Given last week’s announcement by Twitter that it would comply with tweet censoring in certain parts of the world, it might be time for editors and journalists to think what this kind of policy adoption means for them, both now and in the longterm. If you are a journalist who regularly uses social media tools in your work (Facebook, Twitter, Google +), or an editor who encourages their use in your newsroom , here are five basic questions you should know the answer to:

1. What proportion of  your traffic is generated by which sites and services?

2. What proportion of  journalism and user interaction is actually carried out on third party sites and is  that material archived separately?

3. Do you know the data use, identity and privacy policies of each third party site you use for journalism?

4. Do you know under what circumstances data and content might be handed over to government or legal agencies, or blocked from use and what  is the response, should that happen?

5. What is the back-up plan vis a vis the third party sites and services in the unlikely event that something should go wrong?

These questions are easy to answer. They don’t require any specialist information or knowledge beyond access to  internal metrics. There are a number of contrasting opinions on what the Tweet censoring means. Here are some which contain thoughtful views on the subject, and offer links and advice for what to do re: deleted tweets and the ChillingEffects.org clearinghouse for tweets . Jillian York, at the Electronic Frontier Foundation with her perspective . A very positive review of the policy by academic Zeynep Tufekci , and a slightly more cautious view from Boing Boing . And an important piece, I think, from Dave Winer about the development of alternative infrastructures .

As with many policies, the implementation in terms of letter and spirit is key to how well it will work from all perspectives. However, as with all social platforms which have broad use and a commercial future,those of us who feel uneasy about developments need to remember they are not built to be the free press of the 21st century. Twitter is still the best tool for journalism that I can think of, Twitter investor and venture capitalist Fred Wilson, last week enthusiastically described it as a newspaper, and it shares many facets with a news organisation – but it isn’t one, and its development is more likely to take it away from that purpose than closer to it.

Journalism’s often ambivalent relationship with other technologies has meant that many organisations don’t have a particularly developed view of what an editorial entanglement with Twitter or Facebook really means for them in the long term. Inevitably as an increasing number of interactions take place on these platforms, it will be important for editors and reporters to make judgement calls about the right balance between what is distributed onto services with the widest possible reach, and what is kept in proprietary systems.

Large media organisations have been relatively quiet over Twitter’s policy change.  They might not have a view, or think it is at all important. Or they might not necessarily know what they think, in which case a bit of reflection might be in order.

If news organisations have organised thinking about this subject they might want to share that too. This is an area which I can only imagine growing in importance in relation to journalism, and working out the deficiencies of the system might help to galvanise more innovation into what really journalistic platforms might be.

Yes, it's Republican Primary season : photo by Christopher Dilts for Obama for America

If you are ever anxious about the disappearing craft of journalism and your metaphorical engagement in horse-shoe manufacture during the age of space travel, comfort yourself with the sight of small town American libraries and school gyms heaving with a seemingly limitless throng of media talent. Like a roil of mating frogs in a pond, the ‘pack’ of press that trails around the Primaries, sucking up the West Wing atmosphere shows there is life in the old ecosystem yet. Given the vast numbers of reporters and huge resources thrown at the election, it is a grand time to watch out for digital trends and innovations which news organisations showcase during such events. I thought I would write a few down as an ongoing aide memoire as to which innovations stuck, and which fell by the wayside. Please feel free to add, disagree or amend.

Week one of the Primaries saw us in Iowa, and a thunderous unveiling of thousands of pixels of election coverage, each replicating and out doing each other, as if the past fifteen years of lessons-about-aggregation had never happened. If you want a sense of the on the ground media scrum, here is a really good piece by Huffington Post’s Michael Calderone on the frenzy of the press pack covering what is potentially quite a stright forward ‘Romney Wins’ story. My favourite quote is the highly over-excited testimony of Alex Castellanos, a CNN pundit and Republican consultant predicting that we are moving inexorably towards all-live-all-the-time campaigning:

“Twitter’s live, but TV isn’t,” Castellanos said. “And we have the satellite capacity, uplink capacity, Skype capacity — you can do it live from anywhere now. At some point, we’re going to stop doing the same spots over and over and just start live-streaming the campaign on broadcast and on cable.”

“I think the next big hit will be run your campaign live,” he predicted. “Kill your media consultant. Kill your TV spots. And just start setting them up in Iowa for real-time television. The contest has become such a reality show, why not do reality TV?”

Five notable trends out the trap.

1. Google : fugly but first.

Speed is a central issue in election coverage and Iowa threw down the first challenge of the campaign and produced the first shock result.  In terms of who was first and most reliable with election night coverage of the Iowa results, the answer was Google’s election map. An ugly beast of a thing, which proved the old addage in online journalism, well, online anything really :’working code wins’. Much to the chagrin of the paid-for AP feed the free-for-now Google feed remained ahead and alive all night.

Google's election map is not pretty, but it's right

Here is the link to the Google page displaying the results and here is the article on Poynter about what was significant about this ‘map win’. As mentioned in the Poynter article, the stand-out star of first round map wars was John Keefe’s patchwork map for the WNYC website. Keefe presented on his use of Google fusion tables and maps to a packed room at last year’s Online News Association annual conference, demonstrating how had done a similar job on Hurricane Irene and New York’s evacuation zones - in other words taken widely available data, used the available tools to make the best, most useful and clearest implementation.

2. Facebook and NBC, the future of polling?

Years ago, before a particular UK election (2002 from memory), our online politics editor at the Guardian made the observation ‘we should get into polling’. In many ways it was a smart call, although at the time it seemed logistically impossible. The collection, interpretation and presentation of data to give insight into wider voting intent is something that journalism and polling do. The link between Facebook and NBC to produce statistically sound polling data is a genuine innovation, although in this Poynter piece Jeff Sonderman raises issues about the statistical soundness of the methodology. If NBC/Facebook produces polling data which is as accurate as the established polling organisations it will be a significant moment for disruption. Elsewhere the most notable use of the social media firehose is the Washington Post’s @mentionmachine which is a tracking tool that compares the mention rate on social media versus mainstream media. As with Facebook/NBC, it is too early to tell whether this has lasting value, at the moment it is telling us what we already know – the Internet really loves Ron Paul.

3. BuzzFeed is the, erm BuzzFeed

If there is one ‘everyone’s talking about…’ in the early moments of the 2012 campaign it is BuzzFeed . Varying their habitual diet of stories such as ‘The 25 worst haircuts in sports history’ (which, it has to be said, is worth visiting the site for alone), the high-profile hire of Politico writer Ben Smith as editor-in-chief  and a string of other sharp reporters, ahead of the campaign provoked the most media intrigue. Maybe unsurprisingly for a project brought to you via Huffington Post veterans Jonah Peretti and Ken Lerer, BuzzFeed feels like the inevitable disruption of  the old new media and for this reason alone is one of the most noteworthy developments of this campaign. Its reporters are already dominating campaign-oriented social media with their quick fire stories and analysis. Just to underline intent, this week BuzzFeed announced it has $15m of funding to add reporters and technology to the site focused on news for the social web. The battle with the Huffington Post  will be intense.

4. The New York Times with added Silver.

‘Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair’ might as well be the NYT’s motto when it comes to covering major events on the web. Yes, they have dozens of resources, but when you visit their politics home page you know why. The one thing I admire more about the Times more than anything else is their relentless iteration on the web to improve their platform with every turn of the cycle. Yes, they might be dull and pompous and their meandering headlines and endless features about the availability of hummus in Brooklyn and shoes for dogs sometimes make you want to weep, but this is a really extraordinary news organisation which is digitally on top of its game. One piece of very smart transfer window business the NYT did was to purchase Nate Silver’s Fivethirtyeight blog, and have Silver join the Times as a key political commentator. In the unlikely event of being asked to pick only one source of election coverage, I would be hard pressed to think past Silver. His big kick-off piece for the Times magazine last year shows that the trend for real time stokes a hunger for the best in-depth analysis.  Not everything that the New York Times does works all the time, but the distance for a serious news crowd between the NYT and its rivals feels as wide as ever. In fact, sometimes wider….

5. Please Stop! The curious case of too much innovation…

This is a strange one, prompted by Patrick Pexton, the Washington Post’s ombudsman’s column on ‘Is the Washington Post innovating too fast?’, citing the aforementioned @mentionmachine as one such culprit. Making full use of that new fangled invention the public laundry, the Post’s managing editor Raju Narisetti disagreed and  NYU’s Jay Rosen asked Pexton to expand on his comments in an interview on Rosen’s PressThink blog where, unless I am misreading it, it seems as though the real problem is a slow site and therefore not nearly enough innovation. I am familiar with the newsroom frustrations and arguments about the pace and implementation of innovation, and sometimes criticism can be justified. Poorly implemented new features which are not properly explained to  journalists or users and ill-thought through ‘bells and whistles’ that are neither use nor ornament can and should frustrate.The problem however is not ‘too much innovation’.

Two states down, forty something to go,a campaign ripe with innovation promise and unlike the Republican nomination, winners are too early to determine.

Rupert Murdoch’s gift to the rest of the ailing packaged media this New Year was his sudden, spontaneous and apparently authentic appearance on Twitter . It is astonishing to see (apparently) a man that the world’s media media has spent decades trying to decode, announcing as a casual aside that he favours Rick Santorum in the GOP race . The feverish delight at his debut gave way to slow news day speculation about his interest in Twitter in general. I was one among many wondering (on Twitter, naturally) what would happen if Rupert Murdoch liked Tweeting so much, he bought the company?

A Murdoch purchase of Twitter is not the point of the thought experiment. The point is really to sharpen focus for journalists on what their use of  third party platforms really means for the long term. 

News organisations are placing an increasing amount of their interactions and journalism, their own and their users data, into the hands of third parties such as Twitter, Facebook and Google. Tweeting Rupert is a wonderful meta metaphor for what is happening to us all. The bargain here is implicit; these platforms scale so well to the open web, they allow media to reach, research and interact with audiences at close to zero cost. In exchange you surrender well, quite a lot.  Even Arthur Sulzberger Jnr., the publisher of the New York Times recently spoke with great enthusiasm about the power of social media and how the Times has benefitted by embracing it.  Journalism schools routinely teach the use of third party tools as a way of creating valuable and high quality journalism quickly, at low cost, for a world which increasingly demands and reacts to real time news through distributed networks.

This dilemma in choosing between connectivity and control is normally viewed through the commercial prism.  But how many editors can answer detailed questions about what is happening to their journalism and the information about people who read it on any one of many platforms they use?

The famous New York Times graphic on the expansion of Facebook’s privacy policy was created before the controversial launch of  Timeline and Profiles, and there continues to be a trickle of thoughtful people who are deleting their accounts as a result of the unpredictability of data use by the befriending behemoth. Google produces a laudable transparency report, but the fact that Google complies with 93 per cent of the 6,000 requests it receives for user data from law enforcement agencies is very different from the approach news oganisations would take to handing over sources. Or as cyber security student and activist Chris Soghoian pointed out in this article last year in the New York Times, security is often so lax around sources and communications in news a subpeona isn’t necessary.

The world of securing your publishing platform, your archive, your sources and even the confidentiality of your readers or viewers has been transformed by commercial companies whose primary purpose is not journalism. It is not a binary choice either; if publishers choose not to participate, they risk editorial irrelevance and commercial isolation. We have to absorb some of the technology lessons from these services and think through what needs to happen to make them more predictable and suitable for journalism.

Every day we give away more, but understand less about the ultimate consequences of the action. News leadership needs to do more thinking about these core questions. A task for many editors that seems about as interesting as reading through a print contract or becoming au fait with the compliance standards of a broadcast licence; dull work to be done by another department . Not true.  The use of third party tools and platforms is key to developing reporting in a digital environment, it is at the heart of reporting and not a wrapper for it . These are not just distribution networks, they record the fragments and fingerprints of how your readers and sources interact with what you do. As we rapidly enter the ‘post geographic’ era of news, journalists also need to know what the same issues look like in different territories where the risks and vulnerabilities are far more apparent.

One of the big themes for this year is likely to be computational journalism. I really hope we see more and more courses like the joint degree we run at Columbia for computer science and journalism , and an influx of engineers into journalism to tackle some of these complex challenges. Maybe Rupert Murdoch, or the plethora of other media businesses which embrace Twitter and other services, are already working on interesting solutions. Maybe they will buy them. If the prospect of Rupert Murdoch buying Twitter makes you rethink your digital strategy,chances are you should be rethinking it already.

*with apologies to Jeff Jarvis.

The piece sets out to argue that the people at the center of the  consensus, Jeff Jarvis, Jay Rosen, Clay Shirky and Dan Gillmor, have been misguided in promoting the idea of networks ahead of institutions and reporters as the right model for  sustaining journalism in the digital age. I don’t need to defend any of the individuals critiqued by Dean Starkman, as they are all more eloquent in their own defense . However, using Starkman’s article as a starting point, the assertion that this thinking is on the wrong path does not I believe stand up to close examination.

Although not explicitly identified as part of the ‘Future of News’ consensus except in passing, I feel part of it. This is not just because, as Starkman points out,  we inhabit the same classrooms and conference platforms, but because for a decade of my professional life as an online editor at the Guardian I was part of a team that was heavily and openly influenced by this school of thought.

Our strategy at the Guardian was to gain scale and influence through embracing the form of the open web, and developing journalism which was more adaptive to both the technology and behaviour of news audiences in a networked world. All of the pariahs of the future of news consensus met with or visited the Guardian frequently and I for one was deeply grateful that they did. None of them are ‘anti-institutional’ in quite the way the piece would have you believe.

When faced with the decline of print sales (inexorable) and the disruption of your industry, you cannot always stand back and wait to see who wins an intellectual argument. You have to make decisions, organise newsrooms and build technology. Having external voices and intellects who point you to rethink what you do, even if you don’t agree on every point, is important.This is particularly true in a world where the change to the delivery platforms is so profound not enough institutional expertise exists to make sense of it internally . The path of networked thinking, the power of open source and the rise of participatory culture lies well west of the classrooms of New York J Schools and is deeply rooted in the engineering culture of Silicon Valley, the voices that Starkman is so sceptical of  served as warning sirens to look in the direction most of the news industry had routinely ignored.

At the Guardian we pushed ahead introducing more equality with readers through open talkboards, the early introduction of comment threads on articles and experimentation with user generated content, data collection and networked thinking  across our journalism. The controversial but invigorating launch of  Comment is Free, the introduction of live blogging, which moved from sports and entertainment into the heart of our political coverage, a recent analysis of social media use during the London riots are all examples of melding  the network with the journalism. Progress was underpinned by very bold thinking from the Guardian’s development strategists and team which pushed into building APIs, structuring a more open technical environment. None of this was seamless, or without a messy hinterland of failed implementations, internal tensions and false starts.But it was effective in one respect , it propelled the Guardian into a digital world where more of its journalism could be followed, accessed, shared and discussed,  well beyond its borders.

It does not preclude or undermine the work of the Guardian’s brilliant investigative team. The Guardian is also proof that this is not an either/or equation, that the future of news lies in hybrid techniques and that both networks and institutions which recognise their power  represent a powerful ideal. I don’t believe we would have made such progress were it not for the stimulation of new ideas, some of which came from the ‘FON’ consensus and the leadership of  editor in chief Alan Rusbridger.

In seeking to explain to students at Columbia how understanding networked approaches to journalism work I assign Rusbridger’s Cudlipp Lecture, as a starting point for students to understand the possibilities of this in their own work.In a similar vein New York Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger recently spoke of the power of a networked and web-centric approach to Times journalism, spotlighting the new techniques reporters are using to widen their audience and bring relevance to their reporting.
There are many examples too which lie outside the Guardian and New York Times ; Andy Carvin at NPR, the Ushahidi work in the Kenyan elections, the contribution of the Global Voices blog network, ProPublica, dozens of local efforts, including the Journal Register titles (now Digital First media) for which as Satrkman points out, a number of we FON folk consult. All in some way conform to a template which has its roots in the ‘future of news’ consensus, each of which has modified it to produce powerful journalism and information for communities.

Dean Starkman’s analysis of the situation is selective, but as this an essay about ideas, that is permissable. His conclusion though contains assertions which cannot really be allowed to pass unchallenged. He says:

The cruel truth of the emerging networked news environment is that reporters are as disempowered as they have ever been, writing more often, under more pressure, with less autonomy, about more trivial things than under the previous monopolistic regime.

The suggestion that the internet has ‘disempowered’ journalists is just not true. In a global context it is willfully wrong. But even in the narrow context of journalism in the US, to say that individual journalists are disempowered by a medium which allows for so much more individual reporting and publishing freedom is baffling. If this case is made in the newsroom context of reporters having too much to do, then maybe this is an institutional fault in misunderstanding the requirements of producing effective digital journalism. Unlike the pages and pages of newsprint and rolling 24 hour news, there is no white space, no dead airtime to fill on the internet. It responds to 140 characters as well as to five thousand words.

The prejudice at the heart of the piece is best summed up in one line about how FON ideas have undermined reporters in their work by requiring them to perform a series of tasks including to  ’keep in touch with you via Twitter and FB constantly instead of reporting and writing’. There it is: ‘instead of reporting and writing’. The opening of electronic ears and eyes is not a replacement for reporting, it should be at the heart of it. And if it is not, then the institutions that Starkman laments, might be to blame.

We started with the story of Ida Tarbell, so it seems fitting to finish with an anecdote that casts a different light on the consensus and its contribution to journalism. In class on Monday I had set students a task of defining a goal around finding an audience or making connections with available digital tools. In reporting back one student described her exercise to rapt colleagues. In seeking to follow a serious investigative story in a chaotic regime outside the US, she had focused on tweeting links and finding sources on social networks that were of relevance to that country and story. One link led to another, led to another. Her diligence and work were rewarded with a random contact through Twitter, this led to  chance meeting in New York (yes, real shoe leather was expended), and her obtaining a number of key contacts and numbers in the administration she was reporting, new leads in a story which is neither trivial nor easy.

In her words : ‘It is really incredible, to be able to get this access, this quickly, is really something I would never have imagine was possible’. This winter break she will follow the story, honoring the Tarbell tradition, using the methods of the networked way.

In a post on Friday I suggested that OWS has some lessons for newsrooms, many of which missed it as OWS had not announced itself as a ‘proper story’ at the door and therefore had created confusion and upset . There are many things about the story which lend it to different coverage, not least how a network of followers and participants are consuming information, largely through social networks which bypass mainstream media. The question that Arthur Brisbane poses is a valuable one which takes this out of the realm of theory and asks; you are the assignment editor at the NYT, what do you do?

It is self-evident that this is a backyard story for the NYT. It is home territory and should be covered better by the New York press than by anyone else. But it is also international, and sprawling, and highlights a plethora of complex questions, all of which the NYT is more than adequately equipped to tackle, in terms of volume of coverage, the Times topic page is already a pretty rich resource. However, something has happened to news coverage which means that story count is not the only indicator, or indeed any indicator, of how well a story is covered. Judging by the attention data boxes on the NYT site, OWS is not of overwhelming interest to its audience, even though it has been the cause of rioting and arrests across the nation, and internationally.

If the NYT doesn’t already have such a thing, it needs an Andy Carvin on OWS. The fabled head of social media strategy for NPR who dropped everything in December last year to aggregate the unfolding drama in the Middle East – from Washington – and has pretty much not stopped since. For stories with long horizons, readers and users need to know who to follow, who is going to tell you when something is happening, who is going to join the dots and point to the best sources. Greg Mitchell at The Nation did a similar job with his daily blogging of the Wikileaks story as it unfolded, and is doing something similar now with Occupy. I didn’t necessarily want to know what was happening every day, but when I did, he was the first place I turned because of his comprehensive coverage. Assign someone to be the journalistic air traffic controller for OWS, then make sure they are visible beyond their own  website, this story has to be covered  within the network that created it.

What about the content? Should it be as Arthur Brisbane says, about class warfare (middle-class warfare?), about wealth disparity in knowledge economies? There are so many avenues he suggests, which is true, so don’t block any off. The truth is that many of these subjects are covered all the time, by news organisations, magazines, academics, economists, even political parties. Occupy Wall Street offers a prism through which to re-examine them or project them further. Has it moved the dial in Washington? That’s a daily question. So the New York Times should be aggregating all the best topics around all these resources and commissioning  in a similar manner. At the weekend I had a book recommended to me I would not have normally thought about reading, Raghuram Rajan’s Fault Lines, through a conversation about OWS.Has the Times used its wealth of knowledge to push out better information?

The Times could take all the signs, from all the protests,or just some of the signs from Zuccotti Park, analyse the complaints and then point to the best reporting, context and writing on these subjects, and invite contributions too.It is as they say, not rocket science.

The third point on ‘How?’, would be one to push back to the NYT . ‘Why?’ Why does the news organisation want to cover the story? Because, whilst there are people sleeping in tents in the middle of Manhattan it really is a story. But to what end? I sat in on a really interesting talk at Columbia last week by academic Nikki Usher from George Washington University . Her time at the New York Times on its business desk as part of a study raises the significant question of how stories about the financial crisis were covered and to what effect (the tempting answer to this is ‘none’). One thing the NYT and many other news organisations did between 2000 and 2008 was write volumes of stories about the housing bubble, trade defecits, personal debt, banking fragility etc etc. But somehow it gained no traction with the banks, the SEC, the Fed.  So what does the NYT want from its coverage of OWS?

If it wants to engage a new audience, then it needs to be in Zuccotti Park and on social networks, covering the story for the social real time web. If it wants to enhance its news reputation then it needs to create and project its best contextual journalism and opinion into this network. If it wants to own the story it might want to think about throwing open the doors of the Times swanky event space and holding some public events around each of these vital topics.

Oh, and just occasionally, it might want to put an external link into its stories. But that might be going too far.

Occupy Wall Street: a visual culture for networked news. Photo: Anna Hiatt

Occupy Wall Street is the perfect framework for understanding what is happening to news dissemination in an internet age. If there is a journalist or journalism student left in New York who has not yet been down to Zuccotti Park,  they should feel uncomfortably ashamed. The park itself has become a striking metaphor for the internet; it is a space which is privately controlled but to which the public have access, giving the impression of freedom of association without the assurance of continuity.

It is also a story with some complexity, a nebulousness some find irritating, and others find refreshingly nuanced. It is also an overwhelmingly visual story. Go to the Park, read the signs. Here is a post from academic Dr Alison Trope at USC Annenberg on exactly this subject. It is a theme which is as relevant to news reporting as it is to political and media theory.

The movement itself bamboozled the mainstream media and government with what was perceived as a lack of purpose. ‘They don’t know what they want’ being the generic complaint from mainstream outlets such as CNN. Again, if you visit the square, and read the dozens and dozens of signs it is clear what the complaints are, but they are not expressed in a way which is readily interpreted by packaged media.  For those of us who attended plenty of student marches in the 1980s, the mass-produced signs, run off in a student union or by a fringe political organisation, bore one short message with a simple solution;  ‘Coal Not Dole’, ‘Ban the Bomb’, ‘Thatcher Out’, ‘Rock Against Racism’. These messages were created, knowingly or subconsciously, with the medium in mind. One minute on the evening news and one shot in the newspaper, the unitary message is vital, but in the world of the real time social web it is over too soon, it lacks the conversational tone necessary for engagement of audiences. At last year’s good humoured but largely ineffectual Rally for Sanity, the signs were the principal output of the movement, grabbing the coat tails of the rise in photo sharing through easy to use tools like Facebook, Twitpic, Yfrog and flickr.

Nothing could be further from this packaged media message than the maker culture signs of OWS protesters. The cardboard-and-marker factory of pointed sentiments heavily personalised, carefully held up for iPhones and professional photographers alike, spread the movement around the web, infiltrating social discussions, and fueling an event where the  ‘story’ lacks the kind of definition which helps journalists to frame traditional reports. The lack of one punch-on-the-nose message is replaced by a stream of visual talking points around subjects as diverse as student debt, Ben Bernanke’s suitability for his job and pension rights.  A complex economic phenomenon such as the growth of disparity in wealth has no one solution, and demands a complex response.

In blogging about  Dr Trope’s observation ‘the revolution will be hashtagged’, academic Henry Jenkins says this:

These groups are refusing to create a simple unified message of the kind that are familiar from “disciplined,” hierarchical, and established political movements. Rather, they seek to multiply the messages and to expand the range of different media framings so that they may speak to a broader range of different participants. No one piece of media reaches everyone; rather, media is produced quickly and cheaply and spread widely so that each piece of media produced may speak to a different set of followers.

Our understanding of how news stories are constructed, sustained and create impact is shifting, in the same way that movements and protests are reformatting. When our students at Columbia Journalism  School a reported the occupation they realised that this was a story which could not be squeezed into the template of  conventional assignments. It was a multi-faceted story which happened locally but projected internationally, it involved many aspects and themes, and it was long – days, weeks, months – but rewarded minute-by-minute attention.  Covering the movement from the early days is a learning experience for everyone, not just J schoolers.

One of our students, Anna Hiatt,  took a terrific set of photos, but in the process also tweeted pictures in real time by taking camera phone shots of her dSLR viewfinder; an inventive way to combine the demands of the social real time web and the durability of high quality content . Another student, Andrew Katz, has become a semi-permanent fixture at the protests, often not knowing exactly how much of his time it will take,  because the demands of the story fluctuate, making the routine question  ‘what are the 700 words today?’ redundant. Creating a context with presence and consistency, there is plenty of room for – maybe even higher demand for – longform analysis. The piece gaining most traction for the students this week was an essay about the lack of intellectual leadership around the protests.

In Oakland both the established local news outlets  such as theTribune and non-profit Oakland Local,  have to keep the live story  flowing as things turned ugly in the Oakland demonstrations. These are tools, techniques and demands which were not apparent at local or even national level even as recently as two years ago. What OWS is once again illustrating for newsrooms and journalists is how to prepare for this altered reality. Creating context for yourself and your journalism in networks is crucial. Planning to feed stories into more than one publication at various frequencies is entirely necessary, and that those who are present – not just physically, but in the conversation – will get better stories, and greater traction. This is more true now than at any point.

If Occupy Wall Street creates an effective hashtagged presence that forms a platform for engagement and stories, debate and disagreement around something as arcane as economic policies, it has already outstripped the mainstream media . Stories which are important,  but shift on an incremental basis confounding conventional formats has upended journalism in the recent past. The financial crisis might have been eloquently covered by dozens of writers, but it seldom gained adequate traction with the audiences that mattered. Climate change, the rise of al-Quaeda, the collapse of banks, maybe next the crisis in higher education, these are all complex stories with lengthy trajectories which fit into the category of ‘low probability, high impact’ subjects to cover.  Committed in-depth reporting is needed on all of this and more, but the journalistic process for assembling and delivering this to the relevant audiences and engaging their interest needs to be as creative and flexible as the web itself. OWS has so far upset some media outlets by defying dictation about what is and what is not a story, when it is worth reporting and when it should be dropped. For the reporters who were active and listening and reporting the pulse of the movement, it has been an exhilarating time. For those who missed the story, there is a lot to learn for next time.

I have never been an out and out Google fan, but I have defended some of their  innovations such as Google News. This was an innovation which delivered a better more comprehensive service to users who were already migrating to the web. It did not, to my mind, represent the parasitical relationship  some significant media owners suggested, rather it added utility and drove traffic to our stories.Recently, Google has been on the retreat from its purely algorithmic approach to products and battling the rising tide of Facebook and Twitter usage by incorporating more human activity into its robotics. So bonuses and promotions have become tied to the success of social. Google+ is the result of this desire to be market dominant.

Whilst many have salivated over the frankly humdrum interface and deeply mundane social experience of Google+, for some of us, it is not an enhancement on existing platforms at all. Twitter remains the place that allows more control over all aspects of your use, does not demand a ‘real name’ and is not intimately connected to your email account, which makes it a more preferable place for journalists. It is a better broadcast platform.  But the subjective assessments of the merits of these social networks is irrelevant. By telling journalists that their visibility will only increase (a good thing) by using a particular social platform which demands specific protocols, it is a form of coercion. Profiles on publishers own platforms will not be featured. Neither will profiles on Facebook or Twitter.

It is a simple case of something many technology companies have been guilty of at one time or another; using strength in one area (news search) to leverage weakness in another (social). This is how Microsoft squished browser competition in the 1990s, it is how companies used the capture of content to drive worse technologies (VHS over Betamax, Sky dishes over Squarials). It is also what happens when companies simply have too much power in any market. Google has built dominance in search by being better than everyone else, but it is now an unregulated utility. Ditto Facebook, with its equally horrible implementation of  ’profiles’, which has caused something of a backlash among those who question the company’s use of data.

There are many great journalists who are not on Google+ and don’t want to be. The reason the move to promote journalists who use the service rather than those who don’t is wrong, from Google’s perspective as well as the consumers, is that it does not help filter ‘better news’ it confuses the picture .It promotes one type of journalistic activity which has pretty much nothing to do with the quality of reporting. It also potentially creates a false dichotomy between those who do good journalism, or acts of journalism, and those who are professionally employed as journalists.

It hasn’t stopped me from creating a Google+ profile, and it will become something which many journalists feel compelled to do. But it is not beneficial for journalism in the way that Google and its supporters would have you believe. It is only beneficial for Google.

The rise of the realtime social web has changed everything. The network effect now means that people with connectivity and curiosity really do live where news breaks. They are not journalists or reporters, but they are interested in finding out what they have heard or seen, as Sohaib Athar was yesterday. And the best way to get an answer is bot to ask and to tell. None of this is new, all of it is obvious, and all of it can be supported by evidence. When news breaks now, people want to both participate and talk about it, as they did even late on a Sunday evening when President Obama officially confirmed what had been alive on Twitter for some time.

There is far more real time information now about how news is both broken, passed around, read, watched, commented on and analysed than at any point in history. Huge tides of data roll through the servers of every platform and every news site and every IP address every day.  What this data demonstrates is that stories are most engaging when they are happening, and that the level of interest and engagement for big stories is only increased when they are supplemented with context, new facts and conversation also in real time. I remember only a couple of years ago sitting in meetings at the Guardian where there was still real anxiety as to whether breaking news and covering live events was really the right thing for a news organisation which ‘was not a breaking news organisation’ to do. It was an understandable reaction to the terrifying prospect of being on 24 hours a day, engaging with stories at lighter depth and at greater speed than had previously been the case.  This now seems an incredibly arcane discussion to have had.

If you are related to the world of news, as opposed to the world of analysis,  if you don’t have a strategy for live stories and reporting, then you have a very limited future. If you wish to have credibility even in the world of analysis and have no presence in the breaking news conversation then I would strongly argue that over time this is going to dramatically and adversely affect your brand. My desire to read longer form articles by great journalists resides in me being familiar with their work already or having it recommended to me by people I trust. This is a habit formed entirely in the world of print and documentary formats, because there were no other options for me  when I was growing up and becoming interested in the world. New audiences now assess quality through immediacy and relevance. You fail to register a story when it breaks, you lose an opportunity. You don’t have a sentient observer able to share immediate thoughts on the subject on a platform or network I belong to, you also lose. You are not available to be a trusted sounding or thinking post when big things happen, you won’t get them back to read or watch your insights three days later.

Live is not ‘yet another thing’ for a working journalist to understand , it is the great journalistic challenge of our time. The skill involved in providing real time valuable information for audiences around stories as they happen is crucial to being a credible journalist and a resilient news organisation. For those who question whether this kind of journalism can be valuable or high quality, there are three examples I can immediately think of to show them which rebuts the idea (if anybody realy still holds it)  that working in real time degrades good journalism.

First, there is my former colleague Andrew Sparrow, at the Guardian. When we hired him, several years ago, what was striking about him was not his background, (he was a good lobby journalist who had worked for print publications) but that he was interested in the process of political reporting. He was something of a scholar on the issue of Parliamentary reporting and said he wanted to move online because he saw that political reporting and the internet were highly compatible but not being used particularly well. His meticulous live blogging of events such as the Chilcott Inquiry created a form of news reporting which had both the depth and context it was hard to cram into one  space constrained article. This year at the British Press Awards, Andy was named political reporter of the year. This in an election year, where Labour lost power in the most unpredictable election for a decade, a coalition government stumbled into power and politics became momentarily dramatic. This is not just a reward for really sparkling journalism, but the validation of techniques now open to journalists such as liveblogging . To be adding context and knowledge to real time events, was the best way to report the election.

Secondly, I would point to the incredible work of Greg Mitchell over at The Nation. Mitchell has blogged every day of the Wikileaks story since it broke in November. Sometimes his posts are cursory and short, sometimes they are detailed and lengthy. But they are always there. It is interesting that neither the New York Times, or The Guardian come to that, have provided the kind of excellent meta coverage that Mitchell has managed. His daily beat on the story demonstrates what journalists are for in the world of real time communications and complexity. Journalists are there to spend time with stories and sources which are important but not always visible. Wikileaks will continue to unfold as a story over months and possibly years, yet no news outlets are covering it in the way Mitchell is ; he is the Wikileaks bar which is always open.

And last but not least, there is the much talked about work of Andy Carvin, or @acarvin as most of us know him as the head of social media strategy at NPR, Andy’s tweeting about the Arab Spring from an aggregational and curatorial perspective has actually made him on e of the most valuable available news resources on this story. His work has really set out a new template for a role as yet unspecified in news organisations and accidental to his duties at NPR.  Carvin’s skill is in being timely, and diligent. He tweeted up to 500 times a day at the height of the Egyptian revolution, yet he never left Washington. Of course some would argue this is not ‘proper reporting’ although fewer and fewer people would actually contest that it doesn’t bear the hallmarks of the highest quality reporting. But every news organisation has desk editors don’t they? And desk editors follow stories through back channels, conversations, reading, watching and listening to material relevat to their field. Most desk editors will be totally engaged on every story of this magnitude to the same kind of sleepless depth as Andy Carvin, yet almost no desk editors expose this work in the way Carvin does.  Why not?  The job of arranging and cutting stories to length, commissioning the right headline, sitting in meetings to hear how the rest of the bulletin or newspaper is being put together will all take less and less time in the future, or cease completely. The necessity to find and cultivate sources outside your own correspondent network will only increase.  I would be as motivated to buy or spend time with a news brand which had identifiable editors active in their areas of expertise, as I would with reporters. Andy Carvin’s job has baffled many news people; he works for NPR but his public service journalism is being done on an entirely different network. But it is very clear to me that he is absolutely a model of a 21st century ‘news editor’ but one tied to a story or theme, not a format.

Every news room  will have to remake itself around the principle of being reactive in real time. Every page or story that every news organisation distributes will eventually show some way of flagging if the page is active or archived, if the conversation is alive and well or over and done with. Every reporter and editor will develop a real time presence in some form, which makes them available to the social web. When I say ‘will’ I of course don’t mean that literally . I think many of them won’t, but eventually they will be replaced by ones who do. The most interesting experiment in this area by mainstream media is currently Al Jazeera’s ‘Stream’ . even here though, the fluidity of topics and conversations is restricted by format.

For those who want to write or produce at length and in isolation from the real-time web, then this will continue, magazines, documentaries, books and films will continue to have a life independent of ‘the stream’.And there is at the moment  value in this resource intensive research and longer form journalism. It is a kind of slow journalism which underwrites the real time events. However, in terms of how to connect it to the real world and find audiences, it needs integrating more rigorously into this new world which transcends schedules or institutions.

Recently the AP’s interactive news guru Jonathan Stray posted a very thought provoking piece on news search on his blog. The whole post is really worth reading and absorbing, but critically it identifies the idea that reporting information needs to transcend current formats, and be highly aggregational and searchable. And live. Imagining how a new type of story would be structured he says:

A text story about refugees due to war and other catastrophes is an obvious introduction, especially if it includes maps and other multimedia. And that would typically be the end of  the story by today’s conventions. But we can do deeper. The International Organization for Migration maintains detailed statistics on the topic. We could plot that data, make it searchable and linkable. Now we’re at about the level of a good news app today. Let’s go further by making it live, not a visualization of a data set but a visualization of a data feed, an automatically updating information resource that is by definition evergreen. And then let’s pull in all of the good stories concerning migration, whether or not our own newsroom wrote them.

Even in the time I have been writing this post, Giga Om took a brief look at this compressed cycle where news breaks at the speed of thought  concluding, not unreasonably that once a new news cycle is established in requires new tools and ways of thinking to respond to it.

The live updating stream of thought and reaction is here to stay, and it will become more prevalent rather than less. If they haven’t already news businesses will need to prepare their journalists, their technologies and their interfaces to reflect this new world. It is not about ‘being first at the cost of being right’, it is about being there, or not .

The BBC’s web services are increasingly how it reaches the world and therefore its standards and core purpose need to be shot through every bit and byte it publishes. I am a huge fan of the BBC’s online development and the staff who powered it – without the more innovative thinkers and developers and the focus on editorial standards and their digital expression I know that not just the BBC but all of the UK’s online media would be poorer. But in the rapid growth of any such being you are bound to get fringe stupidities and anomalies. Taking a look at the list of web ‘closures’ some seem to be not much more than keyword pages being given an early retirement; Lily Allen, and Michael Palin, are no longer, if they ever were, suitable for top level domain treatment. Many of the listed objects  have already gone. Another 200 top level domains in addition to these will disappear.

Even if the BBC had all the riches in the world, it would not make a difference to the fact that it needed more focus and point to its activities. At its worst, the BBC’s online presence was a reflection of its confused core. All things to everyone all the time. Nobody seemed to understand the concept of ‘no white space on the web’, well plenty did, but not those handing our editorial permissions to start sites as it was ‘only the web’. If you could have actually seen the output of this labour, if it were made physical, the corridors of White City would be impassable with irrelevant content clutter. Instead it ran out of headspace, and into angry competition issues.

The mainstream media is slowly catching up with the idea, that if you are to have a sustained existence in an ever-changing world, you need to know your single point of focus rather than be carried away on a tide of ball-licking possibilites. Doing it because you can, is still, and has always been, a terrible editorial idea. Doing it because you must is a much better manifesto.

I feel very sorry for the people who will lose their jobs, as it was not their failure, but a wider strategic issue which sees them out of work, and one hopes in the mass movement of the BBC it does not break or lose its core pool of talent. The planing down of costs will be in vain unless there is clarity at the heart of the digital editorial strategy. One of the most appealing things about the BBC news website was, as one of its founding lights once explained to me, that its day one strategy was ‘to tell you what’s going on in the world right now’. A dazzlingly simple and unadorned mission, completely right for the organisation.

Now Roly Keating who takes charge of editorial direction has an opportunity to nail down what the direction and the content should be. If the Corporation can achieve that, the latest cuts, however painful they appear, will make the organisation a stronger digital player than it already is. And that’s food for thought. The scale of the BBC’s operations is immense. It’s size, an enormous sprawl over many territories, was a hindrance. More focus is not necessarily a bad thing for the BBC, and it might not benefit its competitors either.