Bring back Dougal Stevenson

Every now and then I get an urge to create a Facebook group or something to campaign to bring back Dougal Stevenson. He was a TV newsreader in my youth, one of several with similar qualities.

Dougal Stevenson didn't smile and joke with an attractive sidekick to let me know when the story was light, or grimace to let me know the story was serious, or banter with a cheeky weather presenter or get matey with the sports guy (and pretend to know about sport).

He just read the news, dispassionately, from a piece of paper while two or three images were displayed behind him. More please.

Here he is:



Thanks to CedricRusty for bringing Dougal Stevenson to YouTube.

RSS is great - if you speak English

I got a bit of a reality check at the GIMD journalism conference I attended recently, in several ways.

The conference was held in Bali and its scope included ethics, minorities and reporting in conflict zones. I spoke, briefly, about how the internet is profoundly changing the delivery of news, how people find and keep up to date with news, who gathers news and how.

Among other things, I touched on how much information is available online, how we can download Google Earth for free, check out Wikipedia (and contribute to it), ask questions of Yahoo Answers and Google, get news alerts from Twitter, blogs, Facebook, RSS feeds and email, how free blogs and cheap mobile phones seriously lower the entry barrier to publishing. And how news companies, faced with declining audiences, have little option but to jump into this new reality.

I acknowledged how poor infrastructure and censored internet access limit this explosion of new communication pathways in many countries. But I was grateful to have a few more home truths illuminated for me.

For a start, an Eastern European journalist made a point of taking me aside and saying, in essence: 'You know, all those RSS feeds are fine, but they're not much use if you only speak, say, Slovenian. In my country I can count on two hands the number of RSS feeds in my language that are worth subscribing to.'

I can't help but think that an explosion of output from individuals in such countries will only be a matter of time - as the price of entry falls (cheap desktop computers and mobile phones) and connectivity increases with the spread of broadband infrastructure. But it's a fair point.

As I've mentioned before, it was sobering to hear people talk about having their lives threatened, of having sources imprisoned for talking to them, and learning that 172 journalists and media staff died in the course of their work last year, according to the International Federation of Journalists.

It was maddening to hear a journalist joke about how his company had created a blog without his knowing and published his columns on it - given this was a conference that dealt with ethics it struck me as of considerable concern if it were true and in poor taste if it were a stretched truth, which I suspect it was. (I am in the camp who see a ghost-written blog as a pointless fraud and a blog that simply republishes a newspaper column as, well, simply pointless.)

On the upside I heard about a family under house arrest who used a smuggled mobile phone and Twitter to keep in touch with the outside world. And I met someone who works with a group that excels at hiding internet connections from snooping oppressors.

I learned that in parts of rural China the availability of cheap mobile phones with cheap data plans is combining with growing use of wi-max to bring connectivity to communities who might otherwise have waited their lifetime for hard-wired infrastructure to reach them.

I read while I was in Bali about an environmental protest in Chengdu, the capital of China's Sichuan province, that had been organised through blogs, websites and text messages. The protesters 'walked peacefully' through the city to 'criticise the building of an ethylene plant and oil refinery in Pengzhou, a few minutes' drive outside the city.'

The earthquake now dominating news headlines struck Sichuan a few days later.

Today I read about an initiative started on Facebook in Egypt (where only 8pc of the population have internet access), which its young organisers had hoped would launch a passive protest but which waned as group members lost interest, confidence or heart. Later, some told of seizures and beatings received because of their involvement.

It's an uneven world.

Washington Post signs syndication deal with TechCrunch

This is interesting. The Washington Post is going to run stories from popular technology blogging site TechCrunch (#1 in the world according to BloggerBoard) in its Technology section.

"TechCrunch will provide washingtonpost.com readers concentrated and continuously updated insights into cutting-edge start-ups, products and other online ventures," the Washington Post says in a press release.

"This addition rounds out the Technology section, which already provides in-depth reporting on the latest news and trends affecting every aspect of the technology industry, from medical innovations to the evolutions in global media policy, personal technology to issues of security."

It's only a matter of time before content deals between established niche blogging sites and mainstream news providers become commonplace, surely.

Link via journalism.co.uk (via Twitter).

Twitter moves news faster than ever - earthquake ripples

I heard about the 7.8 earthquake in China's Sichuan province about five hours ago via a colleague on Twitter and retweeted it immediately. Little was known then.

I went out for a few hours and when I got back it was being tweeted by BreakingNewsOn with the news that 900 children were reported buried and at least 109 people killed.

Then I noticed Paul Bradshaw keeping a close eye on the story's Twitter progress on OnlineJournalismBlog.

Extraordinary how far round the world this story went in such a short time and how much detail and information was added to it along the way.

All the gear, no idea (but it's probably just as well)

I should be ashamed. Here's me with a laptop, digital sound recorder and a phone and camera that take perfectly good pictures and video. And what did I manage to record and post from the conference I've just been to? Nothing.

Then again, there are good reasons for that, and bad.

On the one hand, I was defeated by technological challenges and tropical inertia. The Global Inter-Media Dialogue conference, on ethical journalism and diversity in reporting, was held in Bali where the temperature is reliably warm day and night with humidity to match. Its electricity is slightly less reliable, however.

I went to sleep the first night believing my laptop was plugged in and charging, only to wake to a laptop on its last legs. I found another power point that worked fine provided I unplugged the kettle, sprawled aross a bed and worked offline since it was on the other side of the room from the internet cable. In the conference room, meanwhile, there was wifi but no power. It took the best part of the two-day conference to get a system going.

Then there was my presentation (an overview of changes the internet is bringing to news delivery). It got cut from 20 minutes to 10mins, of which around 2mins passed with the technician struggling to get my PowerPoint slides up on screen and me yabbering away in a room that had inexplicably been plunged into near-darkness and at one point resorting to dancing as a means of distracting my hungry pre-lunch audience. Finally the slides appeared, albeit the wrong ones, which made for a fairly interesting ad-lib exercise and meant I forgot most of the more important points I set out to make. Serves me right for relying on technology. Should have brought my notes with me, like everyone else did.

As the conference went on, I forgot to turn on my voice recorder and missed the beginning of speakers. I didn't notice when the battery ran out so sometimes missed the middle and end as well. I missed some speakers entirely because I got caught up in corridor conversations, the kind that make conferences so worthwhile. And I took intermittent notes which, frankly, would not hold up should I publish something and be damned.

Just as well no one was paying me to cover this thing. As it was, whenever I thought to myself, 'That's interesting, I must blog about that,'" it always seemed to be nap time, cocktail hour or dinner time. One day blurred into another and before I knew it I was homeward bound.

On the other hand, I had good reason to sit back and reflect rather than covering the conference as it unfolded - namely that a number of attendees could be endangered if an indiscreet comment or photograph were to be published.

Some of the conference was held under the Chatham House Rule, which permits the reporting of content but without identifying the speaker or his/her associations. While this didn't prevent me reporting from the conference, it certainly gave me pause for thought.

Having grown up and practised most of my journalism in safe, stable countries, it came as something of a jolt to hear men and women on stage talking about reporting in conflict zones, of intractable problems in long-term conflicts and of being ill prepared for conflicts that arose in previously peaceful areas.

It was sobering to hear journalists talk about how sources for their stories had been imprisoned, even more so to hear journalists talk about having their life and their families' lives threatened.

Life, but not as I know it.

On a more positive note, there were some hearty discussions held, useful networks forged over morning coffee, lunches, dinners and karaoke, and I will no doubt share a few stories in the coming days.

If I had to quickly sum up the messages of the conference, I would say that journalism is still too dangerous in too many places, that mainstream media still lacks diversity in its reporting voice but that the internet is giving more people a voice than ever before. I would say that the internet is having a big effect on newsgathering and delivery, but only where there is adequate infrastructure and unfettered access - in other words these changes are by no means universal.

I would add that journalists appear somewhat divided on what their role is in society - some clearly want to change the world and feel they have the right and responsibility to do so; others steer clear of agenda-setting.

A case in point would be climate change, which some journalists at the conference felt a responsibility to educate their public about and asked how journalists could best be taught to understand this complex issue (erm, read books and talk to experts?). Others, myself included, lean more toward the journalist's responsibility being to understand the issue and reliably report on what communities, authorities and experts have to say on it - when they have something to say on it.

Either way, it's good to have your views challenged now and then and you can't beat a gathering of international journalists to do just that.

In ten years newspapers will be a quarter of what they are now, says Blodget

I can never resist a bit of doomsaying from Silicon Alley Insider's Henry Blodget. This time he's arguing that within ten years newspaper circulation and advertising revenue will be a quarter what it is now:

Why? Because:

• As circulations and ad revenue continue to fall, print economies-of-scale will reverse, cutting further into already shrinking print margins.
  
• As "green business" practices take hold, a new generation of consumers will come to view the newspaper industry as a horrifically wasteful polluter that eats forests, gobbles fuel and electricity, and farts untold amounts of hydrocarbons into the atmosphere--all to deliver information that might have been interesting yesterday.
  
• A generation of newspaper ad salespeople and ad sales buyers will gradually retire or quit, and advertisers will increasingly ask themselves why they are spending billions on ads they have no idea whether anyone looks at.
• As financial and environmental pressures increase and a better grasp of reality sets in, more papers will opt to do what the Capital Times of Madison, Wisconsin, did last weekend: Shut down their print businesses, fire a third of their staff, and put what's left online.

As ever, Blodget sparks some lively debate and the comments are worth a read.

US newspaper websites take 27% local online ad share

Advertising sales on US newspaper websites are in good shape, according to a Borrell Associates survey of 3,000 sites in various-sized markets.

The survey, reported by Publicitas, found newspaper sites earned more than $2bn from local online ad sales in 2007, which gave them 27 per cent of the total local online advertising market and put them ahead of Yellow Pages and television sites.

"The largest newspaper websites achieved a majority of revenue from non-print advertisers for the first time, developing a broader base of customers to generate new revenue streams. The online-only advertisers accounted for 59 percent of the total ad revenue generated by newspaper sites."

Interestingly, "websites who employ at least one salesperson dedicated to selling online advertising averaged 87 percent more revenue than sites that relied solely on print representatives to sell online ads."

I've had a number of people tell me that print sales teams often don't yet understand the online ad space and miss opportunities to educate and enthuse clients on its merits. This survey suggests bringing in specialised online staff may be an interim answer. Any thoughts?

Modesty Blaise, split infinitives and style guides

It's not every day you find a joke about split infinitives in the opening sentences of a novel. But Peter O'Donnell provided just that when he transformed Modesty Blaise (think Emma Peel combined with Lara Croft) from a cartoon character into a full-flesh master criminal turned special agent extraordinaire in the opening book of a series.

'I would suppose, sir,' he said cautiously, 'that Modesty Blaise might be a person awfully difficult for us - er - actually to get.' He blinked towards the big, grey-haired man who stood by the window, looking down at the night traffic hurrying along Whitehall.

'For a moment,' Tarrant said, turning from the window, 'I hoped you might split that infinitive, Fraser.' 'I'm sorry, Sir Gerald.' Fraser registered contrition. 'Another time, perhaps.'

Well, it was 1965, so I suppose your average pulp fiction reader would have got the joke, having learned grammar at school. Unlike those of us who fronted up at school after 1965, by which time rote teaching of grammar had fallen out of favour with the result that generations of students have graduated without the faintest idea what an infinitive is, split or otherwise, let alone a dangling participle or the subjunctive mood. Myself included.

My saving grace was picking up a style guide when I got into journalism. Style guides are created by publishers to set writers straight on matters of grammar and syntax and ensure they observe common spellings, styles, use of numerals and names. The idea is that consistency makes life easier for the reader and creates a sense of trust - if the publication gets the little details right, the big details must surely be right too.

There was a time when you had to work for a news organisation to get your hands on a style guide. Then some organisations started publicly publishing theirs as hardcover books. The first one I read cover to cover was a battered, borrowed Economist Style Guide. I say borrowed, but I just found it in a box of books - with Modesty Blaise and a pile of other 50s and 60s paperbacks accumulated somewhere along the way - so I guess it was more of a gift, given that I can't now remember who gave it to me. Oops.

Next came the perennial The Complete Plain Words by Sir Ernest Gowers and the elegant The Elements of Style by Strunk & White. Both of which remain useful reads, the latter proving a particularly long-standing companion thanks to gems like this:

"Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unneccessary words, a paragraph should contain no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short, or that he avoid all detail and treat his subject only in outline, but that every word tell. - The Elements of Style, Strunk & White

Nowadays many newsrooms publish their style guides online for anyone to use, and they can be very useful indeed. So here's a couple to be getting on with: The Economist, The Guardian, The Times and The Daily Telegraph. I'd be glad to hear from you if you have links to any others.

As for the stylish Modesty Blaise - smart, elegant, discerning, rich, athletic, deadly - it must surely be time for a comeback (if only to give that Twittering Chuck Norris a run for his money).

The world according to news editors

OnlineJournalismBlog has generated some data maps showing how much coverage various newspapers' editors give to various countries. The country expands if it gets lots of coverage, shrinks like a deflating balloon if it gets very little. (Thanks to NZBC for the link).

Here's a couple. Click through to OJB see the rest, and the explanation.

The world needs more people who speak both 'user' and 'developer'

I spent much of today describing a website from the ground up. I say describing because I haven't drawn any pictures of it yet, haven't written a formal requirements document, and it's far from being built. At this stage it's just words on a page describing what needs to be included, and the preliminary decisions that need to be made about navigation, search, display, archiving, content entry and so on.

I'm taking this description to a meeting, in which most people will know a lot about the content and nothing about the back end of a website. The rest will know a lot about the back end but nothing about content.

I'm somewhere in the middle.

I've been to these kinds of meetings before and seen how badly awry they can go. I've seen people talking at each other, past each other, over each other's heads, but seldom to each other.

The first problem, naturally enough, is that each side knows nothing of how the other's domain works. The second problem is terminology. Words mean different things in different environments. And when you're in a meeting talking about things you don't readily understand, when you hear a familiar word you tend to assume it means what you've always known it to mean. Which can lead you and everyone else up the garden path.

Take the word template as an example. When I first got involved with websites I took one look at the form you used for entering content and called it a template. It reminded me of the templates you create in Word to prevent having to recreate standard documents from scratch each time. Made perfect sense to me.

But every time I used the word template in meetings with IT people, they thought I meant page templates - the fixed elements of the homepage, section pages and story pages across the website.

That's just one example but there are many more. I've noticed too that terminology varies from company to company, and from country to country.

It strikes me, though, that neither problem is hard to fix. It just requires someone from each side to draw some simple diagrams to show the main steps, hazards and outcomes of their domain, and to label the diagrams clearly so the terminology is understood by all. A brief explanatory/definition session in the first meeting would surely slash the confusion quota and improve productivity across the project's life-cycle.

I've never known that actually to happen, mind you. I've had people get cross with me, patronise me, ignore me and tolerate me. Happily, I've also had a few people demonstrate enormous patience and goodwill in taking the time to teach me, although generally these have been people I've approached personally.

But I can't see why every user-developer collaboration shouldn't start with an explanation/definition session. Sure, most people might know most of it, but at least the one or two who don't won't be left sitting in the corner unable to contribute because they can't find the terminology to do so. After all, their knowledge and ideas could prove hugely valuable.

It can also be hugely advantageous to have one or two people on a project who know a bit about every side of it, who can act as interpreters and make sure the various participants are communicating effectively. Business analysts can sometimes, but not always, fill that role in the corporate world but it seems to me there's room for plenty more to step in and specialise.

Meantime, in my website description document I'm trying to spell out terminology and write simple explanations as I go, and I'll try to draw some diagrams before my meeting. All going well, we'll have a productive meeting and a good project. Fingers crossed.