vera has a website

different rules for different media

This is from today’s online edition of the NZ Herald, updated less than one hour ago:

Judge restricts online reporting of case

A judge has today taken the unprecedented step of banning news websites from naming two men charged with murder while allowing newspapers, radio stations and TV networks to reveal who they are.

Judge David Harvey said online media could not use the names, or publish images of the accused, to prevent the public searching for the information when the case comes to trial.

He said he was “concerned about someone Googling someone’s name and being able to access it later”.

He was also “concerned about the viral effect of digital publication”.

(…) read the full story here.

I always try to see the other side of things but I’m finding it particularly hard to do it in this case. So online journalists and print journalists should have a different set of rules? It all seems not only wrong and unfair but also terribly pointless to me. For as long as newspapers have been around people have been able to go to libraries or archives and search old editions. Google has just made it easier but it’s mainly the same process. The print edition of tomorrow’s Herald will have the name of the suspects. So what happens if a blogger decides to post a blog post about it and mention their names?

I know this is not any judge - he’s actually written a book on internet law. But, really, it does sound to me like this goes against a number of things, including freedom of speech. What’s really shocking to me is not that journalists are being stopped from doing their mission - informing their audience. What really shocks me is that it’s only *some* journalists that are having to do so. I wonder if this is even legal…

YouTube’s competition for young journos

Starting next month, YouTube will have a competition for young journalists. In this video, Steve Grove, from YouTube, explains the first challenge.

the biggest challenge for young journos

this post was originally posted on Tomorrow’s News Tomorrow’s Journalists and it was my first contribution to the project.

The young generations grew up in a world where media is totally different to what it was for our parents and the generations before them. Like any social change, it takes some time to adjust to a new reality and there is always a culture and generational clash. It’s going to take some years (decades, I’d say) until everything is going full-speed.

Computers, cell phones, internet… they’ve all been present for the vast majority of my twenty-something years. I grew up with them and, in doing so, adapting myself to their presence was a natural and unconscious process. Not so for our parents.

Many older journalists seem to be refusing to adjust to this shift in the cultural paradigm. It’s not our job to tell them they’re wrong - they’ll figure it out by themselves. In many cases, they adjust ever so slightly, by using the web as an archive for material published in the past. The web is still the print’s poor cousin for these journalists and they can’t quite see its potential.

We just happened to be doing what we do in this time. We’re experiencing journalism and communication in a time when journalism and communication are going through major changes. We’re a part of that change and we’re able to embrace it. Others aren’t and probably won’t. Perhaps this is a bit too pessimistic but it’s possible that things will only get better once our generation becomes the old generation that fills up the big chairs in the newsrooms.

The biggest challenge is not the lack of employment – there are always stories to be told and people that want to know them so being pro-active will always take you somewhere. The biggest challenge is not the fact that most school curricula do not prepare us for the job but only leave us with a brain full of theories, that would only be good for a conversation in a bar and not much else. Theory is something good to have when you need to look smart but the job will really only be learnt once they hand you a notebook or a dictaphone and send you out of the newsroom.

None of those challenges or fears come close to the problem we’re facing for being the generation at work during the shift. Sure they’re right when they say they had their challenges and changes to face. However, moving from the man on the bike dropping the newspaper at your doorstep to the RSS feed reader or the email newsletter is one of the biggest changes the world has ever faced. Living and working in a time where both co-exist is perhaps one of the hardest jobs to have and the young journalists’ biggest challenge.

insert title here, please

a few days ago i published a post with 5 reasons why i love my job. there’s a bunch of stuff i don’t love about my job (and i write “don’t love” to stop myself from writing “hate”). the first one i can think of is writing titles. i hate it i hate it i hate it. i never know what to write and sometimes the shortest title takes me longer to write than the longest article.

it might look like a minor issue but it’s not, really. titles are a very important part of a story and writing stories is one of the most important parts of a journalist’s job. when the busy reader is going through the pages of a magazine or newspaper or jumping from news website to news website reading headlines, the title is the decisive factor between reading or not reading the story.

when i was studying to become a journalist (or sort of), a journalist that i highly respect taught me that a good title should be informative, kind of like a sum up of what the article is about, something simple and direct. supposing that the reader didn’t have time to read the whole story, the title should be enough to let him know what’s been talked about. looking at it this way, it’s kind of like the title is the tool for the lazy reader.

so i’m confused: to we want readers to read our stories or not? should the title reveal the essential like that journalist told me or should it just attract the readers’ attention and make them want to know more about what’s being talked about? if that’s the case, maybe “informative” isn’t the best adjective to define a good title. creative or appealing, perhaps. and maybe it doesn’t have to tell much about what happened, forcing the reader to at least pay attention to the first couple of paragraphs of the story.

well, all this rant is to justify the fact that i suck at choosing titles. that’s it.

TNTJ is online!

Exciting news today! the young journo blogging ring that Dave Lee announced a couple of weeks ago is finally online. it’s called Tomorrow’s News, Tomorrow’s Journalists and you can check it out here.

I’ve already registered and I’m really looking forward to writing my first post. The topic for this month is “The biggest challenge facing a young journalist in today’s media is…” excellent topic to start off with. There are heaps of things that can be said and reflected on so the hard thing will be narrow it down to a decent size text. Can’t wait to get my hands on it!

So anyway, TNTJ is open to anyone’s participation so long as:

- you’re under 30 years old
- you blog about journalist
- you promote the ring

so keep checking TNTJ for updates and listen to what young journos have to say.

oh the life of a busy bee…

I think it was John Barger who said that “the more interesting your life becomes, the less you post… and vice versa”.

Well, “interesting” might not really be the most appropriate adjective (or maybe it is, I’m still trying to find that out) but the truth is that I haven’t had much time for blogging lately.

I still need to have my other blog back up and running again but I haven’t even had time for that yet. I’ve been busy with a bunch of different things (I don’t even want to list them because it’ll make me stress about them even more!).

So anyways, just a little note to let you know that I’ll do my best to get back to posting regularly again so keep checking back for new posts.

Cheers!

five reasons why I love my job

You can choose how you’re going to read this article, whether it’s as just me trying to tell you about the wonders of being a journalist or as me talking to myself and trying to convince myself of those wonders, to help me go through harder times (which also happens sometimes).

I became a journalist by choice, as I’m sure the vast majority did. Being a journalist is so hard that you really have to choose it and have a passion for it in order to survive it. When I say it’s hard, I’m not just saying that the work in itself is hard to do (although, yes it is). It’s, above all, hard to get into the profession and start a career. You really have to want to do it, otherwise it’s really easy to just give up and go knock on different doors.

Anyway, here’s a brief list of five reasons to love this job.

#1 unlike other jobs, I learn new things every day. Some of them are boring but others are really interesting. My job gives me a good deal of stuff to think about. I’m sure this happens to all journalists, whether they write about general stuff or specialise in one subject matter. If you’re a journalist, you’re forced to learn about new things every day, stay up to date with what’s happening around you. It’s hard work but there’s no better way of living.

#2 it gives me the opportunity to interact with different people all the time. I don’t need to tell you how cool that is, right? I really do feel this makes me a richer person.

#3 you feel your work is actually worth it because you often get feedback, whether it’s by someone commenting on the article with you or just by seeing someone holding the publication you work for or reading it online.

#4 I write. Plain and simple. There’s nothing I love more. Of course there’s more to it than that and there’s never a boring day in this job. But writing is definitely my favourite part of it.

#5 the fact that, no matter how many times I say I hate my job (and i do say it a lot sometimes, especially during stressful periods) and even wonder whether I’d prefer an easier life, I am deeply in love with my career. Not many people get to feel this way so this is something i feel really lucky for.

if print dies, it’ll be suicide

It’s the old story of the glass half full or half empty – you can look at the same thing from different perspectives and choose to either have a positive or negative opinion about it.

When the first photographs appeared, the end of oil portraits was announced. Later came the TV and people starting digging radio’s grave. When the first CD was out, there was talk of bidding farewell to vinyl.

Some of these deaths were confirmed (who still remembers what a VHS is?) but others weren’t. The question that a lot of people are asking but that none can yet answer is: Is internet going to kill printed news?

But if you think it will, how come the newspapers survived the invention of radio and television? It’s true that paid newspapers are selling less but there’s still the phenomenon of free newspapers. Why not blame those instead?

What newspapers need to do is stop thinking about the internet as the enemy and embrace it. It doesn’t have to be one or the other and it’s not hard to have the same team of journalists writing for the newspaper and publishing that same content online. The Web is the key to their survival – I can’t stress it enough. Instead of trying to fight the enemy, you need to get in bed with it. Producing online content is the only way to keep selling newspapers.

I still read newspapers and, like me, millions still do. I think I probably always will. There was never a time in my life when I only bought the newspaper because I felt the need to be informed. No. Television has been around for a lot longer than I have. Watching the news on TV never stopped me from buying the newspaper. Reading the news online doesn’t stop me from buying it either.

Maybe I don’t *need* to buy it anymore. But need was only one of the several reasons for me to ever do it.

Unless they’re really short-sighted, everyone in newspapers knows what might kill them and what needs to be done to prevent that death. If they choose not to do it, then that will be suicide. I don’t think they want to shoot themselves (it is a business, after all). I might be wrong but, in my age and in my position, it’s a lot better to choose to think things are not so bad.

new media, new forms of citizen participation

during the time i worked for the newspaper in portugal, several people looked for me wanting to share stories, find out more about a story i’d written, say thank you or even complain (small privileges of those who work in ‘community-level news’).

whenever that happened, i always tried to take the opportunity to find out what those people thought about the newspaper, what could be improved and what being done wrong. it always surprised me that, for many of them, the favourite pages were the ones that the journalist had little or no effect on – ‘letters to the editor’ or columns written by other people, for example.

a lot of times, that investigation that had taken several hours to complete and another few hours to put into words was put aside because of the hole on the road next to mr smith’s house. because, for mr smith, that hole was a lot more important than any major investigation. it affected his life in a direct way.

none of this is surprising or new. proximity has always been one of the fundamental criteria in journalism. And I say proximity in many different levels and not just a geographic proximity. For example, whenever something newsworthy happens in timor, you can be sure you’re going to see it on the news in Portugal. In this case, the geographic distance is secondary because the emotional bonds between the two countries are stronger (and, therefore, come higher up in the hierarchy).

in a way, this is also related to the criteria that lead people to, more and more, choose the internet over other media to stay informed. instead of the passive act of consuming whatever is put in front of them, they select, choose, search and comment. the key for the success of the whole chain is the engagement of the reader/viewer/listener and that’s why web2.0 is so successful. people want to be part of the process and they want to feel like they contribute to it rather than just acting as a passive receiver. even if it’s just to say ‘I agree’ or ‘I disagree’, a lot of times without adding anything else, they just want to feel included.

this is also strongly related to the rise of ‘citizen journalism’ (with websites like cnn’s ireport proving its power) but that’s a subject for a totally different post.

the fact of the matter is that in journalism, like in politics, citizens’ participation is fundamental to prevent the structure from collapsing - whether it guarantees a more democratic society, that’s open to discussion.

local journalism is the future

i always thought that internet and globalisation will eventually empower local media. it’s easy to get the latest about the major events on the other side of the world but the easiest it is to access that information, the bigger it is the need for people to get information about their own community (and this doesn’t only apply to a certain geographic area, but rather to any group that shares a certain set of rules or values - and that kind of specialisation is where bigger media, like national newspapers, have a problem).

focusing on the geographic sense of the word ‘community’, i believe that local/regional/suburban newspaper are the ones that will survive for longer. because those local news can’t be find online - at least not yet. but even those newspapers understand the importance of taking the step into online media.

a good example is the newspaper i worked for in portugal before coming to nz: it’s a weekly regional newspaper that’s putting a lot of effort into its online content - the website is updated three times a day and all journalists (and we all know how small newsrooms are in regional newspapers) must contribute daily for the website. also, about a year ago, the newspaper decided to go one step further and start its own online television (without increasing the number of journalists, i must say). so far, it’s been quite successful and it’s fair to say that the online tv was a good move and should set an example for other local media - if you want to survive, you better embrace web 2.0.

the closeness to the community is another advantage that local newspapers have over national and international media. not only do they talk about the issues that matter to people but their offices are generally closer to the readers. and this isn’t just a minor detail. it wasn’t rare for me to have a reader coming in the newsroom just to say hello or give his 2 cents about an article - that relationship between the news producer and the news consumer is vital. the consumer (feels more like he) is a part of the proccess. that can be compared to what makes social media networks so successful - interaction - and that explains why newspapers’ websites have started allowing comments like bloggers were already doing - they realised that the readers didn’t want to be at the end of the chain and just receive the message in a passive way - they wanted to see their opinions taken into consideration.

what got me back to this subject was reading about the huffington post taking on local newspapers. that’s another very smart move and i have no doubts that it will be successful.