NevOn

Daily Telegraph's new media expansion

Another indicator of how some mainstream media see podcasting as a big opportunity - The Daily Telegraph is advertising for two Podcast Reporters/Producers:

[...] We are looking for two individuals who are capable of creating high quality and engaging Podcasts that feature comment and opinion from both internal and external sources. The successful candidates will be expected to write, voice, edit and upload audio content. A proven track record in journalism is essential. Full training will be provided on the technical aspects of the role.

The Telegraph launched its daily podcasts last November, and hired a podcast editor in December - apparently the first role of its kind in the mainstream media in the UK.

(Via Hugh Fraser)

Interesting things going on with other new media at the Telegraph - they now have ten journalists with individual blogs and a group blog.

Related Nevon post:

• Blair and Cameron podcast firsts

Engage with bloggers, says the BBC

BBC  journalist Paul Reynolds regards the blogosphere as a source of criticism that must be listened to and as a source of information that can be used.

In a lengthy article on the BBC News website, Reynolds presents a number of examples to back up his conclusions that mainstream media has to sit up, take notice and develop some policies to meet the challenges presented by an alternate news and information channel - an "army of irregulars," as he puts it.

It's a two-way street, in my view - bloggers need to reach out and build connections with the mainstream media, too. With this in mind, Reynolds' concluding commentary is especially worth paying attention to:

[...] Richard Sambrook, head of the BBC World Service and Global News Division (who runs a blog himself) accepts that the BBC needs to do more.

"The BBC should proactively engage with bloggers. This is a new issue for us. Some departments look at blogs, though haphazardly. But it pays dividends. The BBC is a huge impersonal organisation. It needs to come out from under its rock," he says.

As for using blogs as a source he says: "The key is careful attribution. It would be a big mistake for the MSM to try to match the blogs, but they can teach us lessons about openness and honesty. The MSM should concentrate on what it can do - explain, analyse and verify."

Related Nevon posts:

• BBC getting into blogging
• BBC call for 'citizen journalism'

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Pricey freedom of the press

BBC News: Danish-Swedish dairy giant Arla Foods says the ongoing boycott of Danish products in the Middle East had so far cost it between £40m and £50m. As the Muslim world refuses to buy Danish goods in protest over cartoons published in a Danish newspaper, Arla is losing £1m a day. Arla has also had to send home 170 employees across Denmark due to the impact of the reduced sales.

Ouch.

I thought it was extraordinary for the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten to publish those cartoons (caricatures of the Prophet Mohammed) when it would have been apparent to anyone that they undoubtedly would cause major offence to large numbers of people (and clearly have). Like most western countries, Denmark enjoys freedom of the press. But just because they could publish them doesn't mean they should.

The situation is further worsened when other newspapers in France, Germany, Spain, Switzerland and Hungary re-published those cartoons this week. What on earth were they thinking? Ah, freedom of the press. Right.

Allan Jenkins - who has been chronicling some interesting things at Arla Foods regarding their blogs - has a thoughtful post on what this story can teach us. In his post he also raises a key point of distinct relevance to organizational communication:

[...] What do communicators need to think about in a world where an article in an obscure newspaper calls down boycotts on your company? When a controversy like this can leave employees pulled in several directions: loyalty to religious faith, a desire to do a good job, a desire not to be beaten at the factory gates.

Empathy for different cultures and beliefs - even when tolerance by some of the differing beliefs by others runs very thin - must be a prerequisite for any organization today doing business in any country, not just those in the Middle East. Respect for such differing beliefs would be woven into the corporate fabric (or DNA, as some would call it) of any organization. This isn't a new idea - tolerance, respect, etc, are already part and parcel of the expected behaviours and attitudes by employees in most companies today.

So it's not too hard to see the role communicators can play within an organization confronted with the situation as Allan describes. Indeed, a situation such as is confronting Arla Foods and many other Danish businesses.

Where it gets pretty complicated, though, is making any difference or exercising any influence on the strong (and inflexible-looking) opinions of people outside the organization.

These are easy answers. The fact is - there are no easy answers.

New magazine for podcasters launched

In show #103 of our podcast last month, Shel and I talked about ID3 Podcast Magazine, a new print publication about podcasting launching in May.

Well, you don't have to wait until May if you want to get your hands on a brand new magazine about podcasting as the first edition of such a new magazine was launched online today.

Published as a PDF, Podcast User magazine was conceived and produced in less than a month, according to Paul Nicholls, the magazine's editor. It's the brainchild of a group of a dozen mostly British podcasters - in addition to Paul, Mark Hunter, Adrian Pegg, Linda Mills, Paul Pinfield, Chris Skinner, Paul Parkinson, Phil Coyne, Jim Hastell, Colin Meeks, Grant Mason, and Simon Toon. (Related: Paul and Adrian Pegg are two of the driving forces who were behind PodcastCon UK last September.)

The inaugural edition of Podcast User includes news, features, opinion columns, podcast reviews, and a review of recording equipment. If you sign up to the RSS feed, you'll ensure you get every edition.

Congratulations to the team behind this first publication dedicated to podcasting and podcasters.

Disintermediating the news

A thoughtful article on Friday by Richard Sambrook, director of global news at the BBC, on how the internet is disintermediating news:

[...] News organisations do not own the news any more. They can validate information, analyse it, explain it, and they can help the public find what they need to know. But they no longer control or decide what the public know. It is a major restructuring of the relationship between public and media. But it will affect politics and policy as well.

People can now address politicians directly, and politicians can reach the public without going through the media any more. Public discourse is becoming unmediated.

[...] The availability of information and the pressure for transparency is raising new political issues which we have not had to confront before.

[...] The information revolution is in its earliest stages. But it has the potential to alter the dynamics of public debate, and the interaction between politics, media and the public, beyond recognition.

Interesting aside - Sambrook wrote a blog with his thoughts and opinions about the News Xchange conference for broadcasters last November in Amsterdam, focusing on citizen journalism.

BBC News | How the net is transforming news

Related Nevon posts:

• BBC getting into blogging
• BBC call for 'citizen journalism'

BBC getting into blogging

The BBC's political editor, Nick Robinson, started a blog last week, called Nick Robinson's Newslog.

His first post includes this text:

[...] The BBC is about to start a trial series of blogs, each of which will be built using the kind of software employed by millions of weblogs around the world. This is the first of that trial.

The 'kind of software' Robinson refers to presumably means TypePad as his blog is a TypePad blog (so a very nice coup for Six Apart Europe in getting this deal with the BBC).

I find it interesting that the BBC has chosen to go with an outside commercial service provider rather than developing a blog structure within the organization using their own IT infrastructure. Perhaps part of their experimentation where using an outside provider in this stage of development is simply easier to execute. Robinson's blog isn't the first one the BBC has done - earlier this year, there was Newsnig8t by BBC journalist Paul Mason. That, too, was (and still is) hosted on TypePad.

One major difference between the two blogs - Mason's was very much a personal blog with a look-and-feel that was far from a BBC standard. Unlike Robinson's, which has the complete BBC branding in its presentation and clearly is a formal part of the overall BBC web presence. Indeed, its root URL (blogs.bbc.co.uk) indicates that.

First podcasting, and now blogging. It looks like the BBC is beginning to embrace new media in a big way as a means of engaging with its viewers/listeners/readers in a variety of different ways, traditional and non-traditional.

Will we see a blog portal, an offering to those viewers/listeners/readers to create their own blogs as part of the BBC blog domain? I think it would make total sense in the engagement process.

Now that would be a very inetersting move indeed and, apart from anything else, could be the tipping point for broadening out the world of blogging in the UK. Tie it in with the calls for people to send in their photos and you have the makings of a great connection between the broadcaster and a ready source of information.

Further blurring of that gap between traditional news creators and citizen journalism.

(Hat tip: DrewB)

Unsettling FT feature on blogs and business

Oh dear. The Financial Times nearly "did a Forbes" with a feature story on Friday about blogs and business.

Using the headline Who's afraid of the big, bad blog?, writer Kevin Allison starts out saying:

[...] Weblogs, or blogs, are the periodic rants and raves of millions of hobbyists and armchair pundits, who take advantage of easy-to-use publishing platforms to opine on everything from politics, to pornography, to the latest computer gadgets, and everything in between.

Not an auspicious beginning in an otherwise reasonable story that includes an assessment of the positive impact Robert Scoble has had on public perceptions of Microsoft, the firing of Google employee Mark Jen and commentary on IBM's blogging guidelines for employees.

There are some good and balanced elements in this feature - for instance, these comments from Mark Jen:

[...] Mr Jen argues that, used properly, blogging can help a company reach out to its customers in powerful ways. "When you go to an individual's blog and read the content . . . people will actually take the perception they get from an individual and project it on to the company they work for," he says. "That perception is often stronger than the message that the company is trying to [get across]."

Such an approach requires that companies place an immense amount of trust in employees to act as capable ambassadors. Mr Jen says that companies may have little choice. "You could say, 'I'm not going to allow my employees to blog,' but any one of your employees can still go out and start a blog anonymously," Mr Jen says.

The article concludes with some powerful advice from IBM:

[...] "Businesses and organisations of all sorts are going to need to begin rethinking what official channels of communication are," says IBM. "They are going to have to rethink what the official release of information means. There will probably be missteps along the way, but we see the risks and the learning curve as being worth it."

IBM likens its experiment in blogging to its efforts in the mid-1990s to encourage employees to surf the internet. At the time, many of the benefits were unclear, but eventually, as the internet changed, IBM says that having employees with their ears close to the ground allowed the company to change along with it.

Yet, on balance, I was left with an unsettling feeling after reading this story. If I were a company exec reading this, I'd likely conclude that blogs are something to generally regard as threatening with perceived risks far outweighing potential benefits, notwithstanding the positive views of companies like IBM.

Perhaps we are entering a time of 'blog backlash' by some in the mainstream media, as Shel and I discussed in show #82 of FIR: The Hobson & Holtz Report podcast last week, where we're now in the Stage 2 'attack' phase. That must indicate we've passed from Stage 1, the 'ignore/denial' phase, and on the way to Stage 3, the 'acceptance' phase.

This will repeat the cycle we saw ten years ago when everyone discovered the web and the FUD began.

Financial Times | Who's afraid of the big, bad blog? (paid sub)

Podcast interview with Forbes

An interesting follow-up to the Forbes shallow journalism story (my unrepentant description) yesterday which described how the magazine portrayed blogs and bloggers as the source of all evil.

In a comment yesterday to Steve Rubel's critical post, podcaster John Furrier says he's interviewing Forbes' proprietor Steve Forbes about the benefits of social media:

On Monday I will be posting a podcast on PodTech.net with Forbes president Steve Forbes where Steve talks about the benefits of social media (blogging and podcasting). It will be interesting to see how the writer response when his boss basically says the opposite of his story. Look for the podcast on Monday morning.

Interesting indeed. I'm sure this story will continue to build.

[Update 31-Oct] John's 25-minute podcast interview is up. You'll be disappointed, though, if you expect to hear any specific commentary or discussion about the Forbes article for there is none. The interview is primarily related to topics in Steve Forbes' book "The Flat Tax Revolution." You can also read a complete transcript of the interview.

New editor asks for opinions

In taking up his new role next month as editor of The Guardian Technology supplement, freelance journalist Charles Arthur is doing something quite smart - asking readers for their opinions on how he should shape the newspaper under his editorship.

Terrific use of a blog by a journalist as an 'engagement engine' with a newspaper's readership.

(Via DrewB.)

The Guardian is still the only national UK newspaper that has really embraced the blogosphere and the way in which a mainstream medium can connect its online newspapers to its readers with complementary blogs.

Shallow journalism at Forbes magazine

When you see a business magazine story about blogs with the title "Attack of The Blogs!," you should know what to expect. A cover story in the latest edition of Forbes magazine doesn't disappoint as this paragraph indicates:

[...] Blogs started a few years ago as a simple way for people to keep online diaries. Suddenly they are the ultimate vehicle for brand-bashing, personal attacks, political extremism and smear campaigns. It's not easy to fight back: Often a bashing victim can't even figure out who his attacker is. No target is too mighty, or too obscure, for this new and virulent strain of oratory.

What does disappoint, though, is that this amazing example of shallow journalism was published by the supposedly thoughtful and intelligent Forbes magazine. It illustrates either that the journalist concerned (and his editor) is wholly clueless on the topic about which he writes, or was aiming for the sensationalist tabloid approach to his topic - much as Advertising Age did earlier this week with equally shoddy journalistic practice dressed up as research - or both.

What's equally amazing are quotes in the Forbes piece from Pete Blackshaw, chief marketing officer at Intelliseek, one of the primary blogosphere research and marketing intelligence companies for business, and Frank Shaw, executive vice president at Waggener Edstrom, Microsoft's main PR firm, reinforcing Forbes' negative and alarmist view on blogs. I can only assume that those quotes are taken wholly out of context.

Indeed, I'd be surprised if Pete Blackshaw's comments are as stand-alone as they appear to be, as what Forbes quotes him as saying is definitely not in line with my impression of his more inclusive views about blogs from the FIR podcast interview that Shel Holtz and I had with him in August.

But there is a bright side to this sorry little tale.

My advice to any business person is to go ahead and read the Forbes article. Then, go to Business Week's website and read the cover feature "Blogs will Change Your Business" published in early May.

Now here you have a good example of intelligent journalism in how it treats its subject matter and takes a far more realistic and practical view on how you should regard blogs:

[...] Go ahead and bellyache about blogs. But you cannot afford to close your eyes to them, because they're simply the most explosive outbreak in the information world since the Internet itself. And they're going to shake up just about every business -- including yours. It doesn't matter whether you're shipping paper clips, pork bellies, or videos of Britney in a bikini, blogs are a phenomenon that you cannot ignore, postpone, or delegate. Given the changes barreling down upon us, blogs are not a business elective. They're a prerequisite.

Unlike the Forbes approach, Business Week's feature is a balanced story and does address the negative aspects of what blogs can become alongside the positive, thus making a credible case for why you should be examining these new communication channels.

It's a no-brainer to easily see who is making the better case.

• Other bloggers I've seen today with critical commentary on the Forbes story include Steve Rubel and Dan Gillmor.