When Stuart Hughes wrote on this blog recently about about a reunion in Sarajevo of journalists who had covered the war in Bosnia 20 years ago, he thought it was just the media people who were picking up their old connections.

But he's now had an email from cameraman Robbie Wright, whose video he mentioned in his blog post.

Robbie says a woman in New York had got in touch, thanks to Stuart's blog, to tell him she was the girl he filmed being driven away, crying on a bus (below, in still frame from his video).

"Pretty cool," says Robbie, because he had often wondered what had happened to her.

Richard Jones wrote previously on this blog about his experiences setting up his own hyperlocal service, Saddleworth News. Here he explains the strengths of hyperlocal coverage compared to conventional local media and why he ultimately decided he couldn't make a living from it.

As a journalist, in my experience, editors are full of reasons why you shouldn't cover a particular story. Reporters at all levels will be familiar with responses along the lines of 'I'm not interested in that' or 'we don't do that kind of story' or 'we covered that last week/month/year.'

But as both the journalist and the editor of Saddleworth News I didn't have to worry about such whims. I had the freedom to stick with ongoing local issues, such as a continuing row over the future of the running track at a playing field.

After a packed public meeting on the issue, the local paper put the story on its front page - but then rarely covered it again for months, presumably because of an editorial view that it had been 'done'.

But I reported every new angle, however small, and quickly built up a mass of material that couldn't be matched anywhere else. In every article I linked back to all of my previous coverage, putting each new development into context.

This meant that if a reader was new to the debate they could easily find lots more information and views about it. It's the sort of context which is all too often missing from reporting, whether it's the parish council or Israel/Palestine debate.

Obviously you can't put a hyperlink in a newspaper, but even newspaper websites are often reluctant to include them - either because of corporate decisions to try to prevent readers clicking onto other websites or because journalists simply don't know much about what links are or how to use them.

Whatever the differences, hyperlocal sites also face the problem exercising managers, bean counters and journalists at news operations around the country and the world. The problem of money.

I'm a journalist, not a salesman. And I found selling ads on Saddleworth News difficult. Despite my site's reach of more than 20,000 unique users per month in an area of only 24,000 people, it was hard to persuade the butcher and the baker of the value of taking an ad: much easier for them to do what they've always done and use the glossy magazines or the daily paper.

Most of the ads I did sell were to people who used the website as readers and had their own small online businesses. But I only ever made £150 a month from ads - a paltry return given that I had extended the time I spent writing it to two hours every weekday.

When my daughter turned two and we wanted to start putting her into nursery for at least a couple of days each week, I thought about trying to make Saddleworth News my full-time job. Had I been 22, I might have given it a go, but with a family and a mortgage gambling isn't so attractive.

I would have needed to increase my income from the site at least tenfold to start to make it viable as a career, which would have meant spending all of my time chasing cash rather than chasing stories.

And there was no guarantee that even if I became financially successful others wouldn't simply seek to copy me. Partly inspired by the perceived success of Saddleworth News, other local people had already established sites focusing on events listings and Groupon-style daily deals for local shops and restaurants - not competing with me for content but certainly competing for advertising money.

That helps explain why it was an easy decision to give it up and get back into more traditional work, including lecturing. I had various options for the site, but all but one would have had me continuing to do Saddleworth News for little reward. Most involved bolting on some kind of paid-for business directory to the site, while a freesheet offered me a very small sum to republish my stories. Thanks, but no thanks.

So, I chose the best offer I had and passed the site to University Campus Oldham, part of the University of Huddersfield. A journalism student is now writing Saddleworth News as a final year project.

Hyperlocal websites have a future. Of course they do. There's no reason why well-intentioned local residents shouldn't set up a website and fill it with details of coffee mornings and church services - much as people have long been producing parish newsletters.

But I'm sceptical about whether hyperlocal journalism of a professional standard has any more of a future than newspaper journalism. For all the benefits of hyperlocal reporting, the cash crisis facing other parts of our trade is there too.

Working on Saddleworth News was fun and frustrating, exciting and boring, illuminating and tedious - just like journalism is. But I'm afraid it didn't get me any closer to a model which will keep reporters in the councils and courtrooms.

Richard Jones (@rlwjones) is a freelance journalist, blogger about journalism and visiting lecturer in online at the University of Leeds.

This article is adapted with kind permission from What Do We Mean by Local? Grass-roots Journalism - Its Death and Rebirth, edited by John Mair, Neil Fowler and Ian Reeves and, published by Abramis. 

The BBC College of Journalism is hosting a conference about community media, in Salford on 24 May: details here. 

The Budget is one of the most important - and often one of the trickiest - events in the political calendar. Both an economic and political story, it can be a challenge to see a clear way through the mass of data and announcements. 

This Budget was particularly difficult to report because there was little change in the overall economic forecast and plans for spending cuts, while all the major measures were leaked in advance.

Research carried out by ICM for City University shows that the difficulties are even greater because of the growing scepticism among the public about the role of business journalists in the midst of the Euro crisis.

Half of the public said that journalists do not give them enough information about how the economy will affect them personally; 40% believed that journalists are not independent enough of their sources; and 35% said the news had too much economic jargon which they could not understand. Only 22% said that journalists give a fair and balanced picture of the world of business.

How can these lessons be applied to Budget coverage?

Maintaining independence while presenting a fair and balanced picture was made particularly difficult when the Government tried to manage the news by leaking major Budget announcements to selected members of the press. It was hard to avoid the impression that by reporting these in full the press was serving as a conduit rather than a critic. However, the strategy back-fired, as the one major policy change not leaked in advance - the cuts to personal allowances to pensioners - became the next day's headlines in most of the papers.

It was not just the usual suspects - The Guardian and Mirror - that led on the age-related tax allowance changes. "Gran Theft Osbo" screamed The Sun, while The Mail headline was "Osborne picks pockets of pensioners" and The Telegraph's large-type headline read "Granny tax hits 5m pensioners." 

Interestingly, for aficionados of social media, "grannytax" was trending on Twitter within an hour of the Budget announcement, ahead of much of the media. By the morning it was also the first question Evan Davis put to the Chancellor in his Today programme interview.

Whether this was a relatively minor adjustment to the tax system, as the Institute for Fiscal Studies argued in its post-Budget briefing, there is no doubt the papers knew their audience. Older people are far more likely to read national newspapers, and are also far more interested in personal financial news than the population as a whole.

The other big issue in the Budget turned out to be much trickier to report without resorting to jargon. The argument for the abolition of the 50p tax rate centred on claims about how much the rich were able to avoid it entirely - and unproven assumptions about behavioural change that even the experts admitted had a wide margin of error. It was a particularly difficult topic for radio and television to tackle when the answer is 'we don't really know'.

The  good news from the survey evidence is that people are more interested than ever in financial news, with one in three saying they look for financial information every day - a huge increase compared to 2005.

So the Budget should have provided an even better opportunity to explain how the economy and tax system affects the individual. There was a massive effort in the Budget specials in the newspapers and websites to give detailed tables of its impact. However, perhaps surprisingly, very few picked out the Government's own tables (tucked away in the last pages of the Budget document) which gave estimates of which income groups were losing the most from all the tax and benefit changes combined.

There was also relatively little coverage of the proposed changes to pensions and welfare - something likely to be of interest to another under-served group in the population: those under financial stress.

The Budget is one of the few times when business journalists are almost guaranteed a mass audience. If their job is difficult they can at least take consolation from the thought that the audience is even more sceptical of politicians and their promises than they are of journalists. Indeed, when asked which party had the best economic policies, the most common answer was "no-one".

Polling data: ICM surveyed 2,000 British households as part of its online omnibus from 2 to 4 November 2011, with a margin of error of +/-3%.

Professor Steve Schifferes is director of the financial journalism MA, and Marjorie Deane professor of financial journalism, at City University, London.  

This week has been quite an emotional one for the BBC Russian team. On Monday we went to air with the first of our new daily ten-minute television news bulletins on the Russian IPTV station Dozhd TV (which translates as TV Rain). The broadcast came nearly a year after Russian Service shortwave and medium wave radio broadcasting ended.

The programmes bring viewers the latest international news, and the BBC's coverage of Russian stories. The bulletin is then available at bbcrussian.com.

It's a ground-breaking project in many ways. Firstly, as many of you will know, the Russian Service has had a significant budget cut which meant we had to make difficult decisions about what we could afford to do. We decided to concentrate on the internet as the sole method of delivery for all of our content including the remaining radio programmes.

Secondly because, in the normally expensive world of TV, we're using the latest technology to produce and deliver the bulletin through the internet.

And lastly because Dozhd is an innovative channel both in Russian and global terms. Non-aligned politically and independently funded, it is a mainly internet-based TV station. It is small, but with a growing number of views and a growing reputation.  

The way the internet has developed in Russia over the past year makes me feel that the BBC has taken the right approach. Recent events have demonstrated the very important role the internet is playing in shaping how Russians receive and actually make news, as well as debate and discuss developments in Russia and around the world. 

Russia has now overtaken Germany as the country with the highest number of unique online visitors - over 50 million. In terms of penetration, which currently stands at about half the adult population, it's predicted to reach 75% by 2020 and 90% ten years after that.

And here at bbcrussian.com we're experiencing a big growth in people coming to us, either directly or through partners, for BBC content.

Dozhd TV has become a very significant media player through the internet, but working with other broadcasters is not a first. The BBC does this around the world. And in Russia our radio broadcasts have at various times been carried by other broadcasters, while our online content is available to users of a number of Russian news websites. But this is the Russian Service's first foray into TV, and it's a first for the World Service in terms of the technological delivery of internet TV.

The fast take up of online technology and social media in Russia - and the fact that Russians are looking there for news, views and discussion not readily available elsewhere - is a fantastic incentive for the Russian Service to finding new ways to reach our audience.

I hope you enjoy the new bulletin, whether you watch it on Dozhd or bbcrussian.com.

Sarah Gibson is the editor of BBC Russian for the BBC World Service.

Football fans can scarcely have failed to notice the anaemic newspaper coverage of matches and lack of photographs from this season's early football league games.

It's not that there's been a sudden loss of interest - far from it. What's been hampering the coverage is a lack of access. A dispute is still raging at the time of writing between the professional leagues and the collective might of the newswire, photography agencies and most of the daily papers over what exactly they're allowed to report and how.

The existing agreement between clubs and organs has expired. It was set up six years ago and is no longer fit for purpose, conceived as it was in the days before Twitter, TwitPics, live text, streaming, and much of the rest of the social media landscape we now take for granted.

Everyone supports the idea that the agreement needs to be redrafted. The problem is they disagree over how far the freedoms to report should now be extended.

It won't be much of a surprise to know that money is at the root of this problem. Not in terms of any fees paid by the agencies and papers. Somewhat strangely in these times of billion-pound rights deals, they get their football for free.

Instead, it's the impact that their Twitter feeds and interactive forums might have on the ability of the clubs to profit, literally, from their own websites and the value of sponsorship deals based around a live feed offer. The agencies and papers want to get in and get their content out to an audience with a healthy appetite. The problem for the clubs will come if they can't keep pace and find the public no longer willing to pay a premium for a service they get for nothing elsewhere.

The parties have been negotiating for months without success, but the imminent commencement of another Premier League season is focusing minds.

There have been a few slightly indignant articles in the papers explaining why there aren't any decent match reports or pictures because their staff are locked out of grounds. It sounds a bit dramatic, but essentially it's accurate. Retaliation has come in the form of refusal to name-check and feature the headline sponsors which benefit hugely from the profile the papers and websites give them visually and in written form.

All a bit silly, but when cash and principles are jointly at stake then reason can sometimes take a back seat. As is blindingly obvious, both parties need each other. Symbiosis defined.

Of course, it will all be sorted out eventually, and my bet is it will be sooner rather than later. But it does all serve as a reminder as to just how fast social media is changing the landscape and challenging the thinking of the rights-holders in sport.

Bob Woodward, with Carl Bernstein, broke the story of Watergate nearly four decades ago. He still works as a journalist for the Washington Post. Interviewed for the Post's website, he talked about basic journalistic skills:

One of the questions which persists in journalism is where do we get our information? And there are actually three tracks which, I think, apply to any story.

The first, obviously, is people, and that doesn't mean just going to one person or one source; it means checking everything, talking to half a dozen or even a dozen people for a day. If it's something longer you want to totally surround and saturate the subject.

Second track is documents. I have not really ever seen a story in a newspaper or on TV or even on radio that couldn't be enhanced with some kind of documentation which would support or add more detail to what the story is about.

And the third track - often if you ask people what's the third they don't get it, and I would tell an anecdote from my early reporting career to illustrate the importance of the third track:

In the first months I started working at the Washington Post in 1971, I had developed a source in the local District of Columbia Health Department and they were doing inspections of restaurants, many of the famous restaurants in Washington, and closing them down for sanitation violations; so we were doing front-page stories on this. And one day the source called me up and said we have the worst score that any restaurant in the District of Columbia has ever received and I won't go through the gross details of what was floating in the food.

So I went and got the document - at a newspaper even then they liked to get early copy, so I wrote out the story about lunch time, maybe even before lunch. The story said that the document made it clear that the Mayflower coffee shop, as it was called, was the restaurant which had been closed down with the score of less than 50 points.

I wrote up the story based on the document about the coffee shop at the Mayflower hotel, one of the famous restaurants in Washington, and handed it to the city editor. I said 'Here's early copy' and he was delighted and he said 'Wow, this is a front-page story, that's an awful series of violations', and then he said 'Have you been there?' And I said 'No, I've got the document, I know it is authentic.' And he said 'Well, it's two blocks away, get your ass out of the chair and get over there.'

So I went to the Mayflower hotel and I asked to visit the coffee shop. Everyone there said we don't have a coffee shop. We have a famous Jean Louis or something restaurant, we have the buffet, but no coffee shops. So I looked at the address of the Mayflower coffee shop and it turned out not to be in the Mayflower hotel but in the Statler Hilton hotel which was a half a block away from the Washington Post. So I went over there and found the Mayflower coffee shop and they had a big sign saying closed for repairs. The man who ran the restaurant happily but reluctantly acknowledged that they had been closed down for all of these violations. I went back to the Post and asked the editor for the copy back. I said I had a few minor changes to make.

And if we had run this story without me getting my ass out of the chair and going to the scene, we probably would have had to run a front-page correction.

Is investigative journalism alive in the USA?

I think that there will always be investigative or in-depth reporting. Clearly the newspapers are going through a convulsion now. It may last a long time, but young people are going to develop new business models. Everyone, all age groups, realises that it is important to have good data, good information about what government does. I asked Ben Bradlee, who was the editor of the Post, what he thought and he said 'Look, it's going to change.' But then with great passion he said that there will always be a group of people, a band of brothers and sisters working to get to the under-layer of what's going on, and they will find a way to publish or broadcast what they believe the truth to be.

Bob Woodward has worked for the Washington Post since 1971 as a reporter, and is currently an associate editor. As a young reporter in 1972, Woodward was teamed with Carl Bernstein: the two did much of the original news reporting on the Watergate scandal which led to numerous government investigations and the eventual resignation of President Richard Nixon on 9 August 1974.

This is an edited version of a chapter in the forthcoming book Investigative Journalism: Dead or Alive?, edited by John Mair and Richard Lance Keeble and published by Abramis. It is used with the kind permission of the editors.

What has 'churnalism' got to do with the phone hacking scandal? Plenty, according to Chris Atkins in his support for the motion "This house believes news articles based on press releases should be marked 'advertorial'" at a recent debate at the Royal Statistical Society.

Atkins opened by claiming that "churning" out news stories copied and pasted from press releases is at the mild end of the scale of dishonest things journalists do which ends with phone hacking.

And he knows a thing or two about this. When the Media Standards Trust launched its new website Churnalism.com, Atkins sent out a number of hoax press releases which were slavishly reproduced by a variety of national news outlets - including the posh papers.

My favourite, about a "chastity garter" which contained a text message-sending microchip to alert a woman's partner if she is being unfaithful, became the most read story on the Daily Mail's website.

The linking of phone hacking and churnalism found favour with the main organiser of the debate, Martin Moore, Director of the MST, who raced to it from the House of Lords' launch of the campaign for a public inquiry into phone hacking.

Atkins, Director of the films Starsuckers and Taking Liberties, was supported by James Randerson, News Editor for Science and Environment at the Guardian.

Against them were Trevor Morris, lecturer in PR at the University of Westminster, and David Higgerson, Head of Multimedia at Trinity Mirror. I was chairing (after declining an invitation to speak because, uncharacteristically, I can't make up my mind).

Atkins argued that passing press releases off as news is fundamentally dishonest. He insisted he was not out to demonise PR, but went on to claim that, while the role of journalists is to tell the truth, the role of PR people is serve their paymasters, and, yes, "they lie".

The essence of Atkins' argument was compelling: that the public have a right to know where journalists source their news, and that putting a bold sign on every article taken primarily from a press release could make readers do interesting things - like vote with their feet by seeking out journalists and newspapers that do more original journalism.

Just as the audience began to believe we could enter a kind of journalistic nirvana, in came Higgerson to explain that the press release is now the chosen form of communication with the media of almost every institution in society - many of whom we want and need to hear from. Press releases get a bad press, he argued, pointing out that many are written by former journalists who write well and know what the media needs. Admitting to not being a fan of Churnalism.com's 'churn engine', which allows users to trace how many stories are copied from press releases, Higgerson claimed it is a blunt tool: for instance, it fails to show whether journalists have checked the facts in the press release, or which press releases have been rejected.

He concluded with an argument that did rather queer the pitch of the proposers: that the press release is only one of the many ways the PR industry exerts its influence. While his example of one disgruntled company PR threatening to turn up at his desk with a mallet is thankfully rare, it did drive the point home. Other dark arts include the angry call to the editor from would-be Alastair Campbells and the threat of withdrawal of advertising. Neither of those, of course, would be any more visible in a brave new world where press release stories were labelled.

This last point was echoed by Trevor Morris, the former PR guru, who pointed out that lots of PR comes from private briefings, tip-offs and leaks, prompting Morris to suggest that, alongside labels like 'advertorial', we would have to label other copy 'leakatorial', and so on.

Morris delivered a list of rather brutal home truths: if we have less PR we will have less media, and less media means less advertising, which is bad for journalism. Also, PR allows small players without big advertising budgets to get media space. And PR keeps the cost of journalism down. Finally, PR people have a vested interest in supporting journalism, because without the media they would lose their jobs.

Morris also argued that the power of PR is grossly overstated by both its supporters and its critics - which explains why so many powerful people who spend buckets on the best PR advice still crash and burn (the Murdoch empire comes to mind). He said that 90% of press releases are never even used - which suggests there is a lot more journalistic judgment going on in newsrooms than we are giving credit for.

It was left to James Randerson to subvert the motion by sheepishly admitting he couldn't give it the full-throated defence expected at this kind of debate. He started by bringing up the other media scandal of recent weeks: the Johann Hari plagiarism saga. James sees some of the same paternalism displayed by Hari, in his defence of lifting quotes from other sources, in the general reluctance to be more open about where journalists have sourced their stories.

For Randerson, the idea that the journalist knows best and the reader doesn't need to worry about the mysterious craft of reporting is no longer justifiable in a time of ever increasing demand for transparency. Instead of labeling articles 'advertorial', Randerson argued for the simplest of solutions: linking to sources. For Randerson, the fact that we now have the technical ability to do so with such ease makes this move towards more transparency both desirable and inevitable.

Randerson shares Atkins' belief that more transparency could drive up standards. After all, few reporters come into journalism to copy stories from press releases. Being forced to reveal this would be an eye-opener for the public and may result in more self-policing policy in newsrooms.

The final vote was 23 for the motion - demanding the Advertorial label - and 39 against. The speakers concluded with a kind of consensus that more transparency about sources would be a good thing but the problem of churnalism is unlikely to be fixed by newspapers full of 'advertorial' signs.

Personally, I think the critics of PR make the mistake of using it as a catch-all term. Product placement PR or the frothy opinion polls that trace back to some big corporate with something to sell are worthy but easy targets. It's not so simple in the science world, where I work: many press releases exist to document the findings of long, complex research studies on public health and the environment. Putting 'advertorial' over a report of a press-released Nature paper showing that asbestos-like effects have been found in the lungs of mice exposed to nanoparticles seems crazy to me.

Nor do I buy the idea that a newspaper should be spared the label just because a journalist calls the researcher directly and gets an almost identical comment to the press release - probably rehearsed by the scientist and press officer in preparation for publication. For me, the test of reporting in science should be whether the public and policy makers get access to good, factually accurate, balanced and truthful information. If that is done by journalists and press officers working together and includes a press release, then fine. The failures in this area are as much down to shoddy sensationalist journalism as they are an over-reliance on press releases.

PR, like journalism, is a mixed bag. But if I was asked to identify the people who most symbolise the pursuit of accurate, critical and balanced reporting, my list would include as many press officers as journalists.

Atkins argued that if lifting the lid on the way journalists get their stories leads to a decline in public trust in the media that is a thoroughly good thing if it forces journalists to change for the better.

At other times, Atkins' faith in radical and dramatic change in journalism might have sounded naïve and idealistic. But in the light of current headlines it seems less so.

Fiona Fox is Director of the Science Media Centre, an independent press office working on the front line between national news media and science on controversial issues.

It's unavoidable. The first year or two of any freelance journalist's life abroad is spent pitching. But things have changed since I started out in the 1990s. Today's wannabe foreign correspondents have to pitch by day, blog by night, and tweet whenever and wherever a story breaks.

Some do it all very well. And they find time to do the day job. Take a look at Iona Craig in Yemen and Rob Crilly in Pakistan.

It's with these various changes in mind, and the need these days for independent journalists to have a brand, that I put together the presentation below for the Frontline Club discussion about going solo as a foreign correspondent. It's based upon the Kigaliwire blog I created when I moved to Rwanda in August 2009.

I've never faced a bullet or worked in a conflict zone, but foreign correspondence is not all about danger. I hope this presentation gives wannabes some solid ideas about how to go about getting started. It's not all plain sailing and things will and do go wrong, but at least they will go interestingly wrong.

Frontline Club - solo foreign correspondent

The recent BBC Social Media Summit gave a fascinating insight into how mainstream media organisations are dealing with the challenges of social media.

But, lest we forget, Facebook only launched in 2004, and Twitter in 2006. And both took a few years until they became relatively popular even amongst the digerati.

Despite this relative infancy, these networks have already changed the way journalists work and how stories are sourced, shared and discussed. And the speed of change shows no signs of slowing, with social search just one of the latest challenges for organisations to harness and adapt to.

However, it's worth remembering that social media isn't yet as mainstream for the majority of audiences as it is for those at the BBC conference. Pew reported at the end of last year that only 8% of US internet users are on Twitter.

While in the UK a little more than half of internet users, 54%, have a profile on any social network. That leaves 46% of internet users who don't - along with the 26% of adults who are still not online at all.

So the growth of social media is remarkable, and its adoption is certainly faster than most technologies or innovations, but it is far from ubiquitous. Indeed, in a climate where we have access to more news - and more news outlets - than ever before, I'm frequently struck by the resilience of traditional broadcast media for a range of services, including news.

Recent RAJARs showed that average weekly reach for radio was at a record high, at 91.6% of the UK adult population, as was weekly listening, at 22.4 hours per week. And TV viewing is also up: the average number of hours of television watched by individuals in the UK has risen modestly over the past five years: from 3.7 hours a day in 2004 to 3.8 hours a day in 2009 - an increase of 3%.

There are variations amongst different age groups and genres, but TV viewing has remained remarkably robust and constant amongst all age groups over the past five years. Arguably the biggest change has been the way we watch it. Digital TV, HDTV, DVRs, TV on demand and online catch-up TV services have all helped us to watch television when and where we want to.

Moreover, Ofcom's Digital Day research demonstrated that traditional media holds people's attention even when it is undertaken with other media. Evening viewing of scheduled television remains a single-medium activity for many viewers.

And it's not all X-Factor and EastEnders which has held our attention: soap viewing on the five main PSB channels is actually down 2% since 2005. Ofcom's 2010 report into public service broadcasting showed that TV news consumption on these channels and their digital portfolio has remained consistent, at around 100 hours a year. Average hours of viewing of current affairs on those channels actually increased from 39 hours in 2005 to 48 hours in 2009. It's a fairly similar story for nations and regions' news programmes.

This is not to say that change isn't in the offing - or indeed taking place. Social media does matter to consumers, but so does traditional media - both in terms of its values and the way in which it is consumed.

Even if you share Mark Twain's scepticism about statistics, the data seems to suggest that social media hasn't quite replaced traditional media yet.

Damian Radcliffe (@mrdamian76) is Manager, Nations and Communities, at Ofcom. He is writing here in a personal capacity.

Responses to last week's BBC Social Media Summit have been appearing on blogs since the end of the conference on Friday.

The influential New York academic and blogger Jeff Jarvis followed up his tweets from the first day of the event; then he complained about the Chatham House Rule of that day's discussion. Now he reiterates his points in a post which takes in not just the BBC conference but big media's attitude to social media, the new role of journalism and even super-injunctions.

But here's what got him started - the reporting restrictions at the BBC conference:

"It's most shocking that the BBC would impose this rule on a meeting that is not only about *social media* - I thought all Brits bragged about having a sense of irony Americans lack; apparently not - but worse, one that carried the haughty ambition to formulate 'a universally accepted set of verification guidelines for social media material' and 'an accepted ethical framework for using sensitive material from social networks'. Don't they see that one can no longer set true standards for the rest of the world in closed rooms with invite-only guests who are gagged or anonymous and prevented from interacting with that world? Then the outcome becomes a standard only for that small subset of people, which negates its authority as a standard. At best, it's another club rule."

Adam Tinworth, who works for a business information company and blogs prolifically, also writes about the Chatham House Rule in a post that's broadly sympathetic to the BBC organisers of the conference:

"The mistake, if anything, was in being CHR rather than closed. The partial tweeting of the event just makes it clearer that people are being excluded. And people are sensitive souls, sometimes. The restricted information flow creates an unintentional air of 'nah, nah, we're here and you aren't' that is probably more at the heart of some of the criticism that people are making than they would admit, even to themselves."

The blog attracted comments including a substantial response from Claire Wardle whose idea the conference was. Adam also writes accounts of the various sessions and final discussion from the second day of the conference: editorial issues session; technology session; cultural change; final session and Alan Rusbridger remarks.

Under the headline "What I learned about ego, opinion, art and commerce", Mary Hamilton, analyses the assumptions behind the conference - complaining about the concept of "mainstream media" that was implicit behind the discussion:

"'Mainstream' isn't a clearly defined term. It's slippery. 'Mainstream media' is hurled at news outlets by some bloggers as a pejorative term; it's often linked to circulation and ownership rather than content; it's defined without a clear opposition. And the BBC Social Media Summit had its own definition, which became clearer as the day progressed:

• National or international (not local or hyperlocal)
• General news (not specialist or single-subject)
• Primarily print or broadcast (not web-only)
• Broadsheet (not tabloid or sensationalist)
• Corporate (not individual).

That's fine, of course, though perhaps a more honest hashtag would be #bbcmsmsms."

Martin Belam picks up the question of mainstream media in his account of Christian Payne's contribution to the discussion on audience expectations. Christian (ID card for the conference from website above) had said that...

"...one problem with the relationship between 'the mainstream media' and 'social media' is that our approach on impartiality requires journalists to remove their own emotions from a story. It is [Chris argued] the emotion that builds the rapport with the people you are reporting on."

Martin concludes:

"I think Chris reminded us that there is still a large number of amateur or semi-professional people who have access to the 'new tools' but don't always have the training or the access to learning about the 'old skills' which have served journalism for hundreds of years."

The interaction between smaller, independent media specialists and bigger organisations was highlighted in the Technology and Innovation session. But Joseph Stashko argues against a false choice implied by the question posed: "Can start-ups compete with mainstream media?"

"They shouldn't be looking to compete with each other, because it takes us back to a bloggers versus journalists-style debate again - the two should look to complement each other rather than compete.

It's a mindset which seemed to be uncomfortably pervasive throughout the day. As someone remarked to me afterwards: 'I thought we were over that sort of debate... apparently not.'"

Paul Martin had made his point vividly from the floor of the conference by announcing he had already filmed part of the session and put the video online. In his blog, he is sceptical about traditional media organisations' ability to keep up with technological change:  

"Traditional news outlets, the broadcasters, TV and radio, along with the newspapers, are no longer in control of the story. Before a journalist with the specialisation can get the facts together, the story has been tweeted, blogged, photographed, filmed and shared around the world by those online, regardless of whether accuracy has been checked. The story is out. It's gone, been consumed, swapped, embellished and shared by many thousands of people. I found the underlying discussion today at the Summit was 'What the hell do we do with it then?' 

...Journalists can scream all they like about proper journalism, trained people who can muster the facts, talk to the right people, check the legality and the meaning behind the online content. But, let's face facts, their story can only be told hours, even a day, later."

Philip Trippenbach is the Editor in Chief of Citizenside.com, whose goal is to create the largest online community of amateur and independent reporters where everyone can share their vision of the news by uploading photos and videos. Reflecting on discussions at the conference, he draws a distinction between stories which work well for what he calls "distributed newsgathering" and those which don't:

"In cases of elite, contained stories, where access to power or expert information is crucial... pro teams have an edge. For instance, the Dominique Strauss-Kahn case is a model of one where distributed reporting can't add much. There are a few characters, mostly senior political, law-enforcement and legal figures. There are limited plot points; a few courtroom appearances, and discussions behind closed doors. This is the classic sort of 'big politics' story for which the old-school media-as-gatekeeper model is still valid."

Behind much of the conference discussion was the idea that journalism in organisations like the BBC which want to preserve their role as trusted brands is becoming a question of verifying social media content (a process that BBC journalist Alex Murray describes here).

But Matthew Ingram argues that news no longer needs to be seen like that: "There is also the need to start looking at news as a process and not as a pristine, finished product." He argues that today journalists should be ready to "post a report and say that it is unverified, and see if anyone can help you verify it"; a process not unlike that of the news wires.   

In his account of the conference, Dave Wyllie, who describes himself as a 24-year-old broadcast, new media and print journalist, reflects on the cultural and business shifts that social media seems to require, echoing others who felt that changing the habits and attitudes of journalists is only half the battle:

"How do you motivate a journalist to think seriously about online? More people will read your content. More people will engage with you; you will be able to build a larger contact network if that's what you want.

We talked of doing all this but maybe there is an elephant in the room. And the elephant in the room is that certain organisations are haemorrhaging money...

Are we in a good place? Some of us, yes. Most of us, no. But I'm more worried about the people who are convinced they're winning when really they're just chugging along on the backs of users who visit only because you're the media brand that their parents bought into for 40 years."

The harsh realities of media business today were discussed at the conference by Raju Narisetti, managing editor of the Washington Post, who pointed out, unsentimentally, that journalists need to understand that they live or die by metrics.

His approach was questioned in the Media Blog, citing the success, and the editorial cost, of Mail Online:  

"In search of pure online numbers the Mail has traded in any values its masthead still stands for in the minds of those people who buy the newspaper in the quiet villages of conservative Britain." 

Finally, conference organiser Claire Wardle has written her final thoughts about what came out of the conference and what she hopes will happen as a result.

Please let me know @BBCCollege or in comments below about other blogs on the conference I've missed. 

I chaired the penultimate session at #bbcsms hoping it would pull together different themes from the conference.

I feel very strongly that we're past the 'ooh, isn't it new and different' stage with social media (indeed, I agree the phrase itself now appears outdated), and I didn't want people to leave with a feeling of 'so what?'.

I had the idea for today's BBC Social Media Summit (#bbcsms) over six months ago. I wanted to organise an event that would lead to concrete outcomes. I've been to conferences where I've left feeling inspired, challenged, with a pocket full of business cards, but then found that little changed when I returned to work the next day.

This summit, both the closed event for active social media producers today and the open conference tomorrow, has been designed with potential outcomes in mind from the very start.
Some of the outcomes I see emerging are:

- A universally accepted set of verification guidelines for social media material

- An accepted ethical framework for using sensitive material from social networks

- Advice for managing the legal issues related to privacy and defamation

- Disaster/emergency networks that enable media organisations to work together during serious crises, in terms of disseminating information most effectively

- The creation of research partnerships so academics can gain access to media professionals, newsrooms and data sets.

Do these ideas have legs? Do you think these would help you in your work? Do you think they are necessary?

There clearly needs to be discussion around guidelines versus laws versus frameworks versus best working practice. But, putting that aside, I believe an initiative in this area would increase levels of trust, transparency and relevance, ultimately resulting in stronger journalism.

Summit attendees and the community watching online might decide these ideas are pipedreams - unworkable, unsustainable, and just down right unrealistic. If that is the consensus, I'll be pleased that at least we put these suggestions out and tried.

But maybe there will be more than that. Maybe someone from a news programme will welcome a researcher in for two months to study audience engagement via social media. Maybe representatives from the major UK broadcasters will meet at the coffee bar and agree the need for an emergency planning session to discuss what to do if the worst did happen. Or maybe someone from a journalism think-tank will draft some tentative guidelines around the ethical practices used around social networks.

Worst case scenario: we have some great discussions. Best case scenario: we actually do some things together.

The BBC Social Media Summit (#bbcsms) is being held on the 19 and 20 May.

Claire Wardle is a freelance trainer and researcher working with the BBC College of Journalism and specialising in social media. She was previously at Cardiff University School of Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies, where she holds an honorary lecturer position.

We live in a time when the words 'Facebook' or 'Twitter' can propel a news story up a programme's running order, or onto a front page, not always with good reason.

But behind the hype real, structural change is taking place in personal and public communications. In particular, there's a new and shifting border between the private and the public, mediated by social media businesses.

As I expected when we published a provisional agenda for the Social Media Summit, we are having to make some changes as we get closer to next week's event.

But the changes are to accommodate some very significant additional speakers that will make the day unmissable.

The New York Times' Social Media Editor, Liz Heron, is now coming to talk about how her newsroom engages with the social web, and how it drives innovation. Audioboo's Mark Rock and Storyful's Mark Little will be here to give their views on how entrepreneurs can influence editorial development. And Al Jazeera's Esra Dogramaci will talk about how it uses social media in covering the 'Arab Spring'.

The full agenda also allows time for a substantial discussion at the end of the day that we hope will help to shape the next steps of social media engagement for mainstream media.

We want to involve everyone in that discussion, whether they have been able to make it to the event in person or are following it on social media.

We will of course be tweeting the entire day on @BBCCollege - and we'll also be uploading videos of all the sessions on the College of Journalism website.

But we will also be offering extended summaries of each session that we'll post to the College of Journalism blog - and we hope that anyone who wants to make substantial contributions to the conversation will do so by commenting on the blog.

I'll blog more about this next week - but, to get a head start, if you haven't already registered to comment on the blog you can do so now. It doesn't take long.

We'll be posting thoughts from some of the key speakers in the run up to the event, and there'll be more information about the details of the event; so stay tuned.

Finally, we have a handful of spare tickets. Some of you have already tweeted us asking if there were any returns, so we'll be getting back to you shortly. If you haven't and would like to come, tweets us now.

Details of the Summit and confirmed guests here; full list of attendees here.