This post was originally featured at Journalism.co.uk

“Gradually more power cuts – the future is more certain than you think”.

“With 90% certainty I can tell you that tomorrow will be Saturday”.
James Woudhuysen, Visiting Prof. of Forecasting and Innovation, De Montfort University, Leicester.

“Content is not king, its about how people use it. SMS is one of the most expensive mediums but still massively popular”.
Matt Locke – Commissioning Editor, Education New Media C4

These were just a small sample of the varied and interesting points discussed at Media Futures 2009 in London.

The conference explored the future of the media as we move ‘beyond broadcast’.

Speakers and guests included the BBC’s Richard Sambrook, POLIS director Charlie Beckett and TechCrunch’s Mike Butcher.

Themes for discussion included desirable, feasible, challenging and viable futures.

Television
Video on Demand (VOD) was a popular point which divided opinions. Avner Ronen, founder of Boxee, a video service that connects your TV to online streaming media argued that personal video recorders (PVR) were soon to be obsolete.

But as media analysts including Toby Syfret from Enders were quick to point out, in reality TV still has a lot of life left in it. According to his analysis, despite the success of services such as the BBC iPlayer, watching streaming content remains a niche market with just 0.5% of total viewing time being spent on computers.

Newspapers
Panelists were agreed on the future for local newspapers. Patrick Barwise, Professor of Management and Marketing at London Business School said “Local newspapers won’t come back, the classified advertising model that held them together has changed”.

After the conference I ran into Bill Thompson, the BBC’s technology columnist. Click to hear his views of the future for journalists.

As the authorities have restricted foreign media, newsrooms have been forced to rely more on social media, and more importantly twitter for sources of information.

But could the openness of platforms like Twitter make them a victim of their own success?

Hashtags are a way for people using twitter to mark the subject of their tweet, letting others know they are talking about a popular topic. By using a hashtag, other people can search for all information marked with the same tag, and see a real-time picture of what people are saying about one topic.

According to WhatTheHashtag, a twitter statistics site, the term “IranElection” has been tweeted about 464,449 times or an average of nearly 70,000 times per day since the polls ended. These tweets have given insights into what’s going on, and linked to video footage on youtube, some of which has been broadcast on TV.

But dig a little deeper into the statistics, and you find that over 50% of tweets about IranElection are not first hand information. Twitter allows users to repeat other people’s tweets and send them on to their friends, who can then go on and repeat this to their friends. There is no control mechanism for fact or fiction and misinformation can spread quickly, especially in times of conflict.

WhatTheHashtag estimates nearly 80,000 people have been tweeting about IranElection, but it seems to be a case of he who shouts loudest gets heard.

Some of the biggest contributors to the IranElection hashtag have posted over 1000 times per day but much of these contributions are repeats of others tweets. This makes it increasingly difficult to separate the news from the noise.

Some are even using the popularity of hashtags as a marketing tool. Social Media Today reported one furniture retailer that recently started using twitter, and in a bid to get noticed decided to tag their tweets with the most popular trends. The website reported that this policy quickly backfiring, as their marketing tweets became associated with IranElection. This use of hashtags for marketing was quickly criticised by many on Twitter and described as “damaging to their brand”.

Social media has played a key part in reporting the elections crisis in Iran. It’s brought images and video out of Iran and out to the world faster than ever before, despite attempts to block it. Using hashtags to follow the pace of a developing story is fast becoming mainstream, along with the spam that comes with it.

But Iran’s story shows the potential for a young web-savvy generation to break through and tell the story.

Alex Wood is a social media consultant for agency:2, a leading social media agency based in London.

This post was originally featured at Journalism.co.uk

Journalists, photographers and filmmakers came together at the Frontline Club for a special screening of Kate Adie’s latest documentary.

Shot entirely on tapeless cameras, the film retraces Kate’s footsteps of reporting from the protests at Tiananmen Square in 1989.

Returning to China with what she describes as “an open mind” she found herself  “at the mercy of relentless surveillance by the secret police”.

Kate found fame back in 1989 when she was one of the few journalists reporting from the middle of the action, amongst gunfire and dead bodies.

She told the audience that she made a pact with her cameraman to stay for the sake of the story, despite the odds of them surviving being stacked up against them.

This time round Kate and her crew were denied journalist visas, forcing them to effectively go undercover, under the false pretence of being tourists.

Despite being followed by numerous secret police cars throughout the filming process, she said people were “desperate to tell their story of the events of 1989″.

At the Q&A session people were quick to ask Kate her thoughts on the state of journalism.

One journalist asked: “Do you think the quality of journalism has declined over the past twenty years, with regard to the reporting on Zimbabwe and Sri Lanka”.

Kate replied:

“Journalists have a duty to report and inform the world, the fact that people come to meetings like these here and care about global issues, tells me journalism is alive and well”

I spoke to Kate after the screening, and asked for her reaction to the news that China has blocked a number of internet services this week. Listen:

You can watch Kate Revisits Tiananmen Square on BBC2, 3rd June at 9pm.

Back when I was at Sky News over Easter I reported on the first night.

For those who don’t know, it’s a night when you can offer your goods and services in return for beers and meals at the pub.

Here’s the clip I took for Sky:

[[Visit blog to check out this spoiler]]

The pub’s landlady, Dawn Kolpin, started the idea after she needed some CD’s for her jukebox. She placed an ad on Craigslist, a local classified ads site.

She was so taken aback by the enthusiasm by her local Londoners that she decided to make it a regular night.

So where does Social Media fit into all this?

We’re hoping to slowly bring the world of social media bursting into this classic East End pub.

At the event, my friend Eddie Vassallo manned the twitter deck, which was projected up onto a big screen for all the punters to see. He even got some barters over twitter!

AudioBoo also displayed its amazing potential to capture the moment. Dawn loves people bartering their talents, like this muscian: (Please try to click the play button, I can’t work out why AudioBoo’s player won’t emebed properly)

On my trusty iPhone, I Qikked away capturing live clips of the barters in action:

Our multimedia efforts resulted a massive boost in traffic and interest for the pub. But this is only the beginning. I’m working on getting the online community involved from across the world.

Very soon, we hope to accept barters online, through twitter and seesmic. Seesmic is like youtube for conversations in video clips.

Picture the scene…

You’re coming to London on a budget, so you record a clip of you and your guitar and send it to the pub.

It earns you both a gig and free meal. Result!

I love it when technology creates relationships and brings people together, best of all in the most traditional of British places: the pub.

Fancy a barter for beer? The landlady keeps a list of her wanted items here.

The torrent of anti-BNP (British National Party) sentiment on and offline worries me.

I neither support or agree with the BNP’s policies. In fact I consider myself to sit on the complete opposite side of politics.

But.

I like to think that Britain is a society that allows, and within reason tolerates free speech.

When I reported from the BNP’s national conference earlier this week, I was surprised to see the lengths that members of the party have to go to avoid being attacked in public.

This ranged from them covering their signs up, to making press wait in a supermarket car park until just before the conference.

The “not in my back garden” sentiment exists online too.

Here are a selection of comments on the BNP from the Twittersphere:

robots_: @BNP_Supporter the BNP will never get in power, don’t be so deluded. your voters are racists and therefore i will insult them how i please.
MadMikeMacabre: Im Glad the BNP in the topics was full of Like minded Haters. Lets keep the “British National (Nazi) Party” Out.
urbanfly: RT:@danoliver The BNP: “We’re decent people”. Err, that’s one view, the other is that you’re a bunch of homophobic, racist, bigoted, c**ts.

Like any organisation, I’m sure there are extreme people in BNP.

I’d also like to point out that there are extreme types in both the Labour and Conservative parties who are in power right now. But general public opinion doesn’t allow for linching them (yet).

But do we really live in a society that condones this:

Here’s the video I produced with Helen Livingstone on the BNP and the EU Elections:

Having lived in East Asia, I’ve had first hand experience of what censoring people’s views and ideas can result in.

Historically it’s been dangerous, and arguably lead to some of the worst conflicts we’ve seen in recent years.

To set the record straight:

I do not agree with their policies or support them.

But these people feel the way the feel, whether we like it or not.

Isn’t it far more dangerous that we continue to push these people aside, and make it continue to vilify them?

Will our actions only make them more extreme?

CoverItLive enables reporters to cover stories line by line live and engage with audiences in a whole new way. So far he’s hosted 65,000 live events.

Keith came to City University to talk about what we as journalists can achieve with live reporting.

Before I interviewed him for our upcoming radio show on technology, he told me a little about CoverItLive on this AudioBoo:

Some highlights of his talk:

• CoverItLive will remain free to use for the majority. A tiered business model  (from $25 per month) will be introduced, but the focus remains on getting more people to use it.
• Context is crucial. Don’t livereport what doesn’t need to reported live.
• Comments from readers are great, but this isn’t always the place for full on democracy. Too much chat and buzz detracts from what your readers want to hear about.
• Publishers can adapt to new ways of monetising content:

  Users are likely to watch events for up to an hour, selling sponsorship in a similar way to TV could be a new source of revenue.