During a panel entitled ‘Netizens of the world unite’, Peter Ludlow – an academic who has written extensively about social media and the likes of Second Life – said the media needed to take a more grown up approach to reporting on Facebook and Twitter.

The panel discussion presented the case where large corporations, such as Google, were quashing the upload of controversial material to websites such as Youtube. An Italian journalist had recorded extracts of a radio station in the North of the country which was aligned to a right-wing movement. He had posted these on Youtube but found he was being done for violation of their terms – and was nearly banned completely from the network. Was it right for Google to restrict his expression and ability to post controversial material?

Good points were made about how these big private companies were setting conditions where users gave everything away to them – copyright, identity, privacy and there was little users could do about it.

One Italian journalist gave the example of how if he has a complaint about his milkman he can go to Trading Standards or the Environmental health and something can be done about it. But with social networks, who regulates? And do we want anyone to regulate?

Ludlow also talked about the need for education on how to use social media and the internet better. But who would do this? Would it be delivered alongside sex education in schools? There were questions about whether the government should step in and ‘break up’ large social networks and create open source alternatives. Ludlow made an excellent point, that if you create an open source version no one would go there as the reason you’re on Facebook is because all your friends are there.

You also have to think, with the challenges facing governments and the cuts in public spending – can they justify getting involved in social networks which a) all their citizens are not on and b) they just might not have the resources to effectively police.

Overall the discussion made me think about our media use of Facebook. We use it to promote our brands, to rip pictures of people and generally to use it as a way of finding stories. But is there a place for a consumer watchdog role for the media? We’ve seen with mobile phone companies, utilities etc we monitor price changes closely and report on people who get ripped off – challenging the likes of EDF and Virgin Media to explain their policies and prices. But how much do we challenge Facebook and will this change once the shine wears off?

This is the reality for reporting planning stories in Russia where the applicants don’t want you to report any details about their plans.

At the International Journalism Festival we heard from Oleg Kashin, a reporter with Kommersant, about how the above happened to him when he tried to report about a developer’s plans to build a highway through the Hinki forest near Moscow.

This is the CCTV which apparently shows Oleg being beaten up

The forest was the place where in 1941 the German tanks stopped short of the capital. It’s been a public area for people to enjoy since the time of Catherine the Great. But, the authorities appear to be working with the developers to ensure the plans go through unapposed.

It makes me realise how lucky we are in the UK when reporting local government, and while we may get annoyed with the 300-page long PDF document at least we are free to report new developments and put questions to developers and planners. It’s a vital part of democracy and it’s vital local media continue to report on the planning process – which can often impact on thousands of people’s lives and the future of our local areas.

It was an interesting debate to get the morning started where we considered some of the ways news organisations used social media in particular to start conversations with their audiences.

Peter Gomez from Il Fatto Quotidiano gave an insight into how he and some friends had started up their Italian news and debate website from nothing. An investigative journalist by trade Gomez now runs a site which averages 4.5million unique visitors a month and their following and traction on Facebook and in the comments would be envied by many sites.

The interesting thing they’ve done is used their online brand to launch a print product – and engage their readership through a paper format as well. A true multimedia start-up? They also started their site by asking for subscriptions and donations from readers, and raised around $6million to kick-start the production of their newspaper. They focus away from the mainstream news and provide an alternative and have clearly captured the ‘Facebook generation’ market – and their journalists have become stars in their own right, with Gomez having nearly 20,000 fans alone on Facebook.

Is this something we’re going to see as a trend across media, not just in the UK but worldwide as media organisations look to create ‘social media stars’ out of their journalists and promote them as much as the product they write for. I know it’s something we’d definitely consider doing at Media Wales.

Gomez also touched upon their use of Facebook to find exclusive stories. Some of this may have been lost in translation, but he described how they’d found a young girl who had been to a ‘bunga bunga party‘ with Gaddafi and Berlusconi, and through her Facebook profile – which was public – gained access to loads of photos of her drinking and doing naughty things. This was in contrast to an interview she’d given to the Italian media about recently converting to Islam, all thanks to Gaddafi according to her.

On a more local, and perhaps more creepy level, I described how we used a site called OpenBook, to search public status updates in the event of a death or emergency and find people who know victims – and contact them asking for information, photos.

The panel also heard from Josh Young, who used to work for the Huffington Post, and he described their ‘Off the bus’ section from the 2008 American elections – and the exclusive they got from Obama’s “red-neck” comments about Conservatives in the States. This story blew up, and was provided by a ‘citizen journalist’. We didn’t get much chance to explore the verification of that story or the editorial processes involved but I can only hope the ‘Welsh Watch‘ we’re running on WalesOnline in conjunction with The Guardian provides a similar scoop!

We got onto some specifics about how you can encourage comments on your site, and here’s a few pointers:

- It doesn’t matter if people are writing mundane comments, at least they are doing it on your site
- Allow the option to recommend or rate stories, not everyone wants to comment
- People will tend to comment on things they know and feel comfortable about, don’t be disheartened if your great piece of investigative work doesn’t get any comments. People might be too afraid to comment.
- Make your site showcase the best comments and show the best ones
- Ensure your journalists are engaging in the comments and involved in the debate

Paola Bonomo, head of online services for Vodafone Italia, brought a different dimension to the debate. She spoke about the ‘My190′ community they were creating, where people logged in to find out their balance, how many extras they’d used etc – but also get the latest on new products. This is the beauty of the web, you can create a community around any topic and Vodafone Italia seem to have the balance right.

Bonomo spoke about how they offered exclusive use of new products to their most committed users, posted videos giving sneak peek of new mobile phones and generally just engaged with people who are for want of a better word ‘mobile phone geeks’. The challenge for UK media is how do we engage with people who are ‘news geeks’ and get them involved in our reporting?

The debate then moved onto crowdsourcing, as no panel on engagement can be complete without said buzzword. I was able to show our example of the South Wales train disruption was a great local example of using our readers to show the disruption caused by a power outage during the morning commute in Wales last month.

We were also questioned about paywalls, and whether these hampered efforts to engage with a community. I think this all depends on what the paywall is there to do – if you want to create an exclusive community which you can sell to advertisers then it’s not such a bad thing. Of course, if you’re trying to be mass market and reach as many people as possible then a paywall is not for you.

Justin Peters, editor of the Columbia Journalism Review online, who was chairing the panel, managed to bring the debate onto potholes. I congratulated Italy on some spectacular potholes and spoke about how we’d used crowdsourcing to get people to send in their pothole sightings and that crowdsourcing worked really well at a local level – especially when you found an issue people cared about or got riled up about.

It struck me during the talk about how NGOs need to do more to engage the regional media. We have large audiences, and audiences who care about what happens beyond their doorstep – but need a local way into it.

How many NGOs hook up volunteers/staff who are from a local area e.g. Cardiff, and invite a journalist from the regional media out to see what happens in that disaster zone. Yes, getting the BBC along might get you a broadcast on the 6′o’clock news but allowing a regional journalist the chance to tell the story of Zara from Cardiff who is out in Japan battling to stop disase spreading after the earthquakes and tsunami will have a huge impact on the local community – and create compelling content.

We found on WalesOnline there was a tremendous demand and interest in the situations in Libya, New Zealand and Japan, and this was only upped when a local was involved e.g. in the New Zealand earthquake a survivor called Barnaby Luck was from Pembrokeshire, immediately localising the situation.

While the panel were snobbish about the media always trying to localise stories – saying we only care if a British tourist is killed – this is because that provides an entry point to often big and challenging topics which both our readers and the journalist can understand. What’s wrong with that? As another of the panelist rightly pointed out, once you start quoting this figure and that figure the reader loses interest and is not interested in the bigger picture.

The discussion also touched on the importance of verifying where information comes from, and how the role of the journalist on foreign reporting has changed. Giovanni Porzio, from Panorama, made an excellent point about user generated content. He said: “Anyone can wave a cameraphone at a situation and get a picture or video. The journalist is the one who gives the context. The images need to be interpreted and this is where media can be a trusted source and give accreditation to the images in a wider context. That is what they should be doing.” See this great post from Dave Lee about how the BBC used user generated content in some of their reports from Libya.

This brought me onto a great chat with the guys at Citizenside who are taking ‘citizen journalism’ to a new level. Working with media organisations – note, they’ve just signed up with British regional publisher Archant to work with them – they take the ‘send us your photos and stories’ on a lot further than an email with some JPEG attachments.

They’ve built an awesome system which allows users to register and submit their content – in some cases getting paid for it – but also building up profiles and rankings based on their trust rating. This is how media, particularly regional media, should be working with their audiences to understand more about them and also source content for their print and digital products.

The key thing about the Citizenside project is the gaming feature. It’s probably snobbishly overlooked by many, but people love getting points for stuff – and what do points make, prizes. If I get photos from someone who has regularly submitted them and they are good photos, their ranking will be higher than someone we’ve never heard from before. The best thing about their site is the interface, making it quick and easy to plug into existing websites and the back-end is superb.

So, in summary. Should regional journalists be pushing NGOs more for ways into reporting on disasters, as we know there’s interest from our local audiences. Also, how do regional media improve their user generated content – not just getting it from their audience, but also increasing participation and publishing more of it. Not so much a case of ‘you, the journalist’, but ‘you, the journalist, with a lot of help and us learning more about you’. Plenty of food for thought.

We often see journalists on TV giving their opinion about this story and that, but when have you ever seen a crowd of young people queueing to see a journalist they consider a hero?

Walking down the Corso Vannucci last night to find somewhere to eat after a day’s travel, Nigel Barlow and I were struck by the hordes of excited teenagers lining the street. There were broadcast TV trucks interviewing wide-eyed youngsters. I presumed the Italian version of McFly were in town – but how wrong I was.

On our return trip there was a big screen illuminating the street and thousands of people were sitting and standing watching one man speak – Roberto Saviano. I recognised his face from page three of an Italian political newspaper I’d picked up in the taxi on the way to Perugia.

He was giving a surprise keynote speech* to open the 2011 International Journalism Festival, and the audience was hooked on every last word. This was the man who exposed the mafia in Italy.

The first words I uttered to Nigel were “this wouldn’t happen in Britain”. People in the street, young people, listening to the words of a journalist telling them about how he risked life and limb to get the story. A young, politically active and engaged audience – who in Britain wouldn’t give their right arm for a piece of that action?

So, where are the heroes in British journalism? Or is it a case of no more heroes anymore?

*Unfortunately it was in Italian and the place was rammed, so no chance of a seat!

Two events happening shortly in Cardiff which look interesting and will hopefully ask questions about openess and transparency in both central and local government.

The first is the Senedd 2011 event. It’s a bit vague on what the discussion will actually be on – the general theme of the web and transparency and the Welsh Assembly. The panel has some people with a track record of lobbying and opening up debates on issues, so what they have to say will be interesting.

There’s more details about the event, which is free, on the Vote 2011 website.

Then the Talk About Local Unconference comes to town. An unconference is a cool format where instead of being shoe-horned into a set programme of workshops and seminars, the attendees decide them instead. So, if you’re interested in a certain topic – e.g. making local councils more transparent – you put a post-it up at the start and see if anyone else is interested. If they are, you get a session and people share their knowledge and thoughts.

I’ve been to a Talk About Local Unconference before, and wrote this report – featuring Staffordshire oatcakes – in 2009 about what I learned from it. If you run a hyperlocal, community or blogging site it’s a really useful event to attend and I know it’s given me a lot of ideas and enthusiasm for what we’ve been doing with Blog Preston.

You can find out more about the event in this post I did for yourCardiff and sign up for free on the #tal11 Eventbrite.

I’ll be tweeting from both events, so follow me on Twitter @ed_walker86 and the hashtags #senedd2011 and #tal11 for all the latest.

Image credit to Michael Gwyther-Jones, showing the Pierhead Building in Cardiff Bay

Been to a couple of conference-type things this month to talk about what I do (being an all-round online journalist chap!). Thought I’d make some brief notes on them and share my presentations with you.

NCTJ: Being a ‘fully converged’ journalist

The first was part of the NCTJ (National Council for the Training of Journalists) skills conference held in Cardiff. I delivered a short presentation embedded below about what my normal day is like and the skills I use as a ‘fully converged’ journalist (the NCTJs phrase, not mine). Hannah Waldram has blogged about our presentations, which sums it all up very well. To us, we don’t mention the ‘c word’ we just get on with the business of doing journalism.

News:Rewired: Building an online community from scratch

Last week I battled flu (proper flu, not the ‘man flu’) and gave my thoughts on how to build an online community from scratch. I was joined by some clever people of IPC Media (both past and present). I wanted to show what I’d done with Blog Preston, which was quite literally building something out of nothing. The biggest thing I wanted to stress was online community is no substitute for offline community. I did say that community editors need to “at the heart of the newsroom” as this report by Rosie Niven eloquently reports on our session. You can see my slides from the presentation below and even re-live it in glorious technicolour thanks to the clever people at the BBC College of Journalism, click to watch videos of all our presentations (but you’ll have to excuse my voice nearly going throughout the talk!).

So it was a nice way to round off 2010, talking a bit about what I do and have done. What’s more exciting will be doing more journalism in 2011! And a final note, thank to anyone/everyone who nominated me for the Fleet Street Blues ’10 best UK journalism blogs’ as I snuck in at Number 7! Awesome.

Image credit to John C Thompson

Les Cochrane, and me, chatting with Lichfield Blog at Talk About Local 09

Went down to Stoke-on-Trent yesterday for the Talk About Local unconference. It was a gathering of local and hyper-local bloggers, some community activists, people who run community websites and people who run tools that can help community websites.

There was a great mix of people. Immediately I identified a split between people like myself who had some journalism training and were setting up, or have set up, a community blog/website for their area to act as an alternative to the local media. Others had just set it up because they wanted something different.

An unconference is a great format. You arrive, eat some Staffordshire oatcakes (amazing) and put post-its on a board about sessions you’d either like to run or see be run. These sessions are then moved around, some are merged together until a session schedule becomes clear. There’s another board to put post-its about who you would like to meet at the event and another one to put URLs of your site or others you feel are relevant.

I put a post-it up offering to run a session about Blog Preston and Blog Local, explaining how we wanted to expand the Blog Local idea with other blogs. We got mashed into a session about social media surgeries and using social media to empower communities.

The first session of the day I went to was on data. The government’s Director of Digital Engagement, Andrew Stott, had come up from Whitehall to explain how the government is trying to free up public data and make it available. There was a very technical discussion about data formats but the key thing for people running community websites is that this data is searchable, with some basic technical skills, to find content about your local area. So, you might be able to query health data and find out how many hospitals offer a particular service in your area. Priceless, local, information.

The second session saw us team up with Nick Booth (Podnosh) to run a session about social media surgeries and expand on the Tweetup events that I’ve been running with Blog Preston. It was great to see people really interested in replicating what Nick and I had done, but as Nick stressed it’s important that you find the ‘social capital’ in your area. Don’t start from scratch, find people who are blogging, taking photos on flickr, using Facebook, using Ning and on Twitter and get them together. You’ll be amazed at the results.

Over lunch we mingled and I met a fair number of people who were running hyper-local websites, but wanted to be part of something bigger. This is where Blog Local could come in. While Talk About Local is there for support, advice and I think building a knowledge base/community for hyper-local blogging – Blog Local operates on a more local/regional level to run Blog [insert location] and act as an aggregator for some areas to showcase that hyper-local content.

After lunch we attended a session about comment moderation. It was a great session, with the team from WV11 sharing their experiences (after six weeks of operating) about the problems they were having with comments, there was a lot of debate about whether you should allow anonymous comments on your blog – or whether you should enforce a name and email address. We brought the discussion back to whether people felt they were journalists, and therefore wanted to have standards, guideliness etc on their sites, or whether they were community volunteers. My take on it was that we are publishers, if you hit the publish button and put an article on the web you are a publisher – and you have responsibilities and constraints like any other physical publisher. I think that for hyper-local sites to be taken seriously they need to try and ensure quality, not just in their own content, but also in the contents – and anonymous postings won’t give you that. See the Great Internet Dickward Theory for a short but sweet reason why anonymous posting is not a good idea.

The final session of the day was about collaborative journalism, with a bit of Birmingham City Council bashing thrown in for good measure. Tom Steinberg from MySociety did a quick five minutes on useful tools that his sites can offer to hyper-local sites and there is loads of good stuff, so much that it deserves a post of its own on the tools available. Nick Booth then presented Help Me Investigate that I’ve recently joined up to and this is yet another great way of getting content for your hyper-local site. Michael Grimes gave five minutes on the inspiring Birmingham City Council website sagae, and the BCCDIY site that has been built by volunteers and hasn’t cost millions of pounds – and appears to be better than the official site. Sarah Hartley finished off with a quick look at the future of journalism, and it was interesting to see the reaction in the room from people who run hyper-local sites. Are we journalists?

I think we are and all the tools that were outlined in the final session are ways to create content and that’s one of the things journalists do. Anyone running a community website, blog, forum is in a way a journalist. We ask questions, we edit content, we shoot video, we write stuff. We are community journalists and the future of journalism definitely has space for us – because we’ve always been there. In the past, with print, it was the community newsletter but with the onset of web publishing this is changing. It’s so easy to setup a village website and become the dominant media in a hyper-local area and the traditional media can’t do that.

I came away from Talk About Local with a very, very, positive attitude about what we’re planning to do with Blog Local. It was inspiring to meet other people who are hyper-local bloggers and I was pleasantly surprised at how many people had seen Blog Preston and really liked it. Plus when we talked about Blog Local and what we want to do, we found that many were with us.

Thanks to the organisers of Talk About Local 2009. It was a fantastic event and I was really impressed with how smoothly it ran, the quality of the discussions and I’m afraid to say it, I even liked the bit of Stoke-on-Trent that I saw.

See some photos from the Talk About Local unconference

Image credit to Laurence Hardy

Preston and Lancashire are home to two very exciting unconferences this autumn, it does seem as though the UK is going unconference mad at the moment!

First up there is Barcamp Blackpool on Saturday 17th October, I’m in London so can’t go to it, but it’s an opportunity for creative, innovative and passionate people to come together to talk about whatever they like – the agenda is set on the day. It’s going to be held at Blackpool Pleasure Beach and there are going to be well over 100 people discussing everything from the latest tech stuff to the best way to rear a ferret! Gemma Cameron who organises Preston Geekup is behind it so it’s bound to be a success, she’s seeking sponsors so if you’re interested get involved.

The second is Open09. This is being organised by the people behind Sandbox at the University of Central Lancashire and it’s going to be another unconference but it also involves Turtles. I’m not 100% sure what Turtles are but the website says:

An informal workshop with a group of up to 40 participants. Each Turtle has its own dedicated website with its own authors, participants and agendas.

The topics at Open 09 range from the future of journalism and media to the latest goings on in the world of fashion. If you’re in any sort of creative industry you need to make sure you’re involved in this, it looks like it’ll be immense.

So, I’ll be joining in with some of these unconferences this autumn and I shall report back about my experiences at these rather unstructured events. How will they compare to the stand up and be presented to with a powerpoint events?

Image credit to Scott Beale / Laughing Squid