web / startups / new technologies

This article is a part of May’s Carnival of Journalism hosted by Ryan Sholin over at the Invisible Inkling.

This month we have a theme! What do news organizations have to stop doing in order to find time to innovate? Here are my three tips.

1. Stop Playing Catchup

I find too many news organizations just want to play catchup. Some other newspaper has a blog so they must start one. Some other magazine uses Twitter so they must use Twitter, without stopping to think is this useful for our readers, is this what they want and is this really an innovation? I find one too many news organizations use Twitter for press releases rather than conversations and thus they miss the point, they haven’t innovated they’ve followed the pack and gone down the wrong path. Others are somewhere in between like the Nashua Telegraph (reported on journalism.co.uk) which is using Twitter to feed out breaking news but even this is not a “real innovation”.  News organizations should never be driven to do something simply because other people are. If this was the case how would we ever hear dissenting views and get a true appreciation of news.

Here’s a tip, scale back your 6 blogs, have 1 and let all your reporters and correspondents write posts on the news gathering issues, the problems journalists face, the human side of the news and reports on the issues that couldn’t quite make it into print. Disseminate the little nuggets on Twitter and the meatier stuff on the blog. But let it be led by a strategy and a mission, please don’t make it a dumping ground.

2. Stop Trying to be First

This may sound like anathema to a seasoned journalist, breaking stories is what news organizations are supposed to do. But let’s look at the Economist, probably the last major printed publication apart from the FT that’s actually increasing in circulation. This publication has withdrawn itself from the battle to be first and has concentrated on analysis. This goes back to previous comments I have made about how news is cheap and ubiquitous, value is now in opinions, analysis and personalities. That’s not to say big major stories should be ignored. Clearly not, but breaking the latest primary result will mean less to me than an analysis of the voting patterns, what it means for each candidate and what is likely to happen in the future.

3. Behave like a Technology company

I am admittedly biased, I love technology companies but there are many lessons I feel news organizations can learn. When I think of the amount of data someone like the guardian has it astounds me and yet I don’t see them using it very much. Why haven’t they got a Facebook Lexicon/Google Trends analysis of their stories? I’d love to see that. So how should news organizations use this data? Firstly a deep analysis of their web analytics to see how users respond to different areas of the site and evolving their sites to match what I like to call the “silent user feedback”. Secondly, as I mentioned above, using their existing data to pull out interesting innovations. I think news organizations still see themselves solely as content producers but things are changing. As time goes by, they will also become technology companies.

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This article is apart of the Carnival of Journalism. This month it is hosted by Editor on the Verge, Yoni Greenbaum. 

Of late I have been thinking about the future of news wire services. I think what makes them great is their ability to get a scoop and send reports on news items few other news organisations could hope to gather. However, I’ve been wondering how long this advantage will remain thanks to services like Twitter.

Now most of the stuff on twitter is noise. Random musings about the weather or some mundane event, but every now and then a story breaks. Just like the earthquake that happened in the north of England a few months back. Services are now being developed to parse out the noise from Twitter and present the news. Scoopler.com is the first that comes to mind and in the long term it could be in a position to out outscoop the news wire services. So what next?

Twitter does not make money and many of the services on top of Twitter seem unlikely to make money however, if Scoopler and others consider charging a subscription for this breaking information they could be on to a winner and in the meantime land a damaging blow to the news wire services industry.

Brilliant design, cool music, amazing set up. I wonder how long until the record labels beat a path to their door….

Hello everyone, I was commissioned to write an opinion article on the future of citizen journalism for journalism.co.uk which is probably the best site in the world dedicated to journalism. I think its better than poynter. here is the link for my article…

I’ve finally jumped on the twitter bandwagon and I am loving every second. Its true what they say, you dont know how good it is until you actually use it. I only have one problem with twitter. When you update twitter and connect it with your facebook update status it starts off with “is twittering”. e.g. john is twittering:…. Its a bloody annoyance. On the Twitter Application Facebook Page, they say they will remove it when Facebook removes the “is” in the update status. Facebook has now removed this but twitter has not budged. Why don’t they listen to their users? Poor, Poor Poor.

Follow the debate here….

Terribly smug and somewhat harsh. As a mac user, I just find it funny. This is one of my favs, funny and true!

Mac vs PC

Thanks to WebUrbanist for this……