Good on Birmingham Post editor Marc Reeves for responding to reports today that Trinity Mirror is consulting on whether to turn the Post from a daily to a weekly newspaper. 

Marc has detailed the options for the paper’s future on his blog, and asked for his readers’ views.

It may be that readers don’t decide what happens – economics will determine that. But we’re pleased Marc recognises that his readers want to know what is happening – SHOULD know what is happening – and is putting forward the options and their merits and drawbacks. 

Engaging with your readership is fundamental. We’d be sad to see the Post go weekly or only available online, but it looks like the move may be unavoidable – especially as Marc has shown how quick and effective it can be to communicate with your readership via online means.

As part of the Birmingham Future – Future Focus interview series which has seen the likes of Liam Byrne MP, Sir Bernard Zisman and retail guru Kevin Breese face the 10 questions from Future members, this month we caught up with Marc Reeves. Marc is the Editor of the Birmingham Post and possibly one of the most important and influential voices in the city, with editorial control of one of the country’s most respected regional daily papers…

The Questions:

1. What was your career path to becoming Editor of Birmingham Post?
I started as a cub reporter for a community newspaper in Handsworth in the 80s (I found some old cuttings recently – very cringe-worthy!). From there I worked for weekly newspapers in Birmingham and the Black Country, then had more senior positions on daily papers in Northampton and Carlisle, before going to the south of England where I was an editor in Reading for a while. Before I came back to the city in 2006, I was editorial director of Trinity Mirror Southern.

 2. How integral do you feel your role as Editor of the Birmingham Post is in helping to enhance the city’s young professionals?
I had a great time on the judging panel of last year’s BYPY, and the event reminded me just what the city’s young professional have to offer the region – and how important it is for all of us – the Post included - to support people who have chosen Birmingham as the place to start their careers.

 3. How important do you think it is for these young professionals to have a voice in the region’s press? Are there enough opportunities for this to happen?
I think it’s vital that everyone – no matter how new they may be to the city – speaks up and contributes to the wider debate about the future of Birmingham. Through our columns and blogs, we have several members of Future contributing via the Post – and we always have room for more.

 4. What involvement does Birmingham Post have in events across the city and region?
We are, you could say, ‘all over them’!  The Deal of the Year and the Power 50 – which we run in conjunction with Future of course – are massive events in the Birmingham calendar. We also held a major summit for the car industry as part of our campaign for Jaguar Land Rover this year, and we always support worthwhile events such as BYPY.

 5. With the rise in online media, have you found it important for Birmingham Post (and other regional titles) to embrace the digital age and attract audiences online, as well as through physical newspapers?
It’s more than important – it’s absolutely bloody vital for our future to be a truly multi media news and information service. We’ve made great strides in this and need to do much more. The Post is one of the premiere regional online titles, with a multi-layered website, mobile site and full engagement in social media.

 6. What are the key characteristics that make Birmingham the ideal city to live and work?
A genuinely friendly, collaborative culture that I think is pretty common across most business sectors in the city. Believe me, that’s not always the case in other places. For live-ability, I just love using the canal network for exercise, peace and quiet, and sometimes as a quick route to my favourite pubs!

 7. What is your favourite thing about Birmingham?  Table naan.

 8. Birmingham Post champions the Power 50, but who is your role model within the West Midlands?
John Bright – the original, not the Post’s scurrilous columnist! Bright championed the oppressed, campaigned for free trade, and had a fantastic set of mutton-chop whiskers.

 9. If you were asked to take a group of graduates around the city, what ‘hidden gems’ would you take them to see? 
The Lord Clifden pub in Great Hampton Street, because of its great beer and original Banksy artwork;  St Mary’s Church, Handsworth, because it’s where James Watt is buried, and Hockley Flyover, because it’s always overlooked in favour of its larger cousin, Spaghetti Junction.

 10. Villa or City?
Villa

We are very grateful to Marc for taking the time to complete this interview and if you have any suggestions for future ‘Future Focus’ candidates then please leave your comments and suggestions here.

The following is a longer version of the article that appeared in Journalism.co.uk last week, with some extra tools and quotes.

It’s almost impossible to sum up Twitter in one line. To some, it is a way of delivering content to mobiles as headline text alerts. To others, it’s a social networking tool for getting contacts and leads. Some use it as a research tool for developing stories; and still others as a project management tool to gather a number of contributors together – for example, drivers posting updates on traffic.

In other words, it is what you make it and the only way to figure it out is to start using it. The following is a guide to getting started on Twitter as a journalist, and some of the things that can be done with it.

Twitter for newsgathering

Contacts are central to a journalist’s work. Twitter makes it easier to find them. But whereas, for instance, Facebook requires someone to accept you as their ‘friend’ before you get updates; you can follow people on Twitter regardless. It’s where blogging meets social networking.

The more people you follow on Twitter, the more likely you are to come across a lead or a useful contact. News of the recent UK earthquake, for example, broke first on Twitter, while last year news of a fire in East London broke there too. And even as I type this, someone I know at St Pancras station has twittered that it is being evacuated. You might also use Twitterverse or PicoBuzz to spot important phrases (e.g. events).

Here’s a simple ticklist to fill your Twitter contacts book:

1. Obviously you should begin by searching Twitter for people you know, or know of, in your field. The Labour Party, Lib Dems and Conservatives all have their own Twitter accounts, for example, as do some politicians. But beware of hoaxers. This isn’t really Chuck Norris, for example. Is it?
2. Then, look at who they’re following (I find entering someone’s username on Gridjit is the best way of seeing someone’s contacts and what they’re saying, or you can use Quotably to follow their conversations).
3. Then try Twits Like Me to find people with similar interests (based on what you’ve twittered)
4. and Twubble (based on your friends) or Who Should I Follow? (which allows you to adjust according to whether you want people nearer your location or more or less popular)
5. and Tweetscan for key words (e.g. “health”, “NHS”).
6. Finally Twitterlocal will help you find twitterers in your local area.
7. You can also find a list of significant Twitter users in various fields at the Twitter Pack Project. However, as this is a wiki there is a risk that people have added themselves. It’s also US-focused.

The Birmingham Post, and particularly reporter Jo Geary, are leading Twitter-users among regional newspapers. She sees it as a great way of building a relationship with your contacts and target audience.

“It’s not just popping in, getting something, and popping out, but building something more. And because of that it’s also become a support network of people who help me, and vice versa. It moves into the crowdsourcing thing – if you want to do something you can put out questions and get answers.”

It’s all part of the wider move of journalism to becoming a conversation with readers. Abbie Lundberg, for instance, wrote one article by soliciting tweets on the topic from her followers. Nico Luchsinger even conducted his interview with me via Twitter (which gave me the unique experience of being interviewed while shopping in Tesco.)

Managing your Twitter feeds

Once you’ve set up all those contacts, it’s useful to create some filters to help manage the incoming information. Gridjit, again, has a clearer interface for viewing tweets. Desktop applications like Twhirl will give you an audio alert; Snitter allows you to filter your tweets – for key words or tweets containing links for instance. You can also set up pages to organise tweets from ‘crowds’ of twitterers (for example, friends, colleagues, contacts) using Crowdstatus.com.

You can – and should – set up Twitter to send updates to your mobile phone (click on ‘add device’ or look in settings). It’s free, and is particularly useful for following what’s happening while you’re on the move. But pick your sources carefully – Twitter will only send 250 updates per week, and it’s easy to hit that.

The first thing you should do once you’ve set up Twitter to send text alerts is to text Twitter the word “track” followed by your username. This means Twitter will text you whenever anyone mentions your username on Twitter – very useful for picking up messages aimed at you. You can use the same trick to track mentions of key words in your area, such as a key employer or your own organisation (More tips on mobile commands can be found here). If you prefer email alerts, MobiFeedLive.com and Tweet Scan (not to be confused with Tweetscan) provide them.

You can also follow links that are getting passed about a lot on Twitter though Twitterbuzz and Twitt(url)y. While Twist is a pretty impressive equivalent of Google Trends (from comments).

Twitter for news publishing, distribution and creation

If you want an idea of what Twitter can do for news publishing check out BreakingNewsOn. Headline alerts of breaking news that people can receive on their mobiles are the most obvious application, and used by dozens of organisations including the BBC, the Guardian and CNN (This post has a list of news organisations using Twitter). It’s a good way of alerting people to your content, as well as inviting participation, as Emap’s David Cushman recently tweeted: “Comments on my blog are going mad. Nothing has changed except I now use twitter regularly.”

Many newspapers have separate Twitter accounts for different sections, such as business, traffic and sports. Sky even have one for news about Madeleine McCann.

Twitterfeed will save you typing updates by pushing RSS feeds from your newspaper to a Twitter account, but this means you have to write the article first and risk missing the scoop. Instead it’s better to ‘tweet’ (post to Twitter) before you write the article – ensuring you get to the top of Google quickly, as Birmingham Post editor Marc Reeves did with the arrest of Karren Brady:

“I’m only followed by 30 people or so … But these people are all … in the business of sharing information and knowledge. Consequently, a number of them followed my link to the story on the Post website, and started to talk about it on their own blogs and again through Twitter, with the effect that the Post site received an incredible number of hits as word spread.”

If you really want to track how many people are clicking on any of your links you can also use Tweetburner (or Twitt(url)y to see what they’re saying if they pass it on). Or you can use Intwition to see who’s linking to a particular domain.

Twitter is particularly useful for journalists reporting live via text message themselves. Sky reporter Julia Reid recently used it to post her “minute-by-minute” experiences at Heathrow’s Terminal 5. Robert LaHue used it “to semi-liveblog a board meeting via texting” and it’s often used at conferences and events. You can also download applications that allow you to update Twitter from your mobile – this article compares 20 of them.

Going beyond 140 characters

And if you’re frustrated by the 140 character limit try some of these tools:

• Twitzer is a Firefox extension that allows you to write tweets over 140 characters. MessageDance does much the same via email, and also allows comments on tweets.
• twi8r translates text speak into ‘English’ and vice versa, allowing you to truncate your messages
• Twittermail.com and Tweetahead allow you to pre-schedule tweets to be posted (for when you are not at a computer); the latter also lets you send and receive tweets via email
• Tweetr is a Twitter reader that allows you to send files up to 10MB through Twitter.
• TwitPic allows you to send images from your phone and not only posts links straight to your Twitter account but allows people to post comments that are then posted on their own Twitter page (with a link to the photo). Mobypicture does something similar. TwitterSoap is a mashup of Mobypicture and Twitter.
• SnapTweet posts your latest Flickr picture to Twitter; Autopostr.com does much the same.
• Twiddeo allows you to do the same with video.
• Twixxer does both photo and video sharing
• And American and Canadian users can phone in their tweets using Jott.
• Or you can use the Firefox plugin Power Twitter, which does most of the above and much, much more.

But Twitter becomes really impressive when you tap into its social, conversational nature – or combine the RSS feeds from a number of twitterers. Shawn Smith used it to create the Michigan Twitter Network, which “follows more than 1,300 Michigan twitterers. We’ve gained about 200+ followers and use this account @mlive to send breaking news alerts and also poll users.” (I’ve created something similar for Birmingham twitterers). In Spain, ADN.es used it to follow voter reactions during a televised presidential candidate debate on TV.

My recent experiment with, of all things, a live book review on Twitter demonstrated that the boundary between publishing and conversation becomes blurred when you use the technology – confusing if you’re bothered about semantics, but encouraging if you’re interested in positive relationships between the journalist and reader.

At the end of the day, Twitter is just a platform. What I’ve outlined here is just the start, and there are plenty of experiments being done – the really interesting stuff starts when you try something completely new…

Feel free to follow me, by the way, at twitter.com/paulbradshaw

For more information see my Twitter-related links, or read my other blog posts about Twitter.

I’m wondering if this is the first time a UK newspaper – or indeed any UK business – has decided and debated a policy entirely online and on a public platform? Please let me know!

It started with a tweet. This one:

And then the whole thing snowballed, with my editor, Marc Reeves, publicly stating that he wanted The Birmingham Post to be the first UK newsroom fully signed up to Twitter:

Of course, such a statement wasn’t going to be ignored by those with an interest in online journalism: namely Paul Bradshaw from Birmingham City University and author of the Online Journalism Blog and Martin Stabe from the Press Gazette. There were two other tweets that I couldn’t find. One was Paul Bradshaw saying: “@marcreeves, can I quote you on that?” and another was a response from Marc: “@paulbradshaw gulp. go on then”:

So… from one tweet from me, The Birmingham Post has developed a policy to be the first UK newspaper to have all its journalists sign up to Twitter and decided to embark on a training programme for its journalists.

Then… after a little while… the policy was signed off by Editorial Director of Trinity Mirror’s regionals, Neil Benson (who, it appears, was also having a spot of bother with his iPhone):

From tweet to twittevolution. All in a day’s work off sick!!

On the eve of our 150th Anniversary celebrations, we had a ceremonial turning on of the Post’s new website.

I’ll be transferring my blog to a new home alongside our already 30+-strong blogging community.

Come over and take a look here.

As the countdown to the website launch begins, I don’t expect to be getting much opportunity to blog over the next few days.

Yesterday was spent tagging up some of the stories that have been imported over from the old CMS. It’s a funny job – my instinct is to just tag everything and anything that is mentioned in the story. But, when you remember that these will appear in the “related stories” box on the page, you have to be a bit more tactical with your tags.

Steve (our multimedia editor) and I have been building up a few internal rules as we go along. As, when the website launches, journalists or sub-editors will tag the story, I imagine we’ll develop a stronger set of tagging conventions. Apprently this, according to people wiser than I, is called a folksonomy. But, of course, it’s a folksonomy that will be created only by the content creators, rather than the users.

I am curious to know if this will effect the way things are tagged and, if it does, whether that is a bad thing or not? Should there be a way for readers to submit tags? Would they even want to? And, if they do, how would you stop that creating a tag cloud as large as the moon?

This ties in to a conversation Marc (my editor) and I were having the other day about the transparent newsroom. He’s written about it on his blog. I have been really taken with what the Spokesman Review is doing in the US (see right hand column on their homepage). They have been experimenting with a variety of different techniques to open up the process of newsgathering and writing, with varying degrees of success. [found via the World Editors' Forum weblog]

I love the idea that I am not only directly answerable to the people who sign my pay check, but also to the people I purport to be writing for and, if we would make any of the things the Spokesman Review is doing work on our paper, I’d love to try them.

But, as with the tags, would anyone really be interested in taking part? If so, how?

Birmingham Post editor Marc Reeves has started blogging. Read all about it here. Unfortunately I was miles behind in the scramble to get the first comment in .

I’m sure it will make jolly good reading in the future. Marc is a fine fellow, knowledgable, hard-working, innovative, handsome…

In completely unrelated news, staff at the Post are currently negotiating a pay review. Just saying, you know.

Well… hardly. But still. Aargh!

Not a fan of being captured on camera, this came as a bit of a shock. While googling “Birmingham Post“, I came across this clip from something called Business and Learning Connections: http://youtube.com/watch?v=bl_Y7r2-y7Y (embedding disabled for some reason).

Mostly it’s our editor Marc Reeves but check out the girl with the dangly earrings! I almost choked on my lunch! That be lil’ ol’ me before I dyed my hair (which means it must be over a year old). And yes, my desk is ALWAYS that messy.