As a lifelong newspaper lover and having just moved from a PR agency to an SEO team, one big facet of the changing impact of the internet on journalism continues to attract my interest – that of the influence of SEO on editorial. I wrote on Shiny Red about it at the beginning of the year and the debate’s continued as newspapers continue to struggle and change. Publications and journalists need and want their stories to be found and read, whether via readers searching for keywords, eg: ‘Bush’ and ’shoe’, or checking in on news aggregators to see what’s hot. Stories must be optimally placed to be found by humans and search engines, with for some potentially controversial implications for editorial.

Talk of keyword stuffing and SEO’d headlines makes many nervous about the potentially detrimental effects on punning, creativity, wordplay, humour etc. A few good articles on this in recent months that are well worth a read – Charlie Brooker had a brilliant rant in the excellently titled – “Online POKER marketing could spell the NAKED end of VIAGRA journalism as we LOHAN know it” stating:

“your modern journalist is expected not only to shoehorn all manner of hot phraseology into their copy, but to try and position it all in precisely the right place. That’s an alarming quantity of unnecessary shit to hold in your head while trying to write a piece about the unions. Sorry, SEXUAL unions. Mainly, though, it’s just plain undignified: turning the journalist into the equivalent of a reality TV wannabe who turns up to the auditions in a gaudy fluorescent thong in a desperate bid to be noticed.“

Perfect Charlie as ever, on another layer of annoyance in a stressed profession, but having seen the kinds of unique user targets many professional bloggers are set per post - without the benefits of a national newspaper platform – there’s no avoiding the issue. Shane Richmond at the Telegraph wrote in the British Journalism Review this quarter, and concluded:

“If an editor wants to devote resources to writing stories based on topics people are searching for, they now have the data that will permit them to do so. Giving readers what they want is a sensible strategy, even though the overall mix of stories within a publication has to be balanced. Different editors will make different choices, but they are editorial choices, not SEO choices. SEO is value-neutral. It doesn’t require you to dumb down, to fill your stories with the names of celebrities or to write 500 articles about Viagra every month. Even if you write about badgers, thermal dynamics or parachuting you will want your article to be seen by people who care about those topics. SEO techniques will give your article a better chance of being found.”

It’s about more, better readers ultimately – making articles as prominent as possible to search engines aggregating a story, or the audiences relevant to the article. If brands are busily trying to SEO what content they’ve got, then obviously it’s got to be a priority for those in the business of content production are too. What’s the point of creating great stuff if noone can find it?- is a question for both journalism and online PR.

Please note – one week in, this is not a perfectly SEO’d article! But I will be trying some things out on my own blog as I learn the ropes at Mindshare in the coming months.

For years celebrities have told us not to believe what you read in the papers. Many newspapers have been taken to court over libellous and slanderous comments. But what about libel and slander online?, does the law need changing or do we just hope the readers flag each other’s mistakes before it gets before the judge?

What is the law on slander and libel exactly?, I suggest you check out Jones the Blogmaker, who has a better grasp of it.

So does the law need re-inventing for the digital age? It’s easy to make a slanderous comment on an online forum and for thousands to read it and the writer never hear from the courts. If a journalist made the same comment in a newspaper, they would (quite rightly) be sacked.

Web 2.0 enables a slanderous comment to get round the world. It’s easy to see why keeping the law online is difficult; it’s easy for the audience to think “what’s the harm?”

Contempt Of Court rules just don’t work online. The online community needs stricter laws; the journalists have the editors and the lawyers to advise them. The online community merely has each other and we can only hope that harmful comments or untrue gossip that could ruin a career gets flagged up and deleted before it gets sent around the world.

However, when the newspapers and magazines tell the odd white lie themselves from time to time surely the audience cannot be completely blamed for seeing a blurred line when the media break the law themselves?

Check out a post by Shane Richmond about a High Court judge who ruled that defamatory comments on bulletin boards are more slanderous than libelous.

In addition check out Charlotte Elizabeth Clark’s blog, and Notes from My Sofa (Amy Davies’s blog) as they have also blogged about law.

How should journalists report on blogs?

Blogging gives writers the power to publish, but people should think carefully about what they write and journalists should think carefully about how they report on it.

Anything blogged is archived. It’s more than a passing comment and could be picked up and used by someone else, which is a good thing and a bad thing.

For journalists, the internet provides a wealth of material for stories.

On My Telegraph – a blog site hosted by The Daily Telegraph – a man whose daughters had been killed by a drink driver was blogging at the moment of the trial. As legal restrictions had been lifted, a story about his blog made a story in the newspaper.

Or a newspaper might run a story about the Bebo or Facebook page of somebody newsworthy.

Perhaps it’s the excitement of the now, which makes people forget it’s not always okay to publish pictures of last weekend’s partying or worse. They forget anyone can see and use it.

A blog is exciting because of its immediacy…

But blogging can also be used effectively to raise awareness of a cause. David Smith published an article in last Sunday’s Observer about singer-songwriter, Juliana Hatfield, who blogged during her treatment for anorexia nervosa in a mental hospital.

But it was distasteful for him to precede an excerpt of her blog with: “Here is the raw and unflinching account of Hatfield’s experience inside the clinic in Cambridge Massachusetts.”

His comment inappropriately tried to glamorise her harrowing blog.

…but perhaps too raw to be read by others.

Hatfield paused half way through her blog and wrote: “Before computers you never would have found me blabbing so openly like this about this. This is me being modern.

“Damn these computers and this interweb and the pressure on us musicians to update constantly and to communicate. It encourages, inspires over sharing.

“It’s so easy to say too much and to feel safe giving away one’s private secrets.”

Do these old law books hold the answer? Doubtful.

Shane Richmond , communities editor for The Telegraph made some interesting points in a recent lecture on online journalism regarding the law.

My experience of media law has to date included a module for my BA in Journalism and the module I do now for my postgrad diploma. I’ve never been sued, and I’m hoping that, until the day I get employed by some hotshot magazine which has the weight behind it to fend off such things, I won’t be.

A few legal points for your consideration in such a context:

• Contempt of Court
• Privacy
• Censorship
• Defamation : Libel/Slander?

Contempt of Court

Article Six of the European Convention of Human Rights (ECHR) says that everyone has the right to a fair trial . But with the age of Google, what’s to stop jurors finding out anything and everything about the person standing trial? Even worse, finding out about the terrible crimes committed by someone else with a similar name? At present (and any legal eagles can correct me here) I can’t see much way around this short of banning the internet altogether (bad) or banning jurors from leaving a room until the trial ends (impractical, bordering on torture).

Privacy

As much as I’m addicted to Facebook, I do sometimes worry about the privacy implications. Privacy is another thing protected by the ECHR. I’ve now made the step to make sure my profile is private so that potential stalkers aren’t able to get easy access to my details, but there’s probably a whole host of other resources that would allow one to find me. Worrying.

Censorship/Free Speech

The Telegraph hosts several user blogs (through it’s My Telegraph platform) of which, none of them are censored. Shane Richmond says that the readers expect freedom of speech, to them it is important. Internet moderation is a tricky game to play, but in practice there are three ways to go about it:

1. Read first (and allow approved stuff)
2. Read later (and remove if necessary) 
3. Don’t read at all (can be dangerous and brand-damaging).

The BBC makes use of the first technique, because obviously being the institution that it is, it can’t have any Tom, Dick or Harry posting nonsense on its website. The problem is, this kind of moderation is hugely expensive. Could the millions the BBC spend on this every single year be better directed elsewhere? The Telegraph, on the other hand uses a combination of all three for its blogging platform. The read later approach is probably the best because it allows for immediacy, but also ensures that standards can be upheld.

Defamation on the internet: Is it Libel/Slander?

Is it libelous (written form) or slanderous (spoken form) to defame someone on a blog forum? The thing is, forums are pretty transitory, and are more akin to a conversation. They do, however, have permanence and are searchable. The ramifications for libelling someone are a lot worse than for slandering someone, so it needs to be considered in order for the correct legal treatment. This blog  by Rhian goes into a lot more detail than I have in this paragraph – so you should read that instead…

So all in all, the internet’s made the legal system a touch out of date. And I’m not so sure it can catch up.

What do you think?

As Communities Editor at The Telegraph, Shane Richmond has to deal with troublesome bloggers and commentators all the time.  But as he pointed out in the talk he made at Cardiff University this week, My Telegraph (the Telegraph readers’ blogging site) has to remain open and promote free speech, if it is to remain a popular area where users come and express opinion.  Even if they are Richard Barnbrook, the British National party’s London Assembly member.

Moderation is of course key; Richmond explained when they set the site up, they had three choices “Read first, read later, or don’t read”.  The third being the only viable option, as if you profess to read everything, you are in fact rubber stamping it all as fine, and perhaps even condoning it.  Anyway, there really is not enough time to read everything that’s posted, seeing as they have some 21,000 members.  So the site is ’self-moderated’, in the sense that people can alert moderators to any material they believe to be in breach of the code of conduct.

However, as more of us find our voices online, this style of moderation could pose more problems to hosts – as the amount of material which potentially breaks the law grows, with one of the most serious of those being Contempt of Court.  It seems online communities have little regard to the laws, or possibly just very little understanding of what they could be doing by posting certain material.

The obvious example of this is the case of Baby P, the 17 month old baby who died in August last year after being abused by his mother, her boyfriend and their lodger Jason Owen.  The judge ruled the mum and partner must remain anonymous; however it is not hard to find out who they are, where they lived and what they look like by doing a quick search on Google.  It appears, as Richmond told us, people really do not want their names to be kept a secret, regardless of the law, because they do not think their anonymity is deserved.

If, like I did, you search for their names, you will find an abundance of message boards full of vigilante style comments, calling for all kinds of harsh punishment for these people.  They seem to be growing in popularity, making use of sites such as Facebook, Yahoo Answers or blogs where people can vent their anger in a style reminiscent of George Orwell’s “Two Minutes Hate”.

In Nineteen Eighty-Four Party members are forced to make a show of their hatred towards “the Enemies of the Party”.  Today people are using groups as an outlet for their rage and disgust, although this is not necessarily a helpful way of dealing with complex and emotional issues.  I wonder if the people who contribute to these sites are perpetuating a belief that this is the ‘correct’ and normal reaction to have in these circumstances.  The comedian Richard Herring makes a similar point in his blog Warming Up where he addresses the public reaction to paedophiles.

As a country notorious for grumbling, perhaps it is inevitable that online communities attract people who want to moan.  The Internet is ever fragmenting: people can choose what material they look at, they can seek out communities of like minded people, and actively search for arenas where their views are echoed and reinforced.  And it is for this reason I believe it is not surprising groups naming and shaming Baby P’s mum, and calling for her to be hung, drawn and quartered will flourish, regardless of the law.

Video:  From the John Hurt and Richard Burton version of the film Nineteen Eighty-Four

Last week media forums, social networking sites and blogs were filled with posts by angry individuals wanting to know why the identity of Baby P’s mother and her boyfriend could not be shared with society. Following this, there were posts naming and shaming the adults involved in this horrific case of child abuse.

Clearly, the Great British public are not aware of the legal ramifications of these actions. As far as they are concerned the mother of Baby P and her boyfriend should have no right to protection by the media. To the majority of society, the publication of their identity is deemed acceptable and perhaps even desirable.

Shane Richmond, Community Editor at Telegraph.co.uk, is familiar with the problem of moderating online content. In a lecture discussing online communities last week, he talked of how difficult it was to keep an eye on the flow of information being put on My Telegraph each day.

He said part of the problem stems from the fact Telegraph readers do not see themselves as bloggers. They use the forum as a way of talking to other Telegraph readers, people who have similar interests and viewpoints. It is likely then, these bloggers do not realise what they are publishing may have considerably graver implications than a conversation with a friend.

In the UK, contempt of court laws are in place to prevent jury members from becoming prejudiced towards a defendant prior to or during a trial. Professor Duncan Bloy says:

“In the criminal justice system the assumption is that the jury is the weakest link.”

This is particularly true in high profile cases which have received a lot of media coverage.

For this reason, the media is bound by the Contempt of Court Act (1981) to act responsibly in terms of what it publishes, especially in the run up to a trial. During the 2001 trial of Leeds’s footballers Lee Bowyer and Jonathan Woodgate, The Mirror acted outside such legal prescriptions. Their infringement of the law led to a retrial and the Sunday Mirror was found guilty of contempt of court.

Back to Baby P. What the British public do not realise is the last thing the media want to do is protect the perpetrators of such a heinous crime.

Journalists are obliged under law to adhere to reporting restrictions. If they do not, legal action can be taken against them or, more likely, their publication. By keeping in line with the judges’s order not to identify Baby P, his mother and her boyfriend, journalists are attempting to maintain the legal framework to ensure that any further trials, which may yet take place, are not abandoned.

The main worry is whether the contempt of court laws can survive the internet age and if so how? What is clear is the provisions are out of place in an era where people have instantaneous access to information and the means to distribute it worldwide. Earlier this week a woman was thrown off a jury for putting a poll on facebook which detailed the case she was sitting on and asked for advice on how she should act.

As Judith Townend points out, members of the public are uneducated about the laws and ethics of journalism and have no editorial controls to stop them publishing. Meanwhile, professionals are restricted, and rightly so, by a code of conduct and the rule of law.

How will we reconcile this dichotomy: journalistic values of authority, autonomy and lack of bias, against community values of transparency and honesty? If we can’t then journalists may be faced with a conversation continuing without them.

One thing is for sure: the status quo cannot remain.

At the risk of bad taste, it occurs to me that Baby P and the BNP have several things in common. They both consist of the same number of syllables, share first and last letters, and have the word ‘evil’ used in relation to them most days of the week.

But where the internet is concerned, these subjects highlight two opposite ends of the spectrum. One of them has exposed the uncontrollable pitfalls of web 2.0, while the other has exposed itself to the net’s democratic triumphs.

Over the past couple of weeks, the horrifying story of Baby P has permeated everything from tabloid headlines to chat shows, and web traffic has been no different.

But it’s that ‘traffic’ element that separates the internet from the rest. Whereas TV and newspapers mainly act as engines that drive such stories on, web 2.0 goes beyond this by also offering an outlet for whatever a story provokes.

While tabloids busied themselves prising ever more sickening details from the tragedy, this networked Britain of ours, stoked with moral outrage, sought to vent that fury with a vigilante quest to publish the names of Baby P’s killers.

In doing so those responsible broke a controversial but crucial court order, and thus undermined the very legal system they slated for protecting child killers.

Information, once controlled even in the fullest democracy by a select few, is now the weapon of the masses. The law is trampled in the face of this lawless cyberspace; as the Telegraph’s Shane Richmond pointed out, current legislation will not survive web 2.0 – and many in media agree.

The terrifying point is: what law comes in its place? In light of such cases as the above, a full and open net democracy seems unworkable, leaving the alternative of a fascist web state, where IP addresses are ruthlessly hunted down until every court order-breaking blogger is locked up for long enough to deter even the angriest of Sun readers.

Yet while it may be ushering in fascism with one hand, the web is stamping on its head with the other.

BNP councillor Richard Barnbrook caused something of a stir a few months ago when he began blogging on My Telegraph – that paper’s pioneering attempt to make its readers feel younger.

The Guardian was particularly scathing in its reaction, but missed the mark entirely – ironically sounding more like the reactionary stereotype of the Telegraph we know and love.

The BNP, as with the Nazis before them, are at their most dangerous when they have control over information, able to keep those niggling bits of racism in their agenda quiet while championing their patriotic wholesomeness.

By exposing his agenda to the networked masses, Barnbrook exposed the BNP to the other, better side of web democracy: enlightened fascist-bashing.

Amidst the two-way and very congested road of 2.0, Barnbrook’s rhetoric is either crowded out or occasionally subject to being pulled apart. His ridiculous voice is silenced, save for the sporadic flushing sound whenever he receives a comment.

If the powers that be tried to crush the sort of networking, however misguided, that led to the Baby P names being published, then they would also crush our ability to steamroll the worst facets of society like Barnbrook and his BNP.

The internet is now too large, too unchained, and too powerful to tame. Regrettably then, it must be the system that bends to the people.

How? Good question.

“Today, because of the internet, anyone and everyone can disseminate their thoughts, their feelings, their research, their discoveries, their analyses, their opinions, world wide to millions at virtually no cost.” – David Matas, Media Awareness Network.

Shane Richmond, Communities Editor at The Daily Telegraph, spoke to us this week about managing the My Telegraph public blogs that the newspaper runs online. A problem he highlighted was the precarious balance between freedom of speech and legality.

Referring to a BNP representative, Richard Barnbrook, who writes a My Telegraph blog, Richmond spoke of The Guardian uproar to them allowing a fully-fledged BNP councillor to speak so openly about his views. Indeed, Barnbrook’s entries are controversial, with one entitled ‘Blame the Immigrants’ which he seemingly does…for everything.

And the Telegraph’s response? If it doesn’t break any laws, it is okay.

Too right. The whole point of these blogs is to allow Joe Public to speak in an open forum. My Telegraph prides itself on dedication to the users; they control how the system is run and what features are on it. As long as what is said is legal it cannot be censored, for freedom of expression would be at stake surely. Letting Barnbrook write his blog doesn’t mean the Telegraph endorses his views and doesn’t mean other people will agree with them; it just means he can have his say like anybody else.

But is this easier said than done? Richmond admitted that moderating the blogs to make sure they stay legal is a tough one.

In August, Justice Eady ruled that defamatory comments in internet forums are more slander than libel; the difference being that slander is defamation by speech and libel by writing. The latter is arguably easier to prove due to the thought out and permanent nature of a written piece. Whereas the former is a greyer area, seen as more spur-of-the-moment expression, akin to comments flying about the internet.

This ruling, sympathetic to those with the hard task of moderating forums, acknowledges how hard it is to maintain legality all the time in an internet space of which the public is given free reign.

Several of my journalism cohorts have played neighbourhood watch this week and flagged up internet pieces on the basis that they illegally name the parents of Baby P. Those names are flying around the internet when they shouldn’t be, leaving their publishers open to serious contempt of court charges…if they can be caught. “The contempt of court laws are not going to survive the internet”, we were told. Pessimistic, but quite possibly true.

The speed and vastness of the internet only allows it to be manageable to a small degree. Richmond’s team does what it can, flagging up controversial topics that may give way to legal problems, but he acknowledged they have to be realistic: there‘s no way to read everything.

Freedom of speech on the right side of the law is our mantra, My Telegraph has admirably ruled. But with over 30,000 bloggers active through the site, getting the users to stick to the same mantra is another kettle of fish. It’s hard for freedom of expression and containment to go hand in hand, especially when it seems impossible to keep up with the internet. However, it’s a journalistic and a legal necessity.

Attracting readers is crucial to the success of any blog. Last week I touched on the subject of building an audience through Search Engine Optimisation and participation in online communities, but what if I was to tell you there are blogging platforms out there right now which can all but guarantee a double digit audience from your very first post?

Hosting a blog on independent sites like blogger and wordpress is the most common way to create content for the web. Scott Karp has identified the some of the benefits of blogging for journalists: it allows us to publish content which you cannot publish elsewhere, it gives us the power and responsibility which comes with becoming our own editor and publisher, blogs can act as an online portfolio and crucially blogging gives us experience with technologies that are fast transforming the media as we know it.

The downside of blogging independently is that you have to fight for your audience. Professional journalists who blog have the backing of not only their name but a big media brand to help them attract readers, amateur journalists on the other hand do not have these crutches to fall back on. Building an audience can take months, if not years.

Becoming part of an online community can make or break a blog and this is exactly what big media blogging platforms like My Telegraph offer, instant access to an online community which all but guarantees an audience. The benefit is clear, as long as you post frequently (at least four times a week according to Shane Richmond), maintain a high standard and write for a niche you will have a successful blog on your hands. However the downside of allowing your blog to fall under the banner of The Telegraph is moderation. For obvious reasons hosts have to moderate the content which appears on their site and as a consequence can your work ever truly be considered your own?

Big media blogging platforms are also clearly inappropriate for the kind of blogs many people create. A blog suitable to a site like My Telegraph would likely be news or current affairs based, while many of the blogs the public create are more personal and often have little to do with the latest headlines. For journalists who blog this is not a problem, the remit of every journalist is to create content which is either interesting or relevant (preferably both), but a huge number of journalists publish blogs independently for good reason, freedom is everything in the world of opinion.

Perhaps it might be a good idea to set up our very own Cardiff University School of Journalism (JOMEC) blogging platform, but rather than an actual tool for creating blogs (which would be an impracticably huge undertaking) it could be a web page featuring links to the best of the work produced by JOMEC students. It would create an instant community and open up the content we are creating to the rest of the world. If success online depends on being part of the conversation what better way to get yourself heard than shouting with 100 voices instead of one.

We were all getting a little tired of the Web 2.0 buzzwords being drummed into us.

Social media. Change. Conversation. Democracy. Blogs. Networking.

Buzz when you hear the Web 2.0 word. Photo by Markus Angermeier.

So, it was a nice surprise for the Telegraph’s Communities Editor, Shane Richmond to give us a different point of view in this week’s Online and Mobile Media lecture.

Most interestingly, he mentioned the NUJ and their concern about Web 2.0 destroying journalism. He has written a blog post about it.

This shocked me. I was under the impression there was two distinct groups in journalism at the moment.

1. The traditional hack; clinging and clawing onto the old ways and means of making news.
2. The tech-savvy geek with a bunch of blogs and Twitter-meet ups in his diary.

@tweetfreak a Twitter meet up. Photo by mallix

Apparently, there are others (aside from the sub-culture of students) who are very confused about all this web stuff. And more poignantly, even the NUJ!

The offending article in the NUJ’s magazine, The Journalist, was written by a Multi-Media Commission member, Donnacha DeLong. He said:

“There are those who claim that Web 2.0 democratises the media. It would make everyone equal, yes, but should they be? It’s like saying anyone can play for Manchester United.”

Whatever Delong thinks, Web 2.0 democracy is something worth maintaining. Quality journalism will not be forfeited simply because more content is being published.

Shane Richmond also defends the concern from people like DeLong about Web 2.0.

Indeed, some internet or Web 2.0 content may seem “rubbish” (to use DeLong’s word) but that content may not be for you.

This is something I had never considered. Some journalists have been very quick to disregard online content. But that awful content may well be important to the people it involves and therefore it is important to maintain it.

Shane used the analogy of someone talking on their mobile on a train. It’s the same conversation you always hear: “I’m on the train”, and it’s a bit of a social joke now (thanks to Dom Joly). Although this conversation is not relevant to you, it is to the people who are having it; even the worst of the internet (as considered by Word Magazine) is relevant to someone.

Relevation: the quality of Web 2.0 content can only be judged by those who it is relevant to. 

I’m sure the Facebook for dogs, Dogbook, is relevant for someone out there (who are these people?)

And – although I hate to admit it – stuff like this makes me laugh:

 Long live Web 2.0 democracy!

I’m going to do a follow up on this with a list of the worst internet content (which is relevant for someone) just for fun. Let me know if you have any to add. 

Photo used courtesy of mallix and used under the Creative Commons Licence. Available on Flickr.

I’ve never had a newspaper that I felt attached or affiliated to; not in terms of political ideas, style of writing, news agenda or otherwise.While some read either the Guardian because they have left wing views or the Telegraph because they agree with the conservative ideas and agenda, me? I’m a floater.

I like the Sun because of the shocking headlines, I like the Guardian on a Monday for the media section, I like the Mirror’s website for unusual articles, and I like TelegraphTV for as-it-happens news on demand.

The same goes for magazines, I know countless girls who like the features in Marie Claire, the ‘gossip’ in Heat and the pictures in OK, the feist of Cosmopolitan but the shopping pages of Grazia.

Rather than read just one title a week or month they, and I include myself, read around the titles on the shelf to get all the pages they want, from the publications that do it – the way they want it.

I guess that means we’re already part of the fragmenting audience.

Shane Richmond, Communities Editor at telegraph.co.uk, notes how where communities once used to build around titles, and loyalty with it, the nature of online publications and aggregation tools allow users to now just take the bits they want from media content.

Communities are now building around particular sections of a publication, such as the sport section of telegraph.co.uk, the fashion pages of Grazia, getting the media news delivered to their desktop by RSS from the Guardian, or taking articles from various places and bringing them back to their own forum for debate and conversation.

But I’m not sure it’s ever really been that different, people have always read along the shelf, but so long as the whole publication was still bought I guess no-one really noticed that many of us were only reading a small section, rather than the whole package.

Every episode of Alan Partridge is brilliant but this may just be the best scene in the whole series. Desperate to impress the visiting Irish TV executives, our hero launches the most incompetent, patronising charm offensive ever seen, culminating in the wonderful section where he lists things people associate with Ireland (horses running through council estates, toothless simpletons etc).

During today’s excellent lecture by Shane Richmond, Communities Editor of Telegraph.co.uk, it struck me that when we the media establish, manage and discuss online communities there is a danger we, like Partridge, struggle to think outside our prejudices and preconceptions.

What do people really want from us?

Shane Richmond told us that the values treasured by journalists and the values users expect in online media sites are very different. He hammered home the reality that in a media landscape where the very concept of brand loyalty has been fractured and users can pick their news à la carte on an article by article basis, reassessing readers and reflecting their wants is paramount.

Part of the new role of media organisations is to facilitate the workings of online communities, which the My Telegraph site is very good at, currently hosting 30,000 bloggers. The Telegraph cottoned on quickly that most of their bloggers did not want to “be bloggers” as such when they signed up, they really just wanted to talk to other Telegraph readers.

Once again when we strip away grandiose theories about people embracing the power to publish, we are left with something much more simple.

If you were to go into any pub in the country and wander around listening to people’s conversations, you’d probably be barred. But as you were manhandled out the door, you would marvel at the range of topics that get people talking. It’s the same on the Internet.

A random look at MyTelegraph today brought up links to posts with the following titles; “Towards a typology of delinquent public service employees”, “What is your favourite recipe?” and “Will Muslims go to Heaven?”.

None of these topics would have been covered in today’s papers and yet at one point this afternoon they were three of the most read postings. The point, as Mr Richmond explained, is things that might seem unimportant, un-newsworthy or uninteresting to a hard-nosed hack have engaged thousands of people.

This 2007 article written by American digital technology professor Rich Gordon urges newspapers to think of their websites as networks rather than destinations.

Add all these network-building ideas together and I think a news site can increase its site traffic significantly — attracting new audiences, making current users come back more frequently, and increasing the time spent and pages viewed per visit.

The same ideas underpin big organisations like the Telegraph managing online communities. It struck me as telling that although Telegraph readers inundate Shane and his team with complaints about the website, they still come back again and again.

Readers’ expectations are clearly changing. Next time we reel off what we think people want from newspaper websites, we would be wise to stop and think. To paraphrase Partridge, “Der’s more to the website, dan dis.”

If you’ve got nothing to hide, why hide behind an official spokesperson? If you believe in free speech, why not agree to a proper interview? The morning’s Media Guardian published an article I have been researching for the last few months. Headlined A Platform for Free Speech … or Hate, it examines the Telegraph’s attitude towards some of the more extremist views available on its readers blogs. My investigation has uncovered that the My Telegraph service is being used by members of the British National Party (BNP) to promote their nefarious views. I knew that I would attract a fair bit of heat from the article, as you can’t go around accusing a national newspaper of harbouring the views of the far right, albeit a vocal minority of them, and not expect it to bite back.

So here goes. One of the card-carrying neo-fascists I mentioned in the article quoted Socrates in his defence (although he couldn’t actually spell my name correctly) on his blog. Many others from the far right called me, and the newspaper I often work for, a lot of nasty names. All as to be expected. Many of them, moreover, also accused me (apparently without reading my article as there comments were published before it was printed) that I was against free speech. I think it goes without saying that I’m not against freedom of speech. I just want to question whether a reputable and recognised brand like the Telegraph (a newspaper I’ve long admired) wants to allow members of the far right to use it as a platform to propagate their extremist views. Of course, it’s not me who is against free speech, but a party that routinely uses violence to support its views; who deny the holocaust and whose leader has been tried twice for incitement to racial hatred (although he did eventually get off). The BNP is also a party that, according to its own constitution, is “committed to stemming and reversing the tide of non-white immigration.”

I asked Weyman Bennett, national secretary of Unite Against Fascism what he thought of the free speech defence and whether the Telegraph should allow active members of the BNP to use the Telegraph to promote their views. He told me that the British National Party remain far from a legitimate organisation and that he “would assume that the Telegraph would be at pains to condemn the BNP. Instead they are allowing a fascist party to whip up racism and that it needs to recognise that it is not a benign organisation, but threat to anybody who believes in democracy.”

The communities editor of the Telegraph, Shane Richmond, published a list of my questions on his blog on Friday without my consent. I took such an intrusion into our private correspondence in good humour, but I think it’s a bit rich of him to complain about freedom of speech when he refused both a face-to-face and telephone interview forcing me to send any questions I had via email and to conduct most of his comments over the internet and in public before even reading my article. So one that question again to Shane Richmond: if you’ve got nothing to hide, why hide behind your official spokesperson?

Apologies if we go back to the same ’source’ material again. And this time, I’ll give the author his due – Mr Anthony Lilley, take a bow.

But the more I read it, the more gems you find. With the same on-going proviso – that you read it through the eyes of a wood-stainer. For whether by accident or design, it bangs nail after nail on the head.

Or at least gives some great starting points for a discussion.

This baby, for example.

“Our use of media is shifting to find a new balance between the creation and distribution of content as we have known it in the age of mass media and the active participation of citizens.

“We are entering the age of “our media” – where the communication of ideas amongst groups and the sharing of content are at the heart of what’s going on…”

Spot on. The new balance between the distribution of content as we have known it and the active participation of citizens… Very good. Cos that’s new media gold – how to crack that interaction without moderation nut. As it stands, most of us have discovered only new media green on that score.

Am I going to run a messageboard community off www.myfootballwriter.com and spend my life enslaved to a moderating screen as anonymous 14-year-olds from their bedrooms Ipswich have a pop at Norwich…? Er, no.

Not as a responsible publisher with a family-friendly brand to protect. A post for another time, but that tide is on the turn was the feeling from both the floor and the platform of Paul’s JEECamp the other day.

I’d also take a different view in terms of the age of “our media”. No surprise given the fact we’re running www.myfootballwriter.com and www.mylocalwriter.com, but I’d say it was more the age of “my media” – something, you presume, Shane and his myTelegraph set-up would concur with.

This bit is good. Particularly if you insert the word ‘newspaper’ into the mix.

“We already have a splendid system of media distribution using the mass media technologies of television, film, radio and, to some extent, the first generation of the web.

“Indeed, broadband networks have the added effect of improving this environment still further by facilitating access to media on-demand.

“But even this change from a scheduled world of media scarcity to a plentiful world of traditional media available on-demand represents a significant challenge to the assumptions and models of mass media players…

Newspaper hats on and two phrases leap out - “media on-demand” and “a scheduled world of media scarcity“, ie I want my news now and not when the paper-boy deigns to finally show and that “scheduled world”, one that for 400-odd years has been enslaved to the deadlines of a print press. And as such was able to keep media scarce.

And that’s a big, big word in this digital age of ours. Cos if media is scarce then it has a value. Simple supply and demand; keep supply scarce and the demand will push the price up.

To my mind – and that of Clay Shirky – the demand for media is not the problem. Everyone still wants a good read, just as they still want to listen to good music, etc, etc…

It’s the supply side that’s the problem. Media is everywhere. News is instant and universal. And free.

“Traditional media are at the zenith of their powers when they are distributing information and providing entertainment.

“These are powerful human needs; but they are not sufficient for life in the 21st century as the force of globalisation flatten our world. We are not in the information age; that has passed. We’re entering the networked, learning age…”

Sit down with a bank in these current, credit-crunched climate – and I suspect this will apply just as much to TrinityMirror, Archant, the LA Times, etc, etc, as much as it will to me and www.mylocalwriter.com – and that’s our biggest, biggest problem. Proving value.

If I can get this for free, on the web, what’s the value in your newspaper? Or, indeed, your website? Somewhere in all the recent talk of share prices halving, that fundamental thought is going through the minds of the markets. Where’s the value? When media was scarce, yeh, sure I get it… Now it’s everywhere. And costs me nothing. Where’s the value?

Because the ’scarcity of media’ applies just as equally to the distribution of advertising as it does to the distribution of editorial content. For 400-odd years, there was only one local advertising platform in town – and that ad only ever got as far as the furthest paper-boy.

Now we’re in this ‘networked’ age and that ad doesn’t need a paper boy to carry it; advertising ain’t scarce anymore, that’s everywhere too. Where’s the value in that quarter page ad? Heh, and I’ll keep myself in the newspaper boat – where’s the value in that banner ad? What’s so special about you? Where’s your added value?

And for all of us the answer we have to urgently hope lies in that one word – that not only are we in this networked age, but we’re in this “learning” age…

Because if information is everywhere, what it actually means is still – thankfully – quite scarce. Or rather those that actually know what that information means are still quite scarce; those that can add the ‘learning’ to a football score, an on-line police rap sheet, a roadside death in Iraq, and all those other bland, bald pieces of information that don’t come with education attached.

That’s why I look at www.everyblock.com with huge admiration – in all but one, key regard. I want to learn from it, not be informed by it. Information is everywhere; learning isn’t… what do I learn from a hygiene report? A police crime stat? I want the analysis, the colour, the background – and I want it from a source that I respect and trust.

That’s the value.

One night last autumn I discovered I had 24-hours in which to submit my final proposal for this year’s Knight News Challenge; boy was the midnight oil burned.

But in my hour of desperate need, I found a quote from Bill Keller as he warned that for all this explosion of information on the Internet, the supply of reliable news reporting was dwindling.

“What is absent from the vast array of new media outlets is, first and foremost, the great engine of news-gathering – the people who witness events, ferret out information, supply context and explanation.”

There’s your scarcity; there’s your value; there’s our future.

Now explain it to a bank.

Shane blogs about the meeting he and The Telegraph are hosting tomorrow (and which I’m looking forward to attending).  He says there are still spaces should anyone want to come, and that the format has changed slightly:

There will be one longer panel discussion instead of two short ones. We felt that the two topic areas – the effect of political blogging on traditional media and on politics itself – were too close for separate discussions.

If you fancy it then get in touch with Shane before the end of the day.