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The teachers are online: social media and education

“When we launch, we’ll have the largest single professional network online in the UK. The community lends itself to a social media network.”
Building a framework for half a million users to share and rate teaching materials is now the focus for the Times Educational Supplement, the PPA Business Media Brand of the Year in 2008. Head of Internet Edward Griffith talks through the changes before tomorrow’s launch of TESconnect.co.uk, the social network for education professionals. More »

Tags: old media, professional network, rating, sharing, social media, TES, UGC

Hockey Stick: the first climate change metaphor

In his Public Understanding of Science 2000 article ‘Knowledge, Ignorance and Popular Culture’, University of Toronto Professor Sheldon Ungar suggests the reason that public understanding and concern could coalesce around the ozone hole, where it has failed to do so for climate change, was in part due to two things: first, that the ozone hole argument found bridging metaphors from popular culture that were easily understood; and second, it engendered a ‘hot crisis’.

As Ungar suggests, these bridging metaphors for the ozone hole were simple and powerful:

The signal advantage of the ozone hole is that is can be encapsulated in a simple and widely familiar “penetration” metaphor. Stated succinctly, the hole leads to increased bombardment of the earth by lethal rays. The idea of rays penetrating a damaged ’shield’ meshes nicely with abiding and resonant cultural motifs, including Hollywood ‘affinities’, ranging from the Starship Enterprise to Star Wars.

Importantly, as Ungar notes, these metaphors are ‘pre-scientific’. That is, they’re kept simple, before they get into the scientific detail of the ways in which ‘ozone eater’ chemicals destroy the earth’s atmospheric protection.

In fact, these metaphors were so powerful, that both Ungar (2000) and Hargreaves, Lewis and Speers (2003) found that many people simply considered climate change to be a sub-set problem of/caused by the ozone hole problem. In a saturated media, people hold onto the main themes and frameworks of science stories, and not much more, with which to take educated guesses at what’s going on in the world (Hargreaves et al, 2003). More »

Tags: climate change, controversy, global warming, hockey stick, MBH, McIntyre, media coverage, science

BBC impartiality and climate change

Tony at Harmless Sky has been following , for 18 months at least, development of BBC policy on the coverage of climate change.

He picks up on this line from a rather obscurely-titled BBC report on impartiality:

The BBC has held a high-level seminar with some of the best scientific experts, and has come to the view that the weight of evidence no longer justifies equal space being given to the opponents of the consensus [on anthropogenic climate change]. From Seesaw to Wagon Wheel, Page 40

As Gareth in the comments points out, the seminar was one of the Real World seminars the BBC holds each year, where execs from the corporation get together to debate particular issues. In 2006, it was focused on climate change. This line from the report worried Tony enough to send the BBC a request under the Freedom of Information Act, and I agree that the response from the BBC is far from satisfying. One reason perhaps is that the Real World workshop quoted was held under Chatham House Rules, so the BBC are stuck in being unable to release information about who attended the seminar.

Tony’s post has been picked up by some other bloggers, one of whom I’ve had debate with recently, who take this as proof that the BBC is proselytising the ‘climate alarmism’ cause (again, on alarmism, see my post on James Risbey’s work). There is a ‘fabulously interesting and in-depth’ post on the Hockey Stick Graph debate over at As with Bishop Hill’s views on the BBC’s position on climate change, I’m not so sure…. More »

Tags: BBC, climate change, impartiality

The hyperlocal (and big sport) future of news

I spent an instructive couple of hours in the offices of the Sunderland Echo yesterday talking with their digital editor. It was an excellent opportunity to get inside a changing newsroom, with pressures of integration, industry sales and, even, writing copy.

The paper is an example of both the innovations and challenges of how a successful local newspaper is developing its brand online, and tackling the industry-wide regional sales drops. However, as their digital editor–a very pragmatic, clued-up, positive, guy–told me, last year was a particularly good year for the Echo.

The Echo is my local media group. I wrote first ‘my local newspaper’, but changed that for two reasons: 1) because they’re not only a newspaper, and 2) because I rarely purchase the paper. (And ok, I’m not from Sunderland, having moved here six months ago.) It’s the double-headed problem for local news everywhere. The web is taking audience, and their paper audience is getting older (the region’s 18-24 age group is dropping by about 5,000 a year).

Their digital editor, Lee, saw the future as hyper-local news and information, and that could be Johnston Press’s strategy across their group. Lori Cunningham was appointed head of digital strategy in March, so her six months of bedding down will be over soon. It will be exciting–and important, for the future of press–to see the plans that develop.

I was surprised with the size of the audience: 282,000 unique users a month in June. Pretty impressive, and growing still. Sunderland’s population is around 177,000. They know there’s an ex-pat community looking in for the football, just as they expect a proportion of the site is people not from Sunderland, especially coming in for Premiership news. They’re launching an online survey to help with demographics, and also crossover between web and paper, which is something they don’t yet know. It will also give the journalists more information about whose reading their stories.

The clearest change from being a newspaper only press was that the web brings more bites at the cherry for each story. Not only can it develop from breaking NIB to splash to in-depth story in a much shorter time scale, with various live iterations, it is also creating new story developments–story comments and forum postings providing leads or additional live paper copy (”We had 50 comments on the story online by 5pm. One of them was…” etc). The web hasn’t changed the copy style of the live story that goes in the paper, but the newsroom are becoming advocates for their stories across forums and other blogs and sites, which is bringing in audience and, more importantly, building the brand among new communities.

Their biggest win online is sport. Not least because the stories lend themselves to optimized headlines (”Sunderland fans are fourth sexiest in England, but Liverpool, Fulham and Spurs boast real stunners“), but also, as Lee told me, because sport naturally lends itself to four or five big headlines, whereas one-liner news headlines have to compete with 20-30 other decent one-liner news headlines each day. (And they’ve been creative with their own version of citizen journalism, with the users writing the headlines for stories).

The main area of conversation was around video. There were about six or seven journalists in the press room who had taken it upon themselves to pick up the video camera and get out with it, and produce (mainly on Avid) small packages. They were useful news bites (such as the march of returning soldiers from Afghanistan) but the digital editor wanted more, and more easily made and uploaded. On mobiles is fine: what kept coming up was that the audience is savvy enough to know that web production values, as long as they’re explained, to the use, can be mobile quality and still get the visits and still do the job. We also looked at some local video work from sister paper the Yorkshire Post.

There were a number of insights into the role. We took a look at the back-end, an in-house CMS built across the group’s different titles that’s on a process of rolling-development; and a discussion about the quality of audience opposed to quality. The future is community and hyperlocal, and information-based as much as journalistic, if the Echo is going to take its brand and make it work online, which means the audience they need are the local community. (Hopefully this can tie in to the idea of digital localism and low-carbon living I’ve talked about elsewhere.)

Thanks again to Lee and the Sunderland Echo for the opportunity.

Tags: digital, local news, online journalism, Sunderland

Censorship or sense? Well, sense actually

Well, that was interesting. My post on the limits to debate on cimate change has generated 40-odd comments so far (modest in the grand scheme, but detailed, and most of which has been useful and instuctive: couple of interesing sites in Devil’s Kitchen and QuestionThat). There were a few personal attacks here and here (and here) and a few more on-topic responses, such as from Sans Pretence.

I’ve actually spent much of the day writing the paper that helped stimulate the blog post, assessing the influence of online on public perceptions of climate change. So to all those who have commented, and provided further links and thoughts, thanks. More »

Tags: censorship, climate change, GGWS, Ofcom, regulation

Camp language: watching the media on Kingsnorth

I can’t make it to Climate Camp as I’ve got a couple of deadlines approaching for a book chapter and article (both on climate change–reasonable excuse?) But to do my bit I’m going to try and monitor the language that the media uses to report on activities at the camp.

I’ll look at the different ways in which the actors and claims-makers are treated in the media. As John Richardson says in his book Analysing Newspapers, “Successive studies of journalism have shown that there is often social or ideological significance between the choices” of how subjects are treated by the media (Richardson 2007,  56). In particular, the level of agency given to the actors in a particular situation–how are they described, how are their actions described, are they given or deleted agency? More »

Tags: Climate Camp, climate change, language, media coverage, newspapers