Tag: BBC

Stuff I've seen June 16th through June 19th

These are my links for June 16th through June 19th:

  • Helpful Technology – New Ministry new website – From idea to live site took less than 72 hours, including signoffs – a thoroughly enjoyable collaboration between former DIUS and BERR people, led by Neil.
  • The Guardian’s tool to crowdsource MPs’ expenses data: time to play | Online Journalism Blog – So here’s The Guardian’s crowdsourcing tool for MPs’ expenses. If you’ve not already, you should have a play: it’s a dream. There are over 77,000 documents to get through – and in less than 24 hours users have gone through over 50,000 of those. You wonder how long it took The Telegraph to get that far.
  • Birmingham Social Media Cafe – Flick to page 29 of this month’s copy of Wired UK and you’ll see we got a mention as part of an article looking at free-form workplaces. Which was very nice of them.

    The next meet-up is on 10am to midday, Friday 26 June downstairs at the Coffee Lounge. Feel free to just turn up on the day but it’d be nice if you could sign up on one/all of:

  • Councils of the country unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains! « Policy and Performance – The essence is that councils challenge and help each other to help them get out of difficulties or ideally prevent it before it happens. We do a lot of that already through peer challenge and review, mentoring and ‘loaning’ staff to authorities in trouble. However, taking this to the next level where it’s not just a ‘nice to do’ but the whole of local government is committed to it, is a major challenge.
  • BBC – The Editors: Social media in Iran – What really stands out is the range of sources, voices and angles to be looked into. There's no hierarchy: everything's on merit, and there is of course a new set of challenges for our staff – chiefly editorial challenges, as well as a kind of chase as social media services appear and disappear in what The Times' Judith Evans describes as "an electronic game of cat and mouse".

Stuff I've seen April 27th to April 29th

These are my links for April 27th through April 29th:

  • Job listing for Innovation and New Markets Executive, Screen West Midlands, Birmingham – Audiences Central – Your job will be to assist in delivering a programme of support for digital projects and companies in the region including events, project development and production funding and identifying new trends in digital media, technology and emerging business models. Experience in the digital media sector is highly desirable, as is successful partnership work, project management and familiarity with media contracts – particularly in the digital sector.
  • After the crunch | Andrew Dubber – Ask me what is the greatest thing in the world, I will reply: It is people, it is people, it is people!
  • The mystery of the missing London parking tickets | News | guardian.co.uk – This fab use of data to reveal curious patterns shows how citizens and news outlets can work together to ask interesting questions: ”
    Nobody has parked in a loading bays illegally for 18 months, and nobody has overstayed in a parking place across the whole of London? That’s a flipping miracle. You’d think TfL would be shouting the new-found behaviour of London drivers from the rooftops.”  Except … apart from a couple of low totals at the end of 2008 (which may be due to delays in tickets issued working their way through the system), total ticket numbers have generally risen; indeed they hit an all-time high in November 2007. Clearly, people aren’t really behaving better.
  • cybersoc.com: revealed: groundbreaking study of user generated content use at the bbc – The majority of respondents to the MORI poll commissioned had favourable views of user generated content and thought it played a positive roll in reporting yet few have actually contributed. One of the questions was whether people would take a photo if they saw a fire break out – just 14% said they would, and just 6% of those said they’d send it to a news organisation. Great differences were seen across classes – 16% of higher management would take a photo, with all saying they’d submit it to a news organisation, but in other groups (middle-management to manual laborers) only between 4 – 5% would take a photo.
  • Job listing for Aspiring programme makers – Audiences Central – Our initial aim was to provide the area with its first local television channel and provide an outlet for video productions made with the various groups we work with. Now with the help of Aston Villa Community Interest Company and Data Pacific we have created V-Cube.tv. We intend to produce and schedule programmes that directly or indirectly support, enhance, promote or deliver local concerns & initiatives directly to the Web and other broadcast platforms.
  • Digital Mentors FAQs — Media Trust – “Is this about getting people online?  No. If more people get online as a result of Digital Mentors, that’s great. But digital media is as much about offline technology. But digital media is as much about offline technology, as long as it helps communities to express and exchange their views.”

Should the government stop local councils competing with local newspapers?

Below (scan down a bit) is a piece I’ve written at the invitation of Paul Bradshaw from the Online Journalism Blog. Paul e-mailed to say:  “I’m creating a 6-part series of responses to the government as part of its inquiry into the future of local and regional media. I will be submitting the whole – along with blog comments – to the Culture, Media and Sport Committee. They invited responses on 6 areas. This part will look at the 3rd:

The appropriateness and effectiveness of print and electronic publishing initiatives undertaken directly by public sector bodies at the local level. The question of what public sector bodies should be allowed to publish, how that affects local journalism, and how it affects local democracy, is one of the most difficult to resolve – not least because it involves so many interconnected elements.”  So that’s what Paul asked. He has written this and here are my thoughts – mostly on the question of the quality and transparency of information paid for from the public purse:

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I talk to a lot of people who work in council communications departments. They’re all conscious that the regional press is in trouble.  If they’ve not recently lost a local paper they’ve certainly seen local journalists lose their jobs.

They consistently tell me one thing: “Because there are fewer reporters it’s easier to get coverage. Those who are left are really grateful for the stuff we give them.  More and more they run it verbatim”.

On the one hand we have newspaper editors complaining about direct competition from council newspapers and websites, on the other they increase their reliance on content from these same sources.   This tension amply illustrates the waning value of newspapers as mediators.

Public bodies will continue to want to connect directly with an audience. They will find it ever easier to tell their stories in audio, video, maps, text and images and they will attach all that content to rss feeds to be used by individuals and publishers of all sizes.

Not only that but public services have a growing responsibility to talk directly to the public.  The conversational web and data mashing offer an unprecedented opportunity to collaborate with us to improve public services.  It would be negligent for any media regulation to stifle this.  Indeed central government already actively encourages local councils to improve their direct relationship with the communities they serve.

Any minister making decisions now risks being derided in years to come for not understanding quite how powerful these new flows of information are, first to undermine the business model of newspaper and second to strengthen the democratic opportunities for our public services. I can’t imagine any sensible intervention from Andy Burnham or Hazel Blears demanding that this trend should be somehow stopped!

New standards for Public Information

Newspaper editors should stop bleating about potential competition. Instead they should fight for new standards for public information.

Clearly all public communications departments take care to be accurate and negotiate the line between politics and public service. Often they will check their facts more carefully than journalists might because they get more stick for being wrong.

But as more and more material from local government press departments is used  use un-mediated by millions of people how do we guarantee the quality of this information?

So now is not the time for government to stifle council communications teams. Now is the time to ask if we have the right editorial guidelines for council press officers and communications departments. Let us instead ensure  every single one is a centre of excellence for plentiful, high quality and easily re-usable public information.

We already have at least one model for using public money to pay public servants to create content for the public good. It’s called the BBC. This is based on the rather clumsy notion of impartiality. The new model should be built on guarantee of quality that comes with transparency.

Any comments you make below will be posted, by Paul, through to the enquiry. Others in the series include:

Alex Lockwood on “The impact of newspaper closures on independent local journalism and access to local information”

Adrian Monck on “The opportunities and implications of BBC partnerships with Local Media”

Paul Bradshaw also on “Should Councils Publish Newspapers”