I’m very pleased to announce that Eric Ulken, a former editor from the Los Angeles Times, is joining the UBC Graduate School of Journalism.

Eric is coming as the Canwest Visiting Professor for 2009-2010. He spent four years at the LA Times as managing news editor for latimes.com and as editor of interactive technology.

He is known in online journalism circles for developing new ways of collecting, organizing and presenting information through the use of database, mapping and visualization tools.

Eric starts in January and will teach in our core journalism course, Integrated Journalism (iJournalism) as well as in our International Reporting course.

I caught up with Eric recently and we discussed where journalism was heading:

Verso un mondo senza articoli, dove il giornalismo considerato “tradizionale” perde ogni significato, così come ha ormai perso di significato il concetto di “new media”. Eric Ulken, multimedia producer per il Los Angeles Times non la mette giù così drastica, ma gli esempi che fa indicano che, comunque, le strade si dividono. Anzi si sono già divise. “I’m not against articles” (non sono contro gli articoli) precisa al termine del suo intervento. Intervento in cui mostra come il mondo dell’informazione sia cambiato: oggi il giornalismo ha imboccato la via del digitale e quindi della multimedialità, sfruttando contenuti e risorse prima indisponibili o molto limitate. Quelle della rete e in particolare del pubblico, degli stessi che poi usufruiscono del prodotto che contribuiscono a creare. 

Ulken fa degli esempi. Va a fuoco un palazzo nel centro storico: quali contributi utilizzare? Le proposte arrivano dal pubblico. Foto certo, magari video dei lettori filmati con il telefonino, una mappa per indicare il luogo dell’evento con immagini inserite quasi in tempo reale. Nel panorama dei media, anche testate di grande rilievo nazionale, c’è già chi, tra i giornalisti di cronaca online, utilizza cellulari per inviare foto, audio e video alla redazione.

Un altro esempio: American idol (il nostro Xfactor o, se preferite, Amici di Maria De Filippi) sbarca in città. Centinaia di giovani fanno la coda per un’audizione. Come raccontarlo? Naturalmente chiedendo ai vari aspiranti Prince o Madonna di inviare una breve clip, per presentarsi con un pezzo del brano che hanno intenzione di cantare o ballare all’audizione. Le idee sono tante, per la scelta dei documenti e delle piattaforme da proporre (blog, Facebook, Twitter e gli altri esempi di social network). Come spiegare gli effetti di una nuova legge sul divieto di usare il cellulare in auto? Oppure per illustrare la figura di un candidato sindaco? Le proposte emergono nell’aula del convegno e si moltiplicano in rete: contenuti e forme potenzialmente infiniti nell’universo della narrazione digitale.

Matteo Marini

Eric Ulken, del Los Angeles Times

Un “supermedia” è una redazione divisa in tre parti: una che si occupa della carta stampata, l’altra che cura i contenuti on-line della testata e una terza che organizza il materiale in senso multimediale. È una definizione fumosa, l’unica che esce dal dibattito che avrebbe dovuto chiarire il concetto editoriale di new media al Festival. Nemmeno gli esperti sanno prevedere le tipologie di azienda che permetteranno al giornalismo di superare le difficoltà economiche portate dall’avvento del web 2.0. Che ha straordinarie potenzialità, ma che fatica a generare profitto. Le maggiori testate on-line si mantengono ancora appoggiandosi alle “gemelle” che vengono stampate in tipografia.

Il pubblico è piuttosto stordito. Intervengono redattori di provincia e studenti delle scuole di giornalismo. Sono i soggetti che hanno più paura dei cambiamenti: i primi lavorano lontani dalle redazioni centrali e temono chiusure e tagli; i secondi temono che, proprio mentre si affacciano alla professione, quella sbatta loro la porta in faccia. “Come dobbiamo organizzarci? Che dobbiamo aspettarci?”. Ma nessuno conosce la strada. E come attrezzarsi rimane un mistero, mentre i relatori proseguono armati di molta teoria e di qualche esperienza su cui riflettere.

“Il giornalismo non sarà più di produzione ma di servizio – sostiene Charlie Beckett direttore di Polis London School of Economics – il compito degli addetti ai lavori sarà quello di organizzare i contenuti che forniscono i media indipendenti, le associazioni o i singoli utenti che si avvicinano al web. Basta con il giornalismo fortezza che si cala dall’alto: il networking deve essere sfruttato come piattaforma come negli Stati Uniti”.

Giuseppe Smorto, condirettore di Repubblica.it, propone che si comincino a studiare forme di micro pagamento dei contenuti prodotti sul web. Marco Pratellesi, direttore di Corriere.it si rifugia sugli esempi: “Hanno spedito alla redazione di Roma quattro colleghi dalla carta stampata per trasferire a noi le spese – si lamenta – non è proprio il tipo di collaborazione che immagino nel futuro”. Insomma, si procede in ordine sparso. Eric Ulken, del Los Angeles Times, racconta di come il suo giornale, per sopravvivere, abbia concentrato molti dei suoi mille redattori in città: “Se vogliamo competere con gli utenti dobbiamo essere capaci di andarci a scovare i nostri contenuti originali direttamente in strada. È “tornare al pre-internet nell’epoca del post-internet”. Paolo Liguori, direttore di Tgcom, preferisce motivare i presenti: “Con impegno ho imparato il linguaggio dei nuovi media a 55 anni, mettendomi a studiare”. Poi conclude con un’arringa contro gli insegnanti italiani che, “mentre i bambini crescono digitalizzati apprendendo dai telefonini e dai videogames i nuovi linguaggi, rifiutano pregiudizialmente questa importante attitudine, che andrebbe indirizzata, educata”.

Lorenzo Allegrini

I went to BeebCamp today – an ‘unconference’ for people involved in all things digital at the BBC and (this time) some influential and interesting outsiders.

Can you spot me? (Thanks to RainRabbit on Flickr for this)

Sadly, I had to leave early for personal reasons but I got to go to sessions on “The Games Challenge – Making Things Fun” and “Building the Datadesk at the LA Time” and “What Happens When (and if!) Mobiles and Desktop PCs Swap Roles” and one on “Piracy”.  They were all interesting but, in the one on Piracy, I had what feels like a big thought that I want to write about before I go into detail about what happened at the sessions.  So here goes… please let me know what you think…

Pre-pay BBC

Imagine this very simple concept: Each year you pay your license fee to the BBC in exchange for programming that you own and control the destiny of.  YOU decide what gets made because YOU decide which ideas, programmes, themes, seasons, etc you want to invest in.  This could be done via an online marketplace that let’s you manage the money in your account and that links you to what other people are doing with the money in their accounts.
The thinking came out of a discussion on piracy where I pointed out that Bandstocks (which I’ve blogged about before) has partially found a way around piracy of music by effectively creating a ‘pre-pay’ model where listeners who really want new music pay for it to be made and then share in the profits (if any) should the music become successful.  Sure, people can pirate the music later, but the artist gets paid up front if the users really want to hear their album.  There’s no guess work by A&R men – you know the album will sell because listeners have already registered their demand with votes and with their own cold hard cash.
 
People pay the license fee with their cold hard cash, too.  Hopefully because they care about commercial-free content public service content (and possibly because they can be prosecuted if they don’t) – but let’s focus on the first part.

Every year households all over the UK ‘invest’ a fairly large sum of money into the BBC in exchange for a portfolio of content and services across TV, Radio, Web, Mobile, etc that should “inform, educate and entertain” them (probably more than they invest on average in cash in any other company – but I’d have to check this).  But, once they’ve paid it, they have no control over that portfolio.  In fact, they have less direct control than they do if they invested in shares in a corporation because they can’t sell their stocks later. 

Once the funds come in, people like myself, spend loads of effort researching, planning and strategising about what that portfolio should be – we do nothing short of our best to try to “build public value” with the funds we get.  And yes, I honestly believe, most of us do try our best to do this – so this isn’t an attack on anyone inside – I work for the BBC, believe in the BBC and think it does a great job given the giant task it has on its hands.

That said, not allowing our audiences to have at least a level of direct control over what programming gets made seems outdated in the digital age.

I’m imagining a digital marketplace where editors, producers, directors, etc “float” ideas to the public and where anyone who’s paid their license fee can choose to allocate a portion of the funding they’ve pre-paid to us.  This could be at the level of specific programmes (after reading a brief posted by a commissioning exec), for an entire service (if say, they really love 6Music – like I do) or even an entire genre (if you just can’t get enough cookery programming).  Those who don’t have access to PCs or mobiles could acccess the system using paper postal surveys.

Programming would have to reach a certain threshold to go into production and larger areas would need a certain amount of funding to continue.  Those areas that received enough funding to go into production and to operate, would do just that.  New areas could be considered by the public and invested in if they were deemed worthy enough.

Would this water down the quality of our content?  It could.  And that would be a disaster; but I suggest that we would only allow ideas that clearly deliver public value and were true to the BBC purposes and values into the system in the first place to avoid this.  Yes, we still need commissioners and editors to perform this function – I’m just proposing a more direct and accountable connection with audience members.

If we knew every programme had an eager audience before it was made, would we ever have another ‘flop’?  I’m not sure the idea is that good but think about this… if audiences loved (and I mean really loved some programming), I’d suggest we give them the opportunity to invest over and above their license fee if they want to.  I can imagine plenty of fans of particular programmes who would love to be able to pay a bit extra to get an extra episode of their favourite programmes – and just imagine the affinity this would build between the fans and the content.  Just imagine the hype fans would create around progamming/content they’d had a direct influence on financing.

Don’t get me wrong here – I’m not suggesting this would allow audiences to decide whether to pay a license fee but rather that they have more control as to how the fee is used.  I also recognise that a large corporation has many overhead costs and operating costs that audiences would not have visibility of or ever choose to invest in so realise a ‘penny for penny’ approach wouldn’t work – but this could be overcome by a point system or something similar.  The ability to allow audiences to see how their money had been used and the direct impact they’ve had on the content would also strengthen the accountability and transparency of the BBC to them; effectively opening the company up to a much greater degree.

Crazy talk?  Maybe.  But I’d love to know what you think.

As for the other talks at BeebCamp…  Here were my highlights:

The Games Challenge: Making Anything Fun

This was hosted by staff from Six to Start and helped us work through the challenges and opportunities of making ‘anything’ fun.  We took on Funerals, the Middle East, Health and Safety regulations, commuting and taxes.  And, sure enough, were able to find a way of making each of them fun so, yes, you can make almost anything into a game.

Building the Datadesk at the L.A. Times

In this session Eric Ulken said: “Journalists gather loads of data, use what they need to write the story, then throw the rest away.  I tried to figure out what we could do with all of that extra data.”  The results were the datadesk at the L.A. Times and he showed us some cool examples of what he’s doing.

What happens when (if?!) ‘mobiles’ and desktop PCs swap roles?

This is a session I ran – based in a question that I honestly don’t know the answer to but am very curious about after having read it in Fjord’s predictions for mobile in 2009 (see my previous post on that).   We didn’t, of course, come to a conclusion – but the conversation raised some interesting points which I’ve tried to gather here.

The conversation kicked off with people talking about he pros and cons of storage of assets in ‘the cloud’ and the desire for ownership of assets.  A great point was made that this was an “over 25 model” for looking at this in that anyone under the age of 25 wouldn’t even think about physically owning media (cheers to Alex Murray for that thought).

 Thinking along the lines of download vs. broadcast models for media then lead us into seeing a third dimension to this paradigm which is the ability to upload.  Uploading, the group seemed to agree, allows for a different level of creativity and participation which meant that information in ‘the cloud’ could only really meet its full potential to be socialised.  Someone summed this up really nicely (I thought) by saying, “It’s about what I can do on the device that I can also share.”

Conversation then turned to the idea of portable devices being the centre of users digital lives because they’d contain a portable, central profile that would identify you to other non-portable devices.  A key point here, was that to reach the full potential of this promise interoperability will be needed and the group seemed to still feel like that was a way off.

• Eric Ulken’s next assignment: the online world, from around the world
  The LA Times interactive technology editor Eric Ulken is off to trot the globe, after ten years working in newspapers. ”Now I hope to effect change from the outside”, he writes.

  “Earlier this month, I left my job as interactive technology editor at the Los Angeles Times to travel and learn and share stories about the great work taking place in online journalism around the world. I love the Times, my work and my colleagues, but I’ve decided it’s time to try something new: reporting.”

  Read about his plans on his blog (link above).

  Come visit Journalism.co.uk in Brighton, Eric!

  (tags: ericulken latimes)
• LetMeGoogleThatForYou.com – new site launch
  When a colleague asks you for something that is right at their own search fingertips, send them this link… Say no more.

 

Visto aqui | From here : Image of the day: technical skills required by journalism jobs

Eric Ulken has taken “all the online job descriptions on JournalismJobs.com from this year, omitted the non-technical words (like “editor”, “seeks” and “self-starter”) and built a tagcloud out of the rest”. This is the result:

Eric Ulken | Technical skills in journalism jobs

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