Turkish Journey

I’ve been fol­low­ing Ben Hammersly’s Turk­ish Jour­ney with great interest.

Ham­mer­sly is report­ing on the run up to Turkey’s gen­eral elec­tion in July for the BBC, but rather than just filing copy for the web, audio for the World Ser­vice and video for News 24, he’s using a raft of web ser­vices to aug­ment the more tra­di­tional media.

There are Flickr pho­tographs, links on del.​icio.us, status updates on Twit­ter, routes on Google Maps and, of course, a weblog. You can even add Ham­mer­sly as a friend on Face­book.

It’s an inter­est­ing exper­i­ment in news­gath­er­ing and alter­na­tive modes of broad­cast­ing, but what’s really grabbed me is that Ham­mer­sly is not only pro­vid­ing new ways to follow a news story, but also reveal­ing the processes which usu­ally remain hidden from view­ers or lis­ten­ers, the nuts and bolts of pro­duc­ing a news item:

I prob­a­bly shouldn’t talk about it in any detail yet, but by the looks of things I’ll soon be involved in a new web project that could learn a lot from the Turk­ish Jour­ney exper­i­ment when it comes to arts report­ing and review­ing, rather than news. More on that next month.

Posted at 6pm on 27/06/07 by Jack Mottram to the web category.
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Tags: journalism, twitter, web, weblogs