Mark Jones

Carlo de Benedetti, Chairman, Gruppo Editoriale L'Espresso/La Repubblica, will deliver the 2009 Reuters Memorial Lecture on ‘Newspapers and Democracy in the Internet era: The Italian Case'.

The Reuters Memorial Lecture commemorates journalists who have lost their lives in pursuit of their profession.

The lecture will be followed by a panel discussion chaired by John Lloyd, with Timothy Garton Ash and Paolo Mancini. Reuters correspondents will be live blogging throughout.

To join the discussion click on the 'make a comment' link at the top of the liveblog panel.

Last week, Reuters News took a small step into the unknown and hosted an 'unconference' - a conference in which almost everything is generated by the participants. This is nothing new in the world of technology where fans have been using the term for more than a decade, but for a journalist like me somewhat unsettling.

Conventionally, at conferences a panel of experts talks about their specialist subject and, if there's time, the audience gets a chance to ask a few questions at the end.  My understanding is that an 'unconference' reverses all this -- the focus shifts from stage to audience. What I also get now  is that it addresses those negative thoughts you find yourself thinking if you attend conventional conferences regularly. Thoughts like:

• This conference is addressing the wrong subject
• I know more about the subject than the panel does
• The chair is asking the panellists the wrong questions
• The audience isn't getting much of a chance to ask/answer questions
• The only interesting thing about this conference is the chat between the sessions

I've been thinking more and more along these lines, particularly at conferences on 'social media' when you might expect the conversation to be the key.

We drew back from hosting a full-on 'unconference' in which the agenda is entirely determined by those who turn up, when they turn up, on the advice of our co-host Toby Moores. His Amplified network of networks has concluded that it is naive to assume that agreement on discussion topics, speakers and formats will simply emerge without someone exerting leadership.

So we chose upfront a couple of debating points dear to our hearts -- news and politics -- and specified that anyone who came must be on Twitter (both because we thought this would be a good proxy for their willingness to participate and because we wanted to use Twitter to collate the conversation). We left the third discussion open and asked participants to make and discuss suggestions on a wiki.

And to underline the point that this was not about performances on a stage we organised our room 'cabaret style' with tables or 'conversation hubs' the focal point.

So what happens when you turn the conference tables like this? There'll be more than this but I can recall at  least 10 lessons:

1. You really need a good trigger to get the conversation going. We didn't have keynote speakers but we did have fantastic 'catalysts' in the form of the BBC's Richard Sambrook and FutureGov's Dominic Campbell for Politics who framed the issues and left participants with a provocative question to consider.

2. If you get the catalyst right the problem isn't in getting the conversation going it's in finding a gentle way of winding it down. We had meticulously planned breaks between sessions to allow participants time to update their twitterstreams, interview one another and otherwise catch up with themselves. But most just carried on with their conversations regardless.

3. Discussion does seem to work best in small-ish groups of 4-6. Any more and the tendency is for splinter conversations to develop and for some participants to get lost. Any fewer and there can be a lack of ideas.

4. You don't need much in the way of rules but I'd recommend these from Toby Moore that served us extremely well:

Two feet -- if you don't like the conversation then move on

Two ears, one mouth -- a reminder to those that like the sound of their own voices that participation is a two-way process and at the very minimum should be done in the ratio of two parts listening to one part speaking

One tweet -- tell the world what you found most interesting about your conversation in 140 characters

5. If an unconference is a series of conversations then the Master of Ceremonies role is about putting the punctuation around those conversations. That's a lot easier said than done. If you're too bossy then you kill the conversation. If you don't provide sufficient guidance then the conversation loses focus.

6. We might need a new name. We called this a 'curated unconference' and some of my journalist colleagues told me that a lot more of them would have turned up if it hadn't had such an offputting title.

7. Unconferences are very good for capturing lateral thinking and collective intellience. Some of the best ideas for improving news and politics came from people with no direct experience in those fields but who were actively investigating how social media can help them in very different areas.

Of all the social media approaches I've come across this one came closest to the ideal of creating a platform that allowed smart people to share their most interesting ideas.

8. Curating the conversation so that those there and those monitoring the event remotely can see the highlights is an emerging art. We tried a number of approaches including a live tag cloud made up of the most popular keywords in participants' tweets put together at short notice by Nik Butler (@loudmouthman), a full aggregation page of all content tagged '1pound40' and a manually edited live blog handled by my colleagues Ross Chainey (@rosschainey) and Astrid Zweynert (@astridzweynert}. I'm still unclear as to which was most useful.

9. Be careful about putting a live feed of tweets behind a panel discussion. We did have one panel discussion at the end made up of the liveliest contributors to the conversations discussing the most interesting tweets from participants. Mid-way through we put up a live feed of what the participants were saying about the panel. In effect this was participants responding to participants responding to participants and you can see the impact of this recursiveness on the conversation in the clip below.

10. Being conversational, an unconference doesn't really have a fixed start or endpoint. Building the buzz and encouraging participants to discuss potential topics starts weeks before the event. And the conversation doesn't finish when you switch off the lights. It's still going on. So it's time-consuming. But it's also a lot of fun.

Further reading:

Amplified's aggregation page

Drawnalism at Reuters Conference

Scott Gould - 10 Insights Into Guidance, As Opposed To Governance

Hannah Nicklin - The Future of Politics is Mutual

Jennifer Jones - Building on Hannah's thoughts on #1pound40

The Guardian - Is Twitter sustainable enough to influence politics?

Adam Tinworth - #1pound40 - The Ubiquity of Reporting

Waves PR - One Pound 40 unconference #1pound40

@documentally - The Psychology of Twitter

Ipadio - £1.40 Conference Round-Up

Sarah Hartley - Musings on the week: A north-south social media divide?

Bag of Spoons - #1pound40

David Terrar - Connective intelligence on politics and news at #1pound40

We'll be covering live the Edelman debate on social media and UK politics.

If you think that tweets are the mindless outpourings of those with more time than sense then this one's not for you. But if you're curious about how social media is increasingly influencing key areas of public policy then read on.

Reuters and the Amplified network are bringing together users of Twitter to discuss the idea that social media has evolved to the point that it can help solve real world problems.

Twitter's role in transmitting news has been demonstrated numerous times, with its role in the Mumbai bombings last year and June's post-election protests in Iran just two examples. But can that power be harnessed to improve the news?

Twitter's seemingly effortless ability to mobilise citizen concern has been illustrated by the #welovenhs tag used at the height of the debate in the US over universal health care provision and more recently by the overturning of the super-injunction banning the reporting of the Trafigura case. But can social media go further and help re-engage a jaded electorate with the political process?

We'll be debating the potential for social media in these and other public policy areas in London on November 11th. If you'd like to come apply for tickets via eventbrite (you'll need a Twitter id to register and be warned -  this is not a listening event but a highly participatory one.) If you've got a suggestion for a real world problem that could do with some help from social media then let us know via the comments below. To track the conversation about the event then follow the 1pound40 tag on Twitter. And we'll be updating this post with more details including live coverage plans for those who want to contribute via social media.

Update: BBC Director of Global News Richard Sambrook (@sambrook) will act as the catalyst for the conversation on Twitter and News, and Conservative MP Nadine Dorries (@nadinedorries) will be doing likewise for Politics and Twitter (Commons business permitting).

Kerry McCarthy MP (Labour) who had hoped to come but can't make it has left us with this challenge:

On Monday, Reuters arranged for UK Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg to be interviewed live by the social web.

We've been edging towards this with previous social media segments in Reuters-hosted NewsMaker events like those with Conservative leader David Cameron and World Bank President Bob Zoellick who have taken questions from Twitter and the like after making public policy speeches.

But Monday's event was purely online, with an agenda driven entirely by web participants. And, in weaving together four elements of social media practice, we think we've come up with a possible template for interviews in the age of Web 2.0:

1. Crowd-source all the questions

Questions were solicited via a Reuters blog post, the 12 seconds video service, Twitter and the CoverItLive live-blogging service.

We know this isn't new -- there have been radio phone-in interviews based on listeners' questions for decades. But the questions that we prompted weren't exclusive to our service - they existed on other platforms where side conversations could and did take place. That notion of setting off a distributed conversation is new-ish.

The most interesting of those questions were put direct to Nick.

Again, not brand new -- the CNN/YouTube Presidential debates last year were a powerful illustration of this strand of new media. But the Reuters approach was agnostic over form -- questions and comments could be text, audio or video and not limited to any one social media platform.

2. Aggregate the conversations around the event

The best of the rest of the comments and questions were aggregated and pulled together in various modules on the page containing the live video interview. The idea was to enrich the experience of participants by offering them a filtered guide to the best side conversations.

At it's simplest this merely involved setting up a hashtag on Twitter -- in this case #askclegg. But we also pulled in audio, video and pictures from social media sites like audioboo, 12 Seconds, Qik and Flickr to modules on the page and the highlights put on the timeline of the CoverItLive widget.

For those with deep interest in the interview we had meant to offer a full, unfiltered view of ALL conversations around the event by aggregating material tagged 'askclegg; but we forgot to link to it during the event.

3. Use the live Web

Live responses from social media participants were woven into the live interview making it dynamic -- participants could and did follow up on answers given by Nick so influencing the direction of the conversation.

Again, this is something that phone-in interviews have facilitated for some time. The difference is that our curators could choose the most interesting responses from a wide range of participants rather than the handful of listeners who get fed into radio phone-ins.

4. Use social media to promote the event

Content on Qik, Flickr, 12 seconds, audioboo and Twitter was used to update potential participants on what was going on behind the scenes as we built up to the event itself.

NIck Clegg got the ball rolling by asking a couple of video questions well ahead of the event including one on "greedy bankers":

Nick Clegg @ Reuters - Bankers on 12seconds.tv

This is akin to what broadcast media has always done with programme trails but the difference here is that we were using raw, unvarnished content with immediacy the key and making use of the social web's amplification to promote what we were planning.

Another good example: the in-cab interview with Nick conducted by Documentally (aka Christian Payne) on the way to the Reuters News London HQ.

So what was the net result of all this? There did seem to be high levels of engagement all round. The unpredictability of the questions helped, as did the near-live responses from web participants. There was also a strong sense that the role of the journalist in such an interview is fundamentally different -- more about keeping up with the side conversations and adding the context that the 140 characters in a tweet can't possibly do.

Also see:

Nick Clegg at Reuters: the highlights - Liberal Democrat Voice

Clegg takes over own Twitter name -- BBC

Live caricaturing Nick Clegg at Reuters -- hackcartoonsdiary

I had an unnerving experience at an event last week.  Matt Buck, who had been asking me probing questions during a presentation at the News Innovation un-conference in London, caught up with me afterwards, said he was a cartoonist and showed me a quickfire caricature he'd done of me (right).

I should say that I have tried and failed several times to teach myself how to do caricature.  I have nothing but admiration for those who can capture the essence of someone in a few lines.

There is something incredibly personal about the form and I was both shocked and delighted by this picture: it's possibly the least flattering image of me yet (and believe me, there's a wide selection to choose from).

And the fact that it was immediately uploaded to Twitpic got me thinking about drawing and news.

Traditionally, artists in news media have been employed to create cartoons to a 24-hour news cycle. But now that's changing. The decline of newspapers and the rise of online are pushing cartoonists into online animation on the one hand and into covering non-news events on the other.

I asked Matt to come along to an online event I was helping to organise -- a social media interview with Nick Clegg, leader of Britain's Liberal Democrat party -- and he duly produced a sketch that I think complements the large number of photographs taken.

Later I was intrigued to hear Matt talk about how putting someone like Nick Clegg into an unfamiliar situation -- in this case answering questions direct from voters via Twitter -- can reveal a great deal to a caricaturist:

Update: We've closed comments on this post as the Interview is now finished. See Nick's Twitter stream for further responses to questions and this post for an account of how the event worked.

Video Feed

If you've got a question for Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg then now's your chance: on Monday July 13th (1200 GMT). he'll be joining the Reuters UK team to take your questions live. And no subject is off limits.

You'll be able to see the live videostream here and you can ask questions ahead of the event or respond during it by using Twitter (#askclegg) the 12 Seconds video service (nickclegg) or use this post's comment form below. (We'll also feature the highlights on the reuters uk news twitterstream.) Nick introduces the event below and, to kick off the discussion, asks a couple of questions of his own.

On Monday we can change the way we do politics. Every week I travel around the country to meet people in their local town halls and listen to their views. Anyone can come along and ask me (just about) anything and in return I get a pretty good picture of how people across the UK feel about politics and how they are being affected by the recession.

Next week I am going to do another of my public Q&A meetings, but this time it is going to be live and online so that you can ask me your questions from home, your work or wherever you happen to be online. There will be no script and no special invitations - just get in touch and ask a question on subjects that concern you.

The one thing that keeps coming up again and again is the state of our politics and how we can clean it up. Many people say they would like to see action taken against MPs who seriously abuse the system. But currently voters have no power to sack those MPs who have been found guilty of serious wrong-doing. I want to change this and make politicians more accountable and politics more transparent. I am keen to hear your ideas.

This has never been done before so, on Monday 13th July post your questions and let’s discuss how we can clean up politics and fix the British economy.

Nick Clegg

Nick Clegg @ Reuters - MPs on 12seconds.tv

Nick Clegg @ Reuters - Bankers on 12seconds.tv

Finbarr O'Reilly has won the best published photograph award in the Diageo Business Reporting awards for his images of gold mining in Congo.

For the other short-listed entries and Finbarr's words of acceptance, as voiced by former Reuters Africa Editor Barry Moody, see this video:

Chris Anderson, the editor of Wired, is in London promoting his new book 'Free' and spoke at the Institute of Contemporary Arts.

He told the audience that, amongst other things, the terms 'news', 'journalist' and 'journalism' were being rendered meaningless by the democratisation of content via low-cost production tools on the Web.

The substance of Chris's remarks has been covered well elsewhere but, alarmed by his comments about news, I caught up with him after the event to ask him what hope there was for journalists.