The Day After Tomorrow (Part II): New Medium, New Narratives

In the last entry in this (rather erratic) series, I identified one of the problems of most online journalism as a widespread failure to integrate old-school text narratives with the new media tools at our disposal.

You can imagine a typical example: straight news story, probably taken from the print paper, with a video stuck on the end.

Not the optimal way of telling a story with the tools we have today.

A few weeks ago, a lecture by Daniel Meadows gave me some ideas as to how better integration might be possible.

Daniel is a photographer, filmmaker and all round good egg. I was lucky enough to come across some of his pictures in the How We Are exhibition at Tate Britain a few years ago.

He talked about his work with ‘Digital Storytelling‘ in Wales for the BBC. Rather than an add-on to a story planned and executed in print, these audio and visual narratives can be seamlessly integrated into our reporting.

If you didn’t watch the video at the beginning of this post, shame on you. Go and do it now.

Doesn’t it tell you more about Daniel Meadows than I could have in a block of text?

And do we need 25-word intro paragraphs if video can draw you in so well?

Our future on Facebook

From the Facebook blog, after this week’s upgrade of Messaging.

I’m intensely jealous of the next generation who will have something like Facebook for their whole lives. They will have the conversational history with the people in their lives all the way back to the beginning: From “hey nice to meet you” to “do you want to get coffee sometime” to “our kids have soccer practice at 6 pm tonight.” That’s a really cool idea.

Beautiful or terrifying? You decide.

Funding Models for Online Journalism II: Rupert Murdoch’s Paywall

Rupert Murdoch

The big bad.

It’s difficult to decide whether my own dislike for the paywall stems from it being Murdoch’s baby or from simple revulsion at a concept that goes against the grain of everything the free internet represents.

But my personal bias doesn’t stop the paywall being a valid means of funding for online journalism.

Perhaps the worst choice the newspapers ever made was not to follow the magazines in deploying paywalls when they first went online.

The early results are not good, and analysis suggest the scheme is some way from making up for the lost ad revenue at this point.

It gets worse if the rest of the industry stays free and ad-supported. The most worrying problem is that the paywall model could be successful (through unpredictably so) if all the major newspapers were involved. But the current beggar-thy-neighbour approach could doom us all.

Unlike magazines, pure news doesn’t hold many strong niches that we can build into popular paywalled content. And as a brand, the Times isn’t as strong as it once was, in no small part due to Mr Murdoch himself.

It can’t work. Can it?

Funding Models for Online Journalism I: Advertising and The Daily Telegraph

The Telegraph has a very underrated online side, perhaps because their readership aren’t on average the type of people who take to the blogs to mutter about this kind of thing. (Unlike the Guardian, whose online side is probably overrated).

In all, telegraph.co.uk is a great example of a strong ad-supported online arm, and the snazzy new redesign makes it look the part too.

They focus, successfully, on search engine optimisation, and everything is designed to increased traffic.

The downside of this model? Google does it better.

A huge amount of any newspaper site’s traffic is now redirected through our tyrannical masters friendly neighbourhood search engine.

The advertising pie is only so large, and when someone very powerful and very good at generating ad money is taking first slice, it squeezes your revenue.

If advertising support is the way we intend to fund online journalism, then we survives. But it makes less money, and as a corollary employs fewer people and sustains fewer titles.

It’s an imperfect method, and not an attractive one in my view. I don’t want to see the media a weaker beast. I don’t want to see further decline in investigate reporting. And I don’t want to see a content race to the bottom as the papers get ever more desperate for online traffic.

Do you?

Map This

In celebration of being back in Cardiff (and in no way because it was a set task), I’ve only gone and created a map of recommended places to eat in Cardiff!

Listings are based on reviews, and feature both pretty pictures and direct links to the menus.

 

View Larger Map

There’s probably a million wonderful places I’ve missed, so your favourites below the line please.

The Day After Tomorrow (Part I)

Last Thursday my fellow Cardiff Journalism students and I were lucky enough to get a lecture on online journalism from Claire Wardle, formerly a lecturer here and currently a social media consultant for the BBC.

As ever, I got pretty excited about the future of journalism – the online pathway is probably my favourite part of the course. Claire is an incredibly bouncy and energetic speaker, and I came out of the lecture fairly enthused.

Me, circa Thursday

Afterwards, I was talking to Adam Smith,
about how we could better integrate online tools with our existing journalism.

Mr Smith, The Father of Economics

….and I came up with some criticisms of Claire’s talk, and more generally of the way we think about online journalism. Here are two:

1) The nature of the web removes the traditional space and time restrictions on the news. Admittedly, it creates new structures, but we are still thinking about news in terms of newspapers.

2) Web 2.0 allows integration of text, audio, video and image. Yet for most news services, this means embedding a video at the end of some text that was probably written for the print edition. We’re missing the point here.

I’m going to use this blog over the next few weeks to look at some of these areas, where even online-minded journalists are failing to grasp the full potential of the tools available.

Thanks for reading this far. As a reward, here’s a picture of Harold:

Harold doesn't like it

Until next time.