Media coverage of Somalia

I was at an event discussing the nature of media coverage from Somalia yesterday. It was a very interesting discussion with contributions from various people with experience of reporting from the country. A round up is available on my Frontline Club blog.

A Twitter Revolution in Breaking News

I'm hoping that you will have already seen my Frontline Club blog post on the way Twitter has been adopted as an essential tool to monitor breaking news by media organisations. If you haven't you can jump over now...

Or you can listen to me offering "some sharp observations" (in the words of Thomas Rid) on the topic in the War Studies Department podcast. (Warning: Other observations may have been less sharp...)



If either of those things catches your attention, do head over to the Frontline Club next Tuesday evening (5th April) for your first opportunity to get a copy of the full book chapter I have written on the topic.

As part of the launch event, a panel will be discussing future news tools for the modern media age. I'll be there if you want to talk to me about it (or anything else for that matter - I'm easy-going like that).

Further details and tickets are available here.

Writings elsewhere on blogging, Facebook, Afghanistan, Twitter, usual subjects etc...

Couple of Frontline Club posts up this week:

1. How Facebook users can report casualties in Afghanistan before the US military
2. The blog as a weapon in an era of information war

Meanwhile, Matthew Eltringham wrote an interesting post on the BBC College of Journalism blog asking whether 'Twitter has grown up'.

I wrote a comment in which I noted that journalists might also have 'grown up' in their use of Twitter.

Matthew's come right back at me and posed some questions on what all this means for a journalist's relationship with his or her audience.

What I've been writing

I've been working on a chapter comparing the coverage of the 2008-9 Gaza conflict on blogs and on the BBC. This, I've discovered, is not for the faint-hearted.

As good as BBC content is, there are only so many hours of TV and radio of the same topic you can listen to in one go. And as interesting as reading the blogs has been, after a while trawling through mountains of material leaves you wondering what you were trying to achieve when you started.

That's a bad place from which to try to start comparing the two. But we'll get there. I say we...I mean me. Ludicrously underpaid research assistant internship anyone?

Still very much early days for this chapter - about two thirds of the way through an initial draft.

In the meantime, I've still been writing the odd blog post to keep my hand in.

Talk Issues

If you haven't found my contributions on Talk Issues yet and want to know about some of the defence issues that are relevant to the General Election hop on over:

1. Whir of helicopters drowns out real defence questions
2. Are you going to vote on the basis of defence policy?
3. The Liberal Democrats: Strident change or Trident tweaking? (Probably more than you wanted to know about nuclear weapons).

Michael Yon and Embedded journalism

I've just written a quick blog post on this subject at Frontline. Wired has all the details.

Michael Yon and embedded journalism

I've been looking at the end of Michael Yon's embed with the British Army in Afghanistan including the views of Michael himself and the Ministry of Defence. It's a two-parter over at the Frontline Club - Part One and Part Two.

A rant: adding value by leaving links in comments

I submitted the following comment to the Defence Management website on an article they had written about the MoD's new social media guidelines: "MoD wants personnel to use Twitter". (Something I covered here for the Frontline Club.)

"If you read the guidelines in full you'll see that the remit for using social networks is very narrow, (which is only hinted at in this article.) They certainly don't encourage soldiers to tweet from the field or in fact say a great deal which would be of much interest without permission. I've written a blog post which includes a discussion of the excpetions at the Frontline Club which might be of interest bit.ly/4BiIS."

When the comment was published a couple of hours later Defence Management chopped off the last sentence with the link to my post leaving just the following:

"If you read the guidelines in full you'll see that the remit for using social networks is very narrow, (which is only hinted at in this article.) They certainly don't encourage soldiers to tweet from the field or in fact say a great deal which would be of much interest without permission."

Now, if I was a bot leaving a spam link then by all means edit out my link. But I'm not a bot.

I rarely promote my own blog in this way, because it takes too long. So I'm not one of those people that constantly leaves links in all sorts of random comments sections as a promotion tool.

Of course, I was hoping to push a few readers (probably one or two) my way. But apart from the fact that it's nice for me to think that a couple more people might read my work, it doesn't make much difference to me.

I don't make any money from my Frontline blog. It's not like I need readers for my share of the advertising revenue because there aren't any ads on Frontline.

(Unlike Defence Management, I note. And I wonder how much pressure they are under from their advertisers to keep people reading what their advertisers want people to read on their site and not be directed to anyone else's point of view?)

My main reason for adding the link on my comment was because I thought it might have been of interest to the readers of Defence Management.

I thought this would be a neat way (rather than copying and pasting my whole post into the comments section) of letting people know of a different take on the issue at hand and letting them decide if they wanted to find out more.

In short, I thought I was doing Defence Management a favour by adding value to their content. How naive of me. I won't make that mistake again.

I mean, maybe I'm wrong and my blog post doesn't add any value to the discussion and they were right to edit me out. Or maybe my comment adds enough value without the link to my post and the extra information it provides. You can decide for yourself.

But whatever you decide, that's the last time I'll be commenting on the Defence Management website.

If I'm way off message with this, let me know in the comments or write your own post and stick a link in the comments! Is there an etiquette for promoting your own work in comments? Did I fall foul of it?

Seven fours are...

I've been transcribing a couple of research interviews over the last couple of days. Here's a classic quote from a participant who shall remain nameless:

"But again they send out four emails a day at least and they build up nicely. That’s seven fours...are 36. That’s 36 a week."

Unlikely to make it into the final cut for the PhD, but by way of background it does go some way to explaining why they're doing journalism and not helping us clamber out of the financial crisis.

(Then again, maybe it was this sort of numerical 'skill'...)

In the 'stuff I've bookmarked' section:

Twitter

• Twitter use by UK newspapers. (The Guardian leads the way.)

Blogging

• Web pioneer Marc Andreessen to fund blogging investigative journalism initiative.

Tweets of the Week (so far)

• How the sophisticated news consumer curates news and information.
  

• And this one caught my eye: "Conclusion from a chat with regional station editor: there's a lot of "pressure" for journos/editors to use twitter/social media tools..."

Frontline Club

• Catch up with my latest Frontline posts on the US Army and wikis and a different look at the recent deaths of two British soldiers in Afghanistan.
  

Curating media coverage on the Iran Election

I've been gathering links on the continued trouble in Iran with the calm frenzy of an obsessive stamp collector.

I've stuck all the links up on my Frontline blog.

If you missed yesterday's offering, hop on over here or if you're well-ahead of the blogging game, here is today's collection.

Abusing (and using) the blog

Sorry folks, I'm abusing my blog for research purposes by embedding the video below. It's an example of a military blog making the news, so I wanted to make sure I didn't lose track of it.

It's about Col Sgt Michael Saunders (2 Mercian) who has been blogging while on deployment in Afghanistan. I wrote a piece which included a reference to his blog for the Frontline last week. I missed the fact that his pub/blog posts had made the news back in April because I was preparing for a conference.

The great thing about blogging is that when you post stuff up people get in touch with you, and I was really pleased to get an email from Mike's brother, Tracey Tyrls, who features in video. I've been following that up this morning.

(Beats working on interview transcribing. Yesterday I finally wrapped up several days work on one that came to 18,908 words. I am left wondering how the people at Hansard transcribe sessions of parliament and remain sane).

Blogging about Twitter

Not been much blogging going on here lately.

But you might be interested in my Frontline posts on Moldova (1 and 2) and media coverage of the G20. Though the latter seems like ages ago.

I've been reminiscing lately about the good old days when I used to blog about blogging. These days I only seem to blog about Twitter.

In protest, at my inability to keep on topic, check out the epic policing FAIL at the end of this rather extraordinary little snake story.

Links for today: Twitter, RSS and blogging

Haven't done one of these posts for ages. Tend to push links through my Twitter feed these days. But anyway for your dereliction or delight here are a few things I've been reading:

Twitter

• Can't seem to escape it these days. Surgeons are tweeting operations and 'normal' people will be using it soon. Heaven forbid. Normal people.
  

• For those of you just can't take it anymore, here's the Daily Show's John Stewart who says what you're all thinking.

RSS

• Various journalists explain how they use RSS feeds to do journalism in the comments section of this open post.

Blogging

• So 2005, but still so much to be resolved. Kevin Anderson highlights some of the issues that have cropped up as a result of the festering NUJ row.

• Though budget airline Ryanair might usefully take a trip back to 2005 and learn a few basics. This is a case study in how not to engage with bloggers.

P.S. And if you're interested in counterinsurgency and social media, check out my latest post at the Frontline Club.

All change on the blogging front

My shiny new Frontline blog is finally up and running:


You can check it out here.

My latest post is about how the Israeli Defence Force used social media during the recent conflict in Gaza.

More 'Gaza media coverage' on the soon to be improved Frontline Blog

I've got a couple of other bits on Gaza up on the Frontline blog.

One post on War 2.0 and another about discrepancies in the figures the Israelis are giving out on the number of rockets being fired into Gaza.

The latter was picked up by The Guardian's live Gaza blog.

Incidentally, the Frontline blog is currently undergoing a makeover and I'm hoping that very soon you'll be able to bask in the shiny new glow of the updated blog.

From my point of view, it should mean blogging will be much more straightforward. I'm looking forward to being liberated from the blogging dark ages where moving photos involves coding in the phrase 'align="right"', (by hand), and resizing means taking out a calculator.

(Maybe one day I'll look back at these days with a sense of nostalgia. But probably not.)

Gaza media coverage - the BBC and blogs

If you regularly plod through the content of this blog you'll get the score by now.

I imagine some of you might be bored of clicking through to another website, but then Google has built something of an empire on this concept so it can't be so bad.

The post on this topic is here.

Gaza media coverage - alternative voices and blogs

Part two of an unintended series on Gaza media coverage on the Frontline blog.

This post was sparked by a commenter who pointed out that the media often end up recycling the same old Israeli voices.

I've also linked to a few blogs which might provide an alternative perspective and dug out a BBC Editor's blog post from the archive. (If anyone knows where I can get some virtual dust for my delicious account, let me know).

Links for today: acronyms - BBC, FoJ, RICU.

• Paul Bradshaw has got some great notes from day one of last week's Future of Journalism Conference. (I might get some of mine up at some point. I have more on the first day than the second because I abandoned ship to go and watch the World Online Team updating the live text commentary on Mumbai. Or I might just collate my Twitter Feed. Thing is, I have too many things I want to do all at the same, so I might just admit defeat and pack it all in for Christmas.)

• Also reflecting on FoJ at the BBC, Jem Stone has the lowdown on why Robert Peston blogs.
  

• Andy Dickinson uses Dipity to highlight some key online media landmarks. I'm inspired and might make my own timeline in the near future. (Or I might just pack it all in...)
  

• I might put up some stuff soon on Mumbai on my Frontline blog. (But again...) What I have done is write a couple of posts about RICU, the government's counter terrorism communications unit. Here's the second one on whether and how they are trying to influence the media.

An insight into RICU - the UK Government's counter terrorism unit...

...can be found on my Frontline blog.

Telegraph journalist vs the Milbloggers

Over on my Frontline blog I've been looking at some of the military blogging reaction to this article and video by embedded Telegraph journalist Nick Meo. And there'll be more on this soon...

Stuff I've written elsewhere recently

1. I was at a talk on the representation of political violence in literature earlier in the week. I did a review for the Complex Terrain Laboratory.

2. I have a Frontline Club post up on the potential use of Twitter by terrorists.

The BBC and reporting insurgency

This is the main theme of my latest Frontline post. It follows on from yesterday's post about a conference I attended on how insurgents shape the media landscape.