Richard Sambrook, head of global news for the BBC, gets that networked journalism religion in this posting on the BBC's The Editors blog.
CAPE TOWN: One report of the discussions here at the World Editors' Forum had the surprising headline that the BBC's director of global news got his news from the social networking site Facebook rather than the BBC's own news services.
Well, not quite. But sites like Facebook, My Space and Twitter are presenting the editors of the world's newspapers and broadcasting stations with a real challenge. I was invited here to talk about the BBC's approach to what's awkwardly called User Generated Content or citizen journalism.
In some ways it's simple. News organisations have always interviewed eye witnesses to events and used their pictures if available. Technology now means people can e-mail their experiences and pictures in their thousands to us, and they do. Equally, for decades the phone-in has been a staple format for many radio stations, allowing the opinions of the public to be given a platform. Today, the same thing can be achieved by running blog comments alongside news coverage online.
It's in the area of what's called networked journalism that the biggest opportunities may lie. Whatever subject we choose to report, someone in our audience - let alone the collective wisdom of the audience - will know more about it than we do. If we can use the new technologies to embrace their expertise it can only strengthen our journalism, and hopefully our relationship with the public.
But doing so is more complicated. Editors at this forum are worried about how to verify what they are offered, and how to pay for it, let alone how to make enough revenue to support their organisations. Looking ahead there's wide agreement that where today they are talking about blogs, tomorrow it will be the networking sites like Facebook which is currently enjoying huge growth. And yes, last weekend I did join it.
And in 48 hours I had connected with the editor-in-chief of Reuters, two internet entrepreneurs in the US, a couple of newspaper columnists and a number of the BBC's own staff. My colleague Rory Cellan-Jones, the BBC's technology correspondent, has also joined in the hope of understanding this new phenomenon although, as he reports, with mixed results. For news, however, I will still rely on the BBC.
I haven't played with Facebook or Myspace yet. I suspect I would meet with the fate of Mr. Cellan-Jones. :)
I am wondering whether social networking sites actually will provide a strategic challenge to not only traditional news media or even just enhance it. I have my doubts.*
* Note: This is a rough, rambling, disjointed, incomplete post right now; I'm writing it at the end of my day, but I hope to fine-tune it sometime in the next day or two. Read on at your own risk. :)
This is the crux of Mr. Samson's post:
It's in the area of what's called networked journalism that the biggest opportunities may lie. Whatever subject we choose to report, someone in our audience - let alone the collective wisdom of the audience - will know more about it than we do. If we can use the new technologies to embrace their expertise it can only strengthen our journalism, and hopefully our relationship with the public.
My feeling is that journalism has always been about networking of a type, the harnessing of collective wisdom and, at it's best, the journalist gleaning insight from the info-rich and sharing it with the info-poor with the news organization's distribution mechanism as the nexus.
I don't think the social networking sites like Facebook will provide a quantum leap forward in that regard.
As background, I've been online since the very early 1990s, before there was even commercially available Internet access.
I was a long-time member of the Canadian Association of Journalists (I'm not anymore; something about my distaste for arrogance, ineptitude and cronyism) and played a very active role on its e-mail discussion list, moderating it for more than four years.
During that time, it served a social networking function for at least 500 Canadian journalists (more in the good years).
However, you could always tell when something really newsworthy had happened because everyone shut up.
As one tenured professor once said, "Sometimes you just want to talk to somebody over a beer."
Or say nothing at all, especially if it's in public.
Most people don't want to have their names attached to a controversial opinion if it will harm their personal interests -- and for good reasons.
These words about CAJ-L from a seasoned corporate operator always stuck in my mind:
I tend to think that listservs are hardly an asset. They require devotion, feeding and care, and while many on this listserv haven't the courage to come out of the weeds more than once an eon, those who do have to put a pretty good foot forward. It's not exactly the key to upward mobility. A lot of things are said that can be career-enders, but at least it's on the table and honest. It's hard work, often criticized, and many of us wear the welt marks on our backs as evidence.
If saying the wrong thing in such a forum (and in the corporate context, simply being honest can be the wrong thing) is a potential career killer, then social media technologies are simply another method of social control rather than a vibrant new outlet for information sharing that threatens the foundations of of traditional journalism.
From where I sit, the most valuable information still needs to be ferreted out; it likely won't be altruistically shared via some social networking site.
Journalism, reporting in particular, is an active activity, not a passive one. I've been a journalist more than 20 years. The number of great stories that just fell in my lap compared to the ones where I had to work like a madman are relatively few and far between. If social networking sites change that reality, then that truly will be revolutionary, but somehow, I don't think that will happen.
Another thing is that for the most part, our audience comes to us to learn stuff. While a few of them may have valuable information to share, I still think the onus is on news organizations to inform their audiences, not the other way around.
On something like a Facebook, there may well be specialized channels that could provide access to a community solid sources for journalists, much like e-mail lists did for journos of another generation.
Sambrook is already taking steps in that direction, according to this post on the Organ Grinder blog of the Guardian, which reported from the World Association of Newspapers conference in South Africa:
The session was chaired by Reuters editor in chief, David Schlesinger, who introduced Sambrook with a brief précis of his career and "He's also one of my Facebook friends".
Sambrook started the session by admitting that the BBC had been slow to embrace user generated content and blogs.
"The BBC has been slower than some newspapers on that. Maybe it's the text broadcast divide, I don't know."
Sambrook said he used social networking sites such as Facebook to create a network of friends and colleagues involved in new media issues, social networking and web 2.0.
"I find out much more about what's happening in that realm from them than I do from traditional media."
Yes, if you connect with a elite community (and I would say being the e-i-c of Reuters or a news executive at the Beeb is pretty elite) in a specialized area , you will probably learn more than you would from a general news publication or broadcast.
But so what? Small, elite communities with specialized knowledge have always existed and for the most part, have always known known more than the journalists covering them.
Do social networking sites help in the journalistic mission of finding information that is interesting, useful and important to people, or do they just provide another clubhouse?*
David Akin of CTV's parliamentary bureau wrestled with the appropriateness of belonging to some Facebook groups in this April 23 post on his blog.
One problem I have with Facebook in that regard is how it's largely walled off from the larger Web (Akin has a public profile, but to drill into it, you must be on Facebook).
More to come ...