Links from the Archives: 1996 - 2001

So my two day absence at a teaching course turned into a two week blogging absence. Afraid I had an allergic reaction to something I did that day and spent far too many of the following days hardly eating.

Been recovering and catching up in the meantime hence it's all been quiet on the blogging front.

Thought I'd stick up a few links I've saved from years gone by in relation to the BBC, blogging etc over the next few posts. A little history slot if you like.

1996

• The BBC's 1996 budget website. (That's a reference to the Chancellor's budget, rather than the website's quality. Which for the time I imagine was far less 'budget' than it seems now.)
  

1997-8

• Current research: a data set of the emerging links in the blogosphere.

1999

• Dismissed MI6 officer Richard Tomlinson demonstrates the potential of the Web to frustrate existing information gatekeepers by ignoring a government D-notice and publishing a list of alleged MI6 agents on his Geocites website. (BBC website)
  

• A BBC report by 'Internet Correspondent' Chris Nuttall includes a reference to "contributors to a discussion on the Slashdot Weblog". I reckon it's one of the first uses of a weblog as a source of information on the BBC website. If you have any earlier references, let me know.
  

2000

• BBC's h2g2 project invites 'researchers' to keep a blog. The project aimed to "be an unconventional guide to life, the universe and everything, an encyclopaedic project where entries are written by people from all over the world." And it's still going apparently.
  

2001

• While then leader of the Liberal Democrats, Charles Kennedy, is criticised for not updating his website, a commenter on this BBC article called Nick Jordan suggests politicians should start blogging: "It seems to me that many politicians would find a weblog a useful thing. Tools such as Blogger and Greymatter can take most of the pain away from updating regularly."

• BBC news E-Cyclopedia lists new additions to the news lexicon including the word weblog which it describes as: "a log of webpages a surfer has visited and recommends. In 2001 the term also came to mean public online journals where cyber diarists let the world in on the latest twists and turns of their love, work and internal lives. 'The majority...are not all that interesting,' says weblog-tracking psychologist John Grohol."
  

• Political Correspondent Nick Robinson, or somebody on his behalf, explains what 'newslog' is to the BBC's online audience. It was the first major high profile experiment with news blogging at the BBC: "Many [blogs] consist of links to other websites of interest, often with a comment added by the owner of the weblog. But some weblogs adopt lives of their own right, becoming unfolding diaries. Nick Robinson's aims to having something of both of these - news about and links to things that have happened, and his own take on those events."
  

Links I've dredged from the morass on the usual subjects

BBC

• BBC News is like a "factory" according to former news presenter Peter Sissons.

• Matthew Eltringham asks: what makes a good citizen journalist? A question taken on by the World Service as well.

• North America Editor, Mark Mardell, demonstrates how not to liveblog Obama's maiden address to the UN. File under 'Technology FAIL'.

• World Have Your Say leading the way on transparency. And navigating the legal difficulties of global media.

• BBC political journalists get involved with Twitter just in time for conference season (and the impending general election no doubt.)
  

Blogs

• Kristine Lowe: How blogs transformed and challenged mainstream media coverage of the financial crisis:

'"Mainstream media reporting of finance and business is still important in that it keeps everyone updated with data releases and breaking news. But its relevance and timeliness more or less stop there, and bloggers step in to fill in on the rest," said Dana Chen, a financial blogger and former analyst who is currently involved in a finance news launch. Indeed, more and more people find that, in their chosen fields, specialist blogs cover issues more in-depth than traditional media. It has certainly been my experience as a media journalist that blogs such as Professor Piet Bakker's Newspaper Innovation and venture capitalist Fred Wilson's A VC cover their chosen subjects better and more consistently than their mainstream media (MSM) counterparts.'

• Kuwait censors 'terror' blogs according to AFP.

• In Iran, while one blogger is freed, others are still being persecuted.

Bonus journalism link

• Paul Bradshaw on the end of objectivity.
  

BBC's Nic Newman: "better links within blogs amongst the most effective"

Last Friday, BBC Online conducted an open meeting about plans for the website over the coming months. The meeting was held in response to criticisms that the BBC's online services were not sufficiently open and transparent. The talks and discussion are available in a series of videos on the BBC Internet Blog.

I haven't watched them all yet, but I thought this section on the BBC's approach to external linking by Nic Newman, Controller, Journalism, FM&T*, was worth pulling out, (especially as it ties so neatly with last week's wee rant):

"Our aim is not to link indiscriminately, but to link in line with our public purposes and editorial guidelines. So we look to add value through our links. We look to take people to content that further enriches or informs.

"We will continue to use a mixture of manual and automated methods to do so. So we've already talked about Search Plus which is part of our automated solutions but a lot of the evidence points to the focus on editorial linking as being a really important part of the mix.

"One of the most trafficked pages on the Sports site is the football transfer page and the deep editorial links that we've added here in the last few months are responsible for delivering a significant amount of that uplift that you see in the previous graph. [Showing a rise in external clickthroughs from around 8 million a month to over 12 million a month for bbc.co.uk].

"In news, the better links within [BBC] blogs, are amongst the most effective because of the editorial relevance that comes from the authorship of that (sic) blogs and the relationship that people have with that content."

These are steps in the right direction and I think editorial linking, rather than automated linking, is vitally important. Regular readers will know that I wrote a post about the value of link journalism a while back and as I did then, I still think more could be done which would involve some significant changes to the working practices of BBC journalists.

That sort of thing doesn't happen overnight. But the BBC has a responsibility to continue to work on the area of external linking - it's absolutely key to the BBC Trust's aim of the Corporation being 'a trusted guide to the Web'.

*That's 'Future, Media and Technology' for those outside the BBC's jargon-laden walls. Although actually I remember talking about "FM&T" to a BBC journalist who looked at me as if I was talking about a souped-up form of shortwave radio so the previous sentence might be of some use to BBC employees as well!

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.
  

Bits and pieces on blogging and journalism

• Blogger cleared of misleading South Koreans on the state of the economy. Funnily enough it turned out that Park Dae-Sung's ("Minerva") exaggerated claims of financial turmoil weren't that exaggerated after all.

• Tracing how journalism is changing. Charlie Beckett highlights some useful literature on the history of journalism by Terhi Rantanen.

• BBC online journalist Adam Blenford on the G20 photographers and the blurring of amateur and professional photojournalism.

• Jeremy Bowen, the BBC's Middle East Editor, breached the BBC's guidelines on impartiality according to the BBC Trust in an online article on the 1967 Six Day War. Robert Fisk's typically belligerent commentary defending Bowen is also worth a read.

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.

Links for today: Blogging and the BBC

Blogging

• If you want to write a great blog you need to write for a tribe says Seth Godin. (I find myself wondering who might be in my tribe and if I want the role of writing or indeed 'leading' them. I reckon my tribe would lose in a fight to the Huffington Post tribe though.)

• Paul Bradshaw has been having a go at defining blogging, or at least defining what news blogging should be. You'll find my views in the comments.

BBC

• The BBC's Helen Boaden on citizen journalism and democracy.

• Steve Bowbrick says the Broadcast Era is over. (Not sure why I decided to capitalise there - gives the impression it's on a par with the Mesozoic Era and the like)
  

Unconventional mid-bullet aside - Steve's the BBC's blogger in residence. I met Steve the other week at a College of Journalism event and he already says he has way too much to do. Over a rather good lunch, he said we should take more risks on our blogs and be less concerned about what we published.

So in a post coming tomorrow: 'All the "this is totally off the record", "that's unbloggable", "please don't include", "you won't be passing this to the Daily Mail will you" conversations I've been privy to since the start of the project'....hmm...don't get your hopes up.)

• Nick Reynolds points to a blog that shows how the BBC can make bloggers happy by linking to them. And always better to make happy bloggers than have to deal with angry bloggers.
  

Links for today: BBC

• An interview with Richard Sambrook, Director of the Global News Division in the Media Guardian:
  

"People say the BBC is expanding too fast and is overly aggressive. I see it the other way around, that we're in danger of falling behind because we're unable to keep up with what is going on out there. We've got to move as fast as we can. It would be a very peculiar time for the BBC to pull back from its international role. It's absolutely the time when the BBC should be moving forward internationally rather than moving back."

• Alfred Hermida reports the opinions of Peter Horrocks, head of the multimedia newsroom, on changes to the BBC's newsroom. Stephen Mitchell, head of multimedia programmes, had his say on multimedia at the BBC in last week's Independent.
  

• How to search discussions about the BBC on Facebook courtesy of Murray Dick, who trains BBC journalists in online research techniques.

• BBC stringers are unhappy about new contracts. Maybe the future isn't freelance after all.
  

Links for today: blogs, multimedia, and linking

• The Guardian is relaunching their blogs.

• The Independent talks to the BBC's head of multimedia, Ian Burrell about the Corporation's multiplatform approach.

• National media outlets fail on attribution and linking according to Adam Tinworth.

• Which is made more interesting when you consider that Kevin Anderson reckons the way to fact-check online is to follow the links.

• What do you reckon? Let me know. Or don't. Your choice.
  

Links for today: Media

• 'Mission to Explain': Sounding a little bit like John Birt and Peter Jay in the 1970s, Jay Rosen reckons that journalists should make explanation, rather than information their number one priority.

• Jeff Jarvis wonders whether editors are a necessary luxury item. He thinks 'yes' but reckons the role of editor will need to change:
  

"There is still a role for editors, but it changes. There is a need to add context and fill holes in understanding - by using links. As we move from an economy of scarcity in media to one of abundance, there is a need to curate: to find the best and brightest from an infinite supply of witnesses, commentators, photographers and experts. As news becomes collaborative, editors will need to assemble networks from among staff and the public; that makes them community organisers. I also believe editors should play educator, helping to improve the work of the network."

• More evidence of bloggers acting as a 'fifth estate'. Here they point out some holes in a story about a 93 year old author. (Though in this case the BBC's Chris Vallance does an equally good job.)

• Paul Bradshaw flags up an article in a book - I know, how quaint - on the way political bloggers 'routinise' their work.
  

Links for today: Blogging

• Blogging is a community strategy and some people still haven't sussed this yet says Adam Tinworth.

• Paul Bradshaw at the Online Journalism Blog asks what skills we should be teaching online journalism students. For starters, I think they should all be made to keep their own blog throughout the year. Oh and expect them to have posted before 9am everyday...get them up and around and hard at work etc...

• Bloggers fight censorship in Uzbekistan.

Links for today: Impressions of Iraq

• Last of Iraqis has a post on the security situation in Baghdad which I summarised on my Frontline blog.

• Another dentist in Iraq has also recently written about his view of life in Mosul and Baghdad.

• A psychiatrist has pictures of the 'buses' he uses to get to work.

• And finally, US Army officer, Lt G, swapped engaging the insurgency in Iraq for an engagement party of his own. Congrats!

Links for today: Bad news from Afghanistan

• The 100 is up and it's not a good sort of 100 as Alastair Leithead, the BBC's correspondent in Kabul, explains.

• The Guardian has an interactive photo-board of the 100 fatalities.

• The Telegraph has a space for readers to pay tribute to the fallen.

• A Canadian soldier also died over the weekend after falling into a well. (AFP).

• And it's not just soldiers who are putting their lives in danger in the country. Leithead's fixer and BBC World Service's Pashto reporter, Abdul Samad Rohani, was killed at the weekend. Here, you can read Jon Williams, World News Editor, on Rohani's death and that of another journalist, Nasteh Dahir Faraah, in Somalia.