MULTIMEDIA MEETS RADIO

Blogging about the cricket

We are a masochistic lot here at the EBU. Every few months, several of us volunteer to keep co-workers away from their lunch for 30 minutes while we brief them on a topic of special interest. Next Wednesday, I will share the floor with my colleagues David Wood and Nicoletta Iacobacci to talk about blogging.

The plan is that David will explain how member organizations do it, Nicoletta will provide some examples of successful media blogs and I will say a few words about why broadcasters are bothering.

The first point I will make is that our Radio and TV Members approach blogging in different ways because of the diverse natures of their media. TV is a “sit back medium” that requires the complete attention of its audience, while radio allows people to do other things, such as surfing the blogosphere, while they listen.

I heard a good example of this at a recent conference in Copenhagen. BBC Radio Five Live’s Brett Spencer told delegates how a rather large insect had gate crashed a commentary position during last year's Cricket World Cup, in Guyana.

One of the commentators told listeners he had taken a picture of the creepy-crawly with his mobile phone and was uploading it onto a BBC blog. He invited budding entomologists to visit the blog and advise the commentary team whether or not they needed to worry about the six-legged intruder.

Many people took up the invitation and posted comments on the blog while continuing to follow the cricket (the game, not the insect) on the radio. The match commentary was interspersed with remarks about the alarming entomological advice that was arriving on the weblog.

That level of “sit up interactivity” would be more difficult to achieve on a TV show. I’m not saying it’s impossible, but it’s not really what the telly is about.

In its way, Brett’s cricket story also illustrates what Jay Rosen calls "users know more than we do" journalism. The idea is that if members of an audience have expert knowledge in a particular field, it can be exploited to enrich programme content.

Blogs bring audiences closer to presenters, journalists and other programme-makers, which not only builds brand loyalty, but also makes public service broadcasters more accountable.

Why Kate Adie hates blogs

A gloriously sunny day in Stockholm was drawing to an end and I was enjoying dinner on a restaurant ship cruising to the historic Royal Palace at Drottningholm. I spent the evening admiring the scenery, enjying the food and arguing with Kate Adie about the merits of blogging.

Kate is instantly recognisable to most Brits and a household name. The only way I can think of describing her is as a sort of cross between Dan Rather and Dame Flora Robson as Lady Bracknell.

During her quarter of a century as the BBC’s chief correspondent, Kate reported from many of the world’s trouble spots.

There used to be a joke among British servicemen that when Kate arrived in town, they knew something serious was happening. To TV viewers she became famous as much for her steely gaze and no nonsense style of questioning, as the trademark flak jacket she wore when filing from war zones.

There I was tucking into my shrimp salad and listening to one of my heroes, a living icon of broadcast journalism in Britain, dismissing my blog as “egotistical nonsense.” She didn’t actually mention my blog, of course, but that is how it felt.

Emboldened perhaps by the Chardonnay, I pointed out that although my audience can be measured in the dozens, there is interest nonetheless in what I have to say. I know I have an audience because they post comments on my blog and send me e-mails.

Tools like Statcounter tell me where my audience is based, how long they spend on the site and whether they come back again.

By the time our pudding arrived, Kate had admitted that what she really objected to was not so much weblogs, as the idea that journalists should spend their "precious time" writing about how they obtained their stories:

“You are blogging to a peer group - that's all right - I can understand there is a demand for that. But journalists shouldn't have any time to blog - there are too many stories waiting to be told!”

The other thing that Kate objects to is BBC managers who blog during working hours. Their weblogs, she maintains, are proof they have nothing better to do.

I am not mentioning any names.

The one thing Kate and I did agree on was that radio is having, in her words, “a wonderful resurgence.” As the audiences for TV news tumble, the numbers turning to the radio for in-depth analysis are growing.

Kate told me that in the early 1980s, something like 15 million viewers watched the BBC’s flagship evening news bulletin. Nowadays, the figure is closer to three million.

The 'size zero' broadcasting diet

A senior editor - let's call him Prendergast - recently confessed to me that he was assailed by doubts about the future of broadcast journalism. Prendergast claimed that his employers, like many other media organizations, were behaving like teenage girls on a crash slimming course.

"It's bonkers," he complained, "as an organization we're being forced to go on one of those size zero diets."

Prendergast was at pains to stress that he was not talking about the latest wave of redundancies to hit his company. Like it not, he said, there were usually solid financial reasons behind decisions to trim the labour force, be it budget cuts, diminishing commercial revenues or, in his country, a failure to collect license fees.

No, that wasn't it.

Prendergast was losing sleep over moves to embrace user-generated content. "We are pouring more and more editorial resources into sifting through pictures of kittens playing with balls of wool."

He said that it was turning his company into the editorial equivalent of a skinny model with a disproportionately large head. "Even if we come to our senses, I'm scared that we will have irrevocably damaged our health."

Prendergast was unimpressed as I tried to argue the case for UGC that I have blogged about several times before, including here and here.

I believe that by empowering audiences to tell their own stories, a UGC strategy adds authenticity to news output. Text, photos and video sequences from your audience can enrich and complement the analysis, context and background provided by your journalists.

Think of all that amateur video that captured the devastation wreaked by the Asian tsunami, or the eyewitness accounts of the July 7 bomb attacks in London. Quite simply, these accounts are more powerful than the cutting and pasting, or ripping and reading of Reuters news ticker that sometimes passes for journalism.

It enables you to engage more directly with your listeners, viewers and readers to build a genuine, two-way conversation.

Prendergast remained unimpressed: "Yes, but at what cost?" he demanded.

Then I remembered the BBC Manchester blogging project, which I believe offers a sustainable model that other broadcasters should explore. It started from the premise that sifting through e-mails, reviewing thousands of pictures of kittens, building message boards and creating community platforms is an expensive business.

The cost is not just financial, as it also exposes broadcasters to legal and moral risks. (I remember when the chat room on a website I was responsible for was taken over by a neo-Nazi group.)

The Manchester blog project, which is run by Richard Fair and Robin Hamman, turns the conventional BBC way of doing things on its head.

Instead of using sub-editors to review and approve UGC, Richard and Robin simply keep an eye on where contributors are publishing their content online. And rather than building new applications, the project team is helping people to create content on existing platforms, such as Flickr, YouTube and blogger.com.

Participants are invited to attend a series of workshops, the first of which takes place on 22nd February. Speakers will discuss production values, as well as offering practical advice on how and where to create content.

The BBC Manchester blog keeps in touch by subscribing to the RSS feeds of each participant and by highlighting interesting content, in return for a promise to abide by the BBC's editorial guidelines.

I told Prendergast that while the aim of the project was to stay slender, he should think of it as more Jeff Jarvis than Posh Beckham.

Richard and Robin will be visiting the EBU on 29th and 30th March to discuss the Manchester project at the Multimedia Meets Radio event.

Never mind the quality, count the links

People who put their trust in the wisdom of crowds believe that popularity is a reliable indicator of quality - what I like to call the '60 French girls can't be wrong' school of thought. To be fair, more often than not they are right - if something is good, it usually does find an audience.

Popularity is a sort of guarantee: if tens of millions of people rush out to buy 'The Da Vinci Code' you can be sure that it is not a load of badly-written tosh. Eh? Oh.

Actually, a recent study by Columbia University appears to confirm that the sort of success enjoyed by bestsellers is only partly determined by quality:

"Hit songs, books, and movies are many times more successful than average, suggesting that 'the best' alternatives are qualitatively different from 'the rest'; yet experts routinely fail to predict which products will succeed. We investigated this paradox experimentally, by creating an artificial 'music market' in which 14,341 participants downloaded previously unknown songs either with or without knowledge of previous participants' choices. Increasing the strength of social influence increased both inequality and unpredictability of success. Success was also only partly determined by quality: The best songs rarely did poorly, and the worst rarely did well, but any other result was possible."

In other words, people buy books or download songs in order to feel part of a group. If there is a conversation, they want to join in.

Of course, social networks play a hugely important role in the blogosphere, where they encourage two kinds of behaviour.

Firstly, by providing links and leaving comments on popular sites, bloggers stake their claim to be part of an online community. Secondly, bloggers strengthen ties within their own social networks by linking to the blogs of friends and colleagues.

For these reasons, it really is pointless to use websites like Technorati as a kind of recommendation service. Technorati's popularity lists are compiled mechanically and have nothing to do with quality.

I suspect that hit parades of this kind may even be one of the reasons why many journalists remain sceptical about the value of blogs.

Nowadays, like many others users, I regularly visit a small number of favourite blogs - you'll find most of them on this site's 'Blogroll', in the left-hand column - because I simply don't have time to trawl through the entire blogosphere. But this is very limiting, which is why I have also turned to social websites. 

Disappointed with Technorati and dismayed by Digg, where I believe users have too much control over content, I recently discovered NewsTrust. As far as I am concerned, this is what the Web has been crying out for - a social network dedicated to quality content.

Users rate newspaper stories and blog posts according to their quality and not their popularity, or link count.The running order of stories on the NewsTrust website is based on several criteria, including average reviewer rating.

In contrast to what happens on Digg, a panel of citizen reviewers, students and journalists assess the submitted stories for balance and fairness, as well as originality.

In common with other successful news-based services, like OhMyNews, the NewsTrust community is managed by a small group of media professionals. It is the best of both worlds: the wisdom of crowds and the experience of news editors.

Are blogs scalable?

Some of the men in pyjamas who populate the blogosphere, at least in the imagination of one senior BBC executive, are gleefully predicting that the MSM will fall off the blogging bandwagon. Major media, they say, will encourage too many people to post comments, thereby making their blogs unmanageable.

Not even the BBC will be able to recruit enough editors to cope, as what was conversation rapidly degenerates into mere information. Blogging, they argue, is not scalable.

Apparently, blogging is an intimate dinner, for a handful of guests, not some vulgar office party. A few bloggers even suggest that popular sites may have to put a cap on the number of visitors who can post comments.

The demise of the big blogs, they hope, will provide opportunity for the rest. The thinking is that users will resent losing themselves in the crowd and eventually gravitate back to the one-on-one conversations they have experienced on smaller blogs.

I think they are wrong: blogging is not about creating a single conversation. If you want one-on-one, then choose e-mail or IM.

Why should there be any limit to the number of discussions that can develop around a debate?

A case in point is Beppe Grillo's controversial blog on Italian politics. Grillo's posts regularly generate over a thousand comments, within which you will find dozens of conversations between smaller groups of users.

Ideas are not lost; invariably they are retrieved and revisited by subsequent users and make their way back to Grillo. These are genuine debates, rather than visitors leaving behind the electronic equivalent of "I woz here" graffiti.

It is the interactivity that keeps visitors going back, which is why the MSM are interested in the first place. Blogging is a community strategy, a logical progression from chat rooms and message boards, as Jay Rosen points out:

"User loyalty and engagement with the site: that's why newspapers need blogs. Some grasp that, some don't."

Rosen is writing about print media, but the same applies to broadcasters. Kevin Anderson makes a similar point:

"We used to call it stickiness, how much time people actually spend on your site. But this is even more than stickiness."

It is sound marketing and therefore highly unlikely that the MSM will abandon blogging in the foreseeable future. In my view, the idea of restricting comments is plain daft: no-one ever based a successful community strategy on excluding large parts of the audience.

John Naughton's recent essay on the changing media ecosystem suggests there is room for everyone: it is just a case of learning how to adapt. TV did not kill radio, Internet has not killed TV and big media blogs are not a threat to smaller blogs.

This is, after all, the era of the long tail: at least, that is how I console myself.

Web 2.0: reality or hype?

"It's perfectly ordinary banter," protests an RAF squadron leader to some baffled-looking pilots, in a famous Monty Python sketch. They are still straining to understand and too late to evacuate the RAF station by the time the "cabbages" drop.

In real life, every profession has its jargon and understanding the banter is not usually a problem. A journalist will know what to do if his editor tells him to spike a story; those working in New Media know their ASP from their ISPs and their bitrates from their BitTorrent.

Occasionally, though, a word or phrase creeps in that has everyone nonplussed, but at the same time afraid to admit that they do not really understand. When this happens, self-respecting professionals start behaving like the courtiers in The Emperor's New Clothes.

"Web 2.0" is a good example. Everybody uses it, the blogosphere is full of chatter about Web 2.0, but what does it actually mean? Is it just hype, or are we witnessing the birth of a new generation of Web-based services?

Internet guru Tim O'Reilly, who claims to have coined the phrase, defines "Web 2.0" as "a set of principles and practices that tie together a veritable solar system of sites that demonstrate some or all of those principles." Perhaps the most significant thing Web 2.0 sites have in common is their heavy reliance on the active participation of users.

For example, peer-to-peer systems are Web 2.0 applications because their services actually improve as more users become involved. Akamai, in contrast, belongs to the Web 1.0 era, since it needs to add servers to improve service.

Participation is also at the core of two sites that in the minds of many people have become synonymous with Web 2.0: MySpace and YouTube. Their phenomenal success persuaded Rupert Murdoch to part with half a billion dollars to acquire the former, while Google forked out three times as much for the latter.

Both sites build communities: MySpace even bills itself as "a place for friends". It allows users to create their own area, where they can write about themselves, upload pictures and do a spot of social networking.

In other words, the MySpace community provides the content, as do YouTube users, who post videos on that site. But there is nothing very new about that.

Sites like Napster and Kazaa were doing it years ago, albeit illegally. Even I was having a go at building online communities, six years ago, with discussion boards.

Wikis and weblogs might have moved into the mainstream, but they were already around back in 2000. It is just that now every media company feels obliged to have one.

As a consequence, many journalists are now producing weblogs for their company websites, as part of the much heralded Web 2.0 revolution. But editorially their blog posts are no different to the articles they used to write for the same websites.

The American comedian Jon Stewart dismisses the phenomena as "giving voice to the already voiced." In actual fact, these pseudo-blogs are no different to what media sites were doing seven or eight years ago, when they simply invited readers to "comment on this story".

It is a fashion thing: web pages must look as though they have been cobbled together in Blogger or Typepad. Many of Tim O'Reilly's other "principles and practices" were also around well before he invented the term "Web 2.0".

Amazon.com has been allowing visitors to participate for more than a decade, encouraging them to write reviews. It then uses their activity to hone search results and offer recommendations.

It is human nature to look for patterns and create categories where none exist, a behaviour exacerbated by the success of management manuals. In truth, though, "Web 2.0" is no more meaningful than the "excellence" label applied to companies in the 1980s by Tom Peters and Robert Waterman.

Web 2.0 does not reveal anything about where the Web is going; it simply identifies good practice and highlights what is possible today.