Freelance Unbound

#newsrw As reported elsewhere, the Crowdsourcing session at news:rewired was a fractious affair. Setting that aside – here are some lessons learned.
Key question: Does crowdsourcing = crowd following?
Make sure you’re doing what journalists normally do – go to where people talk and eavesdrop.
Ruth Barnett, multimedia producer at Sky News, outlined some of the issues Sky has had to handle dealing with crowdsourced material.
#Iranian election Twitter coverage:

• As soon as something becomes a trending topic the material becomes less reliable and less useful
• First 24 hours has peak value
• As the conversation becomes wider, it becomes more diluted

Sky also uses crowdsourcing-type tools to allow collaborative professional journalism – dubbed teamsourcing.
Problems with crowdsourced material

• Can exclude the poor and marginal groups
  How universal is access to content creation and crowdsourcing tools? There’s an in-built bias in technology and platforms that means some stories won’t be told
• Legal problems
  Make sure you know where your material is coming from – different territories have different rules (on the use of telephoto-lens cameras, for example, or libel)
• Is the source genuine?
  Make sure you can verify its authenticity. Content mediation services such as NewsCred can be a guide to the authenticity of crowdsourced material.

Kate Day, head of communities at Telegraph.co.uk, noted that you can shape the demographic of an online community.

• The community: MyTelegraph users tend to be 45-65 – the same demographic as the newspaper
• The reason: MyTelegraph was heavily promoted in the offline newspaper – attracting a user-base of readers who are interested in talking to like-minded people
• The result: a community of bloggers and commenters that is older than the normal online readership of Telegraph.co.uk.

#newsrw Some tips from Adam Westbrook on creating an effective audio slideshow.
[vimeo width=”266″ height=”200″]http://www.vimeo.com/7742500[/vimeo]Why a slideshow?
It’s cheaper and easier than video – and there’s less messing around. Can better focus on the story.
Tips for success

• Focus on story and character
• Pre-interview your subject by phone – work out your story in advance so you can plan photos and sound
• Does the story have great audio potential? Think of effects – background noise (traffic, water) and music
• What about photos? Spend time thinking of effective and atmospheric shots
• Let pictures breathe – give the audience enough time to register  and explore them on screen

Tools of the trade

• Decent audio recorder
• Digital SLR camera
• Editing software (he uses Soundslides)

The New York Times has created an evocative series of audio slideshow portraits of the city in its One in 8 million feature.

#newsrw Some good lessons from the news:rewired panel on How can journalism support itself online?
SoGlos deputy editor James Fryer offered the five dos and don’ts of starting up online.
His prediction: quality, professional journalism is key to success and will see a resurgence in the next decade. User-generated content is not enough to attract advertisers and readers.
Plans for 2010 include: a site redesign, a move into iPhone Apps and the development of a franchise model for others to launch similar regional sites. SoGlos has a target of more than 100,000 readers
Sift Media CEO Ben Heald noted that success online required changes to traditional journalism.

• Write to engage rather than write to inform – the aim should be to start a conversation rather than have the last word.
• Journalists create very raw content – aim is speed.
  Web production team polishes to web publishable quality.
• Advertising model – Sift’s sites deliver “high quality business leads” for advertisers.
  – a specialist audience for conferences
  – customer leads for new products
  Sift site content has to help meet these needs.
• News is actually very valuable – as long as it’s on Google.
  Sift needs to maintain a high number of visitors for lead generation. It lost too much traffic when delisted by Google News. Many sites benefit from churning out low-level news – topping and tailing press releases for example. Sift Media had to learn to play this Google News game.
• Paywalls don’t work – they cut traffic too much (see above).

#newsrw Lots of excitement was generated by Telegraph digital media chief Greg Hadfield’s resignation announcement at news:rewired.
But of all those tiresome bloggers and not-real-journalists Tweeting and wittering about the event – who was it who reported and got the facts wrong?
Oh, yes. Roy Greenslade. In the Guardian. You know, one of those purveyors of “quality journalism” we’re always asked to pay for to protect democracy.
From the Greenslade media blog:

He stood up at the news rewired conference at City University to make a keynote speech, told a questioner that newspapers had no future and, as a consequence, he was leaving his job.

Two things.

1. He wasn’t making a keynote. He was on a panel.
2. He wasn’t standing up when he revealed the news. He was sitting – on the panel (I was there. I remember).

Small things, small things. But, you know, wrong.
Worth noting when faced with hacks sneering at the efforts of so-called amateurs…

#newsrw Yesterday’s news:rewired event did indeed prove to be worth 80 quid – good speakers, good panels, good audience (except in the Crowdsourcing session – get over yourselves, journalism “professionals”). Big thanks are due to Laura Oliver, Judith Townend and the Journalism.co.uk team.
There’s a whole slew of material blogged and Twittered already (just check the sidebar widget on the right). If you really want more, some will be assembled here over the weekend, complete with grainy, shaky, poorly lit video™.

I slated recent BBC (and other) coverage of a survey on how children seem to be failing to learn to talk. Luckily for the media, here’s a handy guide from pressure group Panos on how to approach research to create better journalism.
Panos has its own agenda, of course (promoting “the participation of poor and marginalised people in national and international development debates through media and communication projects”, since you ask). But there’s some useful guidance here – especially given how rubbish the media seems to be at critical analysis of survey-type material.
It offers some of the questions the BBC might have asked in the children’s speech story.

• Who did the research? Are they well respected for their research?
• How was the research conducted?
• What did researchers expect to prove? Did they learn anything new? Did the evidence in their research surprise them?
• How did they decide which issue/people to research? How did they communicate their research findings? What was their impression of the research process?
• Were they made aware of the reasons for conducting the research?

And, crucially:

• Who is funding the research?

A few months ago, when I moved Freelance Unbound to its own host, I wrote that I had got a bit excited about the world of plugins and had, temporarily, broken the site.
It’s all settled down now. And finally the vast universe of plugins is starting to make sense. Here are the ones I’m using. Because I’m sure you geeky WordPress types just want to know.
Admin Menu – creates a very useful admin menu bar right at the top of your site’s front end. WordPress.com users have something like this by default and it’s a great time-saver.

Akismet – Essential anti-spammage, no matter that it has its critics. Comes as standard.
Audio Player – Easy enough if you know WordPress’s syntax (no, me either). Looks boring. Works OK.
Blubrry PowerPress – Looks a bit better. Seems to work, but doesn’t like spaces in podcast URLs. Or Radio 4 podcasts (they’re mono, apparently). Thank god I don’t use much audio.
Broken Link Checker – Sorted out my broken links in a jiffy. Easy to use – but does report some false positives.
Get The Image – Anyone who has ended up weeping in a corner, defeated by WordPress’s arcane custom image fields, will welcome this. It’s robust and pretty easy to use, and it allows you to specify a thumbnail for a post by browsing your media library like normal folks, as opposed to pasting in image URLs in a field you have to create yourself. But you  still have to work with CSS if you want more control over how they’re displayed. How I’d love to have a plugin that allows you to specify a crop and a size from a menu, as well as choosing the image you want to use. I won’t hold my breath…
NextGEN Gallery – Probably the most popular gallery plugin. Probably rightly.
PollDaddy Polls – Requires you to have a free account with WordPress-owned PollDaddy. Stupid name, but works well and is easy to use.
Popular Posts – I’m not actually sure if this is working correctly, as it seems to continually show the same posts. Unless my visitors are sheep and only click on those links. You’re not, though.
Query Posts – Sophisticated plugin that seems to replicate some of Drupal‘s magnificent Views functionality. Has 40 different ways of showing posts. Not by popularity, sadly.
Recent Comments – Does what it says. Doesn’t filter out my own comments though, which would be nice, or trackbacks.
[UPDATE: On the advice of Malcolm Coles, now using Get Recent Comments. Works well, though doesn’t show Identicons, which is kind of a shame. Also trying out Subscribe To Comments.]
Reveal IDs for WP Admin – A developer thing. Super useful for Widget Logic.
ShareThis – Links to all those social bookmarking sites. I bet no one uses this EVAH.
StatPress Reloaded – Finally: decent stats. After try out various Google Analytics plugins and the familiar, if hopelessly inadequate, WP Stats, StatPress gives me a ton of useful data about my traffic. Such as it is.
Velvet Blues Update URLs – You’ll only need to use it if you change your entire blog file structure – when you buy a new domain name, say. But that one-time use works a treat to make all your embedded content link up again as it should.
Viper’s Video Quicktags – Quick and easy embedding from a whole host of video sites – though it did seem to break my animation blog when I installed it. Works fine here though. Could have been a WordPress version problem.
Widget Logic – Fantastic plug-in that allows you to specify which pages a Widget appears on. You do need to use a bit of PHP, but there’s a handy guide here.
WordPress Database Backup – Soilman says don’t trust it, but I do. So there. (I’ll be sorry, no doubt.)
WordPress Gravatars – Kind of works; kind of flaky. Two differently sized gravatars show up on my admin pages next to a comment, for example. Also took time to figure out how to configure it.
WPtouch iPhone Theme – Because so many people check in here on their iPhone. When I finally got to see Freelance Unbound on an iPhone I thought how cool it looked and what a good job the plugin must have done. Until I realised that all sites on an iPhone look like that. No idea if this even does anything.
WP_Identicon – Creates those jaggy icon things next to your name when you comment. Oh, go on – get a Gravatar, why don’t you.
I’m constantly surprised at how active and generous WordPress developers are in creating incredibly useful software that’s distributed free. Thanks to all of them.
Just thought I ought to say.

He’d have been doing stuff like this. Because, frankly, carving and moving those 25-ton blocks out of real stone would have been too much work when you’re got your dissertation to worry about. And all that drinking…

Every journalist and his dog seems to add this redundant phrase to whatever story they’re writing (or presenting, if it’s on TV or radio).
Here’s a typical example (from the Telegraph): “Amazon releases Kindle for iPhone but are there enough ebooks out there?”
Uh – out where, exactly?
If the story is asking whether there are enough enough ebooks in Croydon, say, then it should say so.
But in this case, it means, sort of, “in the market” – or maybe “available”. But why doesn’t the writer just say that? Or simply leave it out? The question “are there enough ebooks?” is clear enough, surely.
Unless removing the phrase makes the sentence unclear, just ditch it.

It seems there was more to today’s unrelenting commuter misery than the “adverse weather conditions” cited on the South West Trains tannoy.
My six-hour total commute featured not one but two trains on fire. I ended up stuck behind on for about half an hour at Surbiton on the way in to Waterloo – then delayed at Woking on the way back as a burning train was cleared from the opposite line.
And it’s not a statement by furious pyromanic commuters. As it pulled away from the platform at Farnham this evening, the train spewed a spectacular display of sparks – probably the cause of the undercarriage fires that plagued the service today.
Another train caught fire at Basingstoke, according to the Basingstoke Gazette. It reported a South West Trains spokesman blaming a short circuit:

“It was to do with ice and snow on the contact rail. It affected the power supply to the train and it can cause an electrical short circuit on occasions.”

The big question is whether this is inevitable in snow in the UK. It’s a tired cliche that other countries are better able to cope with severe winters. But it seems it’s not just a question of having enough grit for the roads…
[UPDATE: The Surbiton fire has been all over the BBC. But I wonder how many other trains are a potential fire risk.]