Journalism

And if that bit of Birtspeak 2.0 doesn’t get a double gold star from the DG I wonder what will **

I have borrowed the term from Dr. Claire Wardle, who is currently on a mission to get BBC journalists to understand how they can use social media to improve their journalism.

The principle is pretty straightforward – now it is extremely easy for people to self-publish content on the web, instead of keeping information acquired in the course of telling a story hidden from the audience, use social media tools to publish it. Obviously this is not an option for someone involved in an undercover investigation

Here are some examples of things that are currently going on in the BBC:

• World Have Your Say whittling down the possibilities for their running order on their blog and twitter feed

• BBC Technology Correspondent Rory Cellan-Jones asking for sources and opinions via twitter

• Today and ipm publishing their links on delicious

• The Virtual (nee Digital) Revolution team putting their interview rushes online before TX (and inviting re-edits and mashups from anyone which were then used as trails)

This kind of transparency potentially opens journalism and programme-making to a much greater degree of scrutiny than before. As people can see more – there are more questions they can ask:

• Why did you ask X and not Y?
• Why did you post here and not there?
• Why did you leave that bit out?

But then these are the kinds of questions programme-makers need to be asking themselves anyway.

Transparency – it’s the new Impartiality.

** Although it’s got a long way to go before it’s as unintelligeable as this particular bit of gibberish: