalism all those
products are available within a
single platform and mental space. The
user can now click and flit
between each set of news. Or they can
use an aggregator to pull
together all the information they
require. The reader may never be
aware from which fortress (or brand)
the information has come.
THE FUTURE OF JOURNALISM
8
The consequence of this change in
users’ consumption has
only dimly been understood by the
majority of journalists. Most of
the major news organisations had the
assumption that their news
product provided the complete set of
news requirements for their
users. But in an internet world, users
see the total information set
available on the web as their 'news
universe'. I might like BBC for
video news, the Telegraph or Daily
Mail for sports results and the
New York Times for international news.
I can penetrate the barriers
of the fortresses with ease.
The ability of audiences to pull
together their preferred news
is bringing the walls of the
fortresses tumbling down. In effect, the
users see a single unified news
universe and use technology (e.g.
Google, Digg etc) to get that content
to come together. So if the
users require collaborative content,
what of the competitively
minded news organisation? Clearly
competition will still generate
originality, enterprise journalism and
can help to lower costs. But
as a business, each organisation will
need to choose very carefully
where it has a comparative advantage.
If agency news is available,
there will be no advantage in creating
it yourself. In each
specialised area of news,
organisations need to assess their
unique advantages and reduce effort
where they don’t have such
advantages.
Reducing effort in any journalistic
section is anathema to the
old fortress mindset. Even more
disturbingly, it might also mean
co-operating explicitly. If the BBC is
best in news video and the
Telegraph best in text sports reports,
why shouldn’t they syndicate
that content to each other and save
effort? Jeff Jarvis, Professor of
Interactive Journalism at the City
University of New York, has
THE END OF FORTRESS JOURNALISM
9
coined the neatest way of describing
this: “Cover what you do best.
Link to the rest.”
That linked approach requires a new
kind of journalism, the
opposite of fortress journalism. It is
well described as “networked
journalism”, a coinage popularised by
Charlie Beckett at the
LSE/Polis. And it requires
organisations to be much better
connected, both internally and
externally. That kind of networking
can be unnatural for the journalist or
executive brought up in the
fortress mentality. What changes might
be required?
It means moving from a culture which
is identified by the
news unit you are in towards a culture
based on audience
understanding. So as a journalist don’t
think of the world as being
identified by the programme you work
on or the network you
provide for. Don’t think of the world
solely through your paper or
magazine. If you are a subject-based
journalist, remember that the
reader is likely to be consuming your
journalism within a much
wider frame of reference. They are
probably not consuming news
through your specialist prism. You’ll
need to link with specialists in
other fields. As a technology
journalist, you might get more coming
to your story via a link from the
entertainment or consumer section
than those choosing to read about
technology.
News organisations can assist their
teams by providing much
richer data about how audiences are
consuming. And we are
helped in this by technological
changes. On-demand journalism
automatically generates much more
specific data about audience
usage of stories and story types. Most
online sites have real-time
systems that provide editors with
information on story popularity.
There is a danger that such
information systems could
THE FUTURE OF JOURNALISM
10
prompt editors to prioritise stories
simply according to the
numbers. A recent study by Andrew
Currah1 identified a move
towards a narrower agenda of sports
and celebrity stories in
newspapers as being partly caused by
an over-concentration on
these techniques. The BBC has
developed test Beta software that
allows the main BBC news front page to
be presented according to
the order of users’ click preferences –
i.e. the most popular stories
at the top. It creates a news product
that is pretty bizarre and one
that would not, in the BBC’s
judgement, be wanted by audiences.
Users still want clear professional
editorial judgment. But that
judgement can be much better informed
by a sophisticated
understanding of the data. That is
especially important in
considering user experience, design
and user journeys.
As well as improving internet-based
journalism, audience
insight is also the foundation of an
important cultural shift across
platforms. The BBC has in recent years
put significant effort into
improving the availability of its
audience research to staff. BBC
television and radio producers have a
much greater understanding
of their audiences through qualitative
data such as the daily
internet survey, the Pulse. That
provides overnight data on the
audience’s judgement of the quality of
programmes and news
items. In 2009 the BBC will be
developing further techniques that
will allow us, for the first time, to
analyse audience consumption
alongside demographics. So, if we want
to, we might be able to tell
which stories were most popular among
young audiences, or men,
1 http://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/about/news/item/article/whatshappening-
to-our-news.html
THE END OF FORTRESS JOURNALISM
11
or ethnic minorities. We know that
there are certain parts of the
audience that consume BBC News less
than others. Detailed
information will enable us to address
these audience gaps.
However we will always make sure that
BBC News’ editorial values
are our guiding principles and not
simply 'chasing audiences'.
Yet the biggest impact of greater use
of audience insight is
on overall organisational attitudes.
Within the BBC, the research
for the Creative Future project on
journalism and for its reassessment
of the BBC News brand proved
conclusively that, for
audiences in the UK and
internationally, the aspect of the BBC that
they most appreciate is 'BBC News'.
They value the BBC’s
individual news programmes, but it is
that overall concept that
matters most.
The integrity and dominance of the BBC
News brand was a
powerful driver in the rebranding of
BBC News in 2008. But it has
also acted as a powerful
organisational and cultural driver. BBC
News has been re-organised on
multimedia lines. Instead of
departmental teams gathering each
morning in platform-aligned
meetings, there is a single conference
where all of BBC News
comes together to discuss priority
stories. Tithe barriers and
secrecy within the organisation (our
mini-fortresses) have been
torn down. Programme plans and running
orders that were once
hidden are now open. In determining
whether a piece of
information or content should be held
back from another part of
BBC News or shared, we apply the test
of a notional member of
the audience looking at us. In almost
all cases that mythical BBC
licence payer would want good
journalism shared as widely as
possible.
THE FUTURE OF JOURNALISM
12
It has also prompted major
re-organisation. In the past, as
various BBC services and programmes
were launched, they were
often added to the existing
organisation without being properly
integrated. The structure of BBC News
could be imagined as a
series of archaeological sedimentary
layers, with the attitudes and
working practices living on from the
initial foundation of that unit.
Recent reforms have adopted a holistic
and integrated approach to
working practices and all the other
accretions of the many different
journalistic operating models
accumulated over the years.
Audience insight has therefore driven
cultural and
organisational change. It will
undoubtedly drive further cultural
change as all the resources of BBC
journalism, in the UK’s nations
and regions and across the BBC World
Service, are drawn
together and leveraged for the benefit
of all our audiences.
This further change is likely to have
the biggest effect in the
BBC’s online content creation and
distribution. When BBC Online
was launched, with great foresight
over ten years ago, it was
created as an adjunct to, rather than
an integral part of, the BBC’s
broadcasting production base. And BBC
Online was not itself
integrated. Instead the model that was
generally adopted was of
each division of the BBC launching
separate websites related to
their particular programme brands or
subject genres. So, for
instance, arts content could be
produced separately within News,
Television and Radio. Information
about climate change might sit
within a science website, a Radio 4
environmental programme site
or the BBC News website. A golden
opportunity to create a
website and an organisational
structure that aligned with audience
information needs was missed.
THE END OF FORTRESS JOURNALISM
13
In recent years attempts have been
made to create more
cross-linking, and technology is now
being employed to allow more
automatic cross-fertilization. But the
BBC website structure is still a
better approximation of the
organisational diagram than it is a
mental map of the BBC’s purposes and
its audience needs. The
only answer to this long-term is a
BBC-wide appreciation of overall
audience requirements and a ruthless
focus on what we do best
and what content we can provide, as a
coherent proposition, to all
our audiences.
What closer integration of content
also needs to take into
account is the proper balance between
an efficient, centralised
system and the needs of the BBC to
serve a variety of audience
needs. In a resource-constrained
organisation the temptation will
often be to centralise and
standardise. BBC journalists typically
describe this as a fear about
producing bland 'news nuggets' in a
news factory. BBC News has currently
negotiated this balance by
creating systems that ensure that
basic BBC news content (e.g.
press conferences, speeches, raw
material) is gathered and
processed as efficiently as possible.
The greater efficiency of those
systems leaves more resources
available for differentiation around
that core. Programme makers are able
to chase alternative angles,
explanations that illuminate the
central news and therefore offer
variety around it.
Soon some of these ideas about sharing
content might be
developed externally through
partnerships. The internal dilemmas
we have faced around journalistic
identity, efficiency and the
balance between efficiency and
plurality will move to the external
debate
to support the UK news industry. If
other sectors of the news
industry decline, the government has
said it would consider the
BBC offering widespread support –
possibly to commercial radio
news, network TV news and online
operations at local and national
level.
Some of this might not be through
formal partnerships but by
extending and formalising the
underpinning of the media sector
that the BBC has often supported. For
instance, the BBC could
share its audience research, its
production technologies, its knowhow
in multimedia journalism, its training
capabilities, like the BBC
College of Journalism, and its
technological expertise in areas
such as metadata. Metadata and the
effective 'tagging' of all
content will be the lifeblood of the
new sharing/linking journalism.
So it would be appropriate for the BBC
to develop that capability,
as it is an organisation that should
be the embodiment of sharing.
Beyond the sharing of facilities and
capabilities, the BBC
might also syndicate its content more
widely to other websites and
other news organisations. But if the
BBC just develops
partnerships through providing to
others it will not be seizing the
real two-way opportunity of
partnership. To be true to that the BBC
will need to consider taking content
from its partners. And, online, it
will need to be more generous in its
inclusion of content from
others and linking outwards. The BBC’s
strong position in ondemand
content provision in the UK needs to
be accompanied by
a corresponding generosity in
directing audiences to others who
produce great content.
The BBC Trust has asked the BBC to
link out more and there
THE FUTURE OF JOURNALISM
16
has been some improvement. But the
real barrier to achieving
progress in this is the fortress
mindset. BBC journalists must
realise that they have a wider purpose
than just to sustain their
own programmes and content. They have
a wider responsibility to
audiences to direct them to the best
content, wherever it comes
from. Unless we do this we will never
deliver the more open
approach to content that the new
audience requires and which will
be the foundation of a modernised
trust in the BBC.
Openness and partnership should help
to answer the charge
that the BBC is economically
over-dominant in the news industry. If
it can successfully support the rest
of the industry, it could be seen
as less of a threat. But it could also
answer the charge that it is
intellectually over-dominant. The BBC
has been accused of
adopting a “group-think” on some news
stories. By having a wider
range of voices internally, welcoming
in a wider range of
contributors and linking out to a
greater diversity of news views
and sources, the BBC can adopt the
permeability and plurality
which the modern audience requires.
But moving towards this networked
world will be hard for
journalists trained in the fortress
mindset. For editors and decision
makers it requires balancing the
interests of their programme or
website with a wider view of
audiences. It means a far higher level
of collaboration with colleagues than
has traditionally been the
case. It also means 'inheriting' more
shared content from
elsewhere in the organisation. Editors
can no longer commission
and publish content exactly to their
own specifications. For many,
this is profoundly unsettling. And it
may go further and entail more
external collaboration – for instance,
agreeing shared news
THE END OF FORTRESS JOURNALISM
17
coverage with partners who are also
competitors and partnering
non-media organisations such as NGOs.
This will be tough stuff.
But new news journalists will need the
flexibility to cope.
They will need to network with the
audience as much as they do
with their colleagues. The audience is
becoming a vast but still
untapped news source. The most
go-ahead journalists are using
social networking tools to help find
information and interviewees.
Responding on blogs and using those to
promote a dialogue with
informed members of the audience is
leading to improved
journalism. It can be time-consuming
but it can yield real benefits.
So journalists will need changed
culture, changed
organisation and an improved
understanding of the modern tools
of journalism – audience insights,
blogging, Twitter, multimedia
production. It sounds like being
pretty challenging. It’s certainly
more complex than the old fortress
world – of riding out to fight the
enemy to the death every day. But I
suspect that the public may
well appreciate a journalism that puts
serving their information
needs at its heart, rather than one
which is about organising the
world in the way that journalists prefer.
2. Introducing Multimedia to the
Newsroom
By Zoe Smith
Zoe Smith started in journalism at the age of 15 with a weekly
column in the Watford Observer. While at university in Glasgow
she wrote for The Herald, and she worked at The Financial
Times
during her studies at City University in London. A haphazard
path
from the Observer’s internship scheme to Rolling Stone Italy,
Press Gazette and the Daily Mail online led her to her current
position as an online broadcast journalist at ITV News. She
also
runs networking events for journalists under 30.
As someone who has ‘grown up digital’,
it’s hard to comprehend
how news organisations could even
question the need to make
exciting content available on multiple
platforms. The figures speak
for themselves. Just Google it.
Nearly a quarter of the world’s
population use the internet.
Every year 200 million join the online
revolution. According to
Google, the internet is the fastest
growing communications
INTRODUCING MULTIMEDIA TO THE NEWSROOM
19
medium in history. When the internet
went public in 1983 there
were 400 servers. Today there are well
over 600 million.
If you don’t get why you as a
journalist, editor, programme or
organisation need to invest
intelligently in web platforms, you risk
being ignored by an ever growing number
of young people for
whom television is an irrelevant
medium. In his book Grown up
Digital, inspired by a $4 million
private research study into the
habits of young people aged between 11
and 30, Don Tapscott
reveals that 74 per cent of the UK’s ‘Net
Generation’, if forced to
chose, would prefer to live without
television rather than the
internet.
I learnt first hand the importance of
recognising the power of
online platforms when Press Gazette,
the magazine for which I
was the broadcast reporter, was threatened
with closure. Its
illustrious history spanning more than
half a century at the heart of
Fleet Street was no protection against
the inevitable migration to
an increasingly online media
landscape. At that point in my early
20s, I realised that to sustain a
career in journalism it would be in
my interest to embrace the potential
of online.
ITV News launched its website as part
of newly branded
ITV.com in summer 2007. For the first
six months, in addition to
hosting a news feed of stories
reflecting the on-air bulletin, ITV
News online focused primarily on
gathering user-generated
content (UGC) commenting on the top
news story of the day to
complement the on-air programme in a
strand called Uploaded.
The extent to which working on the ITV
News website is a
multiplatform affair is apparent even
in its structure. Generic news
content is produced by ITN ON – the
digital division staffed by
THE FUTURE OF JOURNALISM
teams of enthusiastic young people who
spend shifts spanning 24-
hours gathering content and editing
video and text. Added value
and exclusive content is produced in
the ITV newsroom by two
web producers and correspondents,
reporters and producers alike.
The content is then hosted on a
channel within the ITV.com
network. We’re some way from a fully
converged operation.
It was only with the relaunch of News
at Ten in January
2008 that the two-person team from the
digital end of ITN moved
into the ITV Newsroom and started
producing and commissioning
multimedia content. Encouraging
journalists and editors to think
about more than one platform has not
been simple. Being in the
same room doesn’t automatically mean
that people working on
different media will be thinking on
the same page.
The modus
operandi of
newsgathering and news output
within broadcast operations has been
honed over many decades.
At ITV News, the process of providing
content for various outputs
has been operational for barely over a
year. A great leap forward
has been made by including online
producers in the daily
programming meetings to get an
understanding of what stories are
being covered and what angles
different bulletins are taking.
Efficiency is the key to multiplatform
journalism – define a workflow
that works for your organisation and
ruthlessly stick to it.
In the main, most editors and
journalists will admit that they
are technically challenged. This
culture will have to change as
multiplatform journalism becomes an
issue more of the present
and less of the future. Already we’ve
witnessed the growing
importance of ‘developer days’ where
news organisations open the
doors to the geeks to come up with
inspirational new ways to ‘give
INTRODUCING MULTIMEDIA TO THE NEWSROOM
your content wings’. The BBC already
does this very well through
Open Source projects and via
Backstage, its web-based
developers’ network. Collaboration is
the key to successful
journalism in an increasingly
connected and shared media space.
On a daily level, programmers and
developers or journalists
with programming skills should
increasingly be an integral part of
journalism teams. Charles Arthur,
editor of The Guardian's
Technology supplement, blogged: “If
you’re doing one of those
courses where they’re making you learn
shorthand and so on, take
some time to learn to code.
“All sorts of fields of journalism –
basically, anywhere you’re
going to have to keep on top of a lot
of data that will be updated,
regularly or not – will benefit from
being able to analyse and dig
into that data, and present it in
interesting ways.” His advice,
although aimed at journalism students,
is equally relevant for
practicing journalists looking to
extend their skills.
Be clear what your organisation hopes
to achieve through
multiplatform journalism. Respect the
technology but make it work
for you; just because you have shiny
new gadgets doesn’t mean
they’re going to be the best medium
for telling all stories. It
requires time to craft good
journalism, so maybe asking your
correspondent to send a vlog (video
blog) or even a blog from a
breaking news event may not be the
best use of their time. If you
urgently require content for your
website, why not use Twitter? It’s
less time consuming but still enables
users to track a moving story,
and is also the perfect vehicle for
viewers to share their knowledge
with journalists in real time.
Adding a multimedia team to the
structure of your newsroom
THE FUTURE OF JOURNALISM
may be more effective than trying to
get current staff to work
across all platforms. Understand the
key strengths of your
journalists and grow these. Why make
an on-screen talent write a
blog if they’re not a natural writer
and would be better at producing
a vlog? Make the most out of your
specialists. At ITN
correspondents like Lawrence McGinty,
who reports on health and
science, and Angus Walker, who covers
home affairs, often have a
wealth of material behind their
stories that may not make it into a
two-minute 45 seconds report but which
will undoubtedly be of
interest to viewers online.
However, it’s a mistake to focus only
on your star reporters;
involve cameramen, producers in
creating extra content for online
platforms. At ITV News we’ve made
great use of willing and able
off-screen staff to shoot video blogs,
create picture galleries from
places as far afield as the Arctic,
the Himalayas and the Gaza
Strip. Bearing in mind that the
internet is a global phenomenon, the
brand value that your on-screen talent
has in the UK could well be
lost in translation to a global web
audience. Don’t be afraid to
encourage and nurture new talent
online.
Gone are the days when viewers only
expected to hear from
reporters and presenters during news
bulletins. They want
information when it breaks and increasingly
demand an insight into
what goes on behind the camera. The
rise of opinionated
journalism has made blogging more
acceptable. But it’s important
to remember that a blog is ultimately
a platform, not just a hyperpersonal
or informal style of writing.
The increasing appeal of these
websites lies in the fact that
not only do they allow reporters to
break stories and pass on
INTRODUCING MULTIMEDIA TO THE NEWSROOM
information outside of traditional
broadcast or publication
deadlines, but they allow viewers to
interact with journalists and
each other through comments. This
enables the platform to be
more than a destination; rather it
develops into a network where
like-minded people will come to
interact.
The web is becoming an increasingly
social platform – this is
about more than buzzwords like ‘Web
2.0’. Around one in every six
minutes that people spend online is
spent in a social network of
some type. In January 2009, Facebook
founder Mark Zuckerberg
noted that, with 150 million people
around the world actively using
Facebook, if the social network were a
country it would be the
eighth-most populated in the world,
just ahead of Japan, Russia
and Nigeria.
Yet if you think you’ve got the
internet cracked, you may
wish to reconsider. There is no room
to rest on your laurels in this
constantly evolving medium. In a
recent interview with ITV News,
Sir Tim Berners Lee – the professor
credited with inventing the
World Wide Web – said: “Website
designers will get better and
better at following guidelines about
how to make things work on
mobile phones. More and more people
are going to be using
mobile phones and things you put in
your pocket, to access the
web. That’s a really important move.”
Back in 2003, ITN ON pioneered video
news on mobile in
Europe, launching with 3, and became
the first UK company to
create made-for-mobile news and
weather channels. This year, it
used its skilled developers to create
an application that provides
news to the ever increasing iPhone audience.
In the two weeks
since its launch, the app had 65,000
downloads from the iTunes
THE FUTURE OF JOURNALISM
App Store, making it the number-one
free news app globally. Who
ever said the younger generation isn’t
interested in news? The key
is making it available in a format that they want to use.
2. Introducing Multimedia to the Newsroom
By Zoe Smith
Zoe Smith started in journalism at the age of 15 with a weekly
column in the Watford Observer. While at university in Glasgow
she wrote for The Herald, and she worked at The Financial
Times
during her studies at City University in London. A haphazard
path
from the Observer’s internship scheme to Rolling Stone Italy,
Press Gazette and the Daily Mail online led her to her current
position as an online broadcast journalist at ITV News. She
also
runs networking events for journalists under 30.
As someone who has ‘grown up digital’,
it’s hard to comprehend
how news organisations could even
question the need to make
exciting content available on multiple
platforms. The figures speak
for themselves. Just Google it.
Nearly a quarter of the world’s
population use the internet.
Every year 200 million join the online
revolution. According to
Google, the internet is the fastest
growing communications
INTRODUCING MULTIMEDIA TO THE NEWSROOM
medium in history. When the internet
went public in 1983 there
were 400 servers. Today there are well
over 600 million.
If you don’t get why you as a
journalist, editor, programme or
organisation need to invest
intelligently in web platforms, you risk
being ignored by an ever growing number
of young people for
whom television is an irrelevant
medium. In his book Grown up
Digital, inspired by a $4 million
private research study into the
habits of young people aged between 11
and 30, Don Tapscott
reveals that 74 per cent of the UK’s ‘Net
Generation’, if forced to
chose, would prefer to live without
television rather than the
internet.
I learnt first hand the importance of
recognising the power of
online platforms when Press Gazette,
the magazine for which I
was the broadcast reporter, was threatened
with closure. Its
illustrious history spanning more than
half a century at the heart of
Fleet Street was no protection against
the inevitable migration to
an increasingly online media
landscape. At that point in my early
20s, I realised that to sustain a
career in journalism it would be in
my interest to embrace the potential
of online.
ITV News launched its website as part
of newly branded
ITV.com in summer 2007. For the first
six months, in addition to
hosting a news feed of stories
reflecting the on-air bulletin, ITV
News online focused primarily on
gathering user-generated
content (UGC) commenting on the top
news story of the day to
complement the on-air programme in a
strand called Uploaded.
The extent to which working on the ITV
News website is a
multiplatform affair is apparent even
in its structure. Generic news
content is produced by ITN ON – the
digital division staffed by
THE FUTURE OF JOURNALISM
teams of enthusiastic young people who
spend shifts spanning
hours gathering content and editing
video and text. Added value
and exclusive content is produced in
the ITV newsroom by two
web producers and correspondents,
reporters and producers alike.
The content is then hosted on a
channel within the ITV.com
network. We’re some way from a fully
converged operation.
It was only with the relaunch of News
at Ten in January
2008 that the two-person team from the
digital end of ITN moved
into the ITV Newsroom and started
producing and commissioning
multimedia content. Encouraging
journalists and editors to think
about more than one platform has not
been simple. Being in the
same room doesn’t automatically mean
that people working on
different media will be thinking on
the same page.
The modus
operandi of
newsgathering and news output
within broadcast operations has been
honed over many decades.
At ITV News, the process of providing
content for various outputs
has been operational for barely over a
year. A great leap forward
has been made by including online
producers in the daily
programming meetings to get an
understanding of what stories are
being covered and what angles
different bulletins are taking.
Efficiency is the key to multiplatform
journalism – define a workflow
that works for your organisation and
ruthlessly stick to it.
In the main, most editors and
journalists will admit that they
are technically challenged. This
culture will have to change as
multiplatform journalism becomes an
issue more of the present
and less of the future. Already we’ve
witnessed the growing
importance of ‘developer days’ where
news organisations open the
doors to the geeks to come up with
inspirational new ways to ‘give
INTRODUCING
MULTIMEDIA TO THE NEWSROOM
your content wings’. The BBC already
does this very well through
Open Source projects and via
Backstage, its web-based
developers’ network. Collaboration is
the key to successful
journalism in an increasingly
connected and shared media space.
On a daily level, programmers and
developers or journalists
with programming skills should
increasingly be an integral part of
journalism teams. Charles Arthur,
editor of The Guardian's
Technology supplement, blogged: “If
you’re doing one of those
courses where they’re making you learn
shorthand and so on, take
some time to learn to code.
“All sorts of fields of journalism –
basically, anywhere you’re
going to have to keep on top of a lot
of data that will be updated,
regularly or not – will benefit from
being able to analyse and dig
into that data, and present it in
interesting ways.” His advice,
although aimed at journalism students,
is equally relevant for
practicing journalists looking to
extend their skills.
Be clear what your organisation hopes
to achieve through
multiplatform journalism. Respect the
technology but make it work
for you; just because you have shiny
new gadgets doesn’t mean
they’re going to be the best medium
for telling all stories. It
requires time to craft good
journalism, so maybe asking your
correspondent to send a vlog (video
blog) or even a blog from a
breaking news event may not be the
best use of their time. If you
urgently require content for your
website, why not use Twitter? It’s
less time consuming but still enables
users to track a moving story,
and is also the perfect vehicle for
viewers to share their knowledge
with journalists in real time.
Adding a multimedia team to the
structure of your newsroom
THE FUTURE OF
JOURNALISM
may be more effective than trying to
get current staff to work
across all platforms. Understand the
key strengths of your
journalists and grow these. Why make
an on-screen talent write a
blog if they’re not a natural writer
and would be better at producing
a vlog? Make the most out of your
specialists. At ITN
correspondents like Lawrence McGinty,
who reports on health and
science, and Angus Walker, who covers
home affairs, often have a
wealth of material behind their
stories that may not make it into a
two-minute 45 seconds report but which
will undoubtedly be of
interest to viewers online.
However, it’s a mistake to focus only
on your star reporters;
involve cameramen, producers in
creating extra content for online
platforms. At ITV News we’ve made
great use of willing and able
off-screen staff to shoot video blogs,
create picture galleries from
places as far afield as the Arctic,
the Himalayas and the Gaza
Strip. Bearing in mind that the
internet is a global phenomenon, the
brand value that your on-screen talent
has in the UK could well be
lost in translation to a global web
audience. Don’t be afraid to
encourage and nurture new talent
online.
Gone are the days when viewers only
expected to hear from
reporters and presenters during news
bulletins. They want
information when it breaks and increasingly
demand an insight into
what goes on behind the camera. The
rise of opinionated
journalism has made blogging more
acceptable. But it’s important
to remember that a blog is ultimately
a platform, not just a hyperpersonal
or informal style of writing.
The increasing appeal of these
websites lies in the fact that
not only do they allow reporters to
break stories and pass on
INTRODUCING MULTIMEDIA TO THE NEWSROOM
information outside of traditional
broadcast or publication
deadlines, but they allow viewers to
interact with journalists and
each other through comments. This
enables the platform to be
more than a destination; rather it
develops into a network where
like-minded people will come to
interact.
The web is becoming an increasingly
social platform – this is
about more than buzzwords like ‘Web
2.0’. Around one in every six minutes that people spend online is spent in a
social network of
some type. In January 2009, Facebook
founder Mark Zuckerberg
noted that, with 150 million people
around the world actively using
Facebook, if the social network were a
country it would be the
eighth-most populated in the world,
just ahead of Japan, Russia
and Nigeria.
Yet if you think you’ve got the
internet cracked, you may
wish to reconsider. There is no room
to rest on your laurels in this
constantly evolving medium. In a
recent interview with ITV News,
Sir Tim Berners Lee – the professor
credited with inventing the
World Wide Web – said: “Website
designers will get better and
better at following guidelines about
how to make things work on
mobile phones. More and more people
are going to be using
mobile phones and things you put in
your pocket, to access the
web. That’s a really important move.”
Back in 2003, ITN ON pioneered video
news on mobile in
Europe, launching with 3, and became
the first UK company to
create made-for-mobile news and
weather channels. This year, it
used its skilled developers to create
an application that provides
news to the ever increasing iPhone audience.
In the two weeks
since its launch, the app had 65,000
downloads from the iTunes
THE FUTURE OF JOURNALISM
App Store, making it the number-one
free news app globally. Who
ever said the younger generation isn’t
interested in news? The key is making it available in a format that they want
to use.
4Dealing with User-Generated Content: is it Worth it?
By Paul Hambleton
As Executive Producer of Television Newsgathering at the
Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, Paul Hambleton has been
thinking about and working with user-generated content (UGC)
since 2007. He says he has learnt that it’s easy to agree that
UGC
is worthwhile. But exactly how media professionals should
engage
with it is a more difficult question.
We were aware of the wave of social
networking, and YouTube
hysteria; video uploads and citizen
journalism. Our job was to try to
figure out how the media could get
involved. Clearly there was a
need and a want from the public to
express themselves, and our
conventional media practices were not
giving them that
opportunity.
But where are we now, in 2009? Let’s
just say we are in the
game. Media organisations around the
world are developing citizen
DEALING WITH USER-GENERATED CONTENT:
IS IT WORTH IT?
33
journalism sites; they are building
three-dimensional web pages
with comments and ‘your video and
audio’ opportunities.
We solicit ideas and comments from our
radio and television
audiences. However, we still struggle
to understand the
intersection point between our
audience, our journalism, and their
feedback.
A group of aboriginal leaders from the
central Canadian
province of Manitoba urge that hate
charges be laid against CBC,
the Canadian public broadcaster. Why?
It’s because of some
poorly-moderated user-generated
comments which escaped into
the public domain on our website – in
the name of free expression.
It’s the kind of stuff that defines
that stupidity point in our
intersection with our media audience:
the point or moment where
freewheeling UGC seems to enable and
indeed to empower the
inanity of the narrow-minded and
racist people. Send us your
comments, we ask enthusiastically, or
be the first to post a
comment: these are all calls to arms
for our audiences to get
involved and take part in the pursuit
of noble journalism. In this
case, though, written comments
attached to a story about a house
fire on a native reserve attracted
some gems like “Native people do
not have the knowledge to look after a
house, build them a tepee
…” Twenty-five comments in all were
deemed to be hateful. The
CBC had to apologise. The comments
option for that story was
closed off. That, of course, didn’t
stop rival print media from
reporting our difficulties.1
1
THE FUTURE OF JOURNALISM
When we ask our audience what our core
values should be,
they rank those old classics up there
at the top: the 'real story',
presenting all sides, not taking
sides, dealing with issues that affect
my daily life, and so forth. A
comprehensive poll done by the CBC
in 2008 told us so. You have to go
right down to the end of the
priority line before you will find
'user-generated content' as
something that our audience is asking
us to facilitate. Yes, it could
be that awful phrase that implies some
kind of homework
assignment; but really what it tells
us is that we, the media, have
not yet figured out how to make that
connection beyond asking for
written contributions in the comments
sections of our online news
pieces. We have this adolescent
understanding of our relationship
with our audiences that rarely get
past a kind of high-school type of
environment: here’s what we want from
you; and here’s how you
can get involved.
So how do we empower the audience to
engage with us
without it looking like we just want
freebies from them? And how do
we engage more motivated contributors,
without alienating the
natural blog-style participants? How
do we raise the level of
engagement?
We need clarity of purpose: what
exactly would we like from
our audiences, and what are we
offering them in return? Let’s take
the 'contract', if you will, with
YouTube. It is simplicity itself: people
submit material, and other people
watch it. It has no value beyond
that which is attached to it by the
contributor and those who watch
it. It is judged by audiences in
'views', and the contributor knows
there is nothing else expected.
But people expect more from the media –
more than idle
DEALING WITH USER-GENERATED CONTENT:
IS IT WORTH IT?
comments from those with time on their
hands, or random videos
of bad weather or car accidents. Many
of those would-be
contributors want journalistic
standards applied to their work. They
would like to be part of the world we
work in. It’s the revenge of the
expert. There is so much unsolicited
advice and information out
there: we need to help make sense of
it for them. There are many
who want to take part in that
journalism with us. But how do we
protect the genuine efforts to engage
from the destructive influence
of angry bloggers or committed
interest groups?
May 2007 was a case in point: a
triumphant user-generated
proposal to hook up a then social
networking sensation called
Facebook with the Canadian
Broadcasting Corporation and a
national youth group called Student
Vote, which is mandated to
build youth awareness and engagement
in politics.
It was an outreach initiative called
the Great Canadian Wish
List. What is your wish for Canada in
the coming years? A
tremendous coming together of CBC, the
mainstream media outlet,
with a street-based students outreach
group and the coolest site of
social networking.
The CBC set up a Facebook site and
Student Vote pushed
the concept out to its constituents.
In a six-week challenge, we
asked our audience to articulate their
dream for Canada as we
approached the Canadian National
holiday of 1 July. We invited
people to join and support the wish
they liked best, or contribute
one of their own that others could
support. We built a ranking
system that showed our Facebook users
the top ten wishes. There
were forums and discussion threads for
comment.
It was entirely unmediated, or
perhaps, more accurately, it
THE FUTURE OF JOURNALISM
was self-mediated. We thought this was
brilliant, but within a week
two interest groups begin freeping2 the
site: a group for abortion,
going head to head with a group
against abortion. They went toe to
toe. Our idealistic and motivated
contributors lasted but a few
minutes in the sea of abortion rhetoric.
In the end, the top two
wishes for a better Canada were a
nation that supports abortion
and one that opposes it. Other more
genuine ideas wound up
buried in the vitriol of the abortion
debate. Why? Because without
moderation the wisdom of the masses
naturally descends to a
common denominator that is determined
by those with the most
time on their hands. Free expression
is not terribly compassionate.
Which brings us to that stupidity
point once again. When
does empowering people to take part
become just a blurge of bad
taste? As with any change, we need to
move slowly but surely.
In Canada, research is telling us that
people are increasingly
taking in their news on multiple
platforms. More than a quarter of
regular news consumers are drawing on
four platforms: TV, radio,
newspapers and online. A third of them
use at least three. Clearly
our audiences are looking for a new
experience with their media,
or at the very least they are open to
it. Left to their own devices,
they are creating their own new
experiences.
2 From the Ethics Scoreboard website:
'freeping' is “coordinating efforts to
overwhelm online polls with thousands of silly, obscene,
irrelevant or politically
pointed responses. The name comes from Free Republic, a
politically
conservative activist website that has a readership especially
responsive to
poll sabotage requests. Recently Grand Forks, North Dakota
City Council
candidate Scott McNamee asked his fellow Free Republic
visitors to stack an
online poll offered by a Grand Forks radio station's website.
When his
opponent questioned the ethics of the stunt, NcNamee
apologised while
denying that "freeping" was unethical. After all,
stacking polls is a web-world
tradition, he argued. http://www.ethicsscoreboard.com/list/freeping.html
DEALING WITH USER-GENERATED CONTENT:
IS IT WORTH IT?
Our research also tells us not to rush
headlong into this. We
in the media are quick to peddle the
newest ideas or technologies,
and we forget that our audiences can’t
or don’t want to move that
fast. While 96% of the CBC staff felt
that internet news
consumption would sky rocket, only 59%
of our audience felt that
way. Newspapers? Seventy-six per cent
inside our industry felt the
print medium is a dying breed, while our
only 26% of our audience
felt that way. Don’t argue with the
customer.
We must continue to offer our
audiences safe and creative
places to get involved in the news
business. Otherwise they will
just upload to YouTube. We need to
staff our newsrooms
accordingly and value that kind of
work. Commit to the wisdom of
crowds, to that great community of
gossip and talk.
A few days after the nasty native
comments disaster from
the Manitoba site, a commuter plane
falls out of the sky, carrying
50 people preparing to land at the
airport in Buffalo, New York.
Everyone on board is killed, plus one
person in the house it
crashed into. The chase for stories
begins. It’s the middle of the
night.
The overnight online writer is young
and not the most
experienced. However, he knows enough
to work all possibilities.
The US networks are giving him the
mainstream news feeds for a
basic write-through. Then he goes on
Twitter and finds someone
who actually witnessed the crash. That
person does an interview,
contributes his own observations to
the website coverage and
becomes just another quote in our
story. User-generated content
THE FUTURE OF JOURNALISM
to be proud of.3
How do we reassure that writer and
that witness that this is
what we are looking for: honest and
authentic accounts of real life?
We need to keep moving. Not too fast,
mind you, but just enough
to keep ourselves honest too.
So while we keep the comments coming
and we solicit your
views, and your photos and your
videos, that contract or
agreement with the audience is still
being negotiated – a living
document that spells out the details
of what they need from us and
what we need to do for them.
Video Games: a New Medium for Journalism
By Philip Trippenbach
Philip Trippenbach studied international development and
economics in Canada before starting work as a TV journalist
for
the CBC in New York. Since then, he has discovered that the
many hours he spent playing video games in his childhood were,
in
fact, preparing him for a brave new world of media
development.
He now works in Current Affairs Development for the BBC in
London, where he develops interactive journalism projects.
Philip’s
work centres on identifying and exploiting the new
opportunities for
journalism provided by social media and gaming.
Video games are the youngest medium in
our civilization. But in
the few decades of their existence,
they’ve come further faster
than any other medium in history.
Video games have become a
mainstream medium – in fact, they are
poised to become (and may
already be) the dominant medium of our
society. There are more
THE FUTURE OF JOURNALISM
40
gamers than football fans in the UK.1 Video
games outsell both
films and music.2 And despite the
current recession, their sales are
growing at double-digit rates3, while
other media sales figures are
steady, or declining.4
It takes time for the full potential
of new technologies to be
realized. When they were introduced in
the early 20th century, both
radio and television were dismissed as
frivolous entertainments,
unsuited to the serious business of
journalism. Though some
people still perceive video games as
little more than gung-ho
escapism, like any medium they are
capable of great sophistication
and intelligence.
The gaming audience is large and
diverse. Gamers are
ready for factual games that help them
understand the world
around them. And the interactive
nature of video games gives
journalists an opportunity to reach
audiences in powerful new
ways. It is an opportunity not to be
missed.
In the last five years, video games
have climbed out of their
early ‘geek’ niche. In the UK, one of
the most mature gaming
1 David Hayward: Under the Mask: Perspectives on the Gamer (http://pixellab.
squarespace.com/talks/2008/6/11/under-the-mask-games-culture.html)
2 ‘Games 'to outsell' music, video’
BBC News
(http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7709298.stm)
3 ‘Games will 'eclipse' other media’
BBC News
(http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7821612.stm)
4 Julia Kollewe, ‘Games buoy HMV while
CD sales sink’ The Guardian 2 July
2008
(http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2008/jul/02/hmvgroupbusiness.retail?gus
rc=rss&feed=technologyfull)
VIDEO GAMES: A NEW MEDIUM FOR
JOURNALISM
41
markets, the average age of a video
gamer in 2008 was 33.5 Over
a third (37%) of the UK’s population
describe themselves as active
gamers6 – and that’s across all age
categories, including the over-
60s. In the 16 to 29 age bracket, the
proportion of ‘active gamers’
rises to 48%.7 And essentially everyone in the under-16 bracket is
an active gamer.8
What’s more, the proportion of gamers
in every age bracket
is rising with each passing year.
Video gaming is not a youth
pastime that people abandon as they
grow older. Rather, it is
something that people pick up as kids
and then stick to – just like
television and reading.
Indications are that the gaming
audience is receptive to
factual and journalistic content.
There is evidence that gamers as a
group are more interested in politics –
and more politically active –
than non-gamers.9 Nor are they an
isolated sub-population:
several studies have shown that gamers
tend to be at least as
5 Interactive Software Federation of
Europe: Video Gamers in Europe 2008.
(http://www.isfeeu.
org/tzr/scripts/downloader2.php?filename=T003/F0013/8c/79/w7ol0v3qagh
qd4ale6vlpnent&mime=application/pdf&originalname=ISFE_Consumer_Rese
arch_2008_Report_final.pdf)
6 Interactive Software Federation of
Europe: Video Gamers in Europe 2008
7 Interactive Software Federation of
Europe: Video Gamers in Europe 2008
8 BBC Audience Planning: State of Play II (Internal publication, 2005)
9 Amanda Lenhart et al.: Teens, Video Games and Civics. (Pew Internet &
American Life Project, 2008)
(http://www.pewinternet.org/pdfs/PIP_Teens_Games_and_Civics_Report_FIN
AL.pdf)
THE FUTURE OF JOURNALISM
42
social and outgoing as non-gamers, if
not more so.10 What’s more,
the gender balance of gamers is close,
though men and women do
tend to play different games.11
Of course the primary reason most
people play video games
is because they’re fun. But many
players report that they also find
games more stimulating and more
thought-provoking than TV or
the cinema.12 BBC audience research
indicates that an
overwhelming majority of gamers of all
ages feel that games can
be used for education as well as
entertainment.13
But can games really convey
journalism? Well, games have
been used for learning for centuries –
modern flight simulators and
war games are just the latest
high-tech examples. There’s nothing
like being immersed in a situation to
find out what it’s all about and
gain an intuitive understanding of it.
And though games as
journalism are in their infancy, there
are already several good
examples of video games with a
journalistic bent.
Insurgency14 is a simulation of street
combat in Baghdad
and Basra. The game is a modification
of Half-Life 2, a
commercially successful first-person
shooter game. It was
originally created as a volunteer
project by veterans of the US
armed forces upon their return from
combat duty in Iraq.
Authenticity and realism were
paramount, according to Pablo
10 Amanda Lenhart et al.: Teens, Video Games and Civics
11 BBC Audience Planning: State of Play II report (2005)
12 Interactive Software Federation of
Europe: Video Gamers in Europe 2008
13 BBC Audience Planning: State of Play II report (2005)
14 http://www.insmod.net/
VIDEO GAMES: A NEW MEDIUM FOR
JOURNALISM
43
Dopico, one of the game’s makers:
“This is an adult game – it requires a lot of skill, and
knowledge of
military tactics. It attempts to depict modern military combat
accurately. We have many players from the military. They
contribute from their experiences, and they consult with us
informally on accuracy. People come straight back from Iraq,
play
the game, and they like the feeling of realism they get. Some
of the
team members are actually doing military training at the
moment
… America’s Army is the game most played by military people,
and
we are the second-most played – the military users provide an
invaluable feedback, like mailing us and saying ‘the AK47
sounds
good, but it should actually reload like this ...’”15
America’s Army16 is a free game used
as a recruiting tool for the
US armed forces. Arguably it is
advertising or propaganda rather
than journalism, but it shares
Insurgency’s commitment to
accuracy and realism. Both of these
games are, in a very real
sense, interactive records of what it’s
like to be a soldier on the
streets of Baghdad.
Where games really come into their own
is as a medium for
deep explanatory journalism –
especially journalism about
complicated systems with many
inter-relationships, interacting
forces and factions. These can be
important situations to
understand, such as factional politics
on the streets of Baghdad in
15 Personal communication with the
author
16 http://www.americasarmy.com/
THE FUTURE OF JOURNALISM
44
2005-06, or the complicated realities
of the global fight against
malaria. This sort of story is very
difficult to tell in text, and doubly
so in video, as these media require
journalists to arrange dynamic
relationships and issues into some
sort of fixed linear narrative.
Video games allow a different
approach. A video game
journalist can construct a model of
how things work and interact in
the situation being described, and
allow the audience to explore
the model at leisure.17 The accuracy
of this mode of journalism
consists of making sure that the model
reacts to a user’s actions in
the same way that it would in reality,
generating an authentic
experience and applicable
understanding.
The successful Sim City series of
games is a perfect
example of this sort of interactive
communication. Though not
intended as journalism, these games do
have a factual theme and
are an example of how a game can be
used to increase
understanding of a factual subject.
Sim City puts players in charge
of planning, growing and running a
city. Starting from an empty
patch of land, players must build the
energy grid, plan the transport
network, set taxes and provide
services. Though the cities that
players design are fictional, success
in this game requires an
internalized understanding of very
real concepts such as
infrastructure, tax policy, budgeting
and zoning practice. This is dry
stuff by any account, but the games in
this series have sold over
18 million copies, and Sim City
players can spend dozens or
hundreds of hours on the game.
17 Ian Bogost, a professor at the
Georgia Institute of Technology, calls this
kind of communication ‘Procedural
Rhetoric’ and discusses it further in
Persuasive Games: the Expressive Power of Video Games (MIT Press, 2007)
VIDEO GAMES: A NEW MEDIUM FOR
JOURNALISM
45
Not every topic will be appropriate
for treatment in a
journalistic video game. Games as
journalism are less useful for
telling the facts of what happened in a given past event. Video,
audio and text maintain their
respective advantages here, not least
because they can be produced very
quickly. However, none of
these media can match the power of
video games to explain the
way things work in an ongoing situation or issue. This fact,
coupled
with the relatively long production
time most games require, makes
video games eminently suited to
long-form (i.e. current affairs or
documentary) journalism instead of
reactive news journalism.18
Games can also transmit a particular
political or editorial
point. A simplified version of the Sim
City concept has been
published by The Economist in
association with the petroleum
company Chevron. Energyville19 gives
the player control of a
growing city and the task of ensuring
its energy supply in the face
of shocks, changing technology and
environmental pressures. The
game’s mechanics make this very
difficult to achieve without
resorting to petroleum – hardly
surprising, given the game’s
principal sponsor. But this game does
illustrate the power video
games can have to make a rhetorical
argument. Other games such
as September 12th,20 Oiligarchy21 and
The McDonalds Game22
18 Future production tools and methods
may shorten this, but at the moment
even the simplest in-browser Flash
game has a production time of a few days
– too slow for the 24-hour news cycle,
but entirely adequate for ‘magazine’-
type journalism on a weekly time-scale
or longer.
19 http://willyoujoinus.com/energyville/
20 http://www.newsgaming.com/games/index12.htm
21 http://www.molleindustria.org/en/oiligarchy
THE FUTURE OF JOURNALISM
46
also make arguments about current
events and are well worth a
play.
Video games are a very powerful medium
that can achieve
an unparalleled level of engagement
with the audience. The Sim
City example is telling: it is hard to
imagine many people spending
many hours considering knotty problems
of tax policy or residential
zoning law (in their leisure time!) in
any other medium. Games can
achieve this level of engagement
because they are fun. This may
seem self-evident, but the concept of
fun is a critical one for video
game journalism, because fun in video
games is a very specific
kind of enjoyment.
Fun in video games consists of
problem-solving. This is the
essence of the video game as a medium. Graphics,
story, and so
on, are secondary features also found
in most other media. But
video games are unique because they
confront the user with a
series of challenges set by the game
designers. At first the user is
a novice, with no idea how to solve
the problems being presented.
Progress is patchy and random. With repeated
attempts, however,
the player gains expertise and
confidence and is eventually
rewarded with the thrill of success.
Fun in video games is thus the
process of engagement with a problem
in the search for a solution.
In other words, fun in video games is
engagement in an iterative
process of skill acquisition through
repeated trial and error.23
The skills acquired vary from game to
game. Insurgency
22 http://www.mcvideogame.com/
23 Raph Koster explores the nature of
fun and fundamentals of video game
design in his book A Theory of Fun for
Game Design (Paraglyph Press, 2005)
VIDEO GAMES: A NEW MEDIUM FOR
JOURNALISM
47
trains accurate aim and applied combat
tactics. Sim City requires
urban planning skills. Other popular
games are challenges in
geometry (Tetris), hand-eye
coordination (Wii Sports), rhythm
(Guitar Hero) and football tactics
(FIFA Soccer).24 In all these
cases, players experience fictional
(though more or less realistic)
scenarios. But the skills and
situational understanding players gain
from facing these game challenges are
very real.25
This challenge structure is at the
heart of games’ value to
journalism. By setting challenges that
are relevant to the subject
matter, a journalist can communicate
understanding of almost any
complex topic. Imagine, for instance,
a current affairs project on an
ongoing story of topical interest:
illegal migration into the European
Union. Documentary series, magazine
articles and books have all
been written about this. But a game on
the same topic could cast
the player in the role of an African
migrant trying to get into the EU.
The player would have to deal with all
aspects of the journey –
tough conditions back home, dealing
with corrupt smugglers,
eluding border patrols, obtaining
black-market work or fake papers
once in the EU. This sort of
engagement, if properly designed,
would be intensely fun and convey a
rich understanding of the
24 The Wii’s hand-eye coordination
training is good enough that some
hospitals have started using it as a
training tool for surgeons. One hospital in
the US reports that surgeons who spend
an hour a night on the Wii score 48%
higher on tool-control performance
than those that do not. Paul McNamara,
‘Why a Wii could be good for your
health’ The Guardian, 7 August 2008
(http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/aug/07/research.games)
25 Imagine the following thought
experiment: take 20 people who have never
played football and divide them into
two groups of ten. One group is assigned
games consoles and plays four hours of
FIFA Soccer a day for six months.
The other group is a control and is
exposed to no football at all, in any
medium. Both groups then get one day
of on-the-pitch soccer training before
facing off in an exhibition match.
Which group will prevail?
THE FUTURE OF JOURNALISM
48
complex realities of a difficult
issue.
At 2pm on Sunday, 16 November 2008, a
15-year-old boy
from Halland province in Sweden
collapsed in an apparent
epileptic fit. He was rushed to
hospital, where doctors found him to
be dehydrated and exhausted from a
prolonged period of extreme
concentration. After a brief stay in
hospital on an electrolyte drip,
he was discharged. The cause of his
collapse: Wrath of the Lich
King, an expansion of the massively
multi-player online game
World of Warcraft. The boy had gotten
a copy of the game at
midnight on the Saturday and gathered
with his friends to play it.
The experience engrossed them so much
that they stayed up, not
tiring, forgetting to eat or drink,
for over 36 hours of continuous
play.26
This story was reported in several
papers as a lamentable
example of what video games can do to
people. The boy
undoubtedly made some poor choices.
But his story illustrates a
larger point.
In the video game, journalists have at
their disposal a
medium so powerful, so engrossing,
that people can forget to eat
or sleep while using it. Players of
World of Warcraft memorize
great tomes of arcane knowledge to
gain an advantage in the
game’s invented world. Why should this
kind of power be restricted
to fiction and fantasy?
26 David Brown: 'Boy collapses after
playing World of Warcraft for 24 hours
straight' The Times, 17 November 2008
(http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/article5173755.ec
e)
VIDEO GAMES: A NEW MEDIUM FOR
JOURNALISM
Video games are as powerful as
television, radio, or even
books. It is time we started using
them for more than
entertainment.
6. The Audience and News
By Matthew Eltringham
Matthew Eltringham is Assistant Editor, Interactivity, running
BBC
News' UGC (user-generated content) Hub which manages the
thousands of emails and pictures sent to the BBC every day. He
set up the Hub in the spring of 2005 as a pilot project, just
before
the 7 July terror attacks on London. It's now a 24/7 operation
providing content for every part of the BBC's news operation.
He
started in journalism as a reporter in the Exeter district
office of the
Western Morning News (where among other stories he reported on
Exeter City Football Club winning the old Fourth Division
title). He
joined the BBC in 1993 as a producer for 5 Live. Before
setting up
the UGC Hub, he was also an output editor on Sir David Frost's
Sunday morning show Breakfast with Frost and spent four years
in
the BBC's Westminster newsroom as news editor and planning
editor.
The UGC Hub is a team of 23
journalists based in the BBC’s
multimedia newsroom in London, working
across all three
THE AUDIENCE AND THE NEWS
51
platforms – television, radio and
online.
On an average day we get around 10,000
to 12,000 emails,
as well as hundreds of pictures and
video clips, sent to us from all
over the world.
These emails provide a fantastically
rich source of content
for all the BBC’s news output. Our job
is to mine it for the best bits
and make the most of them for the BBC’s
news output.
But that is only part of the job. The
material sent directly to
us represents the tiniest fraction of
the conversations and content
online at any one time. So we are
increasingly moving the focus of
our work into the much wider and
wilder world of the web itself.
There are four key aspects to the
influence that our direct
dialogue with our audience has on our
journalism.
First of all, we use the opinions they
share with us, mainly
through the News website’s
messageboard, Have Your Say1.
When the Archbishop of Canterbury gave
an interview to the
World at One debating the case for the
incorporation of some
aspects of Sharia law into UK law, we
received around 9,000
emails that afternoon that were
overwhelmingly critical.
The response included many churchgoers
and not a few
vicars. The story was already running,
but was, for example, only
scheduled fifth in The Six O’Clock
News running order. We fed into
programmes the volume and nature of
the response we were
receiving. By 6pm the story was
leading on every outlet.
The next day all the papers were
leading on the story and
Lambeth Palace tried to blame the red
tops for whipping up opinion
1 http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/talking_point/default.stm
THE FUTURE OF JOURNALISM
52
against the Archbishop. However, it
was clear from the response
from our audience the previous
afternoon that the papers were in
the main following public opinion
rather than leading it. Thus, as a
result of our relationship with the
audience, the BBC was ahead of
the game.
But it’s not just the opinions of the
audience that matter – it’s
also their experiences.
In 2008, there was a minor uprising on
Nauru, an island off
Papua New Guinea, which also happens
to be the world’s smallest
republic.
The website reported the story and we
asked for a response
from our audience. Within four hours
we had received several
emails, verifiably from the island,
telling us all about what had
happened. We were then able to add
telling detail to the reporting
of the story.
The relationship with the audience is
not linear: the size and
volume of the response does not
translate directly into news
coverage. In the case of Nauru, the
incredible global reach of the
BBC meant that our audience was able
to share their experience
with us, which again allowed us to
improve and influence our
journalism in a way that almost no
other news organisation can.
It’s a small example of the invaluable
role that the audience
plays in our storytelling. That role
is more dramatically illustrated
by pictures of bomb-damaged buses in
central London, or video of
burning cars at Glasgow Airport.
The other key area where our
relationship with our audience
affects our journalism is when they
share discovery with us.
The story of the hijacking of the
Sirius Star (in 2008) is one
THE AUDIENCE AND THE NEWS
53
striking example. The story broke on a
Monday morning and we
immediately asked for a response from
the audience. By late
afternoon we had the name Peter French
– one of the captured
Britons – and his role on the tanker,
in an email from an
impeccable source2.
By Tuesday afternoon we knew the town
where he and his
family lived, which Newsgathering
colleagues followed up. We had
also recorded an interview with a
former shipmate who had
emailed us confirming further personal
details.
But that’s not all – we had interviews
with Somalians, who
had emailed us from Puntland in
support of the pirates.
And we had emails from a number of
sailors from around the
world who had either just returned
from the area or who had
themselves been kidnapped. Most of
these gave interviews across
TV, radio and online.
We’ve extended our remit by appointing
an interactive
reporter to follow up stories and
leads suggested to us by the
audience.
One email forced a change in
government policy when
Newsnight followed it up and reported
that foreign workers at
Heathrow’s Terminal 5 don’t have to
undergo a criminal records
check.
Finally, we have started mining the
collective knowledge of
the audience – using interactive
mapping to display the results of
our consultations. Early on in the
credit crunch story, we asked the
audience what immediate difference the
cut in VAT would make to
2
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/7737969.stm
THE FUTURE OF JOURNALISM
54
them3. The answer was a resounding ‘no
difference’.
For a few years, high-profile
commentators like the BBCs
Richard Sambrook, Director of BBC
Global News, have been
arguing that mainstream media ‘don’t
own the news any more’.
A couple of years ago that might have
seemed like a bit of
geeky scaremongering. But if you look
at what went on during the
US elections, for example, it’s a
prophecy that is coming true.
Citizen journalism organisations like
the Sayfie Review4
reported live on Qik5 – a video
streaming website – from polling
stations across Florida. The standards
of broadcasting were mixed
– but they got their facts right and
provided an incredible source of
local information for anyone who
logged in.
Elsewhere, the Uptake6, another
US-based citizen
journalism organisation, is mobilising
people – offering a platform,
training and on occasion money for ‘ordinary
people’ to report on
stories as they see them.
Just two examples of the growing
stature of citizen
journalists that we cannot afford to
ignore.
As a result, the UGC Hub has been
focusing on joining up
with social media and social networks
across the web as much as
it has been working on the content
coming in directly to the BBC.
There’s Twitter of course – now a well
established and
hugely valuable source of comment and
content. We first
3 http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/talking_point/7746165.stm
4 http://www.sayfiereview.com/
5 http://qik.com/
6 http://theuptake.org/
THE AUDIENCE AND THE NEWS
discovered the value of the
micro-blogging site during the Tibet
uprising of March 2008, when we used
it to find an eyewitness in
Lhasa. Since then it’s become de rigeur to use Twitter in any
breaking news environment.
It first came to mainstream attention
during the Mumbai
terror attacks in November 2008. But
it was when a picture of a
plane crash-landing in the Hudson
River in January 2009 was
posted to Twitter within five minutes
of the event that it became
headline news in its own right7.
There is also Facebook, Flickr and all
the other social
networks that allow us to connect with
people across the world.
That sometimes means starting
conversations ourselves, as well
as monitoring what is being said.
We reported the Burma uprising of
autumn 2007 through an
equal mixture of content coming in
directly to us and content we
found on the Burmese blogs and social
networks.
And we have joined Seesmic, Qik and 12
Seconds – video
chatrooms that have growing global
communities which have all
provided us with great video
contributions.
The focus for us is the audience.
Sometimes, because we’re
the BBC, they’ll come to us; more
often we’ll have to go to them.
But wherever it is, we have to listen
because there is always
someone, somewhere with something to tell us.
7. Delivering Multiplatform Journalism to the Mainstream
By Derren Lawford
Derren Lawford joined the BBC in 2000 as a tri-media Senior
Broadcast Journalist for Radio 1 Newsbeat, making radio
packages, writing features for the website and reporting for
BBC
Three. Since then, he has worked as a documentary maker and
presenter for Radio 1 and 1Xtra, before moving into TV
production
and development.
My first foray into the world of
multiplatform with the BBC Current
Affairs department came about through
my work on Born
Survivors, a newly-commissioned strand
on BBC Three that I had
helped to develop. It aimed to tell
extraordinary stories of young
people surviving whatever life throws
at them.
The series consisted of four one-hour
documentaries which
explored serious and significant
issues for young people – teen
pregnancy, self-harm, young carers and
children who grew up in
severe poverty.
DELIVERING MULTIPLATFORM JOURNALISM TO
THE MAINSTREAM
57
I knew that these subjects would be of
interest to the
audience long after the transmission
on television. I also knew that
the very people we wanted to engage
with in these films might not
even watch the channel. That’s why I
wanted to provide a space
for our audience to shape the debate
and share their views online.
So each full-length film was re-cut
and repackaged as a
three-minute self-contained narrative
called a ‘minisode’, and then
premiered online ahead of the
television broadcast1. Each one
attempted to reflect the key issue at
the heart of each film in a way
that would work online. That’s why I
changed the style slightly:
wherever possible, only the young
contributors’ voices are heard,
and the music and fonts were tweaked
to better suit a short video.
The minisodes – which we called Kizzy:
Mum at 14; Cut up
Kids; Looking After Mum; and Growing
up Skint – were also
embedded into the BBC Three website
via YouTube, a first for the
channel, predating the now widespread
use of embedded video
players across bbc.co.uk.
I then sought out the only other BBC
platform with an
audience which would readily connect
with the themes explored in
the Born Survivors minisodes – Radio 1’s
The Surgery. The latenight
weekly phone-in show addresses issues
that matter to young
people, the same issues that arose in
our Born Survivors
minisodes.
On 9 December 2007, the weekend before
the Born
Survivors season started, The Surgery’s
host, Kelly Osbourne,
played an excerpt from Kizzy: Mum at
14, talked about the issue
1 http://www.bbc.co.uk/bornsurvivors/minisodes/series1_cutup.shtml
THE FUTURE OF JOURNALISM
58
on air and directed listeners to the
website, where they could click
on a link to view all the minisodes.
The BBC Three website then
provided a reciprocal link on the Born
Survivors page to The
Surgery’s website, specifically its
advice pages, which have a
confidential phone number people can
ring.
Then on the days the programmes aired,
the BBC News
website ran features based on the
characters and streamed the
Kizzy minisode, too.
To extend our online reach even
further, I also researched
the best places to ‘seed’ these
minisodes on non-BBC websites.
Why? Because we wanted to help our
potential audience to find
the minisodes, especially if they
wouldn’t naturally gravitate to the
BBC. Once found, we wanted them to be
shared among our
audience and ‘broadcast’ by them. That’s
why we uploaded all the
minisodes ahead of the terrestrial
transmission to YouTube, Bebo,
Facebook blogs and messageboards, and
made them
embeddable, too.
In the case of Cut up Kids, we also
targeted websites
connected to the issue raised in the
film, namely self-harm. We
wanted both to create an online
community around the season and
tap into existing communities.
So I contacted LifeSigns and Recover
Your Life (which has
over 20,000 members online). They are
two of the best-supported
websites for self-harmers, acting as
gateways to this world for
harmers and their friends and
families. Both sites agreed to back
the Born Survivors season and the Cut
up Kids minisode on their
websites, blogs, as well as their
Facebook and MySpace pages.
This lent the self-harm film an
implicit credibility.
DELIVERING MULTIPLATFORM JOURNALISM TO
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59
So what happened next? Well, the
articles on the four films
on BBC News online recorded a total of
879,617 page
impressions. The Kizzy minisode was
watched just over 33,000
times via the News website.
On YouTube, the minisodes have been
watched 65,956
times and counting. They sparked a
discussion among the
YouTube audience about the issues at
their heart – which
continues today.
The following comment was posted on
YouTube more than
12 months after the Cut up Kids
minisode appeared online in 2007:
“I was gonna be a part of this but then helped by advertising it
around. And I have Sky+ and its be on there ever since. I
won't
delete it because it helps me when I'm really low. This was
probably one of the best documentaries on self-harm I've ever
watched because for once they understood it properly.”
In the case of Cut up Kids, there was
an intense flurry of views
posted on Recover Your Life ahead of
television transmission.
Three different self-harmers pointed
to the minisodes via three
different routes:
“Just looked on the internet for when it's on. not found it
yet but
found this which is a bit out of the documentary I
think...[just warn
you though, could be triggering]
http://www.bebo.com/Profile.jsp?Memb...d=5073712 340”
“There is the beggining of it on youtube.....type in cut up
kids - born
THE FUTURE OF JOURNALISM
60
survivors - bbc3 it should come up...*there is visable scars*”
“Sorry if this has already been posted...
http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbcthree/progra...s/cut_up.shtml”
One of the contributors in the film
also got involved in the debate:
“Hey, I'm Beth (from the documentary). I really think that no
one
should judge it, or have any strict opinion before watching it…”
The Recover Your Life users also
counted down to the television
transmission before posting immediate
reviews:
“It's different to what i was expecting but it's a nice change
they could of made it poorly and caused people to trigger i
suppose Channel 4 would of done something like that
Not triggered.... which is rare for a doc about self harm
seemed pretty well made to me...”
The Cut up Kids film, minisode and
multiplatform impact were
recognized last year with a Young
People’s Media award at the
Mental Health Media Awards.
But that wasn’t the only multiplatform
success from the
season.
Kizzy: Mum at 14 has pulled in a cumulative
television
audience of over 5 million and viewing
figures have increased over
time, because the audience discussed
the issues and posted
television listings on the sites we
targeted. The third repeat on
DELIVERING MULTIPLATFORM JOURNALISM TO
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61
BBC Three was watched by approximately
300,000 more people
than the original broadcast. Two days
before it was shown, this
was posted underneath the Kizzy: Mum
at 14 minisode on
YouTube:
“If anyone has not seen this programme in full yet it is due
for a
replay on BBC THREE this Monday 21st January 2008 at 9pm”
If anyone doubted that putting BBC
material on external websites
can actually raise audiences on BBC
channels, that surely is pretty
solid evidence. The latest repeat was
on BBC1 and was watched
by 2.2 million people. It was also
flagged up ahead of transmission
by a YouTube posting.
The audience, and especially fellow
young single mums,
were so moved by Kizzy’s story that
they set up two different
tribute pages on the social networking
site Bebo which have been
viewed over 40,000 times.
When the Born Survivors season was
recommissioned, the
challenge was to be even more
ambitious with the multiplatform
offering and deliver truly 'co-created
content', allowing young
people to tell us what they think a
Born Survivor is.
Working closely with the Media Trust,
we sought to enable
young people whose extraordinary
stories are rarely heard to make
short films representing what the
audience cares about. We
wanted these films to empower young
people to drive the debate
and help define ‘current affairs’ for
this generation.
Although inspired by and complementing
a second series of
films for television transmission,
these short films would exist
THE FUTURE OF JOURNALISM
62
online independently of the BBC Three
programmes. Like the
minisodes, these co-created films
would also be embeddable,
providing the audience with a real
sense of ownership.
The Media Trust has close ties to
hundreds of grassroots
organisations that enable young people
to make their own media –
whether television, drama, animation,
photography or websites.
For this pioneering project, it agreed
to find some of the most
disadvantaged young people across the
country who would be
interested in making short films about
their lives. The only criterion
we stipulated was that the film should
address the theme of being
a ‘born survivor’ and be no longer
than five minutes. The final films
covered subjects such as living with
an illness, homelessness,
living in care and being a young
refugee.
Each of the nine young filmmakers
worked with a BBC
mentor, one of whom was Tom
Marchbanks:
“I spent a couple of weekends over the summer with my mentee,
a
16-year-old boy on a one-way ticket to prison or hospital. He
certainly had issues, but also amazing vision and creativity.
The
best part for me was becoming friends, colleagues almost, and
seeing his initial suspicion of me replaced with interest and
excitement for the project. The worst part was his
time-keeping.
The whole idea of taking skills out into the community while
making
front-line multiplatform content is one that the BBC should
angle
towards. Altogether, a hugely enjoyable and rewarding piece of
work, where I learnt just as much as my mentee. I'd do it
again a
hundred times.”
DELIVERING MULTIPLATFORM JOURNALISM TO
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63
The BBC Three series and the online
series of co-created films
were both marshalled by Series
Producer Sarah Waldron:
“Finding the balance between young people feeling free to
create
their own content and it fulfilling the BBC guidelines was
challenging. The sheer scale of producing a number of short
pieces of media with different teams and subject matters meant
the
project was extremely labour-intensive if judged per minute.
They
all needed to go through the same rigorous checks and
compliance issues as broadcast films.”
The combined output had two executive
producers to make sure
that all content – irrespective of
platform – fully complied with the
BBC’s editorial guidelines. Executive
Producer Samantha Anstiss
signed off all terrestrial content and
Martin Wilson, Head of
Multiplatform and Development, oversaw
all multiplatform content,
including the creation of a new Born
Survivors website that housed
the original minisodes, the co-created
films and minisodes for Born
Survivors II2. Martin Wilson said:
“Our primary concern in making Current Affairs BBC Three
documentaries is the welfare of the young, vulnerable people
we
often feature. We have a great deal of experience in
understanding
and minimising the potential damage that television will have.
We
are less clear about the impact that featuring them on other
platforms will have, particularly around messageboards, how
the
2 http://www.bbc.co.uk/bornsurvivors/
THE FUTURE OF JOURNALISM
64
material will be used and how long-lasting the impact will be.
And I
think that does concern us all.”
The co-created films were also posted
on YouTube and broadcast
on Charge, the Media Trust’s
multiplatform site dedicated to young
people whose voices are not often
heard in the media. Along with
its website, Charge exists as a
three-hour strand on the
Community Channel.
BBC Three’s new Born Survivors website
has only been live
a few weeks but is already breaking
records, with 70,000 weekly
unique users, the most for a BBC Three
site ever.
The fact that Born Survivors II
represented the first time that
the BBC Current Affairs department had
developed, commissioned
and produced the television and
multiplatform offerings of a project
in tandem was key to its subsequent
success. From the outset,
Channel Controller Danny Cohen,
Current Affairs Commissioner
Clive Edwards, Multiplatform
Commissioner Nick Cohen and BBC
Three’s Multiplatform Channel Editor,
Jo Twist, were all closely
involved in shaping the proposition.
This was probably the biggest single
insight that drove my
next role. Following on from my work
on BBC Three, I took over
the Panorama website3 as part of a new
position on the
programme, Multiplatform Editor. The
key challenge was how to
use the lessons of Born Survivors to
provide a multiplatform
offering for a more mainstream and
traditional BBC programme.
The Panorama website is a central
destination for the
3 http://news.bbc.co.uk/panorama/hi/default.stm
DELIVERING MULTIPLATFORM JOURNALISM TO
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audience once the programme finishes.
A key part of my job was
relaunching and redesigning the site,
but I also needed to create a
team to fulfil my multiplatform
ambitions for a strand that is on
almost every week of the year and has
been on our screens since
1953.
My team is embedded within the main
Panorama production
team, so there’s a constant flow of
information and content both
ways. I recruited people with a
variety of skills including writing,
picture editing, self-shooting, desk
top editing, web encoding,
production assistance, blogging and
archive research.
To ensure that multiplatform thinking
and practice is central
to Panorama, I liaise closely with the
Editor, Sandy Smith, and
Deputy Editors Frank Simmonds, Ingrid
Kelly and Tom Giles, from
the commissioning process right
through to the production.
So much work goes into a Panorama
film, and the website is
the perfect platform to showcase the
best of it online. For Britain's
Terror Heartland, there were blog
posts from Deputy Editor Tom
Giles, with reporter Jane Corbin
providing extra context, while an
extended interview with Pakistan's
Interior Minister, Rehman
Malik, gave an extra perspective. Jane
also wrote a feature on the
programme for the BBC News website and
introduced it online in a
short video4.
The website now has more to read,
watch, comment on and
contribute to. Viewers coming to it
for the first time should find
enough features, picture galleries,
short videos, full-length films
4
http://news.bbc.co.uk/panorama/hi/front_page/newsid_7783000/7783602.stm
THE FUTURE OF JOURNALISM
66
and blog posts to encourage return
visits.
Thanks to the BBC’s Political Editor
Nick Robinson and
Business Editor Robert Peston,
blogging has become an integral
part of journalistic discourse in the
UK. I was keen for Panorama’s
journalism to play a significant part
online, too.
Via our new blog, online archive
specialist Eamonn
Walsh now thematically links Panorama
programmes from the
present to the past, giving classic
clips a fresh airing5 and allowing
viewers to chat online about previous
editions, often from many
years ago. Deputy Editor Tom Giles has
also entered the
blogosphere, inspired by the online
coverage of the US election.
And reporters Jane Corbin, Raphael
Rowe and John Sweeney
have all been given a platform to blog
about the programmes they
make and the wider issues that arise
from them. The audience
themselves join and drive the various
debates on our blogs or their
own, too.
Given the appetite for video online6,
whether it’s short clips or
full programmes, one of the biggest
challenges was to make a
website dedicated to a television
programme have a more
televisual feel. To that end, we are
fully integrated with the BBC
iPlayer and online programmes pages.
When viewers come to the
5
http://news.bbc.co.uk/panorama/hi/front_page/newsid_7928000/7928826.stm
6 According
to Ofcom’s
latest report on the communications industry
(http://www.ofcom.org.uk/media/news/2008/08/nr_20080814), 26%
of those
aged 15 to 24 claim to use the
internet for 'watching TV programmes', up 16%
on the year before. Some 51% used the
web for 'watching video
clips/webcasts', up by the same
amount. But the report also noted an increase
across all the age ranges for
audio-visual content online, and that the fastest
growing online community is actually
the oldest (although it is still in the
minority).
DELIVERING MULTIPLATFORM JOURNALISM TO
THE MAINSTREAM
67
website they should find it simple to
catch up on the latest
programme – which can now be watched
online for a full 12
months after it is broadcast.
For short-form video, there is a
prominent embedded video
player on the front page. This has key
moments from a current
programme or a reporter's take on the
film they have made. Below
it is a new section called Panorama
Video Extras, a mixture of
extra exclusive programme footage,
original material made by my
multiplatform team, re-versioned
snippets from the programme,
classic clips – and the odd minisode,
too.
One thing I felt was lacking on the
old website was a
permanent and prominent space for the
reporters. For all their
investigative and award-winning
endeavours, there didn't seem to
be enough information about them
online. So we've created a new
section called The Team and completely
revamped their pages
with new pictures, text and a series
of special videos to give a
better idea of what makes the likes of
Paul Kenyon, Vivian
White and Peter Taylor want to be
Panorama reporters today.
After seeing the impact that the Born
Survivors seasons
could have on platforms outside the
BBC, I was determined that
Panorama should have a presence in the
appropriate places, too.
So there are now Panorama updates
posted to the micro-blogging
site Twitter, our archive on the
ultimate bookmarking site,
Delicious, and some key moments from
our films on YouTube7.
The latter raises particular editorial
challenges. The
7 http://www.youtube.com/profile?user=BBC&view=videos&query=panorama
THE FUTURE OF JOURNALISM
68
comments posted are moderated by
YouTube, not the BBC, so
contributors need to appreciate the
significance of being online in
perpetuity. If a posted comment is
extremely offensive we can get
it removed, and have done in the past.
But it’s also important to
note that these sites are
self-moderating. Often other users will
admonish comments they deem offensive.
If video material is illegally
uploaded, this can be removed
too – for example, if there are
serious editorial concerns about the
age of the contributors featured, or
an excerpt from a film is being
deliberately used out of context. And
of course, in purely legal
terms, any illegal uploading is a
breach of copyright. Whenever we
have requested material to be removed
in the past, this has been
done within 24 to 48 hours.
We do have control over the metadata.
Keywords that are
used to describe and find content
online are essential, but we need
to ensure that, when using descriptive
shortcuts and shorthand, we
don’t inadvertently defame. For
example, for a film like Daylight
Robbery, which was about billions of
dollars stolen, lost or
unaccounted for in Iraq, you would
avoid using keywords such as
'corrupt Cheney' or 'Bush crook'.
One of the biggest cultural changes
for television production
teams is the notion of exclusivity.
There are fears that by releasing
key material, in whatever form, from
our programmes ahead of
transmission, we could reduce the
audience for the full television
version.
These fears can only be dispelled by
example. Thankfully, in
the short time I have been at
Panorama, we have already had a
few successes, most notably Primark:
on the Rack, as well as
DELIVERING MULTIPLATFORM JOURNALISM TO
THE MAINSTREAM
69
What Happened to Baby P?.
The Primark film was on YouTube, BBC
News online and
BBC Thread, the BBC’s ethical fashion
website, before
transmission. It was watched over
20,000 times. More than
230,000 people read an article about
it on BBC News online, too.
Yet 4.3 million viewers tuned in to
BBC1 on the Monday, making it
one of the biggest Panoramas of 2008.
Afterwards, an additional
57,000 people caught it on iPlayer.
It was a similar story with What
Happened to Baby P?. The
production team gave my team some
footage to cut for the web
only that wouldn’t make it into the
television programme8. One
hundred thousand people watched it
that week on the News
website; 500,000 read our news
article; and 3.9 million viewers
tuned in to BBC1. Despite blanket
coverage the week before the
programme, 67,000 watched it on the
iPlayer, too.
My conclusion? Multiplatform
initiatives in current affairs
programming can offer the audience
strong journalistic content
here, there and everywhere.
8. Death of the Story
By Kevin Marsh
Kevin Marsh became Editor of the BBC College of Journalism in
April 2006. Before that, he was Editor of BBC Radio 4’s Today
programme. He joined the BBC as a news trainee in 1978 and
worked in Belfast and Birmingham before joining The World at
One. After a short spell at ITN, he re-joined the BBC as
Deputy
Editor of The World at One, before becoming Editor of PM and
The
World at One. In 1998, he developed and launched Broadcasting
House – the first new news programme on Radio 4 for a decade.
He is a Visiting Fellow at Bournemouth University Media
School, a
Fellow of the Royal Society for the Arts and Commerce and an
alumnus of the Cambridge Programme for Business and the
Environment. He has been a participant and panellist at four
World
Economic Forums in Davos and lectures regularly on the media
to
international audiences.
The story is dead.
The basic unit of currency that nearly
all of journalism has
DEATH OF THE STORY
71
traded in since it began is finished.
And it's dead because of three big
things we've all seen
happening, but that we've been
reluctant to put together to come to
the inevitable conclusion - that the
story is dead.
It's obvious why we're reluctant to
come to this conclusion:
the story is at the centre of
everything that we do.
What’s the first question we always
ask? 'Is it a good story?'
The language we use about our
journalism comes back to the
story.
'Get the story.' 'Tell the story.'
'It's a lead story.' The thing we
tell young journalists to focus on
above all else: 'Be a good
storyteller.' 'Use the touching detail
of the story to tell a bigger truth
about the world.'
The story has become everything that
we do. It lies behind
all our rites and rituals. The things
we think make journalism.
Scoops, deadlines, headlines;
accuracy, impartiality, public interest
– they all lean on the fundamental
assumption that we do our
business in stories.
So what are the three big things that
have killed it?
First: journalists have extended 'the
story' way beyond what
it was once useful for. It's a great
way of learning some things
about the world – but it's rubbish for
many other forms of public
communication.
In spite of that, we have stretched
'the story' as a format and
sub-genre further than it could ever
really go. And we did that to
create the whole idea of journalism
and journalists as a trade and a
tribe apart. We did it to define
ourselves. Only journalists could
spot stories; only journalists could
find the top line that could
THE FUTURE OF JOURNALISM
72
compete for the attention of mass
audiences.
Second: 'the story' – extended in this
way – has become the
root of the mistrust in journalism.
Our audiences have rumbled the
weaknesses of ‘the story’,
even if we haven't. And while some of
them still find journalism
based on 'the story' capable of
getting their attention ... they know
'the story' as often as not tells them
nothing 'true' about the world.
They know that on some subjects –
crime; youth; leadership;
the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan; the
thing George Bush used to
call 'The War on Terror'; most aspects
of politics – 'the story' may
well reinforce their prejudices but
does nothing to give them the
kind of information they need to be
active citizens.
Third: the web has taught our former
audiences that neither
one nor two above needs to be true.
'Journalism' and 'the news' – founded,
as I say, almost
entirely on 'the story' – is not a
fixed point in the universe. It's not a
force of nature. It doesn't have to be
how we journalists have made
it.
The web has unbundled the bundle we
used to sell
audiences as a paper or a bulletin;
it's erased the distinction we
journalists used to make between
'news' – what we said it was –
and information, stuff, the whole of
the rest of the world.
The web is enabling our former
audiences to come to their
news in their ways at their
times.
Our old image of gripping them
with our
‘stories’
is no more.
The story is dead.
Since I floated this idea about a year
ago on my blog
DEATH OF THE STORY
73
Storycurve1, other writers,
teachers and academics in the world of
journalism have come – independently –
to a similar view.
Jeff Jarvis, on his blog Buzzmachine2, wrote about what he
called the end of the 'article' ...
but his reasoning was similar to
mine.
Paul Bradshaw3, one of the most
respected online journalism
teachers in the UK, tells me he's been
teaching the death of the
story for years.
And Mindy McAdams, one of online journalism's
big thinkers,
wrote last year about the idea of
journalists as 'curators' of
information4 – a role in which
their idea of 'the story' has no place.
What's also clear is that some big
news organisations –
including us here in the BBC – are
starting to organise ourselves in
ways that assume 'the story' is dead –
without actually articulating
it.
Ask yourself this: what's more
important to the biggest force
in news today, the news aggregators
like Google News? Is it the
way in which information is finely
honed and shaped into
journalistically approved 'stories'?
Or is it the way one piece of
information – because inside the big
Google News barrel, it's not
news any more, at least, not as we
know it – from whatever source
can be linked to another?
The story is dead.
Let me clear, though, exactly what I'm
talking about here.
1
http://storycurve.blogspot.com/
2 http://www.buzzmachine.com/
3 http://onlinejournalismblog.com/
4 http://mindymcadams.com/tojou/2008/curation-and-journalists-as-curators/
THE FUTURE OF JOURNALISM
74
When I talk about 'the story' I mean
something quite specific
… capital 'T' capital 'S' – 'The
Story'.
I'm not predicting the death of
storytelling, narrative as a
human activity, as a linguistic and
cognitive form.
E.M. Forster was right, back in the
1920s, when he talked
about storytelling as one of the first
human, communal activities,
as the first way we found to tell each
other something useful about
the world outside the experience of
our listeners.
He conjures up an imaginary scene
where what he calls
'shockheads' sit around listening to
storytellers5. And he imagines
three possible outcomes to this kind
of early newscasting –
outcomes that should have worried
journalists much more than
they ever did: either the 'shockheads'
stay entranced and awake;
get bored and fall asleep; or get so
bored they kill the storyteller.
We like narrative because the
conscious part of our brains
works in a linear way: we can take in
first one thing, then another,
then another – what Forster called
'story'.
And we can put them together to find
causes and effects:
because of this, this happened and
that resulted in this – what
Forster called 'plot'. It is an
immensely useful and attractive way of
communicating.
So, no, I'm not predicting the death
of narrative.
What I am saying is dead is the
capital 'T' capital 'S' story –
the journalistic creation that grew
out of narrative and accounts of
5
http://74.125.77.132/search?q=cache:H_A91attHm8J:ncertbooks.prashanthell
ina.com/class_11.English.WovenWords/Essay-
06%2520(The%2520story).pdf+shockheads+
E.M.Forster&cd=10&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=uk
DEATH OF THE STORY
75
the world.
'The story' is the carefully burnished
unit that’s been
exclusively our province as
journalists for as long as newspapers
and news broadcasts they’ve existed.
'The story' is actually a very formal
thing. We've created rules
for it – so that we can teach those
rules.
The bible of journalism education is
the book Reporting for
the Media6. It's the course book
in many US journalism schools.
Most British schools and colleges – if
they don't encourage their
students to pay $80 for it – borrow
its ideas.
Here's what it says about 'the story' –
which it divides into the
'lead' (what we'd call the 'top line')
and the 'body'.
What's the rule for 'the lead'? Well,
among other things:
emphasise the magnitude and stress the
unusual.
Well, yeah – I can hear you thinking –
what's the problem
with that? We don't need a book to
tell us that's how you start your
story. It's obvious.
And there are the rules for the ‘body’
of the story, too. Some
of you may have come across the ‘inverted
pyramid’. The ‘5Ws’
(who, what, where, when, why) at the
top narrowing through the
detail, context, background. Here's
another shape for a news story,
favoured by the Wall Street Journal:
the hourglass style. And so
on.
Now, whether you've learnt how to tell
a story from a
journalism school, a book or a senior
colleague, you will have
6
http://www.oup.com/us/catalog/he/subject/Communication/Journalism/NewsW
ritingReporting/?view=usa&ci=9780195337433
THE FUTURE OF JOURNALISM
76
developed some sense of the rules of a
‘good story’.
They seem intuitive. They seem
obvious. And I suspect you
rarely question them.
And they're good rules – for capturing
attention, for defining
what we do, for excluding the great
unwashed from our tribe.
But they can be absolutely terrible
rules if we use them
exclusively to tell each other about
the world.
And this is exactly what we have done –
we've overextended
'the story' to be the default unit of
journalistic currency.
Our audiences have realised this. And
that's one reason why
they've killed 'the story'.
As a basic idea, using narrative to
tell other people what
you've found out about the world is
completely intuitive. And once
there was no other way.
In the early days, whenever they were –
Herodotus, if you're
of a classical frame of mind, the 16th
century if you're more of a
modernist – people went out into the
world, found things out and
reported back.
What could be simpler? We kid
ourselves that that's all we're
doing now. As I'll explain later,
we're not.
But it was the narrative, the partial
account – 'this is what I
have seen', 'this is what I know' –
and our acceptance of it on its
own terms – limitations and all – that
enabled journalism to happen
in the first place.
We accept that journalism – unlike a
court case, a tribunal, a
Royal Commission or a public inquiry –
is about partial accounts.
Journalism isn't about the whole
truth, the totality, of anything.
Sure, if you add all of journalism's
stories together on a
DEATH OF THE STORY
77
particular topic you may – may – come
close to some kind of
comprehensive understanding. Though
there's no guarantee of
that. (A thought you might want to
hold onto.)
But if we didn’t accept journalism as
a series of 'stories' –
fractured, partial accounts – we
wouldn't even get past base one of
journalism's most important function:
addressing the information
asymmetry between people and power.
We accept the proposition that
journalism will have to
spanner the truth out of power bit by
bit. And that it can and should
put together a complex truth bit by
bit. And find the facts that will
fuel our public deliberations bit by
bit.
If you look at journalism’s great
achievements, that's exactly
how it happened. Russell in Crimea,
the My Lai massacres,
Thalidomide, Watergate, Iraq’s weapons
of mass destruction.
The great achievements of journalism
came about because a
small number of dedicated, driven,
skilled people went out on our
behalf to find out as much as they
could, and brought back to us
what they'd found when they found it.
Actually, this image of the journalist
is so institutionally
accepted that it's gaining more and
more protection from the law.
The so-called Reynolds defence,
further developed in the Jameel v
Wall Street Journal7 and McLagan
judgements8, protects
assiduous and diligent journalists who
come in good faith to a
conclusion on the facts they've
unearthed – even if that conclusion
turns out, in the end, to be untrue.
7 http://www.swanturton.com/ebulletins/archive/JKCReynoldsDefence.aspx
8 http://www.pressgazette.co.uk/story.asp?storyCode=39085§ioncode=1
THE FUTURE OF JOURNALISM
78
So what's the problem? The problem is
that not all journalism
is quite like Russell and Hersh and
Evans and the Insight team.
And not all of journalism's public
good can be fulfilled with
'the story'.
Yet that is the job journalists have
come to expect 'the story'
to do – if we still believe journalism
fulfils any public good – and not
everyone does: my friend Professor
Adrian Monck at City
University argues that journalists are
simply storytellers. End.
Well, maybe that's a view most of our
audiences have come
to as well.
'The story' – stretched, pulled,
extended every which way –
has created the whole complex we call
journalism.
And we're now so used to the
pre-eminence of 'the story',
and to all the things we and it have
created, that we find it hard to
imagine the world any other way.
It’s hard to imagine that 'the story'
is dead.
Think about what we've created with
'the story':
– The deadline.
In the world of 'the story', news is
when we journalists say it
is. In the very old world, it was when we got the paper to them or
when the bulletin began. 'The story'
defined the deadline and the
deadline defined 'the story'. 'The
story' was what we could unearth,
verify, render impartial by the
deadline. The deadline set the point
at which work in progress became 'the
story'. Yet deadlines were
never more than a function of train
timetables or space on the
spectrum and in the schedules. No room
there for evolving truths.
DEATH OF THE STORY
79
– The headline.
The life cycle of the story depends on
what we call 'legs' –
whether it's still worth our attention
or whether it can be left alone
to slide back into the morass of
'stuff'. The paradox of the search
for the ‘new top line’ – when we think
a 'story' still has legs, but
we're damned if we know what the new
top line is.
– Relativism.
Relativism knocks a 'story' that still
‘has legs’ out of the paper
or the bulletin, simply because
another 'story' is newer or has
stronger ‘legs’.
So 'the story' isn't just about
narrative. It isn't just about going
out finding out. It isn't just the
preferred way we journalists have of
describing the world. It's the basis
of what we do and who we are.
It’s ideal for the business that
journalism became.
To be a business, journalism needs a
mass audience. To get
a mass audience, journalism needs to
persuade people in that
audience that they really are
interested in things they thought they
didn't care about.
The problem is, audiences never were
masses. But with no
alternative to the papers, radio and
TV, they satisfyingly behaved
as if they were.
We measured them, prodded them,
questioned them – to
find more and better ways to make them
behave like a single
THE FUTURE OF JOURNALISM
80
undifferentiated mass.
Then they discovered it didn't have to
be like that. And the
more that our former audiences found
they did have an alternative,
the more dominated we became by 'the
story'.
Think back for a moment to those rites
and rituals of
journalism: deadlines and headlines;
legs and top lines; the
structures of 'stories' and those of
our journalistic lives.
What on earth is a deadline now? We
think we're used to the
idea that there's no such thing as a
deadline on the web and on
live and continuous news. But we tend
to think that means no
deadlines within a news cycle; we
still cling to news cycles.
Our former audiences don't. Each and
every one of our
former audiences has their own news
cycle. If it's new to them, it's
new. We don't know how long a tail the
web has – it hasn't been
around long enough yet. But it's long –
and as long as stuff is
there, it's new to someone.
And that idea of 'the story',
perfectly honed and burnished
just in time to meet the deadline?
It's axiomatic that on the web
nothing is ever finished; it's just
the latest version.
So what's the purpose now of the
headline, the top line?
Proximity is the watchword on the web –
if it's close to me, I'll take
an interest. If it's not, who cares? I
don't need to.
And yet the deadline, the search for
new legs, a new top line
– reckless competition for attention –
is more evident in journalism
now than it has ever been – partly out
of panic at and competition
for departing audiences who've lost
patience with 'the story'.
It was that panic that took Express
newspapers down its fatal
McCann route … over 100 libellous
articles for which the
DEATH OF THE STORY
81
newspaper group has paid dearly. And
it persuaded the Evening
Standard to run entirely unfounded
rumour and gossip about the
Duke of Edinburgh – a 'story' for
which it acknowledged it had no
evidence.
And – just the other day – it's about
a story that appeared in
the Sun:
“I was disappointed when I heard that Mr Peter Doherty, a fine
upstanding member of his local community, was meeting BBC
bosses on Tuesday for a job interview.”
According to the Sun, Peter Doherty
was to write a new drama for
the BBC.
So what did the BBC say about the
story? Two things. One,
it's not true. And, two, the BBC told
the Sun journalist it wasn't true
before 'the story' went into the
paper.
You know the depressing thing? When
you tell that to nonjournalists,
they just shrug and say 'What do you
expect?
Or this (from Ben Goldacre): it’s the
way in which the Daily
Mail, in the UK and in Ireland, has
written ‘stories’ about cervical
cancer jabs.
In the English edition we read: “The
serious health concerns
about the cervical cancer jab”; “Alert
over jab for girls as two die
following cervical cancer vaccination”;
“Twelve-year-old girl
paralysed ‘after being given cervical
cancer jab’”; “How safe is the
cervical cancer jab? Five teenagers
reveal their alarming stories”.
But in Ireland, these are the stories:
“Join the Irish Daily
Mail’s cervical cancer vaccination
campaign today”; “Europe will
THE FUTURE OF JOURNALISM
82
shame FF into providing Ireland’s
life-saving cervical cancer jabs”;
“Ditching cancer vaccine is a big step
back, says expert”; “Health
campaigners in Ireland take fight for
cancer jabs to Washington”;
“Cervical cancer vaccine for Ireland’s
girls: online poll slams
decision to pull funding”.
They even have a graphic, with the
Daily Mail logo, like
something from a parallel universe –
it reads: “Daily Mail
Campaign: Roll out the vaccine now!”
So we have the same paper approaching
the same
information in two mutually exclusive
ways; in the UK it’s to attack
any government healthcare decision –
particularly one that has
anything to do with sexual health – by
portraying it as medically
dangerous.
In Ireland, it’s to attack any
government healthcare decision
that can be portrayed as
penny-pinching.
It's an environment that is so taken
for granted that Damian
McBride and Derek Draper knew it was
worth seeking to serve up
rumours that would find their way into
mainstream journalism. They
knew some part of mainstream
journalism would, in the end, run
their smears – either because the
journalist didn't care they weren't
true, or because they thought someone
else might run them.
It's an extension of the insight that
governed the infamous
triumvirate of Mandelson, Campbell and
Gould and their
subversion of the press back in 1994.
When a politician can tell a
newspaper – as Peter Mandelson did in
1997 – that it's his job 'to
create the truth'9 – and political
journalists connive in that creation,
9 http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/1997/aug/09/labour.mandelson
DEATH OF THE STORY
83
all in pursuit of apparent 'stories',
then you know the game is up.
It’s no great surprise that three
times as many of us will trust
a complete stranger in the street as will
trust a journalist. And their
stories.
They've rumbled us.
And they’ve rumbled the weird world ‘the
story’ creates:
where the search for the word ‘sorry’
trumps the search for what
really happened and what it really
means; where a leader can only
take responsibility by resigning,
never by understanding what went
wrong and putting it right; and where
every perceived wrong has to
generate ‘an inquiry’ and – hopefully –
compensation.
The more I find out about how our
former audiences are
getting their news now that they don’t
have to rely on us
journalists, the more convinced I
become that our invention, ‘the
story', and all that goes with it is
dead.
One obvious piece of evidence: we know
that the vast
majority of those in our former audiences
just don't read our stories
in the way we write them. Nor do they
view our video 'stories' in the
way we cut and script them. Jakob
Nielsen has done a range of
eye-tracking studies since the 1990s10, repeated by
researchers at
the Poynter Institute11, to find out how
people actually read the
stories journalists write.
The answer is not very closely and not
very much of them.
More than three quarters never get
beyond the first paragraph.
And of those that do, more than two
thirds don't read – they scan
10 http://www.useit.com/eyetracking/
11 http://eyetrack.poynter.org/
THE FUTURE OF JOURNALISM
84
the beginning of each line. Almost
none make it to that final,
resounding, rhetorical final
paragraph.
And we know from sites like YouTube
that people want to
see the thing, the event. 'Let me see
the fire engine run over the
cat.' They don't want the build up,
the clever edit, the piece to
camera. ‘Just show me.’
We were talking the other day to
groups of audience
members about our reporting of the
recession. But if you drill down
into some of the responses they gave,
you can see an emerging
pattern of usage that doesn't care
much for our idea of 'the story'.
Here's a typical response:
"Some feel that to fully understand stories they need to
crossreference
with other channels, and for more encyclopaedic
explanation on technical terms they use online sources like
Wikipedia and Google."
In the old journalistic world, we
controlled the context and
background – the cross references, if
you like. As we led people
down that inverted pyramid. Now,
you're more likely to find people
like this respondent:
"I watch the TV and I’m on my laptop at the same
time."
So there's your former audience,
watching your carefully
crafted story. When they hit something
they want to know more
about, off they go to construct their
own context, history,
background.
DEATH OF THE STORY
85
You think you've written and crafted a
story. They think
you've tipped them with an alert.
There's more like this:
“I use online because I can get more detail.”
“I need more context and understanding and use online for
that.”
You thought you were writing a
carefully crafted story. They
thought you were offering them a news
alert so they could go off to
assemble their own context and
background.
It's even worse than that. 'The story'
was always a
component in that bundle we called a
newspaper or a bulletin.
Search engines and news aggregators
have ripped that bundle
apart.
It's striking now when you talk to the
under-25s how they see
Google News or something similar as
their news provider. They
value and respect the BBC when they're
linked to it – but they
often see it as a second link after
Google.
There's also a growing tendency
amongst the young to take
the ubiquity of information on the web
for granted and assume that
news will find them. They're not
sitting around waiting to have their
passions excited by 'the stories' of
us journalists.
In that competition for mass
attention, fewer and fewer want
to play. So what does this all mean
for journalists – particularly
publicly funded, publicly accountable
journalists?
Well, the first thing is to realise
that the story should be rolled
back to where it’s useful. Narrative
is still a great format or genre
THE FUTURE OF JOURNALISM
86
for foreign, war and investigative
reporting. We all still need people
who go out there, find things out and
come back to tell us what
they’ve found – the Jeremy Bowens,
Allan Littles, James
Reynolds, John Wares and Peter Taylors
of this world: people who
work with their audiences, level with
their audiences – ‘Look, this
isn’t the totality of truth; I’m
calling this as I see it. Impartially,
accurately … but as I see it.’
But narrative has proved lousy and
untrustworthy for almost
everything else. We need to think
about what audiences are telling
us about how they want to be alerted
to, and helped find their way
through, ‘everything else’.
But if
we
accept the death of the story, it’s fantastically
liberating – if we
can stop hankering after that historical oddity, that
anachronistic creation of journalists
for journalists.
For instance, we can start to get used
to the idea of the alert
as an end in itself. Though our job
doesn’t end there, it’s certainly
where our audiences want it to start.
We can learn not to wait until we’ve
got ‘the story’ before we
tell them anything. Not to impose our deadlines
on them. Or only to
give them an alert when we think
it’s serious enough.
We need to understand the importance
of ‘intelligencing’ the
news – and the difference between that
and the old ‘story’. We
need to use expertise – not prejudice
or world view – to help our
audiences find starting points to
navigate their way around what’s
important to them.
The BBC Business Editor Robert Peston,
constantly scans
DEATH OF THE STORY
87
the horizon in his blog12 – including the
horizons that are largely
hidden from view – to spot the
significant, offer alerts to capture
the significant, to pass it on, to
move on.
We can never again afford the
condemnation of our trade
that was the Credit Crunch – probably
the biggest economic
disaster ever; which we failed to tell
or explain. Because when all
the elements were moving into place,
it wasn’t a ‘story’.
We need to get used to the idea that
in gathering links and
associations between information,
multiplying information is more
important than filtering it, paring it
down, or reducing and selecting
to make it fit ‘our’ story. We need to
get used to the idea that
nothing is ever ‘the final version’.
We need to forget about deadlines –
and the idea that a
‘story’ has ever run out of ‘legs’. It’s
always new for someone.
Everything always has legs for
someone. Forget mass audiences;
think masses of individuals.
We need to rethink our cycles of
information: we’re not bad
at ‘pre’; we are absolutely lousy at ‘post’.
We need to look at
timelines that link events and
information; graphics that make
sense of big patterns over time. Tools
that mine the data out there;
not ‘stories’ that pretend only one
bit of data matters.
We need to understand that platforms
are mutual and
interlinked – not exclusive. It’s as
important to us that someone in
our audience gets an alert from TV and
radio and navigates
around it online as it is that they
stick with our 30-minute bulletin.
Then how do we interconnect one
platform with another? We
need to understand that news is multi-layered.
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