The experiment is taking place under Pool, the social media project developed within Radio National. Pool is a groundbreaking experiment in User Generated Content. Users can upload text, music, photos, videos, documentaries or whatever and the content is made available for others to view and use. It’s worth taking a look, or you can read more about it here.

Tentatively, the team opening up the archives plans to start in Darwin in the next few weeks with the release under an open licence of a small amount of footage. The plan is to then move into other areas, slowly releasing slices of archive content. Says Social Media Producer Kate Gauld:

Releasing the archives under open licences is the goal. The platform for the release (and inviting back  reused/remixed/repurposed material) will be Pool. The theme we choose (Darwin, censorship, oldest archives etc) is just a way to isolate a tiny slice in a very large pie (perhaps we could crowdsource where to look next?!).

The project is part of a wider initiative by Creative Archive Australia – a program of the Queensland University of Technology’s Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation) to investigate the feasibility of opening up material from government institutions. The ABC project will be the first “test case”.

It’s an expansion on the theme of Media as Application – something I blogged on last week.

And for the ABC, it is one part of the ongoing issue of how to preserve the credibility of the brand, and at the same time become a more porous and interactive institution (in fact, less of an institution and more of a space).

The ABC released a Discussion Paper on User Generated Content last year. I gather that we will be seeing some results, in the way of new Editorial Guidelines for UGC, before too long. Should be interesting

]]> http://blogs.crikey.com.au/contentmakers/2009/01/05/abc-opens-its-archives-slowly/feed/ 7 http://blogs.crikey.com.au/contentmakers/2009/01/02/the-content-makers-one-month-of-operation-and-going-ok/ http://blogs.crikey.com.au/contentmakers/2009/01/02/the-content-makers-one-month-of-operation-and-going-ok/#comments Fri, 02 Jan 2009 05:29:15 +0000 Margaret Simons http://blogs.crikey.com.au/contentmakers/?p=226 I’ve said elsewhere that one of the reasons I am doing this blog is to experiment with the efficacy and sustainability of serving news and views to a niche audience online – the niche audience in this case being journalists, media workers and those who are interested in them. Meta-journalism, if you like.

Well, its been just under a month since the first post on this blog, and you can read my Google Analytics report here.

Given that this is a start-up publication, I think I’m doing okay.

Traffic has slowed over the holiday period, but is by not miserable. Some people never rest! (although you can see the hollow spots on the weekends).

The peaks in traffic through December are notable, coinciding with NEWS – about Sue Howard’s departure from the ABC, and Peter Fray’s succession at Fairfax. Even the posts in which I said that Peter Fray was saying nothing got a lot of traffic. (Thanks Peter. Imagine what we could do if you actually said something!)

Google Analytics also tells me a bit about where the traffic is coming from. My biggest single source is, as you would expect, the Crikey.com.au site which drove almost 65 per cent of the traffic. Next comes Google searches, with search terms like”,mark scott christmas message” “sue howard”, “peter fray”, “alan oakley” and “bruce guthrie” driving significant amounts of traffic.

I am glad to say that over ten per cent of my traffic comes direct to me – meaning that people must deliberately bookmark or visit the site.This seems to be growing fast, which is pleasing.

Mentions on Larvatus Prodeo and my Twitter feeds (user name MargaretSimons) each drove about two per cent of traffic.

But these monthly figures don’t tell the whole story, because the pattern was changing quite fast as people got to know about the site, and there was a lot of variation depending on what news I had on the day.

There were days when visitors from inside the ABC made up to 80 per cent of my traffic. Likewise visitors from inside News Limited and Fairfax were in the majority on certain days. (Just to reassure you all – Google tells me the location of the network you are using – not the identity of your computer!)

And the peaks in traffic tell their own story. Breaking news, albeit news that is of interest only to certain journalists, drove my traffic figures above 1000 visits. On one day, almost all of these were from inside the ABC!

Let me know if this is boring, but if there is some interest, I’ll keep you tabbed.

“THE Israeli government escalated its PR war this morning when it held a world first “Citizens’ Press Conference” about the Gaza incursion, inviting the world to ask questions on social networking site Twitter.

Even before its scheduled start time questions were being asked of the New York Consulate General of Israel’s representative on Twitter, within minutes questions began flooding in and, by the end of the two-hour session, Consul of Media and Public Affairs David Saranga had been peppered with at least 400 questions from all over the world, including Australians who were up before 4am (Queensland time) to take part.”

Read more

Stanford University is re-deploying its famous mid-career Knight journalism fellowships to drive a shift towards innovation and entrepreneurship.

The Fellowship website states:

“The program is transforming itself in order to serve the needs of journalism and journalists as much in the years ahead as it has in the past. The dizzying landscape of layoffs and consolidation, Internet media sites, citizen journalism and bloggers make journalism a chaotic and exciting proposition today. We are making bold changes to meet these new realities.”

The Stanford fellowships have a small but significant place in Australian journalism history. During the late 1980s and early 1990s leading editors at Fairfax, including Michael Smith, Malcolm Schmidtke (now at the Herald Sun) and Bill Birnbauer (now at Monash University) had periods at Stanford. Some of the world’s best journalists have done likewise.

Jay Rosen, the new media guru from New York University, has posted an interview with Fellowship Director Jim Bettinger, on the reasons for the change. Partly, according to Rosen, it is the uncomfortable fact that applications are dropping because US journalists are too scared to take a sabbatical, in case the jobs aren’t there when they return.

But Bettinger also says its about trying to solve the problems, and seize the opportunities:

“We will be expecting fellows to come with a particular journalism problem, challenge or opportunity that they want to work on during the year, and to have something to show for it, which we will then publish on our website so that others can use it. Our idea is that these results would be replicable, scalable and open-source: It could be putting on a symposium, which we would record and post. Or it could be guidelines to using new digital or other tools for better storytelling in a specific realm, like foreign correspondence. Or maybe the beginnings of a business plan template for independent publishing. We’ll see.”

Bettinger’s blog, which includes a video interview about the changes, is here.

Now, when people have said things like this to me in the past, I have ended up asking questions like: “Yes, but how would it be different? What exactly do you mean?”

Well, thanks to Elias Bizannes I have been alerted, rather late in the day, to an example: big media as a combination of platform and network. Not only digging up information, but also making it available for interrogation, use and even mash-up by others.

The example I am talking about is the move by the New York Times to launch an  API based on campaign finance data to allow users to construct their own analyses based on candidate, zip code, whatever. The Times describes the project thus:

“With the Campaign Finance API, you can retrieve contribution and expenditure data based on United States Federal Election Commission filings. Campaign finance data is public and is therefore available from a variety of sources, but the developers of the Times API have distilled the data into aggregates that answer most campaign finance questions. Instead of poring over monthly filings or searching a disclosure database, you can use the Times Campaign Finance API to quickly retrieve totals for a particular candidate, see aggregates by ZIP code or state, or get details on a particular donor.

The Campaign Finance API is currently limited to presidential campaign data. Future versions will include house and senate campaign data.”

The Times says it plans more APIs, including ones based on congressional votes.

So what are the Australian applications? Well, the campaign finance documentation might not be it, given that the Australian Electoral Commission already has a pretty spivvy database.

But let’s say a media organisation with local and regional presence – such as the ABC or the Fairfax Media/ Rural Press conglomerate – provided the public with an interrogatable  database on how their councillors have voted on every issue. Or on every development and developer operating in the area. Or on the detail of local government budgets, road funding by state government, expenditure on health, key health data such as life expectancy and disease rates by postcode – you get the idea.

Or perhaps something could be done with a combination of politicians’ registers of pecuniary interest, and company search data available through the Australian Securities and Investment Commission, plus data from Land Titles Offices.

Or for less weighty matters, look at the New York Times’ API based on Movie Reviews. Perhaps the ABC’s several book and movie related programs could do something like this?

Moving beyond journalism, might the day come when the archives of an organisation like the ABC are made available for others to use in creating new drama from pastiches of old? Would we want it, if so?

Other ideas, please!

I disagree with elements of Young’s essentialy pessimistic analysis. She says:”Even though we are spending more time with media today, we’re spending less time on news,” and backs this up with figures on declining newspaper sales and declining and ageing  audiences for television and radio news and current events.

My main point of disagreement is the definition of news. If you define news as that which is put out by big media companies, then the picture is grim. But that definition is circular.

The decline of mass media does not necessarily mean the decline of news. Indeed, it would be strange if this were so. Gathering and passing on news is a basic human activity. It preexisted literacy, printing and broadcasting. It will outlive them, I believe. But what we think of as “news” has changed in the past and will change in the future.

Jan Schaffer, the US Pulitizer Prize winner who now runs J-Lab, talks about “news ecologies” that are developing, using online social networks among other things. News is no longer only that which is put out by journalists. (In fact, it never was, but we were able to kid ourselves…)

The young people I know are very well informed indeed about the things that interest them. On other things, they may not have the kind of broad yet superficial knowledge that comes from reading a daily newspaper or watching a television newscast. Yet they are able to bring themselves up to speed with astonishing rapidity when they want to.

For example, a twenty something friend of mine who has taught me much of what I know about new media might not know why Australia intervened in East Timor, but if he wanted to know, he might do some of the following things: Post a question on the issue in Facebook or some other social networking site, and follow the links provided in the responses. He might perhaps join a group concerned with East Timor on Facebook. he might look on Twitter for members who know about or are interested in East Timor, and “Follow” their posts. These Twitter posts would lead him to other sources of information – blogs, academic articles and the like.

He would Google, and the Google search would send him to many places: some established media sites, but also to lobby groups and special interest groups and East Timor based bloggers. And that’s all without even mentioning Wikipedia.

Meanwhile there are many things that he hears about long before they make it into the newspapers and television news broadcasts. For example, he was telling me about this story to do with Google’s Chrome browser controversy in great depth a clear week before it made page three of the Age. He heard about it from a friend online, and a visit to a few sites gave him an in depth briefing from international expert sources in moments.

He was also able to tell me, earlier this year, that the later episodes of the TV series Underbelly were available online at a time when Channel Nine was protesting to me and other journalists that this could not possibly be so, because the episodes in question were not even out of the production suite. Foolishly, I trusted Channel Nine and not my friend. He turned out to be right – something he has not stopped rubbing in. Thus his online knowledge undermined, or could have undermined, the claims of corporate PR.

Young writes about the internet, but makes the rather dismissive observation that young people use the internet for “email, socialising …doing homework/research”.  Yet all these activities are often ways of accessing  and disseminating news. Young acknowledges this possibility, but then dismisses it by saying that figures suggest that when citizens search for news online, three fifths of their searches are for the names of familiar news outlets, rather than searches by news topic. Once again, the circular definition.

Yet research by Hitwise here in Australia shows that when a topic is in the news, there are clear “spikes” in the number of searches on the topic – and the traffic from these searches goes in all directions. Hitwise figures also show that of the traffic to print news sites 13.34 comes from Google topic searches. Social networking sites are also becoming significant drivers of traffic to both traditional news sites and news-based blogs. I’ve written more on social networking as a driver of news and other media consumption here .

Certainly there is cause for concern about the loss of  broad knowledge of current events. But we do also need to acknowledge that the concept what is news, and what consitutes current events, may need re-examining. After all, before the printing press “news” was what happened locally or could be passed by word of mouth, and “current events” did not really exist in the same way it does now.

We are living through a change at least equivalent to the invention of the printing press. It isn’t sufficient to say “this is what has been news, and this is declining, therefore news is declining”.

If I may (modestly) give an example. Four weeks ago this blog, which is mainly a source of news on media with an emphasis on journalists, did not exist. I gather my information from friends, colleagues, and the usual journalistic trick of wearing out the telephone keypad and some shoe leather. The audience at this stage is only just over a thousand strong – nearly all media workers or those closely interested in media. Before this blog came in to being that audience did not exist as a single, identifiable entity. I am glad to report that it is growing strongly, and there is no doubt that what drives site traffic most is news – about internecine ABC disputes, who is going to be the next editor of the Sydney Morning Herald, and so forth. Stuff that would not interest the great majority of the population, but does interest this audience-in-the-making.

Media workers being what they are, they gossip, and the contents of that gossip both finds its way on to this site (if I can verify it) and is also fuelled by this site. Bloggers link to this site. I link to bloggers.  When I have some news here, I Twitter about it, and Twitterers re-tweet my posts. And so it goes on. What I am doing here is news, yet it looks nothing like any traditional news source. The audience is niche, but if I do my job properly it will be intensely engaged. The boundary between “source” and “audience” is more than usually blurred.

This is my own little meta-journalism experiment.

More in the future on questions such as: “can serving an Australian niche audience pay enough to make it worthwhile”.

Sigh.

*Declaration: Inside Story is published at the Institute for Social Research, Swinburne University of Technology, where I am employed part time.

While I know we are going through a period of paradigm shift, with all the distress and chaos that implies, I think the future contains more threat than opportunity.

Which is why today I want to write about a new web based Australian publication that has started quietly in the last few months, built for nothing using open source blogging software, and kicking arse in the content department.

The publication is Inside Story.

Now, before I go on, I should declare that I have a number of conflicts here. The founder and editor of Inside Story is a mate, Peter Browne, who has also in the dim and distant past been my publisher. Browne is well known to journalists, having once edited Australian Society magazine, (that later became Modern Times), worked at the ABC and also presided over the UNSW Press’s short series of Briefings books.

Another conflict: Inside Story comes out of the Institute for Social Research at Swinburne University, where I am employed part time. Also, I have written for it and expect to do so again.

So, take all that into account when I say that I think this publication is a prime example of what can now be done with very little, how it is possible with almost no publicity to get noticed and read by a small but engaged audience, and, forsooth, that the decline of newspapers is not necessarily the end of intelligent material on issues of current affairs, written in an accessible fashion.

I won’t go on about the content. Have a look for yourself. It is international, thoughtful and falls nicely between journalism and the academy. Writers include David Corlett, Peter Mares and Geoffrey Barker.

Inside Story had a soft launch in October. It wasn’t really meant to attract much attention. Browne was negotiating a regular print outlet as a partner to run the best articles from the site. The Australian National University were talking about coming in with more funds. He was waiting for those moves to come off before making a big noise.

Yet despite getting almost no publicity Inside Story – which is free to read – already has 1837 subscribers, and around five and a half thousand page views a week.

What’s more, a number of its major articles have been picked up by the mainstream media. Three pieces have been reprinted in the Canberra Times, and one in The Age. Two authors have been interviewed about their pieces on Radio National, and another piece, Xan Rice’s “The Mobiliser”, an extraordinary first person account of the end of a Sudanese refugee camp, is shortly to be reprinted in the New Statesman.

Browne built the site himself, for free, using the open source Wordpress blogging software. For copy he draws on Swinburne University’s network of researchers, as well as his own contacts in journalism and publishing.

What is more, Inside Story pays its contributors on a sliding scale. Less for salaried academics, and rates for freelance journalists that are not laughable by industry standards – not that the pot of money is unlimited.

I think this is the real divider between the various online publications. Those that pay have some hope of sustaining high quality copy. Those that don’t become aggregators of stuff produced elsewhere, and forums for the intensely involved and interested, rather than for disinterested journalism.

The fact that Inside Story can pay is, of course, a product of its home inside the university sector – but if the American experiments teach us anything, it is that universities are one of the places where high quality journalism might have to be incubated and reinvented while new business models emerge.

So, amid all the gloom, it pays sometimes to look at the new things that are happening, and could not happen, without the new technology.

More on new and hopeful things in the week ahead, if I have time away from reporting gloom and collapse.