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My e-Democracy ’0815. November 2008 – 20:37 by Rolf Luehrs |
Although a bit late, I would like to share some of my impressions from Dan Jellinek’s (headstar) e-Democracy conference which took place in London Tuesday this week.
First of all: I enjoyed the conference very much! The RIBA was a real nice venue and lots of interesting plenary sessions and workshops have been presented.
The conference started with two keynotes by Helen Boaden, Director of News, BBC, and Tom Steinberg, founder of MySociety.
Helen talked about what social media means for journalism. She especially highlighted three aspects: the increasing speed of the news beat caused by eyewitnesses equipped with communication technologies (“accidential journalism”), citizen newsgathering and the interaction with those formally known as readers or listeners, some of whom have now become active participants.
Both, increased speed and increased interactivity have to be perceived as major challenges by the BBC which has not given up the ambition to deliver high quality journalistic content. However, the attitude is still positive: “It’s no surprise (…) that the BBC has gone from passively accepting user-generated content to positively soliciting it. It’s not just a “nice to have” – it can really enrich our journalism and provide our audiences with a wider diversity of voices than we could otherwise deliver.”
For those who want to learn more about the BBC’s social media approach, I recommend to read the full keynote speech which Helen published at her blog.
While Helen delivered at the same time an example on the perfect usage of PowerPoint, Tom just showed one website to support his talk – a very funny one, though. Read the rest of this entry »
