Category Archives: Journalism and Media

Something often taken for granted by journalists, particularly students, is being able to get an image for pretty much whatever subject for free and use it legally thanks to Creative Commons.

Whatever the article is, how many times have you searched through Flickr to find a nice little shot to illustrate your piece? It’s a phenomenally useful tool, from just adding more colour to an article or some more unusual and creative uses.

But how many people who use it actually contribute back to the commons? Personally, not as much as I probably should or could – there’s a bunch of photos you can use on my left-for-dead Flickr page (if you want some photos of Doctor Who monsters, hey, feel free) and all the work for the Dev8D and DevXS conferences, including the full film, are CC-licensed.

But not much that I’ve done as a journalist. Which made me wonder – are there ways that journalists, particularly ones that make use of CC content, could release more content to the community?

One of the big reasons more don’t do this could be financial: if you can license your photos for profit, why give them away free? Journalism isn’t exactly awash with money right now, so why cut off a revenue stream? If you’re in a business, you’ve paid for it, so why shouldn’t others? And as stories are the bread and butter – is there a point giving away that hard work?

Wired Magazine last year started releasing staff photos for reuse, but with the requirement for credit and asking for a link back. Having the link has some benefits for Wired of advertising of content and SEO, as well as being good for their brand. See, I’m talking about them now. Oh no, I’ve just been suckered in by it. I even linked them too.

Even if it was on a selective content basis, I think it’d be a good thing if there was more sharing of parts of content from journalists. Maybe selected parts of audio or video interviews, certain photography too, and allow it for remixing with contribution. People are remixing all sorts of content online already and it’s fantastic. It’d be better if it were legal and encouraged.

Obviously it’s something where this could vary from national behemoths to hyperlocal sites, student work or individual blogs: depending on a million different factors. It’s not a debate to which I have any answers to, but think it’s one worth having. If journalism is about the sharing of information, maybe there’s more they can share.

With hundreds of links flowing through the fast stream of social media every day, it’s understandable if you haven’t got the time to take a step back and enjoy a long read. For me, that’s where the weekend comes in to catch up with everything bookmarked over the last few days thanks to the gorgeous app Pocket (also known as Read It Later) – and here’s four of my favourite articles I’ve read this week.

Jade’s Empire

“I don’t know when we decided as an industry that in order to sell five million copies of a game you have to make a Michael Bay film. There are other options.”

Ubisoft’s Jade Raymond is known best for her work on Assassin’s Creed, but in this feature interview she talks about how it’s time for the industry to “grow up” and how games can take more creative risks and have more deeper meanings – but also the risks that involves.
Read it at Eurogamer

MACHINE POLITICS: The man who started the hacker wars.
From being the first person to unlock the iPhone to jailbreaking the Playstation 3, this profiles the story of the notorious hacker GeoHotz and the court case that followed. Your mileage may vary with how linked the hacks that followed on the Playstation Network and the work of Lulzsec are, but it’s a very interesting read.
Read it at The New Yorker

Exams, Demand, and a Short Lesson in Controlling Public Discourse
It may be becoming as predictable to hear people make predictions about journalists saying exams are getting easier as it is them actually saying that, but it’s still a common criticism that deserves a second look. Daniel Hemmens looks at the truth behind some recent claims in the news, as well as asking if it even matters if they really are. An interesting new take on this regular complaint.
Read it at Ferretbrain

Why Publishers Don’t Like Apps
The mantra of businesses disrupted by the internet is “adapt or die”. While tablets and apps are sometimes considered the future of journalism, they’re not without their growing pains – as Jason Pontin looks at the difficulties publishers have faced with news apps and the new direction some are taking.
Read it at Technology Review

If you found any of these articles interesting, let me know on Twitter and I’ll put together more picks in the future…

The internet is a wonderful, blank canvas. There’s so much potential for incredible creativity and technological innovation which can push how we create and consume content.

This wanky introduction leads me to this point. With the opportunity to make such great things, why is so much of the internet shite?

On Thursday, I read a lovely feature in the i about the Commodore 64 and its impact on a generation and discussing the link between creativity and coding. In the newspaper, it’s a nicely presented piece with a colourful background that really draws you in.

So I went to find the online version of the article to share it on Twitter. I have to say, I was impressed. Impressed at how carelessly it seemed dumped online. Squished in to a 380px column between related posts, adverts, boxes for Facebook and anything to distract you away from the interesting content. It scrolls for decades, with the sidebar of the timeline just dumped at the end as text.

If you were designing the pages to put a feature in the magazine or newspaper, and you submitted such a careless text dump with a tiny image, you’d be rubbish at your job. But online, it seems acceptable. Why?

The benefits of online journalism include being able to use so many more tools. Hyperlinks, interactive elements, galleries, videos, audio… but the design side seems forgotten.

Obviously it’s also about using things when appropriate: the 200 word story about the cat in the tree in the local news doesn’t need much in the way of enhancement (it’s as fascinating as it could be already) but when it comes to those special stories and features which have had so much work poured in to them: do something special with the look of them!

Doing it right

I’m constantly finding myself use The Verge as an example of a fantastic news website and how they display long articles is one of the reasons why. The news posts look as you would expect them to look (but without distracting you boxes saying “HEY! People read these 5 year old stories on Facebook! WHY DON’T YOU?!?!”) but with reviews and features they really come in to their own.

Despite claims that long-form writing is dead online (because something always has to be dying) it has such a great chance of life. This feature about Kickstarter, as well as being a brilliantly interesting piece of writing, is presented in a way that makes you want to read it.

The use of subheadings, images, columns, pullquotes,videos: it all comes together to make the article not seem overwhelming and it looks great. Even down to little details. Normally having text flow in columns next to each other as you would in print doesn’t work online due to the need to scroll: but on that story the few instances they do it – it never goes on for longer than the height of the average laptop screen so it causes no problems.

Give people the right tools

The biggest thing holding more people back from doing this is probably the tools they have. Content management systems can be dire at best and don’t play well with creativity. Stick the text in, add the meta-data, publish. Even on WordPress, an incredibly versatile system, doesn’t have that much to play with by default. There’s buttons to make text bold, do a list and a blockquote if you’re pushing it.

If you know the HTML you can do much more of course, but even buttons for headers aren’t part of the post editor. I’d hope that more people would look at this and go “hey, we could do more” – it can’t be that much work for your publisher’s developer to add a button and shortcode for some pretty pullquotes, sideboxes… even small things just to make more of what we’ve got. Equip people with the tools to do more.

It doesn’t have to be huge amounts of require sinking hours in to design and planning to make a better reading experience. The BBC News website is a good example – they’ve not got the level of design detail you’ve got on The Verge, but the use of sideboxes for related links and analysis, pullquotes, subheadings, video and audio embedded at relevant points within the post. They’re not huge things to design with but there’s enough there to make a difference and show that there is one.

And then maybe as the people higher up see the benefits of what happens when people have these tools for the simpler things, then more will be made or made available for use. With the way some sites look you’d think they believe presentation doesn’t matter on the internet, but how much time and resources have they spent building up a look for their publication in print, designing templates for pages, creating a style toolkit of resources to make pages look good?

Although all news organisations will lament the quality of the technology they work with, newspapers aren’t now put together with typewriters and prit-sticking an image on top. So why should things be online?