Times communities editor Joanna Geary delivers the news:rewired keynote. Photo by Thoroughly Good on Flickr. All Rights Reserved.
news:rewired - beyond the story looked at the processes and technology beyond producing content which could help make journalism more powerful. Sessions included discussions on building a community from scratch, search engine optimisation, linked data and the semantic web and the digital production desk.
Here is a guide to some of the coverage of the day by us and by our delegates.
Videos, courtesy of the BBC College of Journalism, are be available at this link. We will continue to upload more over the course of the week.
Presentations can be found in their own category on the site here.
Here are the liveblogs and reports from each session:
Keynote: Joanna Geary, the Times
Tight-knit communities make brands successful, not numbers, says Joanna Geary
1A. Building an online community from scratch
Community editors should be an integral part of the newsroom, says Media Wales' Ed Walker
1B. Business models beyond the paywall
2A. SEO for B2B and specialist publishers
2B. Branding and entrepreneurialism
3A. Linked data and the semantic web
3B. The digital production desk
ScribbleLive to open up syndication so freelancers can earn for liveblogging
Final session: Are we ready to play the journalism game?
- Going beyond the story: journalism, storytelling and computer games
- BBC to launch nationwide social survey, developer tells news:rewired
Reaction from our speakers:
Stories have traditionally been the lifeblood of the media, but situations or issues that are complex, systemic, non-personalised, and non-localised are actually stifled by the distortion and personalisation of narrative – what they need is interactivity. Events need stories, systems need interactivity.
When national news organisations like the Mail or the BBC take an interest in your specialism, they can siphon off all your search traffic. All of a sudden, you go from being the number one result on Google for a given search term to being buried under a mass of news stories from the mainstream media.
- Plenty of posts from Martin Belam, one of our speakers in the linked data session:
Whether it was the games session, looking at the potential future of IPTV, or the online community session, there seemed a genuine understanding in the room that listening to our readers and viewers is vital, and that the era of the passive mass audience is rapidly drawing to a close.
I'm still always surprised at how little knowledge there is, even amongst otherwise digital people, of how search engines work. It has been a specialist interest of mine for a decade now, but given the fundamental way in which web search engines dominate the human ability to navigate across the world wide web, you'd think content publishers would be an awful lot keener to have their staff understand the fundamentals.
I really enjoyed the day, and there were a lot of great topics at news:rewired, but I think it is important not to come away thinking "oh no, we are doing everything wrong, and all of our journalism now needs to be a 360 degree interactive game featuring linked data, optimised like crazy for search engines, with a serving of online community on the side".
Reaction from our delegates:
- Nicola Hughes summarised her views on our build an online community from scratch, linked data and branding sessions;
- Charlotte Clarke on why 'big-headed hacks can't create communities';
- Martin Cloake on the key points from Jo Geary's opener and Margaret Coffey from ContentEtc on chasing loyalty over numbers;
- Charles Miller over on the BBC College of Journalism's website responds to Mary Beth Christie and Joanna Geary's talks about the importance of knowing your customers;
- The Media Briefing's Patrick Smith on Joanna Geary's discussion of customer acquisition and user retention;
- Martin Cloake on how production discussions have moved on following the digital production desk session;
- CityWire's Mary Hamilton covered our linked data, SEO and gaming sessions in 'Games, systems and context in journalism at news:rewired';
- Martin Cloake also takes a look at the issue of money-making and media in response to Daniel Kennedy and Alex Wood's presentations;
- Patrick Smith speaks to interactive producer Philip Trippenbach for more about journalism and gaming;
- Martina Reinstadler from Cision on expanding horizons and skillsets for journalists.
