publish first, edit later

My PDP Blogging Presentation

If you've turned up here after hearing me rabbit on about weblogs as tools for Personal Development Planning at the Teaching and Learning Conference at The British Library... thanks for stopping by.

If you want some more of the same...

In lieu of printing off some leave-behinds, I've put the powerpoint online. For the pilot and the presentation, I drew on some ongoing research I've been doing - it probably started with a story I wrote for The Guardian about the Warwick University Blogs Project.

The story features some of the material I discussed, along with some useful links. I think it's quite interesting browsing some of the blogs at Warwick to see how students (and staff) use them.

As I said in the presentation, I think we can learn lessons from their experience over the last year and a half. Also, if the college decides to explore blogging further, I think we could do a lot worse than use the blogging software/platform they developed there.

(Btw - the pic is from some of Hannah Jamison's excellent publicity material for the Warwick Blogs launch).      

Any more UcCA blogs?

Over on the right there, I've put up some links to some other UcCA blogs - the only two I know about at the moment - Oren Lieberman's Multi-Story and Phil Ely's general site, which features a blog and a few other things.

I'm sure there must be other college weblogs I could link to - so if you have a blog, let me know and I'll put up a link.

I think blogs could offer a good way of sharing research ideas across the college's multiple campuses. I know there are staff forums and discussion lists.

But blogging could let the different researchers at UcCA share ideas and build up a more visible kind of collective presence, one that extends beyond academia and into the wider world.

Incidentally, if you're interested in starting a blog, drop me a line or leave a comment and I'll try to point you in the right direction.

One for the reading list

Given my research interests and approach, I really need to get hold of 'Participating in the Knowledge Society - Researchers Beyond the University Walls', edited by Ruth Finnegan. The site features the TOC and a free chapter.

Looks like it sets the current interest in blogs and research and the whole beyond the ivory tower, public intellectual, pro-am debate in some sort of historical context. Wonder if I can get the college library to spring for a copy...

Link found via Will Davies' Potlatch blog - he has a piece in the book too, about using the net as a research tool...

Phil Ely's Staff Research Seminar

A few weeks ago I managed to get along to 'When Designers Become Social Scientists', Phil Ely's staff research seminar - the only one, apart from my own, that I've managed to attend. I always seem to have teaching scheduled Wednesday at 12.30...

Anyway, I meant to post about it back then, as a way of reminding myself to download the literature review at Phil's Home Entertainment site and look at his 'ethnoview' and analysing field research data. I thought Phil's focus on users of technology that have previously been marginalised - extreme users, non-users etc - was potentially very productive.

With the user-driven web stuff I'm interested in (for example, blogging) extreme users play a key role in determining how people think about the technology. Early adopters and advanced/extreme users establish a set of default assumptions about what something like blogging 'is supposed to be about'. And afterwards, everyone sort of follows their lead...

But the weblog is a flexible, open-ended tool - the assumptions coded into it by early extreme users are only one set of possibilities. There are other ways to use it, uses that are beginning to emerge as different groups of people play around with the tools.

For example, it's been pointed out - by the net researcher/writer Will Davies, in a piece her wrote a while back, called 'The Sunshine Teens' (unfortunately, it doesn't seem to be online any more) - that it's mainly older early adopting users who have tended to see blogs as a publishing tool, as something that lets them 'talk back' to Big Media. For younger users, in particular, teenagers, blogging is a social networking thing, a way to communicate with friends.

My Staff Research Seminar

So when I did my research presentation - called 'Publish First, Edit Later', like this blog, about research, weblogs and personal, participatory media, like this blog - I promised that I'd make the Powerpoint available online. Here it is, only a month and a half or so late.

The Powerpoint sketches in the basic areas I'm interested in. It drew on some research I've been doing for a while. Some of that fed into a piece I did for The Guardian about the different ways academics use blogging. It's still worth a look, just about - I think.

The blogs I mention in the story and the powerpoint are definitely worth visiting. Crooked Timber is a good place for links to the range of different academic blogs.

The blogs by Dr. Esther MacCallum-Stewart, Dr. Jill Walker, Steve Shaviro and Anne Galloway show what can be done with the form, in terms of trying out and sharing ideas connected to and beyond a research speciality.

They're also v. impressive just in terms of the sheer amount they all manage to post. Maybe now I've got all my year 3 Journalism dissertations read and marked, I might manage to post a bit more here.

Maybe.

Interviewing an interviewer

Carole Cadwalladr profiles Nick Broomfield in yesterday's Observer. Interesting piece, though it does tail off rather abruptly. I guess when you're interviewing an interviewer, you're inevitably tempted to go a little meta - which is interesting for journalists - and journalism lecturers looking for material to dissect in their Features classes.

Not sure how gripped general readers will be. Then again, a certain media self-consciousness is just part of the papers now - even on the back pages - see Simon Jordan's unpicking of the hypocrisy surrounding the tabloid's outrage over the Rooney gambling story. His account of why The Sun didn't really touch the story might also be useful to put in front of my students.

Course, you could argue that the reason he's so upfront about journalists is because he isn't one.

Things you can't link to

So last night, I was reading last week's Observer (don't ask - but I often end up reading the papers days, sometimes weeks after they actually appeared. Kevin Kelly once came up with a good reason for doing this - something about avoiding the (generally trivial) big stories of the moment and the pressure of keeping up with the real time round the clock news agenda and instead looking for deeper patterns in the papers. And that's obviously why I do it. That and laziness, I guess).

Anyway, I'm there rummaging through the recycling bag, reading last week's Observer Review, which bigs up its front page story no end. Big picture of Tom Cruise, Big Serious Headline, and a blurb that goes on about a 'nine month investigation into the world's most controversial religion', ending with 'at last, the definitive account'.

Looks pretty good. Nice work of The Observer to have dug so deeply, you think. The story opens big too - huge headline, another fairly screechy blurb about how Janet Reitman spent nine months on the story. Then it rolls over four pages, which is a lot of text in the Berliner format.

So you think, good on The Observer - still committed to serious investigative journalism, to funding it and finding the space... even if the whole Scientology expose is a bit of a disguised celeb story these days. (Let's face it, it's only big on the front page because of Cruise and his Scientological preparations for Katie Holmes' labour).

But in the end, you probably don't read the story. I didn't - I've read enough about Scientology in the past - I don't want to give them any more of my headspace. You're probably the same.

But if you do read it and you do make it to the end, you see - in very small print 'first published in Rolling Stone magazine'.

So basically it's a buy-in.

Which is something that happens more and more. The truth is, the British qualities like the sound of investigative journalism, but they don't like actually doing much of it any more. It takes too long, costs too much, is too risky. Hard to justify in meetings with accountants. Much safer to buy it in once someone else has pulled it off.

The papers and magazines that are still committed to the idea of big serious investigative pieces tend to be American - The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, The New York Times (especially the Sunday magazine), Harpers, Rolling Stone, still, very occasionally, if there's a celeb angle (see the Scientology story).

British papers and magazines, whilst talking a good game, tend to avoid actually putting money on the table for this kind of thing. Easier to fill space with a celeb column or some lifestyle piece about 'marriage being the new divorce' or some such, which a journalist can knock off in a day, after phoning a few mates.

So if you see a big investigative piece in a Brit paper/magazine, it's almost always bought in from America (either direct, or via a Brit publisher, which has bought a book length version of the story - case in point - Eric Schlosser, whose new teen-targeted expose of McDonalds - 'Chew On This' - will be all over the papers in various forms in the next week or so.

This is a drag for British journalists who want to write longer pieces, but do readers care? Probably not, though if they go looking online for these pieces, they won't find them. I couldn't find the Scientological expose on the Observer web site. That's because the buy-in deals usually don't involve online rights, which stay with the media outlet that fronted up for the piece in the first place.

This is a boring headline, but it's boring on purpose, right?

OK - so what I should really have written for the headline, is something like 'Great New York Times piece about how Google is changing the way headlines are written on big new media sites' - which isn't really a headline, but what the hey.

The link probably won't work now, but Collision Detection has a good summary of the key points. There's been a whole heap of comment on this already online - try Simon Waldman or the Technorati aggregation of the blogosphere responses.

(By the way, the image comes from the original NYT story and is by Paul Sahre)

The gist of the story is that the kind of clever, allusive, punning headlines that grab the eye in newspapers can confuse the automated programs that search engines like Google use to gather links and info. These programs are quick and smart, but powerfully dumb when it comes to puns, wordplay and the like - so they find it easier to process simple 'does what it says on the tin' headlines. Result - if you want to achieve high visibility on Google and other search engines, you need to give your online news stories simple informative headlines.

As the article points out, search engine optimisation is a growing business, one that takes in online retailers, spammers and scammers and, increasingly, journalists. The BBC is already experimenting with headlining stories twice - there's a clever alluring hook on the main page for human readers, and a straightforward informational blurb on the actual story page.

In the past, journalists have developed different writing techniques in response to different constraints - production schedules, design formats, new technologies (the NYT story talks about how the inverted pyramid style of news writing was a response to the telegraph). Google represents a new set of constraints - one that can affect more than just headlines.

The natural-language processing algorithms, search experts say, scan the title, headline and at least the first hundred words or so of news articles. Journalists, they say, would be wise to do a little keyword research to determine the two or three most-searched words that relate to their subject — and then include them in the first few sentences. "That's not something they teach in journalism schools," said Danny Sullivan, editor of SearchEngineWatch, an online newsletter. "But in the future, they should."

Two things to think about here: first, Simon Waldman's worries about Google being a force for a certain homogeneity in news writing online...as Jeff Jarvis points out, this really only applies to Google News, not to Google on its own. You can imagine a world in which journalists learn a few new tricks - search engine-friendly headlines, key word laden first paras - without churning out identikit stories (which, of course, they don't do now). It depends if the pressure to be more visible on Google mutates to the pressure to be more visible to Google News.

Second, pace Danny Sullivan, and without wishing to indulge in shameless self promotion, which clearly isn't the done thing on blogs, we do teach this kind of thing in the Online Journalism course at UcCA at Farnham. I do a session on writing online, which revolves around a discussion of usability guru Jakob Nielsen's guidelines for scannable prose, headlines and the rest. Nielsen's been banging on about making text online easy for machines (and humans) to scan and process for quite a while now.

Course, you don't have to agree with everything he says - some of which feels very early web these days (though a big update is imminent). And stories written according to his guidelines might be visible to search engines and easy to scan, but they're not that readable, if you know what I mean.

In the class I teach on this, we usually look at an example of prose that's been Nielsen-ized for the net - last year, I even got the students to Nielsen-ize an alternative set of guidelines for writing online. Overall the aim is to pick up what's useful from Nielsen. Take his approach too far and you end with prose you don't read but process, or parse.

In his piece about how users don't read online, if you, well, don't read, but scroll down (I think that's permitted now...) to the Nielsen-optimised prose at the end - the one that's 'precise, scannable and objective', in his words - and boasts a 124% increase in usability - well, it's basically a bullet point chart - it's not writing any more.

Completely Nielsen-zed prose can be kind of dehumanised - it's all about crude, unambiguous information delivery. It loses the conversational personal flavour that is one of the nice things about much online writing. You could argue that blogs - and the personal rambling they contain, which got started end of the nineties - were perhaps, in part, a response to the kind of homogeneity brought about by Nielsen's influence on the big portal sites of the times and the way they presented information...

I digress... Actually I don't mind Nielsen-ized search engine friendly prose at times. Overall, I guess it's a 'horses for courses' thing. Most machines, and some people - e.g. the RSS reading infomaniacs Clive Thompson mentions in his post - want as much info as fast as possible, all the time, with no buggy ambiguities slowing the raw data transfer.

But the rest of us flip between info-bites and more human writing, depending on what we want and how we feel. And the beauty of the net is that it can do both at once - in theory. The real problem might be if people started to insist that there's only one way to write online...

Flickr and Photojournalism

I rambled on so much before about John Pilger that I didn't get round to what I really wanted to talk about - his comments about the photos of the July 7th bombings, taken by ordinary people who were caught up in events and circulated via Flickr.

Pilger was asked what he thought about these pictures. He replied that he found many of the images very moving. But he drew a distinction between this kind of image and the photojournalism in the exhibition. It was connected to his general point about the explanatory, analytical power of the best photojournalism. I found it really interesting - a way to think about the rather limited discussions around 'citizen reporting' and cameraphone images

Pilger didn't quite spell this out, but I think his angle was that cameraphone shots of terrorist attacks simply document - they register an event, put it into media circulation. They don't explain anything. Their message is, mostly, 'this is what it was like' and 'I'm still alive'. The latter accounts for the moving, but also chilling quality of these images.

If the pictures are cameraphone images, in theory their message is also personal. At least it was at first. Now people taking pictures in this situation are probably aware that they're potentially speaking to the world. Hell, they probably already have a deal with Scoopt.

But that iconic image of the people trapped underground - the one above, which you've probably seen in the papers and magazines, often accompanied by the 'We are all reporters now' headlines, the one you probably found on Flickr, actually first appeared on Alfie's moblog, a personal page. It was taken by Adam Stacey and was circulated online under a Creative Commons license.

Go to the moblog and scroll down and you see the way the image appeared first in a personal context - people were worrying about the person who took the pic, was it a friend, were they ok etc. (They were, by the way). Then someone sends the pic to Sky News, then they see it on Sky News...

Something changes when the image gets sent to Sky, I think. It has something to do with losing the personal story behind the image. The people in the thread on Alfie's Moblog point out that when it appears on the Sky website, the personal credit is lost and it's described at first as 'passenger's camera photo' (sic). 

So what happens in the move from private to public? Well, to use/adapt Pilger's terms, you could say you lose the explanatory power the image might have had in its personal context. And it becomes something else... something powerful and moving sure, but also something to do with the way the news media covers terrorism now (in real time, demanding that we all participate, by dropping everything and watching). It has something to do with the media's movement into all areas of life, with its relentless drive to make everything visible, no matter what.

There's a lot of talk about the democratic nature of citizen reporting, and some of it stands up. But...

Clearly the big media companies need all those citizen reporters. Anyone remember watching the Beeb early on on July 7th? News 24 ran a loop of some rescue workers getting out of a car, putting on their backpacks and walking off. They ran it again and again - it was all they had - their cameras were behind a security cordon. Now, when there's a big event, almost immediately, Sky, ITN and the Beeb appeal for photos from people who are there.

Participatory media is all about user control, people say. It's about ordinary individuals using new media technologies to tell their own stories. Great, but that individual control isn't the end of the story. There are larger control structures that frame and limit those individual contributions. Those individual cameraphone images become part of a larger media story. One of the questions to ask is, does that story explain anything, to use Pilger's terms?

That's enough, I think - don't think I've really got close to what I wanted to say - or really figured out my uneasiness about citizen photojournalism. Maybe I'll have another go later.

John Pilger at Farnham

Yesterday I suggested to my Online Journalism students that they should have posted something on their blogs about John Pilger's visit to the Farnham campus last Friday. I'm hoping some of them might still get round to it.

Pilger came down to talk about Reporting the World, a touring exhibition of photojournalism he curated, which was on in the James Hockey Gallery this February and March. The show featured work by Philip Jones Griffiths, Steve Cox, Marion Kaplan, Jill Tweedie and others - the pic above is from a series about Australian politics, shot by Tweedie.

The place was full - one mayor, various lecturers, lots of students - and Pilger cut an impressive figure, holding forth in response to a series of questions from the audience.

Pilger explained that he'd put the exhibition together to highlight the kind of serious photojournalism that's been squeezed out of the mainstream newspapers and magazines these days. This led to more general observations on the mainstream media monoculture and infotainment and their stifling effects on public discourse.

Pilger revealed that when he broke the story about the genocide in Cambodia at the end of the seventies, the piece he wrote for the Daily Mirror filled most of the paper and ran with over twenty pictures by Eric Piper that were given the space to tell their own story too. The paper sold out that day.

I've been to events like this that have got a little predictable. A 'preeching to the converted' feeling of consensus can hold sway. You hear sniggers almost automatically triggered by certain key words and phrases and you get that sense that, hey, we all understand each other here, we all agree on certain things. You know what I mean.

I'm not complaining (much). That didn't really happen last Friday (much) and this is just a rambling preamble to the observation that at this kind of event sometimes the most interesting questions come out of left field... And that was helped when Pilger came down by the fact that the audience was mixed - not just college types but people from Farnham.

One guy, who described himself as a 'passer by' got up and asked how come most of the pictures in the exhibition were black and white and not colour. Colour photography had, after all, been invented a long time ago now - didn't all these photojournalist types realise they were living in the past.

Cue sniggers. Actually, I think they were more related to the way the guy asked the question. He has the slightly schoolmasterly air of impatience; there was a kind of 'what's the matter with you boy, don't you realise we all use colour now'.

Pilger looked slightly bemused by the question, pointed to some of the colour photos in the show and eventually answered that black and white was more of a personal preference, on his part. 

Actually the question keyed into his main claim for the work in the show - that the best photojournalism has an explanatory, analyticial power. The pictures tell stories (though, perhaps revealingly, he insisted they often couldn't do it on their own, but needed the right words as captions).

Surely some of that analytical, explanatory power comes in part from the use of black and white, which makes clear in a very simple way the move from simply documenting to analysing. The world isn't in black and white, as the questioner suggested, but when we look at it that way, courtesy of the photojournalists in the show, we can sometimes understand a  bit more about it - things become clearer.

Sometimes.