O post no OJB está aqui :

How Portuguese News Websites (don’t) use Citizen Journalism

O site holandês Skoeps.nl dedicado baseado em jornalismo do cidadão fechou a semana passada por não se ter tornado lucrativo. Nicolas Kayser-Bril explica as razões num post para o OJB.

O que levanta a questão: o jornalismo do cidadão envolve lucro?

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The citizen journalism based dutch website Skoeps.nl closed down last week because it didn't turn out profitable.Nicolas Kayser-Bril tells us why in this OJB post.

Which raises the question: is citizen journalism about the profit?

Skoeps closure: CitJ is not about money

]]> http://olago.wordpress.com/?p=462 Fri, 02 May 2008 09:30:49 +0000 Alexandre Gamela http://olago.wordpress.com/?p=462

Já começam a surgir resultados do estudo que a equipa do OJB (da qual faço parte) está a fazer sobre o grau de interactividade dos sites informativos, a partir de um primeiro estudo feito pela Joana Geary. Apesar de estar incompleto e a precisar de uma uniformização de dados, as primeiras conclusões são bastante interessantes. Desenvolvimentos em breve.

Results are coming out for the research run by the OJB team (of which i'm a part of) about the news website's interactivity index, based on a previous study made by Joana Geary. Though it still is incomplete and in need of some data uniformization, the first results are quite interesting. More developments soon.

Jornais portugueses | Portuguese newspapers

Gráfico comparativo | Comparative chart

]]> http://olago.wordpress.com/?p=459 Wed, 30 Apr 2008 12:15:07 +0000 Alexandre Gamela http://olago.wordpress.com/?p=459 This post is the portuguese translation of the text Recommending news by Wilbert Baan at the OJB.

No seu primeiro post para o OJB, Wilbert Baan, designer de interactividade para o jornal holandês de Volkskrant, desenvolve a ideia de como as notícias podem ser items de partilha com a nossa comunidade pessoal. Ler texto original aqui.

Os websites como os conhecemos estão-se a desintegrar. Widgets,APIs e feeds levam a informação para outros lugares para além do domínio. Numa cultura de rede gostamos de levar a informação connnosco. No nosso telemóvel, desktop, widgets, websites, televisão digital, para todo o lado. Para o projecto do EN estou a reflectir sobre como podemos interagir com as notícias como objecto. Como podemos levar o artigo connosco ou usá-lo para criar novas colecções.

O artigo como objecto social

Por exemplo, no Flickr a fotografia é um objecto social. Temos uma página pessoal de contacto onde as fotografias relevantes para nós podem ser vistas. Todas estas fotos são provavelmente informação pública, mas é esta selecção baseada na nossa rede pessoal que torna esta página interessante para nós.

A mesma coisa acontece com o Del.icio.us, onde temos uma página com as páginas preferidas dos nossos amigos. Ou a Last.fm onde podemos saber que música os nossos amigos ouvem. E o Twitter, onde a sucessão de mensagens dos nossos amigos tornam este serviço valioso.

Hoje em dia os sites mais populares são criados em torno de nós.

Quase toda a informação nos sites da web 2.0 é informação pública. Links no Del.icio.us, artistas e canções na Last.fm, notas pessoais no Twitter. O que acrescenta valor a toda esta informação são as colecções que reunimos à nossa volta. Nós somos o centro e os nossos amigos virtuais estão à nossa volta. Os serviços da web 2.0 assentam em grupos de pessoas em que confiamos, tendo em conta quem eles são ou o que fizeram.

Notícias 2.0

As notícias raramente são apresentadas em torno de nós. São apresentadas de uma perspectiva em que o que é importante é definido pelos editores. Este é um sistema muito bom e fiável. Faz com que os sites e os jornais sejam diferentes e dá uma linha e personalidade às empresas de media.

Mas podem as notícias ser adaptadas a nós? Sabemos quais notícias são importantes para nós , certo? Confiamos nos nossos amigos? Pode a distribuição das notícias ser reduzida a um artigo (objecto) e ser sistematizada?

A maioria dos sites noticiosos já arrumam as notícias por popularidade e tempo. Isto é já uma forma mais sistematizada de distribuir as notícias e pode não ter nada a ver com a real importância da notícia. Eu não estou a defender que se deveria personalizar todo um site noticioso, pode ser apenas uma página como as páginas dos "amigos" no Del.icio.us, Flickr e Twitter.

As vossas ideias

Poderemos fazer às notícias o que a Amazon faz aos produtos? Gostariam saber que notícias os vossos amigos lêem? Ou estariam a perder a informação que é importante para vocês ou as surpresas? Alguns websites - como o Google News - estão já a fazer experiências com as recomendações. Gostaram? E conhecem mais algum website que crie uma experiência noticiosa valiosa em torno de vocês?

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Basicamente o que Baan defende é que as notícias podem ser mais um artigo de partilha dentro das nossas redes sociais, redefinindo-as da mesma forma que os outros artigos que costumamos partilhar. Isto implica talvez uma redefinição nas estruturas dos sites noticiosos e talvez na sua linha editorial. A personalização da agenda noticiosa é provavelmente umas das características mais revolucionárias no jornalismo do futuro próximo, que se neste momento se encontra a caminho do hiperlocal, assim se transformará no hiperpessoal.

Deixem as vossas sugestões e comentários a estas ideias do Wilbert. Podem também visitar o seu blog.

EDIT: Tom Scotney already has - see what he took from JEEcamp here.

A success

There is no doubt in my mind that yesterday's event was a success. I personally took a lot of information, and insight from it (more later in the post), and others will have taken their own opinions away from it.

I was part of the blog team, along with a few other students, who were relaying the day's events to the viewers of a live blog, (via CoverItLive), and others were twittering away as the speakers delivered their speeches and pitches.

An RSS feed of all of the attendees twitter accounts, and anything tagged 'JEEcamp', can be found here - some of it makes for some very interesting reading.

436

Rick Waghorn, founder of myfootballwriter.com, began the day's proceedings with a keynote speech about how his business came to be, amongst other things.

Rick said that his site attracted 33,000 unique visitors in January - and whilst that may be down to the transfer window opening, it is certainly impressive.

The more interesting figures that Rick mentioned are 436 - the average number of seconds that a single user spends on the site, and 3.5 - the average number of visits his site will get in a month.

Laura Oliver of journalism.co.uk has written more about Rick's keynote speech, which can be found here.

Funding

Once the speech was over, the conference split up into its discussion groups, which included Online News Models, Communities, Legals, Fundings, and Business Models. I covered funding, which was hosted by Rick Waghorn.

Alex Gamela has given a brief overview of the other discussions, and key points to come out of yesterdays events.

The main things to come out of this discussion, other than a sustained attack on Google's advertising models were:

• To be successful, you need a five year financial forecast. Rick uses iReport, for which CNN bought the domain without even giving it a thought, or doing anything with it. Rick hasn't an idea what his domain is worth. (He paid £16 for his site.)
• Why doesn't the Trinity Mirror set up a fund like the Knight Foundation for smaller companies?
• Some local papers panic and put everything online, in an effort to keep up with the nationals.
• You have to earn over $50 with Adsense before you can claim your money
  How many sites must there be UNDER that threshold?
• Demographically, if you took out everybody over the age of 60 in local newspaper circulation, where would you be?
• The fundamental challenge is to persuade potential investors to invest in your product/site, without OVERspending or releasing too much equity into the project.

Pitches

The most well recieved of the day's pitches was Nigel Eccles' project Hubdub - a news prediction website where users bet on the outcome of certain news stories using 'play' money. This clearly has the potential to grow very quickly and Nigel was a man who was most definitely in demand after his speech. (It had 42,000 unique visitors in its first week!)

However, a key point raised during his pitch was 'Should Hubdub place ethical restrictions on its questions?' - because currently, a user is able to sign up and pose ethically incorrect questions, such as something regarding a missing child. We posed this question to the viewers of the live blog - 42% agreed that it should, while 58% didn't).

This was the most well recieved of the three pitches (Which included scribblesheet, and qotz - a project still in development).

Panel Discussion

The day ended with an informal Q&A session with Mark Comerford, Martin Stabe, Kyle MacRae, and Sarah Hartley.

This was definitely where I picked up most of the key points from the day.

The panel believed that advances in technologies, such as mobile, RSS, and broadband - just make people use what was originally present more often. Mark believed that traditional media have no real strategy for utilising output on mobile phones, and as a result "Newspapers aren't dying - we're committing suicide".

The panel then went on to discuss Qik - software for mobile phones that allows users to stream video directly from their mobile phones. They believed that such software changes everything, and anybody can now walk around with a live TV camera in their pocket.

Such advances allow journalists to change the way they tell their stories - and it allows the public to tell their stories back to journalists. Mark believed that journalists are tired of being seen as 'the voice of the people', when they are simply A voice IN the field (of journalism).

This raised the age old debate of 'Do we need Journalists?' which was quickly answered with 'Who is a journalist may not be as important as "What is Journalism?'. The panel agreed that it was an issue of trust - and if journalism isn't transparent, the public will go to a news source that is - which may not neccessarily be a journalist.

If journalists want people to engage with them, they need to bring the stories TO the public, rather than waiting for the public to go to the press. Most news organisations clearly try to get UGC (user generated content) for free, which is detrimental to the medium. What they should be doing is working together to become part of a 'sharing partnership' - which would benefit both freelancers and news organisations.

Young Journalists - The future?

Mark's final point was the one that really drove home with me.

He mentioned that young Journalists are more technically skilled than their older superiors, but they are being put into difficult positions - where they have the neccessary journalistic skills, but not the power or the experience needed.

"It's the same as leaving a bunch of kids in a car park for long enough and then expecting them to know how to drive."

Referring to my final year project, and a discussion that I had with Pete Ashton at the end of the event - Initially I was worried that I had to design and run a website and a CMS - and that was my biggest stumbling block.

I realised by the end of the event that I shouldn't have been worried about how the website might look or how and where I was going to get it online - I should instead place more of an emphasis on how I'm going to drive traffic to the website and keep users coming back to it.

The very last point from JEEcamp was also VERY relevant:

"Now is the best time to be a journalist. The demand is for journalists who WANT to tell a story. All of the contacts, features, etc, are in place to become a great journalist. This is THE time to be a journalist. It doesnt get much better than this."

And that is pretty much that, roll on next year!

PS - I also gave a video interview to the European Journalism Centre - I'll link to it once they get it online.