It’s interesting to see how the event has evolved over the years. When it first began the result was unexpected – most who’d come for a bunch of presentations about the ‘process of narrative’ were instead treated to more of a stories round a campfire affair. I loved it, but I know some people were after something a bit more explanatory and, for better or worse, this is what the event seems to be leaning towards.

The 2012 event still had the variety; music, games, photography, art, design, programming, magazines, journalism and anarchism. Yet there are more one on one ‘Inside the Actor’s Studio’ style interviews now than at that inaugural event, with the majority of talks discussing a project (often a pet one) and how they went about it.

Not that that is a bad thing – we’re all keen to learn. But I felt the best talks were the ones that, even if about a particular piece of work, encompassed something of the speakers personal, rather than professional, experiences and how it changed them. Maybe it’s my own need for that kind of personal detail to connect with the story.

I still really enjoyed it though – who wouldn’t love an event where the running order is given in chocolate? Here are my 10 highlights:

1. Fake lesbians everywhere

“Of course she’s real – I’m friends with her on Facebook!”
- response to Liz Henry’s enquiries when she started to doubt the identity of Gay Girl in Damascus Amina

Number one by a country mile for me was blogger Liz Henry’s riveting account of her role in uncovering the Gay Girl in Damascus hoax. It told of empathy, humanitarianism, politics, sock-puppetry, the power (and dangers) of internet life, identity theft and human motivations.

Many in the room had probably read about it in the news, but Henry’s perspective of swapping emails, forum discussions, blog posts, personal attacks and inner conflict gave it more. She told us of the stories within the story, of her guilt at doubting someone in trouble, of the forum poster she started emailing who she at one point suspected of being the hoaxer, of late night sobbing phone calls, clues within names she followed around the US, of the mutability of the story and how multiple false stories strengthen each other, the bizarreness of the growing ‘Amina entity’ and the fallout for both Middle East and lesbian bloggers as a result of ‘bad allies’. There was genuine shock and sadness around the room as she talked of “fake lesbians all the way down” on of the net’s most prominent gay forums. But the whole talk was also enhanced by her humour – the most human thing is our ability to see the funny side of a traumatic experience.

“Marginalised people lose their histories because they are drowned out by (more palatable) fake stories.”
- Liz Henry

2. @Tom_Watson, @EmilyBell, #Hackgate

This was a story of political failure, said Tom Watson MP. But it’s also a story about how a story changes you when you get swept along in one. Columbia Professor of Journalism and ex-Guardian Director of Digital Content Emily Bell interviewed a central figure in one of the biggest news stories of the last 10 years on how, as Bell put it, “someone who’s only known to people like me becomes someone who’s now asked for his autograph on the street” (“It means you have to think twice about having more than three pints in a West Brom pub,” said Watson).

It was fascinating just to hear of the interplay between journalism and politics. Watson told of the Press Association reporter who had to decline part of the story because “it’s more than my job is worth” (PA is owned by News International). Bell told of the dichotomy between what editors first thought and the evidence that web stats can provide to back news hunches – the earliest hackgate stories were trending in the Top 5 most read for Guardian.co.uk while some editors were convinced this was a mainly a media-interest-only story (the Dowler revelations changing all that of course).

She also marvelled at the serendipity of its timing. Hackgate broke at a time when there was little else to stop it getting the frontpage. “What if something had happened to the Royals or David Beckham?” she wondered. And it’s a story that continues of course, the talk taking place to the backdrop of the Leveson inquiry and on the day that Rupert Murdoch announced his intention to soon launch the Sun on Sunday. It’s “like surfing a great wave 24/7,” said Watson.

3. Data collection is normal. Contemporary art is still fabulously bonkers.

Confessions of a Recovering Data Collector is the title of “artist activist administrator” Ellie Harrison’s 2009 book. It tells of how a mundane office job turned into an obsession with recording everyday aspects of her life (not in a Facebook sort of way, but in an Excel spreadsheet way). She talked to us about her life’s changes and how data collection was a part of and a catalyst of that, as well as talking through some of the, frankly, mad but amazing installations that have resulted. These include the office chair disco, the vending machine that dispenses a packet of crisps every time the word ‘recession’ is mentioned on BBC News (I want this for our office) and the photo collection of everything she ate in 2001 (now on display at Wellcome Collection).

This was a great talk combining a personal story with a bit of process of what you can do with the wealth of data we all generate. And some crazy photos. But it also made you think about the role of data collection in our modern lives, and how, with apps, social media and ramification, recording your every bit of food, physical activity or otherwise is actually pretty normal. Though maybe not in a spreadsheet.

4. Urban play

“It’s the story of what we do that will always last.”
- Scott Burnham

Scott Burnham is a “social entrepreneur, creative strategist, creative director and writer dedicated to reprogramming our relationships with design and the city”. And he came to tell us about Urban Play in Amsterdam. It was an inspiring talk full of great ideas about getting people to take pride, and hence care about, their surroundings. These include putting trees in shopping trolleys (“give people the opportunity to put green where they want it”) and boombox benches that can play your music via bluetooth (the city kids treasured these because of what it offered them). “It’s interesting what happens when you trust people [not to destroy things],” said Burnham.

The core of his talk was dedicated to the Stefan Sagmeister Urban Play project, which used 250,000 Euro cent coins to create one of the writer’s sentences. Its remixabiity – and hence vulnerability – was a big part of its appeal (it will degrade (i.e. be trashed or bits stolen) – but how? What will people choose to do?). He showed us an anonymous dialogue that started – coins turned over to dare ‘Do it’, followed by another person’s urge to ‘don’t do it’. The irony is that the artwork did indeed disappear – the police removed the whole thing in a misguided attempt to save it (“It’s ok, the artwork has been secured. You can pick up your 60 bags of coins anytime”).

“Give people the opportunity and all sorts of people will engage,” said Burnham. “Give people the opportunity to be part of something, and all those small moments connect.”

5. Jeremy Deller bringing history to life

What happens when you take the practice of historical re-enactment and use it to recreate a moment of conflict in recent history, where the wounds are still raw? Through a fantastic array of photos, Deller showed us the Battle of Orgreave – a re-enactment of a confrontation between police and miners in the 1984-5 miners strike. He talked us through how and why he did this – of the strike’s importance in history, but also how it brought disparate communities together – miners, women, gays. He also touched on raw emotions of the history, and the situation, which were such that the authorities worried about the rioters rioting for real.

What I liked about this talks was the way he framed it, bookended by a photo of a miner’s sun who’s gone on to be a famous wrestler, posing, in full costume, by a mine shaft with his Dad. How Britain has changed.

6. Anthony Owen, Head of Magic

“The best magicians are storytellers.”
- Anthony Owen

The man with “the best job title ever”, as host Meg Pickard put it, of course did a little magic trick (distraction through narrative being one of the strongest tenets of magic). And then he did a little technology trick (in the process getting 100 people to watch a video where a bunch of people watching YouTube…).

The BBC3 trick he showed us gives, he said ‘the opportunity for anyone to play the part of being a magician”. It’s no more a betrayal of magic, he says, than selling magic kits in toy stores. The beauty of this trick’s narrative is in tapping into something we’d all like have – psychic power, prediction of the future. All magic, says Owen, appeals to that base instinct to crave immortality and surviving the inevitable (think of why cutting the assistant in a box trick is so compelling).

One interesting aside from him  was this: the best tricks are often summed up in a sentence. It’s why the TV shows he produces have simple titles: The Real Hustle, Derren Brown: Mind Control. You immediately know what they’re about, and hence you’re already bought into the narrative – and ready to be fooled.

7. Preloaded and death

Kudos to Tom Chatfield and Phil Stuart from games company Preloaded – they did probably a quarter of their talk about games sans visuals when the technology failed. I always love the indie games talks at The Story, mostly because games are such a different medium, often completely immersive and innovative. Their game about death and philosophy for Channel 4 Education was interesting, and the game looked gorgeous, but it did have me sceptical and curious to see how engaging with the issues it really was.

The End comprises a stunningly animated platformer, mixed in with a puzzle element for the boss battles and seemingly a lot of ‘extra’ information about the issues around it. But how much do you engage with the issues when it’s a ‘bit of extra info’ at the end of a level, or with an added click, than when the ideas are a core element of the game itself? I’m thinking primarily of High Tea, a game Preloaded did for my colleagues at the Wellcome Trust. In playing that you were fully immersed in the role of a Victorian opium smuggler in the Chinese Pearl Delta. The issues it wanted to teach came about naturally, rather than in a ‘learn more’ bit. This is something missing, I felt, from the company’s recent work for the Science Museum and I wondered if it was also an issue in developing The End. It’s a tad unfair, I realise, as things like death are a lot more difficult to design a game for (and yes, I am probably biased when it comes to High Tea).

Another interesting point raised was audience – Preloaded were intentionally aiming for an atheist/agnostic audience, recognising that 2/3 of kids likely to play the game had no religion or weren’t strongly practicing one. The aim of the project was to make death easier to cope with, hence the heavy element of philosophy and placing your method of thinking on a graph ranked alongside your mates and famous thinkers. I have to admire the many facets of the game, but again, I did wonder if a complex issue necessarily has to lead to a complex game. But if it works – and, crucially, is fun – then your audience is already engaged.

8. Magazines are not dead.

Karen is an answer to the celebrity-obsessed culture of today. Where Heat concentrates on the intricate details of the lives of celebs, Karen is a “glossy magazine without the gloss” about all about the everyday people Karen Lubbock knows. (Typical headline: “My neighbour Tony has a cold. It’s been hanging around all week.”

In keeping with the subject of the magazine, this wasn’t the most thrilling of interviews. But the content, accompanied by a fabulous slideshow of Karen images, was fabulous. What I liked most was two things: it was a talk about a print magazine (an ex-colleague used to always tell me, to my chagrin, how ‘print is dead’) and that this was a project celebrating the mundane, the the everyday existence.

Karen Lubbock: "Someone's ordinary is someone else's extraordinary" #story2012—
Mun-Keat Looi (@ayasawada) February 17, 2012

9. Star Wars and more behind the scenes at the BFI.

A bonus 5 min talk from The Story ‘techie’ (really BFI Head of Digital Business Development) Richard Ayers. He took us on a guerilla iPhone photo jolly through the BFI archives, the highlight of which was definitely snaps of George Lucas’s annotated Star Wars script and behind-the-scenes shots like Storm Troopers in the desert without their bottom halves on.

10. Justifying the silly… and ourselves

I wasn’t entirely enamoured with writer and activist Danny O’Brien’s talk, the last of the day. For one thing I got a little lost in his tale of nerds, coding and liberal anarchy. But he did finish on an appropriate, if slightly sycophantic, note. At last year’s Story event the BBC’s Adam Curtis gave a talk, effectively saying ‘What you’re all doing is great, but how do you know it matters? Doing all these wonderful small things is all well and good, but you’re ignoring the bigger system that inevitably engulfs us all’.

O’Brien’s response to this was yes, that’s right. But that doesn’t mean it’s futile. You have to assume that your tiny thing will build and scale. There’s an arrogance to the ‘geek condition’, he said. That what you build can change the world. Without that you limit yourself and your ambition.

Yes, we might be playing a stupid game, and maybe what we’re doing as creatives isn’t that serious. But sometimes serious change comes from the silly.

Big thanks again to Matt Locke for organising a fab event. For more, go to The Story’s website, where organiser Matt Locke is once again organising podcasts of the day, and no doubt collating the many blog posts written about it. You can also see all the tweets from the day on #thestory2012, which someone will probably (appropriately) storify.

The topic was the future of journalism and whether ‘journalism’ even exists anymore. Top billing was the free vs pay debate, highly topical given that The Times went behind its paywall just a few weeks ago. Rusbridger made the fair point that paywalls are not necessarily all bad or all good — they may be right for some but not others, they may be the right idea, but wrong at this moment in time.

How will digital paywalls change journalism, he wondered. Rusbridger said the debate marked the first fork in the road for journalism and represents a wider debate about open vs closed journalism and ‘us’ (journalists, special) vs ‘them’ (non-journalists, not special). He wondered if the key might be the value of specialist knowledge or information, as opposed to the general information that will be freely available.

He also touched on the technology debate. Would charging for mobile access be the way forward, with everything else free? Screens give us more than just words, said Rusbridger, “We are in an age where most under 25s can’t remember a time without them”. He argued how some stories work best with a combination of links and embedded video, evolving content, while others are best as a pure snapshot. “Journalists have never before been able to tell stories so effectively,” he said.

Most interesting to me (though obvious) was the effect of all this on the scoop. In a 24/7 news environment, he said, it’s difficult to break stories. A scoop has a lifespan of just 3 minutes in the Twitter age. Those 3 minutes are still a commodity to those in a market sensitive environment (like the Financial Times) but it changes the game for the others. Most people will be prepared to wait until it is free elsewhere, rather than pay to read it first. The fact is, he said in the discussion later, the speed information travels makes it difficult to tell who breaks which story these days — in 45 minutes it’s appeared on other media outlets and aggregators and most readers won’t have a clue it came from you originally.

In the Q&A, Rusbridger pointed out that speed vs accuracy was not a problem. Wire services have been dealing with this for decades — the trick, he said, was to file quickly, and repeatedly, reporting on what you do know for sure, not what you don’t. He also put in a nod to the Guardian’s story trackers when he said that stories don’t end with publication, and remarked that there was no excuse for failing to add, clarify and correct afterwards. This constant addition and clarification leads journalists to act in different ways, he said. To quote Rusbridger, quoting CP Scott, “What a chance for the world, what a chance for the newspaper.”

The presentations were interesting, though largely of a familiar ilk: both press officers and journalists are partially at fault, fitting responsible health information with news values is a difficult task, the public needs to be more critical of what they read etc. etc.

However, one point got me thinking. Ginny Barbour, Chief Editor of the journal PLoS Medicine, gave a talk about how scientists can help journalists and how journal editors work to get their stories picked up by the press. Usually, she said, they encourage researchers to write more easily understandable titles and abstracts, so that non-specialists can make sense of them. But in one slide she gave the example of a paper they received on suicides in Taiwan. This paper found that media coverage of charcoal-burning suicides was fueling a steep rise in Taiwanese suicides.

Among the authors recommendations are “introducing and enforcing guidelines on media reporting” to deal with the problem. In keeping with this, Barbour and colleagues were happy to stick with the wordy title, ‘The Evolution of Charcoal-burning Suicide in Taiwan: A spatial and temporal analysis’, rather than push for a change (admittedly, the title and abstract aren’t actually that bad for this paper). Barbour argued that in this case it was of more benefit to society for the paper not to be covered in the media. And her team patted themselves on the back when, sure enough, the paper received zero press coverage.

I can certainly see their point of view, and it’s not as if this is an uncommon thing — there are guidelines on reporting suicides in many countries for the same reasons. However, I had to ask myself if it is really in the interest of press freedom not to report findings such as these, particularly if those results could be useful to others. Would knowledge of these results raise awareness and help policymakers prevent future suicides? Or would it give people ideas on how to kill themselves, as they feared?

It reminded me of something an African colleague said to me at a recent meeting. She mentioned how some of her researchers (she’s a communications officer) were unwilling to publicise a paper containing some quite important findings about HIV in the men who have sex with men (MSM) community. The reason? Homophobic activists had trashed one of their labs a few weeks earlier and the scientists were afraid of a repeat. But what is the point of doing such important research if you don’t tell anyone about it, or if the only people who do are those who stumble across your paper in a literature review years after?

This isn’t the same as reporting suicides of course, but it got me thinking about the responsibility to report scientific findings and when social responsibilities, individual responsibilities and journalistic responsibilities clash. Thoughts?

It was one of many puntastic new words picked up at the Nuffield Council on Bioethics’ Annual Lecture at the Royal Society on Monday night. Other terrible words I liked: obesessing, obesogenic (and turning society from that into a ‘fitogenic’ one). Not exactly what I was expecting to take away from a lecture about the obesity debate, but what I should have expected from a lecture entitled ‘Whose potbelly is it anyway?’.

Overall, it was a great lecture by Professor Inez de Beaufort from the Erasmus Medical Center, Rotterdam. She gave an interesting multimedia presentation full of comedy clips,Wall-E and visual and textual puns, offering some light relief from the ethical moral philosophising that comes with Nuffield Council territory.

de Beaufort highlighted and expanded on many of the issues discussed in the Council’s recent report on The Ethics of Public Health. The complexities of obesity are well-known: the problems distinguishing genetic and environmental/social influences, the fact that few treatments bar stomach stapling are proven, that risks associated with it are relative to fitness and age. The talk was essentially a tour around the major hotspots in the debate, including what government and society can do to help — and indeed whether they should do.

What de Beaufort did really well in her presentation was matching these to visual and humourous cues that really hit the point home (or at least gave a cheap laugh if you really weren’t listening). One of the nicer examples she used was a YouTube video of the Swedish piano stairs — an example of a societal ‘nudge’ that might be used to change peoples behaviour, this time by making it fun.

As de Beaufort said, it’s a welcome change from the usual blaming and shaming that we use when talking about obesity.

She also made interesting arguments about individual choice. For some, their size is part of that person’s life, and if a person is happy with that choice who has a right to tell them different. Would you tell a sumo wrestler to lose weight just because he is technically fat? Sure, sumo wrestlers die young as a result of their choice, but plenty of people take dangerous decisions with regard to their physical wellbeing all the time — think extreme sports or even taking out extra insurance cover for a ski trip.

de Beaufort also pointed out how odd it is to think of food purely from a health perspective. After all, it plays a major role in so many other parts of life, from social bonding to mourning rituals (as de Beaufort said, “to think of food like this is to think of sex as purely a means of reproduction).

It’s funny how we’ve come to associate looking good with being good when that is often not the case, she said, pointing to pictures of major world leaders acting ‘athletic’ for the camera.

“It’s a case of ‘Beauty and the obese’”.

"To thine own self be true"

There have never been so many stories, or so many ways to tell them. We can tell stories in the pub, on television, in books, through games, on stage, over mobile phones, on twitter, in newspapers — any time, place or object that we can share with others can be the birthplace of a story…. This is surely the most exciting time in history to be in the story-telling business.

I had a day off on Friday. Not to go on holiday or laze around or even to fulfill some chore. I took a day off to sit in a conference hall with some 100 other people to just listen to stories.

I’ve said before that learning from your peers is the best way to improve, and indeed to be inspired. That’s why I signed up for The Story. Sometimes the best way to improve your work is to learn from other fields, particularly those perceived to be much more ‘creative’ than your own.

As I shuffled into the quaint wooden confines of Conway Hall I really didn’t know what to expect. There was an eclectic mix of people, and many men with beards and glasses. I knew it was an event about stories and the art of storytelling, but what form would this take? Part of me expected a discussion of narrative theory and lively Q&As between a diverse range of people from different backgrounds. Wrong on all accounts.

Cory Doctorow, blogger, author, journalist, internet legend, stepped up to give the first presentation of the day. The room was abuzz, applause sounded out. What would he talk about? Blogging? Journalism? Web 2.0? Cory said hello in his relaxed Canadian tone… and just read. He read a story, fiction, about books, about bookselling, about stories. So far, so unexpected.

Aleks Krotoski, tech journalist began with talk. She talked about her BBC series The Virtual Revolution. She talked about the difficulty squeezing the organic story of the internet’s development into the linear narrative of a documentary, and how the series had used blogs, Twitter, Flickr and encourage mash ups of the crew’s rushes to engage with the audience that might be interested in watching the show. She began with talk, but soon segued into a video diary, her own ‘mash up’, her own story of making of The Virtual Revolution with a tweet-driven narrative, soundtrack, photos and personal clips of her own thoughts and frustrations. (Aleks said she would be posting this video on her website)

By the time Jon Spooner stood up to deliver his stream-of-conciousness tale of everything from neutrinos to cowardice and coincidence, I had grasped the real spirit of the day. It wasn’t about theory, it was about examples, it was about different ways of telling stories, different styles, and being shown not told. As Matt Locke, the event’s organiser, wrote in the conference newspaper:

The Story is designed to try and bring some of that visceral pleasure back into your own work. The speakers will not talk about business models, technology platforms or government policy. They have been given a simple brief — either tell a story, or talk about what it feels like to tell a story…  The aim is to get you to tell more stories — to be challenge, excited and inspired by the stories you’ll hear today, and to spread this amongst the people you tell stories with.

(In hindsight, yes, I should have engaged more with what I was paying money for, but it’s nice to be pleasantly surprised).

Tim Etchells stood up to tell three stories with the same dry delivery. The last one, in his own words, “barely qualifies as a story”, a string of celebrity names and descriptions of acts ranging from the mundane to the scandalous (all fictional — or are they?). It was all about the details, the clear, crisp adjectives, and our brain’s capacity to instantly recognise the names of dozens of people we know only through screens and print.

After a much needed caffeine break, the charmingly nervous Sydney Padua – the girl with possibly the best name ever — came to talk about storytelling in comics. She disarmed everyone with a couple of humorous graphs, before apologising for discussing the ‘theory’ they had been asked not to focus on. Pushing up her glasses, she explained the planning, sorting, organising of information and ideas — mostly in graphic form — that leads to a story in her comic Lovelace and Babbage, itself a fictional take on the story of two historical (science) figures. She also admitted to ‘borrowing’ the story of Orpheus for their latest adventure, introducing to the day the familiar writers device of ‘building on what has gone before’ (after all, if it works, why not?).

That theme was carried on by Tony White, a former writer-in-residence at the Science Museum, who talked about ‘remixing’ the words of different sources to make a new story. And in the spirit of organic narrative, Annette Mees and Tassos Stevens from Coney spoke of the interactive narratives of their plays, which feature no actors and rely on the audience to play the parts, taking ownership of the story and effectively co-authoring the work. It’s “adventure-making” according to Mees and Stevens, reflecting real-life, broken and messy and full of regret. But the key aspect is creating ‘flow’, the mental state in which you lose yourself in an activity. “The best designed play will make flow” said Stevens, which pretty much applies to storytelling in any medium.

The play they discussed, A Small Town Anywhere, I’d heard of previously after a few friends of mine took part. Speakers I’d never heard of talked about the thinking behind stuff I’d heard plenty about through friends, in and on practically everything I consume — comics, science, words, books, theatre. Next up: games, specifically Echo Bazaar, a web-based, ‘you can play it for just 10 minutes at a time’ game that a friend has been eulogising to me about for some time. My take home message of Fail Better Games‘ talk? ‘Interactive casual narratives’ with multiple players over social networks that still have to make sense to everyone playing at their own pace are a nightmare to organise.

The organisers threw free chocolate at the audience. Nom nom nom. Then the real pleasure, Tim Wright with perhaps the best story of the day, a diary-driven account of a prank taken very very far. The story, complete with the fake letters and other props used in the prank were printed in the conference newspaper, but interestingly that version didn’t include the parts about the breakdown of his relationship that added a bittersweet and quite different spin on the story. Were these real or embellishments for the performance? Was any of it true? I don’t know Tim, so I really can’t say. The mystery is part of the narrative I guess.

Kat Akingbale talked about how the power of stories can be misused, particularly by quacks cashing in on people’s fears and beliefs for profit. Her’s was a standard talk, but distinguished from the others by the ghost photos, serious subject matter and her use of phone a friend (via mobile and mic) to explain the psychology behind why some people buy into paranormal stories. (I did think though, that her use of ‘call the expert’ was perhaps a form of audience manipulation itself?).

Manipulation, the type employed by Kat’s sometime colleague Derren Brown, was also in in order for Stuart Nolan, who did a magic trick, after manipulating the audience into the right result. No slides, no projector, just pure audience participation, one man and a chair. “Making choices is how we understand peoples’ character,” he said. How we make people make the choices we want reveals something else.

The best storytellers often realise that the best stories are sometimes not their own. Such were the words of Sam Conniff from Livity, a youth-led media agency, who told the tale of Jody McIntyre, a wheelchair-bound rap-inspired teen from the South-side for whom nothing was impossible. He climbed Machu Picchu, he went to live in Gaza.

The power of true-life stories is also a theme of David Hepworth‘s monthly storytelling event. Six people gather round a table at an Islington pub, each telling a 12 minute story, a true story about themselves, no notes, no slides. David told one of his first stories, about fine tailored suits and his Dad, and with a traditional story ending: a moral to the tale. The moral of his story was ‘Dad, you were right’. The moral to my day was: ‘Matt Locke, you were right’. There are an awful lot of stories out there, and I can’t wait to tell my own.

There are plenty of other people’s thoughts, videos, photos etc. on the event out there on the web. Search #thestory on twitter. We’ve also been promised podcasts of all the sessions at some point in the near future, so keep an eye on The Story website.

Expecting a lot of questions on Ed’s Not Exactly Rocket Science site, I was pleasantly surprised that a fair number of people seemed interested in what blogging could do from an organisation’s point of view, which bodes well for interest in our own blog.

Ed talked about his reasons for blogging, how it differed from other media and gave his tips on how to run a successful blog. He made some excellent points:

1. Blogging, in line with new social networking tools, is reactive and interactive. You can publish something in minutes and, through comments, stimulate conversation with people interested in the same subject. Cancer Research UK (CRUK), for example, have used their blog to respond to confusing or misleading cancer stories in the media, not so much to condemn the reporter or newspaper but to point out the evidence for or against it and offer a more considered response with sources. Ed gave one example where a misleading story about red wine preventing breast cancer appeared. Within hours CRUK were able to write a response on their blog. It was soon appearing right alongside the main news story on Google search results.

2. Blogging is about community. Once you hit publish, that’s not the end of the process, it’s just the start. Comments allow you to interact with people interested in the subject, exploring it further and facilitating the kind of discussion that science thrives on. Of course, you may also attract less favourable comments, but, to me, as long as the criticism is fairly and intelligently argued, it’s not too different from the peer review that takes place in scientific publishing or journal clubs across the world. Except, of course, that it’s not just scientists who get involved.

3. You need to add value to a conversation. To make a successful blog, you just need to have something to say and be able to say it well. Offer value to a conversation.

4. Similarly, many people try to drive traffic to their blogs by commenting on other blogs. This is a good idea, but only do so if you can say something useful. Don’t just wade into a random conversation and say ‘I’m great!!’. You wouldn’t do this in real life, so why online?

5. And in another related point, vary what you write about. Ed spoke about how CRUK try to deal with different facets of cancer research, not just correcting bad reporting. (As Ed said, there’s so much misleading cancer reporting, sometimes it’s just too easy…).

6. You have to be thick-skinned sometimes, particularly if you write about controversial topics. Bear in mind too that if you write controversial  stuff, those are the types of commenters you will attract. And you can’t always predict what will be controversial and what won’t.

7. Having said that, think carefully before responding to comments (particularly if you are blogging on behalf of your organisation). You don’t want to enter into a dialogue with someone who’s just looking for a fight (or as I read once, “don’t roll around in the mud with the pigs – you both get dirty but the pigs love it”). Also don’t forget that, if you’ve built up a good community on your blog, other commenters will step in and deal with some comments/queries on your behalf. (Ross MacFarlane, the Editor of the excellent Wellcome Library blog, pointed out how this happened on one particular Library post, with the producer of a BBC radio show pitching in). You can direct dialogue by responding to those people who have something value or fairly argued to say (rewarding them with attention), while ignoring those who are just there to attack. This is something Ben Goldacre does fairly well.

8. Running an organisation blog can be different. People in organisations like to be in control — but you can’t sign off the internet! CRUK sign off each others posts, which are also checked by the Press team. In Ed’s opinion, that’s the maximum amount of sign off you can have a blog is to be successful. To repeat what he said earlier, a blog has to be reactive — you need that fast turnaround. A blog is a living breathing part of your website, the main part of which is usually static.

9. Factor in the time needed to moderate and market the blog. Also, from an organisation point of view, remember that people’s responsibilities and workloads can change. Unless you have someone whose entire job is the blog be prepared to replace or change bloggers as the team’s priorities change to ensure your blog doesn’t die.

10. Share and share alike. The CRUK blog has a CC license and all material is free for people to copy and redistribute elsewhere. (For the record so is all of the Wellcome Trust’s material — something that’s not always made clear. I’ll have to write a separate post about this some other time).

I was also interested to hear about how CRUK use different social media. CRUK are relatively good with ‘Web 2.0′ (for want of a better term) — they have a blog, podcast, Twitter and Facebook presence.Someone in the audience asked about the difference between a general blog and a blog on Facebook. Ed pointed out that Facebook is an enclosed network, designed to keep you within their site (one of the things I don’t really like about it). A blogs is more open and findable, particularly — and crucially –  via search engines (then again, with real-time search increasingly being integrated into the likes of Google and Bing, and Facebook changing seemingly every week, who knows what the future holds?).

Ed also mentioned how they took a conscious decision to make the CRUK blog a science blog, which doesn’t cover the fundrasing side of the organisation. The CRUK twitter is more of a free flowing stream of consciousness, encompassing everything the organisation does. (The Wellcome Trust twitter, by contrast, is much more restrained and less ‘interactive’ with its followers. I’ll write a post about the evolution of the Trust’s twitterfeed one day).

Finally, we had an interesting discussion about how blogging has developed and how it occupies a spot between various fields. Some of it is comment or opinion, but there is also straight news journalism. Some bloggers are professional scientists writing about advances their field or their day-to-day working process. Some bloggers are professional writers or journalists, others are just interested parties. And the boundaries are blurring. As Ed said:

Wellcome News, the Trust’s main magazine, is published quarterly and every few months I’m tasked with writing the copy. Because of the nature of print deadlines (usually a couple of months before the actual publication date to allow for copyediting, proofreading, design and printing) this often involves writing about things that have yet to happen, meaning that at the time of writing there isn’t much to say about it. This also means that by the time the audience reads about it, the ‘news’ often took place months before.

Meanwhile, as the News Editor of TSR, it’s my job to deliver news articles for the newsletter’s quarterly issue — ‘news’ that more often than not happened months before (do you see a pattern here?). We usually try and do some kind of ‘overview’ or analyses, rounding up the coverage of a particularly big science journalism/communication issue, but really, in the world of 24 hour, real-time information, who wants to read about stuff that already appeared everywhere months ago?

So what makes news news? According to my Mac’s dictionary it is:

newly received or noteworthy information, esp. about recent or important events.

But what if your publication schedule negates the latter half of this, which could also negate the former part? It’s a real dilemma for publications that only appear four times a year (or, for that matter, those that appear monthly). On the one hand, it’s nice to have a News section, but how newsworthy are the things that one can deliver on a quarterly publication schedule? This may not make such a difference if your subject is so niche that news is hard to find, but, again, is there such a dearth of information in the internet-age?

At the ABSW, we’re trying to rectify this by moving to a more rolling news service. With the sparkling new ABSW website up and running and the neglected ABSW blog integrated into it, I’ve been tasked with merging the TSR News with the website’s news. We’ll deliver news stories as and when they happen and then include the more relevant ones in the next issue of TSR, just in case anyone missed them, alongside more analytical takes on stories that warrant it.

This is a real opportunity for us to provide a more timely service to our members, and a chance for our eager team of writers to contribute more (one of the strange things about the blog was there were few people with the time and inclination to contribute, but we have a decent number of people willing to write for TSR).

Of course, this could also mean more work. A rolling news service means that there are no once-every-four-months deadlines and instead a continual stream of writing, editing and posting. On the other hand, it could spread things out a bit more, so I don’t end up with two weeks of commissioning/emailing stress, followed by two weeks of editing hell every four months — not to mention the desperate scramble around for stories from the previous months that might make ‘news’. How will it work out? We’ll see.

In the study – which was originally released in September last year but has only just been press released – researchers exposed mice genetically modified to develop Alzheimer’s and un-modified mice to the electromagnetic field generated by standard cell phone usage for two one-hour periods a day.

Yep, the study was published four months ago, but only made the headlines this week because of a press release.

Now, this isn’t new. I come across this all the time in my day job — we’re often sent press releases from universities or research institutes about papers that were published up to six months before. But you might wonder why this happens.

You might expect that real ‘news’ is defined by the timeliness of the story — news is about things that have just recently taken place. By that criteria, this story should have come out in September when the paper was published. But with thousands of academic papers published each day, you can’t expect journalists to make a story of every one of them.

You might have expected the university/institute’s press department to have timed their press release to coincide with the publication. But that could have been (or, in fact, is more likely to be) the researcher’s fault as much as the press officer’s. With hundreds of researchers to keep track of press officers rely on their researchers to tell them when a potentially interesting paper is about to be published – and they often don’t. Our own media office often gets calls from researchers telling them about a paper that has ‘just been published’, not realising that the real window for news is the day the paper is made public, and that lots of preparation needs to be made to attract attention to a story for that time. Then there’s the journals, which can sometimes alter their publication dates at the last minute, not to mention that researchers themselves sometimes don’t realise what might make a newsworthy story or not….

So, sometimes a paper slips through the cracks and isn’t picked up by anyone. But later some canny press officer gets wind of it and writes a press release. That in itself makes it news, as many journalists often take a press release as a sign that the study has ‘just been published’ and rarely check if that is the case. Then again, it doesn’t really matter — if no-one had heard of the story before, technically it’s still news. After all, news is defined by whether the information is ‘new’ and interesting to you, not just by when the event occurred.

Nevertheless, every time I see a news story on a study published months before, I get a little shudder.

Well not really. But not far from that.

Because of its mission to ‘examine ethical issues raised by new developments in biology and medicine’, the Council is constantly scanning the latest developments in all sorts of areas, from nanotechnology to GM crops, personalised medicine and stem cells. As such, it subscribes to a huge amount of scientific journals, magazines and newspapers.

Back in the day, one of my duties was helping to keep track of all this. The Deputy Directors, Research Officers and Press Officer would scan through every publication and mark on a little sheet what was worth keeping on file for future reference. Then I would disappear into the photocopying room for hours on end, making copies of each article and filing them in hundreds of paper files hanging all over our office. It was boring, tedious and absolute madness.

Such a thing would be unthinkable today, just five years later. Why would you make copies when practically all articles are available to view anytime online? And why have hundreds of files when you can use web bookmarking tools like Delicious to tag the link to an article, with as many tags as you like, all searchable and sortable in seconds?

Today I bookmark and tag practically every interesting thing I read, which helps no end when I find I need to revisit a topic for research (though admittedly my tags need a bit of pruning). I’m thankful to my old job for this useful habit, but thank goodness I don’t have to sit around in the photocopying room by myself anymore.

I’m not entirely sure what to make of it, but it’s an interesting piece. The article focuses on cancer, but is actually about the perceived ‘American’ positivity that is being peddled — backed up by bad science — in society. Ehrenreich points out several contradicting studies and features accounts from different people who have had little benefit from positive thinking.

As someone who is naturally pessimistic and cynical about things (but who nevertheless strives for a more positive, optimistic attitude) I feel the pressure to be upbeat about everything — as Ehrenreich suggests, to not do so makes you feel like anything bad that happens is your own fault for ‘expecting the worst’. But I’m not entirely sure that the extract leaves the reader with any idea as to what to do about the situation. Is it actually better to wallow in your anger and sadness?

At first, I wondered what the author hoped to achieve with this. It’s one thing to unmask potentially harmful bad science, but is she actually berating people for not being angry and depressed when bad things happen?

Reading it again, I think I understand what she’s getting at. It’s not about being falsely upbeat and optimistic about life but about making peace with the way things are. At the very least it reminds us of how terrible it is to feel pressured to feel a certain way or to force others to feel a certain way, even if you think you are doing them a favour.

On a side point, I wonder how much work goes into choosing and editing a piece like this. It looks to me like the editor did largely a good job, piecing together many of the separate aspects of a complicated subject, in a still cohesive narrative. As I say, it does suffer from the lack of advice or conclusion — you feel that Ehrenreich must have reached one, even if it is ‘let me wallow for fuck’s sake!’.

Perhaps the book gives more of a definitive answer. It certainly shows how extracts can be used well as advertising, making you want to read more on the subject and providing exactly the kind of article that sparks heated debate.