Tagged: social media

Context: One thing that liveblogs can’t do at the moment

Liveblogging is still a nascent writing style. There have been several discussions about its value. You can debate for days about whether or not it’s appropriate for everything, or whether covering something through process journalism is always the right decision, but liveblogging is a form of storytelling that’s here to stay.

To me the humdinger that almost every single liveblog that I’ve come across has failed to address is the issue of context.

When talking to people about Ocqur, one of the most common pieces of feedback was not being able to properly understand what had been going on in a liveblog if joining the story or event part of the way through.

This is a problem for two reasons.

First, viewers are likely to spend several minutes trying to work out what happened and when before getting back to the latest updates, which is a poor reading experience.

The second reason is a byproduct of the first, in that as long as this problem keeps occuring and readers still view it as an issue, it’s going to put people off the liveblog experience.

There’s a reason why things like Longform and Readability have done so well – because they enshrine and bring out the simplicity that long form reading used to be before we were assailed by a horde of feeds, links and social networks. Right now it doesn’t seem like the frontend of many liveblogs seem to treat their readers in the same way.

So how can it be done better?

News organisations like the Guardian, the Times and the New York Times have it easier than most in this respect, simply because they have access to thousands of articles, hundreds of tags and topic pages, video content, photo archives, commentary and analysis. This alone should make the task of contextualising liveblogs a lot simpler for them than a standalone service like Cover It Live or Scribble Live.

In fact, the New York Times already seem to be halfway there. Take a look at this screenshot of their Facebook IPO liveblog.

The right column displays a graph tracking the stock price, with major shareholders listed below and a pane offering videos, interactives and documents. The NYT come closer than any other organisation to offering a full contextual experience alongside their liveblog.

So for us at Ocqur, this is potentially the toughest nut to crack. Feature requests are small fry – we can build multiple authors, we can give you more options for embedding, and we can add permalinks for individual entries.

But when it comes to context, how do we interpret that? It’s potentially a very abstract and subjective concept. One man’s article is another man’s YouTube video, and it’s very difficult to tell how everyone reads stories when they’re being played out live.

I think the solution lies in, ironically, looking at how ‘old’ media cover things like elections. Take the BBC’s 2010 general election coverage. The main coverage consisted of rolling news in the vein that we’re used to seeing from the BBC news channel and Sky News, with reporters from various counting halls around the country occasionally doing a piece to camera and reporting the local result. This is the broadcast equivalent of the liveblog, with the liveblog author taking the place of the program producer.

Between these results, the BBC would come back to the studio, which featured Jeremy Paxman, David Dimbleby, Emily Maitlis et al filling in viewers on the bigger picture. “Here’s the result” said the journalist in the counting hall, “and this is what it means” said the presenter in the studio.

The problem with this analogy is that we don’t seem to have found our presenters yet in liveblogging. There isn’t much contextualisation of the river of information that’s flowing through a liveblog, and it’s one of our main challenges in the ongoing development of Ocqur. @socialtechno has pointed out some excellent processes on how to address this in the comments.

As mentioned in my last post, we’ll be working with our testers in the next couple of months in order to really draw out and establish what it means to have a liveblog that truly allows the reader to stay up to date as well as understand the key issues quickly.

Sky News’ Social Media Policy – It’s not archaic, it’s just a new approach

By now you’re all likely to be aware of Sky News making significant changes to their employees’ social media usage via an email to staff last Tuesday.

In this week’s Media Mouthwash podcast I called the policy “anti-web”, but I’ve deliberately left it this long before writing something about it because I think it’s a much more nuanced issue than some dissenting voices have made out.

Don’t tweet when it’s someone else’s story

This is probably the most galling aspect of the policy. If an employee isn’t particularly social media-savvy, then there’s no harm in another journalist using Twitter and other networks to promote and share their content in a way that means it’ll get maximum exposure.

If I was the only person sharing my own work around Twitter, then it’d get very limited traction, and there’s no harm in staff helping get extra eyeballs onto a colleague’s piece.

Always pass breaking news lines to the news desk before posting them on social media networks

There is fundementally nothing wrong with this. If we’re acknowledging that Twitter is a medium like any other, and one that should sit alongside videos, blogs and audio reports amongst Sky News’ output, then it makes sense that it should be properly integrated with the news desk.

Communication with the desk is essential in order to make the news operation an efficient one. I don’t have a lot of experience with them, but I can’t imagine the vast majority of news editors being too happy with a journalist breaking a story on Twitter and then strolling over and telling the desk about it a few minutes later.

Breaking news without context on Twitter holds little or no value for the journalist or his/her audience in itself. The value comes from using Twitter as the start of a narrative.

When I was covering the bomb blasts and shootings in Oslo, I started by using Storify to collect information and photos about events in the city centre. Then when people became aware of the shootings, I moved to turning my Twitter feed into one dedicated to covering new developments.

My follower count didn’t rise because I was constantly breaking new information on Twitter, but because I was able to organise it more efficiently into an understandable narrative than others covering it at the time. I didn’t retweet everything I saw, I thought carefully about how people following me would be able to easily understand what was happening.

Breaking news in itself holds little value – were my parents really any the worse for getting the full picture of the London riots on Newsnight rather than watching it unfold in real time on Twitter?

Passing lines to the news desk before tweeting makes good sense in a large organisation because the news desk is the hub that controls their coverage. They can distribute information to correspondents, multimedia specialists and graphics teams.

The ego of a single journalist itching to grab a bit of social media limelight should be able to bow to the collective nature of a news operation in order to strengthen its overall coverage. As Martin Belam notes, “being first really mattered when your rivals had a 24 hour print cycle before they could catch up”.

If anything, this shows that Sky would like to step away from the “never wrong for long” tag that indicates they’re happy to be wrong as long as they correct themselves quickly.

The BBC are rarely quicker than Sky when it comes to breaking news, but hold far more trust because they seem to pride context and verification much more. Is it a bad thing that Sky want to move toward this model more? I don’t think so.

Do not retweet information posted by other journalists or people on Twitter.

This is slightly more problematic, but I wouldn’t go as far as saying that it’s removing the social from social media. As a Sky News employee, I certainly wouldn’t have been able to cover Oslo or the riots in the way that I did if I’d adhered to this rule.

However, if you look at the social media usage of many journalists, they primarily use it as a promotional, rather than as a news gathering tool. Sky News’ new social media policy does not stop journalists from seeking out sources on Twitter, or finding photos that can be later added to strengthen news coverage. There are lots of journalists with big followings on Twitter, but only a fraction of them seem to use social media to actually dig things out and add another aspect to traditional sources.

If anything, the whole debate seems to be a microcosm of the divide that often seeks to engulf any rational discussion about online journalism. That is, if you don’t agree entirely with the popular view of mainstream media persistently “not getting it”, then you’re old news, you’re irrelevant, or Victorian.

I think it’s important to understand that there are many shades of grey – what works for Sky News wouldn’t work for Tech Crunch and vice versa. This policy is neither surprising nor as draconian as some commentators have implied – what’s more interesting will be observing if it becomes indicative of Sky News’ shift to a markedly different kind of news provider.

Why Google+ stands above other social networks

Google+ launched last week, and it was predictably oversubscribed within hours by geeks wanting to get a piece of Google’s latest foray into social networking. I created an account after about a day of the service going live, and so far I’m really impressed.

The first thing that I love about the service is that it allows me to choose who I distribute information to at the point of sharing. This means that I don’t have to set up my privacy settings in advance (a la Facebook) but can instead share things depending on who I’ve sorted into various ‘Circles’.

So far I’ve divided my contacts into Friends, Acquaintances, and Journalism. It means that I can share as much as possible without alienating any of the groups with potentially divisive content.

I often hold back from posting journalism-related links on Facebook, for the simple reason that people on my friend list don’t really care. In the same way that the average pub punter is unlikely to want to hear about the latest trend in digital journalism, your Facebook friends would rather generate conversations around socialising than anything professional.

What Google’s Circles feature allows me to do is, in essence, be all things to all people. I can post interesting links that will appeal to the ‘journalism’ Circle, and I can post Lolcats to the ‘friends’ Circle. Neither Circle will ever be aware of the others content, unless I explicitly specify before posting.

It’s a remarkably new and yet obvious way of sharing information, and it’s for that reason that I want to bring as many ‘normal’ people over to the service.

Robert Scoble writes:

“Come on now, we geeks and early adopters and social media gurus need a place to talk free of folks who think Justin Bieber is the second coming of Christ. That’s what we have in Google+ right now. Do we really want to mess that up?”

I don’t like the perception that everyone who isn’t a ‘social media guru’ shouldn’t be included or invited into Google+.

Twitter is blinkered and incestuous enough. Despite the great value and pleasure that I get from it, there’s no escaping the fact that many heavy Twitter users have a distinct set of values, interests and beliefs, which can lead to a delusion that what’s considered a norm by the Twitter crowd has resonance among a wider set of the population.

Google+ offers the best of both worlds through its selective sharing. Because what Google have created isn’t just a social network, it’s an entire platform that can be applied in so many more ways than Twitter or Facebook. Twitter does things like information gathering and crowdsourcing very well, and Facebook offers a great platform to share photos and memories with friends.

But neither offer the kind of thing that Google+ is now capable of. Google have built their entire adored toolset (Mail, Calendar, Documents, Photos, Reader) and now made it more shareable and accessible.

The Google toolbar hovers at the top of the screen, showing notifications in the top right corner, and allowing sharing from any Google site. You can post video, text, photos or location information to Google+ without even visiting the Plus homepage.

That means I can work on a collaborative Google document, publish it to the web and then instantly share with say, a ‘work’ Circle, so everyone can see the latest draft of what I’ve been writing. Again, a new way of doing things yet obvious and simple.

There are many more features to be discussed with regards to Google+, the potential of Sparks as a personalised newsfeed, video chat in Hangout and instant messaging in Huddle.

I’m sure that “How can journalists use it?” is a big one for many people.

For the moment, I think it offers promise and an exciting way of sharing information, but will ultimately sink or swim based on whether people who aren’t technologists, journalists or other media reptiles see any value in it.

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