Tomorrow I’m off to Skillset to talk about their new standards framework for journalism. I’m looking forward to the chat around what skills journalists need and not just because I’m involved in delivering this stuff to our future journalists. What I’m equally interested in is what skills the industry think they need (the framework has been created in consultation with industry and accreditation bodies) as it says a lot about what they think a journalist actually is – what defines the job.

It’s been something on my mind since the newsrewired conference a few weeks ago when the vexed debate of identity reared its head. That debate is best paraphrased as “grumblings on why people can’t be called a journalist” and left at that.

But the skillset visit and a chat with Francois Nel about onions and data, pushed it to the front of my thinking again.

The best way I can sum-up where that thinking has got me is Skillwalls.

A skillwall is the best way I have found to balance the argument (in my head) of what sets journalists apart with the issue of what will people pay for.

In terms of the ‘definition’ debate a journalist would be defined by which skills your average punter/blogger/anyone-you-don’t-want-to-call-a-journo does not have or is unwilling to develop. The skillwall is too high or too much effort to climb.

Skillwalls help define the paywall debate for me in terms that are more tangiable. People will pay for stuff that they can’t do themselves. If you have the skills to do that ,they may pay you. Thinking about it as a skill issue works better for me than trying to assess a value proposition.

The web has become a place where people can do things – it enables. The successful sites are those that enable them to do things it would be hard to do otherwise. Things that would take new skills.

Skills Vs. experience or Skills and Experience

This is where it gets difficult for the industry and why I think recent discussions have been so interesting for me. Yes, the knowledge and experience is valuable but is it a skill? Is going to lots of council meetings a skill? Is knowing the PM’s press secretary a skill? Valuable, yes, but a skill? No. Being able to get that stuff online in an interesting way is.

Unless you can do one people won’t see the value of the other.

It’s easy to be dismissive of skills. They can be seen as functional, low level things. But skills enable. Get over the skillwall of data gathering on the web and you can add the value of your knowledge and experience.

Of course a skillwall is not an exclusive or all encompassing barrier. It’s a peculiar new obstacle/challenge that digital has thrown our way. But it’s also a powerful opportunity for journalists to exploit.

So where is your skillwall and what are you going to do to get over it?

It seems that some of the breakout sessions descended in to ‘arguments’ generated around an issue which can be best summed up as the “but they are not journalists” argument. The afternoon session on hyperlocal I sat in on certainly fell victem.

We had the whole gamut of arguments including a number of the old favourites, my personal fave was “someone holding a camera is not a photographer”. Erm…yes they are but…I found it frustrating because I thought we had moved on from this. By the time we got to the ‘close the BBC and local newspapers will thrive’ stage  I lost my patience and   my contribution reflects that.  But I realise that was naive and a little unfair.

Given the painful restructuring in the industry at the moment it’s perfectly understandable that people will be looking at where the pinch is. Adam Tinworth made a good point to me that in terms of the stages of loss at least they had moved on to anger from denial. But I realised that it’s not really fair of me to dismiss that out of hand. I should have sat on my hands.

What did become clear to me is a growing divergence in the way hyperlocal and community are being defined and applied. Let me expand.

For me hyperlocal is now best defined by outfits like the Lichfield blog, represented at the session by Philip John. It’s content built on social capital. People are involved because it means something to them other than just a job or brand. Money is second to social status or altruistic motivation.

In contrast we could say that (in the context of the future of journalism) community is a strategy employed by media organisations and the journalists within them to engage with audience. Money is a defining commodity here in terms of starting it and sustaining it. Whether it’s to use that community to newsgather/crowdsource or to bolster the brand.

Both have economies of scale.

A hyperlocal site can only be so big. It will eventually get to a point where it demands more time and resources than volunteers can sustain. The economics of altruism only stretch so far. They can be be satisfied with ‘big enough’ or look at alternatives. Communities can, perversely, be too big to manage for large organisations, they cost too much for little return. In the context of profit and investment the economics don’t work

Both are different.

This inherent difference of motivation and a definition of the economic (investment and return) is becoming increasingly clear (and more so in the debate today) and in that a truth is evident. Hyperlocal websites are not a solution for media organisations who are struggling. You can not fill the gap that hyperlocal sites are starting to fill. A good community strategy may work but your core motivations make it different.

But just as hyperlocal is not the solution it’s also not the cause of the problems.

The truth is that the shift is creating a lot of friction (it’s perhaps bad taste to refer to shifting tectonic plates) and I think thats what created a lot of the ‘grief’ in the sessions.

There was a lot of criticism of hyperlocal as undermining/stealing/destroying journalism; you know the arguments. Likewise the crowd sourcing session seemed to descend in to sa similar semantic debate. As Adam reports:

There’s an undercurrent of hostility to the very idea of calling these contributors to crowd-sourced journalism “journalists” in any way – and that it’s under-mining credibility. In answer, people are suggestion that people can become journalists for single events – one time they happen to be at the right place at the right time.

But growing difference between parish pump websites and the local media, between community and audience, suggests that even discussing hyperlocal and community together is, perhaps, a mistake at a journalism conference.

The motivations, models and practice, it seems from the tone of the debate, are just too different.

£5 pounds will get you the full correction

Perhaps it’s an unforseen problem of paywalls or just an oversight on the part of the paper. But it does highlight an area for some rethinking. Particularly from the PCC who are supposed to regulate this kind of thing.

Due prominence

A significant inaccuracy, misleading statement or distortion once recognised must be corrected, promptly and with due prominence, and – where appropriate – an apology published.

So says the Editors Code of practice from the PCC. There have been many ways that newspapers have dealt with this – more often than not in a corrections and clarifications section buried deep in the middle of the paper.

But I suppose we also need to start thinking about these things being buried deep behind the paywall. And if paywalls are the future then perhaps the PCC needs to think long and hard about the way it requires those at fault to say sorry and correct mistakes. It also made me think that we should all maybe pay a bit more attention as well.

Show me how good you are

If I am going to pay someone for this stuff then one of the things I should want to know is just how accurate their content is and how transparent they are.

I for one would like to see all corrections and clarifications made free and visible on all parts of media orgs websites before the paywall. That way I can make an informed choice.

Thanks to Josh Halliday for pointing this little gem out on Twitter.

God: What are you doing now?
King Arthur: Averting our eyes, oh Lord.
God: Well, don’t. It’s just like those miserable psalms, always so depressing. Now knock it off!

A bit of link bait that title I know. But imagine that you had followed the link and before you could read the first line of text a video ‘overlay’ appeared and covered the whole page with adverts. You could try it. Hit refresh then close your eyes and count to 30.

That’s the idea behind ex-CNN.com chief David Payne’s new venture ShortTailmedia. Beet.TV reported on the plans for this bug hitter, just out of beta

The company, an ad network of sorts,  allows publishers to insert television spots or “pre-roll” video advertising into users experience as they call up text pages to read.

So essentially its like your first click is ‘end of part one’ and then you have to watch an advert before you get to see the page and get to enjoy ‘part two’

Payne himself has called this the holy grail of digital media. But in this world of timeshift recording will it really work?

We are still having the debate about people skipping ads through when they use DVR’s. Do we really need to strong arm that part of the TV experience back in?  Do we really need something that produces ‘unit’ (their words) that  “are part of a recent movement to bring bigger, more interrupting ad units online”. More interruptions to my browsing? Oh yeah. That’ll endear me to you.

It sounds like a bit of dud to me. So it’ll probably be a huge success.

“In every newsroom there’s a power center, and the reporters know where the power center is and they will follow it,” says Ken Sands, former online publisher at The Spokesman-Review in Spokane, Wash. “I can’t think of one regional paper that is run by a Web person. You have [print] people running them who have been in the same kind of jobs for 25 years. At the regional level, that is jeopardizing the need to make substantial changes.”

That’s a quote from an interesting article on Editor and Publisher which asks When Will a Web Editor Lead a Major Newsroom? . The article is specifically about the changes at the Washington Post. But that quote resonated with me. Especially the part about the regional level.

Amongst the marking and other stuff a few things have been pushing the ponder button. One of the the things was the recent updates to Google Translate.

Even if you haven’t used the tool itself you will have probably spotted the odd option to translate search results. If you use the Google Toolbar you may have even been surprised to be offered a version of the page you are reading in its original language.  It’s like a lot of things on the web these days, a background thing.

But I have been pondering it lately for two reasons. The first comes from the increased amount of contact I have working journalists who are getting to grips with using search tools and other online stuff in a more structured and journalistic way. Sitting in a room full of journos and seeing the mixture of awe and surprise at just what you can do with an IP address these days, for example,  just underlines how much of this stuff can pass you by if you don’t have a bit of headspace to explore.

The second is thinking about how, when training, I can make this as relevant to all the flavours of journalists I come across. It’s often the case that after a session of looking at searching council websites and the like, sports journos feel like there isn’t much in it for them. Most team websites have no RSS and the online presence for many official bodies is pretty slim. I get much the same from the Sports journalism students I teach.

Searching in another language

Of course, when you get on to community stuff, forums and blogs etc. some of the sports journos are pretty adept at finding and working with those communities. But I’m always on the look out for stuff for that search part of what I do that will peak their interest in the basic stuff which, I think, is really valuable. Google translate does just that.

Here’s an example picked at random.

The rumour mill throws up that Italian football coach and radio pundit Nevio Scala is pitching for the Scotland Manager’s job.

Interesting stuff. What’s this guy about then? We could push a few searches through Google:

Starting with  “Nevio Scala” or building on the search with information about his other clubs. e.g “Nevio Scala” +Parma or “Nevio Scala” +Spartak will turf up a lot. But it’s in English and this guy is Italian. So what do the Italians say about him?

We can push Google to search Italian sites by selecting Italian in the Language option of the advanced search. Which gives us some lovely results with the Translate This page option. Click there and we get translated results.

The language option in Googles advanced search

We can take that step further with Google’s Translated search option.

All you do is tell it what you are looking for, what language to search in and what language you speak. Then tell it which language you want to search in. The results are slightly easier to digest as you can see the options side by side. We can use the search to dig a little deeper.

A translated search from Google

Back to the Scala example. I want to delve in to the fan chat during his short spell at Spartak. Setting the results language to Russian means we can plug in a search like  “Nevio Scala” Spartak OR Spartacus +forum and throw-up forum discussions around Scala on Russian football sites.

Of course doing this is not just limited to Sport. It’s not uncommon to find someone from your patch appears in the foreign press.  Take “meredith kercher” OR “Amanda Knox” as a  translated search in Italian as an example. But given the international impact of sports, especially as the world cup comes in to view and I think sports journos have plenty to play with here.

Translating from the Toolbar

For me though the real flexibility comes when you use the translate options in conjunction with the Google Toolbar.  By installing the toolbar you can translate pages on the fly.  That makes searching in another language a lot easier.

I tried the same search for “meredith kercher” OR “Amanda Knox” in Google news but with the location set to Italy.  All the results come up in Italian but a quick click of the translate button and I have a better idea of what I am looking at. Then I can continue browsing in (Googles best approximation of) english.

Using the pages

Using the toolbar translation also means you can take advantage of the basic functions on the page.

Using the Nevio Scala” Spartak OR Spartacus +forum search I found a Spartak forum which I wanted to search for any mentions of Scala.  I could find the search box but sticking Scala in won’t work as it’s English not Russian cyrillic. So I used the Google translate tool to convert Nevio Scala in to Russian (Невио Скала) and went directly to the original Russian version of the football forum. The toolbar translate option converted the page in to english so finding the search box was easy. Then I plugged the Russian version in to the search box.  Bingo.

Ok, so the translation is pretty hokey sometimes and we need to be mindful of the different standards of journalism (legal and ethical) that we might encounter. But it’s a great opportunity to get a different perspective. I think this is especially important in sport. There is always the other team and if they happen to be from another country then it would seem a shame to miss their perspective.

The next step

The next step is to integrate some of this stuff in to your “passive aggressive newsgathering” by finding the best in foreign language sites and then using a site like Mloovi to translate the RSS feed. Then you really are doing international journalism.

I thought as a writer you could just get paid to write

I heard that phrase in the cafe to day as I was working on lectures for next week. It was a small group trying to get their heads round arts council funding and realising that despite all the agreements in place for minimum fees the money doesn’t match the reality.

It was obviously a frustrating reality for some of the group who realised that they can’t just get paid for what they do without getting involved in all the other aspects. You can’t just write the play. You have to involve actors and put the play on. A writer can’t exist in a vacuum

I felt really sorry for them.

It’s clear that the shrinking pot of money and the way the funding worked was forcing them to compromise at the expense of the professional standards (at least professional standard rates). Just because it’s the arts it doesn’t mean that you should do it for free.

It made me think about journalism.

It echoed a phrase I have heard repeatedly over the last few weeks: “people will pay for good writing” .It was always in the context of paywalls – the latest idea in funding journalism – and in my opinion its one the emptiest phrases I have heard in a while. The reality is that good writing, on its own, is not enough. There are other actors on the journalism stage now and  everyone needs to be writing to involve them.

The solution for the group in the cafe was to scale back on performances and start the painful process of finding match funding and sponsorship to offset the cost.  Key to that was the relevance to the community. The Police, council and other organisations are looking to fund writers and creatives who get in the heart of the community.  The idea that all the money would come from above is well and truly dead.  Much as the writers wanted the distance they couldn’t have it.

Sound familiar?

Are paywalls our arts council? Are the community our match funding? I don’t know.

One thing is certain. The reality of how we pay for this doesn’t match our professional expectations and definitions. Much as we would love it not to change it already has.

The new CNN homepage

CNN have updated their website. I like the layout although I think the boxed content and the ad on the right are a little to similar and the movement of the ad is very distracting. But they aren’t going to move their ad’s around are they.

There is a shift in emphasis towards video on the site but the international version doesn’t get a link the Newspulse beta which is a shame. But few things did catch my eye with respect to video and multimedia in general.

The first thing was a neat little feature of their video player. If you drag the play head around on the video it overlays the running time . Not groundbreaking but a nice little touch.

The player overlays the running time as you drag the playhead

On the article pages themeselve many stories now have an integrated slideshow at the top. This is nicely done but it will be interesting to see how many articles get this treatment.

The integrated slideshow is a nice touch

The last thing that caught my eye was the use of video embedded in the article page. Video is presented as thumbnails in the left-hand-column which ‘pushes’ everything out-of-the-way on the page when clicked.

Video bullies its way on to the screen when clicked

I have mixed feelings about this. In one sense I’m pleased to see video in with the article but the overlay on the article feels wrong.  Many times when watching embedded video I will start it playing and listen to the content – it’s more often than not packaged content (script etc) so I can keep reading and dip back in when the video sounds interesting. (who says men can’t multitask!) This approach seems to bully its way on to the page and does little to integrate. This is made worse by the use of packaged content rather than clips with little or nothing to signpost the link between the article and the video.

I think a better option would be to go with the clickable thumbnail approach of video. Align the images more appropriately to the text and the expand your player from that point.

Still. Lots of interesting new tweaks and experiments.

I’m doing a lot more video this year as part of my digital teaching. One reason for that is we have bought a boat load of Flip video recorders to play with. That means we can do video without the big camera issues.

Whilst pulling together resources for video (I’m expecting the students to do a lot of reading around the basic technical stuff) I came across the Flip video spotlight site.

Flip Video Spotlight provides steeply discounted access to selected Flip Video products to qualifying charitable organizations. To start, charitable organizations apply online to become a Participating Partner. If approved, Participating Partners join our online community and receive access to the Flip Video Spotlight storefront. For each Flip Video Ultra camcorder purchased through the storefront, Flip Video Spotlight donates a free unit.

How nice is that.

As part of the site there are basic tips on storytelling,  shooting, production and distribution. They also have a couple of neat videos offering guidance for using for the flip. So even if you don’t fit their criteria you can still benefit from the advice

Of course the public sector moves slowly when it comes to IT and it’s no surprise that there are still a majority of orgs that hide their content away on static pages. No RSS feed to help there. So what do we do?

Well we could resign ourselves to adding them to the list of pages that we bookmark and visit. A bit like those regular calls we make to keep our contacts book fresh; no bad thing. But another solution is to use on of the many RSS services on the web to ‘scrape’ the page for content and convert it in to a feed.

Preston city council (the council nearest to me at work) has a few feeds but none around the basic operation of the council – meetings, decisions etc.  This kind of thing would be great to get a feed of. So I thought I would give it a go with their published decisions page using Feed43

No feed for the dull stuff!

The first thing I did was set the search so that it showed all results. That way any new ones would show up by default. I did this by using an * in the search box. The * is a standard operator for a wild card or ‘any matches’. So it seemed a logical punt to try it.

The next step was to copy the web address to feed my RSS maker. The URL looks complex but it contains all the information needed to drive the search.

Feed43 grabs the whole page for you to explore

The first step with Feed43 is to feed it the URL then click Reload. It pulls in the whole page and then you get the hard bit. The idea with feed scrapers is to give it enough information about the way the stuff you want is presented that it can ‘spot’ the stuff and ignore the rest. This means trawling through some HTML.

You get two options

The global search pattern looks for HTML that ‘wraps’ the content you want to make in to a feed. It could be the whole table that contains the search results. But this doesn’t really help in this case.

Better to go straight to the second option which defines the specific things to look for to define an item to be added to the feed. Here’s what I put.

<td > <a href=”{%}” title=”{*}”>{%}</a></td>

In feed43 language {*} means this could be anything, just ignore it. {%} means this is important so store it.

So I can saw from the HTML that each decision in the list looked like this

<td > <a href=”http://preston.moderngov.co.uk/ieDecisionDetails.aspx?ID=348&amp;displaypref=0″ title=”Link to decision details for North West England Regional Spatial Strategy Partial Review Consultation”>North West England Regional Spatial Strategy Partial Review Consultation</a>

So I told feed43 to look for anything between the <td> </td> tags regardless of what ‘class=’ said. Then I told it to grab the href link as the actual weblink, ignore the title and then grab the text between the <a> tag to use as a title.

Finding the useful bits on the page means working through the HTML

Clicking extract will filter the content and show you the results. You can see they are split in to {%1} for the link and {%2} for the title of the decision.

The filtered results display in a list

The last step is to define which of these makes up the key parts of the feed. You can see it’s pretty straightforward to fill the gaps at this point. Your feed is then ready to go. All you need to do is subscribe in the normal way

The filtered results can be added to the feed template

Moving beyond the basics

The thing that makes scraping pages difficult is picking through the HTML. Feed43 makes this easier by limiting the number of options to filter by. But if you need to push further in then you will need to explore other options. One to consider is Yahoo pipes which has a page grabber option. But you will also need to invest some time in understanding regular expressions.

I think this kind of stuff is more an more important for orgs and journalists especially when it comes to councils and government orgs. We all know how ‘mundane’ many see this stuff (important as it is). So making it in to a feed would be more conducive to newsgathering by stealth. Encourage more ‘passive aggressive newsgathering’ as Paul Bradshaw once described it.