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aoa.dk-2, Århus (Berlingske Media A/S, Denmark). |
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Project name |
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Music Festivals - seen through the eyes of the audience.
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General Publication Info |
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Our mediahouse consists of a daily, several freesheets and several sites, that corresponds to sections of the newspaper. We are part of Berlingske Media, which is part of the British Media Company, Mecom.
Our online cultural cityguide - aoa.dk - decided in the spring of 2012 to experiment with how to cover two very big music festivals in Aarhus, which is the second largest city in Denmark - linking the online and social media activities to print.
Let me just give you the background for the project, which is somewhat different from a lot of other project. This project is less concerned with how to PUSH content through social media - and more concerned with how to PULL and INTERACT with social media in order to create better content that people really want to read.
Journalism worldwide is under serious pressure, especially print, but also journalism in general due to the digitizing of our society making much communication possible around and without traditional media - sort of disconnecting media from it’s audience and sources. In Denmark journalism is futhermore under heavy accusations for not listening to sources and not listening to what the public really thinks is interesting.
But we still believe that journalism and the journalistic way of working is much needed and requested - we just have to find new ways to give journalistic value to the public.
In short this method - that we hope will be consindered seriously for the Cross Media Award is very different from normal journalism because we listen to the public through social media, discuss possible angles based solely on their comments, curated the social content using our selected angles and then publish. Traditional interviews and reportage was at a bare minimum. The social media content becomes our eye witnesses in the field and we use our journalistic capacities to transform the voice of the crowd into journalism that is interesting to others than the ones participating in the event.
The preparation for the project started early in 2011. It was at this time Signe Damgaard Jepsen, editorial director of aoa.dk, started to look for events in Aarhus that were big enough to gather critical mass of content on social media. Two stood out - the music festivals SPOT in May with 5000 participants and NorthSide in June with 20.000+ participants.
We collaborated with the Danish School of Media and Journalism in a project about event based innovation through curation of social media content and a number of students were involved, especially in the SPOT-project - making the total amount of people working in this project 13.
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Idea and Implementation of your special project |
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We tried out two different approaches for the festivals - innovating the approach as we went along.
The two festivals are very different in their own approach to social media. SPOT is still finding their way, where as NorthSide put a huge effort into reaching out to their pucblic via social media - making the process much easier for us.
The SPOT project experimented on making professional reviews more engaging by attaching crowdsourced social media content such as tweets stating the audience’s opinion to the same concert.
Before the actual event we created several guides to the festival for our site and our news paper. We promoted upcoming coverage in the news paper. We also asked the users of aoa.dk and through the festival hashtag #SPOT12 asked people on Twitter to help us improve the guides with new input, for example to unorganized events such as afterparties and other free concerts connected to the festival event around the city.
This proved to be very fruitfull in order to get the crowd engaged because people kept retweeting this request and the crowd gave many unique ideas to the product. That way we created a stream of tweets on #SPOT12 before the festival and gave the readers a feel for what kind of coverage we would do if they would help us by tweeting their experiences during the festival.
Also, we never considered the guide finished - but as a sort of ongoing piece of beta journalism allowing our audience to improve it all the time, a very new way of thinking journalism. Our conclusion is that the crowd responded very well to our openness.
Preparation was key to this project because SPOT has more than 70 concerts during only two days, so we had to analyze the event throroughly beforehand. That included researching and registrating all musicians, bands and other people interesting to the festival. We registered their twitter-handles so that we could keep track of them. Also, we selected which concerts were most interesting.
The Northside Festival on the other hand had a very good and competent 360 degrees social media strategy - having decided long ago how to engage their audience and give them extra content on social media.
That let to us trying out a setup for our coverage that would be less experimenting and more realistic in an everyday life in media. So we were two people at the news desk each day of the three day festival. In total we made 45 article based only on social media content. In addition to that we did 20 other articles including image galleries.
We did also promote our coverage in different ways, among so on our own social media platforms, on our website and in our news paper before the festival began. That way we got people to pay attention to our gameplan, giving them a chance to get involved in our covering.
All of our stories were made with the free social media curation tool Storify (storify.com) and the stories were embedded on our website.
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Project results and results monitoring |
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The results of the two festivals were very different.
During the SPOT Festival we ran into technical difficulties, since the festival did not offer wi-fi too their guests and the venues were in concrete buildings, out of reach of the 3g and 4g network. That limited the amount of social media content and the traffic on Twitter, the main source to the social curated content during SPOT Festival. We did however get enough content that enabled us to use it on our site.
The day after the SPOT Festival was however the most visited day in the history of aOa.dk - so we did manage to create some kind of attention towards our work, which we are very proud of.
The Northside Festival was a whole other story. The festival provided the guests with free wi-fi and the festival was held on a large field in the outskirts of the city with good 3g and 4g covering. We got a lot of content from the social media platforms and were able to carry out the meaning of these projects - creating great stories based upon the guests’ experiences.
We would never have been able to create 45 really good stories with only two people working each day if we used traditional media methods. So, the ability to create volume is very different with this curation method. This is of course very interesting concerning the possibility to scale journalism without spending huge amounts of manpower.
However, that’s not the only benefit.
Some of the stories we would never have been able to do without listening to the social media. For eksemple that people were experiencing problems with the wifi or that they were very angry, when the festival due to strong winds decided to take down their big screens - which made people think that the festival was closing. This kind of story you can only see when you monitor peoples opinion - and also gives great perspective to this kind of journalism.
We also found that our online activities were a great supplement to the reviews and reportages in the news paper - making a whole new connection between the two.
Furthermore, our coverage was made from what people thought was the most interesting events during the festival. Because we listen to that we have a higher possibility of actually making content that people want to read and not only the content that the journalist finds interesting. As stated earlier this is one of the problems in journalism that this method can help demolish.
Also, during the NorthSide Festival our two journalists in shift didn’t go to the festival spot at all but stayed at the media house. In reality they could be in a totally different country as long as they were well prepared. So we didn’t have reporters on scene. That creates a possible point of failure - how could we know that the stories really conveyed reality?. But we looked into whether our angles were the ones that people at the scene thought were important or not. All reviews from the audience and the festival itself say that we cought the right angles and what was really going on at the scene. This gives this kind of journalism a very unique and great perspective - and that together with what we have described above is why we think, that we should be awarded the Cross Media Award.
At any moment we will be happy to elaborate on any of the above points.
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Additional comments |
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LINKS |
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Here are examples from our coverage - unfortunately in Danish - but most important is the see the method, so please check it out.
The theme site SPOT Festival:
http://www.aoa.dk/spot12
The theme site Northside Festival:
http://www.aoa.dk/northside
Example of a social curated story from SPOT Festival:
http://www.aoa.dk/reaktioner/spot-gaesternes-bedst ...
Example of a guide article based upon readers input on Twitter:
http://www.aoa.dk/guide/gratis-musik-under-spot-fe ...
Example of a social curated reaction story from a Turboweekend concert during Northside Festival:
http://www.aoa.dk/northside/turboweekend-fik-hjael ...
Example of ‘fun-and-sweet’ social curated love story from Northside Festival:
http://www.aoa.dk/northside/northside-publikum-er- ...
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General contact and feedback address:
Ms. Raquel Meikle
Programme Manager Events
WAN-IFRA
Darmstadt, Germany
Phone: +49-6151-733.927
E-Mail: raquel.meikle@wan-ifra.org
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