Tagged: blog preston

Kelvin MacKenzie, journalism courses and innovation

Just over a week ago Kelvin MacKenzie derided modern entry routes into journalism. I’m fairly certain I’m the last to blog about this; there’s plenty of other informed opinions already out there if you want further reading, some which I’ve collected and curated with Scoop.it.

Kelvin is angry because of the saturation of journalism courses in the UK. In a sense he’s right; there are only a handful that are fulfilling while others seem to be purely money-making exercises. Where he goes wrong is when he advises young people to “try and achieve three different A Levels, go to a local, then a regional and then head out on to nationals or magazines by 21-22″. The problem with this piece of supposed wisdom is that it doesn’t exist any more. Not only is Kelvin describing a ludicrously accelerated career path (can you think of any other industry that purports a step from the bottom to the top rung of the ladder within 4 years?) but also a model of journalism that ceases to exist.

Looking through local newspaper job listings, what do many of them stipulate? Some form of journalism qualification – be that undergraduate or postgraduate. Kelvin also enthuses about the joys of training people up on the job in regional journalism – another thing that is fairly scarce. Journalism courses have taken the place of many of these trainee schemes, ensuring that graduates arrive more or less fully formed journalists by the time they begin knocking on a publication’s door. Hence the need for good journalism education.

It’s not so much the chip on his shoulder faux working class chumminess that irritates me about Kelvin (particularly as he was educated at Alleyn’s) but more the lack of ability to accept a meritocracy of ideas. In that sense he can be said to be emblematic of the journalism industry’s thinking up until now. That is; patronising, unwilling to engage and with a ludicrous sense of self-importance.

“That’s how it was in my day”-style anecdotes rarely stand up to much scrutiny, particularly within journalism. In some aspects the industry is a diverse one; people who arrived through undergraduate courses, postgraduate courses or after long stints in other professions before turning their hand to writing. This should be an industry where anyone can write and anyone can teach. It’s one where the opinions of Kelvin MacKenzie should be seen as what they are; inflammatory and misguided opinons written by people long out of touch with the mechanics of modern journalism and have instead resorted to playing to the gallery.

Why are journalism courses valuable? Because they allow students to form ideas within the safety of academia. They lead to things like SR2 Blog, Blog Preston and Wannabe Hacks. They give students a better understanding of the mechanics of journalism – the theories that underpin it and what can be learned from them. Despite their practical nature they get young people thinking about journalism in ways that would be impossible if they were whisked onto training schemes to deal with the day to day.

There’s a good reason why people like Jeff Jarvis and Jay Rosen ruminate on such fascinating possibilities within journalism – they’re detached from the practice of it. The reason they can research and theorise about the future of journalism is so well is because they’re not weighed down by meeting deadlines every day. Journalism courses rest on the same crux, and if they produce a new generation of innovators and thinkers in this transitionary period for the industry then I think it’ll be all the better for it.

 

Social media training: Why it’s bullshit

Or more eloquently; why it’s done all wrong.

I like learning, and I like teaching. I like open conversation with others and I like problem solving. And I like the fact that social media is conducive to holding discussion on a wider medium. But I can’t stand the so-called “experts” who dole out social media training like it’s a secret sauce only available to the privileged few.

The knowledge gap between those not knowing anything about social media and those purporting to be in the know definitely exists, but it’s not as wide as it’s perceived. There’s a tendency amongst humans to put on a pedestal whatever new medium exists during their lifespan. We saw it with radio and with television. Both are now accepted norms, and so it should be with social media. Why are we letting people get away with paying hundreds of pounds for poorly structured, patronising and corny sounding seminars?

Let me be clear; I am not against teaching. Everyone has to start somewhere. But the way we teach social media (if such a formal tag is to be applied to the methodology) has to shift from the perspective of a top-down system.

An expert standing at the front of a room packed with baffled faces, doling out “gems” of information as if they and only they  hold the key to unlocking the so-called secrets of social media. This is fundamentally overcomplicating and building up the concept of social media in order to exploit it financially.

Being social is instinctive; all social media has done is allow us to share that instinct with a wider audience. There’s no magic code, no correct way to go about doing these things. Most of us got here by experimenting, messing up, and seeing what worked for us. And that’s the key point; to each his own. The way that I use social media in journalism is different to how a behavioural analyst or a small business uses it.

I’ve written previously about how I think universities should shift their purpose in the context of enabling and supporting entrepreneurialism. Encouraging the use of social media should also seek to accept that we are all constant learners, and that we can all benefit from each others viewpoints. Blog Preston recently won the Talk about Local prize for “Best overall hyperlocal website” and one of the reasons cited was our use of social media. The way in which we interact has to be playful but informative, accurate but talkative, authoritative but friendly.

Ideally I’d like 2011 to be the year when the “social” tag is dropped altogether, and it just becomes the accepted way that we participate in media. This will help debunk some of the mystery behind social media as well as hopefully outing some of these so-called gurus wanting to make a fast buck.

As someone who’s often called a social media geek I hope I’ve never fallen into the trap of preaching from a parapet. Over the summer I’ll be making some forays into training young people in storytelling techniques and media. But at the heart of it I’ll always remember that they can potentially all know more than me. And that we can learn learn together.

Has this century produced a growth in journalism thinkers?

With this blog, I generally try and avoid slipping into the echo chamber of media criticism that tends to afflict journalism. I stay away from “why x should be doing x” and “why x will fail” posts, and instead try to make sense of the world of journalism from my own unique perspective.

Aside from the odd post that harnesses practical personal experience, my writing here is largely thinking about the concepts that make up the industry and trying to piece together thoughts on how elements of modern journalism will evolve.

But the subject I’m trying to explore in this blog post is one that provokes a certain level of introspection, as it concerns the idea that there are more journalism thinkers than ever before.

Academics have a perpetual presence in society and journalism educators have been around since the inception of journalism school. But I think that the 21st century is unique in that it’s produced many younger journalists who are thinking about how to shape journalism outside of their own personal space.

Consider this. Journalism is referred to as a practical trade, a vocation plied by people prepared to get their hands dirty. You have academics on one side and the practitioners on the other, just like you have scholars of International Relations and practitioners in the form of diplomats.

The gradual and somewhat inevitable decline of large news organisations has shown the cracks in poorly thought out business models. It’s allowed people in nascent periods of their career a glimpse at the cogs and pulleys that make up the news machine. While that machine remained tightly sealed those journalists focused on themselves; holding down a job, writing copy, and keeping everything steady. Because of the new focus on transparency, those problems are clear for everyone to see, and suddenly the focus has shifted.

That begs the question: If the news industry wasn’t in trouble, would I even be writing this blog? Would the Wannabe Hacks and countless others be writing theirs?

Their thoughts and my thoughts are provoked by the feeling of something new. That something new may ultimately be the downfall of everything we understand to be journalism, but that doesn’t matter so much. What matters is that the feeling of the industry on a knife edge has given birth to a wider and crucially younger generation of journalism thinkers.

These aren’t people who are either doing their job or thinking about the bigger picture. They’re doing both. People like Mary Hamilton work for Citywire and talk about unconventional storytelling at the weekends, while Dave Lee combines a day job at the BBC with running a hyperlocal website.

The early 21st century has created a range of hackademics who are prepared to discuss the theories underpinning journalism while applying it in the workplace. Looking across the pond, where US media lies more decimated and fragmented than our own, and you can see hundreds of inspiring news projects that are all generated by journalists in the first flushes of their careers.

The concept of a melting pot of ideas springing from the industry’s youngest is exciting, but it’s all worthless unless there’s investment and recognition in the right places.

Blog Preston just won significant funding as part of a joint bid for NESTA’s Neighbourhood Challenge. As part of that we’ll be able to train people to record and document what’s going on in their local area. An excellent achievement, and hopefully NESTA saw something in our passion about local community that meant they gave us the go ahead. We didn’t get to that stage by thinking about journalism in a traditional sense, but by first understanding the importance of a community and then identifying its needs.

Of course there are lots of people in executive positions similarly attempting to restructure and adjust their organisations to today’s news environment. But once this generation of young journalism thinkers start to infiltrate the industry en masse and occupy decision-making positions, that’s when we’ll really start to see change.

Using Foursquare with #hyperlocal

Back in August, Ed Walker wrote a post asking whether location apps were useful for journalists. He rightly pointed out the lack of relevance in using Foursquare to pinpoint his location, because quite frankly, who cares? For journalists who belong to a news organisation it seems fairly unworkable, but I think I’ve managed to find a use for it within the hyperlocal sphere.

I’ve long since stopped using Foursquare on a personal basis. Now that I’m able to push my check-ins from Gowalla it means that logging into two services is no longer a necessity. But when I heard that they were offering business pages to more customers, I saw the potential for using it in some capacity with Blog Preston, and engaging our audience more as a result.

I sent Foursquare the following email.

Start-ups are generally terrible at customer service. Many of them don’t have a dedicated team of support staff, or they’re concentrating more on building the actual product rather than answering questions from users. So as the weeks ticked by I was hardly surprised that Foursquare failed to get back to me. After all, I couldn’t have been the only one who had asked about this.

Several months later when I’d forgotten all about it, the following email dropped into my inbox.

I sketched together a quick logo design on Photoshop and a few lines of copy before emailing it all back to Foursquare. Within half an hour, my business page was up and running at foursquare.com/blogpreston.

My plan was to go through the Blog Preston archive and dig out any posts that were vaguely related to reviews or features about a particular venue. I then published a two-line summary of each review in the form of a Foursquare Tip, with an additional link that links back to our site for the full article.

It adds an extra layer to our community. I’ve added everyone who follows our Twitter account on Foursquare, so 43 people now follow the Foursquare page. When walking around Preston you can see nearby tips like this (click for larger image).

When the user clicks through they’re presented with the tip page and the link that then directs them to the mobile site. That means that people can not only view our reviews on another platform, but they’re also made more relevant now that they’re tied to a location. A foursquare user looking to check-in will see our tip, (even if they’re not following us) read our review and then hopefully come back to the site in the future. If you visit the Foursquare page itself it collates all the tips onto one page, so it also can serve as a directory for local information, and one that crucially encourages users to click through to our site to access the full content.

In addition, I think it’ll also have an impact on stories that I’ll write in future. The fact that we can dot these tips all around Preston and then link back to the site means that reviews suddenly become a very valuable resource. We focus on community news, and that will continue to be the case. But reviewing more events, bars and restaurants means that we can build up an audience that may never even visit the site through any of our other online streams; be that direct traffic, Facebook or Twitter.

Tips are good, but I’d also like to take this further. How about geo-tagging posts with a foursquare check-in and then feeding the RSS into a Google Map to create a automated story map? Daniel Bentley briefly wrote about the possibility of doing this last year, but I’ve yet to find a plugin or app that allows me to do exactly what I want. If you’re a developer who wants to work with the Foursquare API and think you can help build something useful, I’d love to hear from you.

That’s about it. Fairly simple to set up but a great way to raise awareness of the Blog Preston brand, bring in more users as well as making it easier for them to access our content on yet another platform.

I can feel some readers shaking their heads and muttering “what about the content?”. Rest assured that’s still the priority at Blog Preston, and the site would be nothing without it. But by experimenting with applications like this we can help foster a wider community, and isn’t that what it’s all about?

The finished Foursquare page