How to improve the UBC Thunderbird's Media Map for the next election
By Roland Tanglao on November 23, 2005 - 11:49am
Congratulations to Richard Warnica, Mark Schneider and the team at the UBC Thunderbird for their baby steps into Web 2.0 and the world of news as conversation.
As somebody who's been doing this Web 2.0 thing/news as a conversation since 1999, here's some ideas for improvement.
It seems like this initial attempt was somewhere between the old school "command and control hierarchical editorial" model of newspapers and the "loosely coupled, distributed" model of Web 2.0 (blogs, wikis, etc.). 15 "media scanners" emailed their media scans (which is basically what we call re-blogging) to editors who gathered them up and posted them. My suggestion: go one way or another, either have a newspaper model where everything is edited and controlled or go for the loosely coupled model.
More concrete suggestions after the break.
As I suggested in my UBC TOJR podcast with Richard, why not allow the 15 to post directly? The 15 were all students and you have to learn to give up control and trust your students. If they post something libelous/defamatory then delete it (I doubt that journalism students would actually do this).
Here's the incremental/conservative model of how I would revise it for the next election (which is probably the federal election early in the new year):
- Create 1 category for each media outlet that you monitor. So 1 for each blog, 1 for each paper e.g. a category called Vancouver Sun, one called Tyee, etc.
- Have the scanners post directly to the TOJR using the relevant category or categories.
- Editors read the scanners' stuff to make sure it is not libelous and delete or modify the posts after the fact.
- Analysts and Synthesists post their pieces and link to the scanners posts as source material.
This allows people to follow the media outlets of their choice in real time. And for the scanners to have a voice of their own.
And finally here's a more Web 2.0 way to do it (there a lots of ways this is just one off the top of my head):
- Define 1 tag for each media outlet. e.g. vancouversunfed2006 for the vancouver sun's coverage of the upcoming 2006 federal election, thetyeefed2006 for The Tyee's coverage of the upcoming 2006 federal election, etc.
- On Urban Vancouver, Metroblogging Vancouver, Live Journal Vancouver, Beyond Robson ask people to re-blog the media's coverage of the election using these tags. In other words, let all of Vancouver (not just UBC Journalism students) be scanners.
- 5 UBC J students would listen using flickr, del.icio.us, Technorati, PubSub, etc. to what the scanners are covering for these tags and re-blog the best ones to the TOJR site.
- Analysts and Synthesists post their pieces and link to the scanners posts as source material.
I hope that helps! There are lots of local experts who can help implement improvements like our local guru of Tags, Alexandra Samuel, as well as Darren Barefoot, Susannah Gardner, Travis Smith, myself and many others!
From Shades of green colour campaign coverage - The Thunderbird.:
QUOTE
Assisted by a team of approximately 15 students, broken into "scan teams" assigned to particular media types, this group has laboured away for the last 6 weeks producing a wide-angle view of the election as seen through the lens of the news media and bloggers.
As news consumers, we are usually so immersed in the world that journalists describe, that it's hard to see the forest for the trees. We count on reporters to bring us a clear picture of the world, so we can fulfill our duties as citizens. And yet, as has become clear from this tremendous effort, newsfolk also have a hard time escaping from the "mediascape" they have had a hand in creating.
They read, watch and listen to each other's stories, and in the process build a pea soup we live in. Journalists have a quaint expression they use for this phenomenon: they call it "drinking each others' bathwater."
Which is precisely the opposite of what TOJR's Media Map was all about. Instead of merely lapping it up, the idea here was to create a kind of meteorological chart showing how news stories spring up, blossom, and peter out just the way storms do. A regular reader of this remarkable project would have seen stories such as mayor-elect Sam Sullivan's connection (or lack thereof) to Walmart billow into a cumulous confection, only to dissipate into our dank coastal drizzle.
"Green" is not a word I would use to describe my pride in the incredible work these graduate students have done (except, perhaps, for a tinge of chartreuse when I consider how vastly better prepared these new journalists are than I was when breaking into the business).
No, my best colour is a blushy fuschsia - a pinkish glow of pride for all they have accomplished.
UNQUOTE
