Daniel Bentley

Lord Hunt, PCC chairman since October, told Exaro in an interview with David Hencke: “At the moment, it is like the Wild West out there. We need to appoint a sheriff.”
His initial plan for online media is to invite bloggers who write on current affairs to volunteer to be regulated by the replacement body for the PCC.
They would be able to carry a ‘Kitemark’, showing that they abide by the new body’s code of practice. They would lose the ‘Kitemark’ if complaints against them were repeatedly upheld. But this regulatory oversight would mean bloggers having to pay a fee to the new body, which would be funded by the publications that it regulates.
Hunt said: “I want accuracy to be the new gold standard for blogs. Once they have agreed to be accurate, everything would follow from that. I would like to see a ‘Kitemark’ on the best blogs so the public can trust what they read in them.”

• A wiki-esque history of the article - Except in cases where the removed material was inaccurate to the point of being damaging I want to see a full history of the article. I want the user to be able to see what was added/removed and when. This is massive for transparency and also lets the reader into the process of journalism. As with wikipedia, news articles have been subject to edits for ethically dubious reasons. Journalists should stand by the article from the first click of 'Publish' til the last edit.

• Winerlinks as default - Winerlinks are paragraph level urls. They allow the sharing and highlighting of an article to a particular paragraph. These are particularly brilliant for Twitter. Followers might not have time to read a full article, so why not point them to that juicy bit in paragraph 14? Winerlinks would also be my basis for...

At CUNY’s Tow-Knight Center for Entrepreneurial Journalism, we invited John Paton, CEO of Digital First Media, Journal Register, and Media News, and Justin Smith, CEO of Atlantic Media, to answer questions about how they are executing their digital first strategies. I interviewed them, digging down into revenue, costs, transition for staff, audience, and advertisers, and more. 

• The ability to add "pin" notices from my location but outside my n0ticeboard to it. For instance, some of what Nigel is reporting in Manchester might be useful to people who visit my Northern Quarter board. 
• A formalised membership structure and the ability to notify my members of new events, and send out a community summary email.
• Fuller capabilities when editing a post. I'm sure this is just because it's a beta but it's very hard to edit something posts when they've gone up. I've had to delete some and start again.

You're our readers, you're important to us, let us know what's important to you.

How are changes in technology and audience behaviour affecting news values, shapes and structures?

Today, publishers as a breed have so far tried little more than reproducing their old content and business models in new forms, from CD-ROMs to the web to iPads. It was the same in the Renaissance. The earliest publishers made books to mimic the work of scribes, even designing their typefaces to look like scribes’ handwriting. Printing was promoted as automated writing. “They appear not to have perceived the printed book as a fundamentally different form, but rather as a manuscript book that could be produced with greater speed and convenience,” Leah Marcus says in “Cyberspace Renaissance.” They didn’t yet see the possibilities.

But there’s another aspect of these launches that’s troubling, and that’s the pride so many publishers seem to take in having produced a Facebook app, as though it’s the pinnacle of media innovation.

But if all you are doing is creating widgets for people who live inside a specific walled garden, then I think you are missing the boat.

(Some of) The Problems

Before Mary Hamilton showed me the error of my ways I blindly swallowed Zuckerberg's maxim that a better web is created if we all operate under our real name. I do still believe, that where possible, it is better to use your real name. But this should be encouraged, rather than obligatory. A more nuanced approach is needed.

Krishnan Guru Murthy - Duncan Bannatyne is right to be angry - but we can't let the cowards get to us

There are plenty of anonymous cowards on the internet who abuse others, spread hatred and distribute obscene criminal material. And there are anonymous heroes on the internet too, who fight repression, spread inspiration, ideas, wit and truth. It is entirely understandable that Facebook, Google and others would want to stamp on the bad by ending anonymity, but they have not yet done enough to show how they would preserve the good.

As Randi Zuckerberg recently argued, if people were forced to reveal their identities online most would be less aggressive and more thoughtful. But without anonymity we would be starved of tweets from Egypt, Syria, Iran and repressive regimes around the world where internet anonymity is unleashing new freedoms and ideas. We might lose the mobile phone videos that tell us what is really going on in Hama, the whistleblowers who reveal corruption and the brave insiders who leak the things the powerful try to keep from us. And yes, we'd miss some of the gossip. It is not clear how anonymity online could ever be stamped out altogether. But the likes of Facebook and Google need to show how they would support the free flow of important information if widespread anonymity was lost.

Discussing Google's rather stringent real name policy on Google+, I rather arrogantly assumed that...

But I'm not so convinced now that we can ignore these edge cases. I'm a white, straight, adult male living in Britain. I'm not the type of person who needs protecting online. But there's plenty who do, including unfortunately, a lot of women and sexualities. Problems described in this blogpost by Denise Paolucci. Indeed in a talk I gave to the Preston Social, one woman spoke up from the audience that she'd been targeted by an internet stalker and now has to take extraordinary measures online so that she can interact normally with her friends, as his her right.

So many of the problems on the internet are about user culture. Different websites and services breed their own types of culture. Reddit has a fantastic community which helps each other, laughs with/at each other and roots out spammers, evil doers and trolls. Interestingly, Reddit users mostly go by pseudonyms. Different newspapers have different cultures in their comment sections. The Guardian's has a totally different tone and attitude to that of the Daily Mail, indicative of their respective readerships.

A proposed solution

What I propose is a rewards system for being good citizens of the web, a system recognising respect and standing. This is prime for someone like Google or Facebook to take on, but they must revisit their policies on pseudonyms. You can be a pseudonym and a great web citizen.

Just as you can Like or +1 a status or content shared on Facebook/G+, we could instead +1/Like users who have been helpful in comment threads, or have created helpful blogposts. This could create a web-wide system of trust. By looking at a ranking you could see how trusted/respected/liked/friendly someone is.

This is just a suggestion and a tad simplistic. The major social players no doubt have teams of people dedicated to solving problems such as these. When the problems are resolved, we'll hopefully have a better web.

Trinity Mirror journalist, David Higgerson, blogged yesterday discussing whether online comments were worth the bother.

Trolls, nastiness, timewasters, spam are all potential problems when news stories and opinion pieces are open to user comments. But despite these problems, turning comments off is the last thing news orgs should be doing.

Sarah Hartley in the comments made this great point:

With news, if the only invite is to comment on what’s been delivered from on high it could be quite frustrating for a reader who knows something about the topic. If the readers felt more empowered, more listened to and more part of the process they would be less fighty. Bloggers are generally more willing to involve the reader in the process – something that news sites could learn from perhaps?

Spotify announces another new initiative that doesn't involve paying musicians. Great.


http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/2010/how-much-do-music-artists-earn-online/

How Much Do Music Artists Earn Online?

Proof that quality journalism can still make money.

TheMediaBriefing.com originally shared this post:

Why the Economist prospers: intelligence, mobile, good branding and simple reader offers | TheMediaBriefing

Yo dawg I heard you like Jimmy Wales, so we put Jimmy Wales in your Jimmy Wales page so you can Jimmy Wales while you Jimmy Wales.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jimmy_Wales