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One to watchb

jonathan harris, one of the most brilliant designer/thinkers around has just launched an awesome new project -- Sputnik Observatory.

This morning, Google's YouTube opened up its Reporters' Center - a new hub for teaching citizen journalists to become better reporters by teaching them about how to prepare for interviews, be better investigative reporters, and how to help media organizations in the news-gathering process. Interestingly, at the same time as YouTube is trying to help citizen journalists, Google is also encouraging professional media organizations to join the YouTube Partner Program and upload more videos to YouTube that can then be featured on Google News.

Sponsor

Google argues that by joining this program, news organizations will be able to reach a wider audience, cut hosting costs, and be able to interact with YouTube's large (and often highly vocal) user base.

Playing Both Sides

It is interesting to see how Google and YouTube are courting both 'amateur' reporters (in the best sense of the word) and large media organizations at the same time. Google is clearly looking to strengthen YouTube's position as a hub for news content - and given how the news market is in flux today, it is smartly trying to encourage both pros and citizen journalists to use its site as their default repository for their video content. The core reason for Google to encourage citizen journalists to shoot better and more compelling video, and for courting bigger media organizations, however, is that it is simply easier to sell advertising against professionally produced content.

Of course, as PaidContent pointed out earlier this morning, news organizations and Google News don't exactly have the most friendly relationship, though now that Google News features YouTube videos more prominently on the site, news organizations could potentially profit from this arrangement, though many larger organizations already use white-label video services and sell their own ads against their video content.

Good Content

Looking at the Reporters' Center, by the way, it is nice to see that the quality of the content there is generally very high, and any aspiring journalist can learn quite a lot from the videos that are currently posted on the site.

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One to check

Web activist and filmmaker Brett Gaylor has created an open source documentary about copyright and remix culture. The entire film can be downloaded from here.

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Word from the frontline from someone who should be at the front.

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Ah, new languages and practices. I think I said...

Emmett Rensin and Alex Aciman aim to squish literary classics into series of tweets

Is there no end to Twittermania? Last week we saw the social networking tool Twitter deployed on the streets of Tehran. This week, moving seamlessly from the sublime to the ridiculous, it is being used to aid the digestion of the world's greatest literature.

Fans of the classics will either be delighted or appalled to learn that the New York-branch of Penguin books has commissioned a new volume that will put great works through the Twitter mangle. The volume has a working title that will make the nerve ends of purists jangle: Twitterature.

In it, the authors will squish the jewels of world literature - they mention Dante, Shakespeare, Stendhal, Joyce and JK Rowling - into 20 tweets or less - that is 20 sentences each with fewer than 140 characters.

The book is the brainchild of two 19-year-old first-year students at the University of Chicago who claim to be starting a cultural revolution from their college dormitory. Bashing their heads together one evening in their university digs, Emmett Rensin and Alex Aciman asked themselves what defined the grandest ventures of their generation, and best expressed the souls of 21st century Americans?

Pretentious, maybe. Precocious, certainly. The answer they came up with was double-headed. They identified high literature as a crucial pillar for any generation.

But they also latched on to Twitter, the website where users compress all of human experience into 140 characters. Twitter, they thought to themselves, epitomised the short attention span and info-deluge that defined the contemporary age.

So what if you put the two together? If great literature and Twitter were combined into one new form - Twitterature. "We have embarked on an attempt to bring the two pillars of our generation together, once and for all," the students said.

In the blurb for the new book the authors give a clue to their incentives for writing it, which are not entirely ethereal. Aciman and Rensin, from New York and Los Angeles respectively, both harbour ambitions to become writers and both clearly also hanker after cash.

They say they are aiming for a book that has the literary merit to wow the blogosphere, as well as the "pure-money genius to take the market by storm".

Whether they are right and fulfil their dreams depends on the appetite for reading Dante's Divine Comedy reduced from its 512 pages in Penguin's own Classics edition to 20 short sentences. Or Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, the last in the JK Rowling series, rendered in 2,800 characters down from 784 pages.

All should become clear in the autumn, when Twitterature is scheduled for publication.

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More Evernote goodness

For the past year, we’ve had a single goal: becoming your second brain. We made it easy to capture and find all of your ideas and inspirations using (almost) all the devices you own. We’ve even been called “the anti-social app“, for our unconventional determination to focus on what’s on your mind, not just the mind of your friends. Ok, maybe we call ourselves that. Today, we’re broadening our view.

Now begins Phase 1 of our major effort to help you share (and collaborate on) the stuff you’ve collected with individuals, groups, and the world. Introducing, Evernote Shared Notebooks. [cue fanfare]

What’s new?

Using Evernote Web, you can now specify individuals that are permitted to view, and in some cases modify, your notebooks.

How it works

In your Evernote Web account, you will see a new, blue Sharing section in the navigation panel. Click on “sharing setup” to begin the process of sharing your notebooks. Select the notebook you wish to share, then decide whether to share that notebook with individuals or the world.

There are two additional options under the “Share with individuals” category:

• Share with individuals (view only)
• Share with individuals (view and modify) – Evernote Premium feature

For added security, you can require log in, which means that the unique link in the email your invitees receive can only be used by a single person and they’ll be asked to log in before seeing your notes.

Modify my notes (Evernote Premium only)

While all users get the ability to share their notebooks, Evernote Premium subscribers can also grant modification privileges: add, edit, and delete notes. You don’t need to be Premium in order to perform the modification, but you must be Premium in order to allow for modification of your notebooks. It’s important to note that any additions will affect the notebook owner’s monthly upload allowance. Learn more about Evernote Premium »

Linking notebooks into your account

We also made it really simple to keep track of any notebooks that have been shared with you. Whenever you visit someone’s shared notebook, you will see a “Link this to my account” button in the top right corner. Clicking that will add the notebook to your Evernote Web sharing section so you can jump back to the notebook any time you like. Try it now by linking this aspiring super villain’s notebook into your account.

New look

For those of you that published your notebooks in the past, you will see a new interface. The new look is closer to our standard web layout, and is much easier to scan and navigate. We also wanted to make sure that individuals unfamiliar with Evernote would get a consistent web experience throughout the application.

If this is Phase 1, what’s Phase 2?

You (our wonderful users) have been clamoring for selective sharing for some time. So, we decided to make it available in phases as we build out the functionality. Right now, most notebook sharing functions are only available through Evernote Web. Soon, you will be able to share right from your desktop or mobile Evernote. Like with everything else we do, sharing will be everywhere. Our developer API has already been updated to support the new sharing features, and we can’t wait to see what you all come up with.

If you want to join us on the first step of this ambitious journey, you can do three simple things: (1) Make some notebooks that you want to share, (2) invite your friends, (3) tell us how to make Evernote better.

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Ideagora animation.

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Some figures to think about

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Semantic search

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TV news big and small

People in Iran are continuing to contact the BBC's interactive services with their accounts and pictures of recent unrest as tens of thousands again take to the streets of the capital, Tehran, in protest at election results.

Read full article on the BBC.

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Government on the Live Web

Caveat: this is not exhaustive, it does not include all departments (even the Home Office!) It is literally a snapshot and I sincerely hope it will be taken and used by anyone who needs it. I am aware that Ross Ferguson in COI is preparing a repository for this sort of information, so I will not duplicate with another collaborative space, but here is the info for the time being (I have not summarised, nor offered opinion – this is just the information I have been given… enjoy):

DIUS (Steph Gray)

At DIUS, we’ve been experimenting over the last six months with a variety of social media tools and online engagement projects, particularly in the area of consultations and collaboration with stakeholders.

• We developed an interactive version of the Innovation Nation white paper (http://interactive.dius.gov.uk/innovationnation/) published earlier this year, inviting stakeholders to comment on the text of the document and engage in discussions online with policy officials.
• The centrepiece of the Department’s Science and Society consultation (http://interactive.dius.gov.uk/scienceandsociety/) has been a ‘hub’ style site, incorporating a blog, video hosted on our YouTube channel (http://uk.youtube.com/diusgovuk), shared calendar, links to online mentions of the consultation and ‘widget’ versions of the consultation questions for bloggers and stakeholders to embed on their own websites.
• We’ve hosted blogs to support the policy development process in some of our key policy areas including Higher Education (http://hedebate.jiscinvolve.org/) and Informal Adult Learning (http://talk.dius.gov.uk/blogs/adultlearning/), continuing discussions which have started offline, into online spaces.
• We sponsored ‘Meet the Freshers’, an online soap opera on the social network Bebo (http://www.bebo.com/meetthefreshers), supporting our £3m student finance campaign. The partnership included input into the direction of the series, video messages and online promotion linking to a campaign profile page on Bebo where young people can ask questions and get advice on student finance issues.
• Our Science & Innovation news desk use Twitter (http://twitter.com/DIUS_Science) and Flickr (http://www.flickr.com/photos/diusgovuk/) to promote new events, visits and press notices and provide multimedia materials for journalists and bloggers.
• Internally, we’ve been helping press and policy teams to keep up to date with stakeholder news and mentions of the Department’s work on blogs with easy-to-use online ‘dashboard’ tools such as Netvibes – including one we set up to help track mentions of the key issues and partners DIUS needs to engage to address the current economic challenges.(http://www.netvibes.com/diuscommunications#Economic_Challenges).

FCO (Claire Collins)

The Press Office in the FCO has an embedded web team managing the digital news output – working closely with other digital/web collegues.

Within the team in press office is a news editor, an assistant news editor and the photographer.

In terms of social media:

Twitter:

We manage the FCO’s twitter channel http://www.twitter.com/foreignoffice updating frequently throughout the day on news events. We also use twitter to respond to comments and direct messages. Twitter is now seen as a mainstream form of communication in press office.

Flickr:

As the photographer is based in press office and part of the team – we populate the flickr site – in real time – and the site acts as a photographic news channel supporting our news articles. Press office direct the wires and journalists to flickr to download images rather than distributing via email:

http://www.flickr.com/foreignoffice. Anyone can download the photos and comment on the photos.

Press office blog – hosted on tumblr:

We are ‘beta’ testing a press office blog which will act as a way of rebutting inaccuracies in the press and be a way for us to promote upcoming ministerial events etc. We will also use the blog to highlight letters to editors – all in all a useful tool for press office and getting positive response in testing.

YouTube:

Press Officers regularly commission videos for ministerial visits or events in London which are hosted on YouTube – and pulled across onto the website by the news editors.

FCO blogs – press office are involved with this.

There are also the various campaigns which individual press officers work on – which have a social media angle – such as ‘64 for Suu’ or the London Summit. These campaigns are a collaboration between the web team (DDG), press office and strategic communications all increasingly taking into account social media.

DCMS (Mark O’Neill)

We use YouTube for Ministerial films and we are looking at (finally) doing some videoblogging which will be hosted somewhere

We have internal blogging which is available to anyone who wants to use it – mainly the Board and internal service providers. We have external blogging for Ministers.

We have our own platform for consultations but are looking at Communtariat and UserVoice for some future initiatives.

We are piloting Yammer for internal microblogging but so far there is no demand from the business for a corporate Twitter account. Similarly we have not had any demand for a corporate presence on Facebook though a number of our sponsored bodies are doing interesting things.

Oh and we use Netvibes for simple news dashboards.

Press Office use all the above and lead on content.

DEFRA (Daniel De Cruz)

Beta testing a blogging policy official at http://blogs.defra.gov.uk/3rd-sector. Press office enthusiastic but not yet doing anything.

DWP (Neil Franklin)

• Putting a WordPress environment into place
• Viral video (youtube etc)
• Monitoring (using bespoke dashboard – still being built)
• Talking to Press Office about boosting monitoring capability

DFID (Julia Chandler)

Sent you two quick tweets:

juliac2@hubmum neillyneil covered us I think, but to confirm, DFID is on twitter, YouTube, Flickr and Facebook, Youth reporters too

juliac2@hubmum oh yes – and your question – Press interested but not really involved yet. they do help with checking blogs/moderating comments

Press office are interested, but so far have not involved. As mentioned, they moderate blog posts pre-publication (hasn’t resulted in too much upset, but has helped with a couple of potentially risky comments) and they help with moderation.

Twittering is very experimental – but reasonably steady – again, we sit opposite, so run any drafts past them.

Flickr and YouTube they leave to us, but one or two press officers (particularly those who work with 2 of our junior ministers who are interested) have got involved in doing quick video interviews when the ministers have been overseas.

Our white paper team were involved in our open consultation, but press not really involved.

HM Treasury (Daniel Atkinson)

Externally we have a corporate Twitter account which we used to post the highlights of the Budget and had ministerial tweets during G20. Normally it’s used to announce website updates although we are looking to broaden its usage.

We’ve used our Youtube channel to help explain the Budget, feature Q&A sessions from the G20 summit and highlight ministerial activities.

Flickr we use to share images of the Treasury for those who require them which has helped to cut down on the number of individual requests we receive for generic images.

Internally we have a blog by the permanent secretary. This has proven a popular means of engaging staff  in both the wider work of the department and specific events.

The Press Office has been enthusiastic at our use of social media although we’re working on collaborating more closely. The Press Office also check social media content when necessary.

Twitter responses

Local government/authorities

alncl@hubmum Monitoring of soc med fed back to press team by me (where relevant).

alncl@hubmum Twitter, YouTube and FB at the moment, Flickr in the pipeline. Press office feed RSS to Twitter and FB, more planned with YouTube.

martinxo@hubmum #snappoll SM used by webteam only at the mo’, slowly talking to other depts/services, press office not the best place to start IMHO

Commission for rural communities

russelltanner@hubmum we’re using Twitter, Youtube, wikis (internally), commenting/ discussions on website, led by comms team

BERR

neillyneil@hubmum See my lists of gov YouTubers and Twitterers on my blog. & Here at BERR @digitalbritain is led by a press officer.

neillyneil@hubmum …and exploring SNMRs now, inspired by @lesteph

Neil’s blog post is here on UK government on twitter http://neilojwilliams.net/missioncreep/2009/the-uk-government-on-twitter/

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So is the regime of truth, the language of 'journalism' shfting, under stress, struggle? Maybe even wider in terms of ideas of 'investigation', depth etc.

People have a dizzying choice of media. But has a 'cut and paste' culture left no room for in-depth news?

Journalists always seem to be in some state of self-doubt, but with the recession, it is a particularly anxious time. Journalists here at the Deutsche Welle's Global Medium Forum wondered whether there was still room for in-depth news despite the huge range of channels and platforms.

The panel discussing the subject included:

• Ruxandra Obreja, Controller Business Development, BBC World Service

• Kris Boswell, Team Leader, SR (Sweden)

• Petra Kohnen, CEO, Euranet

• Arthur Landwehr, Editor-in-chief, ARD-SWR (Southwest Germany)

• Lem van Eupen, Head of Strategy and Business Development, Radio Netherlands - World

The new choices available to consumers now are huge: Free newspapers, commercial radio, commercial TV, public radio, public TV and Millions of blog sites, said Kris Boswell of Swedish Radio, adding:

But if you look closer, much of this news is copy and paste from wire service.

He works with a team of six producing news about Sweden in English, and the person who writes the news stories, also puts it online and reads it on the air as well. A decade ago, they only produced a one-half hour news programme a day. But with the internet, you have to get it up online because if you don't, your competitors will. You have to write copy for radio news and also for the internet. He said:

It takes time, time that in the past that they would have taken digging out sources and investigations in the past.

He doesn't like sound bite journalism but likes to hear what people have to say. The internet has brought competition. Swedish Radio is putting more funds into investigative journalism, and Boswell believes that investigative journalism is key because "everyone can cut and paste agency copy".

He used to work at the BBC, and he said that often several people there can be working on the same story. He said that news organisations needed to reduce duplication to free up resources to do other things.

Petra Kohnen talked about a service created by the European Commission focused on European affairs, Euranet. They broadcast and 10 languages and have sites in 9 languages. They hope to increase this to 23 langauges in the future. They hope to create value-added content to differentiate themselves from the already crowded market..

For instance, they can give perspectives on major issues such as healthcare from the perspective of countries across Europe.

Moderator Ruxandra Obreja of the BBC asked if we have enough time to cope with all of this information. Deep investigation takes money and time. Journalists take days or weeks for investigations. Are we going to click, click, click?

Lem van Eupen of Radio Netherlands World said that the explosion in platforms and channels had to dramatically increased competition for the attention of people.

While some broadcasters have focused on trying to increase their reach and generate large audiences, as a relatively small organisation, Radio Netherlands had conceded that it would never have the audiences as large as the BBC. Instead of trying to have large broad audiences, her broadcaster has taken a different approach trying to target niche groups and niche themes. While they might not be able to compete with the BBC, they want to be number one in a few areas, such as international justice issues. They focus on building these stories, day-by-day so that profoundness is increasing not decreasing.

Obreja said, "For journalists, bad news is good news. Recession." There is more interest in written press, radio and television than ever. Since 1870, we have had 265 examples of economic recessions. But there has never been a story where we had 100m cameras where everyone can become a Facebook writer, a video producer on YouTube or could be Twittering away at 140 characters. It's not just about clicks, but it asks questions about the role of journalist himself or herself.

Arthur Landwehr said that bad news might be good news for journalists but people don't feel the need for journalism.

That doesn't mean that professional journalists aren't important. He told the story of how a journalist posted an old story United Airlines filing for bankruptcy wiped out $1bn in stock value.

We're getting used to free newspapers. Free television. Free radio. This cake of advertising doesn't grow but the slices are getting small and smaller. He fears that as resources get squeezed that companies might choose or be forced to choose slick radio packages being produced by PR agencies and dressed up as news.

Drag and drop news. In the best case they come from news wires. Worst case from blogs. Who checks blogs?

If we invest in quality journalism, then people know that you can tune in everynight.

Obreja said that listeners and viewers want something to know and something to think about. Maybe this is something for the viewer to decide. Are we trying to say that we're still trying to say that journalists are still important? Are there platforms that are more suitable to one kind of journalism than another?

Lem van Eupen said that with the wealth of platforms now available that journalists can create mixtures of stories. She couldn't imagene a documentary on mobile. But on mobile. she said that you could have "interesting bits and pieces".

Landwehr agreed that journalism is important not only for us but for audience. Role of journalism is changing. Every bit and piece of information is out there. We are becoming more and more discussed. When it comes to different channels, editors now need to consider what is the best channel for different types of news. For breaking news, mobile might be best for that. Podcasts for longer form listening. We are looking to have a 360 degree service on all channels.

Again, one of the panel dismissed blogs. Boswell said:

All of those who work for international broadcaster know that we have to put things into context. In a lot of blogs, you get a lot of verbatim quotes. But you don't get context.

The questions were dominated by concerns that journalists were being asked to do too much with too little time. A member of the audience, a foreign editor at the largest newspaper in Luxembourg said that he is concerned that if quality newspapers fail that free newspapers won't have content.

Landwehr said that this was the big question: What is the monetary value of news?

Mercedes Bunz, an online editor for the Berlin newspaper said that forcing people to pay for content will not solve this crisis in news.

This haunting of paid content has come back. Let me tell you frankly, there is no way that this will work. There is a deep shift in information culture. We are pretending that people want to come to us and look at our pages. Normally, a news portal, a person goes there only four times a month. This is not only the younger generation. It is not a problem with younger people. We live in an information age. It is everywhere. This is a fundamental shift.

Listen to what else she has to say about the differences between print and online journalism and why paid content won't work.

Personally, I think they were painting blogs with a very broad brush when they rubbished them as not being credible. Just as there is a huge range of quality in journalism, your mileage may vary with blogs. Blogs can be a great source of expertise or experiences, but journalists have to assess them as they would any other source. But it's wrong to generalise about the acitivities of millions of people around the world.

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So was the disc money well spent?

Daily Telegraph gains 2.29% month on month on MPs' expenses, with 3.08% year-on-year fall beating market

A string of exclusives about MPs' expenses boosted sales of the Daily Telegraph by an average of 18,718 copies a day in May.

Average daily sales of The Daily Telegraph rose 2.29% in May compared with April, to 836,410, according to the the latest figures from the Audit Bureau of Circulations, published today.

Sales of the Telegraph Media Group flagship were down 3.08% year on year – but this was the best result in the daily quality or middle market and was beaten only by the Daily Star, which has slashed its price to 20p. May circulations would have been affected across the board by the two bank holiday weekends.

Combined extra sales at Daily Telegraph and Sunday Telegraph since their Expenses Files investigation first appeared on Friday 8 May total more than 1m copies, the company said. Sales on the first day were 87,000 copies above the Daily Telegraph's base level.

Murdoch MacLennan, chief executive of Telegraph Media Group, praised staff and editor-in-chief Will Lewis: "Will Lewis and his team have done a brilliant job with the MPs' expenses scoop. It just shows what a great news story and good journalism can do for newspaper sales."

Steve McLaughlin, the group's newspaper sales director, added: "It's clear that sales have benefited greatly from this scoop. To date, the Daily Telegraph and the Sunday Telegraph have sold over a million extra copies since 8 May. And these latest ABC figures show we have increased our market share on the previous month."

Last month the Daily Telegraph also benefited from a promotion with WH Smith, which offered readers a free bottle of water if they bought the paper.

The Independent's circulation plunged 15.01% compared with May 2008 to a daily average of 204,413 sales last month. But the paper's circulation was steady when compared with April.

In May the Financial Times continued to feel the effects of its April price rise, to £2 on weekdays and to £2.50 for FT Weekend.

The FT was down 8.8% year on year to 410,928 copies globally. Pearson's financial title, down 2.41% on April, also increased its price twice last year.

Last month the Guardian, which raised the price of its Saturday edition by 10p to £1.70 on 18 April, had an average daily circulation of 335,615, down 2.23% compared with April. The circulation of the paper, part of the same group as MediaGuardian.co.uk, fell 18,207 copies or 5.15% year on year.

Sales of the the Times fell 5.63% on May 2008 to 591,137 copies a day. This was steady on April.

More details soon...

• To contact the MediaGuardian news desk email editor@mediaguardian.co.uk or phone 020 3353 3857. For all other inquiries please call the main Guardian switchboard on 020 3353 2000.

• If you are writing a comment for publication, please mark clearly "for publication".

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Around the world not all news is equal... easy or safe.

Eynulla Fatullayev, 'truly courageous editor' imprisoned on dubious charges, wins prize in Amnesty journalism awards

A newspaper editor from Azerbaijan who has been beaten up, threatened, and jailed for eight and a half years on dubious charges after criticising his government last night received a special prize at the Amnesty International Media Awards.

Eynulla Fatullayev was arrested in April 2007, following years of harassment by the authorities, and was given a two-and-a-half-year sentence for libel. In October 2007, he was convicted on further charges including terrorism and his prison term was increased by six years.

Yesterday evening Amnesty International UK director Kate Allen named 32-year-old Fatullayev as the winner of the charity's special award for journalism under threat. John Mulholland, the editor of the Observer, part of the group that publishes MediaGuardian.co.uk, accepted the prize on the jailed editor's behalf at a ceremony at the British Film Institute in London. Amnesty said there was no plausible evidence to back up the "trumped-up" charges against Fatullayev. Instead, the Azerbaijani government appeared determined to silence his "independent reporting", the human rights group said.

Giving the prize, Allen described Fatullayev as a "truly courageous editor".

"The Amnesty International special award for journalism under threat recognises the work of a particularly brave journalist. People like Eynulla face constant opposition and great personal risk, simply for exercising their human right to freedom of expression and doing their job as a professional journalist," she said.

"Amnesty calls on the authorities in Azerbaijan to release Eynulla Fatullayev immediately and to stop its attempts to stifle freedom of expression."

Azerbaijan is one of several post-Soviet countries with a dismal record on freedom of expression. With the possible exceptions of Ukraine and Georgia, no post-communist country has developed a strong culture of independent media reporting, with critical journalists routinely facing harassment, imprisonment, attack and even murder.

In Russia several opposition journalists have been mysteriously killed. They include Anna Politkovskaya, a scathing critic of the Kremlin and special correspondent for the newspaper Novaya Gazeta, who was shot dead in October 2006 outside her Moscow flat.

On Monday, a 27-year-old Russian journalist, Yelena Maglevannaya, requested political asylum in Finland after writing about a Chechen man tortured in prison, and receiving a lawsuit from the local authorities.

Fatullayev started two newspapers: the Azeri-language Azerbaijan Daily and the Russian-language Real Azerbaijan.

Both became known for criticising government officials, and were closed down after inspections. Fatullayev also worked for the opposition newspaper the Monitor, whose editor Elmar Hüseynov was murdered in March 2005. The murder is unsolved, with Fatullayev in 2007 accusing high-ranking officials of ordering it.

Amnesty yesterday described the situation for Azerbaijani journalists as "very bad", with four of their number currently in jail. Amnesty plans to deliver a petition to Azerbaijan's London embassy on 29 June.

"Every person has a vocation. Eynulla's vocation is to be a journalist," Fatullayev's father, Emin, said. "He misses work very much. A person who was occupied with journalism from morning to evening, he has been in prison for two years. He is in prison for the truth."

• To contact the MediaGuardian news desk email editor@mediaguardian.co.uk or phone 020 3353 3857. For all other inquiries please call the main Guardian switchboard on 020 3353 2000.

• If you are writing a comment for publication, please mark clearly "for publication".

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'Reinvent journalism'. Regime of truth again, struggling over the (power-full) truth of news and what journalism IS.

(My friend Nick gave a great graduation speech on Wednesday, at Columbia Journalism School. As Columbia hasn’t posted the speech themselves, I’m putting it up here. -clay)

Commencement 2009

Welcome, everyone, and warmest congratulations and good wishes to all our graduates and our families.

Columbia Journalism School is rapidly approaching a very important milestone, our centennial, but if I am doing the math correctly, today is a significant anniversary too: this is our seventy-fifth conferring of graduate degrees (before that we were an undergraduate school). As our older alumni often remind us, back in the early days of the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, the room on the third floor of our building that you know as the Lecture Hall was outfitted as a newspaper city room, complete with desks in rows and a small printing press set off in the corner.

Today we offer three different graduate degrees. We teach journalism in many different media and on many different subjects. The Lecture Hall is no longer a newsroom. But we still operate on the principle that if a course can possibly take the form of a guided exercise in doing journalism, it will. The number of individual journalistic Web sites launched every academic year from within our building is now up in the dozens.

One of the great things about a university setting is that it permits us, while we are doing our work, also to think about its larger purpose, more than most of us will ever have the chance to do while working at a news organization. (And as you saw a couple of hours ago during President Bollinger’s commencement speech, we are not the only people thinking about our larger purpose.) That is what I would like to spend a few minutes on today, as my parting words to you.

My generation was raised to think that journalism worked this way: owning a newspaper, especially a big-city newspaper, was a “public trust.” So was owning a local television station, and for that matter a television network. (Alex Jones and Susan Tifft’s 1999 biography of The New York Times is simply and grandly called “The Trust,” for example.) We assumed that news organizations were naturally very profitable; the idea of them as a public trust meant that their owners had an obligation to operate them at a handsome, but less than maximal, profit, so that they could fund newsrooms filled with dogged, independent journalists who would report on public affairs, at home and abroad.

Although the word “public” in “public trust” implies a quasi-governmental function, we did not mean that government should have anything to do with news organizations. They should be insulated from the state and from politics. We preferred that family dynasties own newspapers—this was an oddly feudal vision of the good, which we probably wouldn’t have had much patience for if someone had proposed it in other domains. Our job, as journalists, was to speak out, loudly, for the value and independence of journalism. We were to keep the government and powerful private interests away, and keep the family dynasties mindful of their public, but not public-sector, obligations.

The obvious problem with this vision today is that many big news organizations are no longer making the profits that were supposed to fund great journalism. This sudden and dramatic change has generated a big, urgent conversation about the need for a “new business model” for news production. That conversation is important, but it isn’t all-important. There is a subtler but no less pressing need for a different kind of conversation, which will take place in a wider realm, about our purpose—what we do and how we interact with other elements in society.

For most of my career, journalists, like most other professionals, had a robust, vigorous, tough-minded ongoing internal conversation about what the standards and norms governing our work should be. We felt that our own judgments about what good journalism was, achieved after a lot of argument, should be accepted by the rest of the world. So, like members of an extended family, we should be internally disputatious and externally unified. We should defend, stand up for, journalism.

But this is no longer a good way of defining how we should conduct public conversation, when, so to speak, we are outside the family circle. First, we have a palette of standard journalistic forms—many of which you have just learned how to execute while you were here. They grew up over the years, in response to commercial imperatives, technology, and the judgments of our profession. They have always been in a process of evolution, but it seems certain that they are going to evolve more rapidly over these next few years.

It’s amazing to think about how many new journalistic forms have been developed over these last few years, because of the Internet: blogs, wikis, interactive graphics, animations, audio slide shows, and so on. If you keep constant our basic mission of gathering, assessing, and presenting information, the specific ways in which we do this are changing more rapidly than at any time I can remember. And we don’t get to decide on our own how they change—that depends on what the technology permits us to do, what provides an economic basis for our work, and what our audiences respond to. This is not a time for journalists to say, “We have decided that the traditional news story is the best basic form of news delivery, so we’re doggedly sticking with it.” This is, instead, and more interestingly, a time for experimentation, which also means it’s a time for listening.

Second, and more broadly, we have been in the habit of assuming that whatever appears in a newspaper or a magazine or on a broadcast or a news organization’s Web site is available there uniquely, and represents a distinctive and irreplaceable contribution to public life. I spent a lot of my time these days talking to non-journalists about journalism, and I can tell you that we all have to learn to make a more sophisticated argument for ourselves.

Much of the public that we believe we are serving needs to be persuaded that it cannot find out what’s going on in the world simply by looking at non-journalistic Web sites and blogs—that there is a special value to the work that news organizations do. Conversely, we need to be more precise in our thinking about exactly how we are serving that oft-mentioned cause, the public’s right to know, at a time when, thanks to the Internet, the public has more free unmediated access to information than at any time in the history of the world. It may be that the particulars of how we execute our general mission will have to change quite a lot for us to be able to make the strongest possible case for the value of our profession. We have to be willing to explore all that undefensively, with energy and enthusiasm.

The kind of journalism that we have trained you to do—reporting—requires economic support. American journalism’s traditional systems of support have eroded in recent years. We have to find new ones. Some of these will be commercial, some will be philanthropic, and some will be public. That is the case for all professions. It is the case for ours already, but in these next few years our reliance on a mix of support systems, many of which will be new, will become more obvious than it has been.

So this is your charge. You will not only have to reinvent journalism, you will also have to reinvent the conversation about journalism, making it less internal to the profession, and more interactive with the rest of society. That’s an enormous job; I wonder whether any generation of journalists has had a more momentous mission than yours. But, to me, and I hope to you too, it sounds like fun. Good luck. We’ll miss you.

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How could a thinking meeja org use this?

Google have announced something really rather interesting called Wave.

(Warning: looooooong video)

Essentially,

A wave is equal parts conversation and document. People can communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more.

A wave is shared. Any participant can reply anywhere in the message, edit the content and add participants at any point in the process. Then playback lets anyone rewind the wave to see who said what and when.

A wave is live. With live transmission as you type, participants on a wave can have faster conversations, see edits and interact with extensions in real-time.

Lots of people are very excited about it. Take TechCrunch, for example:

Wave offers a very sleek and easy way to navigate and participate in communication on the web that makes both email and instant messaging look stale.

What is really interesting is the way that Wave will work as an open standard, with APIs available to developers to make it possible to embed the way Wave does things into other applications.

Of course, before we get too excited about Wave, we need to remember Knol, Sites (which I actually quite like, but no-one else seems to) and Base. Google gets a lot of stuff wrong.

But when they get things right, such as with Gmail and of course search, the results can be devastating. For that reason alone, it’s vital to keep up with Wave and its development.

Possibly related posts:

• Google: not just search
• EtherPad - cool collaboration tool!
• Working better together
• FriendConnect
• Gmail gets better with labs

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Audio snapshots, a new scopic retgime?

UK sound-sharing website AudioBoo, also available on iPhone, attracts 1m page views in first three months

It has captured the birth of a new baby, clashes at the G20 protests, London marathon runners gasping for breath, cheery observations from Stephen Fry and bad jokes from Tony Blackburn. Less than three months since its launch, the sound-sharing website AudioBoo, is well on the way to becoming the YouTube of the spoken word.

Its success has prompted media companies to incorporate it into coverage of this summer's festivals and sporting events. ITV's coverage of the FA Cup later this month, for example, will hear fans' views of the game and armchair commentaries via AudioBoo on their mobile phones. And the British Library wants to use it to capture dialects, accents, oral histories and neighbourhood soundscapes.

"It's not only a recording device, it's also a publishing device and that's its great appeal," said Richard Ranft, the head of the library's sound archive. "It has fantastic potential – it allows people to easily capture an event as it happens. All you need is your phone, you don't have to use recording equipment."

AudioBoo, which was partly funded by Channel 4, was launched in March as a website and free iPhone application, although it can now be used on other mobiles and landlines. It allows users to make "boos" – digital recordings – up to five minutes long. At the press of button, they can then be published online as a mini-podcast. The AudioBoo website allows users to comment on the recordings, share them on other sites, and follow other users.

Its take-up has been encouraged by celebrities and the media's use of boos at news events, including the Guardian's coverage of the G20 protests.

Stephen Fry's endorsement to his 450,000 followers on Twitter also helped. The broadcaster and gadget enthusiast has recorded boos, complete with audience participation, while hosting TV show QI and at the recording of the new series of the Radio 4 programme I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue. At one point Fry's first boo was being listened to 46 times a second.

Mark Rock, the head of a small team who devised AudioBoo in an office beside a railway line in south London, points to a graph that tracks growth over the last three months. "That's the G20 spike, that's the Stephen Fry spike, that's the Tony Blackburn spikette, and that's Chris Moyles," he said.

Blackburn's transatlantic DJ's patter is currently one of the prolific voices on Audioboo. "It's reinvented him," said Rock. "He keeps ringing me up and now he wants to do radio phone-ins on AudioBoo." There have even been tribute boos to Blackburn.

It was when Chris Moyles starting using the service and playing Blackburn's boos on his Radio 1 breakfast show earlier this month that it began to go mainstream.

In the last week alone more 66 hours of material were uploaded – almost a fifth of its total since March.

This week the website is expected to top more than 1m page views since it launched and 30,000 downloads to mobiles, making it one of the most successful UK-made iPhone applications.

Most of the users are in the UK, but a random 24-hour period last week illustrates how AudioBoo is being used and how it's spreading. Recordings included: a cat purring in Brooklyn; office banter in Kosovo; 10-pin bowling in Cardiff; square dancing in Berlin; a steam train in Australia; two lads from Yorkshire talking on helium; clarinet practising in Ayrshire; the sound of the Dutch coast; the dawn chorus in Sefton; doing the laundry in Bangkok; a bootleg clip of a concert in Brighton; and swearing from a traffic jam on the M6.

James Cridland, head of future media technology at the BBC, says such content is a goldmine for radio stations. "Letting your listeners generate great audio will really transform your radio station – far more than texts or emails ever will," he said.

AudioBoo has been talked about as next thing in social networking. Some fear it will simply be a spoken version of banal Twitter updates. Or worse – boos on the lavatory are disturbingly frequent. 

"The rubbish makes you appreciate the good ones," said Rock.

Cridland said it would not compete with Twitter or radio. "It's probably going to be more niche than that – it's primarily audio so it's hard to play around with while you're at work. But it brings back the power of the spoken voice."

Ranft agrees. "I'm pleased people are  talking about in terms of it reinventing radio. It's difficult to convey emotions in text, but it comes across immediately in the voice," he said.

He is talking to Rock about setting up AudioBoo channels for the library's sound archive to help members of the public build up its research collection. Schoolchildren could get involved to record how telltale words such as bath are pronounced in their area, Ranft says.

"It takes recording out of the realm of the specialist," he said.

Rock imagines publishing daily boos from the library's archive. "If a recording of Queen Victoria popped up I'd listen to it, just as I listened to Tony Blackburn's first audioboo."

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Create your own daily me with added meta news

Here are some Twitter publishing and tracking tools that I’ve been using a lot recently…

TweetDeck – installs on your desktop and is a useful program from publishing and monitoring Twitter activity – www.tweetdeck.com

TweetStats – provides statistics about your Twitter activity, and if you put others’ names in you can get data about their activity – www.tweetstats.com

TwitGraph – more or less the same as above, not as nice an interface but you can save the graphs as JPGs to drop into reports – www.twitgraph.com

TwitterFall – initially quite confusing, this is useful for tracking activity on Twitter – www.twitterfall.com

TweetBurner – shortens and allows you to track use of your URLs – www.tweetburner.com

Trendrr – compare Twitter trend activity – www.trendrr.com

What are you using?