I am a lobby correspondent working from the House of Commons.
What I Do
I write local and national political stories. I also write a regular column for the Birmingham Post, a weekly diary for the Birmingham Mail and leaders for the Post. I also blog on the Post website.
Monday, 01 December 2008 18:49
Written by Jonathan Walker
Newspapers have always been about communities, particularly local papers. We claim to represent communities and interact with them, and the internet provides new ways of doing that.
But how many newspapers are actually taking advantage of what the internet offers? As a general rule, we offer readers the chance to comment on stories and, um, that's it.
I believe we should be using our websites as places where readers can communicate with us and with each other. This is particularly important for local newspapers. People still care about their local communities. There are plenty of blogs about Birmingham (and no doubt about Liverpool and Newcastle too) - people have ideas and information they want to share. We should be presenting ourselves as the platform to do it.
And there's another reason for creating a community on our websites. People like establishing an identity online, for better or for worse. This is one of the reasons they create blogs. It's one of the reasons you get flame warriors on forums or among people who comment on blogs, and one of the reasons others try to establish a reputation for thoughtful, constructive posts.
It's possible for newspapers to go much further than they do in allowing communities to develop.
I have been playing with JomSocial, which is an application for websites using the Joomla CMS (like this one). It's inspired by sites like Facebook, and allows people to establish an identity online.
It costs around £100 and is very easy to use. Of course, our newspapers may not be using Joomla, but a major media company could surely develop their own app?
We shouldn't try to compete with Facebook, but I believe that readers of local newspapers would be interested in taking part in a specifically local community as well as, or in some cases instead of, the national or global communities they are also part of.
JomSocial allows people to create a profile, connect with friends, create groups, share RSS feeds (eg to promote their blog), share photos, share videos, add events to a community calendar, share their Twitter feed and share mini-blog posts (ie on a "wall").
It also interacts with the comments system produced by the same company (the one I use on this site) and with a blog platform they have developed. In other words, when people comment on a story, that comment also shows up in their profile. And we could allow people to blog on our own websites - keeping the "community blogs" separate from our "official" blogs.
One thing it does not do, but which I believe would be key for a newspaper website, is allow people to bookmark news stories - allowing them to share stories from our websites that they think others would be interested in, as well as rating them and commenting on them.
Although I point out that this particular application is dirt cheap in the context of a one-off investment by a major regional newspaper, I appreciate that developing something like it for ourselves might not be so easy.
But isn't it the type of thing newspaper businesses who want to adapt for the changing marketplace should be doing?
Tuesday, 04 November 2008 00:00
Written by Jonathan Walker
Media organisations could encourage journalists to embrace new ways of working by making it easy for them.
For example, articles can frequently benefit from the inclusion of related links. One method of getting those links to readers would be to create a del.icio.us account and direct readers to it.
But a simpler method would be simply to input them with the story itself. This would also allow the business to make better use of them, as the links would be associated both with an individual journalist and with a specific story, as well as being stored on the organisation's own servers. (Links from a journalist's del.icio.us account can be accessed as an RSS feed but I think it would be technically difficult to associate the right links with the right stories this way).
One of the obstacles to journalists doing this is frequently the content management system they use, which may not be designed to accomplish what the media organisation is trying to do.
Media businesses should take the initiative and develop systems designed to make it easy for staff to achieve what they want them to achieve.
I also believe that, while it makes sense to use whatever applications and web services are out there for the taking, it would be a mistake to rely on them. We should deciding what we want to do and then doing it - inspired by what other people are doing, rather than depending on them.
Below is a dummy front end (for authors) of a content management system which I think would be easy to use and accomplish some of what a multimedia news organisation should be trying to accomplish.
The front end is a vital part of any CMS, but a small one. And what is below is only for illustration - it doesn't work. And it is probably missing things. It's simply an attempt to illustrate what I mean when I talk about making it easy.
Wednesday, 22 October 2008 21:21
Written by Jonathan Walker
Okay, it's a bit of a naughty headline. But they have increased the number of press officers employed by the civil service.
Sir Gus O'Donnell, cabinet secretary and head of the Home Civil Service, today defended an increase in the number of press officers in government and said the increase was a response to the 1,600 political bloggers in the UK.
I've never understood why businesses got so excited about Second Life (pictured, left). If you've never played it, it's a 3D graphical application - kind of like a game, except without the actual game - which allows you to create a character and fly around a virtual world full of things other people have created.
These creations can be buildings, vehicles, clothes other characters are wearing, or just about anything you can imagine.
It's like World of Warcraft without the elves. What it does have is lots and lots of porn, as people use the freedom it offers to make pornography and sell it for real cash.
There was a period, which hasn't quite gone away, of organisations creating Second Life material to promote themselves, such as an "office" in the Second Life virtual world.
It's also used for virtual conferences. Microsoft and the Social Market Foundation think-tank roped West Bromwich MP and Cabinet Office Minister Tom Watson into taking part in a fringe event set in the Second Life world during Labour's conference in September.
Online gaming guru Raph Koster is developing something better.
His Metaplace project will allow people to develop their own virtual world and stick it on their website (by embedding some flash on the page).
It is better than Second Life because:
There is no need for visitors to download a client. You just need flash on your machine, and 99 per cent of us already have that, even if we don't know it.
People can access your world directly from any website you choose.
There's no need to share your virtual showroom or conference hall with a thousand badly-textured penises. Worlds are self-contained, but you can link to others if you wish.
The only downside I can see is the cartoony default graphics, but you can create your own graphics if you wish.
Here is a video about the internet and porn (don't play it at work):
Adobe Flash Player not installed or older than 9.0.115!
I've never understood why businesses got so excited about Second Life (pictured, left). If you've never played it, it's a 3D graphical application - kind of like a game, except without the actual game - which allows you to create a character and fly around a virtual world full of things other people have created.
