Blogs

Vienna.
The next speaker at Challenge Social Innovation is Birgit Blättel-Mink, who focusses on the case of German games developer Crytek (which developed Far Cry, Crysis, and other games), based in Frankfurt, which engages with its users as innovators. The company has some 600 employees distributed across five international studios and two distribution centres; its core product is the Cry games engine.

Crytek’s user community includes casual gamers (on social networks), hardcore gamers (in the Crytek Mycrisis community and other online communities), and modders who generate modified games modules and take part in various specialist communities. Casual gamers are engaged with for marketing and promotion, hardcore gamers participate in quality control, bug reports, and bug fixing, and modders drive user-led innovation.

Vienna.
The next session at Challenge Social Innovation starts with my own paper, on Twitter as a case for social innovation (and the challenges which exist in such a proprietary environment, governed by competing interests). My Powerpoint is below, and I’ll try to add the audio later the audio is online now, too. The full paper is also online here.

Vienna.
The next speaker at Challenge Social Innovation is Agnès Hubert, representing the European Commission. There is a growing interest in questions of social innovation at the European Union, with important preliminary work already underway; a new report has already been published, and further social innovation actions are underway. This brings together a wealth of important but still very fragmented initiatives in the past; social innovation is now becoming a frontline issue for decision-makers at the Commission.

Two major EU policy documents, framing the next ten years, address social innovation: this includes the 2020 directive, promoting inter alia innovation and the reduction of poverty. Social innovation is also embedded throughout a variety of other initiatives contained in the directive. Additionally, the EU budget also features significant financial support for social innovation initiatives; member states will need to identify themes for social innovation, and the Commission will facilitate capacity building in this field. Further, the EU Horizon 2020 research programme will also address social innovation research, and aims to unleash innovation across a number of crucial growth areas.

Vienna.
The last stage of my August/September European conference tour has brought me back to Vienna, where I’m an invited speaker at the Challenge Social Innovation conference. We’ve already has an extensive welcome from the conference organisers and sponsors (even including a fictional videoclip of Joseph Schumpeter himself) – and now we’re moving on to the first keynote of the day, by Denis Harrisson.

He begins by noting that no comprehensive theory of social innovation exists today; the conference addresses this problem. So far, there is more practical than theoretical work which engages with the social innovation context. We need to formulate a conception of social creativity to resolve human and social problems, to deal with the flow of knowledge, ideas, and resources and conceptualise civic society.

Cardiff.
The final session here at Future of Journalism is a roundtable on the News of the World scandal; as a panel session, it will be hard to blog, but I’ll try my best. Bob Franklin starts us off by highlighting the wide reach of the scandal, and notes that while journalism overall has been tarred with the abuses committed by News International, there also has been some excellent journalistic coverage of the scandal.

The first panellist is Labour Party MP Chris Bryant, shadow minister for political and constitutional reform. He says that it feels as if public debate in the UK has been changed massively by the scandal; it feels like being released from prison, he says. In fact, in his Welsh constituency, the only way to get digital TV is to subscribe to (the partly Murdoch-owned) BSkyB; and Murdoch has been using his newspapers’s political influence to protect BSkyB as a cash cow.

Chris’s own phone was hacked, and he knows that this has enabled News papers to find a great number of his contacts, who could then be contacted for any potential dirt they may have. The same happened in the Milly Dowler case, of course, and here Glenn Mulcaire even delete messages, which is ‘playing god with the family’s emotions’, Chris says.

Cardiff.
The next speaker at Future of Journalism is Lex Boon, whose focus is on the changing context for journalism in this transitional phase. In particular, blogs have been driving this change, and as a result, of course, journalists themselves have also started their own blogs.

Lex examined media blogs (in the professional context of journalism, published on the Website of news organisations), and interviewed the journalist-bloggers behind them – from a broad range of news beats. Mostly those journalists essentially fell into blogging: their editors raised the need to start blogging, and they started their blogs as experiments, without much pre-planning. This also means that they’re not taking their approach to blogging too seriously at this point.

Cardiff.
The next speaker at Future of Journalism is Alfred Hermida, who is interested in how news consumption changes as a result of the greater use of social networking platforms. Such users may now start to constitute network publics: mediated public spheres where networking technologies and social interactions influence one another. How does such a networked audience use the news?

The Pew Center has already shown that 75% of U.S. audiences get part of their news via email and other sharing; this mediated sociability is increasingly simply part of what we do, and social media have infiltrated our daily habits. What questions does that raise for the media industry, which has long managed to control its content distribution channels?

Alfred conducted a national survey in Canada to examine how people consume online news; of the 1600 people surveyed, some 1000 also visited social networking sites at least once per month. Half of the Canadian population is on Facebook, some 20% of Canadians are on Twitter. Do such networks play a role in the distribution of news, then?

Cardiff.
The next speaker at Future of Journalism is Jeroen de Keyser, whose interest is in how Web 2.0 has changed the presentation of ordinary people’s views in newspapers. Traditionally, journalists view citizens as sources only for anecdotal (eyewitness, vox pop) information; otherwise, they prefer elite actors as sources. As a result, few everyday citizens are visible in news output, and they are mostly positioned to be of low importance.

Web 2.0 has changed this situation somewhat, both through the introduction of citizen journalism practices and by making a wider range of everyday sources available to journalists. Does this lead to ‘ordinary peoople’ appearing more often and more prominently, then?

Jeroen undertook a content analysis of five daily papers in Flanders (two quality, two tabloid papers from three different companies), comparing samples of their news coverage from 2001 (pre-Web 2.0) and 2011. All articles which included ordinary citizens (through quotes or mentions) were included in the dataset.

Cardiff.
The next paper session at Future of Journalism 2011 starts with Megan Knight, whose interest is in the impact of social media on newsgathering. She’s already examined the level of social media-based sourcing of mainstream news reporting in the context of popular protests in the Middle East - which appears to remain relatively low; however, does such low overt use hide a greater amount of use of social media not as direct sources, but as generating story ideas and providing background which is then pursued further my journalists sourcing information from more powerful sources?

Megan pursued this question by observing the reporting processes at a major national daily newspaper in the U.K., as well as interviewing key actors and conducting content analysis. She found that stories originated overwhelmingly with state institutions, corporations, and government bodies; indeed, journalists increasingly appear to wait for power elites to approach them, rather than contacting them directly.

Cardiff.
Day two of the Future of Journalism conference starts with a keynote from Robert McChesney. He begins by acknowledging yesterday’s keynote, but also notes that he has a somewhat different view on matters; pointing to The Guardian as a special case, endowed by a trust, and publicly funded media in Britain in general, he notes that there aren’t all that many such news organisations left – and these and new initiatives may not be enough in their own right to sustain the future of journalism. More and other approaches are needed.

The world is filled with young people who want to be journalists, and they need to be given the opportunity to do so. There’s no lack of talent or enthusiasm, but a lack of resources and institutions that enable this – this is a political problem first and foremost; the labour market for journalists in the U.S. is now the worst it has ever been – worse even than in the Great Depression –, and this will not change unless major changes are made. And things may get even worse in the coming years.