Is this useful? An account of how I started blogging and how it changed my journalism

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.

I didn’t publish it at the time, thinking some of the things I was saying about The Birmingham Post wouldn’t go down too well considering the upheaval the newspaper was going through.

As you can see, it isn’t finished – and I certainly had no idea that in a year I’d be working for The Times – but I thought I’d post up what was there because it is a record of how I got into blogging and might be of some use to someone.

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.

How Created in Birmingham taught me about blogging

If you follow my Twitterstream, you won’t have avoided being pestered to vote for Created in Birmingham for Best UK Blog in the Weblog Awards.

I am careful about partisanship on most topics, but this is one I am happy to put on my campaigning hat for and I want to use this post to explain why.

I came across CiB in 2007 when I was working as Media & Marketing Editor for the Post. I was tipped off about it by someone at Advantage West Midlands who happened to know then-author Pete Ashton.

At first, I think my reaction was pretty typical of journalists: I saw it as a two-bit, amateurish attempt at keeping tabs on the local creative community. Sweet and cuddly, but not REAL news. No threat there.

Except, that wasn’t exactly true. What I quickly came to realise was that CiB is  a unique resource for those in the creative sector.

Pete’s commitment to post at least once a day and the honest style in which posts were written (conversational, links out, making it clear where information came from) was the recipe for its success. It wasn’t long before it was a recognised name within the creative circles in the city.

It bought together the creative community in a way that traditional newspaper articles could not quite do. What was posted was not restricted by page space, nor limited by when it could be published AND it gave people a place to talk, connect and debate.

As CiB increasingly became a resource for my story ideas, I realised there was something in this blog lark that meant it had the potential to be genuine competition to “traditional” media.

Determined to understand more I pestered Pete to meet me (not something he was initially that keen to do – me being “evil mainstream media”). When we eventually did meet we started to realise there was quite a crossover in the work of CiB and my job as Media & Marketing Editor.

It was fantastic to go through that process . Pete started questioning how much of what the blog did was “journalism” and I started looking at the ways in which my work could better engage with a community and how the online news model would work as a business.

It was Pete that suggested I started this blog as a way of experimenting with a more “two-way” type of writing.

There is no doubt that has changed eveything.

My personal experience of blogging set me on a road that challenged all my beliefs about journalism and media. It introduced me to new online tools and helped me develop a new network of interesting sources, contacts and friends.

It has changed the way I think about my industry, about the businesses that form it and the organisations that claim to support it. It has also irrevocably changed my hopes and plans for a career in journalism.

Pete has now left CiB, but his good work has been continued by Chris Unitt and, I’m sure, will be by new author Kate Spragg. It is still a fantastic case study to use when looking at how blogs can impact on traditional media.

So please vote CiB, it helped this print journalist learn more that I can tell you.

What is journalism and is it really that essential?

This is a comment I wrote for an earlier post about the role of journalists. I hope you don’t mind but I’ve copied it into a post because it is actually longer than most things I write and  the debate is moving on. Let me know what you think!

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.

Continue reading

Preston Returns: Journalism and the Market

So today we spent the day with Jeanne Hill learning about the art of good marketing and about the need to get editorial and marketing departments in newspapers talking to each other more.

I think it has become a universial stereotype that marketers and journalists are hardly the perfect image of interdepartmental communication bliss. Journalists often mistake marketers for salespeople and take a “holier than thou” attitude to their supposed editorial integrity. Marketers, I think, assume editorial are incapable of grasping much more than a pen and paper, when it comes to the fundementals of running a newspaper.

But, of course, we’re all in the same business and today was a great insight into how marketing can be used to better understand and then target a readership.

We also assessed the way in which readers are referred to in the newsroom. This sparked a conversation on Seesmic where I asked the community how they wanted to be percieved by journalists (wish this would embed).

Some very interesting repsonses are here (Documentally), here (solobasssteve), here (Pete Ashton), here (Cataspanglish) and here (Hache). There were many more that raised very interesting points, but you’ll have to log onto Seesmic to see the full conversation!

What comes out a lot is that if a reader feels even slightly as if a journalist is not respecting the reader then they will simply go elsewhere. There is an acceptance that objectivity is a myth and that social media provides an opportunity to critique journalists and build a relationship with them, which then provides context to their work.

Obviously most of these guys (and they are all guys) are early adopters, but it was certainly an interesting exercise.

SXSWi… it all starts from here.

Wow! Well this has been a strange 48 hours.

Quick catch-up:

Having raced around London on Thursday evening to pick up a Nokia N95 to use in SXSW, I hot-footed it to the Media Guardian Awards with Stef and Pete who were picking up an award for Created in Birmingham.

Those who follow the above pair’s Twitter streams will know the evening was… well… eventful. Pete and Stef will have more to say on this than I as, I’m ashamed to say, I missed witnessing Pete’s “Jarvis Cocker” moment. But, considering how disappointed all the nominees from the blogging category were about their lack of recognition at the awards (and how much free alcohol was flowing), I suspect someone was going to do something.

Then, after an hour’s sleep in a Travel Inn, we trudged bleary eyed (and sore of head) over to Gatwick for the flight to Houston, Texas. Quick change in Houston onto a flight to Austin (including a very nice chat with the immigration officer who was amused when I defined my profession as “being a geek” – he even told me a Star Trek joke).

Nowwe’re in the Fairfield Inn, Austin which has free wifi (why can’t UK hotels do this?!) and waiting for the other three SXSWM-ers to arrive.

Here are the obligatory shots of the view from my room:

Austin View 1

and…

Austin View 2

Stef, being the dynamic and frankly enviably capable person that he is, has already organised for the SXSWM-ers to meet a fantastic array of people here, including Phil Campbell, the guys from Viddler and Shawn Morton from Profilactic. I am so excited about this!

Right, got less than ten minutes to grab a shower before we’re off to check out the parties. Remember to visit the SXSWM website to tell us what to do. And, if you’re in Austin – get in touch!

Web 2.0 … The Machine is Us/ing Us

I remember being shown this video by Pete Ashton, about the same time as I first dipped my toe into the blogging pool. I watched it again today in amazement at how much more I understood about social media and how much I still had to learn.

If you haven’t seen it (and I know it has done the rounds on the web for over a year) it is an introduction to the social Internet by Michael Wesch, assistant professor of cultural anthropology at Kansas State University.

I’ve realised I need to keep re-visiting it as I make my mistakes and learn my own lessons about the web. So, I thought I’d post it here:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NLlGopyXT_g]

Could The Post website use Flickr?

I have said before that the Birmingham Flickr group is a wonderful thing, and I know that others appreciate it too.(thanks CiB for the link).

There are so many fantastic pictures of Brum on Flickr, I would like to see the new Birmingham Post website showing and linking to them. It would certainly help showcase the talent we have in the city.

Indeed, it is something that was suggested when I asked for ideas for the new site.

But not everyone in the Birmingham Flickr community is going to want The Birmingham Post publishing their picture on our website. We wouldn’t have the right to do so anyway, unless we contacted the photographer first to get express permission, or they had relinquished all their IP rights (which is very rare).

So, what could be the solution? Pete Ashton suggests that The Post creates it’s own Flickr group, which people submit Birmingham photos to on the understanding that they may be used in a certain context on The Post website and will, of course, be credited.

But I wonder, with the plethora of specialist groups out there on Flickr, how keen are photographers going to be to submit to a Birmingham Post group?

Any advice and ideas from members of Flickr, and particularly the Birmingham Flickr group, would be gratefully received.

The Brummie of the Year is…

John Tighe.

Congratulations John!

As landlord of The Spotted Dog pub in Digbeth, John has battled against a noise abatement order served against the pub, after live music at the venue (which has been going for 20 years) affected some of the residents in a new apartment block built nearby.

A campaign website related to his plight (set up by a resident from the very same apartment block) keepdigbethvibrant.co.uk tells more.

Also congratulations to runner up and mentor to the Birmingham blogworld, Pete Ashton.