“The good news is that contrary to conventional wisdom, consumers are willing to pay for meaningful content. The bad news is they are not willing to pay much.”    John Rose of Boston Consulting Group (BCG)

Paying for content is what we discussed this week in two lectures with Robert Andrews of PaidContentUK (PCUK) and Peter Preston, the Director of the Guardian Foundation and former editor of the Guardian and Observer.

Newspapers R.I.P.

By “meaningful” Rose means niche or local.  It’s not all bad news.  The Wall Street Journal has increased sales this year while The Economist and Private Eye magazines are doing well.  People pay for analysis they can access if they become one of the 128,000 paid subscribers to the Financial Times rather than the 1.6 million unpaid subscribers. 

The BCG poll surveyed people in 9 countries and found American and Brits least willing to pay for online content.  The price people put on their news worries me as I know it takes time, money, training and expertise to make good news.  Those willing to fork out in the UK would pay on average $4 (£2.40) a month.  The average in the USA was lower ($3) but higher in Italy ($7), Spain ($6), Germany and France ($5). 

Why are we Brits so reluctant to pay more?

The Harris Poll shows only 5% of UK people surveyed would pay for online news content.

The BBC has always meant high quality, standard setting media that is free (apart from TV license fees).  Perhaps we feel we are entitled.   

We have also enjoyed 15 years of free access online so why would we pay now?

What can be done to change this?

Robert Andrews says changes need to be “piecemeal” rather than absolute. s

The Times already charge for access to their puzzles (£24.99 a year).  Other sites are offering dating sites and celebrity photos.

Will value added extras make us pay?

When do I start making ma monays?

It seems so.  The hardcopy Daily Mail has been the most innovative in this area, starting the trend of free dvds, releasing albums and investing in speciality supplements like EuroMoney magazine.

The Harris poll showed that the 5% who would pay for a newspaper website would rise to 48% if payment included a free or discounted subscription to the paper copy.

Does Rupert Murdoch have the answer?

The lectures made me think Murdoch’s paywalls could be ploy to make us buy hardcopy newspapers again.  He can ban google from showing news stories but it would only take seconds for someone to copy and repost elsewhere.  There is no set date on when his paywalls would start so I think even Rupert Murdoch may be experiencing the difficulties of what Robert Andrews says is trying to put the free genie back in the bottle once it has been let out.

Lastly 

I don’t think newspapers will ever die out completely.  Online news is great but its no place for 500-2500 in-depth piece of analytical writing. You need paper for that.  I would miss tarting around several news websites a day if it came to it but yes, I would be prepared to pay a subscription for web and paper copies combined (but then I am a journalism student).

Had great fun working with Lauren Wright, Alex Hargraves and David Phelps on our final project for Convergent Journalism; a travel website titled 24 Hours In

For the project, each team member had to produce two feature  stories and one audio/visual piece. I wrote two features- one on solo travel (in two parts) and another on doing Tokyo in 24 Hours. But my favourite part of the project was producing the multimedia pieces- one a short video interview with Rob Fembock and another a slideshow of photos I took in Japan.

If you could only take one snippet of information away with you from the lecture that Adam Tinworth gave to postgraduate journalism students at Cardiff University, it should be the recommendation that blogging should be something that you enjoy doing.

It makes sense. As with anything else that you write for public consumption, be it journalism or not you should inject a generous helping of enthusiasm. After all if you don’t want to write it, who’s going to want to read it? Adam advises people to ensure they develop their blogs to ensure that they are not just monologue like rants. After all they are on the internet for a reason, so people can read them.

Following on from this, another good point Adam made was that if your blog topics are interesting then chances are someone is going to want to want to respond to what you’ve written or comment on it on yours or their blog. Although it sounds like I am reiterating the obvious there are a significant amount of people who abandon their blogs after a few weeks and then wonder about the point of it all. Adam points out on his own blog, One man and his blog, that if you want your blog to work for you then you have to work on it.

Adam talked about the perception of online social constructs, how often we see social networking sites as being communities artificially created by us. Adam’s viewpoint is that we don’t create communities in this sense but naturally acquire them through the process of communicating with each other through online communication: networking and blogs. The online activity that we have individually is actually far more fragmented and compartmentalised than we initially think Adam explained, illustrating this with a circular diagram depicting the closed private activity in the inner core, followed by public space and then surrounded by completely open web content. All of which we can use to control our online activity, important when we begin to use the web for business and livelihood purposes.

What is a pressing issue with people in this area is the worry that engaging with people online will somehow create a false environment compared to ‘the real world’. This needn’t be the case just as long as we are aware of what exactly we are trying to gain from blogging and social media and to keep what we are writing about online in check with what we are writing in print.

Adam provided an impressive summary of how blogging can drive readers to your news content, useful both for journalism and anyone else looking to hold their own in a competitive economy. There now several blog guides for businesses on the web. He also applauded blogs as a means of helping consumers get to your content first, stating that on some sites the majority of editorial traffic is to blogs, with some blogs receiving 500,000 page impressions a month.

While highlighting the need for regular blogging, quality newsworthy content and having a niche subject to work within (sticking to what you know best and linking to the rest) he also stressed six key personal qualities needed to make your blog successful. He stated a good blogger is: inquisitive, communicative, honest, enthusiastic, social and informed. Much the same qualities to be a good journalist then. More so than this enjoying what you write in your blogs, the lynchpin in all of the above qualities, is good for your mental health so says Joanna Moorhead in an article for the Guardian.

Two last sound tips from Adam?, watch and learn what is happening on the web as we should always be aware of new tools and new trends developing and continue to engage with your audience all the time. Advice to remember.

I had an argument with my dad on the phone last night. However, this was not the usual drill “You need to stop spending money!” No, this was about newspapers. The future of print media and the perils of the online world and the talk of pay walls by Rupert Murdoch.

My dad trying to get his head around online content

My dad wanted to be a journalist himself and I imagine if he had taken that route he may be one of the journalists today who refuses to get on board with the online world.

He argued that he didn’t think people actually read the news online and that by putting the content on-line in the first place newspapers were damaging themselves. He did not see my argument that newspapers had no choice but to start putting content online because of the rise in citizen journalism and user-generated-content.They had to compete and move online.

Newspapers online content

I found it interesting that I had had this discussion with my dad the night before our lecture by Robert Andrews, the UK Editor of Paid Content. Today he spoke to us about the boom in advertising revenue online and explained it was better than traditional forms of advertising because it is more measurable so there is no wasted expenditure. He also discussed the possibility of pay walls, a route which Rupert Murdoch is trying to push through. He had some interesting insights on whether people would pay for certain content and suggested that perhaps not all newspaper content online would have the same level of difficulty getting people to pay.

The video below is an interesting interview with Rupert Murdoch about pay walls.

Paid Content’s PCUK/Harris Interactive poll on consumers willingness to pay for online news showed some quite worrying results if Murdoch is serious about trying to make readers pay for online content.

74% said they would find another free site if their favourite news site began charging for content.

Just 5% said they would pay and continue reading that news online.

If readers were forced to pay it was found they would pay as little as possible with 72% saying they would pay less than £10 for a yearly subscription.

Compare this abysmally low price to the annual fee charged by The Guardian for a seven-day subscription which is £308.69.

These figures do not appear to support pay walls.

Encouragingly though they also found that 48% would pay for online news if it included a free or discounted newspaper subscription.

The argument Robert Andrews made was that it may be speciality content that people will be more willing to pay for, news that is different and not just what everyone else is churning out.

The Financial Times and the Wall Street Journal already have partial pay walls on speciality content people are willing to pay for in the business and financial world and they offer subscription deals such as standard online, premium online, just newspaper or newspaper and online combined.

They can get away with charging people because of the high quality reliable reports they produce which are written by respected journalists who are experts in their field.

What about content that is not quite so specialised, will people ever pay for this content?

Perhaps pay walls will make journalists improve as they realise that in order for people to want to read their articles or even pay for them they have to be of a certain quality that you cannot get elsewhere.

The argument with my dad was not brought to a conclusion. He said he would step off his soapbox but would not agree that people were moving to online news.

Perhaps we will always have newspapers. Going into the industry I would like to think so. But then again as Robert Andrews said, have some savvy editors like Alan Rusbridger already anticipated the death of the newspaper?

When the Guardian moved to the Berliner format and they bought a new printing press, Alan Rusbridger is to have said that this would be the last printing press they would buy.

A reflection on the future of the industry or did he really believe in the longevity of that printing press?

The future of the print industry is an intriguing one. Economic figures so not look promising but for me the future without newspapers does not either. I think I may agree with my dad on this one point. Newspapers will never disappear entirely.

What I will add to his comment is that newspapers will, are and have to adapt to a world which is moving online.

As for pay walls.

Watch this space….

Catch Robert Andrews on Twitter @RobertAndrews

If Rupert Murdoch imposes paywalls on his newspaper websites, will the public pay, or just click elsewhere?

“Quality journalism is not cheap. The digital revolution has opened many new and inexpensive distribution channels but it has not made content free. We intend to charge for all our news websites.”

Rupert Murdoch aims to put paywalls on all his newspaper websites

So said media mogul Rupert Murdoch back in August. This week’s online journalism lecture featured ex-Cardiff alumnus Rob Andrew who spoke to us about business models and paying for online content. Bearing in mind Murdoch’s recent plans for all the newspapers under his command (The Times, The Sun, and The News Of The World to name a few) to introduce paywalls, this lecture couldn’t have come at a better time.

Having previously freelanced for The Guardian and Wired magazine, Rob Andrew is currently responsible for the UK part of paidcontent.org- a website that was started by entrepreneur Rafat Ali back in 2002. As well as its UK counterpart, paidcontent.org also features moconews.org- a website that deals with mobile content, and contentsutra.org- the Indian equivalent. Paidcontent.org has three fundamental aims- to provide breaking news, to act as an aggregator of current and topical issues and also to provide a layer of analysis and expertise. The structure of the website takes on a blog framework, and the writers increasingly use social media tools, such as RSS feeds and Twitter, to get the information they need for their posts. Andrew explained how Ali has been seen by many in the media industry as the “poster boy for career independence from global media companies.” Ali appears to be seeing the future of the journalism industry clearly and realistically; he has said from the onset that all media will become digital media, and the fact that the website was set up over seven years ago highlights how this issue of paying for online content is not a new idea.

Although the idea of paying for online content is not entirely new, the fact that it has not been an integral part of online news consumption means that it is going to be very difficult to persuade people to pay. Paidcontent.org teamed up with Harris Poll earlier this year and conducted their own research to see how much, and for which types of content, people would be prepared to pay.  The survey found, contrary to Murdoch’s plans, that only five percent of people would be prepared to pay for online content, whereas a massive 74 percent would look elsewhere. Over all ages almost three quarters of people polled would find a free alternative if their favourite news site starting charging. Surprisingly though, the results found that people in the 16-24 age bracket were 13 times more likely to pay for content than those in the 35-44 and 55-66 age groups.

The same survey also found that out of the five percent of people who would be prepared to pay for content, three quarters of them would want to pay less than £10 a year. Which isn’t exactly going to make up the increasingly huge drop in newspaper sales over the last year…

Yet despite the bleak support for paid content, Andrew made one point very clear; if news organisations are going to start charging their consumers for reading news on the internet, they are going to have to make huge improvements to their online content. Competition will be fierce, and if news organisations are going to attract, and keep, customers, their online material will have to be unique and interesting. If not, people will find an alternative. He used the example of B2B magazine Farmers Weekly. As this publication provides unique information on a niche subject, more people are likely to pay for its content, as it is not information that readers can find readily available elsewhere.

The FT is already successfully charging its readers online

Andrew also put the issues of paying for online content into the context of media advertising. He explained that there are two main reasons why companies are much more willing to invest their money in online resources. The first is that advert visibility can be counted on the web, unlike its print counterpart where advert views can only be estimated. This therefore allows companies to make informed decisions when choosing which websites to sponsor. Secondly a KPMG research survey found that 60 percent of people polled would rather have to watch an advert before accessing news than pay for it. Although this level of advertising does make up a large volume of revenue for the news organisations, the selling of online adverts does not make up for the loss of revenue from dropping newspaper sales.

There are, however, a few news websites that are already charging for content through subscription. Currently The Financial Times’s website FT.com has 1.6 million unique unpaid readers a month. It also has 128,000 paid-up subscribers who pay £90 a year to read the full content of the website. Although The FT has successfully demonstrated that people will pay to view their content, it is also important to note that this publication typically has a wealthy readership, and therefore would be more likely to purchase a subscription than forego reading it at all.

Will newspaper sales increase if online news has paywalls?

A point was raised towards the end of the lecture concerning Murdoch’s possible motives for creating paywalls on his news websites. As well as his frustration towards free aggregators such as Google, there is also the possibility that in the whole scheme of things, perhaps Murdoch is secretly hoping that by forcing people to pay for online content, people will eventually revert back to their old habits of nipping to the corner shop to pick up a newspaper. Only time will tell if paid content will become the norm, and whether it will force the five percent figure to increase as access to news sites are denied to those who want their news without cost…

Full results of the paidcontent.org and Harris Poll survey can be found at paidcontent.org.

The print industry is in a rapid decline, online news is more popular than ever and  Rupert Murdoch is proposing making people pay for his online paper’s from next year.

Are we just waiting around for the end of print – or will Murdoch’s plan actually push people who are unwilling to pay for online news back to their newspaper?

Online news is growing rapidly but in a lecture with journalist Rob Andrew, editor of Paid Content.co.uk, it became clear that at the moment people are unwilling to pay for it. A yearly subscription to The Guardian can cost around £350 but in a recent PCUK/Harris Poll, it was found that only 5% of people asked were willing to pay to read news online.

Newspapers rely on advertising but unlike with online adverts – there is no guaranteed return – and more and more advertising companies are moving away from print for this reason.

Rob, worringly, but accurately, describes newspapers as being in a perilous state and compares this to the music industry.

Music is now accessible free online and the only way to make money from it is through live performances – as the experience of watching live music can’t be replicated online.  The industry tried to introduce copy protection to stop music being shared online but abandoned this after sites like Spotify and We7 have made music instantly available for free.

Newspapers are looking for a short-term answer to this crisis to appease shareholders but what they should be doing is finding a long-term solution.

Specialist papers like the Financial Times and European Wall Street Journal currently charge a subscription. The FT has 128,000 subscribers paying approximately £90 a year. I find it highly unlikely people will pay for The Sun, News of the World or even The Times – but Mighty Murdoch is dead set on introducing these charges and if they are no longer available in print form the only option may be to buy online.

Surely if one paper charges online, people will just go to a free newspaper’s site instead? It would be impossible to implement a pay wall system unless all the papers agreed to do this. People do not want to pay for online news and most public opinion polls go directly against Murdoch’s plans.

The Guardian has a different ownership model to papers in the Murdoch News International empire and this allows it to put more into being innovative and exploring and developing it’s online version.

The future of print is very uncertain – if Murdoch does introduce charges will other paper’s follow? or will this backfire completely and will people just go somewhere else for their news?

We’re constantly being told how newspapers are in decline and how commercial media are struggling because of the loss in advertising revenue.  Rupert Murdoch’s plans to put a Paywall for online content is one of the hottest topics in (online) journalism right now and a possible new business model for commercial media.  Why should news be free? It takes time, effort and sometimes expertise to produce.  Yet who would pay for news when there are high quality sites and aggregators that provide it for free?

A study by PCUK and Harris Interactive has shown that the majority of people don’t want to pay for online news and that if they do, they expect perks such as a free or discounted paper sub.

Being a poor student, I rarely buy papers when I access them free online.  If I had to pay for online content, I would start buying papers again, because if I’m going to have to pay for my news, I’d rather have a physical copy of it than have access to a website.  Giving online content a price might put paper boys back in business.

Perhaps if people had to pay for online content, more of them would make the small effort to buy a daily paper from their newsagent.  Perhaps the very fact that news has been so easily accessible online has led to an apathy that has hit circulation figures hard.

The critics of Paywall think that the average person doesn’t value news enough to pay for it.  I think only a fool would pay for something that he can get elsewhere for free (provided the quality is more or less equal) but what if Paywall became universal? And brands so unique that the experience was worth paying for?

What if all the world’s media went on a week-long strike and left a big gaping hole where information used to be…would we realise what was missing and pay for news then?

I’m not sure we would as long as BBC News exists.  It’s many people’s news source of choice even now that all online content is free, so wouldn’t it become even more popular if other sites put up a Paywall?

Having written about my sporting icon of the decade Ryan Giggs and my fellow trainee journalist colleagues gave their nominations, here are the final ten for the vote so have your say on your favourite:

Not that I would try and influence your decision but go on, vote for Giggsy, you know you want to!

“I was asking the right questions. It was the questions that were important and because I wasn’t absolutely certain, people were more likely to debate and answer. I don’t ever feel like I have the answer to things.”

So said Joanna Geary, Web Development Editor for The Times, when she came to speak to the journalism postgrads at Cardiff University last week. Joanna previously worked on the Birmingham Post, and as it happens, @bhampostjoanna was one of the first people I followed on Twitter. I remember finding it really exciting that some regional papers were actually taking social media seriously, rather than being stuck in the technological dark ages.

Joanna also told us about how she set up her own blog, and it was reassuring to know that despite taking an interest in the web, she didn’t go into the project knowing how it would turn out. Like most of us experimenting with online tools, she just gave it a go.

But one of the biggest issues that her lecture raised for me was the network of community bloggers Joanna set up at the Birmingham Post. She convinced about 35 bloggers from across Birmingham to be part of an experiment in social media, to blog for the Birmingham Post website. The contributors came from various backgrounds, from a university professor to an automotive expert to a student fashion designer.

This is an exciting venture and one which, particularly at the time, pushed the boundaries of what could be done when bringing social media and journalism together. This was no doubt a boost to the paper’s engagement with its community, attracting a new and different audience online from those who would traditionally read the print version. In fact, in many ways, this did what local and regional newspapers should be doing: providing a platform for debate among members of its community.

So it’s all good then? Well, not quite. I’m entirely in favour of experimentation and there is definitely a place for this kind of activity. But I think we should also consider whether there are any potential downsides. As Joanna said, sometimes it’s asking the questions that’s important, even if you don’t have the answers. I certainly don’t have the solutions (and given the amount of soul-searching out there in the industry, it seems no one does), but I’ll have a go at a few questions.

Is it right for newspapers to ask for content without paying people? Even on a blog, if your writing is driving traffic to a company’s website and therefore holding up its advertising revenues, shouldn’t you receive some kind of reward?

Is it sustainable? Joanna told us there was quite a high dropout rate among bloggers, mainly because they weren’t being paid, and the paper didn’t have the resources to keep recruiting potential bloggers. If blog content isn’t updated regularly, tech-savvy readers will simply go elsewhere.

Did it work? Joanna told us they ended up with a small but very committed community engaging online.

I have to admit I wasn’t convinced at first by the idea of a network of bloggers, largely because I sometimes get the feeling that newspaper companies are focusing on this kind of content at the expense of investing in journalists who are covering stories bloggers wouldn’t.

But the more I think about it, the more I like it. It’s a good opportunity to hear fresh voices and fresh perspectives, and anything that improves our ability to engage with readers can only be a good thing.

I suspect that Joanna’s next challenge, helping to figure out how to implement paywalls at The Times, might be a harder nut to crack.

The most interesting, thought-provoking writing I’ve read on the internet recently was not from of a newspaper, magazine or even a blogger. It was an open thread asking the question “what exactly is premium content,” populated with interested and expert individuals. While the attitude (and intelligence level) of many internet commenters is often unpleasant at best and downright ignorant at worst, in certain situations it is the readers who provide the best content. This is one of the best things about the internet, even though I have only recently begun to encounter it on a regular basis.

This kind of thing doesn’t only happen on posts solely dedicated to creating discussion, though (the above post on premium content was deliberately created for commenters). Take my favourite TV blogger, Alan Sepinwall, who ends his review posts with the sentence, “What did everybody else think?” I often find myself, after reading a post, looking through the comments for the discussion that occurs there. The highlights are always when Sepinwall himself gets involved or, even better, when a director or producer or writer of a show enters the fray.

Part of the reason that comments on Sepinwall’s site are more helpful than not is his enforcing of 6 simple rules for commenting, which are not overly strict but keep a great deal of internet douchebaggery out. The other, and larger part, is the relationship that he builds with his readers by responding to comments and occasionally doing columns where he answers reader mail or even offers to answer any and all TV-related questions asked in an eight hour window. This serves not only to make him more accessible as a blogger but draws return readers.

I rarely see this on more official bloggers, such as The Economist’s Lexington blog. While I enjoy the content of both, I am rarely inspired to comment on Lexington but always respond to Sepinwall’s posts when I have something to say. While it is obviously time consuming to read and respond to comments, I believe columnists, bloggers and other types of online writers will benefit from striving for a more intimate relationship with readers.

I still remember the time I e-mailed a writer from The Globe and Mail to thank him for writing an article with an unconventional take on global warming and got a response: it gave me the warm and fuzzies. I felt special. In addition to connecting with readers on an individual level, comments can serve as a rudimentary form of market research. Take this crude example: posts about “Mad Men” on Sepinwall’s blog routinely get close to 400 comments per episode, while shows like “Lie to Me” (not a bad show by any means) garner far fewer (10-30 per episode). This type of information could give writers a signal of which topics are deserving of long, investigative articles and which only need a headline and a few words.

To start things off, anyone not studying journalism might already be going bonkers at the mere mention of twitter. But the fact is that I am starting to agree with pretty much everyone else in the business that it is an excellent tool for us. Perhaps I should just come up with a codename for it. I’ll just refer to twitter as … tsirp from now on (at least for till the end of this blog post).

I have mentioned how I like Google News – a news aggregator – but what tsirp does is that it provides me links by other people I know and trust on topics I might find interesting. It is like my own personalised news agency. Who could not love that?

Like mentioned oh so many weeks ago, Adam Tinworth talked about how blogs represent you and how they can benefit you in your search for jobs. I have my blog’s URL on my CV now and am trying to engage with likeminded people in various internet communities.

Joanna Geary told us the story of how she got into journalism. Aside from her determination, the way she has taken onboard blogs and used tsirp efficiently has really done her wonders.

Inspired by Joanna’s presentation, I thought I might share some of my journalistic journey so far. This blog has been key in all of it. When I started this September I was so eager to do everything they told us, so I immediately started my niché blog.

Aside from being a silly little thing I do on my freetime, it’s also given me great inspiration for stories and enabled me to stay in touch with the industry people we have visiting us for lectures all the time. Following them on tsirp is the easiest thing in the world, adding links to their blogs is a great way of making sure I’ll know what they are up to also in the future.  They might sometimes visit the link I have on my profile, which directs them to this blog. That way they get to know how I write, what my interests are and also on my about page I actually give a condensed CV.

Social media is just closing gaps like never before. I studied in Maastricht, about 1.5 hours from Brussels, but I haven’t felt more close to the EU as I do now with the Commission’s EU representation being on tsirp. I can talk to them about Finnish food or the election of the new Commission college. I don’t need to worry about them knowing I’m only a student, to paraphrase Miley Cyrus: I’m just being Mia, only online instead of IRL.

My blog and tsirp account have done me wonders. I’ve gotten some amazing contacts, feedback and even potential job offers. Clichéd to end on a high note but I just love it.

PS. I also have a weird fetish for linking, I have so many tabs open all the time so that I remember to link to them.

So last week the web development editor at The Times, Joanna Geary, came in to speak to us. She was quite the inspiration as she was probably the youngest person we’ve had as a guest lecturer.

“Web development editor” is quite a snazzy sounding job title for a girl in her twenties, but as she pointed out, it doesn’t actually mean any one thing. Her job involves blogging, business news, event planning, exploring new technology, developing the website and deciding whether to buy into the “paying for content” debate, among other things. But how did such a young woman get such a grown-up-sounding job?

She didn’t get it on a plate, that’s for sure. She did work experience, got rejected by several companies, finally got a job at the Birmingham Post, started up a blog network in Birmingham, and then started making contacts on Twitter. It was in fact the wonderful Twitter that helped her get her job at The Times. A mysterious tweet from Tom Whitwell, formerly known as MusicThing on Twitter, popped up, and bang! Joanna Geary got a job at The Times.

It was motivating to see someone so young get such a good job, through sheer hard work and not giving up. A lesser person would be put off by rejection, but Joanna knew that she had to keep trying, because if she hadn’t, she wouldn’t be where she is now.

Her talk also emphasised the importance of Twitter and social media, because without that form of online conversation, she wouldn’t be where she is now. And the really important thing to remember is to follow the right people and become part of the conversation. A lot of the time it’s who you know that is important, and contacts are crucial if you want to get anywhere in life.

Apparently it’s quite hard to get a job these days. Hadn’t you heard? It seems people have been crunching figures, making claims and failing to add everything up nicely.

It’s the “frivolous” industries that are suffering too. You know, the ones that keep Lily Allen in business, designers selling couture and freedom of speech widely available in print. This is not exactly the most opportune time to be aiming for a career in journalism.

Print media is suffering. Media Week ran its final hard-copy edition last week, and Editor Steve Barrett told a room of trainee magazine journalists the news industry has to modify business models to get back to being financially viable. Charging for online content needs to be taken seriously if journalists are going to be appreciated - paid even – for what they do. 

With The Times about to start charging for access to its website, it seems Rupert Murdoch was right afterall. But what does that mean for those of us with fancy ideals and byline dreams? The scaremongering: “fewer opportunities”, “job cuts”, “despair” - we should all being crying ink, especially as learning shorthand is still recommended.  Deep joy.

But there is hope yet so say Rory Cellan-Jones, the BBC’s technical correspondent and Joanna Geary, The Times’s web development editor. And thank goodness because if Cardiff is charging me £6000 for a postgraduate diploma to train me up to a job-worthy standard and I don’t get a job… my bank balance and I will be utterly devastated.

Social media and self-distribution = the new entry point.

Geary’s career really took after she set up a blogging community and began engaging with other social media enthusiasts on Twitter. Cellan-Jones tweets informatively and incessantly on his specialism, technology, as well as his career in general, engaging directly with his audience.  To get ahead you have to be proactive/investigative, have your own niche/beat and engage/talk to people.

In many ways the new online world of journalism is just reformatting the idealised one of old.

Except journalists are selling themselves as brands – bylines don’t work so well on their own anymore - hence the deluge of writers plugging their blogs on Twitter and Facebook. You’re probably reading this because I tricked you into clicking on an innocent looking tiny url on my profile. Apologies for stealing you away, but I do hope you’re finding it worth your while.

To be honest it’s all pretty terrifying. However, Nick Brett Deputy Managing Director and Group Editorial Director, BBC Magazines, said during a lecture at Cardiff University a few weeks ago, that he was actually jealous of those just starting out. We still have opportunities, they just aren’t as static as if we were entering journalism three decades ago.

But if you’re not  up for change, get out now. I think I’m going to keep on trying my luck.

Photo courtesy SXC.

I’ve finally read the synopsis of Leonard Downie Jr. and Michael Schudson’s report, “The Reconstruction of American Journalism, ” in the Columbia Journalism Review, as well as a number of reactions to it. I appreciate that CJR let the authors publish such a rich (30-page!) summary of their 100-page report.

Downie, a former executive editor for the Washington Post and currently a professor of journalism at Arizona State University, and Schudson, a professor of journalism at Columbia University, provide their take on what has led up to the current sad state of affairs at American newspapers, and to a lesser degree, at television and radio stations. They discuss the approaches of a number of new media operations (and are generous with links to the projects in question) and suggest several possible new business/nonprofit support models for the industry.

Whether you end up thinking the authors are offering sage advice to journalists, or are off in left field, you really should read the CJR synopsis or the report. It’s important that those of us working in the media have a say in what happens to our profession in the future, and the only way to do that is to be aware of where we’re at now and what people are doing NOW to adapt to the challenges and opportunities the Internet Era has brought us.

On the plus side

The report largely accepts that Web 2.0 and the other cultural factors that have disrupted American journalism are here to stay and cannot be magically “rolled back” by industry collusion (think simultaneous content firewalls on all major newspaper sites) or government mandate. I know this sounds mean, but this is a good sign!  I have been concerned about the number of journalists—including professors and veteran editors and writers—talking as if the Internet is something that must be, or even can be, “stopped.”

Downie and Schudson present a variety of options for fixing the current situation from across the business spectrum. They discuss multiple variations on publicly funded media, as well as foundation-endowed news projects and hybrid corporate/nonprofit news operations. By doing this, they are acknowledging that one model will not fit all in the future, and that journalists need to consider the context of their news operation or project when devising a funding plan.

The authors rightly identify local news coverage as one of the biggest casualties of the shifts in journalism over the past two decades, and do propose several ideas for reviving it. While local involvement and participation seems to generally be associated with our “bowling alone” culture, there are plenty of people who do care about it, and who now have fewer mainstream media resources for tapping into news about the community they live in.

On the minus side

I immediately noticed that there is almost NO discussion of the fate of the magazine industry, perhaps because that’s what my degree is in (magazine journalism) and because I have worked for nearly all my career as a journalist for magazines—either as a freelancer or a staff writer/editor. I believe that magazines had to face the decline of the so-called “mass media” far earlier than newspapers, after the death of “general interest” magazines such as Look, Collier’s and LIFE in the 1960s and 1970s.

By the time I was taking j-school classes in the 1980s, we were told that starting a magazine was much like starting a restaurant—if you know what you’re doing (business-wise) and can self-fund for part of the first five years in business, you have a good chance of making it. Notice that in that description there is no mention of whether the content (or the food) was any good, if competitors were using unfair tactics, or whether customers were reading (or going out for sit-down dinners) less and less. The focus was on establishing a niche and a business model first and foremost. Paying attention to the market, as well as knowing your craft well enough to produce a quality product, were also assumed parts of that model.

On a related note, Downie and Schuder make huge assumptions about the audience for news content and how they will, or should, behave. To be fair, this is something I’ve noticed over and over again when I read essays of this nature written by newspaper-based journalists. The report doesn’t focus much at all on what readers/viewers/listeners are telling journalists about how they’d like to receive their news, or what sorts of news they’d consider worthy of paying for online.

The authors even go so far as to proclaim that “American society must take some collective responsibility for supporting independent news reporting in this new environment,” and wonder out loud in another section whether journalism is a “significant public good whose diminution requires urgent attention.” These are important issues, but this mindset, coupled with a lack of curiosity or genuine connection to one’s audience, comes across as preachy and pedantic—not the sort of vibe one wants to project to attract supporters to an important cause!

Finally, the report points out one of the largest challenges in journalism’s current crisis—we can’t seem to decide if we’re a profession best suited to entrepreneurial or philanthropic support. I like the fact that the authors include both for-profit and nonprofit approaches to new media, but the way in which they are presented serves to highlight the lack of business sense many of us in the field seem to exhibit. What is it that newspapers do? They’re businesses. Wait, no, maybe we should run them as nonprofits? Wait, maybe we can sell ads and get foundation grants, too?

Late in the CJR synopsis, Downie and Schuder use the term “independent news reporting” fairly specifically, and that’s really what they are concerned about, not so much journalism as an industry or business sector. As they note, “it may not be essential to save any particular news medium … What is paramount is preserving independent, original, credible reporting, whether or not it is popular or profitable, and regardless of the medium in which it appears.” (Emphasis in that passage is mine.)

It bothers me that so many of their suggestions rely on government intervention, although I share their opinion that stronger support for radio and televisions stations receiving money through the Corporation for Public Broadcasting would be a good thing. I am a huge fan of public media; however, I also believe that journalistic enterprises can be successful as for-profit businesses. It remains to be seen how that will happen in the future—my feeling is that the “large public” that the authors seek to have journalism’s best work presented to may have already been replaced by a series of balkanized niches, each one hungry for content, but only within a narrow spectrum of interest.

Please use the comment section below to chime in about your reaction to the report, or the state of American journalism in general.

As I sat typing away on my laptop this evening it occurred to me that it is where I seem to spend the majority of my time recently as I embark on my journey of journalistic wonder (which will hopefully end with a job offer).

A combination of journalism's past and its future

Today a journalist without their laptop, mobile or some kind of new fangled technology has little hope of surviving. A depressing message which has been drilled into us throughout our course.

But perhaps not? Is there hope for technology shy journalists like myself?

Joanna Geary, Business Development Editor for Online at The Times, spoke to our online class last week and managed to somehow calm my fears that you need to be a technology whizz to be a journalist now-a-days.

The tool kit for the old journalist

Joanna started her own blog one day as a distraction from some dreaded DIY job she would have rather avoided. Her reluctance to take this step into the blogosphere reminded me of my apprehension in September when I was told I absolutely had to start one, it wasn’t optional.

Taking the first cautious steps towards blogging

Joanna’s story, her journalistic journey, was one of trail and error, rejection but perseverance to fulfil her dream… having superman as her boyfriend.

Lois Lane style reporting with Superman on your arm, every young girl's dream

On a serious note though, Joanna fought for her first job on the Birmingham Post and ended up from starting as a general business reporter in 2004 to becoming Media and Marketing Editor in 2007. Her experimentation with blogging wasn’t new for journalists but she was the first to try it at her paper and soon found herself in charge of her newspapers Twitter account and setting up the Birmingham Post’s blogs. What her editor thought would be a small collection of local blogs turned into something a lot bigger thanks to Joanna misunderstanding how many blogs her editor expected.

Joanna did not profess to be a technology whizz kid which was reassuring and comforting, she was an example of what you can achieve with some amateur experimentation.

Experimenting gone good

Journalists need to fight to survive in this new environment in which we find ourselves. Technology isn’t something to be afraid of and we need to get on board with these developments or we will lose the battle. I am the first to admit that over the summer I would have laughed if someone told me in three months time I would be blogging regularly and be a Twitter fanatic. But now I have to say I enjoy it. I would never say I was a techno kid but taking simple small steps is how Joanna made her name in the online world.

She told us experimenting was the way forward and I agree with her. I’m experimenting at the moment, trying different things with blogs, trying to use Twitter to its full capacity and even trying some camera work (shock horror).

Journalists have to fight or else people will slowly stop seeing the point of our existence. It’s time to move with the times. If we refuse to conform we will end up running for the hills and journalists are made of stronger stuff than that. We can adapt to the times but still keep those vital skills like accuracy from the older days or else what will distinguish us from the bloggers?

Rory Cellan-Jones, BBC’s technology correspondent was kind enough to stop by and give us a lecture on the media industry. Starting his career in the BBC television newsroom in 1983, Rory admits it was very different to today. His office in the 80s contained,  ”men in cardigans on typewriters” as Rory put it.

These days the news is in more demand, with 24/7 access, there is a constant need, which means…no more typewriters. Rory maintained that 2009 is very different to when he first started in the industry, with the apparent retreat of newspapers and jobs there is also a booming online industry which makes the news easier to report, and there are many ways to report it.

Twitter has a new force, and is constantly growing, I have explained the power of Twitter through many posts, but Rory was an apparent fan, and was even twittering during the lecture! He even took a picture of us! Asking his twitter fans, “Here are the journalist of the future. What advice do you have for them?” Infamous journalist Jeff Jarvis was the first to tweet saying, “Never take anything at face value.” Twitter is clearly the platform for a new form of journalism that young journalists are about to enter.

I still believe that journalism can still have the original qualities that we all know and love, and Rory maintained that a 2009 reporter should be multi-skilled, interactive and is a lone wolf/team player. These are qualities can be transferred easily from paper to web, and vice versa.

This is the BBC’s technology correspondent Rory Cellan-Jones on the internet:

“We have an instant playground where we can try it out and make mistakes.”

As he leapt across the lecture theatre, phone in hand, tweeting our faces to the world at large, he was the physical embodiment of his point. A journalist who entered the fray alongside “men in cardigans”, constrained by typewriter ribbon and that morning’s papers, you can see why he has embraced the new media revolution so whole-heartedly. He didn’t profess to be an expert, rather an interested layman playing with the new toys suddenly available to him.

As world-weary tech-savvy square-eyed over-hypenated twenty-somethings, I think we forget how much potential the internet has. To us it’s bread and butter; we’re so used to it we forget it’s there. But take it away and we’d be lost.

Rory Cellan-Jones reminded us why, despite the 2009 landscape of disappearing jobs and retreating newspapers, the internet is helping to bring back the best bits of the old-fashioned trilby wearing journalism, especially beat reporting, local knowledge and:

“Spotting a story, crafting a powerful intro, telling people something they didn’t know – these skills have not been rendered obsolete by the web revolution.”

For him, the 2009 audience is…

Which ties in rather nicely with the 2009 reporter:

Lone wolves. 2 in 1 shampoo. Buffets. Whichever, increasingly tenuous, analogy you use, it’s clear that with the arsenal of new tools at our touch-typing finger tips, we’re in a better position than ever before to connect with our audience.

Need to find an elderly listener to experiment on? Ask for help on Twitter. Need an opinion? Ask on Twitter.

We may be a bunch of low-paid lone wolves, but we’re not stuck out on a limb with a camera and a phone card any more. As Rory said, now we can send and obtain information for free in an instant, and we have a whole host of interactive web users who we can go to and make what we do better.

Not everything will last. He predicted Twitter may well fade away, but then by the time it does there’ll be another gizmo we’re all chattering about – witness the victory of Facebook over Myspace.

25 years ago, a single bulletin needed a producer, a reporter, an editor, a cameraman, a typist…  now it just needs one vaguely tech-savvy reporter and a laptop.

We’ve grown up in the technology playground. It’d be churlish not to try out all the toys.

If you were asked the question, ‘Do you think today’s journalists are afraid of technology?’ what would be your response? I have to admit I would have responded (with a self-important air), ‘Well of course young broadcast journalists aren’t afraid of technology, it’s an essential part of our job…’ So I was surprised when one of our online guest speakers at the Cardiff School of Journalism, Joanna Geary, Web Development Editor for The Times (more on that shortly) told us that a lot of the people who are opposed to digital media are new graduates who are disappointed when journalism doesn’t match their expectations.

I sat up at this statement.  Because I realised that I could become one of these people.  Joanna’s career aspirations had gone from newsreader to war correspondent to business reporter for a local paper to web development editor.  I’m still on war correspondent.  To most people unfamiliar with the industry, the first three job titles mean something, but what about the fourth? I don’t think any of us aspiring student journalists would have said that was our career goal in our interviews.  Most of us have a romantic vision of rushing into the thick of the action, micriphones or cameras in hand, scooping exclusive interviews or delivering succinct and compelling pieces to camera.  Same goes for print journalists, minus the camera et al.

That said, I get very frustrated when well-meaning friends and acquaintances, on learning about my career aspirations and studies, ask  ‘So does that mean you’re going to be on TV?’ ‘There’s more to broadcast journalism than being on TV!!’ I inwardly scream, whilst patiently explaining that a journalist can also be a producer, or work on a newsgathering desk, or write copy without being on air, or research news and current affairs programmes without ever so much as seeing a camera or going near a radio mic.

But other people’s expectations do rub off on you, so it can be surprising when you find out what most journalists really do.  That’s not to say it’s disappointing.  I was fascinated by Joanna’s passion for blogging, new media and most importantly, connecting with anyone and everyone.

I don’t plan to entirely put my expectations aside, but I am open to whatever the industry may throw my way and also excited by the way it’s changing.  Where do I see myself in five years’ time? It’s an interview question that’s always stumped me, but I don’t really mind any more.

On the 10th of November we had someone to talk to us who made me quite star struck. Rory Cellan-Jones is the BBC’s technology correspondent and I not only recognised him immediately but his voice was unmistakeable. I remember sitting and listening to him with my grandparents while they nattered about how much technology was advancing and how they were never going to be able to keep up (now not only do they know how to text but they also have a laptop and have successfully sent two emails to date much to their surprise… and everyone elses).

So yes, we were told the day before that we were having a change to the schedule and Rory would be in to talk to us Tuesday afternoon in the lecture hall which made everyone rather excited. So in the afternoon we made our way to the lecture where Rory and our lecturer Glynn were waiting for us. Before we had much of a chance to settle we were told to all smile and wave not really knowing why only to discover this was posted on twitter later on:

I wasn’t looking too great that day because I was feeling ill  so I’m pretty grateful I’m at the back hidden!

All in all I found the lecture extremely interesting. Not only is he a very witty man, but he was so ahead of his time in 2008 that the powerpoint presentation he showed us from last year was still completely relevant in 2009, even with the speed at which technology is changing. He started off with the sheer number of people who were often seen hustling and bustling around newsrooms in 1983 when he started at the BBC including producers, reporters, editors and craftsmen including people involved with the cameras, sound, lights, engineers and film editors. The audience in the 1980’s was also very different to the audience we have today. Firstly the news brought in HUGE numbers because terrestrial TV was all people had to watch, there was no Sky and no online TV channels where people could get news anytime of the day. The audience were also pretty ignored. There was no way for them to get in touch with newsrooms such as email, text or comments via the web. Rory even told a very funny story about someone who had once called into the studio with everyone finding it hysterical – calling the person mad.

The landscape today of course is very different. There are now hundreds of channels people can watch, 24 hour news and online news while papers are in retreat and jobs for journalists are quickly disappearing. The audience is also very different with User Generated Content becoming a part of every journalists day to day life. The audience are very much involved and active and more and more raw footage of events is being filmed by so-called ‘citizen journalists’ enabling a story to gather momentum more quickly compared with the 1980’s when a camera crew made up of about 10 people would have to rush to get to a breaking news story as quickly as possible.

He ended the lecture with the ideal journalist for 2009. We have to be multi skilled, interactive with our audience, both a lone wolf and a team player and we have to be willing to be poor.

I’m not looking forward to the poor part…

However my favourite part of the whole lecture was this quote: “Twitter is a platform for news.” This could not be more true. I find out most things these days from twitter because I see it as a trending topic. The Ballon Boy scandal, I found out about that over twitter, as well as the ABC/ Adam Lambert debacle.

Twitter is a way for us to get our voice out into the world. It connects us with people all over the world. People we would never usually talk to. Rory himself told us about how he’d searched for an elderly person to help with a report on computers he was doing over twitter!

I <3 Twitter

So… talking about Twitter this is my niche section of my blog. The trending topics bit!  So today there are lots of different topics that are currently trending. Yesterday the number one tweet all day was #happybirthdaymiley for everyone to wish Miley Cyrus a happy birthday.

However, today the top spots were taken by Adam Lambert and ABC with the number one trending topic for the day being #ShameOnYouABC. When I logged on to Twitter I had no idea what this was talking about until I goggled it and found out that Adam Lambert’s performance on ABC’s Good Morning show was cancelled. Although no official reason has been given, the majority of people claim that it is due to his performance on the American Music Awards on Sunday night. Although ABC has not given a reason for the cancellation it seems that the twittersphere is going crazy with people showing their disapproval for what they assume is a backlash of Lambert’s AMA performance.

Another trending topic is Black Friday. This is the Friday after Thanksgiving and is considered the start of the Christmas shopping season. Lots of different stores in the States have sales on and it is considered the busiest shopping day of the year with fights even breaking out between people competing to get the best bargains. I once saw a fight between two women in work, over a £15 dress. They ended up being banned from the store for life…. Is a dress that has 50% off really worth being banned from a chain of shops for life?!

Until next time bloggers…

Some time back now, we were given a lecture by Daniel Meadows. Starting with a big red bus and a camera, Daniel’s story – or rather his storytelling – began. After watching videos from Capture Wales, a BBC project that he lead, I began to think more about how anyone can tell a story.

I had never worked in television, or with filming of any kind, before I came to the Cardiff Journalism School, but this kind of digital storytelling seems even more accessible… and even something we might be doing already.

So rather than babbling away in an analytical blog post, I took a look at my photos, and what I’ve been doing already.

“People do not seek news”- a worrying declaration indeed from innovative Times Web Development Editor, Joanna Geary.

This comment really struck a cord with me. For a few months I have glowered at the doom and gloom pervading newspaper journalism and resented the ever-growing ignorance and disinterest of the consumer (or non-consumer of news).

News=Product, Journalist=Salesman

But what right do I have to claim this privileged position over what are essentially customers. There is a fundamental lofty misconception that we are the gatekeepers of democracy when in reality we are no more important to the consumer than a sales assistant- we are there to serve.

The typewriter has evolved into an iMac, the copy writers have disappeared and yet we are still producing a similar product to what journalists have always churned out. Admittedly we have changed the content, but we are only just getting round to shifting away from what some consumers might see as an archaic medium.

“Business models are one of the biggest talking points in newspaper journalism.” The question is not: how can we make people pay for news? But: what product will people want to pay for?

Like any other salesman we are subject to consumer demands. Our attitudes and in turn our product must adapt if we are to succeed.

We have heard the problems, now we need some answers. Perhaps Rob Andrew, UK editor of paid content, and this Thursday’s lecturer will shed some light on the possible way forward.

Blogging meets my three loves; Macs, Coffee & Shakespeare...

Blogging has been a fundamental part of the postgraduate magazine journalism diploma that I am completing at Cardiff University. As I have said before, I was completely dreading the thought of blogging. I thought that I would be lost for words, wracking my brains for things to write, then struggling to find the time to actually blog at all. Instead I have found that I am conjuring up new things to blog about all the time, and it has almost become a case of what not to include, rather than scrounging and scrambling for inspiration.

Although we have continually been told throughout our lectures that blogging is a great way of showcasing our work and style of writing, it wasn’t until our online lecture with The Times’s Web Development Editor Joanna Geary this week that I realised the potential for this blog to eventually help me get an actual job in journalism. Maybe…

Journalism & Superman went hand in hand for 12 year-old Joanna Geary...

With her entertaining presentation, entitled How I Got My Job, And Other Stories, Geary told us about how she got into journalism- the hard way. Geary started with the dream of becoming the next Lois Lane (complete with Superman boyfriend) at the age of 12 and progressed to doing work experience with her local paper every summer for years on end. After graduating from university, and after many job rejections, Geary finally got her break at the paper when they needed someone young to shake up the business section of the paper. With plenty of enthusiasm, but not a vast knowledge of the world of business, Geary quickly made business her specialist subject- an initiative that most of our online lecturers have advocated that we cultivate for ourselves.

Like myself, Geary was initially reluctant to embrace the world of blogging.  It was Pete Ashton, who along with Stef Lewandowski set up the Birmingham blog network Created In Birmingham in 2007, who was the trigger in finally persuaded Geary to begin blogging. The CIB blog showcases the artistic and creative communities in Birmingham, and focuses on bringing communities in Birmingham together to celebrate the many creative aspects the city offers. Yet despite the initial relunctance, Geary caved in and started a blog. Here are the opening words to her first blog post in September 2007:

“I sit on the floor surrounded by badly cut pieces of laminate- the casualties of my hopeless attempts at DIY.

This, I guess, is as good a time as any to start my own blog.”

Yet once she set one up, she too couldn’t stop writing.

Bearing in mind the success of her personal blog, it wasn’t too long before Geary was asked by her boss to create a series of blogs for The Birmingham Post. Due to a slight misunderstanding, Geary starting to set up a whole network of bloggers in the Birmingham area, even getting prolific local writers on board through some tactical bribing. Even Geary didn’t realise the power of her blog network, and it was only a few years later that she landed her job at The Times, when an editor at the paper sent her a tweet on Twitter offering her an interview. This helps to demonstrate how Twitter is fast becoming the new email. Quick, and to the point, tweets of up to 140 characters can often have more of an impact than a wordy email. It certainly worked for Geary and even got her the high-profile job she has and loves today.

Dodgy DIY- as good a reason to start a blog as any...

Geary confessed that she isn’t, and never has been, a technological junkie. This is encouraging, as although I am not completely computer illiterate, I am no ‘techo wizz’ either. I just love writing. And if blogging can help me to eventually turn this love into a professional career then I will carry on blogging regardless. With my current struggles to obtain some magazine work experience for next Easter, Geary has given me a glimmer of hope that if I keep on trying I will get some eventually.  And if I still haven’t heard from the magazines I’ve applied to in a week I may even send them a tweet. Who knows, with the immediacy and directness of Twitter, they may actually reply…

Last week our online journalism lecture was taken by BBC Technology Correspondent Rory Cellan-Jones. His lecture, the title of which I have borrowed as my own, detailed the changes that the journalism industry has seen since he first began his own career as a reporter in 1983. According to Cellan-Jones, back in the early 80s the industry stereotypically was brimming with men in cardigans, bottles of booze by their sides, while rows of ladies in cardigans sat at typewriters and typed up the stories…

The news teams of the 80s were split in two groups- you were either a writer or a craftworker. Under the umbrella of ‘writers’ came the reporters, the producers and the editors. Under ‘craftworkers’ came the cameramen, the sound technicians, the lighting crew and the film editors.

This is not the case today. Instead of a crew of eight or so people, one person can do almost all of these things- the research, setting up the camera and sound and the actual  reporting, before producing and editing the film themselves. What was once an eight-man job is now a one-man job, brilliant in the sense that the industry is now more multi-skilled and varied than ever, bad in the sense that there are less jobs out there for people like me.

Yet all is not lost. As top blogger Adam Tinworth said in his lecture last week, and Cellan-Jones repeated this week- if you want to succeed in the world of journalism today you have to specialise. For Cellan-Jones, this specialism has been technology. As well as appearing on UK TV screens reporting for the BBC on all things technical, Cellan-Jones is also a keen blogger. In addition to writing about his experiences with the latest technologies, Cellan-Jones also blogged on his niche campaign Broadband Britain, a blog he wrote while traveling around Britain for his blog dot.life. Not only does this highlight specialism within the wider context of technology, it also demonstrates how blogging is versatile and can be written anywhere in the world- as long as broadband is available, something that Cellan-Jones struggled with while on his mission!

Before the lecture was over Cellan-Jones showed us, via his iPhone, that he had put the following message on Twitter: “Here are the journalists of the future. What advice do you have for them?” Along with a photo. From the start to the end of the lecture about 20 people had replied with a variety of answers, some amusing and some completely bizarre. Most notable was the reply from journalist Jeff Jarvis. His advice? “Never take anything at face value.” As guest lecturers and Cardiff tutors alike have been banging on about Jarvis since the course began, it was rather exciting that he obviously has a certain level of interest in us too.

Since the lecture I have been giving the idea of specialism a bit of thought. Although the niche aim of this particular blog was analogue photography, I have always had a real interest in music and gigs, and I think that shows more when looking in my categories section. I will still aim to write more on photography (I haven’t even started on lomography yet!) but my current lack of funds is preventing me from getting any of my photos developed. Although specialism is a key part of success in journalism today, I hope that by writing this blog and exploring any topic that interests me, and hopefully others too, I will eventually find my specialist calling…

First of all, I really enjoyed this lecture. One thing I am continuing to learn about online journalism is that it does’nt pay to be boring.

A websites success surely depends on its interactivity and it’s general appearance, and the lecture on digital story telling was useful in my progression as an ‘online journalist.’

And who better to learn about digital story telling than someone who, as he showed us in this lecture has been doing it all his life. Daniel Meadows, a.k.a the guy with the bus photos expressed, simply how easy it is to tell a story, using pictures.

I must admit that up untill now, I thought that a web page needs to have all the mod cons, videos, music interactivity thrust into your face. But as the saying goes, a picture tells a thousand stories. This is the most important lesson I took from this lecture.

What also struck me was how, a sequence of pictures with a narrative can also portray a story in ways a film does, at times more effectively, as Daniel Meadows showed us concerning his work with the BBC workshops. Here, he taught volunteers in small communities how to use technology to tell THEIR stories. On their own, Mr X’s story isn’t that interesting, but coupled with pictures and a narrative, simply put into an interactive format, the story comes to life.

I now think that pictures are just as effective as videos in telling and portraying a story, something I will experiment with in the coming weeks.