The email alert instantly grabbed my attention amid the plethora of drab headlines; the Guardian is to ‘experiment’ with the launch of a daily blog intended to provoke responses and suggestions from the public on what stories should be covered.
The paper believes that this will help deepen the newspaper’s investigations, but the question for me is will this genuinely help shape stories or improve the overall level of coverage that the Guardian already provides, or is it a bit of a gimmick? Can this spark debate via social media and increase traffic to the Guardian’s website over and above the discussions that already take place?
Opening up the inner machinations on live news stories appears a positive move, but in practice will this work? The premise of a good newspaper is to inform, educate, entertain and inspire readers through high quality editorial and serve as an element of persuasion to get people to act. I guess it’s the last point that the Guardian is taking to a new level.
The Guardian is inviting readers to tweet with comments and suggestions on news stories by providing a live feed of editorial diaries prepared by the various editors. As the Guardian, explained, “It provides a glimpse into the scheduled announcements, events and speeches that make up the news day. You will also be able to view what our editors think about the stories by reading their updates on twitter.”
At Broadgate Mainland’s Digital Trends Seminar on 5 October 2012, the esteemed panel of Tim Weber, BBC News Interactive, Simon Read, The Independent and Jon Cudby, Incisive Media Investment Division, all spoke of how the use of twitter helps speed up the newsflow and the Guardian’s initiative echoes this and increases the interaction taking place between journalists and readers.
Tim Weber, BBC, uses twitter as a news gathering and information tool and the Guardian is doing the same in a more direct reader engaging manner.
A rather apposite remark made by a colleague and Guardian reader, who commented, “it’s moderately interesting to look at it once, but the only people who’d regularly look are those seriously wanting to influence the news, if they think they can, and perhaps a few media studies students or PRs !
An unintended consequence of the Guardian’s idea is that they will receive many more calls from PR’s who identify a story which their clients can add value to, and we have used this to good effect already. Whether intended or otherwise the fact that PRs are probably the main winners of this ‘experiment’ will support the papers intention of gathering a greater diversity of news and views.
To that end I hope the experiment works.
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