There are some interesting findings about attitudes towards online news, bias and global coverage in a Harris Interactive poll on newspapers and their online sites, which has just been released at the World Association of Newspapers conference here in Cape Town. The poll of 8,749 adults was taken last month in seven countries (US, UK, France, Italy, Spain, Germany and Australia).

Online vs TV
Five years out, readers expect online to overtake TV networks as their main source of news in four of the seven countries — US, France, Italy and Spain — and for the two to be level-placed in a fifth — Australia.

Appetite for global news
Against the widely-held view amongst newspaper execs here that the future of newspapers is ‘hyper-local’ the survey shows a surprising appetite for global news.

Asked to tell editors here what they should do to make their services more attractive, the top three responses were:

• Cover more local news and information
• Improve your journalistic quality
• Provide more in-depth analysis on world events

Douglas Griffen of Harris said there was an urgent need for papers to increase international coverage: “We are increasingly affected by national and world events, newspapers have an opportunity to help us better understand the global issues and impacts.” 

Bias
When asked why some people don’t want to read a newspaper on a regular basis the top three were:

• Lack of time
• Easier to go online
• Biased or too narrow a viewpoint in its reporting

The theme of bias also cropped up when readers were asked what newspapers can do to better represent the issues in their communities:

• Ensure that all points of view are fairly represented
• Provide more research
• Raise the quality of writing and analysis

More details of the survey can be found on the World Association of Newspapers site.

The tragic events at Virginia Tech earlier this week will take their own place in U.S. history. Alongside the Asian Tusnami and London’s 7/7 bombings, the reporting of them may also come to be seen as a defining moment in participatory or citizen journalism. I was struck by a number of issues newsrooms had to confront.

Does mainstream media’s promotion of citizen journalism encourage risk-taking?
The iconic video from Jamal Albarghouti — was submitted to CNNs i-reports citizen journalism project. Widely lauded, it nevertheless led observers including lhe Philadelphia Daily News’ Ellen Gray to ask whether the lure of recognition by traditional media is prompting citizens to take unnecessary risks.

Is there a risk of repeating unfounded rumours found on the social web?
Facebook the social networking site which focuses on students was the forum for many tributes to those killed. And friends struggling to make contact via phone were able to check whether students were OK via their Facebook pages. But social networking sites like Facebook were used by bloggers attempting to establish the identity of the killer and a Virginia Tech student whose online profile in LiveJournal graphically illustrated his penchant for guns, found himself the target of much abuse. Wired made the observation that mainstream media had not named the accused but this changed when he later turned to traditional media to clear his name.

Does the advent of social media render censoring of material on the grounds of taste irrelevant?
NBC agonised over screening parts of the killer’s ‘multimedia manifesto’ and attracted criticism. But seasoned bloggers like Dave Winer point out the tendency for such material to end up on the Web eventually anyway. Winer advocates allowing citizens to make up their own minds whether to watch or not.

How should journalists handle requests to use material from social media?
On photo-sharing site Flickr a Virginia Tech Shooting pool was set up attracting a number of media enquiries about access to the images. If, as in this case, media requests are made via comments in discussions or blogs, the interested reader can see the newsgathering process in the raw. Journalists leave highly visible footprints and are going to have to learn to step lightly.

Are blogs and social networking sites ‘fair game’ for journalists looking for quotes?
The BBCs Robin Harman, whose personal blog is widely followed by journalists, was one of the first to start compiling eyewitness accounts from blog entries. Some of those he sampled found themselves being contacted directly by journalists for interviews, and some found that objectionable. Robin admits to being shaken by the experience and advocates greater sensitivity among journalists to what should be considered private at such times.

Do journalists have the skills to harness social media?
Amid the profusion of content sources and the huge volume of comment, Shane Richmond, community editor for the U.K.s Daily Telegraph, likened seeking original sources to looking for a needle in a haystack and references Paul Bradshaw’s call for journalists to become proficient in Technorati, YouTube and their like.

I’m not sure about the answers, I’m certain the questions aren’t going away. What do you think?
Mark Jones is Reuters Global Community Editor

Photo credit: REUTERS/Shannon Stapleton

When we launched our ‘The Good, the Bad and the Ugly’ (GBU) feedback pages we wanted to come clean about the mistakes you spotted (we know we’re not perfect) and, in the interests of balance, also share some of the plaudits that came our way (we’re only human).

lt launched in the spring of 1997 as an attachment sent to editorial managers, but quickly spread to journalists, sales people, and others who asked to be on the mailing list. It later became a weekly fixture on the internal website for journalists, and then the Daily Briefing — the internal site for all Reuters staff. Two years ago, the bold and controversial decision was made to actually let the PUBLIC see it, and we unveiled it on reuters.com.

Over the years, many of our most controversial incidents, including some in which we had to withdraw stories, were first uncovered by reader feedback. It is also fair to say that while most reader feedback dwells on the negative, perhaps because that’s just human nature, some comments have been very complimentary. This is especially true of comments on our photos.

Since we first launched GBU on the open Web, the world has changed. There’s been an explosion in blogging and readers have been looking for greater transparency and ways to have their say on matters of fact, tone and accuracy in news content.

That’s why we’re turning The Good, the Bad and the Ugly into a blog. It will still cover the same ground. But rather than appear once a week it will be updated as soon and often as possible by editor Robert Basler.

And, because we do want to encourage readers to join the conversation,the blog means we’ll not always have the last word — readers will be able to comment on the comments from Bob and our team of specialist editors and correspondents. No reader comments will go directly onto the blog; all will be moderated by reuters.com editors.

If things turn really ugly, we’ll hand over to the ‘Reuters Editors’ blog — where our most senior news executives deal with editorial policy issues (among other things).

I hope you like the changes and carry on letting us know what you like and what you don’t.

Mark Jones is Reuters Global Community Editor

Mainstream media executives, journalists, bloggers and money guys (and they were all guys) met at the WeMedia conference in Miami to discuss how communities can be built. The gathering provided an interesting gauge of the hot topics in new media. I heard five themes that kept coming up in one way or another.

1. Passion. I’ve never heard the word used so frequently at a conference. The opening sequence, which featured Will Smith’s ‘Where is the love?’ video, may have set the tone. Jeff Taylor, founder of Monster and with a new start up — eons — aimed at baby-boomers, talked about harnessing ‘collective passion’ by building up a community with shared values, (and then monetizing it). Jan Schaffer of J-Lab said that mainstream media was struggling with community building because it was “outside their passion zone”, raising the hackles of professional journalists present.

2. Where’s the money? There was a strong feeling that as mainstream media begins to find ways of connecting with the blogosphere the issue of bloggers being paid would become much bigger. Jeff Taylor scared many in the room when he said that he commissions expert articles from journalists but they weren’t being read as much as the blogs he was getting for nothing and budgets were being cut.

The two venture capitalists on the panel — Chris Versace of Agile Equity, and Brian O’Malley of Battery Ventures — said they were now using a well-developed model of community as a filter for new media proposals — if project pitches didn’t embody social networking they were unlikely to be funded. And both said they were looking for passion.

3. Bloggers versus journalists. While most delegates confessed to being bored by this debate, the tensions between bloggers and mainstream media surfaced in every single session. There was much discussion of whether conversation — blogs, comments, forums — really amounted to a dfferent form of journalism or not. In the associated internet chatroom there was an interesting exchange using the metaphor of cloth and tailoring. One participant suggested that bloggers provided the cloth but that journalists were needed to create the finished item of clothing. Another suggested that it wasn’t that simple — you could, after all, knit your own woollens.

4. Cause-related social networking. The fact that tools now exist to allow people to find those with common interests so easily is leading to a huge rise in cause-related activity. Ian Rowe, vice president of Public Affairs at MTV said of his young audience: They want to get their content when they want it and how they want it, and that also goes for issues in their life… It used to be top-down where we chose one or two issues for them. Now our audience is telling us its great you are focusing on issues, but I want to deal with issues that are important to me, and I want to connect with people around the world to talk about issues I care about.”

Lisa Stone of BlogHer — a federation of women bloggers, said that ’social change’ has become the most used tag amongst her stable of bloggers requiring a new channel to be set up to accomodate the volume of comment and discussion the subject is generating.

5. The dark side of blogging. Amid much talk of the ‘echo chamber’ created by much blogging David Sasaki of Global Voices ventured that there had been a move from broadcast journalism straight to “intense partisanship” and somehow the conversation that many talked about hadn’t quite happened. MTV’s Ian Rowe raised the issue of social responsibility, of how young people responded to rewards for good behaviour and that when you see a video of a teenager assaulting a homeless person getting huge volume on YouTube “there’s a big red flag raised.”