Help Me Explain Twitter to Eggheads

New media academic Jay Rosen, whose presence on Twitter is one of the main reason I am there too, is writing an article for the Chronicle of Higher Education about why he is on Twitter. He has asked for help from readers of his blog, and followers of his Twitter feed. The resulting post and comments make an interesting read, and an interesting article in the making.

More Negative Press for O’Reilly

Roy Greenslade predicts that Tony O’Reilly will have to get used to some negative press, and questions whether he will be able to maintain his hold in The Independent newspaper. The profile Greenslade links to, from the Financial Times contains nothing about O’Reilly’s Australian setbacks – the announcement last November that his debt-laden Independent News and Media would sell its stake in APN News and Media, and the reports last month that he is having trouble finding a buyer.

Seems like only yesterday (but in fact January 2007) that O’Reilly was trying to buy out the other shareholders in APN, and there were mutterings that he might want to make bigger moves in media once the foreign ownership regulations were relaxed. All that came to nothing. If the economic times were better, perhaps it would be clearer where APN, with its Classic Hits and Mix FM Radio brands and stable of regional daily newspapers, would end up. As it is, nothing is clear.

A stuff up at the Tele.

Lastly, what a stuff up at the Daily Telegraph. Tim Burrowes reports at MUmBRELLA that the Tele managed to get its weekend television listings entirely arse-about in Saturday’s paper, apparently reprinting a guide from some time last year.

According to the Tele, Big Brother (which you may recall was axed after its last series) is at the heart of tonight’s schedule for Ten, with showings at 7pm and 10pm, wrapped around the premiere of How To Look Good Naked. Meanwhile, fans of Media Watch will be glad to see that that’s on the ABC, along, apparently, with an unexpected return for More Than Enough Rope from Andrew Denton.

Oh deary me….

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/2008/12/30/media-as-application-the-ny-times/ http://blogs.crikey.com.au/contentmakers/2008/12/30/media-as-application-the-ny-times/#comments Tue, 30 Dec 2008 00:26:12 +0000 Margaret Simons http://blogs.crikey.com.au/contentmakers/?p=201 Yesterday in my post about Radio National I tentatively suggested that a new media strategy for the national broadcaster might mean more than new delivery platforms. That it might mean a rethink of how the content is conceived and created.The point doesn’t only apply to the ABC, of course. The same is true of all Big Media.

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!

How do we know? Not thanks to the mainstream media, but because of Twitter and the blogosphere, including young media workers who are below the radar of most mainstream journalists.

The person who was threatened, new-media-man-about-the-web Nick Holmes a Court, is not the first nor the most vulnerable citizen ever to have alleged police abuse of power.  Yet the way this story broke is not only an interesting example of how new media can work faster than some journalists. More important, it shows that in this new world we are not alone any more, even late at night and on the street. We are not only citizens, we are networked citizens, or can choose to be so, and this is a powerful thing.

So what happened? Holmes a Court was near his Potts Point apartment when he saw police apparently conducting a search. He started to film them on his Blackberry, and they responded by threatening him with arrest, seizing his Blackberry, deleting the video and scanning his emails, text messages and contacts.

Initially shocked, Holmes a Court told his extended online network about this experience almost straight away – by posting a message on Twitter, where he writes as @nickhac. If you are on Twitterh and follow nickhac, you can read that Tweet, lodged at 10.42pm on December 19, here.

From here, his story was picked up by his fellows interested in new media. I first heard about it when Ben Grubb, an eighteen year old who runs a web hosting business on the Sunshine Coast, blogged about it here. He followed up with a podcast interview of Holmes a Court. (Today, Grubb is boasting that his coverage of the issue has led to 10,522 unique visitors to his site.)

I knew Grubb slightly, having met him at a Future of Journalism conference in Melbourne a few weeks ago. While middle aged journos like me were winging about our disappearing jobs, he gave us an example of someone acting as a journalist and with a job in new media without ever having been on the payroll of a mainstream organisation. I am not even sure he has left school yet.

Having been alerted by Grubb, and on the eve of going on holiday, I posted about the story here and here, encouraging journos to follow up.

I am glad to say they did – not thanks to me necessarily, but simply because they were linked and networked with the places where the story was being discussed.  Fellow Twitterer and Courier Mail journalist  David Earley was first and fastest. Despite holidays and the like, he did this story, which got on to news.com.au.

The Sydney Morning Herald then did this follow up a day later, written by another young journo with a presence on Facebook, the blogosphere and elsewhere. (Sadly it managed to get Holmes a Court’s name wrong, calling him Nick Hac, which is a version of his Twitter username.  Strange, given that his family of origin – yes, those Holmes a Courts – is surely one of the potential news angles.)

Holmes a Court has lodged a formal complaint with police, and doubtless we will hear more – if we Twitter and read blogs.

In his latest comment on Grubb’s site Holmes a Court says:

You are right in many regards, my story is representative of only one side of the event. And I’m sure the officer on the other side of the table would say i was being a jerk. Quite frankly i wasn’t respecting their “authoritah” and probably valued my own civil liberties above them getting the job done. A debatable topic.

I wholly admit – was probably being a bit cheeky when i decided to film them. And to be honest I was deliberately making a point about the rights of the citizens to “police the police”. I didn’t expect the reaction I received though.…

All this has caused me to reflect. I have written elsewhere about other people – neighbours of mine -  who allege police abuse of power, and who have been terribly badly treated at the hands of the media.

So much so, in fact, that I have at timeshaad to remind myself of what is good about journalism.

Now I am wondering if my neighbours would have emerged in better shape had they been on Twitter, armed with a mobile phone that also took video, and with a bevy of media-savvy young people among their followers.

In other words, with the ability to get their story out there before the network of professional copy-hungry journos and their too-close-for-comfort police sources get to work.

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.

Following on from my post about the things we need to learn from talk-back radio, I have been contacted by Julie Posetti of the University of Canberra, who with Jacqui Ewart (Griffith Uni) has been researching Australian talkback radio for the past 12 months as part of a federally funded project. You can read about the project here.

The research is based on an examination of 12 stations in four states conducted through discussion groups with callers and listeners as well as interviews with about 30 presenters and producers.: Posetti says the results show that many forms of talkback “defy shock-jockery and its divisive effects.”

The positive shows include talk back on ABS, SBS and community stations, but also commercial shows led by journalism-oriented presenters, she says.

“We’ve also identified the role of talkback as the original form of Citizen Journalism and web 2.0 social media (Facebook and Twitter with voice!) and its capacity to build new, younger audiences through engagement with blogging, online social networking and other tech., spelling a future for radio.”

The research is in the process of being published. You can hear what Posetti told Radio National’s Media Report and SBS here and here.

Posetti says:

“By way of aside, the trigger for this research was the role of talkback in the Cronulla Riots and its place in a culturally diverse society. But when we referenced research on Alan Jones’ role in this context, Department of Immigration bureaucrats connected with the project attempted to ‘censor’ our work Further evidence of the enduring power of Jones and the political significance of talkback, perhaps. But, as our research indicates, he may be a talkback dinosaur and the future of talkback is rich in potential.”

She promises to keep us informed.

My take was that talk radio, particularly talk-back radio, will do well. Music radio will die, and indeed is already dead for most people under thirty. Long-form talk and documentary will have a bright future, but probably more in podcast and streaming, rather than traditional broadcast. (At least, once we get a National Broadband Network that means country people can stream and podcast. It will happen – one day.)

Lots of people I know blanch at the mention of talk back radio, let alone the suggestion that it might have a longer future on the airwaves than Radio National’s more tasteful, substantial and in depth offerings.

I can understand the attitude. Alan Jones brings me out in a rash as well. (You can read what I thought of Chris Masters’ biography of the man here). There is something truly awful about a Demigod of radio in full flight.

But that’s not the whole of the story, as academic Graeme Turner has detailed. Talk back includes the good, as well as the bad and the ugly.

I think that the Demigods have lessons to teach those of us who are interested in new ways forward for media and journalism. We need to overcome the aversion to the ugly side, and look at why talkback is successful and likely to survive.

The truth is that it is fitted for the times. Talk back radio is interactive. It relies on User Generated Content. It gives the impression, if not the reality, of giving the ordinary person a say.

If we really believe in democratising media then we can’t turn away just because not all the views expressed agree with our own.

The other lesson is about voice.Talk back radio demigods are personalities. They don’t use the faux objective voice of most news reportage.

That faux objective voice is one of the things I think won’t survive the next couple of decades. While disinterested journalism is important, I don’t have much affection for the kind of “objectivity” that relies on ringing the usual suspects, having each of them say exactly what you would expect them to say, and then reporting so blandly that nobody could possibly accuse you of bias – or, indeed, of having any sense of judgement or insight. Objectivity has to mean something other than being predictable. Supposed journalistic objectivity has to mean more than being predictable,  without anyone ever questioning why those people were rung, and not these.

Successful talk back radio anchors have a voice, a believable persona. They are prepared to lose some skin in public debates – unlike some journalists, who can’t tolerate being questioned in the public realm, (something I have written about elsewhere before).

Of course I would like all radio demigods to use their power responsibly, and behave honestly, and be clean and accountable. That goes without saying.

But aren’t personality, interaction and democratic access to the means of publication the very things we celebrate about new media? We shouldn’t turn away just because the participants aren’t cool enough for us.

Update: Since writing this I have been contacted about some interesting new research which tends to back up what I say here. Read more here.