BBC College of Journalism head Kevin Marsh gave the keynote at the News:rewired conference at City University on Thursday and made a series of sharp observations about how social media is changing journalism that were left largely unchallenged by the audience due to the over-running of his slot:

1. Blogging has redefined notions both of what constitutes a story is and of what a is meant by a deadline, and is improving journalism.
2. Journalism has never been healthier but he was glad not to be starting out in the trade
3. Expertise is going to become an ever growing factor in journalism.

There was a lot of reaction to Kevin’s comments in the #newsrw Twitter back channel and I grabbed him afterwards for some more details of the thinking behind his views:

So, social media, used well, might make you a better journalist but whether it makes journalism attractive as a career option is an entirely separate question.

The return to work on Monday prompted the launch of the main UK political parties’ pre-election campaigns and the indications are that social media is likely to play a big role in the run-up to the general election.

David Cameron kicked off the Conservatives’ Draft Health Manifesto with a very neat ‘ask Cameron’ feature making use of Google Moderator — something I’d not heard of before but previously used by Conservative MP Giles Chichester in the runup to the Copenhagen climate summit.

Meanwhile Labour took a different angle and used some interesting  techniques to ensure that their take on the Conservatives’ fiscal ‘black hole’ figured prominently on search engine results. They also made the full document (which runs to 150 pages) available to all-comers via Google Documents — previously this kind of work has tended to end up only with a handful of journalists and experts.

The backdrop to all of this is of course the widely held assumption that deft use of social media is what helped Barack Obama to gain the US Presidency in 2008. There’s rather a good book by Jeff Jarvis looking at how organisations should reinvent themselves in the age of social media. It’s called ‘What Would Google Do?’ My betting is that the strategists at the parties’ HQs can’t help asking themselves, ‘what would Obama do?”

Excellent review by Rob Cottingham

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.