Multi-Media Journalism

image courtesy of fotosearch.com

I was alarmed when reading an article on journalism.co.uk about the live reporting of a murder trial. Is it the ultimate show of democracy? The public can scrutinise everything said in the court room, making the process more accountable than ever.

Or is it simply glorifying the crime and punishment we watch on so many American television shows?

The ‘Cover It Live’ technology used to report the case allows for detailed information to be fed out about what is happening in the court room.

As technology advances and more opportunities arise for different styles of reporting, journalists will have to make legal and moral decisions to retain the integrity of the profession.

The UK contempt laws are similar to Australia’s, so the Liverpool reporters who were working on this murder trial story would legally have been allowed to report, as anything said in an open court is fair game.

However, I would be concerned that blogging live from a courtroom would give readers the impression they were getting the full court experience, when in fact only parts were being written about. And of course the dramatic ‘jury gasped’ and ‘victim’s mother sobbed’ are the parts that got the most coverage.

I think there is a possibility that it could damage the accused chances of a fair trail.

Live courtroom blogging shows another advance in the technological capabilities of a reporter’s toolkit, but should all new technology be used just because it’s there?

image courtesy of clker.com

This week I’m talking international news. Finding news stories written from another cultural perspective is not an easy task in mainstream media. Generally, cultural blinkers are put on all international news. I’m not saying this is good or bad, it’s just the default setting.

This is where blogs have found a hungry audience. The Internet provides an international platform for news and stories to be told from one side of the world to the other. If you know where to look.

Global Voices online is one service that attempts to guide blog readers towards the best posts daily, from all over the world.

It operates in many languages and has experts who nominate good blogs from their countries everyday. The website aims to address the information overload (discussed in my last post,) by separating the worthy blog reads from the cyber rubbish.

Even youtube is embracing the rise of news postings on the internet. Laura Oliver wrote on journalism.co.uk about the new youtube reporter channel involving both ametuer and professional journalists.

She went as far as to say the channel could ‘provide a collaborative solution to the decline in traditional foreign correspondents’.

The internet is slowly changing the meaning of international news. It allows more people from more backgrounds to contribute to discussions on important issues. The cultural blinkers are starting to fall away.

In my previous posts I’ve mentioned ‘storybuilding,’ and how the Internet can allow a story to grow as more information comes in, unlike the traditional newspaper that published a single insular story.

I was wandering, (I don’t surf, I wander), through Jeff Jarvis’ blog today ‘Buzz Machine’, and found some interesting discussion on this idea.

He quite simply states that journalism is a ‘process not a product’ (Oct 17 post). The recent financial crisis has shown how this process is important as the story is just too big to understand in a three minute clip on television.

The focus of journalism may no longer be in the finished article, but in the way the audience gets the story. In other words, the journey, not the destination is what’s important in modern news telling.

Now every story is multifaceted: there’s the initial story, then links, video, feed, narrative, comment and corrections. It makes sense that trying to tie up all the loose ends of every story for publication is not natural.

However following through with this idea would turn every story into a wiki, which defeats the prime purpose of news as telling the audience the important facts. Endless stories would not help the information overload that we can experience on the Internet today.

I suppose every story must end somewhere. Although I like the idea of Internet storybuilding as a flexible and interactive tool, are we making news more complicated than it should be?

image courtesy Karen Jenkins

A mobile phone with high quality video, instant live uploads onto the internet, and complete freedom in where and when you can shoot and broadcast. It sounds too good to be true. I know my mobile phone can’t do that.

Lucky my mobile phone can’t do that actually. I’d still be trying to pay last February’s phone bill.

Although Australia’s lack of any unlimited monthly data plans on mobile services makes the mobile journalism revolution more expensive than in other countries, the joys of mobile journalism, (or MoJo), cannot be denied.

For the journalist looking for more efficient news gathering techniques, the development of small multimedia phones, or smart phones, are prompting change in journalistic storytelling.

MoJo Robert Scoble says the phone ‘put a TV studio in my pocket’. Initial stories completed with the phones are less than perfect, but the development of phone adapted tripods and better lighting will make the benefits of an unobtrusive camera and intimate interviewing style more clear.

Reuters plans to give citizen journalists smart phones, giving the news agency extended news gathering scope, without the expense of funding more news bureaus.

This leads me to wonder if MoJo’s may start to cover parts of the globe that were previously neglected by the news radar (such as the south pacific islands). At least it seems certain that MoJo’s will be able to access stories that were out of reach not so long ago.

The lines are blurring between different types of media: internet television, television internet, who knows?

There is a growing trend of blogs incorporating video to the extent where the images are in fact what tells the story, relying little on the written words.

True, some video bloggers, (or vlogger’s) films would not inspire praise or return visits from viewers, but there are some vlogs that cater to a niche market, providing information and entertainment we cannot get anywhere else.

Producing and editing video was traditionally time consuming and expensive, and without the right tools the result was less than professional. However with digital video and advances in software, the moving image has become a more accessible story telling tool.

It’s not just photo gallery tools that are available for free on the internet (see my September 2 post), but user friendly video editing software. Windows Movie Maker is an example of a free download which is capable of producing quality final edits of videos which can be published online.

A poignant example of the value of vlogs is Alive in Baghdad, it has stories from Iraq that would never have been broadcast in another format.

vlogger image courtesy of concurringopinions.com

Television is pervasive and influential, but the vlog could provide a quick little antidote to the mass media agenda. It has all the addictive features of TV, but with more varied and independent producers.

Like South Korea, Singapore is launching itself to the forefront of communication technology, utilising widespread quality broadband and mobile service throughout the country to deliver news.

What’s particularly interesting in Singapore’s case is the government’s dedication to developing itself as Asia’s leading media marketplace, through the Media 21 development program. It is not just businesses that are embracing the potential of media; the government is clearly viewing the industry as a big part of the nation’s future economy.

Singapore Press Holdings runs a successful site dedicated to user generated content, known as STOMP. The description sounds similar to OhMyNews, but it is much less formal and there’s a few interesting differences.

STOMP has evolved as a social network with a STOMP football group, STOMP outings, and STOMP tuition groups. It shows how interaction through the telling and receiving of news can provide a sense of belonging. It holds the audiences interest for longer than traditional papers, which people would read but not feel a part of. Articles on this site have provoked change in concerning public issues, giving contributors a sense of empowerment.

Also it’s affiliation to a string of SPH owned newspapers mean that public contributions can end up in mainstream media: this organization now has a simple way of collecting news from everywhere and anyone. SPH certainly recognises the appeal of interactive news sites, and is making the most of professional and citizen news contributions. Is this the news structure of the future?

With just a little bit of know how, low budget and no budget news websites can produce professional looking pages that bring them into line with their heavy-weight competitors.

Who needs a snazzy web designer with a four year degree when the tools for a news web site’s success are right there, available for free on the internet.

Maybe this is the opinion of the big wigs at Fairfax who have just decided to scrap 550 jobs throughout their media organisation. (Although I’d like to see what would happen if the CEO tried to run The Age website for a day! Note my experiment with Picassa below.)

The availability of free photo gallery tools such as Picasa, Bubbleshare and SlideFlickr make telling news stories online more efficient and most importantly they save space.

A slide show allows a homepage to have more attention grabbing pictures, with less scrolling. Imagine if a traditional newspaper could fit ALL its top stories onto the front page without looking cluttered.

This tool is suited perfectly to internet news. It can assist in ‘storybuilding’, as journalists can upload photos to be added directly to the slide show of their story, updating throughout the day.

Just visit the Herald Sun or The Australian homepage and you’ll see how this handy technique is used to great effect.

New tools are making Internet news more efficient and more affordable to produce; levelling the playing field between the big organisations and the small news sites.

There is a problem with having almost any piece of information available over the Internet. How do we comprehend and manage all the facts, figures, pictures, graphs and fibs we can access?

A new sort of software, RSS, is attempting to handle this information overload. It scans the headlines of sites chosen by the user, and delivers directly to their computer. No more searching numerous sites, if the headline grabs the user they are linked straight to that website. Wow, those headlines better be catchy. And newspapers worldwide are catching on.

New sources for journalists are emerging, such as Twitter, a micro-blogging service where people can post quick short updates. Breaking news is likely to be found on services like this.

The key to all these new technologies is efficiency, but can we lose quality and accuracy in our rush for the story?

Well yes, I think we can. Just look at Terry Lane.  But there are some ways to assess the quality of information found on the internet.

Always look for author contact details, earlier dates of registration and good spelling and grammar on blogs, and this integrity scale can help determine the quality of websites.

Reliability may always be an issue with Internet sources, hell I’m still not allowed to quote them in half my university essays, but the Internet is the library of the future and we can’t ignore its vast (and ever more manageable) resources.

Image courtesy of twitter.com

A trend is emerging that has news professionals quaking in their self-important boots. Someone seems to have realised that journalists are people too. Therefore it is logical that people can be journalists. This doesn’t look good for me, an aspiring professional journo. Oh Yeon-ho is the man who embraced this idea and created OhmyNews.com, a South Korean news website run entirely by citizen journalists.

These citizens are payed US $2- $50 per article, and contribute to the site for the thrill, prestige, and to get their story heard and peer reviewed at a professional level. The site attracts at least 700,000 repeat viewers each day.

Often the media is accused of telling audiences what to think. OhmyNews provides a legitimate platform to respond and publicise neglected stories or perspectives.

As someone who’s nearing the end of a three year journalism degree, I can understand concerns that the accountability and ethics of news may be affected by untrained news gatherers. However, unlike doctors or lawyers, there has never been a clear qualification that allows a person to claim the title of journalist, (other than a good grasp of language).

Maybe we were trying to make an exclusive profession out of something that should always have been accessible to every member of society.

OhmyNews requires all contributors to sign a code of ethics, similar to the ‘professional’ code, which aims to deter unethical journalism. This may not be foolproof, but even the professionals don’t offer a great deal more.

Oh Yeon-ho, CEO and founder of OhmyNews.

Photo courtesy of the Sunday Times Online.

It’s time to get down to business.  Over previous weeks I’ve been clamouring on about the future of journalism on the internet. That’s all very well, but how can news which is provided for free on the net make the money needed to support quality journalism? You’re all thinking ‘helloooo…advertising obviously’.

Well you’re right, to an extent. Advertising on popular news sites will certainly provide some revenue, but newspapers really haven’t worked out a way to tame the beast that is internet classifieds. Newspaper classifieds were rivers of gold, the main money maker. Now with CareerOne, Seek, and carsales just a click away, the need for newspaper classifieds (and the online version of these) is dwindling.

Yet we can cling to a skerrick of hope for the future of journalism. Fred Wilson points out some ways to make money around free content in his article on wired.com. Maybe Dad was right, nothing is ever really free.

The fact is that advertisers will pay for publicity: views, clicks, links, transactions, banner ads, endorsements, and any bit of attention they can grab in between. There could be enough new advertising opportunities created by the internet to offset the loss of classifieds. Only time will tell if the ever growing internet news platform can reflect its popularity in gleaming gold.

Check out cyberjournlaist and this interesting interview with The Guardian’s Roy Greenslade for more about the financial shortfalls of online news so far.