Reuters Editors

from Mark Jones:

Davos through social media

I spent last week at the World Economic Forum in Davos producing content for reuters.com, running some experiments in new ways to cover a conference, and observing the growing integration of social media into a major mainstream event.

We had great success with giving our correspondents ‘Flip cameras’ with which to grab short comments from delegates on the key issues of the Forum. You can see some of these on our ‘Davos debates’ on the economy, financial regulation, environment, and ethics. The major learning point was that these were much, much easier to use than the mobile phones we used last year in Davos.

Less successful was our attempt to make the Forum more participatory by turning the tables and getting delegates prepared to admit they didn’t have all the answers to 'ask the audience' via Reuters. This was a good idea in theory, and one that we'll try again, but it was a struggle to find delegates comfortable with the notion that the Davos brainpower might not be enough to solve the world’s problems.

Nevertheless, World Economic Forum President Klaus Schwab set an excellent example (and got a very healthy response):

Elsewhere, we did use mobiles and the qik video-streaming service to go live ‘behind the scenes’ of the forum and the Reuters News operation.

I was co-sited with the team that produced the WEF-sponsored 'Davos Today' programme -- a high-end TV show with a professional team of Reuters broadcast journalists behind it.

Law firms as media companies

I was in Cape Cod last week to talk about social media – blogs and social networks and all that — at Hubbard One’s ‘Innovation Forum’.  (Hubbard One is a Thomson Reuters company providing website services to law firms.) When first invited I had reservations. I know very little about the legal profession and, while I try not to take this personally, my lawyer friends are openly contemptuous of the media and reserve particular scorn for bloggers. But the organisers said not to worry — they needed someone with “out of industry experience who could stimulate new thinking”. Perhaps sensing my scepticism they added that the guest speaker a few years ago had been a chef.

On the plane from London I was still worrying about how to engage the lawyers (or were they attorneys?) and increasingly discomforted about the idea of following the chef, who by this point had become in my mind a natural entertainer with a slick live show almost certainly involving dramatic knife-work. But then I stumbled across a line in the book I was reading (Josh Bernoff and Charlene Li’s excellent ‘Groundswell’) suggesting that all companies were now media companies since they have to manage complex information flows to both their staff and to customers, and this seemed to offer some hope.

Entering into what I saw as the spirit of the event, I recast my presentation around the motion that law firms are quasi-media companies. And in the discussions that followed I did note at least five ways in which these firms are having to face up to challenges that parallel ours at Reuters News:

1. Struggling to throw off the shackles of the broadcast model It’s hard to take an organisation used to broadcasting information and to get it to start engaging with customers or readers as individuals.

There was, for example, an animated conversation about whether to allow comments on legal blogs or not. This is relatively limited engagement but even so most of those present didn’t allow comments on blogs. I had to suppress a chuckle when one marketer said one of her blogs had received just a dozen comments in the past year. But I was stunned to then hear that of those 12, four had generated new business for the firm – an extraordinary response. (At Reuters News we struggle to get our journalists to follow up on remarks made in response to their blog posts.)

2. Making content social

Established organisations tend to view their website as the sole focus. Most media companies are gradually coming round to the idea that you need to make content portable so that readers can read it where they want to. That can range from RSS news feeds to links to social bookmarking sites like Digg or del.icio.us. But, with some honourable exceptions, law firms are struggling with this.

Throwing a pebble and watching the ripples

Thomson Reuters hosted a speech by the British Prime Minister in London on Monday and we opened up the event to the Web with the help of two advisors  — documentary maker Christian Payne and social media guru Mike Atherton.

These two have helped politicians, business people and even a Hollywood studio to connect with online audiences. Our event perhaps lacked a bit of Hollywood glamour but we had business people and politics in spades and we gave Christian and Mike full access to cover the event as they saw fit.

Christian created an alternative video feed of the proceedings using a Nokia mobile phone, and a wireless connection to the Qik social video platform.

This prompted a conversation in the Qik comments.

And somomething similar happened on Christian’s own site — OurManInside — which also carried a streaming feed and acted as a catalyst for another set of comments.

Has Video Killed the Blogging Star?

This was the title of a panel I joined at the Social Media Influence event earlier this week in London. It was a slightly tongue-in-cheek question from Matthew Yeomans, one of the conference’s organisers, but interesting because it touches on a number of current trends — the phenomenal rise of video usage on the Web, the success of user-generated video sites and the impression that, perhaps, blogging has become a bit passe. Just this week we’ve seen a new study show that online video consumption has nearly doubled in the past year while new social video services are growing very quickly and Youtube recently appointed a citizen video news editor.

This was the full brief:

Okay, we’re joking…..sort of. But be it video-snacking, YouTube resumes, digital video activism or live-streaming to the web from your mobile phone, the world of Web 2.0 is being driven by the moving image. This panel will examine the role video is playing in shaping communication techniques within companies as well as helping reach new consumer audiences.

In a way the event answered the question itself. One of the participants, the BBC’s Robin Hamman, who I had thought was going to be on the panel instead streamed the proceedings live via his mobile phone to Qik where it is now archived. So now I’m thinking why blog about the event when you can see the whole thing on Qik? And, in my case, why write a note to my boss when I can just point him to the full recording and (slightly scary thought) he can make up his own mind on how it went?

In preparing for the event I did a couple of things. First, I thought about my professional experience within Reuters. We’ve got perhaps a couple of hundred journalists blogging on a regular basis but just a handful video blogging. That’s partly because video is still a bit tricky while blogging is relatively easy since, in essence, it’s just a text-based content management system and nearly all our journalists are writing on a very regular basis.

Blogging Iran: Politics and Poetry

Blogging is big in Iran. We already knew that from Technorati statistics on the prevalence of Farsi language blogs on the Web. But now comes a fascinating insight into what all those bloggers are blogging about.

This is what the Iranian blogosphere looks like, according to John Kelly – a Columbia University academic who isn’t joking when he tells audiences he thinks there isn’t a human phenomenon that can’t be reduced to a series of coloured dots.

Each dot represents a blog , and the bigger the dot the greater the number of links being made to that blog.

I’m surprised by the size of the conservative politics blogosphere and of the neighbouring religious blogosphere, which are jointly around the same size as the secular and reformist blogospheres.

Most surprising, however, is the equally large poetry blogosphere in the upper left hand quadrant.

John previewed this recently published research at the Media:Republic gathering in Los Angeles last month. And it was the size of the poetry blogosphere that got participants talking — I think most of the American and British participants felt slightly awed that Iranians were using the Web to create art on such a scale.

More questions than answers

I was invited to a gathering of activists, academics and media practitioners by the Berkman Centre’s Media:Republic program in LA last weekend. Exhilarating to be in such exalted company but depressing to find them so anxious about the future of political engagement and so negative about big Media’s future.

The context of the meeting was to establish what we don’t understand about the emerging media landscape in order to inform the direction of future research programmes.

So, in the spirit of Donald Rumsfeld, what do we know that we don’t know?

How distributed can the production of meaning be? An academic question from John Zittrain of Berkman but very much with real world concerns in mind. He’s worried about where the atomisation of media consumption and production will take society. In an elitist world, one in which communication channels (including media) are controlled by the few, then it is relatively easy to see how the politics of consensus and compromise can be pursued. But many felt that the new social technologies were creating new silos, reducing the quality of public discourse, accelerating disengagement from politics and, possibly, creatng the conditions for extremist politics.

How can we get the public to eat their broccoli? Traditionally, nearly all media has followed a public service remit to some degree and mixed content with public policy relevance with the really popular stuff. So you get a smattering of Darfur in a diet of domestic news, celebrity and sports. But that only works when publishers control the medium.

I know I wasn’t the only one to squirm as David Weinberger, co-author of the seminal Cluetrain Manifesto, described how increasingly anachronistic the Big Media model of editors deciding what it was appropriate for readers to read was beginning to seem. What seemed to worry this group more than anything else was that if consumers control their ‘DailyMe’ — a personalised news service — then how will the public service stuff get through?

Gary Kebbel of the Knight Foundation gave some great context when he said, “More and more people are sharing experiences. That means there are fewer shared experiences. Journalism has prospered for centuries because it created shared experiences that I will call community.” He thought that journalists would prosper if they used new social technology to rebuild shared experiences.

The revolution may not be televised… but it will be uploaded

The most memorable line from last week’s WeMedia conference in Miami came from Reverend Lennox Yearwood of the Hip Hop Caucus who works with ‘digital natives’ — young people who have grown up with wikipedia and YouTube and whose changing media consumption was at the root of all that was discussed.

WeMedia is the kind of event where bloggers, academics, social activists, technologists and the occasional VC poke mild fun at the slow-moving ‘suits’ from old media, and where the ‘suits’ complain that the newcomers don’t understand the realities of the media business while desperately working out whether they’re missing any tricks.

Two years ago in London the vibe was all about how mainstream media needed to get up to speed with blogging. And last year, despite the best efforts of the organisers, the meeting was peppered with bloggers versus journalists spats. But this year it did seem that, finally, both sides had decided it was time to establish how best to work together.

The substance of many of the exchanges was that media companies let their hierarchy and brand consciousness stop them from being bold enough to use social media effectively while activist groups can’t quite believe their luck that all these free tools have suddenly been given to them; tools which make it much easier for them to get things done without needing Big Media’s help.

There was much talk of Ushahidi.com — the remarkable Kenyan site collating post-election conflict and peace-making reports and creating a google maps mashup. And The Hub — the social media site run by human rights group Witness which brings together filmed reports of human rights abuses around the world — offered a model of how YouTube-style content and facebook-style groups might be harnessed for a specific purpose.

Michael Smolens, CEO of Dotsub, demonstrated how his group is attracting volunteers to caption films and videos in multiple languages. Hitherto, he says, Hollywood has assumed that the costs of local language production would be prohibitive and has largely limited itself to English. But now technology offers the potential to extend all video to all languages. The best example to date is of an Indian NGO subtitling training material to help unemployed women to become ‘mothers’ for orphans.

Virginia Tech and social media: some questions for newsrooms

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.

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly blog

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).