Apr

18

The Editor is You

Filed Under Blog, eBook, eLearning, Industry Analysis, internet, mobile content, news media, Publishing, social media, Thomson, Uncategorized | 4 Comments

For a brief but happy period I rejoiced in the somewhat overblown title of “Executive Publisher” at Thomas Nelson and Sons Ltd, and was delighted when one of the handful of Edinburgh -sourced executives who had made the long journey with the company to London reminded me portentously that I was “sitting on the chair once graced by John Buchan”. And, indeed, Buchan in his writing days was also editorial director, keeping things safe for his old friend Tommy Nelson while that great leader was at the War – from which he never returned. So I responded with alacrity to a London Book Fair press release from Faber in which they announced an app for “The Thirty Nine Steps” (published in 1915) to create a “fully playable, fully immersive” (if its neither I shall want my money back) new product. This app includes “classic stop-frame animation and original silent film music”: what a huge mound of mine-able data this one book has produced. Hopefully the beautifully taut story-telling of Buchan himself is somewhere in there alongside what Henry Volans, digital supremo at Faber, calls “a new way of reading, with John Buchan’s story at its heart, presented afresh through a TV and gaming-inspired lens”.

I love this and want it to work: at the same time I get all sorts of goosebumps about what the result might be. I believe passionately that the network will produce art forms of its own. The long history of gaming, graphic novels, manga, picaresque narrative, novels of manners, film and television, and animated developments of all types from cartoons onwards, must, if our culture plays out true to type, be antecedents to something else. Clearly narrative is very important and clearly visualization is as well. In the same PR tranche a further Faber announcement indicated that the new Ian Pears novel, Arcadia, to be published next year, will appear first of all in an “semi-interactive” form, and only subsequently in a printed form. Here again is evidence of open-mindedness, though I found the idea that Mr Pears, whose writing I have enjoyed, wrote the novel, according to the Guardian (16 April) “inspired by quantum physics, and written in “nodes” which had been mapped to a graph constructed after consultation with an Oxford Mathematics professor. The aim was to create an infinite number of ways in which the story could be read -“. That word “infinite” has a whiff of the publicity department about it if you ask me, especially since Mr Pears later says “I’m still in charge of the story because I am arrogant enough to feel that I’m a better story-teller”.

Never mind. This is brave and ambitious stuff. The announcement occurred in this same week when The Guardian itself launched its own first essay in Citizen Journalism (see my 4 April blog on “Editorial Views and Viewers”). The Guardian has not gone for nOtice, but has created an app of its own for community responses and submissions. TNW characterized it like this:

“You can access the app via the Web, but there’s also native incarnations for Android and iOS. To contribute content to GuardianWitness, you need to create an account, either using your existing Guardian credentials, or through your Facebook and Twitter details.

The Guardian actually posts ‘assignments’, inviting users to post content based on themes – for example, when Britain experiences unseasonably bad weather. Editors set a range of assignments each week, covering news, sport, culture and life and style.

Photos and videos will constitute a large part of this, particularly for users out and about on the streets with their smartphones.

Selected submissions could be featured on the Guardian website or also in the Guardian and Observer newspapers, while video submissions could be added to the GuardianWitness YouTube channel.

The apps also lend themselves well to big breaking news stories, where Guardian and Observer journalists simply can’t cover the sheer scale of it on their own.

However, if you don’t fancy one of the assignments, and there’s nothing big going on in your neck of the woods, you can also simply submit a story, which constitutes an ‘open’ assignment.

For the Guardian, encouraging the public to submit their content via dedicated apps is a great move, and serves to formalize the growing shift towards user-generated content. It transforms anyone into a roving reporter, giving them direct access to a major news brand. Surely it’s only a matter of time before more big-brand news outlets follow suit, including the BBC.”

When John Buchan climbed down from the editorial chair at Thomas Nelson he went off to govern Canada. I always envied him this in my time: it had to be easier than trying to govern (Canadian) Thomson Corporation’s regiments of accountant managers (as my Chairman said, with deep seriousness, “you could make this so much easier for yourself if you stuck to only publishing bestsellers”). But the equations that we faced then will never be the same again. Just as print will go, so will editorial and authorial control. In a contributory content world, users will assess and vote for each others contribution, pre-buy content to which they are contributing, subscribe where they are contributors, and vote for each others contributions, views, plotlines or innovative media narrative combinations. The tools of the trade are on their desks: for some years now everyone has the potential to be his own studio, or her own graphic artist. The result may not be High Art, but the skills levels of whole populations will increase rapidly as “entertainment” becomes not just experiencing things, but participating in them as well. If self-publishing eBooks has taught us anything, from Amanda Hockings and John Lock onwards, it is that the publisher editorial selection process does not satisfy the participatory urges of large populations, and that user review and rating is seen as the selectivity tool, not publisher puff and blurb.

Now I must dash. There is a real hold-up on the M25 that I feel I should cover for the Guardian…!

Apr

4

Editorial Views and Viewers

Filed Under Blog, data protection, eBook, Industry Analysis, internet, mobile content, news media, online advertising, Publishing, social media, Uncategorized | Leave a Comment

So thanks so much for all the comments on the last piece. I am now truly troubled and confused. Some of you seem to think that the regional press never will re-create itself, so it must be left to innovators to innovate and old brands to die. Yet those who are deeply involved in the regional press claim that the tools and utilities required for innovative services are simply not available. I decided to look at the latter this week, to look only in the UK, and to follow up some of the leads I received as a result of the first piece.

Since the premiere brand of Johnston Press is the Scotsman, I started my search in Edinburgh. There I found the Edinburgh Reporter, and a small team of local reporters working around an editor (Phyllis Stephens) to create, at www.theedinburghreporter.co.uk, a start-up local event site. This is powered by the nOtice web software currently being trialled (progress report awaited) by Guardian Media Group, which is itself an innovative newspaper project, given that it is an invite-only beta run by a group that sold its regional division and exited hyperlocal. But have a look at the intentions listed 18 months ago (http://gigaom.com/2011/10/28/guardians-n0tice-puts-a-new-twist-on-hyperlocal/) and look at http//nOtice.com to see what is being trialled. Clearly the effort here is to find ways in which users can post content and link to existing content. If you look at The Edinburgh Reporter, then you can see how they use Bambuser and You Tube to provide the image and video upload elements. The principle of hyperlocal is emerging here: we are all our own reporters and freelances, and whether or not we need an editorial hub depends more on brand and business model than on anything else. But the vital feature of this model is the need for someone to be able to signal what sort of news update they need so that those “closest” to the news can create media – video, audio, text – and send it back to be accessed and posted.

Which is when I was introduced to CivicBoom (http://civicboom.wordpress.com/about/). A great deal of the communication around nOtice is twitter-based. CivicBoom, from Canterbury in Kent, has its own mobile app, Boomlly, which acts as the reporting link, and the means of signalling when stories are needed. As far as I know, CivicBoom is not currently in active use in the newsroom of any UK regional, yet it is the perfect tool for experimenting with hyperlocal on the smartphones of a local youth (or mature) audience. As we move into the 4G world, the image and video output of an observant community can be turned into hyperlocal news and information, and the news organization/newspaper can tune and frame this content flow by using apps like Boomlly to request coverage, seek other views, repeat coverage or request similar coverage from different places. In other words, citizen journalism can now be organized on a far better basis than ever before, to the extent that it really does become the answer to “how can we do all that we need to do for hyperlocal on a reduced and reducing journalist workforce”. The first examples of citizen journalism at any scale that I mapped were in Florida in the early years of this century, and they plainly lacked the tools to do the job. Well, the answer is now clear – recognize and adopt your own community as participants and partners, follow the interests of that community, seek quality and set standards but do not forget who is doing what for whom. In order to succeed at hyperlocal the regional press may need to retire its editors, turn its remaining reporters into Boomlly operators and forget what was learnt in the age of print about editorial power. But since the alternative is a slow road to extinction then I strongly recommend anyone interested in survival to contact Lizzie Hodgson (e.hodgson@civicboom.com) at Civicboom and discuss the re-integration of community around news. Now.

And if the partial answer to “there is no hyperlocal news is a community answer, the other important reminder is to underline the fact that local news organizations do not mine existing database resources for hyperlocal news. Thus, for example, the national database of roadworks (www.elgin.com) is not used in any active news environment, as far as I know. Yet one of the most important pieces of information you can give anyone on a hyperlocal smrtphone service would be where delays and disruption can be expected, when it starts and when it is due to end. Much more data of this type is now becoming available, both through Open Data mandates and commercial efforts. You do not need Big Data in a local context to find it, and it blends beautifully with citizen journalism.

If the regional press is to hold its post-print position and move forward, then the size and shape of the local opportunity must be re-defined. Successful citizen journalism can point to entrepreneurial activity in local eBook or local eLearning activity. The media organization as a one delivery, advertising-driven, wholly broadcast news operation in the locality may finally be dead; visions of its future are experimental, but it is only by iteration that we drive netorked publishing forward. There are plenty of US models, and even if Patch.com will not eventually succeed then the broadcast media work around EasyBlock (MSNBC) and iReport (CNN) should provide some clues – and TownSquareBuzz and The Batavian suggest others. This is the eleventh hour – there is not a minute to spare!

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