Even though the industry looks pretty dull, the general feeling I got, was that people have now realised that there is no point in trying to desperately hold on to your job, but now is the time to look forward. Naturally, this forces people to think of new things rather than trying to fix the old, – exciting I think.

There was plenty to talk about, and the unconference format really works well when it comes to networking and spreading ideas. There was everything from failed online ventures like Scoopt, new and exciting start-ups like the local news site SoGlos.com, established success stories like London-SE1 who have made hyper-local work in 10+ years. Newly launched Sweeble.com, the poor journalists printer and distributor was unveiled, Ok, it’s been running for a month, but still pretty new ;-).

James Hatts from London-SE1

The whole event was all about the future of journalism and how to make money in an industry that is changing on all fronts. Hyper-local was one of the main topics of the day, and especially how to make it work. As Marting Belam notes in a short interview with John Welsh, there is no reason why every publication has to cover everything.

“Does every publication need to cover horse racing coverage? the Racing Post does that. Or, are we going to end up with a situation were the Racing Post can concentrate on that audience and selling the advertising for that audience, and the rest of us can point to that?”

He also gave re-assurance that there will be news in the future, but the business model will change, thanks Martin.

Live-blogging JEEcamp

I was live blogging the day on behalf of the Online Journalism Blog and had some great discussions and panels to cover. I did a whole bunch of videos with Documentally about journalists use of facebook, why small-talk is important on twitter, the value of your online network and the next big thing.

Documentally showing off

James Hatts from London-SE1 talked about local news and we also had some great impromptu panel discussions. One chaired by Joanna Geary from the Times, and the other headed by Dave Harte from Digital Birmingham. The full transcript of the live bogging is also available and of course, every journalist, apart from one, live blogged their own experience, so search the web or head over to JEEcamp.com where everything is aggregated.

Kyle MacRae’s Keynote: The Rise and Fall of Scoopt.com

CoverItLive:

Video Coverage

The live video coverage was not as successful as I had hoped. the Bambuser video was simply useless, and the audio on the Qik equivalent was poor to say the least. Luckily my LX3 held up nicely and I secured a nice collection of JEEcamp clips that was uploaded to Vimeo. A few are also embedded here.

Kyle MacRae on Scoopt.com

Documentally: The detail is in the small-talk

James Hatts from London-SE1

Tomorrow I will be live blogging from JEEcamp – the Journalism Enterprise and Entrepreneurship unconference. Joining me, will be a team of online journalism students from the Birmingham City University, some of which are also hard working reporters at my little baby; Birmingham Recycled. We will be using a variety of tools including CoverItLive, Qik, Bambuser, Flickr and of course twitter.

Update: Live archive here

“the hashtag to follow on Twitter is #jeecamp, while jeecamp.com will be aggregating any mentions of jeecamp from various social media platforms (Paul Bradshaw’s, Online Journalism Blog )”

You can see a list of attendees over at eventbrite where tickets are also available (I think they are sold out though).

Here is an (un)official schedule of the event.

10.00: People will start arriving
10.20: Introduction
10.40: Kyle Macrae keynote
11.10: Coffee break
11.30: Speed networking
12.00: Break into groups each with a question to discuss
13.00: Lunch break
14.00: Fringe discussion (whatever that means?)
14.30: Open Mic
15.00: Panel discussions
16.00: Finish

An unconference?

An unconference means that the event is basically organised by the attendees. Everyone have had the opportunity to contribute via the JEEcamp wiki. Here’s the official description of the event.

“JEEcamp is an opportunity for a range of people to get together to talk about how on earth journalists and publishers can make a living from journalism in the era of free information, what the challenges are, and what we’ve learned so far.

It is also an opportunity for people with different skills and experiences to network, share those experiences, and perhaps suggest partnerships or new projects.

It is an unconference, which means no endless parade of speakers, and no predetermined agenda (more info here). It’s a self-organising event, so you decide the agenda (via this wiki), and the focus is on providing the space and time for those with valuable experience and ideas – attendees – to talk to peers.

Attendees might have launched their own journalism project – or worked on one within a mainstream organisation. Or they might just have lots of great ideas, or knowledge about the area.”

Follow the liveblogging and  have a look all the aggregated content from around the web and help us make it worthwhile.

If you thought portable devices meant that you had to carry a few of them around, think again. As far as I’m concerned, Chris has a completely different take on this. His philosophy seems to be;  the smaller they are, the more you can fit into your bag. – And I like it :-)

I don’t know if he even got all of his devices out during his stay, but here’s what he dug out of his secret chamber while I was watching.

• Apple Macbook
• 3G dongle
  Gives him a Wi-fi enabled network wherever here is.
• Kodak Zi6
  A nice little HD video recorder.
• Nokia N95
  The device he uses to post Qik videos in conjunction with his iPhone i believe.
• Iphone (with a windscreen stolen from his Zoom recorder)
  The windscreen helps him look more ‘reporter like’, and the audioboo app let’s him record and upload podcast on the go.
• Panasonic Lumix LX3
  Lovely little camera with a bright and wide lens.
• Eye-fi card
  A 2GB SD card you pop into your digital camera and it has a built in wi-fi and GPS chip. It will geo tag your photos and upload them directly to flickr via the built in wi-fi antenna.
• Nikon D3
  SLR for low light, loong zoom and more commercial high res. photography.
• A zoom lens (probably Nikon but didn’t check)

All this, and probably more, stuffed neatly into his North Face backpack – well done for keeping track of it all.

48 Hours in Denmark

I didn’t know about this, but Chris told me about a project called 48 hours in Denmark. Which basically give away a free trip to Denmark for people to come over and shoot some video. Chris and Philip made quite a nice video entry, so please give Philip Campbell and Christan Payne your vote.

Chris was visiting to pour out of his wisdom of multi media journalism in a web 2.0 world, but he couldn’t resist the opportunity to do a quick interview with Paul Bradshaw at the end of the lesson.

Doing a presentation on something like this might seem like overkill. But the more I prepared for this presentation, the more I realised how important this actually is.

It might just be me, but I’m struggling to understand why so many mainstream news papers still don’t link to their sources. I see it day after day, newspapers ripping off twitter messages and giving no credit what so ever. I’m just thinking, who would ever want to work with an institution who consistently pass on other people’s work as their own?

The Format:

Monday March 30th. around 2pm, 20+ online journalism students from Birmingham City University will use twitter to ask questions about twitter, signing their tweets ‘#twask‘. – We need people to help us answer their tweets; so if you are up for it, help us teach twitter by following the #twask hashtag Monday afternoon.

Background:

As some of you may know, I run BirminghamRecycled.co.uk and have a great team of online journalism students, mentored by Paul Bradshaw , to help me. We see twitter as one of the most important tools in our online journalism toolbox; both as a research tool, but mainly as a way of keeping in touch with our users. One of the primary objectives of the site is to interact and connect with the local community of bloggers and content producers.

The majority of students have had no prior experience with twitter and have now only been using it for a couple of weeks. Some are starting to find their feet and are now looking to build their twitter profile, expanding on what they have already learned. Others find it harder to get to grips with the social and conversational nature of twitter, and are a bit uncomfortable with the idea of ‘stalking’ strangers online.

We hope by arranging a session like this, we will demonstrate how useful twitter can be when multiple people are talking about the same thing. It will give the more adapt twitterers a chance to explore ideas around the use of hashtags , and introduce beginners to @replies and the social aspect of twitter in general. But most importantly it will be a, hopefully, fun exercise for everyone.

But how do you actually explain twitter to someone who’s never used it before? Well, Paul gave students 10 people to follow trying get everything going, which for the most part went pretty well. Unfortunately @chloebb got confused over @replies and actually following people. She was probably the busiest tweeter of the bunch but the tweets ended up like this:

Joanna Geary picked up on it and thought she was being spammed by a twitter bot and @paulbradshaw eventually ended up apologizing and everyone was happy again.

The best thing is probably just to throw yourself in there, not being afraid of what you might or might not say. Focus on understanding the basics will probably be the best way to go, start following a few people. Don’t start out by following 2000 people as long as your account is relatively new. If a new user who only has a few updates starts following 1000′s of people, it’s usually a spammer who just hope people will auto-follow back. Understand that twitter is a social network more than a publishing platform. It’s strength lies in instant discussion and the ability to dig into ongoing discussions in real time. It’s a stream of commentary and open discussion between people, imagine a busy conference where you just pick and choose who you want to listen to. Any time you log onto twitter, you get a snapshot of the world at that particular time.

Twitter is really great for learning by doing, and I think that’s the best way to go. You pick up on things that are going on and respond to them in your own way. But if you are stuck and don’t really feel comfortable just throwing yourself to the masses, try creating a twitter template. Basically picking 5 twitter users that you enjoy or you know are popular (they must be doing something right), analyse their tweets and see if you can find a pattern and replicate that with your own tweets.

A few templates worth highlighting from twitip.com:

@kevinrose wrote -> Lunch then movie at home, relaxing weekend. http://twitpic.com/zeeb
Template – What I’m doing -> picture

@tferriss wrote -> Experimenting w/ various ways to start a fire in a fireplace. How about a Coke can + bar of chocolate? http://tr.im/2nor Your tips + tricks?
Template – Ask question? Offer potential answer (or title) -> link -> question?

And a few I just made up to get you networking: