Category Archives: Uncategorized

Earthquake!

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So I was woken up an hour ago by shaking walls and the crashing of books falling off their shelves. It looks now as if the UK has been hit by an earthquake. Reports so far vary suggesting its magnitude was between 4.7 and 5.3 [edit: modified to 4.9 at 0245].

It’s the second time the earth has moved for me in Brum – the first being the Dudley earthquake in 2002.

The difference this time (as well as it being bigger – rumours are that this one was the largest earthquake in the UK for 20 years) was that I could confirm instantly that there had been a quake by logging on to Twitter, whereas I spent hours in 2002 convinced the rumbling must have been an explosion. As my Twitter account demonstrates, there were a fair few of us wondering what had shaken us out of our slumber.

It was interesting too that the first report I saw about the earthquake from a news organisation was via a tweet from Bounder. Through Twittersearch he had found a report from Twitter-based Dutch news service BreakingNewsOn. I then found other links to sites including a Seesmic (apt name for this) video blog from Midlands-based Documentally. [this was blogged seconds after the quake, I am told] I even tried to put my not-so-great skills into a Google map of the epicentre. [which, according to Podnosh, scooped Sky News!]

More on how the story unfolded from ReadWriteWeb. I’m off back to bed!

links for 2008-02-26

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links for 2008-02-25

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Enviromental journalism: question for BCU students

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This afternoon I’m popping down to Birmingham City University to meet Paul Bradshaw‘s group of online journalism students.

They’ve been doing some fascinating work on developing an environmental news service, with each of them specialising in a different subject area.

Environmental news is close to my heart. I would love The Post to be giving more coverage to stories on sustainability.

But it’s also one of those subject areas that many readers regard with great suspicion. Look at The Times guide to the most popular environmental stories of 2007 and you’ll see what I mean.

So, I guess the big question is, can you write environmental stories in a way that builds trust between you and the reader? Is the current suspicion surrounding climate change – for example – caused by media sensationalism or poor scientific reporting? Perhaps it’s neither, maybe it’s just human nature to respond to environmental stories with suspicion.

I certainly don’t know the answer. But in a world where the hegemony of large news corporations is increasingly challenged, the issue of maintaining trust as a way to maintain audience is critical.

And, I suspect, if you find a way to crack the hardest nut of trust and environmental reporting, then you have probably struck gold.

links for 2008-02-24

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Guten tag

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As the countdown to the website launch begins, I don’t expect to be getting much opportunity to blog over the next few days.

Yesterday was spent tagging up some of the stories that have been imported over from the old CMS. It’s a funny job – my instinct is to just tag everything and anything that is mentioned in the story. But, when you remember that these will appear in the “related stories” box on the page, you have to be a bit more tactical with your tags.

Steve (our multimedia editor) and I have been building up a few internal rules as we go along. As, when the website launches, journalists or sub-editors will tag the story, I imagine we’ll develop a stronger set of tagging conventions. Apprently this, according to people wiser than I, is called a folksonomy. But, of course, it’s a folksonomy that will be created only by the content creators, rather than the users.

I am curious to know if this will effect the way things are tagged and, if it does, whether that is a bad thing or not? Should there be a way for readers to submit tags? Would they even want to? And, if they do, how would you stop that creating a tag cloud as large as the moon?

This ties in to a conversation Marc (my editor) and I were having the other day about the transparent newsroom. He’s written about it on his blog. I have been really taken with what the Spokesman Review is doing in the US (see right hand column on their homepage). They have been experimenting with a variety of different techniques to open up the process of newsgathering and writing, with varying degrees of success. [found via the World Editors’ Forum weblog]

I love the idea that I am not only directly answerable to the people who sign my pay check, but also to the people I purport to be writing for and, if we would make any of the things the Spokesman Review is doing work on our paper, I’d love to try them.

But, as with the tags, would anyone really be interested in taking part? If so, how?

What is going on with WordPress Stats?

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 I clStrange WordPress Graphicked on my blog stats today and got this rather odd graph:



What does it mean?! What are Region A and Region B? And why were they doing something in 2003 – 2005 when my blog wasn’t even a twinkle in my eye?!

When I refreshed the graph went back to normal, but I’d love to know if anyone else has had something similar or knows why it might have happened.

What videos by The Post will not look like…

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…otherwise I will be hanging my head in shame.

This was dug up by Paul Bradshaw on his Online Journalism Blog and is the 60-second update from the Reading Evening Post:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0st6x-vrW5M&rel=1]

[Edit: Is it just me or can you hear a female voice saying “lovely jubbley” at the end of the piece?!]

And it seems the crazy transitions and cutting your reporters’ off before they’ve finished are both techniques employed elsewhere on their site:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qNsi-DqKH4I&rel=1]

I don’t blame the journos though (although someone has terrible taste in music and graphics). This smacks of poor training. Notice that the script sounds like it was written for print, not for video.

I hate the way that some people just expect that because you write the news you’re also going to be happy with and capable of presenting it on camera. It’s not true. Personally I’m skin-crawling-ly uncomfortable infront of a lens. I realise it’s something I will have to get used to and, when the inevitable comes, I hope, at the very least, I will have been given the right training to help me do it.

Journalist spleen venting

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Got up on the wrong side of the bed this morning? Coffee machine broken? Swamped with press releases about charity walks and Easter bonnets?

Take some solace from the fact you’re not the only journo out there with problems and share the misery on Angryjournalist.com.

Some of my favourites:

Angry Journalist #246:

I’m angry at myself because I love getting up at 2:30 a.m. every morning to go to my job…a job that I don’t get paid crap for. And when I get there my boss hasn’t written SHIT so I have to write 20 TV stories in 1 1/2 hours and get paid HALF of what he does. I’m angry because at the end of the day I still love my job. I want to get angry at my job so I’ll find the courage to get ANOTHER one!

Angry Journalist #225:

My editor changed my proper use of the verb “comprise” to “is comprised of.”

Angry Journalist #210:

Because my officemate has the social skills of an emotionally stunted 13 year old.

Because my editor can’t decide from one day to the next if I’m any good or not. One day I’m his best writer, the next I’m an enormous piece of shit who needs looking after.

Because my paper insists on turning a blind eye to the enormous staff defection over the last 15 months, and fills open positions, if at all, with part-time college kids who don’t know shit.

Because when I taught the intro newswriting course at my alma mater as an adjunct, I made so little money that I could have been better paid at the nearby grocery store, while the law school adjuncts in the next building over were making 3 times per credit hour what I did for one class.

Oh, and because of fucking photographers who won’t drive more than 20 miles for an assignment, but it’s perfectly OK to send a reporter with no skills beyond a point-and-shoot digital two hours out of town to shoot it, as long as they’re going to be there anyway.

/rant

Thanks for this site!