Media Convergence Week at Sheffield University

• Ed Roussel, Telegraph on digital media
• Ben Hazell, Telegraph on search engine optimisation
• The Twitter debate!
• Audio/Broadcast training and more lectures
• How do you make money out of the web?
  

Convergence Week

Here on the print, web, broadcast and magazine courses at the University of Sheffield journalism department, we've just come to the end of 'convergence week'. Essentially, in line with broader trends in the media, each course has training in aspects of the media they are unfamiliar with - for web students, this meant broadcast training, for broadcast it meant web training and for print and magazine it meant both.

Why bother? Because virtually every media organisation now wants multi-skilled journalists happy working on all platforms. Although we learn many aspects of the media together, the four courses are by nature restricted to their own domain. If I'm honest, I don't know how much longer the department will be able to preserve such a structure, without also offering (or entirely replacing all the courses with) a postgraduate degree in multimedia journalism.

I'd imagine there are conflicting views at the end of convergence week, although those of us on the web course seem to have had a largely positive attitude towards it.

I've already done a post on Twitter, a debate started by Peter Cole in the first lecture on Monday. I seem to be finding new people on all the courses on it everyday now, as well as a flurry of new blogs.

Ed Roussel
On Tuesday, in our ordinary guest lecture slot we heard from Ed Roussel, the Telegraph's Digital Editor. The success of the Telegraph online is no secret, and it was a surprise to hear that despite the latter's obsession with it, the Telegraph gained more hits on Obama's inauguration day that the Guardian.

Ed pointed a quick picture of the media: NYT suffering a 60% drop in share price, the LA Times having 3 rounds of job cuts since July (though as I have written about already, their online revenue has reached a critical point) although the Telegraph has remained profitable for 2 years.

Due to their growth online, Ed feels that the reach of newspapers has, in fact, not diminished even though print circulation is down. In essence, the talk focused on what new business models the media could use to profit from journalism online - more on this later.

I asked Ed what role citizen journalism and user-generated content had to play in such new models, as I'd been surprised he hadn't spoken about it more. He replied that it was 'critical' that readers felt they were part of the process, and stated that his colleague Jeff Randall had become 'obsessed' with reading the comments on his pieces. Ed went on:

'Can you make money from it? Right now, no. But if you don't do it, you'll loose audience and therefore loose money.'

In response to another question, Ed stated that regional newspapers, which are still held in such high esteem by journalists (and journalism students) with a more traditional outlook, were 'firmly headed down the wrong path.' Their problem is, in fact, in the title - hyper-local is now more effective that 'regional'.

Search engine optimisation
Ben Hazell, also from the Telegraph, was a student on the web course last year. He gave us a talk about search engine optimisation (SEO), which has given me even more ideas about re-designing this blog and setting up my next one.
In response to a question about Google (I'm looking forward to reading Jeff Jarvis' 'What would Google do?' when it comes through the door), Ben replied that it is not providing facts, it provides information. At university, it's been banged into us for years to be sceptical about online sources of any sort. What's needed is a different attitude, and a better approach to how to find those sources, what to trust and how to check them.

Lectures and Training
As web students, we actually had a minimum of training this week compared to other courses. We had already done the video training so essentially underwent a re-fresh on the camcorders and Abode Premier. The audio training was quick, but comprehensive enough that I'm sure we'll cope.

During the lecture on online magazines, I realised a point about online revenue. Liz Nice asked who used RSS feeds for magazines, and I replied that I did so for the Economist but obviously didn't pay for any of this. However, this got me thinking. I'm not a fan of ad blockers, simply because if they become too prolific, advertising revenue for websites will reduce and may even cause some to shut down. But is using RSS feeds any different? A tiny minority of the feeds I receive also show the adverts from the website (Mark Halperin and Time's 'The Page' is one of them). Along with a total lack of familiarity with the sites themselves - because you have much less of a reason to look at them - this is just one of the downsides of RSS feeds.

One of our last lectures was on that of digital newspapers. Although this a potentially impressive venture, I can't see it taking off myself. It seems simply like a way to preserve a platform with technology, rather than looking at the wider process of news-gathering and how stories themselves are told. With people getting news and analysis, personally geared towards them from multiple sources on their computers and phones, it may be too late for digital newspapers to seriously compete.

So how do we make money out of the web?
For me, this has been the key and often-repeated question that remains unanswered by the end of this week. I don't believe in charging for content online if it can be at all avoided. Services however, can be charged for (such as pro accounts on Flickr, as Helia pointed out to me). Certain, specialist sections of a website can be used to pay for the rest - Ed Roussel told us the Telegraph's Fantasy Football generated 2% of their web traffic, but 20% of their web revenue.

Making money out of journalism online. There's no lack of people working on this issue, but it will require innovation, creativity and many failed ventures, and even then, there is unlikely to be one, simple, universal solution.

So we'll end with a quote from Jeff Jarvis:

'I realized lately that I’d been assuming we could see an orderly transition, Jan. 20-like, from old media to new. But it’s clear that we’re going to see destruction, voids, and vacuums in the transition.'