One Man & His Blog

When is a Blogger not a Blogger?

2010-02-04T12:34:39Z

Isn't it interesting how the broadening of the communication channel causes gatekeepers of all stripes (in this case, the Tory press office) to tie themselves into knots trying to define who is "media" and who isn't?

Incidentally, I think they'll live to regret that attitude on display here should the Tories win the election.

(UPDATE: the linked post appears to have been pulled by Tory Politico in the last 45 minutes. It's still viewable in Google's cache)

UPDATE 2: Perhaps he has more on his mind that a 6-month old post about daft PR decisions, given that he's fighting a cease-and-desist from the Capital News Company . The Register has covered the story.

UPDATE 3: And it's back...

On Blogging About The iPad

2010-01-31T13:34:15Z

I have about three iPad-related posts in my head right now. One of them exists in partial form in my blog software.

But I can't bring myself to publish them, and that's for much the same reason as I refused to blog about the Apple tablet before it was revealed. Let my illustrate by means of a pie chart:

Never has so much been written by so many about one thing they have so little experience of...

The 4m Pageview Blogger

2010-01-29T18:45:12Z

Flighblogger, one of our stable of blogs on Flightglobal, was just shy of 4m pageviews in 2009, from 2.3m visitors.

Not bad for B2B. :-)

Congratulations, Jon. A solid mix of work and skill there, mate.

Participatory Culture and Traditional Media

2010-01-23T15:14:18Z

Kevin Anderson on why people participate in online communities and share content on them:

I can tell you why I bother. A global culture of participation has been, for me, key in meeting one of Maslow's hierarchy of needs: Belonging. Originally participatory culture was something I did in my spare time because their was no place for it in my professional work, but co-creation in journalism has been one of the most richly rewarding aspects of my career.charman-anderson.com, Generosity and post-scarcity economic media models: Why I love participatory culture, Jan 2010

Lots to think about in that post, especially about the way traditional media people, who have a different attitude to creation and sharing than most people, misunderstand motivations for participation. More myopia?

Kodak, Disruption and Economic Inertia

2010-01-23T13:52:21Z

From an article about Kodak's difficult decade:

Even though they talked about being in imaging and memories - their financial base was still in film, and even though they could move conceptually, they could see no way to move economically (and I suspect that many of us sitting around the Kodak board table at the time would have come to similar conclusions).creativedisruption.net, Creative Disruption, Jan 2010

Much for publishers to learn here...

Weekend Coffee Reading

2010-01-23T11:27:22Z

Lurking around in my browser tabs:

On Makers and Managers - good look at the tension between these two roles that should be familiar to most people in journalism
The Death of Tag Clouds - this has been creating some debate internally at RBI. I still like 'em, but I never thought they were a navigation tool, just a visual means of displaying the "aboutness" of the site.
Why Tumblr is Kicking Posterous' Ass - insightful post on the difference between an engineered website and a designed one.
Jeff Jarvis's Cockeyed Economics - some good economic theory around paid content in here
The Value of Blogging - anyone familiar with my job title knows that I'm contractually obligated to value blogging as a journalistic endeavour - but this post enumerates some of the reasons well.
Posterous, the iPhone and Microjournalism - great account of using the iPhone and Posterous to report from abroad using a mobile device.

Creative Commons Watch

2010-01-23T10:55:19Z

Most of my photos on Flickr are Creative Commons licensed, and I like to keep half an eye on where they appear. A couple have popped up in my in-box in recent weeks:

A post about the French Identity Debate
What looks like an advert for a Mexican Hotel

For some reason, my pics from the various incarnations of Le Web seem to get used more often than anything else...

Flight Global Desktop App Launched

2010-01-22T15:11:55Z

Cool thing of the day: we just launched an Adobe Air-based desktop app for one of our titles. Flight Global. Video introduction:

Covering Our Future (or where are the designers?)

2010-01-22T13:10:53Z

I don't write much about print on here, but long-time readers will know I'm not a "print is dead" type. I do believe that print will have to change and evolve to deal with the changing environment - much as theatre had to after the coming of cinema and then television - but that it will survive. And I'm glad about that, because I love magazines as objects, especially when they're designed to really showcase the visual impact good print titles can create.

Yesterday, I had a day that caused me to think much more about design than I normally do. It started the moment I walked through the doors of Quadrant House, RBI's Sutton main office. There's a big wall of our magazines in reception there, and the above cover, of Hairdressers Journal, really leapt out at me from that wall. It has a level of design aspiration above that of most of our titles, with a few honourable exceptions - New Scientist for a start - and some meetings later in the day reminded me how lacking traditional publishers can be in design aspiration online. Again, I think HJi, the online version of Hairdressers Journal, leads the way in our company.

Is it me, or is the issue of design, of user-experience of our website almost entriely absent from the future of journalism debate? And, if so, why the hell is that?

news:rewired:reviewed

2010-01-19T17:55:08Z

It has been a funny old week, as the lazy, journalistic cliché goes. This time last week, I was telling myself for the third afternoon in a row that I'd do my slides for news:rewired tomorrow, and now they've spent the best part of a day on the front page of SlideShare.

I think that the good folks at journalism.co.uk are to be congratulated for the conference. It's the first journalism shindig I've been to where it felt like the majority of the people who are actively engaged in the front line of journalism exploration in the digital age where there, and willing to share and robustly debate their views and experiences. In short, it felt like a conference where you could learn something, and that beats the same old corporate faces giving the same old corporate presentations we see too often.

And it has most decidedly sparked some discussion. Most of it was very useful, as the compilation of links and discussion makes clear, and I'll almost certainly blog more about that in the coming days. But some of it really revealed the fractures in this industry, as it desperately tries to reshape itself.

I have a theory, which Andy alluded to in his blog post about the event (uh, Andy - might want to get the subs to check my surname there, by the way... ;-) ). Most journalists, if they loved their industry (or their job, which is not quite the same thing) have to go through the standard five stages of grief, as they deal with the changes that are happening to our profession. Many are still in denial (and Kevin made a good job of eviscerating their dismissal of all things digital), but some of the people who were there were very clearly still in the throes of anger.

In some ways, I think the citizen journalist versus "real" journalist debate that kicked off in the crowdsourcing session, moderated by The Telegraph's Kate Day, is pretty much a non-debate, as Sarah explains:

Personally, I find this an outdated debate but I fear it will go round-and-round until the idea that people can have a 'virtual life' and a 'real' one as two separate things is finally, belatedly put to rest.

That would be the move to "acceptance", of course.

I fear that we, in the mainstream media (does B2B really count as mainstream?), are somewhat to blame for this continuing conflict, though, because we have had a tendency to appropriate the name "citizen journalist" for user-generated content on our sites, rather than use it in the context it was intended - people using the tools the web provides to publish their own acts of journalism to the internet. As Martin identifies, part of the heat of the debate was in people confusing publishers using low cost (low value?) content from the audience with people choosing to publish for themselves.

I think Jon hits the nail right on the head, when he suggests that we forget the labels, and get on with thinking about how the tools allow us to do good journalism. And I mean good journalism, not the sort of shoddy page-filling nonsense torn apart here.

What's Hot in my Feed Reader Right Now?

2010-01-19T17:00:15Z

Not bad after 5 days...

The Dangers of Journalistic Myopia

2010-01-18T12:48:37Z

I'm busy pulling together my normal links for the day, but this post from Fleet Street Blues in the wake of last week's conferences really needs a response:

It's all very well talking about building a social media strategy and the growing need for entrepreneurial journalism, but there are lots of journalists out there - good, hard news journalists with skills we as a profession don't want to lose - who are being left behind. So, a plea to those who were there: please don't run before the rest of us can walk.

And that's all very sweet and lovely - but it's very, very dangerous. Because if those people who are pushing at the edges of online journalism - the spaghetti throwers, as George Brock put it - slow down and wait for the rest of the industry to catch up, we might as well just lie down in a grave and, as a profession, die now.

This is myopia. This is only seeing the traditional publishing ecosystem, and not all the new things that are competing for our audience's time and interest (and our advertisers' cash). It's not just the social media journalists and traditional journalists in this equation. It's the untold thousands, maybe millions, of people who are using these tools to publish and consume materials. We're in a huge battle for attention, and if we're not in the places where people find interesting content, if we don't understand how people are consuming content in this new publishing environment, and creating news and journalism generally in ways that match that demand, we're history.

Sorry, Fleet Street Blues, but we can't wait.

Update: Psmith, Journalist takes on another post in similar vein

Journalism, Spaghetti and news:rewired

2010-01-18T10:53:36Z

One of the more thought-provoking (and somewhat reassuring) speeches at news:rewired last week was George Brock's, which I live-blogged. The BBC College of Journalism have put the video online, and it's well worth a watch*.

*Yes, for those wondering. Mentioning me in a speech does boost your chances of my republishing it. ;-)

Everything I Know in 7 Slides

2010-01-18T10:42:13Z

My presentation from news:rewired last week. I suspect it might lose something without me talking over it ;-) :

Five Things I know about journalism (news:rewired)

View more presentations from Adam Tinworth.

news:rewired - Journalism is Entrepreneurial

2010-01-14T17:13:02Z

Greg Hadfield, head of digital media at telegraph.co.uk:

We've been in an era when journalists thought about the lifestyle and about being journalists, but never had to be part of the conversation about funding, about advertising and about money.

The future is a new sort of organisation, a new sort of journalism. It's no longer about us telling, about us preaching, but engaging with communities. More individual, more stand alone.

Where does this end up? The same skills that make a journalism also make an entrepreneur - passion, vision, a sense of ownership. The connectedness of the digital age is only what society knew before - everyone is connected. We are individuals moving within society - and holding it to account.

If you don't have the passion or the curiosity, you won't survive.