Students were invited by Poland’s best read quality newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza to find out whether the country is ready to host UEFA Euro football championship next year. During nine-day journeys in June they were sharing in real-time their experiences of using Polish services, travelling in the country and interacting with Polish people.

The project was called “Mission 21” and had been already recognized by the World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers and students themselves as “one of the most exciting social-media journalism projects to date”.

George Brock, Head of Journalism at City University London, said:

“Mission 21 was an excellent example of the kind of real-time, real-life training for young journalists which rests on cooperation between a leading paper and website and a journalism school. And I don’t think that it was just City University’s students who were learning: it seems that the editors at Gazeta Wyborcza learnt a few things about social media too. These young journalists are showing how to engage audiences in ways which will help to build and sustain journalism in the future.“

21 students of 11 different nationalities had to spend nine days in Poland without any special assistance. They simply got plane tickets and the amount of Polish zlotys that British tourists usually spend there. They went to 21 largest cities chosen by a draw.

“Before the students came to Poland, they told us they expected to see a gray, depressed post-communist country, hard hit during World War II, inhabited by very conservative, Catholic people. We were so surprised listening to all these ideas. Poland has changed so much since democratic and economic reforms in 1989 and joining the EU in 2004,” said Grzegorz Piechota, Gazeta Wyborcza’s senior editor and head of public awareness & social campaigns.

Can Euro 2012 change this terribly wrong perception of Poland?

About a million football fans are expected to travel there next year. And many of them may as surprised as John Seymour, a student on a mission to Poznan, who wrote on the blog: “Call me naive but I did not expect to see shops such as River Island, H&M, Zara, Tommy Hilfiger, Apple and La Senza in Eastern Europe… Poznan appears to be a great example of Poland’s progress since the fall of communism and a city that has the infrastructure and amenities of any Western European city.”

City students found also Poland safer and less conservative than they expected. There are however some stereotypes that proved to be true.

Some non-white students and one Jewish one met with openly racist comments on the internet that made them think Poland still had a problem with xenophobia. Looking for answers in Wroclaw, black-skinned Saad Noor realized: “[Polish] racism is the result of locals having little contact with foreigners and it is more out of suspicion and ignorance than hatred.”

Exactly as feared, the students found that Poles love to complain, hate to smile and are reluctant to speak any foreign languages. Christian Jensen, who tested Gorzow, offered a rule of the thumb useful for Euro 2012 travelers: “The younger generation can speak [English], but the older generations can’t.”

After all Poland proved not that bad as seven out of 21 students decided to stay longer after the Mission 21 had been accomplished.

Grzegorz Piechota said:

“Pictures of attractions all over the country have impressed many Poles too. It seems many of us have not noticed how much our cities had improved since we joined the EU and spent billions of euro on renovations and building new attractions. It took Londoners to tell us to travel less to the Mediterranean and more around homeland.”

Gazeta Wyborcza has just announced a new supplement for Saturday titled “Poland. I like it!” fully based on recommendations by City students.

Football stadium construction sites in Warsaw, Gdansk and Wroclaw (all three are delayed) and the only stadium built on time in Poznan were also inspected. Officials of all these four Euro 2012 host cities assured the students they would be ready for the championship.

The Mission 21 was not all about testing. Journalism students did some old-fashioned investigative reporting — for example Camilla Mills put Bialystok and its mayor to shame for mistreatment of animals at the city’s zoo. Some other showed some entertainment talents — for example Petter Larsson recorded a song about Katowice and made a video clip that was broadcast by Poland’s popular public television channel TVP 2:

“Revealing experiment of use of social media”

Poles have been following the expedition with growing interest from June 6th when it had been announced to June 18th when students arrived until June 26th when most of them left. According to data from Agora, Gazeta Wyborcza’s publisher, the students’ blog at misja21.blox.pl became at that time the fourth best read on a popular Polish Blox.pl platform of 236 thousand blogs.

Despite the fact that the blog and Facebook wall page at Facebook.com/misja21 were written in English, they were read mostly by Poles and 84 per cent of readers were aged 18-34 — so difficult to reach for newspapers.

Extensive use of social media was an experiment for both Gazeta Wyborcza and City University London. All discoveries in Poland were reported and discussed with readers in real-time on Facebook and Twitter at @misja21. Later stories were reported in full and commented on the blog. Some of the students’ stories — after translation to Polish — were published in Gazeta Wyborcza on its websites and in print. Texts were enriched by pictures and videos taken by students and uploaded to the blog and YouTube channel of the Mission 21.

Grzegorz Piechota recalled: “For Gazeta it was a revealing experiment of use of social media for better reporting. Imagine the stream of raw, unedited multimedia bits published all day by 21 students, their 21 shadow journalists, some additional photo and video reporters, and hundreds of readers who got involved. Then imagine these five poor editors trying to manage assignments for all stakeholders including readers and filter from the stream what deserved to be amplified in single or all channels.”

Piechota added:

“For the first time in the history of Gazeta’s editorial projects, we have not received any single e-mail or any letter by post about Mission 21. All interaction has finally moved to social media and we the traditional media editors simply need to adapt. Real-time communication with the public becomes an integral part of our journalistic practice.”

About City University London

• City University London is an international University with a reputation for academic excellence and a central London location. It was placed in the top 5% of world universities by Times Higher Education World University Rankings 2010-11.
• The University leads London in education, research and enterprise for business and the professions and is ranked 10th in the UK for both the employability of its graduates (by The Times Good University Guide 2011) and graduate starting salaries (by The Sunday Times University Guide 2011).
• City is broadly-based with world leading strengths in the arts, including journalism and music; informatics; social sciences; engineering and mathematical sciences; business; law; community and health sciences.
• The University attracts over 21,000 students from around 160 countries and academic staff from around 70 countries.
• City was founded in 1894 and in 2016 will celebrate its first half century since gaining University title.

About Gazeta Wyborcza

• Gazeta Wyborcza is the best read quality daily newspaper in Poland with paid circulation of about 335 thousand copies and weekly readership of 4.3 million people (2010).
• Gazeta was founded in 1989 by a group of journalists and activists of the underground democratic opposition press as the platform for the first democratic parliamentary elections. It became the first independent newspaper in post-communist Central and Eastern Europe.
• Part of the success of Gazeta is its unique formula of the national newspaper with regional pages in 21 regions of Poland.
• Gazeta.pl internet portal is an umbrella for 90+ online brands from news to social networks and advertising. Monthly Gazeta.pl reaches 11.5 million or 63% if Polish internet users (Dec. 2010).
• Gazeta is published by Agora, one of the most successful media companies in Central and Eastern Europe. Its businesses include publishing of newspapers, magazines, books and online services, running radio stations, production of TV, film and music, out-of-home advertising, and a network of cinemas.

Howard Finberg started with the evaluation of the training programs for journalists available at Poynter. He tried to answer the question what has been done right, what could have been done better in new media training. He explained, that the success of a media company depends not only on journalism, nor technology but on training as well. Poynter’s News University is an online training resource basing on 4F’s: focused, flexible, fun and financially accessible. So far it has 161.000 registered users, particularly editors, publishers, journalists and students interested in media aspects.

The 3 most popular trainings:

• 5 steps to multimedia storytelling
• video storytelling for the web
• writing for the ear

Poynter commited a survey concerning its training programs, and the results are as follows. 425+ responses, mostly US reporters were surveyed. In the past 5 years, 84% received some kind of multimedia training. Is it working? Respondents say yes:

• 70,5% said that multimedia training they have received has made them smarter
• 84,8% said the multimedia training they have received has made them better at their jon
• 81,5% said the multimedia training they have received has helped their department program or organisation

Overall multimedia skills in US are better
5 yrs ago 62% nonexistent or poor multimedia skills dropped to 22% today. Sad news is that one fifth of the media workers are not fit to work in the multimedia company.

• In terms of project planning: 5 yrs ago 23% of respondents declared they were proficient or expert. It is 60 % today.
• In terms of video production: 5 yrs ago 22% of respondents declared they were proficient or expert. It is 55% today.
• In terms of photography: 5 yrs ago 61% of respondents declared they were proficient or expert. It is 75% today.
• In terms of interactive design: 5 yrs ago 9% of respondents declared they were proficient or expert. It is 22% today.

The more the training is put in the practice, the higher the rating is. As time increases, so does the self-improvement. Conferences and webinar work but not as much as regular trainings. Motivation is the number one driver of all training programs.
What’s next? Tools change, but training can’t stop. Barriers that are still there: time, money, and energy to develop new skills.

In summary: multimedia training has worked, skill levels were improved. Lots more training is needed – almost all respondents (90%+) will apply for more training.

Joyce Barnathan works for the International Center for Journalists which was created by journalists for journalists.

We live in incredibly disruptive times, the journalism is changing, and so are audiences. They demand to get stories however they want to receive them, they want to interact and often want to produce the information as well. No need for big budget to train multimedia journalism. So many technologies are free.

4 recommendations based on ICFJ experience:

1. Train your staff to engage your readers. Envolving the readers will make the news organisation stronger. Malaysiakini.com is the main online source in Malaysia. When the program for citizen journalism was started, they heard a lot of criticism. They decided to start the citizen journalism program with video – it was the best journalism form to monitor the quality of.
2. Train your staff to use new tools and technology – this will help deliver information to and from the website. The benefit of the free web is that there are lots of free resources to take to enrich the newspaper.
3. Train the staff to be experts in the areas they cover. The most read blogs are the ones where authors have something to say, and they are seen as experts. ICFJ believes it looks exactly the same for newspapers
4. Use the web to train (examples: NewsUniversity, ICFJ)

Tarek Atia from the Media Development Programme in Egypt gave some brief history and description of the training programs for journalists in his country.
In the beginning there was the old model of training in Egypt – veteran journalists told stories to the listeners. Global issues were analysed from the local perspective, and had typical problems: training was treated as as punishment, reluctant managemenent, poor facilities. At the same time Egypt was going through the same problems of the change in media from print to digital.

Things changed with the 15 million dollar donor program which helped to train over 4000 journalists in 4 years

The process required:

• evaluate needs of constituents
• design training programs
• help build training centers
• connect trainers to trainees
• training, training and more

Despite this all, it took time for certain concepts to sink in, topics like: local media, blogging, and teamwork for better design. The number of courses and trainings in Egypt rose. The number of trainees increased from 355 in 2007 to 1986 in 2010. The focus of all these trainings was mostly new media. The others were local media, young readers, photography and media ethics.

Every shift to a new platform followed discussions. And hopefully, with every next shift there will be debates as well..

Only then the news publisher can be turned to a fully operating media company. The platforms of distribution are for Al Ahram outlets only: print, online, radio/tv, mobile, and e-readers. Different outlets with different readers, different generations. Those who read newspapers in the morning are not necessarily the same as the ones who read all the news online. 94% of Al Ahram media consumption is between 9 and 12AM.

People at the New York Times first and foremost storytellers. Print is a very profittable pillar of the company and they will support it. They are not retreating from printing newspapers, and will print newspapers for a long time.

Media companies must be in perpetual beta in serving audiences while maintaining quality content on all platforms. They must learn from their readers, listen to their opinion and make them interact.

Free access to a limited number of articles before being asked to pay, and letting casual users visit through search and social media channels will preserve both traffic and inventory. After some time they will be asked to pay. NYTimes will anounce details of paid content model in late 2010 (prices and other details). They will continue to find new ways of presenting paid content on the digital platforms.

They are not pioneers. First was Times Select – it proved paid-for model worthy, more and more users showed the willingness to pay. It went down because of growing role of search in the internet and growing number of free content. The decision to create paid-content site adds an additional revenue source to sustain journalism

If people are willing to pay for apps, they should be willing to pay for the content. People will pay for news they trust, and are getting comfortable buying apps so will soon be ok to buy news and information. NYT has 43 million users online, the world largest online newspaper. Janet Robinson says it is all about the quality At the NYT they are more and more adapt with community driven content.

Business paradox, the so-called competitors are not competitors anymore. The are no more in the information business but in the making-content-relevant business. Reader engagement is essential to success of paid-content strategy. Interactive maps, sliding timelines, getting skilled with crowd-sourcing, all working better and better at New York Times.

Understanding the art of journalism and storytelling, and the emotional side of online engagement, will be core to New York Times success in future. Storytelling is key and online platforms can do much better than what we see now.

Facebook works well because of users’ identity. It’s important to publishers, because they now can identify the readers, as knowledgeble participants of the social discussion. No more anonymous comments. This will help build a special bond between readers and publishers. Knowing more about the readers will greatly advance readers’ loyalty.

Janet Robinson finished her speech with a statement that no matter what the future holds, people will always need and want to be informed. New York Times will be there for them.

Read this interesting interview with Janet Robinson at the New Media Age

John Yemma, Editor-in-Chief, Christian Science Monitor, USA

Christian Science Monitor has 3 primary channels (instead of 5/7 print as before)

• website
• daily news briefing email
• weekly in print (paid-for)

Reasons behind CSM’s move from daily print to online:

• Daily print was losing money.
• It was tying up human resources (80% of staff’s time was moved to web)

The effects of moving from print to online:

• web traffic has tripled
• retention has doubled
• email signups: from 0 to 50.000
• weekly subscriptions rose to 70.000

How Christian Science Monitor plans to survive:

• build loyalty of the audience
• want to stay strong and relevant
• aggregation of information, not acquisition
• they want to grow the network not the staff

Christian Science Monitor thinks about the paywall, but not in the way New York Times does. Sponsorships are another source of income.

They are looking for Kindle, and iPAd application, so CSM despite moving totally to online 2 years ago, thinks about online expansion. CSM is a business not relying on one source of income only.

Olav Bergo, Editorial advisor, A-pressen, Norway
How and where do we find the money to pay journalists to find news in the future?

Money has always been the power in media. Advertising has become more and more important for the newspaper business. The growing ad income made the income from readers relatively less important. New media plantforms are still sat early stage.  Local newspaper is still a superior reading experience. This is why readers and advertisers still pay more for news and ads on paper than for the same content in the digital format.

Global media revolution moves forcefully, kills quickly and rebuilds slowly. Just as in the past, readers will have to pay for the content. Paid-for model is a matter of time.

Norwegian media policy

• all newspapers have a 0% rate
• 138 newspaper titles (out of 225) get government grants based on the competitive position and the circulation
• journalism needs the daily challenge from a competing editorial staff to be challenged to do their best
• as many newspapers and as few newspaper monopolies as possible

David Cohn, Founder, Spot.us:

Why should we experiment? Rule of the internet: it is easier and cheaper to do something than to debate about it.
On Spot.us, reporters can post story pitches and ask for pledges to pay some part of the cost. It is a community funded reporting: art of distributing the cost of reporting across many people. Transparency and participation in the process of journalism are required for the community funded reporting.

Principle of spot.us is not throwing money over a wall, but knowing where you spend your money on. It is a community focused sponsorships. The community decides where the money should go. The reporters write for the public and they see the public. There is no writing for the editor on spot.us.