Journalism based on 140 characters is bad journalism

Last week and over some of the weekend, the National Union of Journalists met for their annual delgates meeting.
Now the NUJ is often criticised for its lack of engagement with new media and the blogging community, and sometimes this is the case. But things are changing quite rapidly.
I tweet. I am an NUJ member and on the National Exec. I am also a web journalist.
Can we not win? We get criticised for not using twitter and blogs and then when we use both for what was exciting, edgy and excellent coverage of out annual conference, we get slammed by 200 Words from Gerard Cunningham for doing it.
He slammed outgoing union president James Doherty, who was having a dig at David Cameron, who described people using Twitter as ‘twatters’. Doherty was not slamming Twitteres. I am not sure if he is one, but incoming vice-president Donnacha Delong is a new media evangelist and twitters - http://twitter.com/donnachadelong
Cunningham quotes feedback on tweets of Doherty's speech as having references "to the NUJ’s ‘head in the sand approach’."
While this may have been true in the past is is far from it now, especially given Delong's ascendance.
Cunnigham was refering to student members coverage of the event at nujadm.org.uk. They were tweeting, blogging, podcasting and filming, as well as posting more than 100 images of the event on the website. They were an absolute model of modern journalism.
If Cunningham and whoever made these comments had read more than the tweets, rather than just slagging it off based on 140 characters they would have found that the union is engaging in an intelligent discussion about convergence and its effects on all aspects of the media and journalism.
I would simply as Cunnigham and others who care to knock the only body that actually defends their rights to read some more of the coverage of the meeting here http://www.nujadm.org.uk/ or ask the students whether they thought we had our heads in the sand.

We learn the rules so we can forget them

I wasn't sure what I was going to write this post about, but then it came to me.
"The reason we learn these rules is so we can forget them", I was told by a wise German yesterday.

I was attending a seminar by Wing Tsun grandmaster Sifu Gomo Keith Kernspecht in Dartford. The grandmaster said that we learn the forms (techniques) of Wing Tsun to teach us how to defend ourselves, but that the ultimate aim is for them to come naturally - or forget them.

The same is true about a lot of things in our lives. I am touch typing this - I have forgotten where the keys are, I just press them and make words. I have forgotten how to spell the words, they come naturally. And if I don't know a word, I look it up or learn its form. But once learnt it is forgotten.

So less of the mystic nonsense - what am I getting at? Well I work in journalism and websites. I am fairly well known for being innovative. I am also known as being a bit of a non-conformist.

I often get into conversations at work or with my peers that involve phrases like "well the system won't let us" or "we've traditionally never done it like that" - which drive me up the wall!

There are techniques and ways of doing things in journalism - short hand, the inverse triangle story system, who, when, where, what, why, and how etc. The same is true of the web SEO, optimisation of images, use of color (sic) and many more.

My points are these. If we are to truly progress towards Web 3 and true social systems of web-based information, as well as make money from the web for our bosses, we need to forget the lessons and techniques that got us here and keep on innovating.

We need to forget old models (Messrs James and Rupert Murdoch - it will never work) so we can find new models that are based upon, but not reliant upon our fixed learning.

Bloggers - of which I am one - need to remember that they are only doing the same thing that news forums were doing 20 years ago, but with better technology. I'm using Blogger that has a word processor comparable to Word of 10 years ago - and the future will just bring more.

But we mustn't get caught up in the hubris. Twitter will not always be the in web thing - something else will come along. As blogging will be replaced by something else and subs barriers and pay walls and old-school web payment models will be replaced by something else.

As grandmaster Kernspecht said: "20 years ago I would have told you to do this and there are so-called experts who still talk about it as if it is the only way of doing things. I have moved on and they are fools if they do not".

To Tweet to rue

So after telling a potential blogger for Pulse Today that really we wanted at least tow a week (for no money), I have decided to live by my own words and try (until my wiki status reads wizard rather than apprentice) to write a bog post twice a week. Here goes.

Sky News yesterday reported an incident outside Southwark tube, near Waterloo, or at a busy London station involving one or two police officers, a man on a bike and anything ranging from a bb gun, a starting pistol to a submachine gun. One (or maybe two) of the police were shot, or cut, or dove behind a wall and cut themselves - or was the incident in the cut.

Not making much sense am I? And neither was Sky, which seems to have based its early versions of the story on various people - myself included - Twittering about it. I (@PeelaaSqueela) contributed the 500 yard exclusion zone around the scene and the police dogs and armed response units.

A clever Sky Twitter (@RuthBarnett) pieced the story for SkyNews.com based soley on tweets - she even got pictures and video from @jonathanwildman, who I quote " learned my lesson about the power of Twitter today" after getting complaints that the video he supplied was credited with his name. Thumbs up as well to UBM's very own @roxaneM and @SimonMillsUBM among the countless others that added to this growing story. But what is the lesson @jonathanwildman learned?

Twitter is great and I really felt part of a news event as it unfolded - it took me back to my first job on the Clevedon Mercury in Somerset. I was right on the front line, bringing breaking news to the public - or was I terribly misinforming them?

If I was a commuter, say, on my way to Waterloo should I expect a marauding gunman? Or the initial reaction of bomb on tube - was 5/8 about to become another 7/7 or 9/11? Enough fractions...

My point is this. It turned out that two police officers stopped a guy on a bike at the cut by Southwark tube. He drew a pistol and fired at the two cops, who dove for cover (one cutting themselves) and then the suspect rode off. Witnesses and the police believe the gun to be a starter pistol or replica. Not a sub-machine gun. Sure there were dogs and armed police, but no-one was shot.

We as journalists - especially on quality B2b titles - have a duty to maintain accuracy. In fact the editor of Pulse (Richard Hoey) used the accuracy of reporting to talk down a very angry source who claimed we exaggerated a story about delays in swine flu vaccination. He even wrote about it in his blog.

Twitter (and the web and rolling TV news), for all their immediacy, can cause confusion and inaccuracy. So next time a gunman is running around the streets of Southwark shooting police officers, I might think twice about Tweeting about it. Or maybe not.

Passwoes

All I was planning to do was log in to the Wiki and post some Abacus product manuals for our team. I opened Explorer, typed what I thought was my username and password in and got "Error username/ password invalid".

Then, thinking I might have made a typo, I tried again. Same result. Because I have only been at the company for three weeks, I thought I would check the piece of paper I was given with all my log-in details. Aha - it was a username password combination I hadn't tried, so I entered it - "Error: username/ password invalid." I tried a couple of variants - still no joy. It was then I finally got round to resetting my password and here I am.

But it got me thinking. The same thing happens every time I buy something online with Verified by Visa. I think I know what my password is, but always end up going through the rigmarole of resetting the password.

So what do our website users think when they visit Pulse (or any other site with registration for that matter) and forget their password - or think they know it, but have about eight to remember at any one time that this one is just beyond them. And if their IT department (like UBM's I think) has IE set up so it doesn't always remember usernames and passwords, how much does this put them off.

Now don't get me wrong, registration is useful - it tells us who our audience is. But does it also skew the results? Is registration the Schrödinger's Cat of the web world? Does it act to put off the less tech savvy users, thus skewing our data? Enough questions, I want answers.

Here is a debate about them http://econsultancy.com/forums/best-practice/impact-of-a-registration-barrier but where does the ease of getting past them kick in? Am I just having an early morning rant?

More questions. One more though - has anyone any thoughts on the matter?

Welcome to 21st century news

Writer, web head, blogger, film maker, journalist, broadcaster, photographer, SEO expert, techie, geek and more. What are journalists supposed to be in this day and age?

When I was born, in 1972 – a Pisces and the year of the rat (thanks Blogger) – my father listed his profession on my birth certificate as computer engineer.

The same year, (according to Wikipedia) Nixon went to China and ordered the space shuttle program to begin. The bloody Sunday massacre took place and the Godfather is released. The Watergate scandal takes place, leading Nixon to step down and the Munich Massacre takes place. Oh and the Vietnam war was still raging.

1972 it seems made the early 21st century's War on Terror seem a little lame, with a bomb going off almost every week – and in Europe too. And I was raised in the cold war. I genuinely believed that the world could be annihilated at any second by the USSR – something most people today find completely unreal. When the Wind Blows was a potential reality form me.
So what's this got to do with information businesses and journalism?

Well, even though computers at the time filled large rooms and mostly still used punch cards or very big hard disks, the global information age was being born.

The space shuttle development program led to a boom in communication satellites (either to spy on those tricky Ruskies or send radio or TV signals).

Vietnam, Watergate, Bloody Sunday and the Olympic massacre were stories carried around the world and almost as they happened.

These days, despite the massive amounts (quantity?) of computing power we throw at organising the world, there is still terrorism, still wars raging that America can't win and still some good quality journalism.

However, the advent of 24 hour rolling news has done two things.

The first is (perceptibly at least) that wars seem less real and, if anything, further away. In fact, the special effects in movies and the quality of computer graphics means there is very little difference on screen between the real wars and the fake.

Are we suffering from information overload? I don't know, but some times I think less news is better than more.

But as a journalist in the 21st century I can't think that for too long. Oh no. Like Woolworths, if we don't change we die. My former colleague Retail Week editor Tim Danaher writes in his blog that the nostalgia for Woolworths of the past is a dangerous thing. And so is the nostalgia for the good old days of journalism, which brings me to my second point.

Journalism needs to adapt to survive and journalists need to to change to. As my comrades in the Nation Union of Journalists are discovering, journalism and the media can no longer be defined by sector – newspapers, TV, magazines the internet (small i because you don't cap the T in telephone).

Instead, journalists can at any time be called upon to be writers, film makers, editors, bloggers, champions of SEO etc, because the perception is that their readers demand it.

And I truly believe that unless business to business journalists accept this they will all be out of a job. There, I've said it.

The news editor of a certain weekly retail magazine said to me years ago about podcasting: "If we start recording podcasts and putting them online, won't we be a radio station."
The answer is yes and a TV station and a web site and, sometimes, just a writer on a well-written, well-designed and well-subbed weekly business to business magazine.
Bring it on I say.