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

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:

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.

How should news websites cater for the appetite of news-hungry audiences for running commentary during major breaking stories like Iran’s post-election turmoil? The challenge here is to match what TV stations can do when they switch between news bulletins to rolling 24 hour coverage. Only the web ought to be able to do so much more given its scope for interactivity.

In an ideal world you’d want to provide the fastest, most thoroughly verified reports around the clock whether they or not they are from conventional journalists.  And as a user I think you’d also want to be pointed in the direction of where you can find out more. If all this was easy then it would have been done by now. But it’s a lot of work. And all news organisations have had to strike compromises on one or more of those counts.

So what’s the state of the art?

The live blog

The Guardian (live news blog), the NYT (the Lede Blog), the Atlantic (Andrew Sullivan) and the Huffington Post (Nico Pitney) are among those media organisations using this approach to sample the best material across the Web. This method allows blog anchors to annotate content and to point out whether there are doubts or not about its accuracy. It also allows them to point to the originating sources to help participants make up their own minds.

But running these live blogs around the clock is a heavy commitment. And all four had sizable breaks in their coverage.

The Guardian’s live blog was most popular story on several days in the week after the election. But perhaps that’s not comparing like with like — a live blog being in essence one constantly updated story rather than a series of self-contained ones.

The Huffington Post’s live blog was distinctive for the large number of private email messages it published. I’m unclear as to why it and not the Guardian or NYT should get such material.

Reporters logs

This is the same idea but restricted to the output of the news organisation’s own staff. The BBC, perhaps reflecting its comparatively large staffing in the region, did this particularly well. The obvious shortcoming of this approach is that, even without the progressively more onerous reporting restrictions put in place by the Iranian authorities, even the BBC can’t be everywhere and it leaves no space for material provided by citizens.

CNN via its iReport, and the BBC via its Have Your Say service, all had rich seams of user-submitted pictures and videos. But they didn’t appear to be able to weave such material into their running commentary on the Web — perhaps a case of being overwhelmed with material and being forced to keep it in silos.

Aggregating validated citizen journalists

Perhaps the most interesting approach is to remove the middle man completely and to concentrate on channeling to your audience what you believe to be reliable sources.

Sky News’s use of the coveritlive service to feed the live ‘tweets’ of a handful of the most widely followed Iranian tweeters is possibly the most radical experiment so far during this story.

And the fact that Sky displayed this material prominently on its homepage at the height of tensions made it doubly so.

The very great advantage is that you can leave the feeds on and go home. The disadvantage is that it does not allow for any kind of editorial narrative to help readers set tweets in context.

And then there are the pure Twtter feeds. At Reuters we pretty much stuck to feeding our reuters_iran feed with our validated Iran news stream with the occasional reference to other sources. But others took a different tack and created a live two-way channel. And two journalists with U.S. broadcasters struck me as doing interesting things.Lara Setakrian for ABC News is curating the best tweets and other news from mainstream, official and citizen sources in a compelling feed. Meanwhile, Ann Curry at NBC has built up notably strong and open relationships with Iranian citizen journalists. However, neither organisation as far as I can tell has gone as far as Sky has with homepage placement of such streams.

None of these approaches has entirely nailed it. But they all have something going for them. So is there a hybrid that could give you the best of all worlds? In my book this would have:

• Direct publishing by sources validated by the news organisation
• The ability for live blog anchors to republish and annotate external contributions
• A means by which participants could add to or critique particular elements of the commentary

I suppose in theory you could achieve this by turning a live blog into something more participatory by using the comments functionality and find a way of wiring in Twitter feeds. That feels like it could be messy and might have the kind of presentational issues that bulletin boards suffer from.

Or perhaps, with its notions of invited participants, nested comment threads, ingest of web feeds and easy display of multimedia content, this is one of those situations that the much-vaunted Google Wave has been designed for?

Zach Seward of the Nieman Journalism Lab has a great piece of evidence for the ‘nothing new under the sun’ debate. The ‘Telepot’ competition in the Penny Illustrated Newspaper of 1913 encouraged readers to condense telegrams into just 12 words.

If you share the view that the telegraph was the Victorian internet then perhaps this was the (very late) Edwardian Twitter.

Last week at Media140 — Britain’s first ever conference devoted entirely to Twitter — I was asked to discuss the successes and failures of Twitter within Reuters News. It’s a bit early in the game to be talking about successes and failures but we have been experimenting with the micro-blogging service for a year or so, and it’s perhaps not a bad time to take stock on what we’ve learnt.

We’ve come up with at least five ways in which Twitter is being used within Reuters News:

1. As an alternative newsfeed

Our first (and by far the most popular) Twitterstream is twitter.com/reuters. We now have more than 70 streams including one for each of our blogs and the most important news channels like twitter.com/reuters_flunews/.

Most of these streams are automated versions of our newsfeeds. But some, like that on twitter.com/reuters_co_uk, mix headlines with our online journalists’ observations on what’s interesting on the web or what’s coming up on our sites.

What we’ve learnt is that this is an easy way to get our news into a place where readers are consuming news. It’s not generating a huge amount of traffic yet but the game is young. Many of us using Twitter at Reuters sense that its sheer efficiency at serving up news snippets from a group of hand-selected peers, friends and experts is usurping our other forms of news reading. And our hunch is that if that’s happening to us it’s happening to our readers.

2. Covering live events

The brevity of tweets and the ease with which it is possible to republish links to other web content makes Twitter a great tool for covering breaking news events.

The two events that have been most widely discussed in this connection are the Mumbai bombings last year and the Hudson River plane crash. The first raised issues about misinformation on Twitter, the second demonstrated the power of micro-publishing as the first image of the plane was transmitted around the world ahead of any mainstream media coverage.

Within Reuters News we’ve used it for events like the Obama Inauguration and the British Budget. But our very first use was in partnership with our friends at Global Voices during last summer’s Beijing Olympics.

We’d been looking for some social media ’spice’ to add to our traditional coverage and GV suggested using Twitter. You may remember the story about the Chinese blogger who tweeted his own arrest. Well GV was monitoring that tweeter and, in translating into English in near-real time, gave us a scoop of sorts.

If you’re in one of our newsrooms when news is breaking then it is increasingly likely that you will see Reuters journalists using a Twitter service like Tweetdeck to follow events. Just to be clear here, we don’t rely on Twitter for news but from time to time we do use it as a source for leads to be verified using established Reuters News standards. At Media140 freelance journalist Bill Thompson described Twitter as like a seismograph that helps you detect news vibrations to be investigated further, and this is very much the way in which we view Twitter’s role in newsgathering.

What we’ve learnt is that it may no longer be possible to track some stories without using Twitter. Myra MacDonald and Sanjeev Miglani, whose blog ‘Pakistan: Now or Never’ is one of our most successful, believe that it was impossible to track the events that led up to the reinstatement of Pakistan Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry back in March if you were not following the #longmarch09 tag on Twitter.

3. Augmenting ‘beat’ reporting

Some of our journalists are using Twitter to build out networks around their specialist beats. They ‘follow’ specialists in their area and in turn find themselves being followed by experts and sources, together with a  wider pool of interested readers.

What is rapidly becoming clear here is that our expert sources are developing their own Twitter presence meaning that we need to be on Twitter and following them to make sure we are not missing any important material.

Ben Hirschler, a relatively recent recruit to Twitter, has found himself a following within the pharmaceutical industry — analysts, company executives and specialist news providers — and in addition to getting valuable feedback on his Reuters stories Ben is getting constant ideas from the network of tweeters that he follows.

Robert MacMillan is doing something similar with a twitterstream around his media beat.

4.  Sharing what we find interesting with our readers

Long ago when I was a specialist reporter at Reuters and later at the BBC it always struck me that I only ended up reporting a small fraction of what I had discovered in my research and conversations with contacts. The advent of blogging has helped deal with that — those with the time can blog about the ‘nuggets’ that didn’t make it into the finished story and explore some of the loose ends they weren’t able to tie up.

But there’s another side to the intelligence gathered by reporters and editors — the interesting material they find on the Web. I see this as one form of what Clay Shirky refers to as ‘cognitive surplus’ — tacit intelligence that exists in a community that, under certain circumstances, can be captured via social media. What some of our journalists are doing now is sharing those recommended reads with the audience either via a bookmarking service like Google Reader or, increasingly, via Twitter.

A lot of journalists struggle with the notion of how merely repeating what is elsewhere on the Web can be of any real value when compared to original reporting. But it is. As Google News, the Drudge Report, countless other aggregators, and now Reuters journalists like Ben Hirschler can attest.

5. Opening up Reuters events to the wider public

Perhaps our biggest contribution to exploring how news media can harness Twitter most effectively has come from our efforts to wire up public policy speeches made in the Reuters NewsMaker series to the wider Web.

This started in earnest back in December with British leader of the opposition David Cameron who answered questions sent by users of Twitter both within the formal event and later via WebCameron — his YouTube channel.

In March, we did something familiar with Hector Sants, chief executive of the Financial Services Authority — the British regulator — in a session that prompted one blogger to ask whether the financial meltdown might have been avoided had regulators faced the challenging straightforward Twitter-stlyle questioning earlier.

And in April, just ahead of the G20 meeting in London, we took it to the next level by persuading World Bank President Robert Zoellick to do a special ‘social media greenroom‘ event in which, after his formal session, he took half an hour’s worth of questions from bloggers and tweeters.

Zoellick later described the questioning as ‘refreshing’. And what we have found in general is that when you open up an event to social media it makes it more interesting. Questions are less likely to be ‘framed’ within the terms of what policy-makers and journalists feel is the current debate. And, arguably, it seems harder for policy-makers to sidestep questions from the public.

Some unanswered questions

If Media140 is anything to go by then we and other mainstream media groups are wrestling with a number of knotty issues when it comes to our use of Twitter (and other social networks). Of these, the following seem most pressing:

1.    Given the blurring of the professional and the private in conversational media what are the implications for how journalists should conduct their online lives?

2.    To what extent will our sources develop their presence on Twitter and what does that imply for our journalism?

3    How much should we be building around the services of third party networks with which there is no contractual relationship? •

Last Wednesday, I spent the morning with a group of British diplomats at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office who are experimenting with blogging (blogplomats?).

I was a bit surprised that diplomats blog at all — popular culture has them using elegantly-turned but guarded language that seems at odds with the in-your-face nature of blogging.

But there are more than 20 digital diplomats listed on the Foreign & Commonewealth Office site and I heard some interesting stories of how ambassadors are using blogs to get their jobs done.

In Vietnam, Mark Kent is finding ways of raising awareness of what Britain is really like by connnecting the local population to leading Britons. To mark the Vietnamese New Year he got David Miliband and Sir Alex Ferguson to offer greetings:

Stephen Wordsworth, Britain’s man in Belgrade, is using blogging to influence media discussion about Serbian policies:

And in Zimbabwe, Second Secretary Philip Barclay (recently named as a Times Top100 Blogger) uses blogging in a quasi-journalistic manner to get across the real nature of life in the crisis-torn nation.

Barclay’s blog sparked a discussion of the extent to which diplomats can be entirely authentic in their views.

Tony Curzon-Price of Open Democracy suggested that diplomat blogs could only plausibly seek to influence and not perform the journalistic function of “speaking truth to power”. And at least one former diplomat is questioning the entire rationale for amabassadorial blogs.

Most of the diplomats saw Zimbabawe as an outlier and view blogging in a softer light — as a means to influence public views of Britain and its foreign policy. Someone described it as ‘branding’. Underlining the point, noone commented when the name of Craig Murray, the outspoken former British ambassador to Uzbekistan who lost his job after speaking out over human rights abuses, was mentioned.

All the diplomats appeared to agree on a couple of things:

Firstly, that blogging allows them to summarize the British position on issues in a way that the 10-page transcripts of speeches to the UN or official press releases somehow cannot, and that this is a highly efficient way of getting their message across to politicians, journalists and lobbyists.

Secondly, that since almost everyone else is doing it, not to use blogs as part of the diplomatic toolkit would make no sense. As the Foreign Office’s Head of Digital Diplomacy Stephen Hale put it, in the era of the Web “for most people in the world British foreign policy is what Google says it is.”