I’ve just been going through my Google Docs and came across this draft post I wrote back in March last year about how I got into blogging.

Let me know if it is and whether you think I should try and bring it up to date!

You know what you should do?” said Stef to me on the night of The Media Guardian Awards as we sat mulling over the night’s award-winning, stage-invading, surreality:

“Write a post explaining how things have changed since you started your blog.”

It’s one of those suggestions that makes your heart sink to your boots. Yes, I agreed, it would be a good exercise. But then so much has changed since September 2007 that I’m not sure I’m able to put it all into words.

But, having had a break for Easter, I feel re-enthused enough to give it a go:

The easiest way to sum it up is this: In August 2007, I was fed up with the state of UK newspapers and seriously considering my employment options. In March 2008, I am still fed up with the state of UK newspapers but now firmly committed to the industry.

So, what has changed?

I have always loved the internet and have been an active member of forums and chat rooms since I was a teenager. But, in all that time, I never considered that I deserved a corner of the web to call my own. I contributed to other people’s websites, but that was as far as I thought I would ever get.

I think that attitude came from the same stable as my dislike for writing newspaper opinion pieces. I’m happiest when I’m learning from and with others: bouncing ideas around.

A column doesn’t do this. It takes a stance, argues its case, ends the conversation. I think there is a confidence bordering on arrogance that you must have to write columns. I just didn’t have it.

My lack of confidence also extended to being unsure I had anything of value to say at all, because I didn’t think I held any strong opinions.

Then, some time in the spring of 2007, along came Birmingham blogger Pete Ashton. Really, Pete had been there all along, building Birmingham’s blogging community but I hadn’t really paid attention until I was directed to his Created in Birmingham blog by a member of AWM after following up a story for The Birmingham Post’s Media & Marketing page.

At first I ignored it as a rather amateurish publication. But soon I was intrigued.

At the time I saw it as a different model for distributing certain types of news and information. What stood out for me at the time (and I hope Marc, my editor, will forgive me for saying this) was as far as “What’s On”-style coverage of the specific creative sector in Birmingham was concerned, CiB kicked The Birmingham Post’s butt. It would take me much longer to understand how important it was in serving its community and giving it a voice.

So I followed CiB for a few months, found out what I could about its author and sent an email asking to have a chat. Pete, catching the whiff of mainstream journalism, promptly ignored me.

It took until Birmingham’s Creative City Awards in September for me to convince Pete to meet me. I had badgered Marc to take a table at the event and, as a result, I got to choose which guests to invite. Pete was the wildcard – I didn’t think he’d accept. But I was delighted when he did.

Luckily, we got on. Actually, as time has passed I think we’ve realised we’re doing similar things, just coming at them from completely different angles.

It was Pete – who many Birmingham blog scene know as an ardent recruiter of bloggers – who told me to write a blog. He had to tell me twice, because at first I said I wasn’t interested.

Although, I didn’t really know what I was doing with the thing, with hindsight I can see from the second post on I started exploring the idea of increasing audience interaction.

I swore Pete to secrecy and asked him not to tell anyone what I was doing.

I also kept it from The Birmingham Post. Not because I had plans to use it as a bitching platform, but because I was genuinely nervous about revealing more of my personality publicly. I thought I’d be a rubbish blogger.

But I didn’t understand that by linking to other people’s blogs, they would know of my existence anyway. So it wasn’t long before I got a few comments…and people were friendly.

The third post was another voyage of discovery. I outpoured about Birmingham and its support of the creative sector. As well as comments, this time Pete broke his silence and blogged about what I had said. Then things started to roll: suddenly people I didn’t know were getting in touch saying that they had read my blog. Then the Head of Communications at Birmingham City Council called to arrange a meeting to discuss my post.

The last one was particularly strange and got me thinking about the power of blogging. I could have written exactly the same thing in The Birmingham Post, which has tens of thousands more readers than my blog, but would I have got that response from the council? I am pretty sure I would not.

It was when I announced a change to my reporting role, that Marc found out about the blog. I’ll be honest, he didn’t find out from me (I hadn’t dared to tell him), but from a colleague of mine who had mentioned it to him.

I remember being told Marc knew and waiting nervously to find out what he was going to do about it. He didn’t do anything. In fact, I believe he walked past my desk and said: “like the blog”. I don’t think to this day he knows how relieved I was to hear that!

But still, the blog had an audience, and suddenly I didn’t really know what I was supposed to write about. Coming from journalism training that teaches you that there is a form and structure to the way you write, a empty blog page was a bit of a nightmare. There was no convention to cling to. It was entirely up to me what I wrote.

It was the post Blogisfear where I expressed that and, with the help of those that commented, particularly Nick Booth, I began to realise that it was only journalists who thought they always had to finish the stories by themselves. On blogs there was collaboration, often a story would remain open-ended. I started to think about why that wasn’t being applied in the same way to news.

I became engrossed in the concept of “Web 2.0” – that there were millions of people out there thinking, creating content and collaborating. I had no more ownership over content or news than they did and, in fact, it was my responsibility, as supposedly employed to be “the eyes and ears of the people” to consult them about what I was doing.

I decided to start asking people to put forward questions for people I was interviewing. This had varying degrees of success and was something I enjoyed (it’s died out a bit now as I don’t interview people all that often now).

Pete told me this was known as “crowd-sourcing” and had a wide range of potential applications for newspapers. I can not stress enough how helpful it was to have someone that I could call to have coffee with and pick their brains on how the web “worked”. I started to look at journalism in a new way through Pete’s explanations of blogging.

It was also Pete, I think, who was the first person to teach me the concept of blogging as a conversation.

I first joined the UK journalism “conversation” the day I wrote about Roy Greenslade leaving the NUJ. His decision was a fantastic catalyst for me to write about what I had been discovering for myself about the future of journalism. Some of the things I write about make me smile now (they were nearly there, but not quite), but I had some great feedback from people in the industry.

One commentor was Craig McGinty, who introduced me to the idea of papers developing online communty. It’s funny. Looking back at Craig’s comment, I remember at the time thinking that it was unlikely that any newspaper would employs a person with “the responsibility to help local groups and organisations set up blog-driven sites.” Now, after launching 35 bloggers on The Birmingham Post website, that idea seems perfectly reasonable!

The NUJ debate also showed me how blogging can take you into the heart of a community as, within a few posts, I was debating in the comments section of my blog with Donnacha Delong – the journalist that had sparked the whole debate in the first place with an article in The Journalist.

By the time Trinity Mirror’s chief executive Sly Bailey turned up at our offices, to explain why The Birmingham Post & Mail was no longer for sale, I was being watched by a number of management-types in the company… which was a little unnerving to say the least.

So much so, that I actually stopped posting for a bit, worried that I was starting to act like a monkey performing tricks to try and impress an audience.

It’s something that has continued to be on my mind when I write. I still want this to be a home for half-baked ideas and chats with colleagues, but you can not forget that what you say can make people pretty darn cross… as I was to discover a bit later into my blogging experiment.

Nicky Getgood, founder of the hyperlocal “Digbeth is Good” blog, explains why the “all blogs are rubbish” argument is… well… rubbish:

“I’m not saying journalists should come to my, or anyone’s blog, blindly trusting it… Just that it would be better for both journalists and bloggers if they came to blogs with an open mind. Because if they don’t , bloggers get tarnished with a rather dirty brush and journalists seriously miss out.”

More, including a fantastic metaphor describing the situation, can be found on her blog.

Jane McGonigal – Webstock 09

I mean, obviously you can’t ignore the question of how local newspapers make money online, but maybe some of us are coming at it from the wrong direction.

The reason I say this is that “how do local newspapers make money” came up as a question a number of times during the panel I was on at yesterday’s Media 140 microblogging conference.

It’s a question that, in one sense, is a hugely important one to ask in the light of the current local newspaper crisis. On the other hand, perhaps there are other questions that need to be answered first.

So what if you took away the money question. What questions would we be asking about local newspapers? Perhaps we’d be asking: What are they for? Who do they serve? What should they contain? Why do we produce them in the way we do?

Perhaps its spending time answering these that gets us closer to answering “How do we make money?”.

This struck me whilst watching Jane McGonigal’s Webstock presentation that asks “Why doesn’t the real world work like a game?”.

The slide above particularly grabbed my attention. These are the main elements that make people happy, Jane says.

She argues that Alternate Reality Games are so addictive because they take the four points that make people happy into account.

It also occurs that the role of a local news organisation should encompass all four of these criteria too. Point 3 and 4 should be easy – local news should be part of a community and should have lots of ways of putting people in touch.

Local news organisations have traditionally had the ambition to make their area a better place to live, with this usually manifesting in campaigns. That is being part of something bigger.

Perhaps both of these need to be re-envisioned for the 21st Century, but the values and thinking should already be there.

Points 1 and 2? Well that’s where I think it could get interesting. The way I think about this is that it’s all about empowering the people who engage with you, give them the tools to (as Jane puts it) “be awesome” and recognise that when it happens.

I haven’t fully thought out how this would manifest itself , but it seems to me that this is a better line of enquiry to follow if we want to make local news more relevant to consumers.

Jane’s full presentation:

Also Jane’s presentation “The Rise of the Happiness“.

This was another issue that came up during the Journalism Leaders Forum. One question put to the panel was whether there was still a place in the newsroom for new, young, talented writers.

My answer was “yes”, but I’d want to know what else they could do too. Could they build their online community, for example.

However, Alan Murray, deputy managing editor of The Wall Street Journal, puts it better than I in a video for Nieman Journalism Lab.

This is something I’ll put more thought into tomorrow, but I needed to post this in order to sleep!

It was prompted by a panel discussion at the Journalism Leaders Forum today where, once again, the “blogs are rubbish and can’t be trusted” mantra was trotted out by some of the panel members.

Why? Why are we still even having this debate?

Why is it that when you talk about blogs to some journalists, the images that pop into their heads are of the celebrity-obsessed, the political rumour-mongers or the batshit insane?

Why don’t they think about the first hand accounts of conflict, the well-respected tech news sites, the local community information or those producing focused industry analysis?

(Oh, and as for that “citizen journalism“… well who needs that?)

Evening Standard Sorry Tube Campaign by Annie Mole

Is it just me that finds The Evening Standard’s “Sorry” campaign toe-curlingly uncomfortable?

Perhaps it’s because I work in newspapers, but I think my awkwardness stems from being mildly embarrassed at witnessing such public self flagellation.

The medium is responsible for this to some degree:  advertising boards aren’t really the best for a frank and humble discussion with your readers. All The Standard can do in this space is to continue shouting loudly at you about how very sorry it is.

One opinion is that the campaign recognises that we now live in a world of transparency:

“Trust has gone – look at the government and banks. Where we are now, brands have to admit their mistakes.” says Mark Borkowski, founder of Borkowski PR.

I am absolutely happy to be corrected, but I don’t believe this campaign gets anywhere near being transparent or does much to build trust. In fact, I wonder how many employees of The Standard would say it even represents their reality.

Perhaps a better way to say you’re sorry (if you really are) is to modify your behaviour and get on with trying to be good.

Ever since I heard the Undercover Economist Tim Harford’s “The Logic of Life” lecture at the LSE I have been banging on about the “fruit versus chocolate” experiment to anyone who will listen. Now I’m afraid I’m going to share it here.

In short:

“the experimenters offered the subjects a snack: fruit or chocolate. Seven out of ten subjects asked for chocolate. But when the experimenters offered other subjects a different choice, the answer was different too: ‘I’ll bring you a snack next week. What would you like then, fruit or chocolate?’ Three-quarters of subjects chose fruit.”

This, Tim argues, demonstrates the theory that human beings have two competing systems for decision making. One, the dopamine system, is geared towards rewarding immediate gratification. The other, the cognitive system, prioritises long-term planning.

When the brain is presented with the possibility of immediate gratification (such as the offer of chocolate), the dopamine system overides the cognitive system (prioritising the unhealthy sugar rush with the healthier fruit option).

I couldn’t help but draw a parallel between this and news consumption patterns. Could it be that if the experiment replaced fruit and chocolate with the FT and The Sun you’d get a similar result?

It appears I’m not alone observing the connection. Last year Seamus McCauley, Strategic Analyst at Associated Northcliffe Digital suggested that by “unbundling” news stories from the paper onto the web, readers may increasingly choose to indulge in celebrity gossip or quirky stories (chocolate) and abandon “hard news” (fruit).

I’m not sure I’d go that far – news is still a pretty well read section on any news website I’ve worked on. Also, as Seamus’s commenters point out, you can balance your dopamine-hungry browsing by ensuring you get your “daily fruit” with RSS subscriptions or e-newsletters.

But the idea that there may be some way to make “harder” news less like fruit and more like chocolate is an enticing one.

It sent me off down a long and bizarre train of thought equating different ways to eat fruit (dip it in chocolate, chop it into bite-size chunks, etc.) with various methods of news consumption.

In the end I realised that, for me, it was all about the smoothies.

In particular, Innocent Smoothies.

First of all, smoothies are a pretty easy way to boost your fruit intake.

Also, whatever you think about their “twee” advertising (and recent Coca-Cola investment announcement)  Innocent have been widely praised for their customer-focused approach.

The company works hard to make people feel good about buying their product. When customers contact the brand, Innocent try to make them feel valued. This is what distinguishes it from the many other (probably just as good) smoothie brands in the market.

So, could news organisations learn anything from this?

Well, I guess there is already a lot of talk about how news brands can present content in easy-to-consume formats – whether that be a great website, iPhone app or e-Reader.

But what about the service? How good do news brands make people feel about reading their stories?  Do you feel valued as a customer by any particular news organisation?

Kyle McRae, founder of Scoopt, talks about the creation of a business based on UGC, its sale to Getty and it’s eventual demise two years later.

Warning: These are rough notes, taken by me, for me at today’s JEECamp in Birmingham. This means there are typos and misspellings aplenty.

Kyle McRae – Scoopt

@kylemacrae

Asian Tsunami pictures taking two to three days to get onto CNN.

Realised need to connect people with news agencies.

Created scoopt.com – consumer facing, don’t sell to The Sun you’ll get shafted. We negotiated money and split it 50/50

Total website cost £5,000 to build (had quotes of £50,000).

(Probably do it for half that these days)

Taking the plunge was the hardest – how much of personal time, effort commitment should I put in?

Put in everything. Sold house, moved down to the south from Glasgow, wife gave up her job and dedicated ourselves wholesale.

If starting new business critical decision is whether to launch without funding.

Soft launch saw three VCs approached him from Silicon Valley and wasted a lot of time having nice chats with investors.

Best thing with Scoopt was to launch it first and see how it goes.

Ideal world get your project funded first.

Longer you take over it though, the dodgier it gets.

Key thing is making the business the best it possibly can be. Managing consumers’ expectations was key. Can’t tell people their photos are crap.

We focused on revenue – all about selling pics and videos.

Advice was to go for critical mass and go for the network and worry about selling later.

If you are building a business it needs to be selling something – more so now than ever. VCs are going to look at your revenue model first.

Focus entirely on where the money is coming from.

Pulled together bunch of very experienced and useful people to turn it into a realistic business.

I didn’t have much idea of business, just journalism. Needed experience from people who had already built business. Was tremendously advantageous.

Before you launch anything – sanity check it.

There are experienced people out there who can do that. You should listen to them.

Problem with Scoopt was that it doesn’t scale. Most important one was the sales side of things. We found it easy to build a network of thousands of contributors. First problem was filtering it. But the impossible side of it was selling things on to the media.

Anything less than a nationally important story it was impossible to get the reach into the regional and hyper local level.

This came out painfully in every pitch I made to VCs. I had £10mill revenue in year 2 but in order to make things happen it didn’t add.

By middle of 2006 we realized it wasn’t going o fly.

We decided we had to sell it. Forecast for Yr 1 was £30,000. It wasn’t making real money but with sales and distribution network in place it could work.

Drew up fantastic business plan, told a brilliant story, but nobody bought it.

Went through some early due diligence with Getty. We left that meeting thinking they might buy it, but a day after they said it didn’t make sense for them.

I’d lost faith in the business model. Options were to grind on, or stop.

One book you should buy is The Dip. You have to know when to stop and move on.

Latter half of 2006 we were grinding on and had enough faith if we could bring it up to a certain level it would have to be of interest to a Getty or Reuters.

We were the first in the market and similar businesses were starting to set up.

Had some successes – a few front pages.

Times and Glasgow Herald. When pitching VC that looks good.

Reality of the Times sale was they paid £300. The Herald paid £75, but wanted to pay £25.

Pic Desk guy at herald had a daily budget of £250.

Realised budget wasn’t there.

December 2006 driving home

I sent Jonathan Klein CEO of Getty images a message from Blackberry admitting we couldn’t make a go of it without funding and said we wouldn’t be there in a month.

He said don’t do anything rushed.

Met with people in Munich and they agreed they would buy it. Wouldn’t say how much. They talked strong game of what they could do with Scoopt. Scoopt would just be another supplier along with hundreds of photographers. Woollier about the marketing campaign.

Knew we would be shafted on price, but Scoopt would survive.

Decided to sell.

Took Getty 3 months of due diligence before they signed. Could have been done in an afternoon.

During which all I could do was drop the ball.

Did Newsnight and CNN interviews thinking “why am I promoting this, all I can do is screw this out”

Got out on the other side. As part of the acquisition I became part of Getty’s citizen media. We’d asked for minimum staff of six. Realised that wasn’t going to happen – it was just myself and my wife. Just the two of us, but we were still getting paid.

People presumed I was a millionaire.

All the talk about what Getty was going to do didn’t happen. Scoopt stagnated. In terms of acquisition it was a one off fee, no targets. Not particularly incentivized to make a success, but it was my baby and wanted to prove it could work.

The inertia from Getty was very frustrating.

I don’t know why.

If you’re cynical you could say they bought Scoopt to seal up the citizen journalism market. All our competitors went bust.

Once Getty had a piece of the action it didn’t make sense for anyone to compete with them.

Istockphoto bought for $50 million by Getty in order to control the space.

Another argument is that Getty didn’t know what to do with it, but wasn’t going to throw any funds with it. It was going through financial turmoil itself. Picture market had dropped, share prices had dropped.

Getty had to put itself onto the market just to survive. Sold to private equity for $2.2billion

In the end Kyle left on the first day he could when his contact came to an end.

Self-assessment a few months before I explained where the company had gone wrong, that the business still had potential and Getty were squandering.

Left not exactly on best speaking terms.

Carried on with a staff of zero and kept it going for a year and pulled the plug on it this March (two years after business sold).

No real competitors did anything special in this space during the past 2 years. Even the big boys, no one got further than Scoopt. Maybe fundamentally the business doesn’t’ work.

Must be some way of using amateur citizen journalism content and making money out of it, but Getty didn’t figure it out.

Personal lessons:

All about the dip moment.

Grind on or get out?

Enormously frustrating. Running the business was fantastic. One of the most controversial bits of content was a stolen royal family video. Prince Andrew made it for Beatrice’s 18th Birthday. Lots of nice stuff. They had a party at Westminster and rented DVD equipment and left

Obvious and gross break of privacy (before we sold to Getty).

That could’ve been a big money spinner. The obvious candidate was the News of the World but one of their journalists was locked up for phone tapping.

The Sunday papers’ lawyers said no.

Advised him not to approach the papers personally, but he did.

Sunday People exposed him as a squalid rat, got DVD off him and sent it back to the Royal Family making them out to be the heroes. Got a double page spread on it.

There’s an argument to say anyone here thinking of starting a business, I think it pays dividends to escape the echo chamber and think about what you’re doing form a distance.

Being plugged into the industry and reading blogs is not the best way to do it.

Need to take a step away. Remove yourself form the scene for a bit; stop reading Jeff Jarvis and the other pundits. Ask if they really know anything or do you need to work out something by yourself from scratch.

If you can do it without funding, it’s the best way to do it.

Q: Where did the £10 million revenue prediction come from? Extrapolation from how many pictures we got on the percentage we could sell (5%) and we knew average price.

Spent a year in discussion with Flickr. No route to market so pitched route to market as commercial partner can if they want nominate Scoopt as a commercial broker.

Stuart Butterworth? Got pushed down to biz development in the end Yahoo thought it detracted from core proposition.

Partnered with CC that had a commercial license for those who want it. Had it working. Flickr wouldn’t do it.

In the end I did an open letter to Flickr members tagging it Scoopt and we’ll try and sell it.

30,000 pictures tagged and Flickr sent us some very angry emails.

Since then Getty has partnered with them and there is a group – halfway house.

BBC UGC Hub robbed us of revenue; The Telegraph even used our strap line.

When people got our message they tended to buy into it, but more people know the BBC and understand how to get into them.

£10daily budget on Google ad words. Now I would call the marketing we did social media marketing. Talked to people in Flickr and photography and journalism email lists. The key thing was engaging with professional photographers first who at first thought we were out to take their business. In every blog comment, email or forum discussion I made of point of engaging with people who thought we were the devil.

We also got into mobile phone forums, subtly spreading the idea that with a camera they could make a few hundred dollars.

Way back in the dim and distant past of this blog (about 2007),  I discovered folk were reading it.

The result was a panic post entitled “Blogisfear” that partly outlined my worries about balancing my personal thoughts on the media industry with my professional position as a reporter at The Post.

I got some great support from friends and fellow Brummie bloggers and, after a while, settled into a style and a subject matter I was comfortable with.

Eventually, even when I was being quite controversial, I didn’t feel too out of my depth.

I put the anxiety down to new-blogger nerves, but it seems that wasn’t quite correct. It wasn’t the blog that was causing the concern, it was the learning to negotiate a new social situation.

So, with a new life and a new job, it appears the fear has returned slightly.

I didn’t notice at first – especially as The Times have been very supportive about me continuing to blog on my own site – but I’m finding it daunting to post.

Combine this with my usual fear of getting things wrong and I’ve got myself some blog fright.

This may lead to slightly strange/strained posts for a little while.

Bear with me?

“It’s not newspapers that might become obsolete. It’s some of the editors, reporters and proprietors who are forgetting a newspaper’s most precious asset: the bond with its readers.”

I have been catching up with an ABC Boyer Lecture given by Rupert Murdoch in November last year (thanks to Dilyan for the recommendation and link).

In it Rupert about his career in newspapers, gives his take on the Wapping dispute, The Times compact, plans for the WSJ and the loss of newspaper power in the face of the internet:

 

 Boyer Lectures: Rupert Murdoch: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (812)

Some other interesting quotes:

“Instead of finding stories that are relevant to their readers’ lives, papers run stories reflecting their own interests. Instead of writing for their audience, they are writing for their fellow journalists. And instead of commissioning stories that will gain them readers, some editors commission stories whose sole purpose is the quest for a prize.”

“I do not claim to have all the answers. Given the realities of modern technology, this very radio address can be sliced and digitally diced. It can be accessed in a day or a month or a decade. And I can rightly be held to account in perpetuity for the points on which I am proven wrong—as well as mocked for my inability to see just how much more different the world had become.”

There is also a full transcript.