#bbcsms - Bringing together the digital conversation

Claire Wardle is running a “pulling together” session. Key points so far:

Verification:

• Do we need to get more comfortable with saying that things are unverified
• Is it irresponsible to just push things out, knowing people won’y come back to check things later.
• More training needed on how to use tools?

Ethics

• Do we need to respect people supplying material more? Do we need to credit citizen journalists as we would our collegues
• Or do they just want to get that message out to the world? Is the personal credit irrelevant and a journalist obsession.
• Still a reluctance in newsrooms to name bloggers/tweeters/YouTubers
• Digital doorstopping – just grabbing content from people’s Facebook etc, which they don’t see as public, even if it is…

Datasets

• Reporters are expected to keep our notes for 5/7 years – but we don’t keep our tweets. Do we need to? Do we need formal archiving – which could also be useful to academics. (Paul Bradshaw)
• BBC has a scale of content, users and technologists – but they don’t open ANY of that up. They could make that much more accessible and usable (Emily Bell)

Other issues:

• How do we get working groups or collaboration communities out of this
• How do we get big media used to being intermediaries and middlemen rather than top-down editors of journalism?
• Specialist media has been virtually ignored in this discussion – we have plenty of experience in collaborating with communities.

Alan Rusbridger: