New.Journalism.Review

An essential post - Should journalism degrees still prepare students for a news industry that doesn’t want them?

It's a lovely sunny day and I'm feeling happy, but I  took a deep breath and mentally prepared myself to feel miserable before reading Paul's post [Should journalism degrees still prepare students for a news industry that doesn’t want them? | Online Journalism Blog] .

Paul's question is highly controversial and, of course, the responses make for very interesting reading.

One thing that dominates a lot of journalism degrees is the philosophy that journalism is a profession and only the 'pros' can do it well. It's this kind of arrogance that needs to change. Courses need to be far more inclusive.

I agree with Paul's view that students often come in with a 'mono-media' view of working in the industry. We've just 're-valed' our degree at Solent and hopefully, with the new structure, we'll beat this kind of thinking out of students [not literally] at level 1!

Kevin Anderson's view on changing 'mindshift'  is important. I may want to show his YouTube video to my class - it seems quite important. 

I also totally agree with Alison.  On the positive side, students have this amazing  opportunity to create their own brands online. Eventually, if they wish, they will seek jobs in MSM or perhaps not.  Well-known journalists seem to be becoming multimedia  brands themselves. They are bigger than the newspapers and websites that they write for.

The Guardian and its anti-BBC views.

Guardian Media Group (GMG) say “The BBC and BBC Worldwide are encroaching into online areas where commercially funded players could provide the content required.” [Yahoo Pans Ofcom’s Search Plan, Says BBC.co.uk May Be Too Big - PaidContentUK]

The report also states, rather too vaguely for my liking, Yahoo! has "joined the growing ranks grumbling about the BBC’s scale."

Really? Who the f***k are these grumblers?

The only sound of grumbling I hear (apart from that coming from gastro pubs in Farringdon) is from the British Internet Publisher's Alliance (BIPA). This rather secretive organisation is bankrolled by large media companies, including  Rupert Murdoch's News International (no surprise) and, oddly, the ever-so liberal - Guardian newspaper.

So whenever you read a news story or opinion in a broadsheet newspaper regarding the BBC, it's worth checking whether its publisher declares its membership of BIPA [Check its membership list NOW!]

Those that wish to curb the power of the BBC are in a minority in the UK. Unfortunately, they are a minority who happen to work in publishing, have massive public influence and tend be vocal sods.

The Guardian has the facility to spread the BIPA anti-BBC message to the great and the good using its well-read Monday media section.

It also now has a new platform  - PaidContent - which GMG bought recently. Can the Guardian possibly resist the temptation to dominate the online news funding debate using its new baby as a tool?

BIPA would like to see a 'level playing field in the online news environment' - sounds okay, right? In reality, many would like to see funding withdrawn for key BBC services enjoyed by millions. At the extreme end, some even would like to see the large and very popular news site pulled completely.

Commercially, The Guardian would find it very, very, handy if license fee funding for BBC.co.uk was abolished or it service significantly scaled back - not just in the UK, but USA. BBC News is a massive player in  the US online market, a market which The Guardian is hoping to also dominate.

The reality is that BBC.co.uk is a fantastic site and the on-demand, iPlayer, stuff is great. As it does with TV and radio, the BBC sets the standard in online journalism in the UK.

It is enjoyed and relied upon to give honest and accurate information by millions of people around the world, but this means nothing to those commercial rivals at BIPA who will do anything to attack the BBC.

I suspect that many Guardian readers enjoy the BBC site and see it for what it is - a fantastic resource which is an absolute bargain in terms of what we pay for it per a month. They would be shocked to hear that their respected newspaper is privately lobbying against it.

Commercial rivals need to get real. Work out how to raise your game and compete. Quit complaining into your chardonnay and DO NOT INSIST ON FURTHER CRIPPLING REGULATION THAT WILL EVENTUALLY KILL THE BBC.

But competing in a poor economic climate is difficult and that's why we can expect the grumbling from commercial rivals to get louder and more frequent in the pages of newspapers like The Guardian.

A new journalism degree course is born...

Our new BA (Hons) Journalism degree structure has got the official stamp(s) of approval and is set to launch in October [2008].

We spent a lot of time trying to understand the changes which have occurred in the industry and what it means to our students. The new degree has convergence journalism at its heart and this has required a far more integrated approach to teaching.

When it comes to technology, to paraphrase a speech by the BBC's Kevin Marsh,"you don't need to be right, just be ready." I like the sound of that approach. We don't know exactly where things are going in the industry, but I think we're on the right lines now. Our students will be much better prepared for entry into the industry.   

A few reflective points:

Here are a few reflective thoughts about the process...

1) Convergence journalism IS happening: Yes sir! Sounds pretty basic, but some people still seem to think that it's some kind of blip. We'll somehow return to a time when people only get content from the newspaper or radio. Normal service WON'T be resumed soon! It won't 'settle'. Most UK media companies run converged operations. It may not be quite as advanced as what is happening in the US media, but even the smallest local village paper normally has a web site. If they have a web site then there is usually a desire to integrate (even if it's just to save money). Social media, crowd sourcing...these are not just buzzwords.

2) 'Online journalism' versus 'convergence': There is a difference! All students need skill in convergence/multimedia. We kept online journalism as an option. Read on for more...

3) The old pathways remained: Initially there was an idea to have a separate online journalism pathway (possibly even an entirely separate degree!). This would be a mistake.It was decided to keep two pathways at L2 and L3 -  'print' and 'broadcast'. It would have certainly been easier to simply add a new pathway for online (in terms of timetabling), but that would be a non-converged approach. We decided that convergence had to be embedded into the existing print and broadcast pathways.

4) Students can still specialise: We want students to be able to operate in a multimedia and multi-platform way, but we were not creating 'jack  hacks of all trades'. Students must have competent multimedia skills, but we kept the specialist teaching in the pathways and options. It's pretty obvious that good research, interview, reporting and editing skills are as important as ever. You don't want to do anything to damage the teaching of  the sacred cows.

5) Have something to converge with: You have to worry about those courses based around single media ( like all those NCTJ pre-entry courses). How can they teach multimedia? We already gave students flexibility

6) Some software is non-converged: Students get teaching in a range of industry standard software, like : Quark, InDesign, Photoshop, FinalCutPro etc. But some of this software is pretty non-converged [take a look at Quark]. Adobe products are better because they have been built around the 'web workflow'. There is a whole new raft of software that needs to be looked at for internet publishing. New content management systems etc.

7) Visual skills are really important: Students often think they are on a writing course, but they need to understand how content is presented in linear and non-linear ways and the role of images. Audiences need help in navigating their way through vast amounts of information slush. Students need skills in managing content in different formats.

A few challenges still needing to be faced:

There is a lot more than this, but what the heck.....

1) Closer links with the computing courses: The design director of NYTimes.com  [see the full post here]  explained what he looked for in an ideal candidate (it makes for quite a list): XHTML, CSS,
JavaScript, Flash and a "commercially viable comfort level with database and application programming". Wooooooah!. With the exception of some Flash, we don't teach this stuff in the arts faculty. But I am guessing there are specialists in the computing faculty who are experts in this. Cross-faculty links can be tricky to arrange, but we need to do it. 

2) Mobile: Will this eventually become a significant platform for media consumption? Mentions of mobile are a little absent from the unit descriptors that I wrote! 

3) Web First?: I'm slightly skeptical about this. How many 'newspapers' are really operating in a 'web first' way? Come the big story, don't  we always save it for the paper version or broadcast? 

4) Getting students to take multimedia seriously: It can no longer play second fiddle to the perceived 'glamour' of print or TV!

There are some links and journal articles that influenced the thinking about convergence and I will list these soon. I will also be blogging about how I am getting on writing the new Inside Multimedia News course material and New Media contexts stuff. Speaking of which, I better get on with it...

A cute (and short) Olympic 2008 cartoon.....

I'm not convinced that many people really give a shit, but this made me think.... There are more in this series on the Amnesty site.

Mobile broadband reviewed in PC Pro

This month's PC Pro magazine (available in the UK, August 2008 issue) reviews the mobile broadband offerings from UK operators - 3, Orange, 0_2, T-Mobile and Vodafone. The article compares the services on price, ease of use, speed etc. It's certainly the most comprehensive review that I've read to date.

I was particularly interested to see how the five networks performed outside London, where mobile broadband coverage can be patchy at best. Part of the tests involved a reviewer using each of the services on a train commute from Sussex to London.

I commute by train from Surrey to Southampton, but South West Trains appear unable to provide WiFi connectivity which would obviously be ideal.

In the meantime, an ever-growing number of my fellow commuters obtain Net access using various dongles and USB sticks.

Vodafone seems to be the most popular service on my particular route. But coverage must be pretty shaky, particularly in the stretch from Winchester to Eastleigh in Hampshire where deep embankments and hills obstruct mobile reception. It's so bad that you can't even make a voice call at times.

Vodafone also comes top in the the PC Pro tests. This comes as no surprise as most people seem to think it has the best coverage of all the operators. T-Mobile is runner-up in the test, followed, perhaps surprisingly, by the cheapest mobile broadband provider, 3. As for 0₂ and Orange the least said about their performance the better.

The article warned that unless you are located in select areas of  London, you're highly unlikely to get the really fast access speeds. Forget those advertising billboards that promise impressive speeds of "up to 7.2 meg", outside the main cities you may only pick up internet via GPRS  -  which can be REALLY slow.

More worryingly, PC Pro is reporting that the 3G mobile networks may be unable to cope with demand in the future.

Watch out for those services that attempt to compress image files, apparently it's really annoying. And on a similar theme, the costs of going over your usage limits (out of bundle costs) can be horrific (up to around £4 per MB when abroad).

The good news is that they all boast easy set-up, although Mac users find that they have to do a little more configuring. But software packages vary in quality. If you hope to use broadband service on a train,  it can be handy to have software that tells you when you are connecting via HSDPA (i.e. fast Internet) and when are slumming it on GPRS.

Where does it leave me? Still looking. I need a service that A) Works on my train commute - Vodafone seems to be the obvious choice for coverage B) Is affordable. I want a PAYG or a short contract because I won't use it every day or even every month. Perhaps T-Mobile at £4 a day will be best.

I reckon for those outside the big cities, these services are still too expensive for the kind of speed and coverage you are likely to receive.

links for 2008-06-17

• Most influential blogs: Vanity Fair’s Blogopticon
  Vanity Fair's clickable guide to influential blogs
  (tags: blogs journalism vanityfair trends blogging)
• How we read online. - By Michael Agger - Slate Magazine
  Good summary guide to how people read online. A lot of the info is old, but still pretty useful
  (tags: blog blogging writing tutorial teaching)
• Wired News - Bloggers seek training from journalists
  News item about training courses for citizen journalists
  (tags: blog howto law journalism blogging tutorials ethics)
• How the Web Was Won: Entertainment & Culture: vanityfair.com
  Vanity Fair's lengthy and mostly US-focussed article about the history of the net. Strangely it makes no mention of Tim Berners-Lee - did he not want to take part?
  (tags: blog blogging education internet history tech)

Quark 8: AKA "InDesign killer"?

"Quark Strikes Back" reads the dramatic headline on the cover of  MacUser magazine (6 June 2008) It says: "We didn't expect to feel like this, XPress 8 seems like a product that will get people excited about DTP once more."

A few years ago the canteen at Quark HQ in Denver had one dish on its menu -  humble pie. The bar around the corner served two cocktails - 'Total Screw Up' and the rather sickly-tasting 'Zero Market Share'.

But fed up with its poor diet, Quark admitted that the release of versions 6 to 6.5 were, frankly, pants and that it had become more than a little arrogant in its dealings with customers.

But now the world has changed. Quark 8 has got a makeover and actually looks and feels like a 21st century bit of software. Indeed, it has more than a little passing resemblance to its great rival, InDesign CS3. This may prove rather handy for those of us who teach both.

Will this be enough? Only time will tell. But it will have a job in winning the hearts of many newspaper and magazine publishers in the UK.

More reviews and opinions:

CreativePro: First Look Quark  8
Random Quote: "For many established designers, it’s probably too late to generate much excitement. But it seems as if this version of XPress is targeted at new users as much as old ones, and there is a steady flow of new designers entering the market who are taking a fresh look at the tools available to them.

PlanetQuark: Quark 8 (and 7) features
This links through to comprehensive rundown of new features in X-Ray Magazine. The boss of Quark says that version 8 is the best ever - [well, it should be!].

Tuaw.com: Quark 8 interface and typography
The feedback makes particularly interesting reading. StreetStealth says that Quark will "only win on price". [I agree,  so  the message to Quark is keep those education discounts!!!!!]

links for 2008-06-03

• Why do start-ups fail? 11 reasons why new magazines don't succeed - Management | Folio: The Magazine for Magazine Management | Find Articles at BNET.com
  Why do new magazines fails? Here are 11 reasons to start with.
  (tags: magazines business publishing economics)

links for 2008-06-01

• Nieman Reports - Fall 2007
  Journal articles about convergence - worthy of future consideration
  (tags: digital education journalism media)

Choose the best free CMS, good advice in ,Net magazine.

Those looking for a decent content management system (CMS) for a website [quick tip: look at open source before opening your wallet] should check out the current issue of .Net* Magazine [Issue 177 / July].

*Note: The magazine is known as Practical Web Design outside the UK.

It has some good general advice, roughly translated as follows:

1. You probably don't need to bother with a CMS if you have a small site which you don't update very often. Just design it in Dreamweaver instead.   
2. Use a CMS if you're running a content-driven site (e.g. one that contains plenty of news), you do regular updates and/or have multiple authors of content.
3. Avoid outdated and expensive CMS solutions i.e. the type in-house CMS solutions really bad web design agencies love to recommend. 
4. You don't need to spend a fortune. Many great CMS solutions are open source and FREE, but the amount of support varies between products. Wordpress is so popular that there are loads of community websites offering free advice and tons of how-to books about it, including a recent addition to the Dummies series. But quite a lot has been written about DotNetNuke and increasingly there are books about Joomla!

It reviewed a large number of CMS, but focussed on five main ones. [.Net gave the star ratings and I've added a few comments]
Wordpress [rated five stars....Bang on the nail, in my humble opinion]
ExpressionEngine [4 stars]
MovableType [4 stars.....looking a bit outdated, deserves two stars in MHO]
Blogger [3 stars...what's this doing on the list?]
Drupal  [2 stars........?????? MHO]

Little space was devoted to Joomla!, a PHP-based solution, and has plenty of fans. It's also easier to learn than the feature suggests.

.Net also need to separate out those CMS solutions which are suitable for creating news-based sites and those which are better for blogs.

But nobody can dispute the .Net view that Wordpress is king. It can do no wrong in my view and gets better all the time. Security issues aside, the hosted version of Wordpress is great for beginners and when you get round to hosting in yourself - it's just really flexible! It's ideal for blogs, but also can be adapted for  content-driven news sites. See some interesting examples of Wordpress uses.

Newspapers using Drupal CMS video

Quick video from Drupal Rocks which showcases some Drupal-based journalism/news sites, the free CMS. Tons of big names are using it, including Playboy in Germany! The video is small, but you can make it full size by clicking on it.

 
Drupal Rocks Newspaper and Journalism Websites from Drupal Rocks on Vimeo.

There's cash in those podcasts..says The Guardian

The Guardian, the producers of Media Talk and the Sony Award nominated Islamophonic, has revealed some impressive download stats for its range of podcasts.

Some stats:
1.5m - downloads for its 12 Guardian pods in December.
80-100,000 downloads of it's Football Weekly pod a week [Proving that football and cricket analysis has a massive, global, audience - but we don't need to tell The Times or Telegraph this].
15-20,000: MediaTalk downloads a week.

Source: Journalism.co.uk

To put these figures in some kind of perspective BBC London, a local radio station, pulls in weekly audience of around 500,000 a week for its entire output.

Assuming the other Guardian pods not mentioned above are getting an average of around 10,000 downloads per week each, it appears its investment in pod studio technology is finally paying off and the service should become profitable soon.

But how easy is to generate revenue from podcasts? On paper, they have a lot going for them. If you look at the ludicrous way traditional radio figures are counted in the UK by Rajar [Rajar reissues listening figures], you can be far more precise with measurements. Evidence from Edison in the US suggests podcasts audiences are upmarket, I also feel podcast audiences really do listen.They've bothered to download the file after all. But whilst the market is expanding, it is still relatively small. Rajar estimated around 15-20% of those with MP3 players have downloaded podcasts,  this is broadly matched by figures from the US.

But I'm not entirely sure how The Guardian plan to integrate the adverts into the broadcast. It has tried sponsorship before on the Media Talk pod, but I just fast forwarded through it.

It would be less annoying if sponsorship messages or adverts appeared on the screen of your iPod or Zen Micro, rather than having to listen to it.

But hopefully these stats will give a much needed boost to UK podcasts. It would be nice to see some successful independent and home produced pods coming through, as has happened in the US. But we need the big guys to prove a revenue model first.

Dreamweaver: it may be installed, but please don't teach it

Dave Lee, at UKPG website, has been asking - Who's using Dreamweaver? The debate kicked off (again), after Khoi Vinh, design director of NYTimes.com explained how he went about creating NY Times.

A dream candidate: 

He came up 'wishlist' when interviewing candidates [See also coverage on Mindy's blog].

Ideally, recruits would have:

XHTML
CSS,
JavaScript
Flash;
a commercially viable comfort level with database and application programming;
and "last but not least sound news values".

Vinh wanted to know who was teaching this kind of stuff? I can't talk about the entire world (!), but in the UK I only know of  -  City University's MA Electronic Publishing. This highly-rated MA is delivered jointly by City's Department of Information Science and the Department of Journalism and may well come close.

Most journalism undergrad are not covering programming or how to code because they come out of arts faculties. If this is what Vinh requires then he better get used to teaching computer science grads 'sound news values'.

Ban Dreamweaver. Teach open source [sorry Adobe] 

But Dave Lee makes an important point: nobody is talking about Dreamweaver these days!    

It is clear that some students think: online journalism = creating websites = Dreamweaver. Also, some educators believe that just because Dreamweaver is installed on all the machines (part of CS)  = we should teach it. Whilst learning Dreamweaver is surely useful in life, so is learning how to bake lasagna. And you can do both at the nearest adult education college (presumably not in the same class). 

One of the few rational reasons for teaching Dreamweaver is...well, there's something to teach!  People get worried in HE when they feel a sector is changing too rapidly. The argument is that content management systems are a) expensive b) complicated and c) change all the time. Universities seek industry standard software - like InDesign in magazine production and FCP or Avid in broadcast.

But this is missing the point. You can teach a lot of important transferable skills in online journalism via a class website and blog, created in something open source -  like WordPress or Joomla! It doesn't have to cost the earth [bad luck Adobe].
    
Why am I so angry? It's because contact time is SO limited. If you spend two hours a week for 13 weeks messing around with Dreamweaver, students will end up with a pretty-looking static website. But what about:

how journalists should handle user-generated material?
interactivity?
SEO?, Tags, RSS?, analytics?
AdWords? / online marketing?
Web 2.0?
social media and community?
..............and, on, and on...

Student journalists should also be engaging with the local community online. Sure, this type of thing presents challenges to teaching methods and assessment. But teaching Dreamweaver is simply a cop-out, unless, of course, it's a web design unit you teach. 

A Dummies guide to Xaraya - can someone write one?

Would Xaraya make a suitable platform for our university news website? A couple of days ago, I put a call out for comments.

The extent of my knowledge about Xaraya can be written on a very small postage stamp. Thankfully, Dan (aka Baraboom) from the excellent Xaraya development site Xarigami.com came back with a few answers...

Xaraya or Joomla! - what's best for a university news site?
I think xaraya could win this one, depending on the complexity of the requirements. Joomla is a very CMS oriented application whereas Xaraya offers a framework with a lot of CMS functionality that can be extended and customized (tailored) to an organization's needs.

So is this something we should be teaching our journalist degree students?
I think it'd be prudent to cover a variety of open source applications as they pertain to online publishing - lots of applications do not get enough exposure in an educational environment, despite their potential effectivness for small and large businesses.

How easy is Xaraya to learn and who offers hosting?
This is a special combination trick question. Short answer is, no, Xaraya's not the easiest to learn. Support is available, however, for anyone that walks into the IRC #support room, posts on the forum or the mailing lists.

As for hosting, Xaraya should run on any -decent- host that supports php and mysql. However, don't expect any special support from a generic host - and don't expect it to run well on a crowded, over-burdened $1.95 / month hosting account.

JoJo and I have opened xarigami.com to the community-at-large to provide code, themes and support for those interested in developing with Xaraya. Additionally, we do offer hosting as well for those interested in a positive and productive hosting experience.

Will students be able to spell its name, when they already struggle with Joomla!?
Xaraya is easier to spell than pronounce, perhaps - but it certainly looks and sounds cooler, wouldnt you agree?

This all started when I met a senior bod from Hearst Digital, home of hugely popular sites Handbag.com , Netdoctor.co.uk and many more.

I expected the big guys to be using a huge, expensive and bespoke CMS - i.e. the type of thing we're never going to be able to afford.

The reality is that Hearst was using something open source - Xaraya. Open source is good news and not just because of the price factor, they tend not to date as quickly as the commercial products and there's no software company to go bust and mess everything up.

The university went with Moodle as its VLE over the commercial Blackboard for similar reasons. I also tend to think that open source is far more 'with the flow ' of how the Net should work.

Problem: in terms of learning resources, there seems to be bugger all published about Xaraya on Amazon. Although there seems to be some cross-over with PostNuke. Still there are some dedicated Xaraya hosts.

In short, I have a lot more to reading to do at Dan's site!