You use the core skills to dig out a story and you use your new media skills to communicate it with your readers. They are non-competing. This is where I think much of the debate is wrong. It’s not a case of one or the other, they are mutually beneficial.

One set is for sourcing news, the other is for communicating it.

From a post I wrote for journalism.co.uk’s TNTJ blog. The debate topic for August is “What skills do new journalists need?”. Read on…

PC World blogged “Why You’ll Use Foursquare“. I’m going to tell you why, if you’re a journalist, you shouldn’t.

Foursquare is usefully summarised by PC World:

You install an app on your location-aware phone. When you launch the app, the service figures out where you are, more or less. You’re presented with nearby locations, which are mostly businesses. If you’re in one of them, you pick it. If you’re not, you can create your own location.

From that location, you can “check in” by pressing a button. Optionally, you can type in a Twitter-sized message. This check-in alerts your friends on that service where you are. If you’ve connected Foursquare to Twitter or Facebook, messages are posted in your stream or on your wall telling of your location and status.

Whoever has the most check-ins at a specific location becomes the Mayor of that location. Other users can see who the Mayor is. And Foursquare awards “Merit Badges” based on where you’ve checked in and how often, such as “Gym Rat,” “Super Mayor” and “I’m on a boat!”

All very (un) entertaining. PC World then suggests that people will get sucked in by it because there will be incentives, like a free coffee if you become mayor of a coffee shop. It’s also argued that the interactive element – being able to chat to people nearby, leaving and reading reviews/recommendations, etc – will encourage people to join.

But is a free drink really worth letting everyone know your exact location all the time?

A tutor of mine sums up journalism as “if you’re pissing someone off then you’re probably doing a good job”. I’ve pissed a few people off with my writing. And those are just the ones I know about. The last thing I want is for my location to be constantly posted publicly on social networking sites. Being the mayor of my local pub and getting freebies would be nice, but picking shattered glass from the back of my head having been bottled by a former news-story subject would not.

This might all seem very cautious, but I’ve heard stories of irritated locals walking into newsrooms of the local paper to have a fist fight with a journalist. I’ve read and received angry letters, emails, and threats. There are plenty of instances where journalists have been attacked because of their journalism. Shall we not give nutters a head start on tracking us down?

This amount was not all for advertising in the Echo, but as follows:
 
Lincolnshire Echo: £1,234.98 for part-page (large box) advert placed on 17/12/08 and 24/12/08 in the vacancies section

Grimsby Evening Telegraph:   £777.55   for the same advert on 24/12/08

Public  Finance Magazine and website: £3250.30 (same advert)
 
This advert was for 3 vacancies – Group Accountant & 2 Accountants (General Fund).

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I picked up on an investigation over on Help Me Investigate that is looking at how much local councils spend on placing mandatory public notices in local newspapers. Ventnor Blog discovered that between 2008-2009 the Isle of Wight Council spent £4k a week on advertising in the local press.

Given that the Lincolnshire Echo is the only newspaper covering Lincoln, I thought I’d chip in to this investigation and see how much City of Lincoln Council spent advertising with the Echo, via a freedom of information request. The total cost from between January 1st 2009 and December 31st 2009 was £31,599.72.

This breaks down as £18,025.20 on staff advertisements, £1,693.25 on ‘general advertisments’, £1,970.42 on ‘unidentified advertising’, and £9,910.85 on a total of 43 public notices.

The general and unidentified advertising was marked with “no other information available”. For the council to look into these adverts in detail it “would entail a manual search by the departments concerned and would therefore incur a cost,” they said in an email. This is a cost I can’t incur, but the University of Lincoln does house the Lincolnshire Echo’s archives – so I may see if I’m allowed to dig out the issues in which the unidentified adverts feature.

Looking at the detailed breakdown, nothing particularly stands out. Most of the costs incurred seem normal, especially when compared to Ventnor Blog’s discovery. One thing to pick out is an advert that cost £5,262.83. The text alongside says “accountants/group accountant” and is for “Financial Services”. I’ve emailed the council to find out more information about this specific advert.

If I’ve got this right then you can see the detailed breakdown for yourselves. Let me know if you spot anything I’ve missed.

I was hoping that you might be able to pass this around to relevant societies/your student radio stations for me?

I can also offer you interviews with the guys if you are interested.

The last thing is that they have started taking bookings for a Uni tour later this year through Mission Control but if you could pass my details on to your Ents Managers we can organise dates with them more easily.

Yeah, tell you what – I’ll take time out of my day, to research the contact details for all of the societies at the University of Lincoln, to pass on your press release. What’s more, I’ll forward it to the radio station, another media outlet, yeah? Then I’ll get in contact with the Entertainments Manager to let them know about this exciting shit that you’re proposing, yeah?

Shall I hold your calls too, sir?

*Move to trash*.

“Cheap, dynamic blogging solutions like WordPress and Typepad provide all newsrooms need to create a respectable news site. Publishing executives seem to find it hard to believe that something free to use can be any good, but just look at what’s coming in the in-beta WordPress 3.0.”

One commenter under the story, Scoop, made a point about WordPress:

WordPress is great – but show me how it allows you to produce a newspaper. Show me how it manages advertising placements. Show me how it integrates with newspaper production systems without laborious copy and pasting. Show me how it scales up to deliver millions of pages. Show me how it manages dozens of sites under a joint yet devolved framework.

Isn’t online and print writing meant to be entirely different? This “laborious copy and pasting” shouldn’t happen in the first place, surely, as journalists should be writing one article for their print edition and then totally modifying it to be fit for the web: short sentences, SEO, etc.

Why does the system that allows a newsroom to produce a physical newspaper have to be shackled to the website? Why not run the two entirely separately? Why not employ a couple of people to control the website of each title, and allow them to run and design the websites in-house and individually for each title’s needs, instead of having one utterly shit and immovable web template for all?

Then your titles will be able to play with video, audio, slideshows, and all the other goodies readers should be offered.

Then, as we see the Tories unable to offer electoral reform – which is an absolute must for the Liberal Democrats – they’ll be unable to form a government, as it’s also on the agenda for some of the minor parties in parliament.

The door will open again for Labour, who will put forward electoral reform as a part of a deal for a Lab/Lib coalition.

I think Clegg knows that the Tories won’t be able to form a government, so he might as well ‘stick to his principles’ because he knows, or thinks, he won’t lose. It’s just delaying the inevitable while scoring some political points for his reputation.

Then, Labour will have to move to oust Brown and put David Miliband at the top – Clegg won’t do a deal with Labour while Brown is PM.

UPDATE — How wrong I was!

The first Murdoch UK titles to raise pay walls are The Times and The Sunday Times. Starting June 2010, the sites will charge for content online, £1 for a day’s access and £2 for a week’s subscription, for both editions of the papers….

…The maximum figures for a week would be only able to cover the losses The Times makes per day.

Read the whole of Daniel Ionescu’s analysis here.

Southend Borough Council “refused to respond on the grounds of data protection” – why? If most other councils gave over the information, why have SBC refused? Just how much is the Chief Executive on? There are no grounds to refuse on the data protection clause. All we want to know is the name, position, and salary – which as tax-paying citizens we have every bloody right to.

Both Rochford and Castle Point councils responded. The information given for all three is as follows (click on the image to enlarge it):

As for Essex County Council…well…you can judge for yourself…but their (nameless, apparently) Chief Executive is paid more than Gordon Brown. Nice. For the list of Council Officers, see their website here. You’ll have to match up the salaries to the names, I’m afraid, as they didn’t bother doing it in their FOI response to the Taxpayers’ Alliance. Again, click to enlarge the image:

But shouldn’t the ethos be the other way around?

Instead of pushing people towards the newspaper at a time when criculations are falling and print news is dying, why not use the newspaper to drive people to your website? Publish the story in the paper, then online and add multi-platform content.

Offer little extras, like audio and video material, to boost the value of your online content.

In an age where there’s an exodus from print to the web, why are we still trying to turn people back the other way?

Customer: “Waiter, there is a fly in my soup.”

Waiter: “Oh, I am terribly sorry. I’ll get you another bowl. I really can’t apologise enough. Would you like a glass of wine – on the house?”

Customer: “Thank you, that would be very nice.”

For this, and other such gems, go to TheManWhoFellAsleep.