Inter must stump up €1,500 after the fan was left ”indignant and deeply hurt” by the chants, during Napoli’s 2-1 defeat there, presumably having had his meaning and essence in life challenged by the home fan’s crude messages.
While I think there’s hardly enough Nietzsche in the game these days, let’s hope that such litigation never reaches these shores, where many of m’colleagues could be bankrupted for their taunts; describing Crystal Palace as “a small town in Millwall”, for instance, or damning Luton Town’s “shit ground, no fans”.
Plymouth boss Paul Sturrock, too, should offer up thanks that British courts have yet to acknowledge the problem of post-traumatic existential angst, following his ill-judged remarks (Video on YouTube) to some Dundee United fans at the weekend.
After a pre-season friendly between his Plymouth side and United, Sturrock greeted the adoring visiting fans with a low bow, before wishing them – over the PA system – all the best for the coming season.
“And,” he added to huge cheers, “make sure you beat those Scumdee bastards the next time you play them.”
The inevitable disappointment and offense felt by Scu- sorry, Dundee officials was duly recorded by a passing Daily Record scribe, who gently patted the shoulder of club chief executive Dave MacKinnon as he sniffed: “It is ill-advised to make a comment like that but it is a matter for Paul Sturrock to explain why he said those things in public.
“It was obviously a mistake and clearly defamatory. If he is man enough to come out and apologise to the fans for the statement, I am sure the matter will be put to bed but that is entirely up to him.”
While I would never want to question the validity of MacKinnon’s grief – not for a moment – I, for one, hope no apology is forthcoming, lest we look back on these days as the start of a slippery slope to a litigious hell.
Think, after all, of the sums that could change hand after an Old Firm game in Scotland, where paying punters aren’t known to hold back in their attempts to existentially disrupt one another – repeatedly and violently – before, during and after each game. Chaos could ensue; we might witness the bankrupting of both clubs, as they are forced to hand all their assets, payout by payout, to rival fans too distraught to do anything other than seek pecuniary compensation for their loss of self.
Those might be bright times, perhaps, for philosophy, but surely the darkest of nights for our national sport.
On the site today; dramatic video footage taken on a mobile phone from inside the Qantas jet that, at 30,000 feet, popped a hole. It’s occasions like this which, for me, really ram home why video on the site tells a completely different story to text.
The text story tells the story of a lucky escape, yes, but essentially it can only be a variation on: “Plane damaged. Everyone’s OK, lukily.” And you could say there’s nothing dramatic about the footage at all. Yes, the oxygen masks are all down. But the engines sound normal, there’s a little more chatter than normal but no screaming, and some people even still have their lunch in front of them. A stewardess, showing how really well trained and professional she is, appears to be smiling to a passenger.
But then you remember they’ve had the explosive decompression already, and the controlled plunge of 20,000 feet (this is a standard thing, as those earnest guys in the forums at the Professional Pilot’s Rumour Network will tell you). They’re not really sure what’s wrong with their plane, and most must have strong suspicions these are their last moments in this world. Maybe real, true horror isn’t like the movies at all – it can be quiet and orderly and just as horrific.
You only really see the tension as they come in to land – ground hurtling past through the window, some passengers have heads bowed and arms out-stretched to the seats in front, waiting for an impact that never comes. The plane just lands as normal, and after a while the cheery Aussie voice of the captain comes on to tell everyone all’s well, but they might have to wait a while while the fire crews take a look at the plane and decide if it’s fit to taxi to the terminal.
All so normal, and yet such a complete and utter nightmare. Little wonder some of them threw up after they got off the plane, while the captain who did such a good job was pictured looking quizzically at a four meter by two hole in the side of his aircraft.
It’s an amazing piece of footage, and it’s a marvel – ironically, as much of flying and engineering as anything – that the thing landed safely. I only hope they find out what went wrong, and quickly.
Hugh MacLeod’s pithy political commentary on Twitter, this morning.
[Update, 1600:] Since I’m getting a lot – a lot – of Google traffic on the search term “McCain Applesauce“, I feel honour-bound to refer you to a story which explains what Hugh’s comment was about. Here’s the Newsweek take. In brief:
“When John McCain descended on a Bethlehem, Penn. grocery store late yesterday afternoon, the unscheduled campaign stop, meant to highlight McCain’s concern over skyrocketing food prices, instead quickly became a theater for the absurd. First, a cameraman knocked over several glass jars of Mott’s applesauce, which rolled near McCain’s feet as he posed for a bevy of cameras while strolling the grocery aisles.”
In fairness, the Newsweek piece really should be doing better in Google than this post. Bad SEO package, bad SEO.
My attention was grabbed by an ITV London Today story this lunchtime, firmly stating that not only is water in the Thames clean, but that it is easily drinkable – the best in the country, no less. London Today claimed: “99.98% of tests taken on samples from the river met national and European standards of safety, appearance and taste.”
Surely not, I thought.
Y’see, the River Thames doesn’t look like a clean river, and it’s not. Anyone living here knows. Its distinctive swirling brown murk is caused by silt stirred up by the fast-flowing tides – that’s not the real problem. The biggie is that sewers often overflow directly into the river after heavy rainfall, meaning it’s still quite possible that the river is – in a sense only too literal for those keen on watersports, or surfboarding to work – full of shit.
Yet here was ITV’s local news suggesting otherwise. And not just that there was not a problem; that this was the best draw of water in the land.
A quick (web) surf turns up the truth, in a press release from Thursday: Thames Water, the water company which serves the south east of England, is indeed serving up commendably clean water. But Thames Water does not draw its water from the Thames river, thank God, and this report does not mean the Thames River is clean.
So, ITV News’s claim that “samples from the river” have done so well is, alas, as full of shit as the river itself after a heavy downpour. They mean Thames Water, not the Thames river. But that’s not what they said, while showing library shots of the murky old river itself – just to add to the confusion.
The offending 30 second item is below, recorded off my TV – sorry I can’t stand still. And a warning: paying attention to this news bulletin could be a mistake you come to regret, quickly and repeatedly, all because someone somewhere can’t take a days-old press release and rewrite it properly for a bulletin.
Wired magazine’s guide to building a web 2.0 startup, likely to be getting much reading about these parts this week. Picture by wilbertbaan, used with permission granted by his Creative Commons license
I’m sat in the huge Moscone convention centre in central San Francisco, and they’re playing Robbie Robertson’s Somewhere Down That Lonely River over the PA system. I quite like this song, so I’m rather hoping the speaker doesn’t kick off during this, but I bet he will because he’s slightly late and he describes himself as a “kick-ass public speaker” on his website. The session he’s leading? How to innovate on time.
C’mon. I had to mention it.
It’s glorious to be back in San Francisco for properly webby conference. I’ve been coming here reasonably regularly for various reasons since 2001 – MacExpos, often, but with visits to Google and Blogger and other interesting places squeezed in. Even when stuff didn’t make it into print, it was often the place where I’d learn about trends and finally understand the significance of stuff – tagging and XML spring to mind – that I hadn’t grasped before.
I don’t report much now, but being here is still as fascinating, and the trip is still valuable for the learning. This place is truly the heart of all that’s dot.com – a thriving entrepreneurial ecosystem of talent, money and support services that doesn’t exist anywhere else in the world, and an ecosystem that means nowhere else is likely to overhaul it any time soon.
One thing that’s changed since I was last here; we’re now (really) in the era of the social web. The upshot of every webhead in Christendom (and beyond) having a blog, at least one Twitter account and a life fully exposed and declaimed on Facebook is that you know, to within a hundred yards and a few minutes, when they’re at a party.
You used to travel this far and feel quite alone. Now, there’s the surreal experience of landing at SFO after ten hours and 5371 miles, checking in and – after obligatory stop at Cheesecake Factory for Crispy Shredded Beef – heading to a party a few blocks away to be hailed by by the charming Jackie Danicki before having so much as a drink in my hand.
And then asked about my brother. Ho hum.
[Later: she describes me as a socialist pig on her blog. In a nice way, I'm sure. She's obviously never met a real socialist, although I accept the pig sobriquet with only a nod towards its accuracy.]
There are lots of folk I’m looking forward to meeting. Paul Carr, now ending a mammoth US tour which started when we were both in Las Vegas (we narrowly missed each other) is here, and blogging heavily. Chief Shiny Ashley Norris – a man I’ve met more abroad than in London, I suspect – is nearby and plotting drinks. TechCruncher Mike Butcher is liable to hove into view, I sense, at any moment. Thanks to their mammoth use of social media, I can take a stalker’s interest in their movements from the discomfort of this conference centre seat.
Which is a point. Scott Berkun, the speaker, has started during Robbie Robertson. He is, as it turns out, kick ass – giving us some familiar but well packaged thought on innovation theory and project management, delivered with pizazz. His O’Reilly book may be worth a squint later. But this seminar should, really be called this How to Innovate, and On Time. The comma, and the “and”, are important – this talk only ends with a segment on the “on time” bit.
And it better end on time. I suspect the jet-lag wall is positioned at roughly six o’clock.
There’s been some enjoyable to-and-fro after a Obama campaign donor, Mayhill Fowler, punched the mouth she’s feeding, and made public some unguarded comments uttered by the Presidential hopeful during a fundraiser in San Francisco.
(Brief catchup: read about it all here. Obama said some midwestern voters were “bitter [...] they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them”. This appears to be a controversial thing to say.)
Jay Rosen is the journalism academic behind the section on Huffington Post where Fowler revealed Obama’s comments. He hailed her piece, widely followed-up across the world’s media, as an example of the power of citizen journalism. He also explained why he and editors there left Fowler’s rambling piece unedited, running the good bit right at the end (that was done for context, he said. I do hope the revolution doesn’t continue to be quite this long-winded, even if you accuse me of throwing stones in the glass house that is this blog).
My Guardian colleague Michael Tomasky then weighed in with a thoughtful piece expressing doubts about the ethics of Fowler being present both as a fund raiser and a reporter. A brief excerpt:
“Was she free to write whatever she heard, or was she there with the understanding that she would put the interests of the Obama campaign before the reporting?
[...]
If the old rules are fading away, there have to be a few new ones to take their place. There can’t just be anarchy.”
That was guaranteed to raise the ire of another Guardianista, Jeff Jarvis, who blasted back:
“But what happens when you take away the label journalist and just call the person a witness? Does that person have to live by Tomasky’s rules? Or can that person still tell people what she heard and saw? Isn’t that simply put free speech?
I’m rather appalled that Tomasky also thinks that political candidates of all people ought to be able to benefit from the cloak of secrecy enabled by his rules. He makes it a club and if you violate the club’s rules and report what an elected official said, what happens to you? You get ejected?”
Do read both pieces – they’re more nuanced than my quotes imply.
My gut reaction went with Jeff – while I can see the path to the each-for-his-own journalistic chaos to which Michael alludes, it also seems inevitable. I’m not sure how traditional journalistic rules of engagement (off the record, on the record, scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours) can be enforced when everyone has a camcorder in their pocket, and an easy way to reach millions via WordPress and some Googlejuice. In the reporting of public, or semi-public, or even private events where there are more than a few present, the only battle left is over who does the story best, and gets it up first.
This, then, is less an issue for journalism, more one for political campaigners and masters of spin. Just a few dozen silly words in a campaign of tens of millions of carefully scripted ones can be amplified to a volume far greater than one of those speeches. Thus, tragically, the only logical response is for the candidate to clam up; treat every moment as a moment on Newsnight or Meet The Press.
(There is, of course, another response – to let all the candidate’s prejudices and ill-thought-through half ideas hang out like some kind of… well, blogger – but we, as voters, hardly seem ready to accept such an unvarnished, unairbrushed product.)
The implication of all those could be that, ironically, candor dries up because this is an age when everybody can be a reporter if they want to. Jeff pleads for openness on all sides, yet politicians might move even further in the opposite direction. That’ll be a sad day, and one that will have profound implications for a political reporting machine left with even less to work with.
But, then again, it has long been crazy to imagine that a candidate could push one message to the media, and a less guarded one to semi-public gatherings of friends. This has been the reality for a while now. Call it citizen journalism if you must, but just don’t be surprised a candidate has finally been bitten on the arse by it. I doubt he’ll be the last.
What do people actually want from news? I’m wondering if it’s a question we should be asking a little more often.
Let me explain. I’m at a super-smart gathering of media academics and practitioners in sunny LA, at USC’s Annenberg school for communication. The conference is called Re:Public, is organised by Harvard’s Berkman Centre, and has proved quite fascinating. We’re talking about media, its relationship to democracy and society, and how technological upheaval and rapid change is changing everything.
There’s been some searingly clever thinking presented by speakers including “superstar socialologist” Manuel Castells and Cluetrain Manifesto author David Weinberger. We’ve had breathtakingly pretty graphical representations of the blogospheres presented by Berkeman’s John Kelly. A variety of smart industry figures have given their thoughts, led by the BBC’s Richard Sambrook and his provocative keynote on the first evening. Participants are passionate, and concerned, about the state of journalism, and the world.
But, until Charlie Beckett from the LSE raised the point in a question during one session yesterday afternoon, there hadn’t been specific mention of user demand driving supply. As Charlie pointed out, there was a danger we were sitting around simply trying to work out how to continue doing what we want to (i) consume and/or (ii) continue producing. The group was, he suggested, ignoring the usefulness of the market in helping create journalism that was interesting and relevant (a theme he expands on in his blog).
I think Charlie’s right. The assumption among some here seems to be that either it’s not journalism that’s broken, or (conversely) it’s too far gone to rescue (and both views appear to live alongside each other, oddly). Neither diagnosis is a reason for action so in the meantime, goes the argument, let’s focus on the business model. Or the media landscape. Or the audience’s attention span. Let’s address class structure, or a digital divide, or the disenfranchisement that is the problem.
All those things are big, important things to tackle (although you might wonder if we in the media industries have the power to put them right). But no analysis can be complete without taking a look at how journalism – this information so vital to democracy and community – is actually delivered.
Taking a copy of the LA Times as an example, simply because it’s local and handy and described by one participant as the West coast’s most important news source, you have to say things could be better. For instance, this front page tale about safety checks on US airliners isn’t sure if it’s a human interest, business, aviation or travel story, and ends up being none of the above – at huge length. It sat, on the front page, alongside a long apology for, and probe into, a reporting cock-up on a story about an attack on rapper Tupak Shakur, also delivered at remarkable length.
Both stories were run without the design tricks we’re used to in Europe – big photographs, graphics, breakout panels. Because every angle had to fit inone long run of copy they struggled, structurally. Both were, as a consequence, real chores to read. They show, I’d suggest, that it’s not just the internet that’s driving readers away from print. [Later: Meanwhile, TV here veers between the highbrow of Sunday mornings and the crazily tabloid remainder. Fox and domestic CNN are almost comedic in their approaches to big stories. Finding a journalistic middle ground is proving difficult - maybe magazines?].
Serious journalism was described at the conference, repeatedly, as something like broccoli, or medicine the citizenry needs to spoon down, no matter how unpalatable, if democracy is to survive. That’s despite the fact investigative, or civic, journalism is still seen inside the industry as being at the top end of what we do. Yet I struggle to think of another industry that views its premium product as something akin to a nasty cough syrup – necessary, good for your health, but irredeemably foul-tasting.
So, a modest proposal: despite all the interest in non-commercial funding for civic journalism (which may just be an excuse for the actual journalism not to adapt, improve and reach out to more people), wouldn’t it be more exciting if all this change – in business, landscape, audience expectations – also led to experimentation with new, profitable ways for mainstream journalism to engage with the big issues in ways that were – whisper it – palatable?
And that, to return to the start, is why we need to ask people what they want from their news.
* This is first in a new occasional series, called The Last Post, where – thanks to the inconvenience of having a day job, and being somewhat lazy – yours truly arrives at the arse end of a raging internet meme to offer up some half-baked and ultimately unenlightening musing on stuff you’ve been reading about elsewhere for days. Stay tuned!
I’ve been watching with wonderment as All The Big Bloggers soil themselves in fury over BusinessWeek journalist Sarah Lacy’s splendidly misguided attempt to interview Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg at the South by Southwest digital festival in Austin, Texas. [See it all on video, or just the worst bit]
I watched from the discomfort of my desk here in London, and was going to try and thread my miscellaneous thoughts into some grand meta-theme, But, frankly, having popped my back carrying my MacBook to Manchester and back yesterday, I’m hardly in the mood.
Instead, some bullet points, arranged through the painkiller haze in roughly in the order they occurred to me. We all prefer lists, don’t we? It’s just like real PowerPoint, after all.
• First, some sympathy for Lacy. Indeed, my first idea for this post was to complain that the audience simply blithely turned up without doing any background research on Lacy at all. I mean: have they read BusinessWeek lately? If they were looking for insight or revelation, they’d have done better heading for the bar. They shouldn’t have been surprised at the soft-sudding Zuckerberg got, or the BusinessWeek hack’s clear belief she was a big part of the show (as so wonderfully caricatured by Paul Carr). But then I thought nobody would get the gag – sarcasm doesn’t work on the page, does it?
• Then, I came to think of it, I’d seen Lacy in action before – she “interviewed” Kevin Rose at LeWeb in Paris in December. I’d rated her session pretty pointless and anodyne then, but hardly worthy of a blog post, let alone a salvo of abuse.
• The person who suggested that Robert Scoble should have stepped on stage and done the interview instead proves only one of two things: (i) that satire is alive and well and spending some time in Austin, Texas OR (ii) that crack abuse is still worryingly prevalent in the interactive industries. And proves my next point, which is…
• Lacy does get more abuse, I’m convinced, because she’s a woman, and good looking. Were she a grey-haired, paunchy old man from BusinessWeek, she’d have been written-off, I’m sure, as a bit lame, but the scandal wouldn’t have erupted so.
• Lacy doesn’t help herself by using flirting as an interview technique, or by making clear in a video interview after The Event that she’s so big-time and Big Business Writerly that she hardly needs to pay attention to the geek audience which only wants to know about APIs and shit. Jeff Jarvis makes some good points about what went wrong with her interview. I’d offer that she seemed more concerned about how she came across – through a lens irrelevant to the setting she was actually in – than how her interviewee came across, or the utility of the whole exercise to the audience.
• Once she made that mistake, it quickly became clear how really, really dangerous it is to be slightly rubbish in front of the wrong audience. Once, it was possible to make mistakes at a geek gathering and recover. I’ve seen far worse than Lacy’s performance pass unnoticed. Conference hosts and speakers who were patently unprepared and/or drunk. Genuinely shocking presentations (one, memorably, invoking the memory of Ghandi to sell rubbish mobile phones – buy me a drink and I’ll tell you about it sometime) and the accidental spilling of company secrets which would – had they left the room – got people fired. Now, all the audience is always on – Twittering away, with a blog to fire off on at length later, interconnected to the nth degree with everyone else in the room, and everyone who gives a damn in the rest of the world, shielded by – if not anonymity – enough distance not to be actually, physically, banjoed by the person they’re insulting. Thusly, and uninhibited, vast waves of geek ire roll out across the ether at the speed of light.
• Finally, a little self-loathing: we conference-guzzling, globetrotting massively digitally connected geek blogextroverts are cocks. I mean – really. We’re writing long essays all over the webs about a BusinessWeek hack of limited renown interviewing – poorly, but not criminally badly – a techie of massive potential wealth but non-scaling personality (or, by the sounds of things, insight. This happens – genius people manage to crank out one brilliant thing but don’t have much more to say or, in the end, do). We could focus our efforts on stuff that matters, and leave the poor Sarah to slowly realise her sucky stage skills are neither Alpha, nor Omega, nor even really yesterday’s news. Is this – really and truly – the most significant thing to come out of SXSW? If it is, no business should send anyone to this gathering again.
“Clinton’s strategist, Mark Penn, tried to downplay the importance of momentum. ‘Winning Democratic primaries is not a qualification for who can win the general election,’ he told reporters.”
Umm… no, but it is the only qualification for those Democrats who want to have a go at the general election.
Sometimes, it’s true, strategists can be so busy staring at the blue sky in the distance they lose sight of the shit-filled ditch just ahead.
[And to add, before anyone else does: I know what he really means is Obama's not the man to take on and beat the Republicans later this year. It's the riff the Clinton campaign use a lot; that, somehow, a figure as polarising as Clinton is the only person to take on McCain. That's crazy too. And I think that if I were a Clinton strategist I'd be trying something new, because I'm being thumped by the man I'm putting down as an inexperienced leader and sucky campaigner.]
I think the proposed merger is a bad idea simply on business terms – these things rarely work out. But there are some interesting, broader persepectives floating around.
TechCrunch is saying it’s all going to be fine, arguing the deal will both create more competition (good for consumers) and… er… reduce competition (good for smaller players). If that confuses you now, you may not feel much more enlightened after you’ve read it. They’re probably right about Google being afraid, though. And I really can’t be arsed with Flickr protestrs unhappy at Microsoft’s shareholders, rather than Yahoo’s shareholders, owning their photo-sharing services. You are sop0wned, as I think the kids like to say, either way.
Meanwhile, the Subtraction blog is making the point that design couldn’t save Yahoo, which might come as no surprise to most. But the post does remind us that many bits of Yahoo are, indeed, wonderfully designed… which is not something we can say about many bits of Microsoft. It’s interesting that design has played a huge role in Apple’s revival, yet Yahoo’s leadership in web design has apparently gone unrewarded.
