The Media Development Loan Fund applies venture-capital principles to create a sustainable free press in developing nations and countries emerging from repressive regimes:

I think one of the things that seems to be misunderstood between commenters is the thorny issue of the importance of journalism.

I think there are two areas that need to be unwoven in this debate:

One is making sure we understand what we mean when we talk about journalism.

The second is making sure when we talk about journalism being essential, we understand what we think it is essential for.

OK, so trying to define journalism is an essay in itself and I know I’m going to fall far short with this attempt, but here goes:

Journalism seems to be a catch-all for many types of writing that is triggered by current or relevant events.

This includes:

- Information about events and occurances that are deemed to be significant (important, dramatic, entertaining or useful).

- Interviews with individuals of interest to ascertain their opinions and stances on topics deemed to be significant.

- Features and background information that place topics of significance into a wider context.

- Critical assessment on siginificant issues in the form of comment.

Some of this can be done by people who have not been trained as journalists.

If you don’t believe me then go ask:

- Ahmed Bilal, founder of Soccerlens.com
- Andy Baio, founder of waxy.org (which helped dig out the Miss Alaska video of Sarah Palin)
- Pat Phelan of patphelan.net who looks at the telecommunications industry whilst operating a business in it.
And more locally in Birmingham:
- Pete Ashton, founder of the creative industry news blog createdinbirmingham.com.
- Steve Gerrard, founder of gig review blog brumlive.com.
- Nicky Getgood, who is keeping Digbeth residents in the know about local issues at “Digbeth is Good“.

This is news. They do not cover EVERYTHING that newspaper journalists cover, but what they produce is certainly not all opinion and conjecture.

Therefore, I think its important that we are clear what we are saying trained journalists can produce that these people can not.

This is important because that defines, in part, the value of journalists in the future.

We also have to be honest. What proportion of this value do we currently utilise in our products?

Personally, I think journalists are valuable when they have the time and the training to work with the community they serve, identify and then investigate issues that do not seem to add up. They can then convey what they have discovered in a clear way (and that’s not just by story writing).

I might be wrong about this though, I’m still questioning.

But, once we have decided what we mean when we talk about trained journalists, then we have to understand what we mean when we say their work is essential.

I think as part of this we need to ask two questions:

1. Is this “essential” journalism necessary for a healthy, successful and sustainable society?

2. Is this “essential” journalism necessary for a healthy, successful and sustainable news business? (I.e it has strong appeal to a market , makes the business profitable and – if a plc – delivers shareholder value).

I honestly don’t think these two questions are as connected as people like to pretend they are.

If newspaper journalists were given time to “‘create’ real stories,” would that really make more people buy newspapers? Would it really make more people advertise with them?

If it was the quality of the investigative journalism that drove the market would the UK newspapers landscape look like it does?

I think we need to understand what we’re arguing here.

I don’t think anyone is saying that the skills of journalists are worthless, unimportant or unnecessary.

But, I think we seriously need to get past the emotional attachments we have to our industry and ask what skills we offer that are unique and valuable (both in business and societal terms) and then what is the best vehicle for us to undertake them in.

It has prompted a very considered and interesting comment from Steve Dyson – editor of the Birmingham Mail and the Sunday Mercury.

An extract:

Local newspaper brands have great reputations for reporting trusted facts. Let’s not dilute this too quickly without knowing what we’re diluting it with. Yes, add interaction, online and in print, but let’s clearly label what is what.

There is more, including comments disagreeing with his stance.

Most of the news that comes out of media organisations on a daily basis is information that others either WANT people to know or HAVE to admit to. It is just re-written or re-presented in a format that fits that platform.

So, instead of journos, the world needs the generators of this information to communicate it better and to allow for redress to what they say.

So is there somewhere the paid journalist can fit into all this then? Well, I guess journalists should be doing what they’re supposed to do – find out the information that organisations don’t want people to know.

But they can’t do that until they are freed up from the current information processing that they have to do, and that means those that provide information start doing so in formats that are usuable and on a platform that allows redress.

It made me want to scream.

I prompted the comment by admitting I wasn’t au fait with all of Trinity Mirror’s digital acquisitions in the last three years.

I am all too painfully aware of my ignorance in this area and it is something I’m working hard to change.

A lack of business knowledge is, I think, one of the greatest threats to local and regional journalists, especially in this tough economic climate.

After all, if we don’t understand how our market is created, nor how we best make money out of it, then I would argue we know little about serving it properly

Despite having been told in the past that my arts and journalistic background may offer me a “creative” or “unusual” take on the fortunes of the industry, I don’t really buy it. You don’t understand anything unless you understand how the money works.

On the Journalism Leadership Programme at UCLAN last week our course leader Francois Nel got us to examine the relationship between journalists and the businesses they work in.

There is no doubt that the editorial department sits in a strange, rather isolated, space in organisational structure.

In fact to “sully” oneself with the business of making money and selling your content would be unthinkable to many journalists.

But why? We are happy to sell our content to publications as freelancers. So why would journalists want to deny their role in the profitability of a larger business?

Well, one theory that came out of the UCLAN course is that journalists have trapped themselves in the mythologies of objectivity and vocation.

Unlike transparency (which requires you to admit there will always be some slant to anything that is written and to make efforts to show where that may lie) “objective” content seems to require a journalist to disassociate himself entirely from the business of news.

Then there is the vocational aspect of journalism, which means there is no need for rewards to be linked to business performance.

Journalists will mostly, by choice, leave the understanding and running of media businesses to financiers and advertisers with their incentives and bonuses. Instead they are happy to be striving for the praise of peers of a good story written.

This, goes the theory, has allowed news organisations to long enjoy access to a stream of intelligent journalists for very little money.

Whilst I’m not a wholehearted subscriber to this theory, I think it has some strong merits.

Perhaps it’s something the NUJ should be thinking about, especially if it’s true that journalists lack a decent knowledge of their business and industry.

And, when a union makes pay one of its core campaigns, wouldn’t a pro-active policy of educating members and providing them with access to financial information on their companies be worthwhile?

It seems to me when the biggest threat to journalist jobs in the UK is now from cost-cutting, there has never been a greater need for a think tank to assess and understand the changes that are happening in the industry and to present them clearly to journalists.

If the NUJ were to provide this then, instead of being restricted to negotiating better redundancy packages or protecting jobs that may not be relevant in a changing marketplace, they might be better placed to argue for stronger organisational structures that would lead to better quality journalism.

It’s the question I asked on Twitter yesterday.

Some people found it a perfectly comfortable question to debate, others seemed to find it irritating.

If I am being naive then I would dearly love someone to fill me in.

So far, my thinking is that reporters do not write headlines because of the nature of print production i.e. because they are not the ones that lay the story out on a page and therefore do not know what space they have/what other articles are on there.

It surely can’t be because reporters are not expected to grasp spelling, punctuation and grammar?!

The public responses to my question (or the ones that I could find on Twitter Search) are copied and pasted below in reverse chronological order. (Wouldn’t it be lovely to have an app that collated responses to you on Twitter over a specified period of time.)

Media was becoming increasingly personality driven as users decide which sources to trust and which to reject, I argued. People want to know who is behind the news and what they stand for.

It was the first time I had put myself “out there” and, I have to admit, it wasn’t altogether a comfortable experience. I had always said I was happy being a newspaper journalist because it gave me the luxury of standing behind the photographer’s camera. Not anymore.

But, by becoming more visible, I met a wealth of interesting individuals on platforms such as Seesmic and Bambuser who have talked, debated and helped me learn so much more about what the web can offer. Going public didn’t seem so scary after all.

So when my editor Marc Reeves asked if he could put me forward as a potential panellist for The Big Debate I agreed. Three months ago I wouldn’t have dared but, I reasoned, how much worse could it be than doing a Seesmic post?!

Of course, it was far more nerve-wracking, but I was very glad to be given the opportunity to do it. There were a number of firsts and innovations that took place at The Big Debate that I am very proud of and will post about later.

But it also demonstrated the flipside of going public.

Someone who either watched the debate at the ICC or online decided that they did not like me. Not just that they didn’t like my arguments on the future of regional newspapers, but that they didn’t like me. So much so that they intimated in a comment on my blog that I must have done something rather unsavoury to get myself on the panel. The full comment, which was originally on my ‘about’ page, and the responses to it have been put into a seperate post.

That was pretty upsetting. The odd thing was that, when I read the first line, I was glad to see someone had been critical of what I said. I can learn from criticism.

But, when I realised it was turning into a personal attack, it became something altogether different. It felt threatening and misogynistic. After all, how many men have been accused of sleeping their way onto a panel? It was also a rather unhappy thing to learn that the IP address was local.

Now I know enough about flamers to have expected this to happen at some point. The web allows people to hide behind relative anonymity and, as a recent debate on women and the Internet suggests, it could have been far nastier. But it still knocked me a bit and led me to wonder: how many regional newspaper journalists are prepared for dealing with such comments online?

There are two issues at stake here:

1. The emotional response:

I can easily imagine journalists who are not used to online debate feeling very threatened. How would you prepare someone to deal with this and put it into context? It would be a great shame and loss if such a comment made them withdraw from online conversations altogether.

As an aside, I wonder if the current reluctance shown by some journalists to engage with readers online is, in part, a response to some of the comments that can be found in the old-style, poorly moderated, regional newspaper Internet forums where flamers are rife.

2. The public response.

How easy is it for someone who has been attacked to hit back in a similar way? Very: an individual that is hurt, angry and feels unfairly targeted is going to want to bite back with an equally nasty comment. I’ve seen it happen time and time again on blogs.

But, by hitting back, the conversation is only dragged further down into the depths of ignorance, anger and spite – hardly the qualities that are desirable in a journalist. Whilst it might be a perfectly understandable response to a nasty comment, I’m not sure it would be seen as acceptable.

As commenting is such an easy thing to do and can be done in seconds – without prior moderation by news editors or subs – it would seem necessary to develop some sort of strategy or format for journalists to use in dealing with personal comments.

I stress that there is also need for journalists to be able to distinguish between attacks on their points of view and attacks on their person. We must be able to accept strong, vociferous criticism of our ideas and show that we are capable of responding reasonably and intelligently. I think it’s easy for people to mix the two up.

All of the concerns above suggest to me that, as regional newspaper organisations push their journalists into a more public online arena, a little bit of guidance and support is needed to help them deal with the negative side of transparency.

One thing that has emerged from this is that I am lucky to be part of a strong online community (as can be seen by comments here and on Twitter) that will be very vocal if they see something unacceptable or offensive. I am thankful for that.

*Sigh*

Right, well I have just wasted 20 minutes of my last day at SXSW watching what was the most dire representation of the newspaper industry I could have possibly witnessed at a world-leading conference on interactivity.

I will have to come back to who was the speaker and what was the title, because right now the need to rant overtakes the need to Google for that particular information.

The talk was by a 36-year-old US journalist who is trying to help his colleagues embrace new platforms and get to grips with the power of the social Internet.

The executive summary (before I walked out) was:

“Print is dead.”

“Time is running out.”

“It’s real hard to get journalists to blog.”

“Change isn’t happening fast enough.”

“I don’t know what the solution is.”

Well… that’s useful. I can think of at least half a dozen people who could have produced a more insightful assessment of the industry as it currently stands. I might even be so bold as to say I could have done better.

First of all, let’s stop saying that the Internet is the death of print. It is not. The Internet is the death of some print. There will always be a need to place words in places where screens can’t go. Plus text is harder to read on the screen so, for long articles, print is always going to be a more comfortable experience.

But t’s true that a large swathe of news is being repackaged into a sharper, more condensed form making it easier for busy people with busy lives to learn what they need to know quickly. This is the sort of news that needs to be taken out of print and put onto the Internet, rather than print.

The other thing is that “time is running out”. Running out for who, exactly? Running out for newspaper groups? Well, I suspect they are well aware revenues are declining and, if they don’t get their income from newspapers, then they’ll get it from elsewhere and dispose of or wind up anything that makes a loss. Running out for newspapers? Maybe… Running out for some journalists? Yes.

Yes it is really hard to get journalists to blog – mainly becuase they are tied into the busy regime of producing an outdated newspaper and see a blog post as extra work. The hard part is finding the space for them to take time out of that treadmill to realise they need to look at their work in a new way. Once you do that, and once you explain how blogging can connect you directly to readers, most are pretty open to the idea of using the platform.

I simply can’t understand all this negativity associated with the change that is happening to the newspaper industry at the moment. There are lots of things to feel positive about: blogs can help you improve your stories through reader feedback and contribution, video can help you build trust between you and the reader, mashups can help provide readers with richer data and information on the areas and topics that they are most interested in.

Those people that get this stuff right, have a bright future. I wish we’d start looking forward rather than constantly peddling the message of doom and gloom.

It’s certainly a fear expressed by the NUJ, and by others. I can see their point and have said that, if profit-driven newspapers groups thought they could increase margins by relying more heavily on UGC, then it would probably happen.

But I’ve started to revise those thoughts of late. If the Flickr question taught me one thing it was that while journalists are debating how UGC will be used in the future, we are not at all sure about how the future content generators might feel about it.

Whilst the value of blogs as sources is, I think, beyond doubt, it doesn’t mean that the Internet is an orchard of social networks for newspapers to cherry-pick content at will… even if there is no legal reason why they shouldn’t.

For example, Flickr is designed for photo sharing. From the comments I’ve recieved, there should be nothing legally wrong with a newspaper providing a Flickr feed on its website. BUT just because it can, doesn’t mean it should or that people will like it if it does.

One of the problems is that we live in suspicious times. The media is badly mistrusted and, whilst people are happy to read about others in the newspaper, they are fearful about getting involved with it themselves. I’ve lost count of the times I’ve heard the lines: “Oh you’re a journalist, so what lies are you going to make up today?” or I’ve had to spend considerable time convincing people that I am, in fact, not going to stitch them up. Personally, it’s insulting, but then that’s the regard our industry is held in.

I suppose, once upon a time, with an army of dedicated readers and no Internet, it wouldn’t have made a blind bit of difference to sales if one reader was upset. Now they are a potential content generator, the situation is different. Not only will a lack of trust make it difficult to obtain content, it could also mean that if a paper appears to be doing something else that fits the untrustworthy stereotype, the news and damage will spread.

For example: A paper develops a Flickr feed without building trust in the Flickr community. It has done nothing legally wrong, but it is tapping into a community that will not all be fully paid up subscribers to that newspaper. Therefore, the default position of mistrust is likely to stand and the assumption may be that the newspaper is trying to profit at the expense of unpaid photogrpahers.

The understandable result is that Flickr members get angry and start pulling their photos from the group. They then replace these with offensive photoshopped versions telling that paper exactly were to stuff its feed. Angry blog posts sprout up all over the place and, within days, you’ve alienated a community and, I imagine, the feed would have been taken down.

I don’t have an example of where that has yet happened, but its seems pretty plausible possiblity.

So if newspapers are serious about UCG, then they might have their work cut out. Unless they start getting out into local social netwoks and communities and start building up trust, they may find their UGC dream backfires.

I’m going to start tweeting about what I’m working on. When I know what the main story is I’m going to work on each day, I’ll tweet about it. That way it might allow folks who can and want to shed light on the topic to do so.

Will it work? No idea! I haven’t got many followers at the moment. But I’ve already started with today’s job: a story on energy.