Related thoughts and scrawlings about building kigaliwire.com
Plenty good advice in here for wannabe foreign correspondents from four, young freelance journalists who have made it work.
The freelancers agreed that anybody can buy equipment, but few are passionate enough to see it to the end. The glamorous ideal of being a foreign correspondent parachuted in and out of warzones is dead – instead, journalists have to be prepared to be in it for the long haul and push past setback after setback. link
It looks as though paper.li have been working on making the job of news and information curation a whole lot easier and intelligent.
Finally, it looks as if we can say goodbye to automated “newspapers” created using paper.li and add a human, editorial layer to curate whatever you deem important.
A little over a year ago, I bemoaned what was missing from paper.li. The frustration largely came from seeing a number of articles in the Rwanda Daily which were irrelevant, way left - or right - of centre, or just plain crap.
Now, it looks as paper.li is evolving into a hyper-useful curation platform. Here’s what I got in a recent email from paper.li,
Improved CurationWe increased the number of content streams, introduced new sources such as Google+ and RSS feedsand improved filtering to aid you in publishing your topic specific papers.
“Publish it” BookmarkletA nifty tool that empowers you to easily curate content from anywhere on the web into a current edition of your newspaper, as well as store that source for future editions. Learn more
Mobile ReadersWe launched a native Paper.li iPhone app and introduced a web optimized mobile browser for iPhone andAndroid devices to support the growing demand in mobile viewing.
As I seem to be saying increasingly during my training sessions around the world - online curation is a key skill that press teams, news outlets, NGO communications and the like should be getting to grips with.
I constantly push teams to test tools such as storify and storyful. The changes paper.li have made mean it could be a super useful addition for the people I train. I will be testing pronto.
Always good finding a wee ray of sunshine on a post-it in among the receipts. An African fish eagle hunting fish in Uganda, so I’m told.
In receipts hell. It’s all @robcrilly’s fault.
Note to self: do your receipts at the end of every month, you don’t like doing it, no-one does. Or, just carry on the way you always have and grumble about it every 3 or 4 months.
As it happens, and you are going to have to take this on trust I fear, I am a fantastic prig and Puritan on this subject, and fanatical about getting quotes straight and reporting only what I have seen, or if I am quoting what a local or a photographer or a wire agency saw, saying so. That is not because I am a saint. It is more about managing the existential angst of being a reporter a long way away from home: once you start making things up a bit, you might as well start making it all up and file without even getting on a plane. And then you quickly feel the ground vanishing beneath your feet: if you are inventing things, why be a journalist at all?
Lots to nod to in this piece from Bagehot in The Economist on the Johann Hari saga.
Working out of Blues Cafe, Kigali the other day. New business cards and East Africa Foreign correspondent’s club card arrived by DHL from the Reuters office in Nairobi.
This is the kit I use when doing journalism in Kigali for Reuters. It wasn’t really that different a year ago. If you’re interested, pop over to Flickr and hover over the different pieces of kit to find out more about each tool.
For me, the Olympus WS-650S and the Olympus TP-7 Telephone Pickup Hands-Free Cable have been the best buys in 2011. Really, really useful duo to carry around.
NB: I felt particularly smug pleased earlier this week when the AFP correspondent in Rwanda stopped me at the Ingabire trial to ask if the wee Ricoh GRDIII was the camera I used for kigaliwire. It is the only camera I use. He thought I was lugging around $10,000 worth of camera kit :)
Online Newsgathering tools. View more presentations from Graham Holliday
Some links, notes and usefulness to accompany a lecture about online newsgathering for the 2011 summer school at the Centre for Investigative Journalism at City University in London on July 17th 2011.
There are two key things to keep an eye on when using Google for search. Firstly, when you do a bog standard search, look down the left hand column, click the ‘more’ and ‘more search tools’ buttons. The options you find there will allow you to target your search far more effectively than a straight Google search.
For example, try searching using News only, then click the sort by date order button at the bottom of the left hand column. This will give you the latest articles - only from news sources - with the most recent appearing at the top of the search results. Try searching blogs and discussions too.
In addition, always use Google Advanced Search to fine tune your search using the ‘exact phrase’ option, domain search, date options and more.
If you are unfamiliar with using Google Advanced Search, play with it and learn how best to find what you’re after. Think laterally. Think about where you would expect to find what you’re looking for and in what format. Would it appear in a pdf or an excel spreadsheet? In which case use the file format search options. Are you trying to track down a phone number? Think about adding “tel:” to the end of your search. Think of phrases and words associated with what you’re looking for and add them to Google Advanced Search.
RSS - Really Simple Syndication - is a powerful way of subscribing to websites and search keywords to receive only the information you are interested in comes to you. This video will give you a simple overview into how RSS works.
You can use RSS to subscribe to the sections of news sites and blogs you are interested in. More importantly, you can subscribe to keywords, names of people, places, companies and phrases you need to monitor.
Google Reader is just one of many RSS readers available. Once you have subscribed to a number of keyword and key phrase searches within Google News and other sources, the Reader will become your hub for news. This video will help explain how it works.
Aggregators bring content from multiple sources into one place. Google News is a news aggregator. It pulls together 25,000 or so news sources. So is the recently launched Huffington Post UK and NewsNow which pools some 20,000 or more news sources. SiloBreaker is worth a look. It not only aggregates, but attempts to context and analysis. Lastly, Addictomatic is an interesting way of bringing multiple searches into one place.
Since it’s launch on July 15th 2006, Twitter has evolved into an entirely new news platform. When news breaks, it often breaks first on Twitter. However, twitter.com is not always the best close to search Twitter, to tweet from, or get the most out of the service. Here are some tools to explore:
This is for those with a bit of RSS experience already. With Yahoo Pipes you can wire up multiple RSS feeds and filter, sort, truncate and manipulate in multiple ways to deliver a single RSS feed of stuff you want. This is a very powerful tool, best used for filtering large amounts of information. I do find the resulting RSS feed is delivered quite a bit slower than a straight RSS feed, but for complex RSS jobs - Yahoo Pipes is the tool.
In addition, you can search Yahoo Pipes for public pipes. You can then clone and adapt them for your own use. Here’s one I created earlier, run a search in it and see what you find.
I use Diigo and Delicious social bookmarking tools to store news stories and send a newswire to kigaliwire, my news and photography site in Rwanda. It’s like having a filing cabinet of all your research stored online, easily navigable so long as you use tags. A huge time and space saver.
Stay up to date
Online tools and services come and go. It’s important to keep abreast of new tools that can make your job of journalism more efficient. Two places you might want to keep an eye on for new tools are the Mashable blog and take a look through the regularly updated Social Media Kitbag.
I met three folk, whom I’d never met before, at a party in Kigali this weekend. A consultant, a business owner and a diplomat. They all knew of kigaliwire and were very kind in their praise of the blog. What interested me was how each of them received information from the site.
- the diplomat only looked at Twitter and rarely visited the blog
- the business owner received daily emails and rarely visited the blog
- the consultant - and I was particularly pleased that someone actually found this wee tweak useful - told me he visited the blog every day and hovered over the links to get a quick blast of a story from the single para that magically appears (as in the image above)
I was intrigued and gratified to hear how different people accessed the news in completely different ways. By cobbling together a bunch of useful, free tools you can easily make information as accessible as possible for people who are interested in what goes on on your beat.
Some key tools to make this all happen:
twitter, feedburner, diigo, wordpress and facebook (although I don’t use it anymore)
When your newswire host goes down, you need a back up plan. Diigo, my social bookmarking tool of choice, will be down for 3-5 hours today. That means no newswire on my blog.
All you get is a horrible looking RSS error. In addition, I can’t post to Diigo using the Diigolet. My newswire is effectively out for the best part of a day. Or is it?
One of the reasons I use Diigo is that it allows me to send links to Delicious and to Twitter and other places if needed. The idea being, if one service goes down I can replace the dead feed with an alternative and the newswire is back up and running in a couple of minutes.
This minor hiccup to my morning reminded me of a conversation I had at the BBC Social Media Summit with an Editor at a well-known UK newspaper about the importance of choosing the right combination of third party tools,
“It’s very important to consider which tools you can safely outsource to someone else and which ones you have to be in control of. It’s crucial to get the underlying architecture right - you don’t want to have to rebuild.” link
It is key for the self-publisher to understand the tools being used. You have to understand how you are publishing and where. So that, when things go tits up, you know exactly what to do.
Compare and contrast. The thinking behind the impressive new newsroom at Forbes (above). And the original thinking behind kigaliwire (below)
Lewis Dvorkin, Chief Product Officer at Forbes, has written a series of posts about how they are going about transforming the way Forbes works. They’re well worth reading in order.
- 9 big steps in 9 short months, now Forbes is building The New Newsroom
- Our New Newsroom for the Digital Era Is Now Up and Running
In these three posts, for news process junkies like myself, Lewis has provided a fascinating insight into the workings of a major U.S. magazine as it attempts to reinvent itself in the digital era.
For all the hugely impressive innovation, the business model appears to rely solely upon advertising - otherwise known as the great white whale that newspapers have been chasing online - and failing to find - since at least the late nineties. And here we are, well over a decade later, and the online advertising model still stubbornly remains unproven.
I can’t help but snigger a little. From a completely unscientific survey, it appears to me that it’s individuals, going it alone, away from the media dinosaurs, or sometimes in partnership with them, who are the only ones making the net work for them.
The only comparison I want to make between my ‘newsroom model’ and the one of Forbes relates to income. My model makes no mention of it. For a living, I need a more unconventional business model and it works, at least for now.
To a freelancer like myself, it’s quite simple. Journalism doesn’t pay enough. I need other income streams.
I imagine it’s the same for newspapers and magazines, like Forbes, but they suffer an “imagination deficit”. Those are not my words, but the words of Raju Narisetti, the Managing Editor of the Washington Post, in an excellent article, also in Forbes.
Listen carefully between each sentence - that’s the sound of Raju plucking hairs from his head as he struggles to figure out just what the hell he’s going to do to turn a crate like The Post around,
…The Post, like a few large U.S. newspapers, generates millions in online revenue from advertising. But we also generate tens of millions more from print advertising and circulation. The much anticipated intersection of rising digital revenues and falling print revenues has already turned into a mirage, leaving most of us with a cost structure way out of sync with today’s business reality. What is left is a relentless pressure to cut back on the single most expensive cost centre at media companies: The content creation engine, a.k.a., our newsroom…
…While our colleagues on the business side deserve credit for pushing newsrooms to become more nimble in recent years, they have also consistently failed to imagine and then incubate a Craigslist, a Groupon, a Monster. com, let alone a Google or a Facebook. Nor are they any closer today than they were last year in fixing the broken business model of quality journalism. So, while there is still room to cut costs and become more efficient, unless the revenue spigot opens up, the business model will remain broken and the decline of major news brands will only accelerate…
…I, for one, think that the golden age of targeted digital advertising is yet to come. Do we really want to trade that larger opportunity for the much smaller and unreliable pursuit of consumer dollars? I also wonder if we aren’t better off redeploying our newsroom resources to create new revenue streams and more engaging digital platforms than trying to make the traditional Web experience better and charge for it. And, I think we ought to create a drawbridge around our content—not necessarily for readers but for the aggregators. A business model that insists a Yahoo or a Huffington Post uses your content through some form of syndication, giving them trusted content and giving big media an opportunity to share the upside of their more engaging offerings…
…Free is indeed very expensive. But, what the prolonged and knee-jerk debate about free vs. paid inside our news organizations shows is that we still have what led us here in the first place: An imagination deficit. Rather than apply an ‘all or nothing’ approach focused, perhaps wrongly, on just our Web sites, we should be willing to make creative bets on our business model… link
KIGALI, Rwanda - Some 48 hours after Ian Birrell had a tweet-to with Rwandan President, Paul Kagame, I notice this “breaking news” post on VOA.
Since the “story” broke, the exchange has been extensively blogged. Birrell has been interviewed on Channel 4 TV news. There is a widely re-published AP report. The Twitter conversation that started almost two days ago seems like a very distant memory. And there’s plenty more (more interesting) Rwanda news to read today.
So, what is the point of this non-breaking “breaking news” piece on VOA?
It’s a sickness symptomatic of a tired media. Regurgitation, churnalism, all too indicative of the copy and paste school of hackery.
I do wish media outlets would get over themselves and simply link out to the original/best/most informative/well written/comprehensive/authorative and/or reliable source - regardless of what that source may be - rather than rewrite a wire report.
Yes - You need to be across every story. No - you don’t need to write/own every story.
Intelligent use of links will serve your readers better.
ENDS
… this just in.
The second question about kigaliwire, which ordinarily follows the first question, is how much traffic does the site get?
I’ve touched on why I think this isn’t really relevant before, but there’s another reason why relatively low traffic, with the occasional spike is more desirable over thousands or millions of visitors per day, week or month.
Using a tool like statcounter, or google analytics (which I avoid as I don’t understand it) you quickly get to know who is really interested in your site. This is far more difficult if your site gets tonnes of hits.
For example, I know which governments visit my site every day. And, of those, I know which departments of which governments visit my site every day. I also know which universities, news organisations, investment companies, NGO’s, defence agencies and consultancy groups stop by every day.
I’d go as far as to say, for the solo, wannabe, foreign correspondent, less blog traffic is better than floods of folk. That’s not to say, the occasional spike is not desirable. Just, don’t let that second question you always give me in my lectures drive what you do and how you do it.
What’s the business model? I guarantee that’s always the first question I get asked whenever I deliver a lecture to journalism students about social media, blogs and publishing kigaliwire.
Simple answer is, I don’t have one. At least not one you can easily plan for/quantify/stick in an excel sheet and say X + Y = $$$$. I don’t work that way. It’s more about transparency, visibility, connections and being reasonably good at what you do.
For the benefit of wannabehacks and business model seekers the world over, I thought I’d try and quantify the opportunities and connections I have made since August, 2009 as a direct result of Kigaliwire.
Note: As a full-time freelance, I also solicit work. However, for the purposes of “quantifying” - none of what’s listed below was solicited. This is only stuff that “came” to me.
I’ve probably forgotten a few things from this list, but you get the general idea. Also, I didn’t end up taking on all of the work offers and wotnot mentioned. Also, not all of these opportunities were paid and not all of them ended up panning out. However, in a nutshell,
If you’ve got the drive, you’re reasonably talented, you go somewhere odd, meet lots of people, get to know your patch, keep a blog, tweet a bit too, then - at least in my experience - stuff comes your way.
