BBC confuses Halo for the UN

Some of the things I like to point out on this site are those instances where in quality journalistic organs occasionally slip up and misreport video game footage or content as if it were the stuff of the 'meat-space'. Earlier in the year ITV got in trouble for mistaking footage form the game ArmA 2 for IRA training videos and there are often scare stories about the increasingly photo-realistic graphics of contemporary games.

So it should come as no surprise that the BBC have found themselves on the receiving end of what can only be described as a 'face-palm fail' moment wherein they mistakenly used the logo from the United Nations Space Command instead of the the logo from the United Nations Security Council. One is a fictional body from the popular first person shooter gaming series Halo, while the other is one of the principal powers within the UN charged with the maintenance of international peace and security.

The incident tool place during a lunch time One O'Clock News broadcast last Thursday in which the BBC were reporting on the current conflict taking place in Syria. From the screen shot Sophie Raworth can be seen discussing an Amnesty International report alongside the logo of the fictional UNSC. It would appear that a Google image search for the UNSC (United Nations Security Council) brought back multiple images from the Halo game that were then used in the broadcast. Currently, the UNSC has very little ambition to police the Covenant and are more focussed on Earthly incidents.

A BBC spokesperson told Eurogamer 'mistakes do happen' but this image was not broadcast in later bulletins. A segment of the video has been uploaded to YouTube and is embedded below.

Sunday Times in Modern Warfare fail

You may recall a short while ago I posted about the massive fail at ITV whereby they managed to include footage from a video game (ArmA 2) whilst giving the impression it was an IRA video. Ofcom ruled that they were in breach of the Broadcast Code. Well, it only turns out that the Sunday Times have used an image of the fictional soldier, Soap MacTavish, from the Call of Duty: Modern Warfare series in a story about an ill-fated Nigerian-based rescue attempt that resulted in the death of a Briton and an Italian. I'd love to link to the story but News Corp have stuck the Times behind a paywall.

The Sunday Times even went as far as striking out the eyes of Soap, you know, just in case any of his fictional relatives recognised him and feared for his safety. I really can't tell why this picture is associated with the story. From the composition, it also looks like Soap is on a call with David Cameron.

The Media Blog picked this story up and it's since been reposted over at Tech Radar and C&VG. It looks like this may be a case of the mainstream media failing in their ability to distinguish fiction from reality again. It also seems a little tasteless to include an image from a video game when writing about a tragic incident.

War or gaming fun? Spotting the difference

A week ago I wrote a piece about ITV's blunder in which video game footage taken from YouTube found it's way into a documentary about Gaddafi. Ofcom were less than pleased with the lack of due process and compliance breaches on display. A few days ago, a BBC picture editor (Phil Coomes) wrote a playful piece in which he stressed the blurring of real and virtual worlds given the popularity and success of increasingly photorealistic video games depicting war or conflicts.

I only came across this article after a colleague of mine forwarded me the URL devoid of context. I think he knew it would wind me up and the gist of my response to the article can be found below.

Photo/realism

I get pretty confused about these kinds of posts from journalists, in which they attempt to link the digital representations of (usually) fictional war-based games with real world combat. I get that still images can look similar but there's a world of difference between experiencing war first hand and picking up a controller or a mouse and playing in a virtual world with strangers on the Internet (as in Battlefield 3 or Modern Warfare 3). Granted, Coomes was responding to a point raised by the photographer John Cantile, who claimed that the level of realism was such that the "next sufferers of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) may not even have left their bedrooms". The rest of the article seems to give way to Cantile's experiences rather than being the work of Coomes.

What irks me about these kinds of claims is the easy at which the impacts of one experience (war) are neatly overlaid  onto that of another (gaming) at the level of photorealism. You'd think that there's never been a thing called cinema in which actors depict realistic events a la vérite. When reading through the Ofcom report into the ITV blunder it's almost understandable how the game footage form ArmA 2 made it's way into a documentary - a failure of basic fact-checking before running with something grabbed from the internet, but it's another thing entirely to compare gaming to the real experience of warfare. This should be apparent to Cantile as he has photographed battalions in Sirte, Libya.

Fatigue

I'm sure Cantile felt "drained" after playing Battlefield 3 for many hours - I do too, but I also feel really drained after playing FIFA or Fat Princess online for large periods of time. However, I don't make the mistake of thinking that I am at the Bernabéu of that I've ever really played there, setting up goals for Lionel Messi and basking in the cheers or boos from fans and oppositional supporters alike.

The sound mix for Battlefield 3 is phenomenal - you can get incredibly disoriented with rockets and explosions erupting all around your character. This really can be a "hellish cacophony"as Cantile claims. It sounds even better with an expensive pair of headphones but that can break the verisimilitude - it's not often soldiers storm battlefields with big headphones, a games controller or a mouse and keyboard. I note he was a playing on PC - the only real injury the contemporary digital soldier will experience is Repetitive Strain Injury?

I know what happens when a player gets gets shot in Battlefield 3 as I've been killed several thousand times. You get a kill-cam of the player who shot you, overlaid with stats about your 'nemesis' (eg their weapon, their class, their personal kill/death ratio) before being dumped to a character load-out screen to do it all again. Very real. And let's not even go into how bad the texture 'pop-in' is on the PS3, further heightening the supposed reality effect! The texture mapping and frame-rate hardly contributes to the replication of reality (neither does having an on screen radar or ammo count). Just witness the realistic text effects below:

Anxiety

Cantile has spent some time attempting to match real world images to those taken in-game saying: "In some cases it is actually quite hard to tell the difference between my photographs and the computer version, which is deeply worrying. The level of detail is so precise that the virtual war zone is as convincing as the real thing". I'm not sure how worrying it is. As I've alluded to earlier, there are many other media forms that "look" real, but are not - they are representational or, in the case of games, simulational (see Gonzalo Frasca on this point). I think this is the underlying anxiety in the article - a point that is hinted at rather than explicitly addressed, and one which has connections with other moral panics about media forms and their supposed effects.

So the essence of the piece can be summarised thusly: still images taken from some war-based video games look like real combat environments. And rightly so given that vast swathes of research money has been vested in making these products look similar to the actions they depict in order to ramp up the dramatic experiences of gameplay. But it's somewhat disingenuous to claim that we should be worried about the similarities between static images of two completely different experiences 

The future of news? (a quick follow-up)

A few days ago I posted some of my thoughts on the future of news as a response to an email a student sent me.  I was a little pressed for time so I didn't manage to cram in all the points I wanted to make, so this follow-up post will be a slight update to that post.  I had a physical copy of Wired magazine open on my desk at the time of writing and I wanted to include a few points that were in their "The Big Question: New media's effect on journalism".  This is the link to the online edition.  The question they posed was:

In the next decade, what new platform will most affect journalism and self-expression?

They had a variety of guests answering the question including Arianna Huffinginton (Cofounder/Editor of The Huffington Post), Clay Shirky (Academic, author of Here Comes Everybody and Cognitive Surplus), June Cohen (Journalist and Director at TED Media), and Nick Bilton (Leader writer at the New York Times blog) amongst others, and this is what they had to say:

"I think we will see an explosion of news sites engaging their communities in the editorial process. We’ll see a great expansion of the ways citizen journalists will help drive the news: recommending stories. Technology has enabled millions of consumers to shift their focus from passive observation to active participation." Arianna Huffinginton

"There won’t be a ten-year ‘Next Big Thing’. Here’s a slice of the last ten: WordPress, Wikipedia, Digg, Meetup, Flickr, YouTube, MySpace, Facebook, Foursquare. Twitter is the new headline news, QQ the new agora, ChatRoulette puts the ‘self’ in self-expression. Expect more of the same in the next ten." Clay Shirky

"There won’t be a single dominant platform, but rather many platforms that rise and fall. Overall, my money is on mobile: real-time and massively participatory media that will be primarily created and consumed via smartphones. Twitter is the first platform to truly harness this new ecosystem. But it won’t be the last." - June Cohen

"There’s currently a war taking place between big computing companies including Google, Apple and Microsoft; they are all competing to own the mobile platform. Self-expression and journalism will be born from the same mobile devices and the difference between the two types of content will continue to blur." Nick Bilton

They all seem to point to the idea that news will be social and communicated across lots of different networks and platforms.  It will be social, responsive and more conversational.

With the advent of new tablet platforms I expect we will see more applications like Flipboard for iPad appear, which are capable of creating a news/magazine experiences on electronic devices (you can find a quick review on Wired here).  It's a unique experience in which you get to build your own magazine out of the content being shared across your social networks, including articles and images being shared across a network like Twitter. Check out the video below to get an idea as to how it works.



The interface is pretty neat and transforms the reading experience into something akin to the traditional page flipping/browsing one found in paper formats, except it will have the advantage of being able to play digital media like video and audio. If it doesn't do this yet, services like it in the future will certainly have this kind of functionality.  Having said that, the service hasn't come without a set of problems, especially around copyright and the way in which the application scrapes content from websites and then hosts that material on its own servers.  Joel Johnson has posted on this issue in detail over at Gizmodo.  Mike Masnick on Techdirt points out this is similar to the issue that News Corp had with Google in which they accused Google of stealing their content.

What this points to is that the new developments in technology and software are capable of creating a context in which more people can read more information relevant to their interests (remember Zuckerman's warning about this kind of filtering!) providing the legal contexts in which copyright ownership around content is flexible enough to adapt.  I see that as being one of the potential barriers to the future of news.

What's the future of news? Don't ask me!

This is a blog post based on my response to a student email I received asking me about my opinions regarding the future of news that I thought some readers may be interested in.  Now this is a very good student who transferred from a practical degree to take one of our theoretical degrees - BA (Hons) Media, Culture and Communication - who is currently on a Summer internship at ITN helping with their development team. It's not often that our team gets to talk about theory students doing practical work so forgive me for my little indulgence.  Anyway, they are working on a project looking at a number of issues including the the current broadcasting environment, the evolution of Internet-based news, Twitter, smartphones and how these are all becoming ever more integrated and converged, which all sounds pretty interesting.  Everything that follows has been cut and pasted from that email so forgive the spelling errors!

The future?

Ah, the future of news, eh?  I'll come straight out and say I don't know what the future is going to be and there are many people in the same boat (including news providers!).  Lots of talk circulates around mobile being the next big thing.  We've all head the hype about the iPad and how it may save journalism but it's still early days on that front.  3 million units sold is impressive but not when it set against the global fall in paid-for news content.  Personally, I have no doubt smartphones and tablet devices will play some part in nurturing news but I think there are a few barriers at the moment including technical infrastructures (like the UK 3G/4G networks, Apple app approval processes), data limitations being imposed by mobile providers (O2 and 500mb per month cap) which will restrict the way in which news is consumed via those platforms (I can stream Sky News and BBC Radio 4 on my iPhone via 3G but reach my data cap pretty quickly unless I switch to wifi meaning I'll consume less bandwidth heavy forms of news) and the prohibitive costs of ownership (iPhones/iPads are not cheap, but Android devices are affordable to many).

I'm still confident in the value of the printed word, I'm just not sure it's being delivered and curated by established news organisations effectively.  Let's look at two examples from the UK broadsheet/quality markets; namely Times Online and Guardian.co.uk

The recent Murdoch/Times paywall issue is interesting in that News Corp is happy to sacrifice large numbers of eyeballs (in front of ads) for about 10% of their audience who are willing to pay for the service.  They changed the website design so it looked more like a newspaper too, which is pretty strange.  I'm not sure a small paying audience is sufficient insurance against obscurity, especially when the Times doesn't seem to have the kind of content that other paywall sites have (ie the Financial Times has an affluent, niche audience willing to pay for business news).

Emily Bell, the former Director of Digital Content at the Guardian  (and now a New York Prof of Journalism!) has been pretty vocal about this issue, as has Jeff Jarvis (blogger, academic, journalist, entrepreneur).  You should skim Jarvis' blog for some excellent ideas on the future of (hyper local) news: http://www.buzzmachine.com/.  There is an idea that being highly visible is important for monetising news.  The more reach you have the better placed you'll be to sell advertising and services around content.  I think the latter is important here and maybe more important in the future.  The Guardian are currently toying with their Extra service (http://www.guardian.co.uk/extra) - a £25 per year service offering live debates, news room visits, masterclasses, liver performances, exclusive offers etc to subscribers.  It might help build reader loyalty - the incentive to pay and get something out of that paid-for service.  It might also be a last ditch attempt to stymy the massive losses they've been posting the last couple of years.  Who knows?

I do know that The Guardian are interested in hearing from their readers about what they should do next.  As an iPhone app customer I've been asked to take part in various feedback sessions and one online Q&A did ask about whether or not I'd pay a monthly subscription (for the record, I'm more than willing since I use their website a lot and have stopped buying their papers for the most part).  It's an idea that might work for them, but it might backfire - especially when there is so much freely available content (BBC, I'm looking at you) that readers can go to.  It might be in their best interests to keep the content free but build in some additional features into the application such as personalised content.  Currently app users can pick their favourite themes for quick reading and share relevant stories across Twitter, Facebook,  and email but there is no way to actually engage with the news from the portable device.  This seems to be completely at odds with their main website functionality.

Curate and engage

The ability to comment on stories and engage with writers via the blogs over on Comment Is Free is a model of how to curate and sustain reader attention.  I'm frequently surprised by the sophistication and persuasiveness of argument that can be found in the comment section by Guardian readers.  Sure, there are moments when the ability to hide behind a pseudonym allows for a fair bit of trolling, flaming and nastiness, but this is superseded by the positive forms of engagement on offer.  Add to this some of the excellent daily/weekly podcasts they put out (Tech Weekly, Science Weekly, Media Talk, etc) feature insightful news, relevant expert guests and feature some of the highest production standards (on par with the BBC) all of which they sustain and curate via their main news site as well as with Twitter feeds, Flickr groups and Facebook pages.  They have a consistent and wide ranging presence, all of which push the brand to readers in ways that being behind a paywall prevents.

My feelings about Twitter as a news source change regularly.  I started out by using Twitter as a way of discovering news stories when the number of people I followed was relatively small (ie less than 200) and manageable.  As the number of people you follow increases it becomes harder to negotiate the inane from the relevant, especially as Twitter is geared around short bursts of phatic communication.  I suppose this is one of the reasons why the Lists feature was introduced, so users could tune in to certain people and not others at any given time.  Twitter is good for pointing people to interesting stories or links but it doesn't quite beat a good RSS feed in my opinion.  There's no real way of knowing how long Twitter will be around for, especially in its current guise without a clear business model, so I'd be cautious about seeing it as the future of news.  As a cost-free network for connecting people with interesting things to say, Twitter is great, but it isn't a creator of news content with some exceptions (see this fictional dystopian story for an example: http://vimeo.com/10060159).

Mob (a near-future science fiction story) by Tom Scott from hurryonhome on Vimeo.

I haven't really got around to talking about books on the subject and I'm going to have to be brief.  There are many writers who have sung the praises of the Internet in it's various stages of evolution: as a medium of abundance, a pluralistic space, a democratising tool, etc.  One of the better books I've seen in recent years was the edited collection by Natalie Fenton (2009), New Media, Old News: Journalism and Democracy in the Digital Age - there's a few good chapters in there.  There's one which suggests that the despite the Internet bringing us new ways of reading about more diverse material we are actually becoming less engaged with differing viewpoints.  We tend to consume news or info that already supports our pre-existing ideas. The irony here is that the world of abundance hasn't broadened our engagement - rather we've filtered our world views through lenses that reinforce our established positions (with the odd exception).  Add to this the academic work of people like Justin Lewis (Cardiff University) which has pointed out that massive cuts in the financing of expensive news content has led to widespread reliance on PR copy and what Nick Davies calls 'churnalism' and the future of news doesn't look so bright.

There's also a great presentation on TED by Ethan Zuckerman (from Global Voices, a site for bloggers around the world producing non-mainstream news content: http://globalvoicesonline.org/) in which he discusses how easy (and dangerous) it is to filter out issues http://www.ted.com/talks/ethan_zuckerman.html

I want to come back to a recent example of the ways in which, despite the advantages of the Internet with its easy distribution channels, the traditional news providers still have an important (gate-keeping?) role to play.  You might recall that in April Wikileaks released a video of a US Apache helicopter firing on Iraqi civilians (2 versions: one 39 minute unedited version and one 18 minute edited version framed with a quotation from George Orwell) which drew a lot of attention and criticism from the US government. I've embedded that video below but you may need to sign in to YouTube to watch it.

Wikileaks is a site dedicated to whistle-blowing and supposedly free from editorial inflections - the edited video seemed very much like editorial work rather than a objective fact.  This week the announcement that Wikileaks  had released 92,000 documents about the war in Afghanistan to the Guardian, the New York Times and Der Spiegel was an important one.  Julian Assange (founder of Wikileaks) realised that in order for these documents to have maximum impact they needed to be examined and considered by professional journalists who could make sense of the content and frame it in a way that the public could readily engage with.  There's an excellent account of this process on Comment is Free by Dan Kennedy (academic)

Whatever the future of news is, it has to be responsive to news consumers and responsible to the basic tenements of democratic engagement.  If news providers ignore their audience, they'll soon discover they have no audience.

MAC281 slides for the session on citizen journalism

These are extended versions of the slides I used in the MAC281 lecture this week.

An open blog post to the Guardian subscriber scheme

When I first noticed the Guardian's most recent subscriber drive offering it's readers a chance to 'save money' I thought to myself, 'great - a nice incentive to actually purchase the paper versions instead of frequently reading the bits I like via my RSS feed for free'. Despite my love of technology I am still a fan of the newspaper format in its paper guise: it is portable, convenient and has established sections and routes for navigation - something which isn't always as workable in digital versions.

I've noticed quite a few Guardian pages are not yet optimised for portable browsing on devices like the iPhone, in particular one of my regular favourites from the Saturday edition of The Guide: What We Learned On The Web This Week (mobile web link here for July 18 2009). This is the message which awaits mobile browsers:

How does it work?

I was curious to see how it was organised given that most people can generally subscribe to their local newsagent to have a newspaper delivered, usually with a small weekly surcharge. There isn't much difference to this tried and tested process. Essentially, the Guardian will issue a book of vouchers which can be handed in to the newsagent where you normally purchase your paper and they will sort out the rest. Subscriptions are available on a monthly, quarterly, six month and annual basis.

There are a number of packages available:

• Seven-day Guardian and Observer package: saves 33% on cover price
• Six-day Guardian package (Monday – Saturday): saves 25% on cover price
• A weekend Guardian Saturday and Sunday Observer package: saves 20% on cover price
  

If you regularly purchase the newspapers that fit into these pricing tiers then there are some genuine savings to be made. However, this is also the root of the problem...

Who still buys newspapers?

The year-on-year trends for national newspapers is a predictable one of slowly falling circulations and has been doing so for some time. The Guardian sales themselves were down over 3.2% when comparing June 2008 with June 2009, although their digital views were the best in the UK for that month, in excess of of 27 million unique readers. As we can see, newspapers are diminishing in reader presence and this subscription deal seems like a good incentive to stimulate the existing readership or to lure back lost readers.

I'm sure there are quite a few people who regularly buy newspapers, including the Guardian, every day every weekend, etc, and this offer is an ideal proposition for them. However, what about those newspaper readers who have long since abandoned their paper buying habits or who purchase specific daily editions? Is this still a good deal for them?

I would love to be a regular annual subscriber of the Guardian but I'd like a little more options in the editions available. I regularly buy the Saturday edition of the paper and frequently purchase the Monday and Thursday editions for their excellent Media and Technology sections (worth the cover price alone in my opinion). This costs somewhere in the region of £10+ per month - not a massive cost for the quality of the end product but probably too small a figure to qualify for subscription discounts - but only if I actually chose to buy the weekday editions. Like I already said, my RSS feeds do a great job of bringing those sections of the paper to me digitally and for free. I run a broswer with adblock plus installed too.

Bottom line

So here lies the rub, would a little more flexibility in the options available be beneficial to the Guardian if it means that I'd become a regularly subscriber? It's already accepted that the cover price of a newspaper accounts for much less than the products true cost. Some estimate that the the cover price brings in about 30% of the revenue with 70% coming from advertising sales. We all know that advertising rates have tanked in the past 12 months.

So what is more beneficial: the material costs of producing a discounted newspaper, delivered to subscribers via a flexible subscription model bringing in a fixed price or the risk of further dwindling sales whilst readers switch to digital editions?

War reporting essay

I've been away a while... Work has been manic the past month but I thought I'd update the blog with some advice for those Journalism students taking MAC373: Media Ethics and Contexts, who plan on attempting the following question:

2. Habermas (2004) claimed ‘the critical state of a democracy can be measured by taking the pulse of the life of its political public sphere’. He also claimed ‘the public sphere serves those who have gained prominence as a stage for self-presentation’. How does the public’s right to participate in political life measure up against the journalist’s responsibility to serve the democratic process when considering sensitive stories?

A good answer is likely to consider the role and responsibilities of journalists in informing the democratic process. It may be advantageous to consider these issues against the backdrop of examples whereby the media appear complicit in preventing the public from accessing accurate information in a timely manner, for instance the news that Prince Harry was serving in Helmand, Afghanistan

Most of the material I have covered on the module to date has been informed by the core concern of democratic action within public life as informed by the media. Obviously, the work of Habermas on the 'public sphere' is important to this essay in that it serves as the theoretical basis for starting the investigation. Those students on MAC373 attempting this question will need to engage with Habermas' ideas in some form in order to complete the assignment.

I've posted copies of the slides used in the session on war reporting as a way of showing one way into the assignment:

Mac373 Reporting War 2008

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: war mac373)

You can find all of my presentations in the relevant folders in the MAC373 module space on WebCT Vista/Sunspace. I thought it might be useful for some of you to recap the ideas raised on MAC201 last year so I've included those slides here too:

News And The Public Sphere

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: mac201 news)

Tackling the essay

Some of the things that you are going to need to do in order to answer this question:

1. Explain what is meant by 'democracy'
2. Define the 'public sphere'
3. Relate the 'public sphere' to the press/broadcasting (the role of 'public opinion'?)
4. Consider some of the failings of the public sphere (is the press free from commercial concerns? do the public interact freely with news? do some voices/perspectives dominate the news agenda?)
5. By this point in the essay, it should be possible to make some over-arching claims about the role the press plays in lubricating the cogs of democratic action
6. The next stage of the essay should revolve around an example of your choosing - the only caveat is that the story or case study should be 'sensitive' in some way (ie politically or militarily dangerous, perhaps even concerned with privacy issues)
7. You will need to engage with whether or not the public has a right to know or if the journalist/publisher/broadcaster has a right to withhold the information
8. Is press freedom sacrosant?
   

The example you decide to touch on is up to you, but you might want to check with me first to ensure that it is substantial enough to suit the purpose. I have suggested that you might want to consider the example of the media blackout surrounding Prince Harry's 10 week tour of duty in Afghanistan, which leaked via the Internet. This is not the only example that you can use but it is an accessible one.

The story was thought to be subject to a DA-Notice in the British context as the mission was militarily sensitive, until the US-based Drudge Report picked up on an earlier Australian story and broke the news. At this point the British media opened up - there are lots of interesting newspaper accounts of whether the public had the right to know the whereabouts of the Prince, or whether or not it was prudent to not reveal his location for fear that it may endanger his fellow troops (see the links in the first slideshow above)

Was the Prince a likely target for the Taliban? Or was the stunt a PR exercise in order to raise troop morale? Did the media blackout even matter given the reports that the Taliban already knew Harry was there? Who really benefitted from the blackout? Prof. Roy Greenslade makes a few interesting observations in his Guardian blog piece here that you might want to check out.

You could also approach the question from a historical perspective. A famous example of when the British media dealt with a controversial story which might have been militarily sensitive can be seen in the This Week documentary entitled Death on the Rock. In 1988 the programme investigated an incident in which 3 members of the IRA were shot in Gibraltar by British special forces. Conflictual evidence led to public uncertainty about the legitimacy of the shootings. Did the public have the right to know?

You can watch the broadcast below:


Another famous example of a gag-order being served came in the Spycatcher case, when a former MI5 published sensitive information. The Times was carrying a story recently about a forthcoming book entitled Secrecy and the Media: The Official History of the D-Notice History by Rear-Admiral Nicholas John Wilkinson which was itself subject to D-Notice wranglings, and has been subsequently delayed by the publishers (Routledge). A couple of weeks back The Independent carried a story about palns to extend the powers of the DA Notice system, referring to a specific example

If you want to talk specifics then leave a comment or send me a plan or outline via email.

Dates for diaries October 2008

A couple of conferences are coming up that I'd like to attend, so this is going to be a quick post.

The University of Bedfordshire are hosting an event entitled: The End of Journalism? Technology, Education and Ethics on the 17th and 18th of October. Here's the description:

The last few years have witnessed a fresh wave of claims for the potential of internet-based technologies to widen participation in the public sphere. This period has also witnessed a steady stream of jeremiads about the impact of user-generated content on professional journalism. This wide-reaching cultural debate takes places against the backdrop of the ongoing restructuring of the global news industries. In some quarters these changes are regarded with deep suspicion whilst others see a bright future for the media. Central to arguments presented by both sides in this debate is the value of ‘journalistic’ function to wider society.

The End of Journalism conference at the University of Bedfordshire will provide a timely opportunity to re-assess the status and purpose(s) of journalism. It will also provides an opportunity to question the role played by formal institutions (governmental, media, economic and educational), informal institutions and technologies in (re)structuring the ‘journalistic’ function for the twenty-first century.

The conference organizers welcome contributions on relevant topics including (but not exclusively):-

The Impact of New Media Technologies on Journalism
Professionalism, Amateurism and Citizen Journalism
Journalism, Democracy and the Public Sphere
New Journalism in a non-Western context
The Economics and Sociology of Contemporary Journalism
Employment and employability of Journalists
The Methodologies and Tools of Contemporary Journalism
The Ethics of Practice
The Education of Journalists
Academia and Journalism

The conference organizers aim to encourage a dialogue between various stakeholders involved (e.g. practitioners, owners, legislators, technologists, educators etc.) and would welcome contributions, papers and panels from professional journalists. They also welcome a variety of methodological approaches - including theoretical analysis, case studies and practical experiences from journalists – that can provide insights into the global complexities of contemporary journalism.

The End of Journalism conference is organised in collaboration with Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies. Papers delivered at the conference will be considered for publication in the journal (see http://www.beds.ac.uk/convergence for further details).

Sounds interesting and relevant, although I think the title may be a little presumptuous although it is catchy. I'll be more interested in this once some speakers are confirmed and prices are announced.

I was contacted recently Neil Selwyn of London Knowledge Labs who organised last year's Poke 1.0 symposium on Facebook, regarding a related event being hosted by Liverpool John Moores University. The symposium is entitled Facebook: a network, a research tool, a world? and is held on October 24th.

The details of the event are a little short on detail at this stage:

Facebook is one of the faster growing sites for social networking. Its popularity increases everyday, and so do the hopes, the concerns and the controversies that surround it. This event brings together researchers in Social Sciences, Humanities and Education, who study Facebook and its effect on our life and work. The symposium will explore issues of trust, deception and negotiation of identity; the use of Facebook for student support and learning; the use of Facebook as a research tool; and many more.

Confirmed speakers:

• Fiona Frank, Department of Continuing Education, Lancaster University and Department of History, University of Strathclyde, title TBA
• Monica Whitty, School of Social Sciences, Nottingham Trent University, title TBA
• Tristram Hooley, CRAC and Jane Wellens, University of Leicester On-line research methods training programme
• Jane Secker, LASSIE project, London School of Economics

We welcome additional contributions in the form of short papers. Please submit your proposals to a.kuntsman@ljmu.ac.uk by August the 31st 2008.

Time, venue and programme will be available in September - stay tuned for updates!

There is a downloadable Powerpoint poster for this event available here. I'll add more info as it becomes available.