Category Archives: BBC

When the subject becomes the creator…

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Disclaimer: I have been working with the BBC Radio 4 appeal for the past 9 months, but I wanted to share this as I think it’s beautiful and incredibly moving. Below I explain how it came about.

For me, it’s an example of why digital tools and social media can have such impact on voluntary organisations that work directly with people. It’s easy for organisations to go about their work, but then use social media to slickly ‘broadcast’ their news from an official perspective. But more and more are realising the ways in which the tools themselves offer the potential for ‘clients’ to show or describe in their own words, how an organisation has helped them.

The Connection at St Martin’s helps homeless people by providing specialist services to over 200 people in central London every day. They offer a day and night centre, outreach for rough sleepers, skills training and career advice, activity programmes and specialist support for complex needs.

It would have been very easy to create an audio slideshow produced using stock images of homelessness taken by a professional photographer, a sympathetic voice-over and a Coldplay track playing softly underneath. Instead these photos came from a photography project at The Connection, where clients were given disposable cameras. At first there were discussions about providing particular themes (e.g. take a photo at dawn, take a photo of your possessions), but it seemed most appropriate to keep instructions to a minimum.

In addition, rather than doing formal interviews with the clients about their experiences, they had their usual weekly workshops and instead, all conversations were recorded, to produce natural dialogue about the photographs and the motivations for taking them. The audio from this particular slideshow was taken during an interview between Jamie and Libby Purves for the official Christmas appeal broadcast but there are plans that some of the other audio from the workshops can be lifted out and shared more widely.

The Connection already has quite a track record of using art as a way of working with clients and they have exhibitions of clients’ work and a facebook page profiling some of the artwork. Many of the pieces are absolutely beautiful and it’s wonderful that flickr and facebook provide a way of showcasing them to a wider audience. (It’s well worth clicking on these links. Flickr features all of the photos taken as part of the photography project, and the facebook page features different types of artwork created by clients at The Connection).

So it’s perhaps not surprising they just won a Talk Talk’s Digital Heroes award,  a scheme to reward individuals who are using digital technology to benefit their local communities.

Last year a poem by Jamie featured in an audioslideshow. According to Sally Flatman, the Radio 4 Appeals producer, “I think last year was, in a way, a building block for this year. We had Jamie’s poem which was very powerful but the only way we had of illustrating it was by existing photographs. We felt very much this year that we wanted the slideshow to be more of a whole, not pictures bolted onto someone’s audio or audio bolted onto someone’s pictures.  We’re learning that these slideshows can be a very powerful way of someone telling their story. “

Technology today allows anyone to become a creator, and when they do, the results can be absolutely stunning. Please share this slideshow as widely as possible this Christmas.

Tubestrike 4: Crowdmap’s final test

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On the 6th September, London Underground staff staged the first of four walk-outs. On Monday, Londoners face the final of these planned stikes.  I have been working with BBC London, encouraging the use of the Ushahidi crowdmap platform to report the effects of the last three strikes on the city. (I wrote up lessons form the first strike here).

From the beginning we had planned to use the crowdmap for all of the strikes so we could compare, contrast and learn as we went.

As I emphasised here, the map has demonstrated very clearly, that on certain stories, collaboration is the only possible way to report events. BBC London could not resource reporters at every station checking to see whether it was open or closed throughout the day, at every bus stop taking pictures of overcrowding, or giving tips about unclogged roads or the locations of available Boris Bikes.

And yet, while people are looking at the map in large numbers (about 20,000 uniqiue visitors each time) the number of people submitting tips, pictures and experiences is still small. Yes, the #tubestrike hashtag has provided some of the best material, but the map still feels locked in a social media bubble.

I try to imagine what the map would look like if it was covered in red dots, with real-time updates about the current travel situation. The network effect would take hold. The more people use it, the more useful it would become, and more people would use it.

I feel uncomfortable comparing ushahidi deployments, as it’s inappropriate to compare commuters being inconvenienced on their way to work with the terrible situation experienced by Pakistanis during the recent floods (pakreport.org), or the situation in Moscow last summer when the fires took hold (russian-fires.ru). But in Pakistan they’ve had over 2000 reports (a cry for help was posted this morning from someone who has lost everything and can’t get support), and the Russian fires received over 1600 reports.

The London maps have received a handful of direct reports. We’ve been posting content which included the #tubestrike hastag on twitter, adding verified station closure information, and posting audioboos from BBC London reporters, but we’ve received very few emails, SMS’s or reports submitted on the crowdmap itself.

When this tubestrike ends, I will be writing up a report about what has worked, what hasn’t, but mostly, whether this sort of effort can be justified from a resourcing point of view.

Personally, I think it is important that the BBC has a space where this sort of collaborative journalism can be encouraged, but if reports from the audience are minimal, should the crowdmap be resourced?

Is part of the problem the fact that this map appears to be “sponsored” by the BBC. Do people feel like the BBC must know the current situation and therefore they have little to offer? Does it feel too top down rather than community-driven?

We’re going to give it one last push next Monday, and I’d be very grateful if you could use online spaces to encourage people to use it – facebook, message boards, and blogs, as well as offline spaces – in your places of work, down the pub, and around your breakfast table.

And finally, any feedback would be very gratefully received, both technical but also in terms of use and content. Ushahidi have been brilliant to work with, and are hungry for user testing and feedback, and I will pass on to them everything we have learned.

But overall, we want to learn from this experiment. When big events strike, is crowdmap a useful way of describing the impact?

#Tubestrike 2: This Time We’re Serious

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As a broadcast organisation, planning how to cover a major piece of industrial action is never easy. Just when extra people have been placed on shift, bulletins have been altered and the cameras are in place, strikes can be called off at the last minute. The same might apply for the next 24 hour walkout of tube station staff (3/4th October), but in case it doesn’t, we’re preparing for the worst.

As many of you know, BBC London used the new cloud based Ushahidi platform, crowdmap to cover the first in this series of strikes on the 7th September. It was definitely an experiment but we were very happy with how it went. I wrote a blog post with some of my reflections here; in terms of what worked and what we might want to do differently.

We have decided that we would like to use the map again if the strike goes ahead, and our decision is based on one key reason: this is a story that can’t be reported any other way.

While I was excited about using the platform, that came from my passion for social media, and my hope that the experiment would work. It didn’t feel like a journalistic imperative, and some of my colleagues weren’t quite as excited as I was.

But our experience on the day convinced everyone, purely because the BBC’s usual reliance on official sources just could not work in this situation. It was in the Union’s interest to tell the story that stations were closed and that maximum disruption had been achieved. Conversely it was in the interests of Transport for London (TfL) to tell us that as many stations as possible were open.

It wasn’t simply a case of both sides deliberately failing to tell the truth, it was more a case of massaging the truth, and protecting working staff. TfL were moving staff around during the day, opening stations and then closing them just as quickly, trying to keep the locations secret so Union pickets couldn’t be moved around ahead of them.

As a result, as the day progressed it became increasingly clear that we couldn’t rely on the information coming from either side. On crowdmap, during the moderation process, it forces you to define a new report as verified or unverified. At first we were verifying information from the TfL website but we quickly stopped doing that. We found we were posting information but Londoners almost immediately began to dispute those reports via twitter or crowdmap itself.

The point of this post is to ask that people get the word out. The original crowdmap received almost 20,000 unique visitors and obviously we were very happy with that, but we’re also aware that many of those visitors were social media types from all over the world intrigued by the combination of ‘BBC’ ‘crowdsourcing’ and ‘ushahidi’ in a tweet.

Our hope for the proposed strike next week is that the crowdmap becomes a really useful tool for people trying to get to and from work. So we’re asking for a few favours:

  1. Please get the word out – post the map on your blogs, twitter, facebook.
  2. Tell people who live in London they can email us (yourlondon@bbc.co.uk), phone us on 020 7765 1064 or send us an SMS (using 81333 and starting the message LONDON STRIKE).
  3. Show people who might not have seen it, what the map looks like and how they could use it.
  4. Tell us which categories you’d like to see on the map to make it more useful for you.

This isn’t an example of journalists playing with a new tool, or one of those interactive exercises where no-one actually pays as much attention as they should do to the material being submitted. This is our opportunity as Londoners to tell the story of the tubestrike in the only way possible – as a collective force.

The BBC can’t place reporters at every tube station or bus stop, but it can help collate the experiences of millions of Londoners on the 3rd October.

This experiment needs to move out of social media land and into the hands of Londoners to make their commute easier. Its success relies on as many people as possible posting their reports. Let’s see what a real crowdsourcing initiative can look like.

Social media & journalism: a research critique

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This morning I awoke to a few people in my twitter stream retweeting a piece of research by the Society for New Communication Research about the increased reliance of journalists on social media. As someone who works every day with BBC journalists training them to do this, I was sceptical of the numbers, so did some digging.

The report was actually published in February this year, and you can read the executive summary here, and see a slideshare presentation here. The headline findings suggest social media is being taken very seriously in newsrooms.

48% are using Twitter and other microblogging sites
66% of journalists are using blogs
48% are using online video
25% are using podcasts

Overall, 90% of journalists agree that new media and communication tools and technologies are enhancing journalism to some extent.

For those of us who use social media everyday, and understand its value, it’s tempting to see these figures and quickly bookmark the document in delicious, happy they support the way we believe journalism should be headed.

The bottom line is that while the research is valuable as a qualitative study of some journalists’ attitudes (and the quotes listed in the slideshare offer some interesting insights into these), this research isn’t a quantitative representative study, however tempting the statistics are. When you look at the methodology, you can see that only 341 people took the survey and the survey was web-based.

Unfortunately I couldn’t find out how the survey was undertaken, and without that information it’s impossible to do a proper critique. For example, the executive statement claims a 95% confidence ratio, which doesn’t even make sense without other information. (Apologies to the authors if I’ve missed the detailed methodological explanation, but it should have been in the Executive Summary).

I’m particularly interested by how the web survey was distributed. Was the survey sent via email to journalists. If so, how were the journalists chosen? What was the ‘population’? To produce a representative survey, you need to be clear about the total population, and sample randomly from that population. In a world of fluid labour markets with increasing numbers of freelance journalists, how do you get a clear population, particularly when this survey boasts about its worldwide sample.

If it was a web-survey on a site where it was hoped journalists would stumble, you’re already self-selecting journalists who are spending more time on the web, and the types who are more likely to fill in web surveys. And even if it was an email with a web survey link attached, it would be self-selecting. That is fine, but the authors should have disclosed the number of journalists who received the email, and those who went on to complete the survey.

The reason I was sceptical about the figures, as much as I would like them to be true, is that I have spent the last 6 months leading training courses with BBC journalists about social media. While the journalists I have trained are mostly enthusiastic about learning more about these tools, my anecdotal evidence from training about the same number of journalists as were involved in this survey, does not support these figures.

That does not mean the BBC are behind in this regard. That also does not mean I have a self-selected sample because the people coming on the course are in some way ‘behind’. In many ways the journalists coming on the course are the ones who are ready to embrace it. But in very busy newsrooms, where resources are becoming increasingly limited (and I recognise the BBC is in a very special place in comparison to other newsrooms where income is not guaranteed), most journalists have not had the time to spend experimenting with these new tools. When your day is spent desperately trying to meet deadlines, there is no time to have a play with twitter, find relevant blogs, spend time verifying who the authors are, or battle with Facebook’s privacy settings.

Most journalists I train are aware of all the tools mentioned in this report, and want to feel more confident using them, but want time to experiment, and learn the subtleties before relying on them for newsgathering.

While they might have answered the question ‘have you used twitter in your reporting’ with a ‘yes’ because a colleague pointed them in the direction of twitter when a breaking news story unfolded and they were intrigued to see what was being said, that is different to actively using twitter as a newsgathering tool everyday. So when 48% of journalists from this survey said they have ‘used twitter’, how is ‘used’ defined? Does ‘used’ equal occasional or frequently lurking, or does ‘used’ mean regularly engaging with sources and contributing to the community?

I want to stress wholeheartedly that this post is not meant to highlight the shortcomings of BBC journalists. I have talked to a number of other people who lead training at other news organisations across the world, and I know everyone shares my experiences.

I offer anecdotal evidence to show how wary we have to be of research that is not statistically representative. This research is worthwhile and interesting, but beware of drawing conclusions which can not be drawn.

Social media offers everything the authors suggest in terms of disseminating news, finding story ideas and sources, monitoring sentiments and discussions, researching individuals and organisations, and keeping up on topics of interests and participating in conversations with the audience, but I would argue it is far from universally accepted in newsrooms.

There are some journalists who absolutely understand the value, engage daily, are wary of the potential pitfalls and their reporting is significantly improved because of it. The majority of journalists understand social media offers a range of new tool for newsgathering and building community, but understand it should be treated with caution, and the subtleties appreciated. I would say the same of this research.