Really interesting evening at Music 3.0 (from what I saw of it). The concept is smart. Exchanging ideas and thoughts between industries is a constructive thing to do – kudos to Jim Carroll and First Music Contact’s Angela Dorgan!

Here are a few photos from my walk:

Taken closer to Poolbeg – a heron out looking for dinner …

Hoping this beautiful weather we’re having in Dublin is here for a few more days!

Blathnaid

Today marks the beginning of the second week of @Ireland and its second curator, Catherine Drea.  I have enjoyed this challenging project immensely so far. As clearly stated from the outset it is heavily influenced by @Sweden and the strides they have made with the “world’s most democratic” Twitter account these past few months.

Ultimately this is another way to tell a story in the digital age. The beauty of it is we get to hear 52 people’s stories every year, which hopefully inform, entertain or enrich our lives in some way.

I must heartily commend Bernie Goldbach for coming to us with the idea and trusting us to be the right home for such an ambitious project.

I am very much looking forward to seeing how @Ireland develops and finds its way in the Twittersphere.

For more on the project read my post on the WorldIrish blog, follow the account or read some of the curators’ thoughts: Bernie’s and Catherine’s.

One more link, I was on RTÉ’s Morning Ireland programme talking about the project on Friday. Here’s the clip.

Finally, perhaps you’d like to curate @Ireland for a week (or nominate someone). If you live in or are from Ireland, have the time and something interesting to say email Ireland AT worldirish.com.

Talk soon,

Blathnaid

As some of you may already know, I finished up with RTÉ at the end of December and with the beginning of a New Year have started a new job as Content Manager for WorldIrish.

You might remember this post that I wrote back in October after the Global Irish Forum and wonder why I have left Ireland’s biggest media website. It comes down to this – I believe the time is right for WorldIrish.

WorldIrish is the best organisation to create a community for Irish people and those who think Irish. It’s assembling an excellent team of people and will be working hard over the coming months to create something useful and meaningful for the global Irish community. I’m excited to be part of this.

I started in RTÉ in 2007 and had some great experiences from covering Barack Obama’s convention speech in Denver to travelling to Kenya as a backpack reporter. I found 2011 (like most people working in the media) to be an exceptionally busy year. I established RTÉ’s first social media desk, project managed RTÉ’s digital output across several platforms for the General Election and most recently worked on the organisation’s digital strategy.

I have been fortunate to work with some truly excellent people in RTÉ during an interesting time of great digital change.

I’m leaving an established mainstream media organisation for a very ambitious start up. It’s going to be a big change, but one I’m keen to embrace.

We’ll be working hard in WorldIrish over the coming months to introduce an online global Irish community with greater functionality. I’m looking forward to taking on a new set of challenges.

And if you haven’t done already, sign up to WorldIrish here!

Have a great 2012,

Blathnaid

The former news editor succeeds Geraldine Kennedy who has retired.

According to Irishtimes.com, 51-year-old Mr O’Sullivan has previously worked as night editor and special projects editor at the publication.

Guardian.co.uk reports that Mr O’Sullivan beat six internal candidates to the job and there were ‘huge cheers’ when the announcement was made in The Irish Times newsroom this afternoon.

Ms Kennedy, who will turn 60 in September, has been editor of The Irish Times for nine years.

We discussed a broad range of topics, if you have a spare couple of hours – check out the podcast here.

Here is the summary of points I have picked out from the stream, which I think are relevant for journalists and content producers.

I’ve broken it down by speaker (not all speakers are included) and used one tweeter per speaker to avoid confusion (each point is an individual tweet from the stream). Thanks to all the tweeters for keeping everyone updated!

First off, some overview points that seem to be coming back a lot from the #Med2020 twitter stream:

1) Experiment, cheaply, quickly, if you fail do it fast and learn from it
2) Mobile is going to be massive
3) Revenue models are not clear yet

By speaker:

Maeve Donovan, Former Managing Director, The Irish Times
Tweeter: Niamh Smith (@niamhsmith)

-Can newspapers make the necessary changes? Maeve believes they can based on her 30 yrs experience in the industry

-Roles of newspapers to make the most of the immense opportunities offered by emerging technologies

-Digital revolution has much broader implications than its effect on newspapers or tv

-Hardest words to say are ‘I don’t know’ – and she doesn’t know for sure the future of newspapers

Jonathon Moore, Guardian News & Media
Tweeter: Hugh Linehan (@hlinehan)

-Guardian Eyewitness iPad app: very simple app publishing one photo a day. Video: Jobs sings its praises

-You live or die by user recommendations on the app store

-Big traffic spike on Guardian app at 10.30pm. Technology changing how and when people consume content

-Moore: We expected migration to our app would cause fall-off in use of web browser. Hasn’t been the case

Mark Little, Storyful
Tweeter: Gareth O’Connor (@garethoconnor)

-#Med202 hears from @marklittlenews that basic reporting skills still needed by curators and super-users in new age

-New business opportunities for storytelling @marklittlenews tells #med2020

-@marklittlenews tells #med2020 that 2010 marks turning point in journalism

Ronan Higgins, Local, mobile social software start-up
Tweeter: Niamh Smith (@niamhsmith)

-Apps store – a new walled garden. iTunes-simplicity, quality, speed-applied this ethos to iPhone

Matt Locke – C4 Commissioning Editor, New Media & Education
Tweeter: Hugh Linehan (@hlinehan)

-Facebook picks up tiny snippets of attention and rolls them up into something gargantuan

-Very intelligent stuff – but a bit depressing that the experimental groundbreaker cited is Embarrassing Bodies. Blecchh

-Bingeing on cult content – four or five episodes at a time (I think I recognise myself in this presentation)

-Cult content. The Wire first TV series passed around like a 1970s rock album from friend to friend. User content around Lost

-Events-driven initiatives like ITV’s election debate worm – broadcasters comfortable with that

-What broadcast does well is events. So we’re seeing the eventisation of TV, from talent shows to Lambing Live (!)

-Locke: broadcasters used to own the audience. But with new technology, old platforms have to learn what it is they really do well

Múirne Laffan – Executive Director, RTÉ Publishing
Tweeter: Eoin Purcell (@eoinpurcell)

-Laffan: 3.5 million uniques a month for rte.ie and 1 million of those are overseas!

-Laffan: RTE has a hub and spoke model. Create content in hub and reuse as much as possible

-Laffan: Boundaries to entry are very low. Global opportunities. But getting to market quickly is important. Mobile is huge

-Laffan see every tv connected to the internet in Ireland in 10 yrs!

-Laffan: Consumer expectations are through the roof

Note: Compiling this post this evening has reinforced my feeling that Twitter streams are much easier to follow live and are hard work to use as an archive – looking forward to some journalists’ and bloggers’ analysis of the conference.

**Update – Two good pieces about yesterday’s conference: The Irish Times’ Hugh Linehan (including video of Minister Eamon Ryan) and Fin O’Reilly.**

-B

The series of profiles looks at the lives of six Irish people living abroad. Through the medium of video, the men and women featured tell their individual stories.

Beijing: Aidan Duffy (Director: Dan Cheung)
Cape Town: Fr Dick O’Riordan (Director: Jamie Macken)
New York: Alexei Kondratiev (Director: Mary Catherine Brouder)
London: Celestine Cooney (Director: Michelle ‘Shelby’ Sadlier)
Toronto: Tara Lyons (Director: Lauren Crothers)
Buenos Aires: Mick Connery (Directors: Paul Byrne & Jeff Farrell)

Watch the videos and vote for your favourite here.

The series is the first piece of content from Mark Little’s new venture.

B

Deputy Managing Director Liam Kavanagh has been tipped as a front runner to succeed Ms Donovan in the role, according to the Irish Independent and the Irish Examiner.

Ms Donovan, who worked at the organisation for more than three decades, said now was a good time for a successor to lead the organisation through the next ‘inevitable wave of change’, according to a story in The Irish Times, which added that she had not envisaged staying in the role past 2010.

During Ms Donovan’s time as MD, The Irish Times made a number of investments and interesting decisions as highlighted by Laura Noonan in the Irish Independent today:

Ms Donovan’s tenure as managing director began with a substantial re-organisation of the core newspaper business, but she is best known for the “investment and diversification” strategy pursued more recently.

Under that strategy, ‘The Irish Times’ spent €50m on property website myhome.ie at the peak of the boom and also bought substantial stakes in ‘The Gloss’ magazine, Dublin freesheet ‘Metro’ and multi-city radio station 4fm.

Those joint ventures and subsidiaries triggered more than €26m of losses in 2008 and have been slammed by the newspaper’s own journalists, who last year urged their company to “urgently review the flawed investment and diversification strategy”.

Asked if she regretted any of the investments, Ms Donovan replied: “Oh God, no.”

I wonder how the next MD is going to handle the challenges The Irish Times, like all newspapers, faces in relation to digital change. Will it follow the NYT and Murdoch with online pay models or continue like the Guardian and stay free?  It’s a difficult time for anyone to take over when surely the first task is to pull back last year’s estimated cash losses of between €1o to €11m. It’ll be interesting to watch.

B

RTÉ has recently launched the News Now app for the iPhone/iPod Touch.

News Now is an apt description for this. If you click on ‘Top Stories’ it  delivers the latest RTÉ News, Sport and Entertainment stories from RTÉ.ie using a simple and readable layout.

As well as text stories, the app shows the latest live RTÉ News TV bulletins, weather, stocks and currencies through the ‘Watch Live’ function. You can also watch the Morning Ireland webcam (with radio stream) from 7am – a great accompaniament for the commute (not with the iPod touch though!).

You can download the app for free from the iTunes store here

More details from RTÉ about the app here

(DOI: RTÉ is my employer)

Read the full article here