Alan Rusbridger on the Future of Journalism from Carta on Vimeo.

I have just come across this video of Alan Rusbridger talking about the development of journalism.

I think it’s interesting to hear an editor admit that there is more knowledge and expertise outside his organisation amongst his readers than within it.

I’m now waiting for mainstream news brands to take the next step and talk about their journalists being in the service of their readers. It’s not something that gets mentioned too often but I think is an important mindset to start developing.

NB. Also David Montgomery of Mecom has also been uttering some wise words along the same lines.

I’ve been hearing a lot of debate about how news organisations need to re-engage with their readers and, for the most part, this seems to focus on content creation.

There is talk about promoting “citizen journalism”, using “UGC”, releasing APIs for developers, etc. etc.

It’s all good stuff. But there is no denying that those who volunteer time and effort to create news-worthy content or applications are a tiny minority.

Most people just want to be told what the news is by people who are employed to know.

Does that mean those who create want to engage more than those who do not? I don’t think that’s necessarily true.

Perhaps it’s just that others have time and skill barriers that stop them. Or they don’t really see how such engagement would benefit them.

I’m always stunned by how popular polls on news websites are. They almost always do well, perhaps because of their low barrier to entry: just one or two clicks and you’ve contributed.

The frustrating thing is that most of these polls are - beyond capturing a mood - utterly futile.

Readers may overwhelmingly vote that the Prime Minister should resign, but that poll is unlikely to have much influence on Gordon’s decision to bow out.

To look at it in the more negative light, you could argue such polls do little more than reinforce the idea that news organisations pay lip service to engagement, but don’t really want to empower their readers in any meaningful way.

So, what if polls were devised to empower? What if, at the end of the vote, the majority will of the readers was enacted? What message would that send out? What should the questions be?

It seems many other websites ended up covering the story publishing the letter online before the Mail did.

Some even ran the full letter on their websites before The Mail. The Express & Star had the letter up online at midday and Football 365 appears to have published it at 12.31pm. However, Head of Multimedia for Trinity Mirror Regionals, David Higgerson (see comments below) said many of these were actually excerpts.

The Mail had originally had an article and  a teaser on their site saying that they would publish the full letter online at 4pm, although it appeared to go up onto the site a bit  earlier than that.

It’s a very different strategy to the way The Guardian broke its recent video exclusive on Ian Tomlinson, where it used its website to publicise the story first.  I’m also not sure how it could have benefited the Mail to publish on their website so late.

I guess it shows the way newspapers deal with exclusives and how best to split them between print and online is still an area very much open to debate.

Let me know if it is and whether you think I should try and bring it up to date!

You know what you should do?” said Stef to me on the night of The Media Guardian Awards as we sat mulling over the night’s award-winning, stage-invading, surreality:

“Write a post explaining how things have changed since you started your blog.”

It’s one of those suggestions that makes your heart sink to your boots. Yes, I agreed, it would be a good exercise. But then so much has changed since September 2007 that I’m not sure I’m able to put it all into words.

But, having had a break for Easter, I feel re-enthused enough to give it a go:

The easiest way to sum it up is this: In August 2007, I was fed up with the state of UK newspapers and seriously considering my employment options. In March 2008, I am still fed up with the state of UK newspapers but now firmly committed to the industry.

So, what has changed?

I have always loved the internet and have been an active member of forums and chat rooms since I was a teenager. But, in all that time, I never considered that I deserved a corner of the web to call my own. I contributed to other people’s websites, but that was as far as I thought I would ever get.

I think that attitude came from the same stable as my dislike for writing newspaper opinion pieces. I’m happiest when I’m learning from and with others: bouncing ideas around.

A column doesn’t do this. It takes a stance, argues its case, ends the conversation. I think there is a confidence bordering on arrogance that you must have to write columns. I just didn’t have it.

My lack of confidence also extended to being unsure I had anything of value to say at all, because I didn’t think I held any strong opinions.

Then, some time in the spring of 2007, along came Birmingham blogger Pete Ashton. Really, Pete had been there all along, building Birmingham’s blogging community but I hadn’t really paid attention until I was directed to his Created in Birmingham blog by a member of AWM after following up a story for The Birmingham Post’s Media & Marketing page.

At first I ignored it as a rather amateurish publication. But soon I was intrigued.

At the time I saw it as a different model for distributing certain types of news and information. What stood out for me at the time (and I hope Marc, my editor, will forgive me for saying this) was as far as “What’s On”-style coverage of the specific creative sector in Birmingham was concerned, CiB kicked The Birmingham Post’s butt. It would take me much longer to understand how important it was in serving its community and giving it a voice.

So I followed CiB for a few months, found out what I could about its author and sent an email asking to have a chat. Pete, catching the whiff of mainstream journalism, promptly ignored me.

It took until Birmingham’s Creative City Awards in September for me to convince Pete to meet me. I had badgered Marc to take a table at the event and, as a result, I got to choose which guests to invite. Pete was the wildcard – I didn’t think he’d accept. But I was delighted when he did.

Luckily, we got on. Actually, as time has passed I think we’ve realised we’re doing similar things, just coming at them from completely different angles.

It was Pete – who many Birmingham blog scene know as an ardent recruiter of bloggers - who told me to write a blog. He had to tell me twice, because at first I said I wasn’t interested.

Although, I didn’t really know what I was doing with the thing, with hindsight I can see from the second post on I started exploring the idea of increasing audience interaction.

I swore Pete to secrecy and asked him not to tell anyone what I was doing.

I also kept it from The Birmingham Post. Not because I had plans to use it as a bitching platform, but because I was genuinely nervous about revealing more of my personality publicly. I thought I’d be a rubbish blogger.

But I didn’t understand that by linking to other people’s blogs, they would know of my existence anyway. So it wasn’t long before I got a few comments…and people were friendly.

The third post was another voyage of discovery. I outpoured about Birmingham and its support of the creative sector. As well as comments, this time Pete broke his silence and blogged about what I had said. Then things started to roll: suddenly people I didn’t know were getting in touch saying that they had read my blog. Then the Head of Communications at Birmingham City Council called to arrange a meeting to discuss my post.

The last one was particularly strange and got me thinking about the power of blogging. I could have written exactly the same thing in The Birmingham Post, which has tens of thousands more readers than my blog, but would I have got that response from the council? I am pretty sure I would not.

It was when I announced a change to my reporting role, that Marc found out about the blog. I’ll be honest, he didn’t find out from me (I hadn’t dared to tell him), but from a colleague of mine who had mentioned it to him.

I remember being told Marc knew and waiting nervously to find out what he was going to do about it. He didn’t do anything. In fact, I believe he walked past my desk and said: “like the blog”. I don’t think to this day he knows how relieved I was to hear that!

But still, the blog had an audience, and suddenly I didn’t really know what I was supposed to write about. Coming from journalism training that teaches you that there is a form and structure to the way you write, a empty blog page was a bit of a nightmare. There was no convention to cling to. It was entirely up to me what I wrote.

It was the post Blogisfear where I expressed that and, with the help of those that commented, particularly Nick Booth, I began to realise that it was only journalists who thought they always had to finish the stories by themselves. On blogs there was collaboration, often a story would remain open-ended. I started to think about why that wasn’t being applied in the same way to news.

I became engrossed in the concept of “Web 2.0” - that there were millions of people out there thinking, creating content and collaborating. I had no more ownership over content or news than they did and, in fact, it was my responsibility, as supposedly employed to be “the eyes and ears of the people” to consult them about what I was doing.

I decided to start asking people to put forward questions for people I was interviewing. This had varying degrees of success and was something I enjoyed (it’s died out a bit now as I don’t interview people all that often now).

Pete told me this was known as “crowd-sourcing” and had a wide range of potential applications for newspapers. I can not stress enough how helpful it was to have someone that I could call to have coffee with and pick their brains on how the web “worked”. I started to look at journalism in a new way through Pete’s explanations of blogging.

It was also Pete, I think, who was the first person to teach me the concept of blogging as a conversation.

I first joined the UK journalism “conversation” the day I wrote about Roy Greenslade leaving the NUJ. His decision was a fantastic catalyst for me to write about what I had been discovering for myself about the future of journalism. Some of the things I write about make me smile now (they were nearly there, but not quite), but I had some great feedback from people in the industry.

One commentor was Craig McGinty, who introduced me to the idea of papers developing online communty. It’s funny. Looking back at Craig’s comment, I remember at the time thinking that it was unlikely that any newspaper would employs a person with “the responsibility to help local groups and organisations set up blog-driven sites.” Now, after launching 35 bloggers on The Birmingham Post website, that idea seems perfectly reasonable!

The NUJ debate also showed me how blogging can take you into the heart of a community as, within a few posts, I was debating in the comments section of my blog with Donnacha Delong – the journalist that had sparked the whole debate in the first place with an article in The Journalist.

By the time Trinity Mirror’s chief executive Sly Bailey turned up at our offices, to explain why The Birmingham Post & Mail was no longer for sale, I was being watched by a number of management-types in the company… which was a little unnerving to say the least.

So much so, that I actually stopped posting for a bit, worried that I was starting to act like a monkey performing tricks to try and impress an audience.

It’s something that has continued to be on my mind when I write. I still want this to be a home for half-baked ideas and chats with colleagues, but you can not forget that what you say can make people pretty darn cross… as I was to discover a bit later into my blogging experiment.

“I’m not saying journalists should come to my, or anyone’s blog, blindly trusting it… Just that it would be better for both journalists and bloggers if they came to blogs with an open mind. Because if they don’t , bloggers get tarnished with a rather dirty brush and journalists seriously miss out.”

More, including a fantastic metaphor describing the situation, can be found on her blog.

I mean, obviously you can’t ignore the question of how local newspapers make money online, but maybe some of us are coming at it from the wrong direction.

The reason I say this is that “how do local newspapers make money” came up as a question a number of times during the panel I was on at yesterday’s Media 140 microblogging conference.

It’s a question that, in one sense, is a hugely important one to ask in the light of the current local newspaper crisis. On the other hand, perhaps there are other questions that need to be answered first.

So what if you took away the money question. What questions would we be asking about local newspapers? Perhaps we’d be asking: What are they for? Who do they serve? What should they contain? Why do we produce them in the way we do?

Perhaps its spending time answering these that gets us closer to answering “How do we make money?”.

This struck me whilst watching Jane McGonigal’s Webstock presentation that asks “Why doesn’t the real world work like a game?”.

The slide above particularly grabbed my attention. These are the main elements that make people happy, Jane says.

She argues that Alternate Reality Games are so addictive because they take the four points that make people happy into account.

It also occurs that the role of a local news organisation should encompass all four of these criteria too. Point 3 and 4 should be easy - local news should be part of a community and should have lots of ways of putting people in touch.

Local news organisations have traditionally had the ambition to make their area a better place to live, with this usually manifesting in campaigns. That is being part of something bigger.

Perhaps both of these need to be re-envisioned for the 21st Century, but the values and thinking should already be there.

Points 1 and 2? Well that’s where I think it could get interesting. The way I think about this is that it’s all about empowering the people who engage with you, give them the tools to (as Jane puts it) “be awesome” and recognise that when it happens.

I haven’t fully thought out how this would manifest itself , but it seems to me that this is a better line of enquiry to follow if we want to make local news more relevant to consumers.

Jane’s full presentation:

Also Jane’s presentation “The Rise of the Happiness“.

This was another issue that came up during the Journalism Leaders Forum. One question put to the panel was whether there was still a place in the newsroom for new, young, talented writers.

My answer was “yes”, but I’d want to know what else they could do too. Could they build their online community, for example.

However, Alan Murray, deputy managing editor of The Wall Street Journal, puts it better than I in a video for Nieman Journalism Lab.

It was prompted by a panel discussion at the Journalism Leaders Forum today where, once again, the “blogs are rubbish and can’t be trusted” mantra was trotted out by some of the panel members.

Why? Why are we still even having this debate?

Why is it that when you talk about blogs to some journalists, the images that pop into their heads are of the celebrity-obsessed, the political rumour-mongers or the batshit insane?

Why don’t they think about the first hand accounts of conflict, the well-respected tech news sites, the local community information or those producing focused industry analysis?

(Oh, and as for that “citizen journalism“… well who needs that?)

Evening Standard Sorry Tube Campaign by Annie Mole

Is it just me that finds The Evening Standard’s “Sorry” campaign toe-curlingly uncomfortable?

Perhaps it’s because I work in newspapers, but I think my awkwardness stems from being mildly embarrassed at witnessing such public self flagellation.

The medium is responsible for this to some degree:  advertising boards aren’t really the best for a frank and humble discussion with your readers. All The Standard can do in this space is to continue shouting loudly at you about how very sorry it is.

One opinion is that the campaign recognises that we now live in a world of transparency:

“Trust has gone – look at the government and banks. Where we are now, brands have to admit their mistakes.” says Mark Borkowski, founder of Borkowski PR.

I am absolutely happy to be corrected, but I don’t believe this campaign gets anywhere near being transparent or does much to build trust. In fact, I wonder how many employees of The Standard would say it even represents their reality.

Perhaps a better way to say you’re sorry (if you really are) is to modify your behaviour and get on with trying to be good.

In short:

“the experimenters offered the subjects a snack: fruit or chocolate. Seven out of ten subjects asked for chocolate. But when the experimenters offered other subjects a different choice, the answer was different too: ‘I’ll bring you a snack next week. What would you like then, fruit or chocolate?’ Three-quarters of subjects chose fruit.”

This, Tim argues, demonstrates the theory that human beings have two competing systems for decision making. One, the dopamine system, is geared towards rewarding immediate gratification. The other, the cognitive system, prioritises long-term planning.

When the brain is presented with the possibility of immediate gratification (such as the offer of chocolate), the dopamine system overides the cognitive system (prioritising the unhealthy sugar rush with the healthier fruit option).

I couldn’t help but draw a parallel between this and news consumption patterns. Could it be that if the experiment replaced fruit and chocolate with the FT and The Sun you’d get a similar result?

It appears I’m not alone observing the connection. Last year Seamus McCauley, Strategic Analyst at Associated Northcliffe Digital suggested that by “unbundling” news stories from the paper onto the web, readers may increasingly choose to indulge in celebrity gossip or quirky stories (chocolate) and abandon “hard news” (fruit).

I’m not sure I’d go that far - news is still a pretty well read section on any news website I’ve worked on. Also, as Seamus’s commenters point out, you can balance your dopamine-hungry browsing by ensuring you get your “daily fruit” with RSS subscriptions or e-newsletters.

But the idea that there may be some way to make “harder” news less like fruit and more like chocolate is an enticing one.

It sent me off down a long and bizarre train of thought equating different ways to eat fruit (dip it in chocolate, chop it into bite-size chunks, etc.) with various methods of news consumption.

In the end I realised that, for me, it was all about the smoothies.

In particular, Innocent Smoothies.

First of all, smoothies are a pretty easy way to boost your fruit intake.

Also, whatever you think about their “twee” advertising (and recent Coca-Cola investment announcement)  Innocent have been widely praised for their customer-focused approach.

The company works hard to make people feel good about buying their product. When customers contact the brand, Innocent try to make them feel valued. This is what distinguishes it from the many other (probably just as good) smoothie brands in the market.

So, could news organisations learn anything from this?

Well, I guess there is already a lot of talk about how news brands can present content in easy-to-consume formats - whether that be a great website, iPhone app or e-Reader.

But what about the service? How good do news brands make people feel about reading their stories?  Do you feel valued as a customer by any particular news organisation?