Warts and all

Every day, we read about how journalism is changing forever. And so it should - not just because of the opportunities online offers, but because of some bad habits MSM has got into. Far cleverer people than me are debating which qualities should be saved - but I thought it would be fun to compile some of the more, er, frivolous aspects, specifically of local newspaper life which I hope will endure.

First up, and inspired by the reaction I got to this tweet today - the honourable tradition of newsdesk ritually humiliating reporters by making them do stupid stuff - all in the name of a good read. Dressing up is the favourite - tweets and office banter revealed we've been made to dress up as dogs, chipmunks, Lara Croft, monks, pirates, 1930s spivs and David Beckham. At my last place, we even had an arrangement with the local fancy dress shop - costumes for plugs. Abseiling was also a surprisingly popular choice, with @dankerins revealing he'd been made to: "abseil 220ft with a 92-year-old woman, whom I had to interview half way down. Interview was one word long."

The beguiling hush which falls over the office when someone gets a challenging call. Usually the person on the other end is a little unhinged and the reporter can be heard excitedly getting details of the scoop, gradually realising there isn't one, then desperately trying to get them off the phone. Other favourites are the mum of the guy who's just been up in court over some unpleasantness threatening to "have you" for printing her little darling's name - and the 100th birthday girl so deaf the reporter has to shout embarrassingly dull questions at the top of their lungs: "How has life changed since you were a girl?"

The way office banter turns into stories. You get a phonecall about a missing tortoise, which sparks a conversation about how far it could have crawled since going awol - hey presto, there's your page 3, complete with cut-outs of Tommy the tortoise wearing a beret, on top of Stonehenge and perched on the  shoulder of the Angel of the North. I'm sure there are many more examples out there (This one's probably closely linked to the ritual humiliation one).

Gallows humour. I still want a job tomorrow, so I won't post any examples. But feel free to leave yours...

Puncturing pompous, jargon-laded or just plain incomprehensible official-speak. Best example I've heard recently is from @murraykelsoWM who tweeted: "Ambulance quote: 'She suffered injuries incompatible with life". No, really. That was the quote. I didn't make it up. You couldn't.'

And closely related to that would be developing an acute sense of moral outrage, which can be sparked by the important or the trivial, but especially when denied the opportunity to report something, comparable to that seen with this week's Carter-Ruck vs The Guardian saga.

Hearing about stories which no family friendly newspaper could run. A dog born with two willies was a recent one. The way every single bin in Brighton has been vandalised so instead of having slots labelled Butts and Gum, they invite Butt and Cum is another. Related - daring the news editor to see if he can sneak said stories into the paper under the editor's nose.

More treats can be found on Stuff Journalists Like, Newsroom Quotes and a recently discovered favourite, Glum Councillors.

Advertising moving online - but where?

Some interesting stuff has come out over the last week or so about online advertising.

Last week, it was reported that online advertising had become the biggest advertising medium, overtaking TV for the first time. Great news for those working in online news, right? Hmmm.

Here's econsultancy.com with their recommendations on where to spend your money online. And notable by the absence is any kind of advertising which news sites might currently benefit from. Paid search? Tick. Web design? Tick. Social media? Tick. Display ads, directories or classifieds? Er, no.

As one of the commenters says, you need to take this list with a pinch of salt as it comes from "an SEO company and is therefore biased towards a reductive click-based model of online marketing" but I'm not sure it's that far off the mark when it comes to where smart companies are thinking about spending their budgets. 

Take studies like this one from Qube which found in one particular case social media was 23 times more effective than banner ads (as a social media agency, they would say that, wouldn't they - but those figures are pretty striking).

Of course advertisers have always found ways to avoid shelling out for adverts. Every hack knows about the bogus survey - a poorly researched top of the pops on a subject vaguely related to the product, usually with a pointless embargo, which are a) easy and cheap to report b) insanely popular with readers. One dropped into my inbox yesterday. We ignored it, but a quick Google News search shows about two dozen plus sites did publish today. 

But the difference here is that social media allows brands to bypass mass media entirely. And it's not just commercial brands - it's also local authorities, celebrities, politicians, lots of the people who previously relied on the papers to get their message out there.

Are we feeling irrelevant yet?

How can you make community correspondents your colleagues?

I was having a really interesting chat with another web editor today about the merits of community correspondents.

Their point was that by relying on community correspondents to cover grass roots parish pump news, you are cutting reporters off from the contacts they need to get to grips with their patch. My counter was that by enlisting people to write them themselves, they become colleagues rather than contacts, and surely that's an even more valuable relationship?

Clearly though, for this to work the news site has to foster this relationship. Since coming to The Argus six months ago, I haven't done this as well as I would like, and as I embark on a renewed push to get this going, I'm after ideas on how to make it work.

Northern Echo editor Nigel Burton spoke here about how they do it. Interestingly, their citizen journalists get paid, which sadly is not an avenue open to me. So how else can it be done?

Some ideas I'm going to be trying out:

Regularly emailing the group of correspondents with stats from the site, to show how many people are visiting it.
Making the sections more than just newslists, using Steve Yelvington's theory of the three basic roles local sites should play.
Emailing new correspondents every time they upload a story, with an encouraging comment
Setting up an area on our forum for correspondents to swap tips with each other
Seeing whether it's possible to plug sites and correspondents' contact details alongside stories from their patch in-paper

I'm also considering changing my tack, which up until now has been very much to say this is your part of the site, you can do what you want with it. I think a more common motivation is wanting to be part of The Argus. Maybe asking them to stick by the style guide, rewriting intros and being more demanding when they ask how often they should upload would reap more rewards? After all, if they wanted to do it completely on their own terms, they would have set up a blog, wouldn't they?

Any other ideas gratefully received.

Brighton and Hove's social media ambitions

Brighton and Hove City Council is advertising for a social media officer, I discovered today.

My first reaction was to laugh. Then I saw the salary (more than I've ever earned), my news editor hat came on again, and the story of a council paying someone good money to play about on Twitter and Facebook took over. Now, although I will defend the validity of that angle to the hilt, I've had a bit more time to reflect, and I'm more in two minds.

It's way past my bedtime, so some quick thoughts (many prompted by @artistsmakers):

Why do you need a separate press officer to perform this role? As @artistsmakers pointed out, social media is just a tool to talk to people - it's the equivalent of hiring someone to type and send emails.

Perhaps that's disingenuous of me though - the fuller job spec says part of the role is to "evangelise, train and coach staff on the implementation and use of new technologies such as blogging and tweeting". So will normal council staff be allowed to use social media? (I'm told that Facebook etc are currently blocked.)

If council staff are let loose, will they be allowed to respond to tricky questions publicly, e.g. on a Facebook wall, on Twitter, or in the comments of a blog?

If so, will these responses have to be vetted in the way I'm sure B&HCC press responses must be? Surely that would be far too time-consuming? And kind of defeat the point of being open, accessible and accountable in the first place!

But if council staff are allowed to respond freely, then will journalists be allowed to ask questions in these online forums? And if they are, then where does that leave the press office? Could we be seeing a return to the times when journalists were able to talk to the horse's mouth? But now joined by citizen journalists too?

Interesting times . . .

Troll verse

I love my commenters, even the trolls. In fact, sometimes it's especially the trolls. Like this morning, when I came in to find one of my favourites (banned several times now) had re-registered just to post these two poems about me:

Wadsworth a journo so low
That she'd sunk as far as she could go
Got a job censoring Opinions........anything
What a total zero

There once was a dictator called Jo
Who thought she was in the know
She told her minions
What should be their opinions
She ended up with no friends, only foes.

I also love the people who follow me on Twitter. I tweeted the first this morning, and got these two lovely retorts back, the first from @callummay and the second from a DM:

Argus's readers so thick
That they can't even make a rhyme stick
So your website's replete
With comments to delete...

There was a young lady called Jo
A moderating so & so
She upset the ranters
Deleted the ravers
But the rest said 'thank f**k she saved us'

My row with Croydon Council's paper

I broke one of my rules on Twitter today, and indulged in a public row on my @jowadsworth account. But I don't regret it. It was with Croydon Council's monthly "community paper" @yourcroydon and it was about how Pravda Papers like that are a real threat to local newspapers (until February, I was the Croydon Advertiser's news editor). 

I won't bore you with the details, except to say my favourite moment was when they replied to Croydonian @craigbeattie's tweet about our argument, saying it was instead a 'debate'. Here's Craig's response: 

cgbeattie: @yourcroydon lol - quite a funny reply given the key debating point is about certain parties putting things is a overly positive light

Do I feel bad in retrospect? Whoever's behind this is as human as I am, and their intentions probably are noble. But their massive £75k salary and their inescapable knowledge of the situation kinda cancels that out.

They also made this general tweet-out to everyone: 

yourcroydonQUESTION what are your views on media coverage of Croydon? What sort of news and features should Your Croydon carry? All thoughts welcome...

They got one response (don't spin, more youth stories), so here's some more for them: 

• A topical one - compile a league table of how much each councillor claims in expenses, and compare to: attendance at council meetings/letters answered per month/how safe their seat is.
  
• A column each month detailing all resolved complaints (from Stage One to ombudsman), and details which aren't a geniune breach of the Data Protection Act.
  
• A map of where the most parking tickets have been issued, where the most have been successfully appealed, and a heat map showing net revenue made across the borough.
  
• An in-depth analysis by the new head of children's services into the problems he faced when he joined the council, and what he has done and still needs to do to bring the borough's schools up to scratch.
  
• Regular publication of all the information the local press are denied about academies' performance, e.g. expulsion rates.
  
• An interview with anyone living in New Addington's substandard "hut" housing, conducted by the councillor in charge of this - written in Q&A style. Video to accompany,  please.
  
• A panel next to the general info part, detailing exactly how much this issue has cost Croydon taxpayers - including all staffing costs, IT, printing, and distribution - and, estimated cost of recycling
  

So, over to you Croydon Council. I doubt any of these ideas will see the light of day. In the meantime, I will be putting a Freedom of Information request in myself to answer the last bullet point, in the way the fantastic but beleagured Barking and Dagenham Post did (scroll down). 

Oh, and some further reading: 

http://icanhaz.com/evilcouncilpapers1

http://icanhaz.com/evilcouncilpapers2

http://icanhaz.com/evilcouncilpapers3

UPDATE: Here is the link to my Freedom of Information request: http://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/cost_of_council_paper

UPDATE 2: Given the lousy response to @yourcroydon's own tweetout for story ideas, I'm now conducting my own. Leave them in the comments below, or tweet them to me. Here's one for starters:

AllaboutCroydon@yourcroydon Will you print an article of why 3 years and loads of money wasted of the park place project? Will CC put their hands up

Let's see where this gets us  . . .

Getting going again

I've been struck down by blog fear since moving to a new paper (The Argus), both because I'm unsure of how my new employers view personal blogs, and, I think more importantly, because I wasn't sure how my new colleagues would react! But as my job now involves giving advice on blogging, I figured I should dust it off again.

What inspired me today in particular was meeting one of our new community correspondents. She's obviously going to be a natural, intensely interested in her neighbourhood and compelled to tell people about it. But she was also way ahead in understanding how it all works online, without really seeming to think about it. She's not a digital native, yet she's taken to social media like a duck to water.

On a private forum she's set up she now has people from as far away as Spain begging her to keep them up to date with the quirky goings-on she's discovered in her home town. She showed me the many local picture galleries she's set up on her Facebook account, taken on her mobile phone, and the comments they've received. And she's already researched a story about the old hospital whose site her house is built on using forums, community sites and Hansard(!). It was more impressive than many would-be trainee reporter portfolios I've seen. But she wasn't boasting - she just thought I'd be interested. 

So in part, I just want to boast on her behalf, as I already think she's amazing before she's even posted one story for us. But a more serious point, and one which has been hotly debated today, is Robert Picard's question: with enough people like her, what value can professional journalists bring to earn their paypacket? 

Specialism is obviously one answer - on a local level, my answers, none remotely original, would range from the prosaics of law and shorthand (yes, shorthand), through the monetary incentive to sift through the dull (e.g. council meetings) to get to the gold, to simple longevity (of the post, if not the individual reporter) - it seems to me the biggest potential failing of most community sites and blogs is simply that those running them often give up. But I'm sure there must be many other answers out there.

And with longevity comes the power of the local newspaper brand, which is still very significant in bringing a community together.  Up until now, my correspondent's audience has been negligible. But with the help of The Argus, it's likely she'll get a fair following - and being able to say she's writing for us will undoubtedly open doors for her on the ground too. I'm optimistic this project, and every other similar one from UK local newspapers, has a good chance of helping to solve the conundrum of where next for the regional press. Well, here's hoping . . .