EJC Launches Reporting Development Training in Kenya

We and our Kenyan partner AfricaonAir implemented in May their first Reporting Development training to specialise on a specific development theme - agriculture. We had eight journalists from different media houses all based in the provinces and representing different platforms - radio, print and Online. The 3 day training ran from 13 - 15 May. In keeping with the practical hands-on approach to our training, for one of the days, trainers took the group on a field trip just outside Nairobi where we visited and spoke to a a very inspirational farmer who started his farming business with just $6 and it’s now worth more than $100,000. The farmer is now exporting his poultry farming technology to other African countries like Burundi, Zambia and South Sudan. The journalists were extremely happy with the field visit, which gave them a story or two to do that will form the basis of our group work later on. The trip also generated ideas for more stories on agriculture.

Posted on May 21, 2013 by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).
Filed under development.

Applications open for health journalism contest offering a US study tour

The International Center for Journalists (ICFJ) in Washington, African Health Journalists Association and Arab Media Forum are giving away a two-week study tour to the United States and cash prizes. Journalists from Sub-Saharan Africa, the Gulf states and Pakistan may apply. Entries must include Word Immunization Week (April 24-30) and relate to diseases that are preventable or treatable with vaccines. Entries must have been published or broadcasted in Sub-Saharan Africa, Pakistan and the Gulf states, between March 15 and May 15, 2013 in order to qualify for this health journalism contest.

Submissions may be made in English, Arabic (Gulf), Urdu (Pakistan), or English, French, Portuguese or Amharic (Africa). Submissions in other languages must include an English translation. The top winners of each regional competition will receive a cash price and a two-week study tour throughout the United States. For more information and the specific criteria please check the contest page.

Posted on April 8, 2013 by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).
Filed under events.

GEN News Summit 2013: HACK THE NEWSROOM! Event

From 19 - 21 June 2013, the Global Editors Network will be hosting their annual GEN News Summit 2013: HACK THE NEWSROOM! event in Paris. The summit features an impressive lineup of speakers including Isabelle André CEO, Le Monde Interactif, Jim Roberts Executive Editor, Reuters Digital, and Alan Rusbridger Editor-in-Chief, Guardian News & Media. A full list of speakers can be found here.

The event also has a wide array of sessions beyond the panel discussions that participants can attend. These include:

- The Drone Journalism Bootcamp, which is designed to give participants extensive knowledge of the capabilities of drone journalism from editorial, business, and legal perspectives;
- The Data Journalism Awards Ceremony , which is sponsored by Google and is the international competition recognizing outstanding work in the growing field of data journalism. A total of 15,000 euros (around $19,000) will be awarded to six winning projects;
- The ONA Paris Workshops: Disrupting the Newsroom , which features six workshops over a span of two days that will include industry experts giving participants the tools and strategies they need to help seed, encourage and implement experimentation and start-up culture in their digital newsroom.

A complete list of program highlights can be found here.

As a media partner of the Global Editors Network, we are happy to announce that we will be giving our readers a special discount code for the event ticket price. The code that you can use is “EJC”. With this code you can purchase a GEN News Summit ticket at 839 EUR, which gives you up to a 50% discount - the full non-membership price is 1699 EUR (you save about 50%) and the member price is 1199 EUR (you save about 30%). Click below to register. We look forward to seeing you there!

Posted on March 27, 2013 by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).
Filed under events.

Poynter and EJC to Begin Implementation of Journalism E-Learning Project in Indonesia in 2013

The Poynter Institute and the EJC will begin implementation of a multi-year journalism capacity building e-learning project in Indonesia in 2013. The EJC’s country team management was recently in Jakarta to map out methodology, content, and journalistic topical elements of the first pilot with local partners Radio KBR68H and media training centre PPMN.

The two year programme will target regional correspondents and stringers that are part of the KBR68H network of affiliates, which are spread across the Indonesian archipelago of over 17,000 islands. In such a geographical reality, e-learning can prove to be a cost-effective and efficient mechanism for continued education and training of working journalists even in some of the most remote islands where broadband penetrations are often low or non-existent.  

A blended learning approach (distance mixed with an occasional face-to-face session with trainers) will focus on basic journalistic skills-building and ethics combined with story outputs on local and community reporting topics such as development/environmental issues and natural disasters. Individual modules on these themes will provide the core of the multi-week courses developed jointly between the Poynter Institute, the EJC and local partners. Development of the pilot will soon be underway and is set to be rolled out in Spring 2013.

The project is funded through the MFSII instrument of the Dutch Foreign Ministry in the Hague. It is part of a much broader global five year project entitled Press Freedom 2.0 that includes other Dutch media partners, such as World Press Photo and Mensen met een Missie, working in 11 countries on five continents.

Here are some photos of the past trip:

Posted on December 12, 2012 by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).
Filed under projects.

Mapping the Referendum… Before the Referendum

On election night in Catalonia, all eyes were on the final result brought about by the combined forces of groups supporting independence. VilaWeb.cat turned that into a map… mapping the referendum results. Like many other newspapers, VilaWeb got the results of the live vote-counting in real-time, but rather than simply broadcasting the raw data, it created a real-time mashup of the number of votes for pro- and anti- independence groups in each town. The result was like showing the outscore of the referendum before the referendum itself.

VilaWeb, Barcelona’s leading online newspaper, also used another important data journalism tool during the campaign: the Tweet-o-meter. The newspaper followed the twitter account of every election candidate and recalculated the most retweeted messages every hour. Using a specially designed algorithm and the Twitter API, the tweet-o-meter avoided same party retweets and party propaganda. The result was a panel classifying the most retweeted messages at hourly and daily intervals and for the whole campaign. Candidates quickly began to use the #tuitòmetre hashtag to promote their own messages.

Both projects were created by VilaWeb Labs, a spin-off for journalistic innovation created by VilaWeb to bring new ideas into the newsroom, while also helping other media outlets. VilaWeb is the leading Catalan language newspaper and the oldest of the European internet pure players.

http://vilaweb.cat
Map:  http://vilaweb.cat/mapa-electoral
Tweet-o-meter:  http://www.vilaweb.cat/tuitometre

Posted on November 27, 2012 by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).
Filed under announcements, news, events.

The EJC Holds Back-to-Back Reporting Development Journalism Training Workshops in Nairobi

The EJC held back-to-back Reporting Development journalism training workshops in Nairobi at the offices of EJC  Kenyan partner AfricaonAir from 19 - 23 November. Led by veteran BBC journalist and AfricaonAir trainer Joseph Warungu and former BBC/AFP journalist and director of Dakar-based E-jicom Hamadou Tidiane Sy, the two events included a total of 16 Kenyan electronic and print journalists from the capital as well as regional cities Mombasa, Wajir, Eldoret, Voi and Marakwet.

The EJC’s five year projects in Kenya target a specific niche in the country’s media landscape: namely, the lack of in-depth, well researched, compelling, and impactful stories on issues of development. It seeks to raise awareness of development issues through engagement with Kenyan journalists, editors, and society at large.

Here are pictures from the event to better illustrate what went on:

Posted on November 27, 2012 by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).
Filed under projects.

The EJC Kicks off Two Weeks of Journalism Training and Press Freedom Events Across Bolivia

The EJC recently kicked off two weeks of non-stop journalism training and press freedom events across Bolivia this week in cooperation with its local partner Fundacion para el Periodismo. 

Featured is the highly promoted panel discussion, which took place 30 October in the capital La Paz: “The future of journalism and the role of media in the digital era”. The panelists include journalist and former Bolivian president Carlos Mesa, Bolivian journalist Juan Carlos Salazar, Miguel Winazki director of the Clarin Journalism School Buenos Aires, and Pulitzer prize winning American journalist Josh Friedman. 

Other EJC events focus on the training of the future trainers of  Fundacion para el Periodismo led by veteran Reuters reporter and EJC expert Oliver Wates in the city of Cochabamba.  

Wates also ran a practical general reporting training in Cochabamba for 30 young Bolivian journalists on 29-30 October.

Events end next week with two Wates-led topical journalism courses—the first in La Paz focuses on reporting and on development issues. The final event will take place at 3700m elevation in the traditional mining town of Oruro, with its focus on commodities reporting, a mainstay of the Bolivian economy. 

Posted on October 31, 2012 by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).
Filed under projects.

DG ECFIN Seminar Recap

The EJC and the EU Commission’s Directorate-General on Economic and Financial affairs (ECFIN) on October 18th and 19th gave 17 journalists from radio, print and TV representing 12 Eurozone countries the chance to experience Brussels at its busiest, right in the middle of the Summit of the European Council of Ministers. The agenda reflected what was being discussed by the European heads of state across the street; banking and fiscal union for the EU and how to save the Euro.  The guest journalists were also given full accreditation to the Council summit.

First on the agenda on Thursday morning were three guests, Declan Costello, the director for ECFIN, German economics professor from the University of Duisburg, Ansgar Belke and European MEP Jürgen Klute.  The seminar was moderated by Zoltan Geyvai from the EJC.

Mr. Costello introduced the details of the Commission’s plan for economic governance and fiscal capacity, which addresses fundamental elements of the European Crisis. Top on the list was breaking the link between banks and sovereign debt of nations. New legislation would increase the Commission’s reach in monitoring the internal fiscal conditions of member states by embedding international law into national institutions.  This would be enforced by graduated sanctions for offending member states.  In the end, controversy stems from a considerable loss of sovereignty for member states.

Mr. Belke took the floor next talking about the crisis from a German perspective, preferring market flexibility to fiscal transfers to southern Europe. The issue is that there is no investment from the markets in these countries and that capital flowing in from other Eurozone countries is creating an artificial balance of payment.  The short crisis of market confidence is being solved by the ECB but in the long run there is still the problem of the reluctance of larger economies to finance the others through fiscal transfers.

Next Mr. Klute spoke about how it was funny to speak about reinforcing economic governance when it was only 10 months ago that it began and that there needed to be more time to see the effects. He also spoke about the imbalance in the EU where Germany can ignore the mandate of the Commission while Greece or Portugal cannot. The “gap” as he put it is a huge problem and must be addressed as a change to internal policy.  According to Klute the Commission is only trying to encourage Germany to unlock its full growth potential.

The next speaker to take the podium was Rolph Strauch from the director’s board at the European Stability Mechanism, the newest addition to the European Union’s financial stability arsenal.  Strauch made it clear that the ESM is a crisis resolution procedure. The point of ESM was to give an instant resolution and provide time for an intermediary adjustment process when a country cannot finance itself in the market. The legislative framework is hopefully to be completed by the end of the year and implemented in February.

The ESM has been a hot point in the news since it was allowed to be implemented a few weeks ago.  The guest journalists peppered Mr. Strauch with questions, which were to be kept strictly off the record and must remain so here. The tone of the questioning was how much money has already been paid into the ESM, the legality of the ESM and if the mechanism was ready to tackle the Spanish crisis.

Lunch was next on the agenda and the EJC welcomed Simon O’Connor, press spokesman for Olli Rehn, the EU Commissioner of economic and monetary affairs and perhaps the most sought after spokesperson in Brussels. Amidst the rustic charm of restaurant L’Altier, the guest journalists had O’Connor’s direct and intimate attention for a solid hour while a three course meal was served.  The conversation was kept strictly off the record, which allowed O’Connor to speak more freely on issues such as the Commission’s hopes for the upcoming Council Summit and the economic policy pertaining to the journalist’s home countries.

Before the journalists prepared to cover the events in the council there was one more speaker, Hans Martins, the chief executive of the renowned Brussels think-tank, the European Policy Centre.  Martins provided an interesting perspective on the Euro as being a strong currency, but being used by nations that were experiencing a growth crisis. His advice was to work and not save your way out of the crisis. He noted that the USA had a huge debt problem and in comparison the EU doesn’t owe the world money.  Martins recommendation was that the EU, “fire the growth bazooka.”

The rest of the afternoon was spent covering the Council summit where leaders made their respective agreements on agenda’s but as expected, nothing earth shaking was agreed upon. It was predicted that the real show would be the next meeting in December, when what was agreed would have to be set in stone.

In the morning before the next council session, the topic was also a very new proposal, which had been the main topic for the European leaders at the Council, the Single Supervisory Mechanism (SSM) for consolidating European banking. The EJC moderator expressed doubts that the policy, which was agreed upon during the summit, would be able to go through before the end of the year.  The guests were a perfect mix to give a balanced view of the policy in question.  Charlotte Sickermann from DG MARKT who worked directly with creating the policy, Arjun Singh-Muchelle, who is the head of EU affairs for the British Banking Association and Karel Lannoo, who is the Chief Executive at the Centre for European Policy Studies, a well-known Brussels think-tank.

Ms. Sickermann spoke about the SSM in terms of stabilizing the Eurozone by breaking the connection between sovereign debt and banks by introducing EU level supervision of banking practices essentially creating a single block within the 17 Eurozone area banking systems.  This would again help break the connection between banks and national debt and prevent bank runs. The council’s commitment to the SSM was seen as essential or else the markets would have reacted adversely. The SSM was explained as a system between national institutions. Smaller banks would still be covered by national institutions with the ECB providing a supervisory role for larger banks. Sickermann announced that the SSM should be put into effect by 2014, a date that was met with skepticism.

The next speaker, Arjun Singh-Muchelle, from the British Banking Association, which represents banks from around the world based in London, tried to shake off the perception that London is Eurosceptic. He emphasized that London supports any proposals that bring stability to the Eurozone and preserve the single market. He stated that London could provide a platform for banks only because of the single market. The question he raised was whether or not the ECB and the SSB had the institutional capacity to have competence over 6,000 banks.

Providing a tone of expert scepticism to the whole topic was Karel Lannoo. He stated clearly that the SSM was wholly incomplete with only a supervisory mechanism. The real issue was providing deposit and liquidity, in other words to back up the normative policy with real money. The next issue with a single banking structure according to Lannoo is the complicated coordination between national bodies and the ECB. What will happen in Germany when the Landesbanks say no as always to shared deposit guarantees in the Eurozone? According to him the adoption of the SSM is fundamentally flawed when these liquidity and deposit guarantees still exist under national control and there is still fragmentation.

After the very interesting and informative morning seminar the Journalists armed with fresh expertise, on top of their already thorough knowledge of financial affairs, proudly wore their EU Council press badges and headed for the leaders of Europe.

Posted on October 25, 2012 by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).
Filed under events.

The EJC Brings “Maps, the Power of the Crowd, and Big Data Verification” to PICNIC Festival 2012

The European Journalism Centre’s (EJC) presentation at the PICNIC Festival 2012 in Amsterdam, on ‘Maps, the Power of the Crowd & Big Data Verification’, left those in attendance with a head full of ideas about how the media and the world are changing together. The venue was Amsterdam’s Eye Film Centre, which provided an open creative atmosphere for over 65 sessions during the two-day event.

The presentation was the EJC’s fifth appearance at PICNIC, which describes itself as a leading European platform for innovation and creativity. The EJC brought together panellists representing enterprises ranging from the traditional news world like the BBC to innovators of new uses of media like Storyful and OpenStreetMap.

Kicking off the day was Charlie Beckett the director of the POLIS and the department of communication at the London School of Economics. Beckett opened his talk by introducing a broader concept of journalism combining the networked journalist with public participation and new technology. This dynamic creates the demand for new techniques, new narratives and a multidimensional context to which the news is produced. We live in an age of uncertainty and complexity and more than ever journalists are needed to decipher and explain the enormous amount of information available to the public. How the public uses and interacts with the news is also changing. Beckett illustrated the misconception that technology changes how people use the news by contending that how people use technology is based on their personal history and lifestyle and that successful media will be able to produce content that uses this idea. Beckett also identified changes in the news itself. News used to be a product and now it has transformed into a process. News used to be an industry and now it is a service. The issue with the business model here is the place for ownership. The solution according to Beckett is forming an added value relationship based on understanding the social context of news consumers. With this in mind a business model can be created that will pay for the future.

The next speaker to take the stage was David Clinch, the founder of Storyful, a Dublin, Ireland based service, which scours the social media web filtering out content that is up to journalistic standards. The company plays the role of gatekeeper in a world of open information. Or as Clinch put it, “we are trying to harness the power of social media content.”  Clinch began his career in news with CNN international in Atlanta and left after he realised the future of journalism wasn’t possible within the traditional confines of the newsroom.  Storyful wants to solve the key issues behind finding real content that is floating in the cosmos of the internet and turn it into the news.  As Clinch put it, “the web needs to be curated.” In order to do this the precepts of traditional journalism are essential.  The value of social media generated content is that it provides a proximity to the news that could not be achieved before. “There is always someone closer to the story,” said Clinch. The key is to find, verify and contextualise the content generated on the ground. The most essential part of this process is the “human algorithm” there is no way to trust the algorithm of the web alone, human verification plays the essential role. The power of the information on the web is only revealed if journalists do their job by gatekeeping and filtering.

The ethos of Storyful is that traditional journalistic values must be combined with a new tech savvy skillset and the endless amount of content on the web to produce news for the future. After the presentation the conversation continued. EJC director Wilfred Rütten and the audience opened the door wider on a few issues. Clinch spoke about the “golden hour” after a story breaks, where a lot of the content culled from the web is of a better journalistic quality than the dreck that appears after an hour of a breaking story. A fake tweet goes just as far as a real tweet. Still, social media is hugely important for news. It reflects the human aspect of news, which makes it important for everyone. Dynamic experiences must be created to avoid the fallacy of universal interest.

After a short break the session took a turn into Crisis Mapping and Emergency Journalism. Crisis Mapping expert Anahi Ayala Iacucci, Helena Puig Larrauri from the Standby Task Force and Harry Wood from the OpenStreetMap team all presented ways in which maps and information from social media are implemented in helping in crisis situations. Iacucci presented the Fletcher School’s model of crisis mapping during the Haiti earthquake. The challenges were similar to that of those in social media journalism: How to make sure information is reliable and in this case helpful to those in need. Journalists also play a role as a place between the crowd and decision makers where “crowdsourced” messages posted on a board can attain visibility when passed on to officials by journalists.

Helena Puig Larrauri Co-Founder of the Standby Task Force, an online volunteer technical community for crisis response, spoke about the preparedness for disasters and conflicts made possible by geo-location. A location on the ground can be reported by live mapping to first responders or aid agencies who need that information to best do their jobs. The platform provides an online community for live mapping. There are also problems with making the information viable and the trust of subjective analysis.

Harry Wood, from the OpenStreetMap team presented a tool similar to that of the Standby Task Force. He put the functioning of OpenStreetMap as a mass collaboration rather than crowdsourcing. The goals of risk reduction, response and development of resources to create visual map detail are presented on an open online program. Again ever present in the presentations is the importance of verifying the information in a quick situation. It doesn’t need to be totally reliable later in that something is better than nothing in a crisis. The area of trusting subjective analysis on the ground is very important to create this live open system of crisis response.

Turning back to the world of journalism was Matthew Eltringham from the User Generated Media Hub at the BBC, which supplies every branch of the BBC’s news output with viable, newsworthy content. The UGC Hub began in 2004, as content came pouring in after the Tsunami. For the BBC however the beginning of emergency reporting with UGC was after the attacks on July 7th.  Eltringham showed a disturbing video of a man in Syria being buried alive and then explained that they had determined it was a fake. The ways of verifying are down to the details. Accents, license plates, weather. In the case of the video, the man did not seem to be breathing out or spitting the sand out of his mouth. Of course everyone is human, and the rare mistake has been made. The BBC’s UGC Hub has also success stories such as the young BBC employee who used Twitter, Facebook and then a telephone call to get a source on the ground in New Zealand after the earthquake to provide real time analysis from across the world. This was an amazing example of how traditional journalism combined with technology is creating a richer and more detailed news cycle.

Erik van Heeswijk, from “Film it Yourself” also presented the idea of karaoke as an apt metaphor for user generated content. The idea is always to build attraction for quality “singers” by finding a better stage that motivates a quality performance. The effort must be appreciated to generate value. He also reminded us that UGC is not free. It takes time and resources to turn that content into something valuable. It is an “extractive industry” which derives the good stuff from the mountain of content.

After the presentations the panellists discussed and rehashed their ideas together, which proved to be a long and lively discussion on the role of media, the consumer and the way in which we think about information. The day was then capped off by a leisurely ride with the panellists and EJC staff through the canals of Amsterdam, where one could take the time to get to know the very interesting people we’d been listening to, a little more personally. It was a nice way to end an informative day.

Posted on September 27, 2012 by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).
Filed under events.

Social Media Gun Fired at London Olympic Games

Nine million tickets were sold, 962 medals awarded. More than 10,000 athletes competed. At least 21,000 journalists created stories watched by 4 billion global viewers. All of which was done in the two weeks of the London Olympic Games. The record number of journalists covering the event and the millions of people discussing it via social media were expected to make these Games different from all others in the past. Even before it started, the London Olympic Games were called the first social media Olympics. Social media was expected to become a serious rival to traditional coverage and the London Olympics were to be covered differently. Both journalists and the Game organizers recognized the use of social media as not only a big opportunity, but also as a threat. 

This reality begged the question: were the first social media Olympics #winning? Or were they a #fail?

Growing numbers

Looking back at past Olympic games, the power of social media was evident starting in the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games. Back then, Twitter had a total of 6 million users, which quickly reached 500 million users by 2012. Facebook use has also skyrocketed during recent years – from 100 million users in 2008 to 900 million in 2012. These numbers do not include Chinese social media users, which adds an additional 1,5 billion with networks such as Sina Wibo and Tencent Weibo.

Among these social media users are the athletes and their trainers, representatives of sport organisations, journalists covering the event, and other people taking part behind the scenes of the Olympic games. These people could easily use social media to ‘spoil’ or use the information they get in an unauthorised way in social networks. The organization committee of the London Olympic Games were the first to deal with the reality of a large number of people having ‘ticking bombs’ in their hands and therefore had to invent a strategy in order to control the situation in an advantageous way.

Trust but verify

Taking the simultaneous power and danger of unmanaged social media into consideration, for the first time in the history of the Olympic Games the International Olympic Committee (IOC) set the rules for social media use, which stated: “[…] it is entirely acceptable for a participant or any other accredited person to do a personal posting, blog or tweet. However, any such postings, blogs or tweets must be in a first-person, diary-type format and should not be in the role of a journalist”. 
The IOC’s interest in controlling the social media was motivated mostly by commercial interests, however it was important for the journalists as well. As discussed previously, the use of social media was thought to be replaced with traditional media, which was something that was very unlikely from the media’s point of view. The IOC, by restricting the use of social media, especially among athletes, limited the amount of information that could be made public without any participation of the journalists, which at some point saved their position in the Olympics.  

While the athletes had many restrictions when it came to tweeting and blogging from the Games, they could still share their personal thoughts, which was in the strong interest of their fans. As Financial Times sport reporter Simon Kuper pointed out, the main difference in coverage of these Olympic games compared to the past is the lesser amount of interviews with the players.

“Journalists are being pushed out of the game by the athletes. Now players can ‘tweet’ about how they feel after the game instead of telling it to a journalist. It is getting harder to get a player to talk. We still need professionals however, for most of the in-depth analysis of the game” Kuper explains.

He argues that athletes tweeted less than was expected during the London Olympic Games due to the restrictions. “The athletes used social media a little bit less than was expected, because there were warnings that they had – you can’t say this, you can’t say that. A couple of athletes were sent home because of the things they tweeted, so the effect was more material from the fans than the athletes during London Olympic Games”.

Tweets flooding in

While the insiders at the Olympics were managed by the IOC rules, the crowd of Olympic observers was free to do what they wanted. And they did. The audience bombarded the internet with posts and tweets about the event. According to the social advertisement company “Wildfire”, Olympic events fuelled 150 million tweets in total, comparing to 125 thousand during the Olympics in Beijing. The event was mentioned in tweets more than 11 billion times. Some single events ended up sparking a record amount of tweets, as did the 200-meter sprint by Usain Bolt, which was tweeted 80 thousand times per minute during the race!

Social media activism during the Olympics had an impact on the work of traditional journalists as well. The large information flow had to be managed not only in terms of content, but also technically. Organizers were not ready for tweet- and text-clogged networks and it caused some problems for various official broadcasters. An example of this was during one of the cycling races, when fans were actively reporting from the event and the flooded communication system as well as GPS failed. The journalists couldn’t get the data, the broadcast was impaired, and the audience dissatisfied. At the end of it all, the organizers were forced to restrict the social media usage during the races and asked the fans to tweet only in cases of urgent need. The fact that such actions had to be taken shows the direction Olympic hosts might want to move towards in future improvements.

Bridging new forms of cooperation

One of the overlooked aspects about the London Olympic Game coverage was the fact that the traditional media expressed a strong will to cooperate with social media. The decision of NBC to engage in a partnership with Twitter was widely discussed and welcomed with great interest. The fact that it never happened before brought a lot of thoughts and doubts with regards to a collaboration between NBC and Twitter. 

Time Magazine TV critic James Poniewozik compared the NBC Olympic coverage to that of major airlines. He tweeted: “its interest is in giving you the least satisfactory service you will still come back for”. But while the NBC Olympic coverage was given a “fail” by many Americans and widely criticized, the partnership with Twitter did have some benefits. The special page on Twitter updating people with live coverage from the Olympic event was followed by millions of people and in turn, millions of people tweeted about the Olympics from their own accounts, which increased the popularity of the event and its viewer ratings. By the end, the London Olympics became the most watched event in the history of American TV. Whether it was because of the great success of American Olympians or because Twitter encouraged people to watch it, it is hard to say, but the result is obvious.

The first child in the family

“These Olympics had Sydney’s vibrancy, Athens’s panache, Beijing’s efficiency, and added British know-how and drollery”, Australian journalist Greg Baum wrote.

The 2012 Olympic games, a.k.a. the first social media Games, were like a family’s first-born child. There were some mistakes due to the parents’ lack of experience, however in the end the child grew up quite nicely. In the future, the organisers, media, and even the athletes may do things differently when it comes to their ‘second child’. Social media ended up being quite advantageous for the organisers and even the traditional media. The Olympic games attracted plenty of attention worldwide and brought the best ratings ever to the broadcasters. Of course, not all these benefits were thanks to social media. But Twitter and Facebook undoubtedly helped. The next summer Olympics will take place in Rio in 2016 and the winter Olympics will happen in 2014 in Sochi. Future organisers will have to consider social media as an important issue and raise the ‘second child’ in the family as the best example for all children in the neighbourhood.

Posted on September 19, 2012 by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).
Filed under news.