New.Journalism.Review

Freire (1993) examined how elites oppress disadvantaged groups through educational texts. This post will question how commercial interests exploit the creative talents of thousands of unpaid contributors on news sites and social media.

It is clear (Hermida et al, 2008) that news websites based on participation generate more usage than those that do not include such features.  A series of stories were analysed on the website of Newsquest’s  Southern Daily Echo – a regional newspaper based in the city of Southampton, UK. Stories regarding football, particularly about the local team Southampton FC, were the most commented on in online forums. These sports stories often had up to 300 user comments.

However, one must consider for how long users will continue to  post comments in forums on news sites when, apparently, little is gained in terms of personal reward. A potential area of research exists in examining whether firstly, contributors are becoming more selective in the sites they post comments to and, secondly, whether they are are reducing the length of time they spend writing comments if they feel they are being ignored.

Why contribute to news sites?

Media publishers stand to gain commercially from soliciting user comments. One could conclude that the Echo, with such as large number of contributors, is clearly connecting with audiences. Bowman (2003) points to a potential empowerment felt by contributors to these sites when they express opinions online.  A community of contributors can develop  around news. However, Shutlz (2000) notes that readers’ concerns raised in online forums of news sites were, rarely, if ever, paid attention to by professional journalists.

Contributing to news sites can therefore be viewed as a thankless task. One must question who, if anyone, reads through 300 posts beneath a news story, apart from a researcher who is mad enough to study this area?  News site publishers encourage users to comment, only for these comments to be apparently ignored.

In other words newspapers, fulfill a role in encouraging an online discourse, but for a healthy public sphere to exist citizens, experts and policy makers must each engage in the discussion. On the Echo site there were no examples of journalists or local politicians engaging with users. The Echo does not pre-moderate comments or highlight (bring to the users attention) useful comments. So each of those 300 comments has equal value (or perhaps no value).

Users with non-monitory motivations

Tim Berners-Lee (1989) said that for the web to be successful ‘many people would have to post information.’ Benkler (2006) states that the collaborative nature of the web is based on ‘non-monitory’ motivations. On a similar theme, Kelly (2009) in Wired magazine relates the ‘sharing nature’ of participatory media to ideology, he states: ‘it’s not unreasonable to call that socialism’.

Freedom of expression, combined with relatively cheap technology, can benefit disadvantaged groups. But a contradiction emerges when news and social media sites are owned by commercial media operators. In the commercial world,  online content is there to be exploited, monetised and sold as a commodity. Yet still media companies get it wrong. ITV paid £120m for Friends Reunited, the once highly-popular British social networking site. More recently it was valued at a more modest £15m. Friends Reunites consists almost entirely of free UGC, yet ITVs failure to exploit the free labour and creativity of millions of UK citizens is truly staggering.

A dividing line is emerging between those who feel that comment boxes provide the possibility for citizens to impact the news agenda and those theorists who only see exploitation.

On the one hand, researchers must take into account the joy, sense of empowerment and belonging to a community that large numbers of  people feel. On the other hand, radical thinkers such as Petersen (2008) ask for ‘a theory of labour that is able to map both exploitation and free labour, along with considering the value using these sites creates for their users.’

It could be argued, as Petersen suggests, that time spent at a PC uploading creative content to sites shares many of the characteristics of conventional labour. Some unpaid contributions are even referred to as being ‘citizen journalism’ in some circles, almost replicating the output of a paid professional journalist.

A  civic duty

Kovach (2001) reminds us that a civic duty is placed on journalists to serve their readers. If this is the case, this duty could entail being transparent about how UGC will be exploited by commercial publishers. If not, news sites are in danger of simply offering an ‘illusion of participation’ where comments are solicited from users, yet are given little prominence or value.

References

Benkler, Y. (2006). The wealth of networks : How social production transforms markets and freedom. New Haven, Conn. ; London: Yale University Press.
Berners-Lee, T. (1989). Information management: A proposal. CERN, March,
Bowman, S., & Willis, C. (2004). We media: How audiences are shaping the future of news and information. At Http://www.Hypergene.net/wemedia/, Accessed, 1
Freire, P. (1993). Pedagogy of the oppressed (New rev. 20th-Anniversary ed.). New York: Continuum.
Hermida, A., & Thurman, N. (2008). A Clash of Cultures. Journalism Practice, 2(3), 343-356.
Kelly, K. (2009). The new socialism: Global collectivist society is coming online. Retrieved 15 August, 2009, from http://www.wired.com/culture/culturereviews/magazine/17-06/nep_newsocialism
Kovach, B. (2003), The elements of journalism : Bill kovach & tom rosenstiel. London: Atlantic Books.
Petersen, S. M. (2008). Loser generated content: From participation to exploitation. First Monday, 13(3)
Schultz, T. (2000). Mass media and the concept of interactivity: An exploratory study of online forums and reader email. Media, Culture & Society, 22(2), 205.

Students looking to secure work experience in journalism should read Freelance Unbound – How to avoid paying for internships. Referencing Emily Fraser Voigt, it makes some great observations about how young graduates must ‘leverage their position’ to succeed in journalism:

‘Young people trying to get their first job don’t have much leverage when they aren’t that valuable – ie valuable to the people who will be paying the salary. And they aren’t valuable [a] in a recession, like now, and [b] when they pursue a career path that is oversubscribed.’

It’s true that students will  struggle to get work in the ‘sexy end’ of journalism, which has been hit hard by the downturn. As Freelance Unbound observes, students need to build up an audience for their work (see: Blogging as a way to build a personal brand online), build a great contacts book (so students must engage with the community), and do student journalism. I also believe we must revisit that debate over whether journalism should be taught on its own. At undergraduate level, it seems far better to teach journalism as part of a joint honours programs (i.e. it must be combined with another subject – how about computing? Or business? etc).

I too would also urge students to have a back-up plan when they don’t get that dream job working for that celebrity / football mag. Perhaps take a serious look at the land of B2B, where many publishers are riding out the downturn (just take a look at the Informa share price) or consider positions in corporate communications and PR. Students leave with a wide range of transferable  skills which are appropriate to a large number of editorial career paths, although perhaps not always in journalism.

Work Experience at Zoo magazine

One of my students has just got work experience  at Zoo magazine (Baur). I was pleased to see that Baur will be paying his expenses. They don’t have to do this, but it’s great that they are doing this because it means that more students from a wider range of backgrounds can participate.

Zoo emailed over a reassuringly comprehensive ‘Guide For Workies’, which outlined the role of the work experience student.  He would be asked to do the mundane jobs of opening the post and making the tea, alongside the more important work e.g.  searching the tabloids for potential Zoo-like NIBS and gossip. But a guide like this means that both publisher and student knows what they will get out of the placement.

I urged the student  to be prepared to make the tea (a crucial role on deadline day, although a job that some students see as being beneath them) i.e. aim to do the crap jobs quite well (just not brilliantly!). But also go in armed with potential news/feature ideas that they could run past the features editor during a quiet moment. Getting even five minutes with a features editor of a national consumer magazine is very valuable and one not to be wasted.

I saw many workies come through the door when I worked at Emap, most of them were students from nearby City University. I always asked about what they thought of the magazine and how it could be improved. We certainly kept an eye on the ones with good ideas and a keen interest in our mag. Emap employed many former workies.

But when it comes to careers in journalism, it’s tough at the start and even tougher at the end. Felix Dennis, founder Dennis Publishing, bluntly explains the economics of magazine publishing in his book How to Get Rich:

“Youth is a further factor. By the time talent is in its mid-to-late forties or early fiffies, it will have become very, very expensive. Young talent can be found and underpaid for a short while, providing the work is challenging enough. Then it will be paid at the market rate. Finally, it will reach a stage where it is being paid based on past reputation alone. That is when you must part company with it.”

He adds: “Just remember the simple rules concerning talent: identify it, hire it, nurture it, reward it, protect it. And, when the time comes, fire it.”  This is the rule at Dennis Publishing and at Emap.

The analysis of websites from a cultural and media studies perspective raises numerous methodological hurdles. When conducting audience research using a particular genre of newspaper or magazine there is a centrality to the text(s) being considered. In contrast, researchers of the Internet can often feel overwhelmed by the vastness and global nature of web communication, which is in constant state of flux and development.

The following observations on methodology are based on research conducted on the levels of user-interaction offered by British local newspaper websites.

1. Knowing where to start…

To conduct an analysis, one must first determine a sample of websites.

‘Given the large volume of WWW [World Wide Web] texts and that these texts are intertextually connected to each other, a critical question concerning textual analysis is deciding on what could be considered a starting point.’ (Jones,1999).

The Internet is defined as being a ‘network of networks’ and it is its inter-connected nature which has proved so troublesome for researchers.

2.It can be helpful to view websites as academic journal articles.

We can view websites as being a bit like academic journals. Whilst websites are not ‘peer-reviewed’ as such, they do share a key quality of a journal in so far as status and prominence is achieved through the number of times a website is ‘cited’ online.

The number of links in to a website reflects its trust, prestige, authority and credibility within the Internet community (Park, 2003). Similarly, a key way that exposure on search engines, such as Google, is gained is through the number of times a site is linked to by other popular sites.

In the past news sites were quite ‘insular’ in nature – obtaining status within the web community played second fiddle to the old-fashioned logic that the way to generate revenue was to keep users on a website. So you would find some news sites where the only links out were to the websites of advertisers and commercial sponsors.

Web producers have learned to be more generous with the number of hyperlinks they make. They hope that by doing so this will encourage respected sites to create links back. It should be noted that some large publishers STILL do not understand this (note the recent statements by Rupert Murdoch regarding Google News).

It is legitimate for academics to use hyperlink analysis to determine a sample of sites to study and to assess potential influence in the online community.

The benefits of hyperlink analysis are highlighted by Park (2003): ‘Patterns of hyperlinks designed or modified by individuals or organizations who own websites reflect the communicative choices, agendas, or ends of the owners. Thus, the structural pattern of hyperlinks in their websites serves a particular social or communicative function.’

It’s possible to use commercial software, such as LinkChecker Pro, to conduct analysis of website structures.

3. The accuracy of user data is forever in doubt.

Those seeking accurate newspaper and magazine readership figures may naturally drift towards the website of ABC for accurate data.

Unfortunately, no such universally agreed measurement is in place for web audience figures. To give a crude example, Google Analytics is used to monitor the traffic to this blog. But the data it produces differs to that which rival traffic monitoring systems such as SiteMeter records.

Large news sites tend to use traffic monitoring services from companies such as ABCe, ComScore or Hitwise. Peter Kirwin (Forget about ABCe; let’s have an old-fashioned fight about traffic numbers) highlights the discrepancies between figures from these rival website data monitors and asks for more transparency in their methodologies.

To put an additional spanner in the works, it’s an interesting exercise to compare ‘official’ user figures with those generated by external sites such a Compete.com. It’s almost innevitable that there will be discrepancies in traffic data based on companies various methodologies.

4. The problems of using Google.

Unless a researcher likes the idea of writing their own software, they may be reliant on Google (or other commercial providers) to seek out websites to study or to search within sampled websites.

Using a search engines in academic research presents many challenges. Witten (2007): ‘Their architecture is shrouded in mystery. The algorithms they follow are secret. They are accountable no one.’ No single search engine crawls the entire web and we have no idea what sites / pages are missing.

Synder (1999) suggests that the problems with using search engines in link analysis are market-driven, rather than anything particularly wrong with the technology itself. He urged search engine companies to become as transparent as possible in the way they operate, so that academic researchers can use them fully.

5. A website is never complete.

With most media the creative process has already taken place before an artifact is published. On a news website content changes day-by-day or perhaps hour-by-hour. Postings disappear, the headlines on news stories rewritten and features that once appeared on homepages are moved to other places on a site.

Imfeld (Salwen, 2005) highlights the issue of conducting research ‘in this period of almost constant renovation of websites’. Unlike any other type of media output, a website is forever changing and is never fully complete.

This blog post has outlined some of the the problems of conducting serious web analysis. It’s not the aim to locate or suggest solutions. From personal experience, attempts to examine techniques used to study magazines and newspapers and them simply transplant them into a web context have been far from successful and could be considered naive at best.

Jones, S. (1999). Doing internet research: Critical issues and methods for examining the net. Thousand Oaks, Calif. ; London: Sage Publications.

Salwen, M. B.(2005). Online news and the public. Mahwah, N.J. ; London: Lawrence Erlbaum.

Witten, I. H. (2007). In Gori M., Numerico T. (Eds.), Web dragons: Inside the myths of search engine technology. Oxford: Morgan Kaufmann.

Review: Whittaker, J, (2009), Producing for Web 2.0: A Student Guide, Routledge
Whittaker, J (2009) Producing for Web 2.0 (Media Skills)

I’m on the hunt for a core textbook that I can recommend to students who take my Web Production units. The ideal book would provide an overview of the key skills in the creation, editing and production of interactive multimedia content. It would also discuss content management, design theory, usability, social media, online business strategy and legal and ethical issues. Is this too much to ask for?

I used to recommend Foust, J, (2005) Online Journalism: Principles And Practices Of News For The Web. It covers the key areas of what is online journalism?, HTML, writing for online, and opportunities and challenges. The book is well designed and the students find it easy to navigate.

But five years is a long time in dog (and web) years. Of course , Foust makes no mention of social media. Any advice regarding audio/video content is dispensed in just a few pages. It also slightly falls into the trap of assuming that online journalists would be doing their web authoring in Dreamweaver.

Quinn, S Filak, V (2005), Convergent Journalism: A Introduction and Quinn (2005) Convergent Journalism: The Fundamentals of Multimedia Reporting make a useful double act – the former is a practical guide and the latter looks at theory.

But whilst Quinn & Filak’s text has much to recommend it, they look like they were written at a time of massive change. The discussion of blogs and online writing is particularly weak and falls into the classic trap of confusing the ‘medium with the message’. It fails to understand the importance of such issues as audience talkback and interactivity.

If you’re going to write a book that covers this kind of area you need to know what to call it – ‘online journalism’ just doesn’t really cut it. I am also not that happy with that phrase – ‘convergence’. I’m not entirely convinced that the industry is using this anymore. Number one rule – give your book a title that people will find on Amazon! I’ve thought about this quite a bit and it isn’t easy.

So a gap in the market exists for a textbook about modern web production methods and Whittaker’s book seems to have learned from and addressed the mistakes made by others. Unlike the other texts, it takes into account the importance of social media for marketing and community building.

Its general structure is pretty straightforward: pre-production, production/design and post-production. It also provides the best balance of editorial and technical skills of any of the texts. It looks at MySQL, PHP, CSS and Javascript, but only in just enough depth. Whittaker knows his audience and it is not computer science students.

Modern production outputs are well-covered – social media, wikis and mashups. Content management is discussed using Joomla! as the example. There is a huge amount of software out there and it does a good job in informing tutors about the best technology to teach. The good news is that most of the software is open source and free (or very cheap) to deploy.

It sometimes feels (normally on a cold Monday morning!) that as tutors we’re simply training students to be ‘widget cutters’. Whittaker could improve the book by highlighting the transferable nature of the skills taught. The textbooks biggest let down is its weird two column layout and tiny font size – it just doesn’t work.

But Whittaker’s book has appeared at precisely the right time and fills an important hole in the market. Where it particularly succeeds is its near-perfect balance of ‘technical’ and ‘editorial skills’.

Whittaker, J (2009) Producing for Web 2.0 (Media Skills)

This month’s Web Designer magazine includes a tutorial on How to Build a News Site in Joomla! written by me (Steve Hill). By following the 24 steps, readers should end up with a decent looking news site. Well, that’s the general idea.

The tutorial will be particularly useful for charities or schools who are seeking to create a website quickly (I reckon it can be done in 2 to 3 hours!). But it’s well worth a read by anyone looking to create a decent site for (almost) zero cost.

If you read the tutorial and it worked for you, then I would love to hear about it. And if it didn’t work for you – I’m sorry! Let me know, and I’ll try to help out.

Web Designer (Issue 165 – Cleaner Code) is available now from all good newsagents in the UK.

Also, the issue has a wonderful feature lamenting the sad demise of GeoCities. Alongside Tripod, it was the site that got many of us interested in web design in the mid-90s. We’ll miss you GeoCities!