Digital yarns

“Human beings are natural-born story tellers. When memories fail in old age, the stories are the last thing to go” – Daniel Meadows


Stories round the campfire

Stories are part of what binds cultures together. After all, storytelling was one of the first ways of preserving history. Gathered around the camp fire, the young people would learn from their elders about their past through hearing tales that had been handed down from generation to generation.

But memories can fade, and not every story will be passed on. But in this digital age, there is a new way of preserving these stories so that future generations will have access to them and keep the memories alive. Please take a bow then, digital storytelling. These are short multimedia narratives that harness the power of pictures, spoken word, and occasionally video and music, to bring the story to life in the way that words alone simply aren’t able to do.

The beauty of digital storytelling is that they preserve a snapshot of life, or a memory, which may have otherwise been forgotten but through the internet, can be told to millions of people. Aboriginal Cultures and Traditions Storytelling, a Canadian website, does just that, by recording the tales of various storytellers of native Canadian ancestry. Although they are not strictly digital stories in the form that Daniel Meadows has created, they are nevertheless a great insight into the way digital is helping, and not hindering, tradition.

So what does this all mean for journalists? The journalist essentially is, or should be, a storyteller of real life. By reporting events, journalists are providing snapshots of life, preserving information and memories. The only difference now is that people want to tell the stories themselves. And now, thanks to the diffusion of technology, people have access to tools that enable them to do this. After all, as Daniel Meadows has said, the journalist should be the facilitator of stories. They should act as a conduit through which people’s voices are heard. Up until now, journalists have taken on the role of speaking for the masses, but now the masses want to talk for themselves.

So by journalists enabling these digital stories to be put across, as well as making them themselves, this is another way in which journalists can spread news as well as interact with their audience. And contrary to what some techno-sceptics may say, I feel that telling stories through multimedia does not diminish other platforms. Print, for example, will always be around and some stories may simply work better in print than in video and vice versa. It is just about choosing the right way in which to tell the story.

One form of media should not feel that it is in competition with another. Radio didn’t kill the newspaper, and TV didn’t bump off radio. As Ian Hargreaves has said in his book Journalism: Truth of Dare?, “Radio, rather than being squashed by television, has also entered a new and dramatic growth phase. In the pre-digital era of the 1990s, Britain went from under 50 to 250 commercial radio stations. Digital radio will increase that by an unknowable factor.” Different media can coexist and complement eachother. And as long as the story gets told in the best possible way, surely that's the most important thing.

Photo by Adrianne Lacy at Flickr

Mix and mingle, web 2.0 style

Mingling with fellow journalists down the pub, or rubbing shoulders with potential contacts at a business dinner – all valid forms of networking but these days, it seems, the hobnobbing is being done online.

Social networking sites and applications have created a wealth of resources that journalists can use to contact people that they previously wouldn’t have been able to reach. Web 2.0 has opened up a whole new way of interacting with the community. As Alison Gow discussed in her blog, journalists can now use applications such as Twitter to extend their network, find potential interviewees and follow up leads.

So let’s say, for instance, that I decide to write a story about unusual things that people collect. I then ask all my contacts about whether they know anyone with usual collections but no one comes up trumps. In a web 1.0 world, I might have had to discard the story but in web 2.0, my contacts don’t stop after I’ve exhausted my address book: in web 2.0, contacts can be endless.

So, for example, I could pop onto Twitter, throw the question out there and see whether anyone replies:





If that doesn’t work, I could just go and do a Twitter search to see if anyone has discussed unusual collections and hopefully then, I have a potential story! Of course, just like any journalist working in web 1.0 or earlier, I would verify that the contact does indeed have a fascination with milk bottle top collecting, but if everything checks out ok, then I have my first interviewee.

This is just the tip of the iceberg. By engaging with the online community, we can gauge people’s reactions to our articles, and open up a dialogue using the article as a spring board. This could create a sense of bonding with the reader, lead to follow-up articles based on reader’s comments, and become part of the wider conversation, rather than trying to speak above it.

But of course inviting comments from the online community can have its downsides, one of them being trolls.





These ugly little critters are basically online users who make a habit of posting aggressive, insulting messages on forums, blogs, wherever, in order to provoke emotional responses from other users. These are an occupational hazard for the journalist, or anyone else, who wants to engage with the online community, and people just have to rise above those who just want to be deliberately vindictive under the cloak of anonymity. But as Kristine Lowe reported, Norwegian social network, Origo, has introduced anti-troll measures which seem to be forcing the gremlins back into their holes.

The idea behind it is that people are less likely to troll if they can only blog using their own name – suddenly insulting people at random isn’t so much fun if everyone knows who you really are. It’s a great idea, and although it would be harder to implement over here in the UK because we don’t have to register our mobile number by law, it would definitely be worth a try and banish those trolls from whence they came.

Troll photo courtesy of Tyler Platt, aka Chromafly

Does journalism need citizen journos for survival?

Can citizen journalism coexist with traditional journalism? The short answer is of course, but it seems to me that this relationship has become more than mere coexistence – it is a question of survival, for both sides. Let me explain.

Journalism, as we all know, is taking an economic battering. And not only is ad revenue and newspaper circulation falling, but in the face of dwindling finances, many media owners seem more determined than ever to wring every penny they can out of their companies. Cue hundreds of journalist staff cuts across all the platforms, and it soon becomes very clear that it is just not possible for journalism to cover anything like the geographical area it used to. There are simply not enough journalists to go round. Regional news is suffering the most now, and national news will duly follow – after all, national news depends on gleaning stories from the regionals, and news shortages will pass right up the food chain – no one is unaffected.

Which is where citizen journalists come in. We need citizen journalists to shed light on stories that would otherwise sink under the radar. News is now emanating from locations that journalists these days are unable to cover. Citizen journalism to the rescue!

Or is it? Is citizen journalism actually largely responsible for some of professional journalism’s financial problems? Which begs the classic chicken and the egg conundrum: which came first, traditional journalism’s decline or citizen journalism’s rise? Perhaps the decline in newspaper sales is down to the fact that citizen journalists are supplying more varied news for free, or maybe the reduction in the media’s ability to report news from more locations has fuelled citizen journalism’s rise, giving it increased value and importance.

Of course, it’s not that simple, but from what I understand, newspaper sales were diminishing well before citizen journalism was even out of the womb. Rather than being used as a scapegoat for professional journalism’s woes, citizen journalism could instead be used to bolster the newsrooms. Professional journalism lacks the resources to be able to find the stories that citizens in all corners of the earth are able to bring to the world’s attention. And citizen journalism can’t, in my opinion, go it alone because it lacks the credibility of professional journalism. In other words, they need each other.

Having said all this, you would probably assume that I’m a devout worshipper at the cradle of User Generated Content, but you’d be wrong: I can’t deny that the rise of citizen journalism is making me a little bit nervous, not just for my future career but for journalism as a whole. I have more than a few concerns over the fact that citizen journalists can effectively libel and defame their way across the internet without anything to stop them. Professional journalists must learn media law, strive for objectivity and abide by ethical codes, and if they don’t, they are often heavily penalised. Citizen journalists, however, can skip along, spreading opinionated news, inaccuracies or just plain libel without great fear of repercussions. Although it's a spoof, some aspects of the video do have a ring of truth around them. Take these voice-over quotes, for instance:

"People will believe anything these days, so make up a story, fact or fiction."

"If you want to create a stir, manipulate your work so it appears more newsworthy."

"As your popularity grows, so does your credibility."

A million miles away from what sometimes really happens? I don't think so.


Video by citizenjournalist50 at YouTube

Ultimately, until citizen journalists are willing to run by the same rule book that trained professionals must, then they don’t merit the title of journalist. Although some may believe that journalism is a trade rather than a profession, trades still have codes of conduct. And to be a journalist, you have to start behaving like one. Richard Stokoe, head of news at the Local Government, suggests establishing some ground rules for citizen journos, but crucially doesn't say how they would be implemented, which is a key hurdle in the debate. But once this is resolved, then hopefully both professional and citizen journos alike can work together better towards what is meant to be a common goal: spreading truthful, accurate news.

SEO: Optimising or cheapening journalism?

What’s the best way of trying to lure as many people as possible towards this blog? High quality journalism perhaps? Dazzling originality? Or perhaps just a few popular keywords that will bump up my entry on Google?

Ideally, I’d like to think it’s the first two answers, but pragmatically, I fear it’s the latter one. Because no matter how good the content is, no one is ever going to read it unless they’re able to discover it first, and to do that, it means rating high up in search engine results. Of course this isn’t the only way to get yourself noticed – word of mouth, an established reputation or a platform with a media institution certainly help. But even that is not always enough to make even a ripple in the vast ocean of the internet.

According to David Sifry, founder of Technorati, there were over 133 million blogs out there as of September 22nd 2008, and those are just the ones that the website is tracking, minus spamming blogs. But the number of people who actually read them is, well, quite substantially less, shall we say. However this isn’t about blogs per se, but rather the staggering torrent of information, news and views out there with which individual media platforms have to compete. Everyone wants to make their voices heard, and so professional journalism needs to shout even louder. And to do that, a tidy little acronym called SEO is one way that newspapers and other online media platforms are trying to lure the millions of online users to listen to them.

SEO, or Search Engine Optimisation, is all about trying to increase the number of people visiting your web-page by including popular search terms in the web-pages’ content. So, think about a popular search term at the moment: Halle Berry is, according to Yahoo today, the most popular search term in the UK. So, by including loads of references to her, I am thereby, in theory, increasing the likelihood of people visiting this blog. The fact that those people who are hoping to see naked pictures of Halle will be sorely disappointed is by the by. The important thing is that they have been drawn to the site, and hopefully will stick around a while to read it. That’s the hope anyway.

SEO is now being implemented by some media organisations in order to maximise their readership. The Daily Telegraph has instructed its writers to make sure they include popular search terms in their articles, but this has given rise to criticism from various quarters that SEO is cheapening journalism. Are journalists becoming slaves to SEO, guilty of tricking readers into clicking to their article with false promises of Halle Berry in the buff? Both Private Eye and The Guardian’s Charlie Brooker have mocked what they see as the Telegraph blatantly chasing after readers at a cost to its journalism by slotting in popular search terms into their copy. As Brooker commented, “There's something uniquely demented about slotting specific words and phrases into a piece simply to con people into reading it. Why bother writing a news article at all? Why not just scan in a few naked photos and have done with it?”

Surely this is making a mockery of journalism, reducing it to the level of “a reality TV wannabe who turns up to the auditions in a gaudy fluorescent thong in a desperate bid to be noticed” as Brooker puts it. By having to use certain key words to drive audiences towards their articles, it gives off a whiff of selling out to the advertisers and search engines, cheapening the articles to the verge of farcical.

But, on the other hand, why shouldn’t media institutions use SEO if it helps drive more readers their way? In the face of diminishing newspaper sales, media platforms are becoming more and more dependent on advertising revenue. It’s a simple equation: more unique users = more money from advertising, and SEO is a way of maximising that income, even if there is a risk of sometimes undermining the quality of journalism.

Ciaran Norris and Tad Chef have both lambasted The Guardian’s sniffy stance towards SEO as unrealistic in this digital age. And The Telegraph’s Shane Richmond responded to SEO criticisms from the Guardian by pointing out that SEO is “about writing and structuring your story in such a way that it can be found online. Doing that enables you to reach readers who don’t visit, and perhaps don’t even know about, your website. Do it well enough and consistently enough and those people might be tempted to become regular readers.

“It’s about making sure you can be found. No different from making sure your newspaper is available in every newsagent in the land.” The Daily Telegraph are simply trying to maximise their readership, and SEO is a handy tool that enables them to do this.

So is SEO a necessary yet harmless way of garnering readers or a weapon that is cheapening online journalism? In some senses, SEO is a double-edged sword. Use it and there’s the potential of skewering the journalism. Don’t, and you run the risk of less people even reading the articles. Many readers will still flock to established media brands to get their news, but with competition, partly in the form of citizen journalism, blogs and others, cropping up all around, the fight for users is intensifying by the minute. And in the battlefield of the internet, SEO may just be the extra ammunition one needs.


(To all those readers who really were expecting a picture of Halle Berry in the nude, I'm sorry to disappoint you, but just so you don't feel too short-changed, here’s a photo anyway - with her clothes on):





Photo courtesy of indoloony at Flickr