Anyone For Tennis 2.0?
It was all change at the All England Championships this year - the annual strawberries, cream and Pimms festival held in Wimbledon. Apparently there was also tennis to watch! For those not engaged in this waistline expansion exercise, being forced to follow the tournament from an office desk was a much more fulfilling experience this year, with both tournament organisers and host broadcaster the BBC offering new and interactive ways of keeping up with the action.
The official website provided not only live scores - as it has for several years - but also supported interaction with social networking sites such as Second Life and Facebook. In a neat PR exercise Second Lifers were able to use their avatar to look around an IBM sponsored virtual Wimbledon world. Meanwhile, the official Slamtracker tool offered up statistics, with wigetised versions available on other social networking sites.
Meanwhile, the Beeb offered live web coverage of the whole tournament, broadcasting up to five matches at a time using the BBC iPlayer application, which almost totally negated the need for evening TV highlights packages. Then there are innovative services such Zattoo, which re-broadcast live TV on the fly for Internet users throughout the whole tournament. They are not productivity tools!
Similar changes have taken place in news media over the past few years of course. Web-based news sites now routinely integrate text, video, reader comment, audio, and blog-style commentary into their coverage of the hour's top stories. Even traditional print titles such as the Telegraph, Guardian and Times in the UK have become multimedia publishers, cannibalising the next day's paper content with up-to-the minute news. The aforementioned BBC offers perhaps the most seamless service, in which heavy - if controversial - investment in the iPlayer technology has blurred the lines between the state-funded broadcaster's multiple online, TV and radio outlets.
The evolution of the media landscape has not come without changes for those on the frontline - add mobile to the list of media outlets and journalists have now become all-round news-gatherers, who provide a combination of services, rather than specialists in any one medium. The days of the old-school hack, stuck behind a typewriter investigating the latest scandal in the White House, are long gone. The here-and-now matters most; print, web and rolling TV compete for the same eye balls and shrinking advertising pot.
Mobile is at the forefront of even more exciting media technologies, which have developed at a rapid pace. During the confusion of the 2005 July 7 bombings in London, passengers with camera phones and an MMS connection were the first to tell the story of what had happened that morning. Later that year, mobile video from the Buncefield Oil Depot fire prompted the BBC to set up its citizen journalism team, which now filters through thousands of pictures and videos sent in by viewers every day. Then there were the first images of the death of baseball star Cory Lidle, who crashed his light aircraft into a New York apartment building, with local residents who were on the scene long before TV crews, able to sell their images to the media.
Today, images and video filter out of every major world event, such as Tibetan peace protesters in New York City, the Chinese Earthquake, or the Burmese Hurricane, for example. Moreover, almost anybody with a 3G connection can now become a live broadcaster, with services such as JuiceCaster and QIK promising to turn every one of us into rolling media. The citizen journalist was not only born but has truly flourished.
The pertinent question for the media is how to compete when, arguably, citizen journalism offers greater insight - not to mention access - into world events?
And for the communications professional - how not only to monitor this community, but influence it too? Some might say it's 15-0 to the citizen journalist, with the ball firmly in the industry's court.
Posted by Ed Barker on July 15, 2008 at 2:05 AM
