Emily Bell

Emily Bell, Director of digital content for Guardian News & Media:

6,000 followers!

 

By Sharon Robins, on 15th Janaury via the telephone

When you first started what were newsgathering techniques like in the early days?

 When I first started which was about 23 years ago, newsgathering was exactly as you would imagine it had been probably for the proceeding 30 or 40 or 50 years.

 It was personal contact based and it was phone based and then you being able to do shorthand, and have a portable sort of walkman cassette player that I used to record long or important interviews on. 

 But obviously, at the time it was very difficult to flag key sentences or moments in the interview.  You know you could do that if you had very expensive broadcast equipment, I mean Very expensive, so no none of the newspaper organisations I worked for had those.

 Basic technology

 The techniques were extremely basic I would say. It was a rosex (circular roundabout type file for phone numbers or a flip up type list) in the contacts book, a set of phone numbers and land lines.

 Obviously no one had mobiles so you were in two places; largely one of which was at your desk phoning people.

 And the second of which was out; both at press conferences and also on locations wherever something was going on.  You did have to spend a lot more time getting in the car and going there.

Better than shank's pony

What difference would you say that the social media has made to getting in information?

 I think it’s made an incredible difference.  What I do now is very different to what I did in the early days when I was a reporter and I started off on a couple of trade papers and then I moved to the Observer.

 Now I have a corporate management job but I do still write and tweet and do various things that are around the media. 

 It is So much easier now to know at a top level what is going on.  So in some ways social media has made that just liberatingly free for me.

 I think that’s also partially a function of the fact that I worked as a reporter in the media and technology and advertising spaces which have obviously moved into social media first.

 Twitter response

 So, if you want a thousand opinions on Google in China, Twitter is absolutely brilliant.

 And it would have taken me so long to know first of all that that had happened originally;   because I was emailed directly.   

 I didn’t even mention the press releases in the morning which would arrive.  We didn’t have email (then).

 So (see) how many things were different about that story:  The email came in from Google immediately with mobile numbers on it to contact their head of corporate affairs;

 Followed by my instant reaction was to get onto Twitter to see who knew about it and what was being said about it, not just in the UK but around the world and who’d already published.

 Transformative

 So one of the first pieces I wrote on it was a blog post by Jonathan Zittrain who’s actually an academic, he’s not a journalist.  He would be an authoritative source that you would use and instead of having to chase him out of the time zone that he’s in – He’s at Harvard, so he’s in a different time zone -

 Instead of all of that, I could know pretty much immediately what he was thinking and I could tweet him and I could directly ask him a question.

 From that point of view it is unbelievably transformative. 

 Less impactful

 I think where social media is less impactful is where social media and the network meets; traditional old-fashioned skills in the more detailed and secrecy bound areas of the story.

 So in other words, where you really have to have personal contact and get access to information which is not only not in the public domain but which is actively protected.

 And in some ways that part of the job is as hard as ever was and possibly in some cases more difficult because paper trails are much less frequent and can be easily erased.

 Personal contact

 If you talk to historians about this it’s quite interesting.  I was talking to Anthony Beevor about this recently and he was saying that there’s a multiplicity of sources.

 But also they can be altered or erased or wiped out so actually that very source secret kind of material is as elusive as it ever was and your route to it is still really by personal contact and trying to amass documentary evidence.

So to a certain extent then the riskiness of getting media information is by-passed by the fact that you can actually get to authoritative figures quite quickly but then again you’re still going back to face-to-face contact for investigative journalism?

 Yes, I think that that’s right.  It seems to me that the media and technology worlds that I used to report on have this incredibly sort of, you know, rich circuit of meet ups and face time and conferences and things like that.

 Almost because people work now in a way which is so networked.  Your network goes with you; totally mobile, totally portable, it’s without boundary, it’s two way, many to many, one to many and all of those things don’t actually rub out some of the sort of benefits of face to face contact.

  No doubt about the absolute necessity for it in a large majority of cases.  So that’s quite interesting. 

 I feel like I keep up with my contacts on a much more regular basis through Twitter, for those of them who are on Twitter, etc., etc.

 Finding facts

 So as I say where things are not in the public domain and where systems and organisations thrive on secrecy they are the ones most under pressure from the fact that it’s very difficult to control information.

 In those investigations, it’s very important to keep tabs on the story and actually visiting.

 If you’re talking about reporting of news instances the best example I can give from the Guardians perspective is the G20 where we had the video of Ian Tomlinson being pushed over by a policeman.

New & Old methods

That came out of a collaboration where people had videoed it and actually very traditional reporting methods whereby Paul Lewis our reporter went backwards and forwards to the scene and talked to the family and talked to the police and talked to witnesses.

 And his day by day coverage in the paper and online, I think, it would have had an effect on the person who captured the video and meant that they went back and reviewed what they had and thought it was interesting enough to send it to us.

 And that’s the sort of kind of investigation and even those now are helped by the network and the gathering of real time information by more people than just professional journalists.

On that point, have you more comment on the impact that social media has made to the output of journalists?

 I think it’s made a marginal output but I think that that’s because the real impact of it hasn’t been fully absorbed.

 I wrote a piece about it recently for the Guardian where I said I think that the way people consume real time information means that actually the middle economy of content which traditionally has been the summary that newspapers call coverage, which is the sort of medium sized story which gives you a summary of what has happened; an unlinked summary of the previous day’s events around a particular incident, traditionally they’re 300-400 words long.

 Actually now, the fact that the incident has happened and the news story often can be expressed and distributed very quickly,  then the assimilation and gathering of that by your users and your audiences is really quick as they’re using social networks, not all of them but a growing number of them are.

 Gathering community

 That throws the focus onto the news organisation to be nimble and authoritative around an interesting piece of analysis or getting under the skin of the story – saying yes this has happened but I think this aspect is really interesting or this aspect is not quite right.

 So the impact on the process of journalism – In other words, curating your community; I haven’t tweeted nearly enough this week as I’ve been in internal meetings.

 But the fact that I can remind people I’m there every day means that when something happens I’m able to ask them things.  And they’re kind of expecting me.

 And I’m contextualised and I’ve got followers; 6,000 people on my twitter feed.

 At least half of them are going to be able to help me in some way if they catch my tweets, across a range of subjects, and at least several hundred of them will have specialist knowledge in an area where they are much more specialist than I am.

 So I suppose, you have to feed that audience; gathering your contacts.  So your contacts book is compiled like that these days and the process is to be interested in the conversations around the stories that you think are important or that you’re following.

 Continuing conversations

 In other words, commenting on tweeting they’re links as well as creating your own.  So that’s the second bit of the process that’s changed.

Then when it comes to the actual reporting it’s asking which questions you should ask or having a participative element of that. 

 Then sharing the things that you know or your opinion on something when it happens.  Then it’s harvesting feedback and links and posting links to your stuff and posting links to other peoples stuff in places which will amplify your involvement in that story.

 The impact on the actual process of journalism of social media is that you have to start your engagement much earlier.  Publishing is not the definitive event.  It’s a continuing conversation and it’s a continuing process. 

 Involve & include

 And for a lot of deadline driven journalists that’s an enormous psychological gear change to make and I think the ones who really get it have got it incredibly quickly and are doing really wonderful things.

 And for people who haven’t perhaps got there yet, the feeling of being open in the process of reporting, collaborative in the way that you gather your facts, disseminating your journalism and marketing it yourself – network.

 And then actually responding to and interactively engaging with feedback, that’s a daunting prospect so I think the more people you have who are practitioners who are doing it really, really well and who are prophesising about it the quicker the take up will be.

Going back to the bit about having a conversation which is ongoing but also deadlines; previously it seemed that journalists were frantic trying to get everything ready for a deadline but to a certain extent that doesn’t seem to have actually changed; is it just a pressurised environment that you work in because news and conversations are so immediate or do you think something different there?

No, I think that’s a really interesting question about how do you balance deadline and immediacy with actually the fact that you don’t have a bounded format.

I suppose in a digital world it is about what is the value of fastest and what’s the value of best?  And a brilliantly argued, lengthy, properly linked thesis about a particular aspect of the story that arrives three weeks after the event has to really add something dramatically valuable.

The amount of value you need to add inevitably increases over time and it’s always been that way for publishing.  People are prepared to wait for a book on the subject, they’re prepared to wait two or three years but it had better justify the extra time spent on it.

Print pressure

And that’s always the way for journalism.  So in a way the churnalism aspect of it is, are you being asked to churn out instant opinion and have an authoritative view on something in a compressed way?

Oddly, I feel more under pressure to do that from print than I do from digital.  My main job is now not a writing job.

But if something happens and I have to do it for a print deadline, say if I’m writing a column for the paper on Friday that is for publication on Monday, which is a bit weird anyway, and if something happens at two in the afternoon and my deadline is at four and the editor has decided that that is the thing where we really have to have a view, that’s incredibly pressured.

Online changes

Online or in digital journalism you can add the interesting links and aggregate for you audience while you’re forming your thoughts.  It’s part of the process both of reporting what’s going on and also research at the same time; organising yourself online and producing timely commentary.

Weirdly, in some ways it can sometimes be much less pressured than producing for print where you have to hit a certain deadline and you can’t go back and change it so you better make sure it’s right.

Or you better make sure it’s saying the things that you really, really want to say and that you think will still be relevant 48 hours after you’ve written it.

Story interest

What I suppose the real time web does expose is people’s interest in a story’s life cycle.  If you’re lying outside the wave of interest in something and you’re publishing after that and you’re not hitting it at the time that it’s actually happening then you’re not marketing your journalism very effectively.

Sometimes a week, two weeks or even a month after the event if somebody has a new and important thought about something.  And they can produce a really fantastically, insightful and rich piece of journalism which is linked and brilliant and the best thing that somebody has produced it will still – and this is the interesting thing where again digital offers more opportunity – it will still gather an audience.

It will still be of relevance to the core audience who will be looking for information about subject x or subject y. 

So oddly, where paper formats and bulletin formats on television kind of sort of roll on, they have to renew and refresh the agenda because there’s only a certain amount of thing every day.

The web does help you deliver more thoughtful stuff over time than sometimes more limited formats allow for.

Is there anything else that myself and my colleagues, trainee journalists, need to know about social media in the future?

Future journalism; it is one of those things where I was just having a discussion with Andrew Sparrow who does political blogging for us.

I would say to any future journalists, go and have a look at the way he lived blogged the Chilcot enquiry when Alistair Campbell was appearing in front of it.

Actually what was really interesting for me about that and Alan Rusbridger our Editor-in-Chief described it as a dazzling piece of journalism and it really is.

And some of his preparation on that, even though it was a live event, but just his retrieval of the documents and his ability to highlight particular phrases and he was saying to me – everytime I hear something interesting – he’s now got the tools – he can now mark on his recorder; “Oh that’s interesting” and drop it into another folder.

So you can build up a rich piece even though it’s live.  So I guess what I’m saying about future journalism is that the tools and the ability to do so much more than I could do twenty years ago.

Accurate storytelling

But actually the fundamental is still how do I tell this story most accurately?

We had a really interesting discussion where he said he was really pleased with that but if I’m talking about live blogging, PMQ’s (Prime Minister’s Questions), I think there are ways we could improve.  We haven’t quite got that right.

And I think that’s interesting because he’s a traditional print journalist who’s now been online for us for a couple of years.

He’s one of the people who’s re-inventing that language of political way in an immediate way but which adds real depth and value to users and audience.  It uses technology but it also uses really rigorous editorial thought.

I leave you with his phrase because I said to him; “I just think what you’re doing is brilliant and we need to get more people engaged in it.”

Friendly technology

And he said; “Well, I really enjoy it.  You know this is so much easier than having to take 3,000 shorthand notes and go all the way back through a press briefing.  And sit down and read through them and then make sense of the story.”

Better journalism

I think it’s really important to say this is building us better journalism.  We are getting better journalism out of all these processes and technologies.