NetJourn Summit: The international view

Steve Safran October 10th, 2007

How is networked journalism working (or not) abroad? It’s a topic we don’t usually hear much about at these conferences, so good for the organizers to put together a panel of people from outside the U.S: Martin Huber, of My Heimat, Germany; Adrian Monck, City of London Polytechnic and Sky News and Robin Hamman, BBC and Cybersoc.com talked about what they’ve learned in the international world of contributory journalism at the Networked Journalism Summit in NYC…

Martin Huber, My Heimat, Germany: Emphasis is on systems and people. We have a lot of people with a technical background. It’s not just the content or the technology - it’s a service. We had to build a system that could provide this service online, on mobile and in print. We needed fast interations and the ability to make the system better as the community told us what they wanted.

Adrian Monck, City of London Polytechnic: Planning a doctorate at City of London Polytechnic where the PhD would set up a network of hundreds of bloggers. When we announced this, the newspapers said “this was low-cost journalists, it’s a disgrace and we should be shot.”

I think it’s really important that we report on big complicated stories — rendition, corporation - and we need to move with the times on that.

In journalism we maybe value some things the public doesn’t care about. With the unbundling we’ve found out what people value - and it’s not always our Op-Eds. How do we keep the public interested in important stories?

Audience question, Times of London: What are examples of networked journalism that have found a big audience?

Robin Hamman, BBC and Cybersoc.com: When there is a big story, and we say “send it to us,” we will get 50,000 photos of, say, a fuel depot exploding. It can become a real problem, the amount of people submitting content you can use. So we asked people to post it online, blog about it and tag it so we can link to it quicker. That’s a lot more honest.

Monck: The problem is - is this going to be an ad-hoc thing?

Audience Member: Many of us see we’re trying to provide a service. How do you know when you’ve done a service to the community?

Huber: We see a service in terms of a media application we provide. We see it as technology. And then the point behind this is that you can scale the solution so it becomes really specific for local community. In the last year we have put in what we have learned into the service. The software is easy and has good usability.

Monck: On the one hand you’ve got celebratory, community based contribution. On the other, people talk about the dark places we live. We’ve got places for pictures of my kids and places about “fear and loathing in my neighborhood.” I think there is something interesting about aggregating information into public sites. I don’t know where you go from the enthusiasts and cheerleaders to the world-grade cynics.

Hamman: When we’ve done participation, we’ve discovered it’s vastly expensive. The other forms of participations - the “send us your stuff” model are also expensive. They can break your system and you need legions of people to sift through it. “News organizations need to help inform people how to put stuff online and then we need to have our antennae up and know where to find useful information.”

Huber: Sees need for training users as well. Users should also make recommendations and the top recommendations make the front page. Those can also make the front page of the magazine.

Audience Member Brian Conley, Alive in Baghdad: What role do we have as journalists do encourage participation outside the First World? How do we enable journalists in other countries? We trained Iraqi journalists.

Monck: Sky is starting with that with Five News, with a slot on every night where they are working with people to bring content to air. If you look at what’s going on in journalism (school) right now, there are a lot of people training for that right now. One of my students did a story on the Shia death squads, and he can’t go back to Iraq now because someone wants him killed.

Audience Member: What are the differences in the media systems in the UK that have made the blogging system different? The Brit media is different - has that had an impact on blogging?

Monck: It’s so different. The UK is a centralized state and has been for 900 years. Everyone in the media knows everyone else. The big thing is that you have a 3 billion pound broadcasting presence - the BBC. On the one hand that’s amazing and fantastic, on the other hand it’s like Nanny - why blog when someone will do everything for you. You can’t deny the BBC does great things, but it kinda disempowers people who look at it and think “I can’t do that, so I won’t.”

Hamman: The BBC website have always had a hard time (with the concept of) linking out. We’ve seen changes in the past year and a half. The BBC Blogs trial introduces social bookmarking links and now if you look at the BBC News and Sport websites you will see more outbound links.