New.Journalism.Review

I’ve co-authored the Top 50 Blog Techniques feature which appears in Issue 171 of Web Designer magazine (available now in all good newsagents in the UK  and in other countries). It contains 50 (count ‘em!) tried and tested tips to help you use: WordPress, Joomla!, Drupal and Squarespace.

Joomla! isn’t the most intuitive CMS, so many of my tips are to do with speeding up the process of adding content, locating module positions and creating sections / categories. etc. Four authors wrote the feature and each are experts in the individual CMSs, so it’s a really strong feature.  We didn’t get our bylines on it, which was slightly annoying. Apparently this is being corrected when the feature eventually appears online.

I just wouldn’t recommend this particular feature for absolute CMS beginners. To get the most out of it you’ll need to know the basics of how they work. If you want a quick intro to setting up a Joomla! site, order yourself a copy of Issue 165 instead. You’ll find  a feature that I wrote which takes you through setting up a reasonably decent-looking Joomla! based news site from scratch  and at almost zero cost – it’s so easy once you know how!

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 post is a little 'off-topic', so I'll keep it brief. I travel a lot by South West Trains [SWT}. Peak train fares in Britain are the highest in Europe (source: Campaign For Better Transport) and it pains me to think that I spend just over £4k a year of my hard-earned cash getting around by train. 

And let's be honest, the service is patchy at best. Few can forget how the SWT network fell apart when snow fell in London and the South East in February 2009. And so I felt pretty cheesed-off to be given a £60 Penalty Fare Notice at Southampton station for not having a ticket recently. 

A) The story:

I'll keep it brief, but I successfully appealed against the penalty fare notice. The reason being is there were no facilities to buy a ticket where I boarded the train at Woking (the ticket office was being refurbished) and I couldn't buy a ticket on the train (the ticket collector's machine was broken). 

But it took bloody ages to sort out and involved a trawl through pages of rules and regulation about where and when penalty fares can be issued.

B) Receiving a penalty fare notice: 

South West Trains takes an overly-aggressive stance on fare evaders in my opinion. It's embarrassing and, even, intimidating to be issued with a penalty fare on a packed train, when you
may have just accidentally lost your ticket or left a rail card at home. But the general philosophy of
South West Trains appears to be guilty until proven innocent, when it comes to dealing with its customers. 

But a procedure exists for how penalty fare notices are issued and you need to be aware of your rights.

A penalty fare on South West Trains will be £20 or twice the full single
fare to the next station at which
your train stops. You will also have to pay the standard ticket cost, if you wish to continue your journey (they need to sell you the ticket that you should be in possession of). As the South West Trains sites states if you wish to appeal against a penalty fare you must do so in writing within 21 days of the issue date and send this to:

C) What you need to pay when you get a penalty fare

As mentioned, there are two elements the penalty fare (a minimum of £20) and the cost of the ticket you should have bought. You do not have to pay the penalty fare there and then (and you should not do so). You have 21 days to do this (or make an appeal). 

But you must pay the standard cost of the ticket to where you are going (or have come from). If you don't do this, then they will probably call the police. This article assumes (obviously) that you are not deliberately fare-dodging.

D) Appealing against a penalty fare notice from South West Trains

To succeed, you need to read two documents:

• Penalty Fares Rules 2002

• The Strategic Rail Authorities Penalty Fares May 2002 [PDF Link].

Don't bother reading the South West Train's summary leaflet of Penalty Fares Rules 2002. There are many potential ways you can appeal that this document seems to miss out.

For your claim to be successful, you will need to appeal on the grounds that a penalty fare was not issued according to the rules set by the Department For Trade & Industry- Penalty Fares Rules 2002. You need to be very specific about how one (or more) of these rules were broken or were not applied. 

Incidently, I didn't find it at all easy to get hold of the full Penalty Fares Rules 2002 document. Staff at the SWT station didn't seem to know much about it and they should be able to supply a copy. 

D) Penalty Fare Rules – some interesting grounds of appeal: 

 A lot of appeals are won on technicalities, so take note of the following:

A) Check display of warning notices:

Penalty Fare Rules: "An operator who wants to charge penalty fares must make sure that a
warning notice is displayed at each entrance of each compulsory ticket
area……be noticeable, easy to read and easy to distinguish from other notices and from the general surroundings" 

The signs warning of a 'compulsory ticket area' are big and yellow. You should not be able to board a train without seeing one. So if you can't see them,then that is a grounds for an appeal. In my case, where I boarded, there was a temporary entrance to the station and it would have been possible to board a train without seeing one of the signs. 

SRA Penalty Rules 2002 states that penalty warning signs should be "so that at least one notice can be easily seen by anyone joining a penalty fares train" - so that's quite strict!

B) On-board ticket inspector can't issue penalty fares

Penalty Fare Rules: "No-one except an authorised collector may collect penalty fares on behalf of any operator….Each authorised collector must carry, and produce if asked,
identification which proves that he or she is authorised to collect
penalty fares on behalf of a specific operator or operators."

- the average ticket inspector you find on just about any train can't issue penalty fares (they need to be a revenue protection officer, I think that is the correct terminology). However, weirdly, ticket inspectors can sell you a ticket if you don't have one. That's your 'get out a jail' free card. If you jump on a train without a ticket, make sure you go and find a ticeket inspector (more on this later!).

C) Do facilities exist for you to buy a ticket?

Penalty Fare Rules state that a penalty can not be charged when: "There were no facilities available to issue the appropriate ticket or
other authority for the journey which that person wanted to make."

-Interpretation: If a ticket office is closed or there are less windows open than normal or you have to wait in line, you may have a case to appeal. Ticket offices are often closed at non-peak times, but there must be a way of buying a ticket with cash AND buy it using credit/debit card. But what is a reasonable amount of time to queue to buy a ticket? This is where it gets vague…. 

SRA Penalty Fares May 2002 states: "Where penalty fares apply, passengers must allow enough time to buy a ticket, including time to queue, if necessary. Under normal circumstances, passengers may still be charged a penalty are if they join a train without a ticket, even if there was a queue at the ticket office or ticket machine.

"However, we expect operators to provide enough ticket windows, ticket machines
and staff at staffed stations to meet the queueing standards set out in the Ticketing and Settlement Agreement and their Passenger’s Charter under normal circumstances. This standard is normally five minutes at peak times and three minutes at other times."

D) You thought you could buy a ticket on the train – yes, you can!

One of the weirdest rules, is the fact that you can buy train tickets on-board a train from the ticket inspector. Indeed on-board ticket inspectors get a small bonus (around 5%) when selling tickets. You may not be able to get your normal rail card discounts, but they can normally sell you standard tickets.

Even the SRA seems to think this a bit strange: "The basic principle of any penalty fares scheme is that passengers must buy their tickets before they get on their train. If passengers find that they can buy their ticket on the train it undermines this message".

This confusion needs to be cleared-up. People will board trains without tickets if they know they can probably buy one on-board. Simple as that! 

E) If the train service is disrupted that is grounds for an appeal.

Authorised collectors have discretion to not to issue penalty fare notices. This would apply to those with mobility problems, the elderly or heavily pregnant and "all passengers when the train service is severely disrupted." Special rules apply to children as well.

In short, there are many ways to appeal, but you need to read the rules carefully. It's actually well worth making an appeal as you have nothing to lose.

Also, if you think that the private train operators are the biggest thieves around (as opposed to innocent passengers), why not sign up to Campaign For Better Transport.

Useful links to external sites to help with appeals.

• Guardian article – One train of thought about penalty fares.

            (great advise about what to do if you queue to buy a ticket or windows are closed)

• Penalty Fares Appeal Support Documents – useful docs
  

• Consumer Action Group – forum postings
  

• MoneySavingExpert-more forum posts

• IRCAS – FAQ – but always read the full documents listed above, particularly Penalty Fare Rules 2002