noodlepie

Peter Apps profiled

Bean meaning to blog a bit more about work things - just not enough time for food and what have you these days. Plenty going on that's interesting and hopefully can reveal a bit more about it over the next three months. Meanwhile, here's a piece I did for the Press Gazette a week or so back,

When Benazir Bhutto was blown up on December 27, he spoke to three analysts and had an investment analysis piece on the wire in the space of a couple of hours. “Now, that’s fast in anyone’s terms,” says Peter Apps, a reporter on the emerging markets desk at Reuters in London’s Canary Wharf. And especially when you consider this is a journalist who can’t move his arms or legs, let alone type.

Peter is paralysed. He needs help to get out of bed, to eat and to travel. But when it comes to work, things are really not that much different. “I don’t think most people expected I would get back to the stage of doing what is essentially a frontline markets reporting job where I’d be able to travel, go out and do interviews,” he says. “That wasn’t something people visualised at the time of the accident. But I visualised it.”

Peter went to Sri Lanka in October 2005, 10 months after the tsunami and about three years into the ceasefire between the government and the Tamil Tigers. He was covering general news, finance and whatever was going on until an election boycott by the Tamil Tigers led to an escalation of violence by late August 2006.

Everything changed for him in the September when the minibus he was travelling in collided with a tractor. Peter broke his neck in the accident, which also left three other people badly injured. He was helicoptered back to the Sri Lankan capital, where he stayed for two weeks.Then he was flown back to London to convalesce at King’s College Hospital and a private nursing home in Buckinghamshire.

“I got out of hospital on 4 June 2007 and I got back to work on 5 June,” explains Apps. “There was a fairly widespread view that it wasn’t going to be possible for me to get back to doing very much. The principle problem is that I can’t type.”

Specialist equipment

This is where technology helps. He uses some specialist equipment to help him in his work, and although he’s experienced a few teething troubles for the most part it’s a reliable and quick method of reporting.

“A piece of voice recognition software called Dragon NaturallySpeaking 9 allows me to dictate and control all the basic functions of my laptop and a second screen I have with markets on,” he explains. “Then I have a head mouse, which is basically a webcam that scans my face and scans the dot on the end of my microphone, so wherever I turn my head to on the screen it’s where the mouse pointer goes. That is essentially it.

“The software takes dictation slowly, slower than average talking pace, which is incredibly fast. It probably makes about one mistake in 10. Once you’ve corrected that mistake I reckon I’m about the same speed as my old typing.

“I record on tape and play it back, and when I hear a good quote I use the software to transcribe that. It’s not a perfect system, but it works.”

Apps’s first job back at work was with AlertNet, a web-based platform run by the Reuters Foundation to cover humanitarian news.

In September last year he made a 10-day trip to Scandinavia to report and help market Alertnet. From that he went on to work on the commodities team, the UK bureau and then on to emerging markets.

Apps says that his new working methods are essentially the same as they ever were and that having to speak the words into print has made him a better writer: “It’s probably improved my writing style a bit. On the other hand, that was something I was trying to do before the accident. It’s probably a healthy thing in that respect. It’s more difficult to write a nonsensical sentence.”

In an era of less staff, more deadlines, and more demand for words, Apps adheres to an old-school approach. He makes sure he gets out of the office several times a week and insists that face-to-face contact can’t be replaced with phone calls and emails.

“I’m still a great believer in actually seeing things on the ground and talking to people in person,” he says. “As people have to write more stories a day it gets more difficult to do that. I would still say it’s very important. I think it’d be a great pity if we get to the stage when we cover all these things without going out into the real world. That’s certainly a risk.”

He admits that he is not what most interviewees expect to meet when he arranges face-to-face-meetings.

“I try to warn them in advance that I haven’t got working arms or legs. People don’t seem to be that taken aback. I haven’t, so far, arranged to meet someone and forgotten to mention that in advance, but I’m sure one day it’ll happen,” he says.

“It does mean if you’re arranging lunch with a contact, if it’s someone you’re pretty comfortable with, you have to ask them to feed you, but that’s not the end of the world. I don’t think things have changed that much – maybe to less of an extent than most people expect.”

It was his determination to get back to work and to avoid going into a nursing home that drove him on after the accident.

“I made it very clear I didn’t see any reason why I couldn’t get back to work. If anything, I was deliberately over confident to try and make it as hard as possible to wriggle out of it. Now I’m here it’s not a problem.”

As for the future, he enjoys the world of finance and emerging markets, but he likes the idea of being overseas again.

“I’d like to get back to an emerging bureau. I don’t see any reason why that’s physically undoable. Johannesburg, Jerusalem or somewhere like that. I do quite enjoy being able to bury myself in one story , which I don’t have the option of doing here because it’s much more a global role. However, given what’s going on in the global economy at the moment emerging markets is an interesting place to be.” link

From the digital frontline

I've started writing a monthly column for the Frontline Club magazine. I'll be covering digital media in its broadest sense with specific relation to how changes in media and technology impact upon foreign correspondents and war reporters - not that I've been near a war in my life, of course - I may occasionally commission other journalists to write pieces, should they show an interest and have something to say. The first column can be found here. I hope to integrate this into the frontline blogs in the not too distant future to allow for comments and more of that webtwopoint0 stuff. I find the substance of the first column quite inspiring. In fact, I might just have described my dream job. Once there's some kind of feed up of the column I'll link to it in the right hand side.

"But, you're talking about people who are still grappling with email..."

...was one line that stuck in my head after a BBC blogging "think tank" session at Broadcasting House on the 30th October. I was invited along by my friend Robin Hamman to talk about how a blog is (kinda) like a living breathing thing and how social media - in it's broadest facebook, twitter, flickr, youtube, dopplr, linkedin sense - functions in a dramatically differently way from traditional top down media.

I used a very short presentation, and some nifty graphical webbiness, to illustrate this difference. Once that was done, my one sole argument was that there was all this "stuff" going on independently of professional, established media outlets and the challenge isn't really to become "a part" of what's going on, to become a part of that conversation - as a journalist wouldn't become "a part" of a story he or she is reporting - but more a question of how and when to filter and process social media to enhance a particular story.

Access to people using and creating social media is not the problem, receiving and responding to it is. I argued, I think, that the key challenge is for journalists to learn the skills needed to access this information, to receive it automatically via RSS, to filter it, to process and verify the nuggets that deserve a wider audience in a way that enhances and informs a particular news story.

At present the basic skills to do this are not that difficult to learn technically, although they are a little clunky and they get increasingly clunky the deeper you go. However, the real problem is journalistic culture - how long does it take to immerse yourself in blog culture - for want of a better word - to come out with a real understanding of how the sphere works and how to interact with it? And how many journalists are that keen, or have enough time, to really get to grips with it?

There are a tonne of pseudowank arguments about how journalists should be doing a million different things in the name of "the story" these days. The journalist has enough to do - and for what the British press pay, that's arguably already too much to do. Anyway... the social media space, the internet, is so vast, so multi-faceted, are we not already at a point where it is impossible for a single journalist to be expected to do a regular reporting job, to access and filter all the hip social media stuff and get a coherent job done? Maybe the geeky journos could handle it, but certainly not Joe Journalist at the Hicksville Gazette who's still struggling with email.

The internet is not getting smaller which means that it's only gonna get harder and harder for journalists to filter and process this stuff. Until such time as journalists and editors have the tools to efficiently and nonclunkily filter the social web, I think we might have arrived at a point where a new editorial level needs to be created - effectively a social media editorial filter - and yes, I do realise that sounds like total pants, but what the...

Talking to a group of journalists in London, I heard a couple of interesting stories about how some bloggers had been hired on a freelance basis to do this very job - filter social media stuff for journalists. And if you think about it, it makes perfect sense. Many bloggers are experts in navigating social media and are definitely more adept at finding the most important stuff than pretty much any journalist.

Whether there's the will and/or the cash to go this route, or whether there's already some startup designing idiotproof social media filtering tools for journalists which will make any new editorial layer obsolete before it is created I have no idea. But, it's a thought, innit.

Good innit

The Observer Food Monthly blog is kicking out some good stuff this week, I really need to up my game... Jay Rayner has a splendidly eloquent rant about food criticism - which I basically agree with, but am pondering a response, if any. The Crash Test Kitchen are, I hope, a portent of what is to come from the video end of OFM. My own sandwich blethering seems a bit lame errrr... sandwiched in between. Time to come out all bells and whistles and ring and blow 'em good. I am spending an awful lot of time elsewhere these days and I'm really chuffed to blog that we - the Frontline Club - will be on BBC Newsnight next week. Twas supposed to be ce soir, but shit happens. As journalism outlets go, they don't come much better than Newsnight. More on all that as and when. PS. I've seen a feature that will run in this weekend's OFM and it's bloody wicked. If you like British food, and you live in Britain, go buy it this Sunday :) if not, grab it online....

Technorati Tags: journalism, newsnight, frontline club, Observer Food Monthly

Digital toolbox for journalists

This is an html (raw edit) version of a piece I did for the Press Gazette. I think RSS, del.icio.us, a blog, scribefire and twitter are the key tools here. I'm working on a training course for journalists who want to know how to use these tools effectively. Got anything to add??? drop a comment or email me.

You have a wifi enabled laptop and the latest mobile phone so what else do you need to work as a digital reporter?

Interview recording - The Olympus DS-2 Digital Voice Recorder is highly portable, easy to use and plugs straight into a PC/Mac. It is voice activated and can record up to 22 hours of audio. It costs £97. If you already own an iPod, you could consider buying a Micromemo. It costs around £25 and plugs directly into the base on an iPod or iPod Nano. Audio quality from the built in flexible, detachable microphone is good or you can use another mic. Audacity is free audio editing software that some newspapers, including The Guardian, use to produce podcasts.

Google for grown ups - saving bookmarks with a social bookmarking service like del.icio.us or furl offers two key benefits for journalists. You can use the network functions to link with people who share the same interests and subscribe to particularly good bookmarkers and keyword RSS feeds. Social bookmarking is a fantastic way of sharing research with what is effectively a human search engine.

Browsing - Firefox browser has over 1000 extensions, including note taking tools like Clipmarks and blog writers like ScribeFire. Flock is a flexible alternative that bills itself as the "social web browser" with built in blogging, social bookmarking and photo sharing. Google's not the only search engine. Alltheweb is highly customisable and offers live search.

News - RSS feeds deliver the news to you as it is published. Download an RSS newsreader, like Vienna or Snarfware, and subscribe to newspapers, blogs and more. Bloglines and Google Reader are two excellent online alternatives. But, don't stop there. Subscribe to RSS feeds from keyword searches on blog search engine sites such as Technorati and Google Blog Search. Netvibes is a useful tool that brings all this information, email and more onto one web page, although it can take time to configure.

Multimedia - whether it be for research or the printed page, photo sharing sites like Flickr and BubbleshareYouTube, Blip.tv and Vimeo do the same for video footage. Some travel journalists are now in the habit of uploading short video snippets to aid the memory and writing process. Free software like Shozu lets you upload pictures and video from your mobile phone to photo and video sharing websites or a blog automatically. For the sound and vision mashers of the mulitmedia newsroom the £20 Soundslides download is the weapon of choice. offer an easy way to store images either publicly or privately.

Google it - Google offers a wide range of reliable services to help keep you organised. Gmail has a massive 1GB of email storage and integrates well with offline email readers and address books. With Google documents you can write and store features online and work collaboratively. Google calendar is a shareable calendar. Google Notebook helps you store clippings of text, images and links from web pages. Use Google Alerts to find out when a new news item or web page with a keyword or topic you are interested in is published.

It's your call - Skype, Google Talk and Gizmo are three of the most popular internet telephony tools. Computer to computer calls are free. Calls to fixed lines or mobiles are relatively cheap. However, sound quality and connection reliability are patchy. Gizmo is currently the most flexible. It offers free calls to other Gizmo users, Yahoo! Messenger, Google Talk, or Windows Live users. Cheap add-ons allow you to make and receive calls from any mobile phone or landline. Gizmo is the only one to offer call recording as an integrated part of the software.

Contacts - It is possible to sync contacts stored in your computer address book with most mobile phones, other computers and web email services like Gmail and Yahoo! This offers added security if your computer and/or your phone are lost or broken. Services such as Linked in offer far more in depth ways of storing and sharing your contacts.

Blogs - Blogger is a popular free service provided by Google. Typepad is a low cost, professional service while Wordpress and Movable Type are for the more technically minded. Windows Live Writer is downloadable blog writing software that links into Windows Live Spaces. Some journalists use a blog to simply store published articles.

Never forget - Remember the milk is a "task manager" It will help you remember anything, so long as you remember to tell it to remember.

Working as a journalist in Vietnam

I often get emails from journalists and the like who either want to work in Vietnam or visit to work on some story or other, anything from sensitive human rights stories, illegal immigration features to food and travel stories. Here are a few common assumptions about working as a journalist in Vietnam I received this week,

Freelancing is basically illegal in Vietnam, the government will not give you any access unless you are fully accredited.

In order to be accredited, a bureau must be set up by a credible news organisation (and "fees" paid to the foreign ministry).

Journalists MUST be based in Hanoi.

Permission is required by the government every time you want to leave to report outside of your home city.

The whole thing is basically unfeasible.

Can anyone out there - Kay? Julien? - confirm or deny these assumptions? This was always the way I kinda saw it - through word of mouth more than anything else - but has the situation changed any?

Technorati Tags: Vietnam, Vietnamese journalism, freelancing, Asia

"the tools are all in place"

I wrote a piece for the Press Gazette while I was in London last week. It's about how the BBC plans to use social media - blogs, flickr, youtube, twitter etc. - in their coverage of the build up to the Turkish election at the end of July.

“This is an experiment to look at how a series of international reports can be spread through social media sites and hopefully reach new audiences,” says Richard Sambrook, director of BBC Global News. “We talk a lot about convergence – but we want to explore what that can really mean in international reporting.”

If anybody can remember in the very dim and distant, this is a theme I've been keenly interested in for a number of years. However, as Ben Hammersley - who'll be doing the reporting for the BBC - says, "the tools are all now in place" That wasn't quite the case a couple of years ago. Also, the ever growing popularity of social media site like facebook, twitter and the photo and video sharing sites illustrates just how easy these tools have grown to use. It's not the preserve of techies anymore.

I think the real biggie is time. To do a good social media job - with all the interaction that demands - on top of the old media job could potentially take an awful lot of time - especially the video and the interaction. Have you ever tried uploading a video to YouTube??? One video I uploaded took more than ten hours to appear. Most of the other stuff is fairly quick to do and even automated as Robin points out.

It'll be interesting to see what lessons old media outlets like the BBC learn from this "pilot project" and how, if it is successful, they will get other reporters to follow suit, in full or in part. FWIW - regardless of all the hype surrounding a lot of social media, I think if journalists have to choose one tool from the cannon, let it be del.icio.us - best collaborative research tool out there, IMO. Lastly, links to all my public social media accounts can be had in the top right column.

Update: some buzzback from readers here and here - which is gratifying.

Technorati Tags: pressgazette, BBC, social media reporting, journalism

Twitter politics

It seems every other journalist is writing about Twitter and I'm no exception. I penned a piece for the current edition of Total Content and Media Magazine (registration required or Download the pdf ) about how some politicians are using social media tools and Twitter in particular.

On March 21, UK Secretary of State for education and skills, Alan Johnson, launched his campaign for the deputy leadership of the Labour party.

“These days dull, standard, automatically generated emails are beginning to look as ancient as the telegram,” Johnson said in a speech in front of children at a school presentation.

Johnson is one of six hopefuls taking their campaigns online, but unlike his rivals he has embraced free-to-use social networking tools.

Stuart Bruce, spokesman for the Johnson campaign, believes the social networking technology he helped set up is allowing people back into the political process by providing direct contact with politicians.

He says technology is bringing the process full circle. “A lot of people say this is revolutionising the way politics works, but it isn’t,” says Bruce. “If you go back to how politics started you had little more than a street corner soap box. That was about having conversations and listening to people. What’s happening is you’re moving old school politics into the new world. For a long time, the old school got replaced by broadcast and print media. Direct contact disappeared to some extent. Now it has come back.”

Bit more background in the Guido Fawkes interview I posted a while back. And here's Stuart Bruce's original blog post that sparked the idea for the feature.

Vive le law

I did a piece for the Press Gazette on a new law in France called the Prevention of criminality law. There are some worries about how this law may be used by the police on the streets especially in relation to people using mobile phones to take pictures of riots, police brutality etc.

The law provides for sentences of up to five years in prison and fines of 75,000 euros (£50,000) for publishing images that violate specific acts mentioned in the law — one of which concerns violence "committed by an agent of the state in the exercise of his duties". And this, say Reporters Without Borders, is the problem — the wording.

"I believe this law is going to be very difficult to implement," says Julien Pain, internet freedom editor for Reporters Without Borders. "It's going to be very difficult to prevent bloggers, internet users and people on the streets from posting photos and videos on the internet. This law has been badly written. I would find it surprising if a judge would really sentence to jail or even fine someone, just because he posted such a video online, but anything is possible."

Read the full feature at the Press Gazette. For more on the background to the story see this post.

Citizen cash

Got the fright of my life the other day when Martin Stabe called me from the offices of the Press Gazette. The Press Gazette, for those of you who haven't been listening, snuffed it last week. As can be seen from the picture on the left, they've risen from the crypt. I got asked to respond to the news that Yahoo! and Reuters have teamed up to bring us You Witness News. It's an opinion piece, so a bit ranty,

The sight of old media freely milking the udders of UGC - "user generated content" - is now a common and seemingly unstoppable trend. News organisations want our pictures, our videos and our words.

The latest attempt at opening the gates of mainstream media to us citizen oiks and our cameraphones finds Yahoo! and Reuters joining forces to bring us their new - get down with the kids - news service, the appallingly titled You Witness News.

Read more and comment, if you have an opinion. It's incredibly frustrating to work with print deadlines... I've already read two excellent pieces on the same deal from Philip Stone and Dan Gillmor, so it's already antique. However, as Robin pointed out, this excellent Daily Show clip sums up my attitude to this deal best of all. Mummy pic nicked from 'ere.

The deadwood's deadwood is gone

Along with a great many others, I'm sorry to see the Press Gazette close after 41 years. It's long been a regular online read especially since May 2006 when it finally got its online life together - not least through the efforts of my friend and rather good newmedia reporter, Martin Stabe. Sadly it's the predictable numbers game again. Mr. Tosh has the maths

the magazine's website (110,000 uniques a month) was much more popular than the printed version where, I suspect, all the effort went (4,639 sales)

At a guess, the online numbers were probably on the increase, unlike the print edition. I'm half wondering whether or not one or two of the more switched on PG remnants couldn't do a Rick Waghorn and continue where the PG blog left off. 110,000 uniques per month is not a huge number, but I would wager it's a 'monetizeable' number (not sure if monetizeable is word, but who cares...) Food for thought Martin?

Update: here's the Alexa graph of Press Gazette traffic from the comments.

FWIW - I've never trusted Alexa, Technorati, Site Meter, Statcounter, Google Analytics. they all give wildly different data, in my experience.

Enter the starship

I promise a food post next week, but there are a few bloggy/mediary posts coming up - avert your eyes NOW if the paints peeling/drying etc... The Daily Telegraph, the UK's largest clever clogs national, is quietly revolutionizing the way it produces the newspaper. New premises, new methods, new, new, new, it's all so new. Unfortunately, the quiet and the secrecy surrounding the opening of the new office is relative. It's a murmur compared to the cacophony of editorial changes, sackings and (possibly) strike action.

A couple of weeks ago, I phoned a contact at the Telegraph about a story I was writing. In passing I asked if I could take a peek inside Starship Telegraph - as I call it, not them - I mentioned I was in London and fancied a look around the starship. Columnist Peter Preston, media twitcher Roy Greenslade and the Press Gazette had already pawed their way through the swing doors, but as I arrive at 111 Buckingham Palace Road I'm told I'm the first outside media/blog person to visit the starship under working conditions. I was there last Tuesday afternoon. It was only the second working day at the new premises adjacent to Victoria station. And only the second day the newspaper was produced from this spot.

I was politely, but firmly, asked to keep my camera in my bag and most of our discussion was off the record - alors, there's not an awful lot I can tell you here. However, the newsroom is far more lively than the (photoshopped) photos that leaked out(?) would suggest. I was expecting a paperless, clutter-free office, but I found books, files, papers strewn around much like any other newsroom - journalists aren't by nature the tidiest of animals. However, I was told the "spoke and wheel" layout is "designed to be paperless" and the shelves had yet to arrive. The best view is from above as in the picture... errr.... above and to the right a bit.

Along one side of the newsroom floor are studios for TV and podcast output. I talked to the Telegraph's podgod Guy Ruddle. He's been training print journalists in podcasting techniques. He told me they plan to broadcast audio reports from embedded journalists in Iraq. He also told me of plans to 'rebrand' the podcast end of the Telegraph and call it "Telegraph Talk" - I think they are the only 'exclusives' I'm allowed to reveal :) At least I think I can reveal them... Oh well... too late.

A couple of things struck me as innovative, although a bit gimmicky too. The paper offers a downloadable 'click and carry' 4pm pdf newspaper with embedded video. Looks great - far better than The Guardian's G24 thing - more on The Guardian tomorrow - but when I asked if the video was iPod compatible I was told by the tech guy that it was not - bang went my visions of picking up my Telegraph video on my iPod and watching it on the way home. (NB: here's a great video and you can get onto your iPod in a jiffy... I digress)

At the centre of the starship - as I wrongly describe it as it's not *that* futuristic - is a large round desk for meetings. The keyboards are hidden Bond-style under the beige wooden table and rise up when pressed. The screens, visible in the shot above, were not yet installed but will appear above the desk. Two massive plasma screens will also grace the wall opposite the visual/audio studio. They will show news channels and (I think) some in-house production work going on.

Clearly the new office is still a work in progress - the canteen was a buidling site with just a soup kitchen style trestle table offering up sarnies, pastries and snacks - and this is probably part of the reason why they didn't want some blogger snapping willy-nilly all over the place. I've no doubt the starship will be a great working environment.

The newspaper has "lots of plans" and "plenty of ideas" of where they're going and what they want to change. They have the very young and, seemingly, very driven head of Will Lewis - who politely grilled me about photography on the escalator as I entered the building - to steer a course through this period of unprecedented change at the paper.

I do work as a journalist - but I didn't ask to see inside the Telegraph offices for work. I wanted to see the newsroom purely out of personal interest and I was open with them about that. OK - so they were cagey, perhaps a bit *too* wary about snaps and we had a lot of "off the record" moments, but they let me in and they really didn't have to. I'm not sure I would have let me in. My wife often doesn't let me in. But they did and for that I'm grateful. They also know I sometimes write/blog for the opposition and I don't doubt this clouded some of our discussions. I did get to chat briefly with Shane Richmond who has some very keen insights into all this media changing thing. Shane gases emminently well about one area that particularly fascinates me at the moment - the embryonic journalist as blog brand movement.

I learned yesterday that, since my visit, the shit has hit the proverbial. There'll no doubt be a lot more pain coming the paper's way. That said, there can't be a more exciting (and terrifying) time to work in the British media industry. Meanwhile more photos of the outside of an office building.

The journalist's weblog part 3

Journalists who become bloggers and bloggers who become journalists is the theme of the latest column in the wee series at Journalism.co.uk. I talked to Craig McGinty and Tim Worstall for this piece. Different starting points, different directions, but similar viewpoints, if that makes any sense...

I'm blogging this. I'm blogging that.

I wrote a column (yet another...) about blogging and journalism the other day. It'll run in a week or two. Soon after I finished writing it, I re-bumped into a eight year old quote, via a two year old quote,

The beautiful thing about this new meta-journalism is that it doesn't require a massive distribution channel or extravagant licensing fees. A single user with a Web connection and only the most rudimentary HTML skills can upload his or her overview of the day's news. If the editorial sensibility is sharp enough, this kind of metajournalism could easily find enough of an audience to be commercially sustainable, given the limited overhead required to run such a service.

Wee, large et mammoth. It happened. Which then reminded me of those folk who still have trouble seeing bushes for vegetation, florists for flowers etc. Which then lead me back to the guy originally quoted eight years ago. Funny that.

Cut out yer carbon

A piece of mine on offsetting your carbon emissions whenever you travel appears in the Sunday Herald. It's aimed at UK readers,

That short-haul hop to Prague costs you more than just a cheap ticket, a bargain-basement hotel and a few jars in the local brauhaus. The experts tell us the effects of global warming are with us now. The more flights you take, the more CO2 emissions you’re responsible for and the more you might want to consider offsetting those emissions by choosing a travel organisation that will replace the carbon you burn. Sunday Herald.

What no global dimming?

The journalist's weblog part 2

For the second installment of my wee-series about journalists who blog at journalism.co.uk I talked to Robin Hamman of Cybersoc. Robin works for the BBC. I started reading his blog a year or more ago. We had the chance to meet in London in May when I helped (in a very, very small way) organise his We Media fringe event in Soho. Robin's very clued in to the way 'the media landscape' is evolving and he's well worth reading on a regular basis if that subject at all grabs you. As he works for one of the world's biggest and most uniquely funded media outfits, he also has the inside line on big media's take on us new media minnows.

Thanks to everyone who has so far suggested the names and blogs of blogging journalists. I read all your suggestions. However, I'm still on the look out for more, especially the offbeat and the less well known out there. Maybe a guy in China reporting from his blog. Those doing something really unique with their blog. Are there any journalists out there who are solely reporting via blog now? I don't mean the so called 'A' listers here. I'm looking for the newest, freshest, hottest and hippest... well, at least, goodest :)

The journalist's weblog part 1

Thanks to all who dropped comments and sent me emails pointing me in the direction of journalists who blog. I'll be checking them all out in due course. The first installment, in a series of six, about blogging journalists is now up at journalism.co.uk. It's about Sandeep Junnarkar and his excellent Lives in Focus blog. Always on the look out for more...

Where are the journalists who blog?

I haven't been opening up much about work of late on noodlepie, that changes this week... I'm working on a mini-series for a UK publication about journalists who write blogs. Why do they blog? Is blogging changing the way they work? Isn't this whole blog thing all just a storm in a horses mouth? Does anyone really care about blogs apart from bloggers? I'm looking to talk to journalists who blog to try and find out why on earth they bother. If you know a good journalist/blogger, especially if you read one that you like, please post a comment, email or IM me. I'm doing the first one on Sandeep at Lives in Focus. One of the best out there I reckon.

Technorati Tags: journalism, blogging journalists, citizen journalism, open source reporting, blogs by journalists

Meanwhile over at...

The Guardian's Comment is free blog, I'm writing about other stuff. It's seems like fun, not a little bonkers, quite a bit different to our usual kitchen table banter over Earl Grey and Jammie Dodgers here or on any one of the other 1,000's of foodblogs out there. My reasons for joining up are threefold,

Firstly I got invited. Secondly, I have a lot of time for this newspaper and the folk who dreamed the new 'mega-blog' up. And thirdly, I kinda believe the site represents an early form of the future of newspapers. A testing ground for pro-am journalism, if you like, but without the hard news. The content is mostly opinion, off the cuff commentary coupled with expert analysis. The comments boxes and very lively, often witty, sharp and argumentative. My absolute favourite response to my posts so far is definitely this, from someone called SpeakerToAnimals1,

"Learn the language of the natives or fuck off back to Grub Street."

That's a perfect sentence. Give that commenter a blog. Worth watching next week is the start of Big Blogger - at the end of which one commenter, from a starting grid of five, will be voted in to join the Comment is free roster of 200 or so 500 bloggers. It's an incredible lineup - go peruse - what the hell I'm doing among Bono, Tariq Ali, Sidney Blumenthal, Noam Chomsky, George Galloway, Germaine Greer, Douglas Hurd, Jeff Jarvis, John Pilger, Jay Rosen and tonnes more I dunno, but when I do know I'll blog about it :) Here's my page at Comment is free and here's the RSS subscription feed.

Technorati Tags: Commentisfree, write, blog, argue, black sheep

Email faces

Best thing about this conference so far is meeting so many people. Many of whom are new faces to me. Many are 'email faces' I've known for ages but never met in the 'offline world'. More on those guys later. Meantime there's a piece I did for one of the faces at journalism.co.uk today. Thanks to all who helped me with that piece. It's all about How to set up a blog. Back to the conference... More suits. More videos.  Different venue. At Reuters today. Yay. Tom Glocer's up. I liked his speech about seeding clouds a while back. Time to listen. Follow the chat here.

Technorati Tags: wemedia, wemediafringe

The most wired city in Asia...

... Saigon, not Seoul, not Taipei. Just look at those wires. Saigon is freakin' wired maan. An electrician's nightmare and a wire junkie's wet dream. Tomorrow I'll be in relatively wire free London which is paradoxically, and totally unlike Saigon, starved of free wifi access. Hotspotted may help me, but I'm not too hopeful. If you're in London and want to meet, let me know. Particularly keen to meet bloggers, journos, editors etc. Folk I'm already slated to share jars of Aqua libra with are:

Alfie from moblogUK
Fraser from Blogjam
Andrew from Le Cool and Prandial
Martin Stabe, New media reporter from Press Gazette
John Thompson from journalism.co.uk
Jemima Kiss from journalism.co.uk/soon to be freelance hack
Neil Baker: An idle writer
Hugh Fraser, the podcast king of Blog-Relations
Bobbie Johnson, Technology reporter at The Guardian
Nick from Scoopt
Robin from Cybersoc
Rebecca from Global Voices

Then there are all the new faces I don't already know at the We Media Global Forum. Like I say, I'll be quite busy. I don't get this opportunity every day in sleepy ol' Saigon, so I'm very much looking forward to meeting everyone. Anymore for anymore? I'll be blogging at noodlepie (wifi dependent) throughout the trip. Esoteric waffle will probably end up at Stillbop. I'll also be blogging at Morph during the We Media conference. You can follow We Media online. Should be fun. if Air France Chance lose my bags AGAIN. I'll sue.

Technorati Tags: blogclub, rendezvous, wemedia

Blogs, journalism, 2006

Another couple of pieces of mine appear in the Press Gazette this week - nothing to do with Vietnam travel, Saigon, streetfood or anything else from Asia, so avert your eyes now if the subject matter is of less than zero interest. Here's the main story.

It's part of Reporters Guide to Citizen Journalism. Best navigate all features from the Press Gazette blog. There's an interview with Dan Gillmor, one with Scoopt founder Kyle Macrae and others from the BBC, ITV and SkyNews. Well worth trawling through. For my money Tim Worstall nails the main problem/opportunity now facing old media with the advent of the blog era,

“Success will go to the editorial team that can mix and match the best of both. For, as should be obvious, the 500,000 UK bloggers know more, in detail, on any and every subject under the sun than the staff of any individual newspaper,” he says. “How to pick out of the rabble that one voice that has the truth on any specific subject will be the difficulty." Press Gazette.

Which brought to mind this recent quote by Alan Rusbridger, Guardian Editor. Via Mbites,

"The Internet now does a lot of information on all sorts of subjects better than newspapers. I shouldn't be saying this live to the world outside, I should be keeping this a secret, but a lot of people have twigged to this."

And if you haven't you're a wee bit dim. Secrets are so 1980's. It would take a pretty thick newspaper editor/proprietor not to see this. I'm working on something with Kyle and Tim that may help things along. More, much more, on that next month all being well. And hopefully I'll get to discuss it at the We Media Global Forum in May.

UPDATE: Download the pdf

FURTHER UPDATE: Download the entire Reporter's guide to citizen journalism.

Technorati Tags: journalism, pressgazette, citizen journalism, Wheres the bloody cash in content?

How to podcast

I worked on a story about "how to podcast" for journalism.co.uk at the beginning of the week. If the subject interests you, take a look. No deep insights, but plenty of useful tips and links from some podcasters. Meanwhile if media movement are at all interesting, journalism.co.uk is worth a sniff around. It's good on media news coverage and runs a nice wee free freelance email discussion list.

Technorati Tags: journalism, podcast, freelance

Blogs with impact

Been asked to do two further pieces on blogging for the UK press. One piece is about 'blog reporting' that has had an impact, or in some way forced a change. I know a lot of the big - gies, but I'm looking for smaller scale, hyperlocal examples of blogs that have influenced 'stuff'. Any pointers, much apppreciated.

Technorati Tags: journalism, blogs, citizen journalism, newspapers, freelance

Comment is free is nearly there

Finally, details are starting to emerge about the new Guardian blog, Comment is free. Ace reporter Jemima Kiss at Journalism.co.uk writes,

More than 200 columnists and expert commentators have already been recruited for the Guardian's imminent 'Comment is free' blog... the project is a unique experiment in the UK, if not the world, and emphasised that the internet is a crucial platform for the future of comment and debate.

Project editor-in-chief, Emily Bell, told the Online Publisher's Assocation conference,

"The internet is vital to their future... Unless you take your writers there you are already dead."

"There is an old-fashioned debate that still goes on in the mainstream British media about the differentiation between bloggers and journalists," said Ms Bell. "But blogging is just a fantastic piece of software. It doesn't mean that bloggers can't do journalism or journalists can't do blogging. It's just a different way of reaching the audience that now wants links and expects to be able to answer back."

Bee theory kinda hit the mark. Kinda. 200 columnists?? Interested to see who, if they're already blogging and if not, how they'll take to blogging. I wonder if The Guardian ran a "Blogging for dummies" crash course? Very easy to screw up on a blog after all and there's a major newspaper's reputation on the line here. The two key points The Guardian recognises more than most other newspapers is that "blogging is just a fantastic piece of software" and "bloggers can do journalism and journalists can do blogging" Simple really.

UPDATE: Stateside newspaper blogs are rated here.

Technorati Tags: journalism, blogs, citizen journalism, newspapers

Journalists who make the most of blog power

One of the features I worked on recently appears this week in the Press Gazette - no byline, oddly paragraphed in my browser, some missing links and no permalinks... but let's not nitpick. (All fixed - thx martin ;) Download the pdf . I've said it before, and I'll say it again, I think if there's any one group of people who should be embracing blog technology it's journalists, especailly freelancers.

The final paragraph outlines three decent reasons why,

"I think we'll see more savvy freelances realising blogs offer a way to showcase their work and make them money — both through extra commissions via established routes and also through things like Google's Adsense advertising, and Blogads," says Neil McIntosh, assistant editor of Guardian Unlimited. "In the longer term [advertising] will offer a great chance for some specialist journalists to become one-person publishing houses."

Showcase - well certainly. If you have a portfolio website, ditch it, blog your portfolio (and more, much more) instead. My portfolio site is ancient, hasn't been updated for donkeys and won't be. I plan to incorporate bits of it into noodlepie. I don't use the portfolio site when contacting editors anymore. Makes much more sense to point them to noodlepie.

Extra commissions - True. I've had several and I know others who have too. OK - at my lowly blog level, it's not a river of work, but it is work.

Advertising - I run both BlogAds and Google Adsense. BlogAds come and go, but I think they're coming more than they're going. My rates are a bit higher than others in my BlogAd network, but then I think I'm underpricing myself and I think they're way underpricing themselves. As for Adsense. Some folks, like this guy for example, are raking in around $16,000 per month. Noodlepie... well... take a look at February 2006...

With an annual income of $1195.08, roughly the cost of a return air ticket to the UK, that harbour front apartment in Monaco will have to wait... However, many folk live on $100 a month or less in this city. If a Vietnamese blogger, blogging in Vietnamese got his or her act together out here I think they could well earn a tad more than I do with Adsense. I've applied to go to the We Media Global Forum to discuss ways of helping some folk out here get into blogging, disrupt media and maybe earn some cash, fingers crossed on that. There are a tonne of ways to optimize your earnings through Adsense, but I'm not techie and fiddling around with code and templates leaves me completely bamboozled. Although, I do realise it might be worth my while.

One person publishing house - In the Press Gazette article Kieren McCarthy says, "If you get a high enough profile it may be possible in future to syndicate blog entries to media outlets. But let's be honest, that's wishful thinking." Is it??? It is happening and it will happen more. I'm sure there are some folks somewhere working on this very idea right now.

Technorati Tags: journalism, blogs, citizen journalism, newspapers, freelance

Podcast feature

I'm writing a feature for the UK press about the nuts and bolts of podcasting. I'm looking for general tips from podcasters on software, producing and publicising podcasts, pitfalls to avoid and the like. If you're a podcaster and think you might be able to help, drop me a line.

BTW - the only podcasts I currently subscribe to are:

• Blog Relations - concise, no waffle, to the point, professional
• Go Digital - BBC, techie stuff, but understandable by humans
• Spinfluencer - 5 mins 35" of intro and ads is a bit much, but some interesting chats with media folk
• Ricky Gervais - 12 episodes free. New ones not. Very funny.
• WebTalkRadio - professionally done, nice folk, varied content, disccusion on tech stuff

Have dipped into others, would love to hear suggestions of good one.

Technorati Tags: journalism, podcast, citizen journalism, newspapers, freelance

Working lunch

Disrupting media, exploding pardigms, the usual 9 to 5 stuff today. Paradigm exploders still need to eat though. For that, the Pho shack at 14/1 Ky Dong street in District 3, Saigon, Vietnam sufficed, but did not surprise. More here.

Technorati Tags: journalism, blogs, citizen journalism, new media, pho

Bee theory

According to Karl von Frisch's Dance Language and Orientation of Bees, when a bee finds a source of food it returns to the hive and communicates the distance and direction of the food to the other worker bees via an intricate waggle dance. From Quantum Honeybees - research on honeybee behaviour. 

If, for one minute you can suspend your disbelief and think of blogs as pollen and newspapers as beehives. Got that? OK. It's springtime and there are more flowers in the fields than an allergist's wet dream. What newspapers need are bees that can waggle dance. Seriously. I suspect that others far cleverer than I, and not stuck in Saigon, are thinking along similar lines. Whatever, something interesting is imminent and it probably inolves the topic tags below.

Technorati Tags: journalism, blogs, citizen journalism, newspapers, Guardian

There is no blogs vs. old media, is there?

After the (super) New York Magazine article on blogs, an "it's curtains" piece on Slate, comes a feature from Trevor Butterworth in The Financial Times. The article gives a slightly new spin on the ancient Blogs vs. Old media debate (please try and stay awake at the back). It's a well done, in depth peice, with bags of banter from a bevvy of well known bloggers.

Personally, I just don't get the whole 'Blogs vs. Old media' thing. The two are merging and boundaries are blurring. It's happening, but no-one knows quite what the new model is. All fascinating, but where's the 'versus' bit?

I like the fact that the FT article links to a blog specifically created to discuss this story. This is something I've blogged about before. However, it would've been even better to just link through to the journalist's own blog (if he has one?) and discuss it there.

I see Butterworth is keen to join in the debate on his own article and offer up further opinions,

"Blogs are very useful tools for journalists to communicate with their audience: the empyrean "we answer to no-one" attitude in American journalism has been self-destructive; as an editor and a journalist, you should be thrilled that your readers care so much as to write a letter or post a response - even if that response can cut close to the bone..."

"...And here's my prediction: the old media are going to go after the news aggregators – and there's going to be virtual blood on the wall. Listening to major media players at a Knight Bagehot panel discussion, I came away feeling that the dinosaurs were beginning to rumble."

It's unclear whether this blog discussion is a one off for this article or will be repeated for other stories. The blog blurb says,"The FT Magazine set up this blog so readers could discuss Trevor Butterworth's February 18, 2006 story on blogging."  Yet more debate on the same piece at Paul Kedrosky's blog.

UPDATE: More on the death or otherwise of newspapers at The Organ Grinder.

Technorati Tags: journalism, blogs, citizen journalism, new media

Blogging journalists het roi

Just finished the feature on blogging freelance journalists. Took four hours to write and is in London as of ten minutes or so ago. Or is it? How fast does email travel? Just a thought... I'll link to the article when it goes online, but I won't blog the process like the Budget story. I'm finding the different ways in which journalists are using blogs to be a fascinating and recurring topic. These guys are the journalists I mention in the feature:

• Christopher Allbritton
• Sandeep Junnarkar
• Kieren McCarthy
• Ruud Elmendorp
• Neil Mcintosh

All doing very different things for very different reasons. I enjoy reading all of them, maybe you will too. They're in my RSS feed.

Post feature linkfest:

• Have a listen to Brett Martin's 22 minute piece on This American Life, episode 307 - In the shadow of the city - about a group of drunken ex-Eastern Bloc folk getting marooned off the coast of Manhattan. Brilliant. Nice work Brett. Very nice.
• New York Magazine sifts through the numbers behind the blogs in an article called Blogs to Riches. Long article. Very interesting.
• Pete Well's great pro-blog column in Food & Wine Magazine has sparked off all sortsa moronic tittle tattle in foodblogland, most noticeably at Food Blog S'Cool - although I see the moderator has now hidden all 100 or so moronic comments. BTW - I have a pdf of all the hidden comments. Drop me a line if you want to see them in all their spite... - Far more intelligent debate going on at Food Musings. I've had my say there and I won't repeat it here. But if you are one of the morons, do read Pete's column again. And then read it again. Make an effort to understand it. It's really not that hard. Pete Wells = pro-blog. That's about the size of it.

Technorati Tags: journalism, blogs, marketing

How journalists use blogs/How you might too

Done all the research and interviews. Write this up tomorrow (1200 words) for a publication in London. Some interesting journalists doing interesting things with blogs. However, I'll only be scratching the surface and offering a "How to..." with this piece. I have to assume the readers know sod all.

Technorati Tags: journalism, blogs, marketing, freelance

Writing a feature

The process of writing a feature about using blogs as marketing tools for publication in New Media Age magazine:

• Blogging the writing process
• From idea to pitch to commission
• Research & planning
• Interview methods
• Interviews
• Planning & writing
• Editing
• Submission
• Afterthoughts

Technorati Tags: journalism, blogs, upyourbudget, advertising, marketing

Afterthoughts

I Skype called a couple of other advertising agencies for this story, but I couldn't get hold of the folk I needed to speak to in time to complete the story. My fault, I left it too late. It would have been good to track down an agency who didn't really know about blogvertising or blogs to hear their thoughts. Nitpicking really, the viewpoint from Cravens was enough for this story. I also think I should have emphasised the participatory factor in the ad campaign - "the actors not audience" method - as Henry Copeland from BlogAds refers to it.

As regards blogging the process of writing this feature. Too much detail. Too time consuming. But, I'll get quicker, more concise. This is a start. I think it's worthwhile. And I'll figure out a more efficient model for it all. In retrospect - and with approval from the Editor - I would blog everything live, all interviews, notes, ideas, the whole shebang. However, I would only blog the finished feature, or link to the piece online, on publication day.

I've started blogging the process of another journo feature and a moblog piece. What's interesting to me is that by basically blogging ideas I'm working on I've already heard from people who may be able to help with the features. I'm guessing a combination of Technorati tagging, del.icio.us and readers is what's making it work here. Plus both stories are a bit techie and I imagine most Technorati and del.icio.us users area bit techie too.

I wrote all these posts as I worked on each stage of the story, but saved them as drafts with a view to publishing the whole lot on the day New Media Age decided to run the story. 

New Media Age published the piece on February 2nd. I informed Dominic Dudley, the new fetaures Ed., that I intended to blog the process and he was fine with that so long as I agreed to hold off until the date of publication. Somewhat annoyingly for a new media publication, this feature is hidden behind a pay wall... Grrrr... Here's the raw piece.

Readers of noodlepie are here mainly for top shelf food filth porn sweat. I wonder what opening up the writing process on a blog like this would do? If anything? Using suitable Technorati tags could attract non-noodlepie readers to add their point of view. I'll see. It's an experiment.

Technorati Tags: journalism, blogs, upyourbudget, advertising, marketing

Submission

I submit this piece, on the day of the deadline, by email pasted under my email signature. I add the final word count and a suggested boxout. The raw copy, probably not exactly what appears in NMA, is pasted below:

Feature: 1126 words
Boxout campaign facts: 58 words

As newspaper advertising decreases and online advertising increases is blog advertising the answer for online marketers?

Levis, Nokia, Audi, MSNBC and Budget Car Rentals are well-known companies with one thing in common. They all ran advertising campaigns on blogs in 2005. Audi spent 0.5% of its advertising budget for a campaign using BlogAds, the US-based blog advertising company with 900 blogs on its books. The ads drove 29% of traffic to Audi’s site. A blog advertising campaign like Audi’s costs less than one banner advert on a mainstream site like Yahoo!

In October 2005, Budget raised the blogvertising bar. It launched an online/offline treasure hunt called Up Your Budget. Participants had to follow daily video clues posted to the Up Your Budget blog and find sixteen stickers placed in public locations throughout sixteen US cities. The total prize money on offer was US$160,000.

Using treasure hunts for advertising is nothing new. What is new is that this campaign was advertised solely on blogs and relied partly on spreading virally from blog to blog as bloggers joined in the treasure hunt and wrote about it on their own blogs. “I wanted to promote Up Your Budget only through bloggers, advertise only on blogs and let it accelerate virally from there,” explains B.L. Ochman, the blogger hired to create the campaign. “I wanted to prove that we could operate entirely without traditional media and still build brand awareness with a campaign that was not overly commercial.”

There was no traditional press release. The campaign was first reported on by the AdRants and MarketingVox blogs. US$22,000 was spent for advertising on 177 blogs and generated 50% of the campaign's traffic at a cost of US$0.25 per click.

“The cost of the campaign - including prizes and ad spend – was less than a 30-second spot on a highly rated primetime TV show,” says Budget Car Rental’s Executive Vice President of Marketing, Scott Deaver.

This low cost, blog-based campaign garnered some impressive results. Bloggers