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Who’s a journalist, who’s not, and why it doesn’t really matter anyway

by on 17 April, 2008 in Current Affairs, Digital revolution

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.

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Serious journalism’s broccoli complex

by on 29 March, 2008 in Current Affairs, Digital revolution, New Media

mediarepublic_logo_400x294smallthumbnail.gifWhat 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.

[Note: this post edited on 30/3/08]

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The Last Post:* Lacy, Zuckerberg and how being slightly rubbish is more dangerous than ever

by on 11 March, 2008 in Current Affairs, New Media, Web/Tech, Weblogs

* 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.

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Clinton campaign may be in more trouble than it knows

by on 14 February, 2008 in Current Affairs, Strategy

From today’s coverage:

“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.]

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More perspectives on Yahoo + Microsoft

by on 5 February, 2008 in Current Affairs, Digital revolution, New Media, Web/Tech

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 so p0wned, 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.

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Good grief, Yahoo

by on 4 February, 2008 in Current Affairs, Digital revolution, New Media, Strategy, Web/Tech

I do hope Yahoo’s beleaguered top brass didn’t spend all weekend thinking up this defense strategy.

“Yahoo Inc would consider a business alliance with Google Inc as one way to rebuff a $44.6 billion takeover proposal by Microsoft, a source familiar with Yahoo’s strategy said on Sunday.”

You’re supposed to be in competition with them, no? Indeed, that’s why you’re in this hole. Unless you really, really think content – the only bit of your business in which there isn’t real overlap with Google (and even then…) – is where your future lies. Really?

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Facebook’s a nuisance, isn’t it?

by on 30 January, 2008 in Current Affairs, Digital revolution, New Media, Web/Tech

We always knew that Facebook had the capacity to turn into a right pain in the arse. All those emails to tell you there were emails waiting for you, and the friend requests and the spammy events invites and the poker invites and the quiz likeness challenges… you couldn’t deny that Facebook overcame the old Friendster problem of there being nothing to do on a social network. But are you really so keen to be allocated new tasks?

On Facebook, it feels like you’re stuck aboard a raft in a sea of wasted time: stuff to do all around, and not a drop that actually matters.

All of which you might say is a pretentious way to start my personal Facebook backlash, which isn’t what I want to do. Backlash is too violent a term for what is, really, a slow incoming tide of weariness. Truth is I’ve just been using the site less, without really thinking about it.

The Facebook application that bridges the site with Twitter was the breakthrough; it means I’ve started using Twitter more, finding its simple mechanism for releasing inane status updates to be a refreshing change to Facebook’s bloat. I’ll doubtless stay a member of Facebook, just in case anything happens on it of professional interest. And it is a way to stay in touch with some folk. But I’ll end up going there no more often than the dull, besuited world of LinkedIn.

Weariness isn’t very cerebral. But, luckily, others are coming up with smart reasons to ease up on the Facebook obsession. Tom Hodgkingson, in the Guardian the other week, famously took issue with pretty much everything to do with the site, not least the political views of some of the its backers (views which, it must be said, are not unusual in Silicon Valley, or the tech world). In the Observer last year, John Naughton didn’t like the company’s crazy valuation and Microsoft links (although, again, neither is unusual in the digital world).

It’s an issue of trust, says Mark Glaser of Mediashift. He points to lots of bloggers quitting the site because of privacy concerns, which always seems a little odd to me – putting personal details on Facebook (or your blog) and then complaining about a loss of privacy is like a stripper complaining about being spotted nude.

Glaser’s points get closer to the reasons for my apathy, but privacy really isn’t a concern. There’s an obvious cause and effect here, folks, and it’s naive to imagine there isn’t some kind of trade going on as you carefully type in all those favourite movies, books and TV shows to your profile. You gain a way to pass the time, make connections, project self, or whatever the hell else you do on social networks or your blog. In return, someone somewhere is selling your demographic like it’s going out of fashion fast, and harassing you to spread their crappy Facebook application to all your friends so they can get some scale and, eventually, payback of some kind.

Just like Second Life did, Facebook thinks it’s a platform. But if it is, that’s only in a very narrow sense. On the real platform – the internet, the only platform that matters – the utility of the thing isn’t compromised by the profiteering around the outside. The email still works. All your friends don’t get spammed because you click on a misleadingly titled button. You can choose to spend all your time at earnest, useful places. The maddening crowd feels far away.

On Facebook, it’s in your face. So that real-world social faux-pas is only a click away. Facebook’s Inbox occasionally carries a message from a dear, lost friend, but it’s always clunky and full of group spam. And, below, you’ve got a million-and-one requests for stuff you’ll never do – no, I don’t bloody well play online card games. You’ve still to figure out what the hell a poke actually means.

In other words, it’s all a bit of a pain in the arse. And that, I suspect, may slow its growth more than any well-argued concern about libertarian takeovers, or frets that potential employers will deny us jobs based on our stated favourite films or an unfortunate SuperWall picture.

Facebook’s founders could ease the hassle factor, and pursue a course of locking down on development on their “plaftorm”, a little like Apple plans to do with the iPhone or console developers do with games. They could make sure only applications which meet a certain minimum standard see light of day.

But you have to doubt they’d do anything quite so communistic. And, with users unable to find ways to navigate through the noise, maybe boredom will slowly kill something that was only ever a diversion. By that point, I’m sure we’ll all have found something new, anyway.

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Ready for a seismic, and lasting, shift in TV viewing

by on 21 January, 2008 in Current Affairs, Digital revolution, New Media, Television

I’ve had a post in draft for weeks. It was going to wonder aloud about whether or not US TV ratings would recover from the ongoing writers’ strike. The strike has seen hit shows grind to a halt, the Golden Globes reduced to a press conference and – most scandalous of all – a US presidential primaries campaign pass without a Daily Show to lampoon its many absurdities (it’s back now, although weaker for not having its usual team of writers).

The strike is all about writers getting some of the money made online from new distribution channels such as video downloads. There’s an irony there, because you have to imagine that this strike, combined with those ongoing trends towards on-demand entertainment via the internet, DVD and Tivo, could prove devastating to the conventional broadcast TV that makes the serious money.

Faced with strike-hit schedules full of dull repeats and unscripted reality shows, viewers are doing other things. They’re turning off the broadcast TV. They’re developing habits which, in a rapidly changing world, may not be undone. After all, it’s rare people are offered choice and then volunteer to hand it back.

What was holding me back from finishing that drafted post was an apparent complete lack of data about changing habits. It seemed to be the question nobody, with the odd well-hidden exception, was talking about.

Well, that’s changed in the last few days. The numbers are finally in, and its bad news for networks. More than a third of Americans have changed their media consumption habits because of the strike, with the heaviest TV users being hardest hit – and making the biggest changes. They’re watching DVDs. They’re surfing the net. They are – Good God! – reading more.

While this World Screen report tries to paint a positive picture – saying the strike makes scripted hit shows even more important – they leave the most telling line to the end.

Michael Dowling, the CEO of Interpret, [says]: “As top shows disappear from prime time, viewers may go back and view critically-lauded TV series they missed the first time around, play more video games or watch more movies on DVD. Interpret’s past research has demonstrated that consumers’ media habits are already splintered, and the strike is accelerating those changes.” [my emphasis]

There. Habits were already “splintered” – the much heralded atomisation of media, and its consumption, has already hit TV, just as it has print and radio.

Now, a third of viewers may not sound like a great deal. But the US is a big country, and US TV producers seem to lose their jobs over pretty tiny shifts in audience figures. If even one percent of the US population doesn’t get back to its former levels of viewing – or even just changes the way it views TV – it seems to me you’ve got a problem.

Opinion is divided on what happens next. Robert J Elisberg, writing in the HuffPost, suggests the networks will fold because there’s just too much money at stake. But we shouldn’t be surprised that the networks are rattling sabres too – NBC boss Jeff Zucker is already talking of a revolution in the lavish ways US television is made, largely because of the opportunity the strike has afforded networks to cancel contracts and change the way things are done.

That revolution may happen whatever the outcome of this strike. It’s hard to imagine that revolution won’t come to the UK too, even if the BBC finds itself with higher barricades than most because of its public funding. Although even that’s not entirely secure, it seems.

Either way, it’s hard to imagine this strike not having a huge and lasting impact on the production and ratings of traditional network television.

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A video every journalism student should watch

by on 9 January, 2008 in Current Affairs, Digital revolution, New Media, Web/Tech

hillarybarack.jpg

Hillary Clinton & Barack Obama, by Evan Vucci (AP). Used under license. Some rights reserved.

Please forgive the work-related puffery. Or don’t, damn you.

But this video – Obama’s Paranoia Factor, produced as part of Guardian Unlimited’s US elections coverage, mightily entertained me, and I thought it might appeal to the journalism educators I know read this blog from time to time.

It shows the Guardian’s US correspondent Suzanne Goldenberg on the hustle earlier in the week (you know – way back when we thought Barack Obama was unstoppable). The film graphically demonstrates how the Obama campaign had become more secretive and controlling as it moved into the lead (also noted, if only in text, by the New York Times).

Suzanne’s in fine form as she beetles round interviewing campaign workers, fending off absurd requests from officials to stop doing what every good reporter does – asking lots, and lots, of questions. You don’t often get to see a journalist at work like this, which is what might make it useful for those j-deans out there.

Our exclusive series of election videos are, incidentally, proving a huge hit – imho they’re among the best bits of made-for-web journalism we’ve ever done. They’re doing much of what we first set out to do with video last autumn; tell the story using video when it’s appropriate, in a way that’s true to our values and style, and in a way that’s different to anything you’ll see on conventional TV – or other websites. They’re being put together by a talented US-based team assembled by Guardian Films, and including our own in-house producers, journalists and editors.

But we’re still learning – do let me know what you think. And do check out our Deadline USA blog – another new launch I think’s steaming along very nicely too.

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Lessons in diplomacy (part two)

by on 1 January, 2008 in Current Affairs

How the world changes in 24 hours. Voice of America reports:

“The United States Monday appealed for calm in riot-torn Kenya and urged the prompt resolution of irregularities from last Thursday’s presidential election. The State Department backed away from a statement Sunday congratulating incumbent President Mwaki Kibaki as the election winner.“

The New York Times, meanwhile, has shoved Kenya off its front page, and well down the international agenda. But at least it has moved away from its slightly patronising (and, I suspect, misleading) “tribal fighting” line of yesterday. It now acknowledges the rioting is along ethnic lines, but was sparked by the “knot of rage [that] seems to be moving across the country” about the electoral fraud. No excuse, of course, but nor is the violence random.

The paper appears not to be reporting the dramatic change in the State department’s view of the elections. I daresay we should be grateful they’ve changed their position at all, even if the shift is mostly unnoticed.

Some of you may be wondering why I’m so interested in Kenya – especially when, it seems, US media is already treating this as a story of distant fighting in a country not to be cared about. Well, we were there in the late summer of last year, and there’s nothing like seeing a country and meeting a few of its people (and seeing the desperate, grating poverty of much of the population, despite our cosseting as western tourists) to sharpen your views on a place. Even in August, they were excited about the elections. It appeared to be a country improving fast – albeit from a very low base. No more.

I’m happy to say that UK media is doing a better job of explaining why Kenya should really trouble us. This leader, from the Christmas (07) edition of The Economist, already looks absurdly optimistic, but shows you what has burned away.

“Kenya may not be as sexy as South Africa, but as a haven of stability and prosperity in eastern Africa the quality of its democracy matters… Whoever wins, what matters next is that the result should be accepted by the loser and Kenyans should be seen to endorse the principle of peaceful competition… if a country as complex and poor as Kenya can hold genuine elections without civil strife, then any country in Africa can. This is its chance to set an example.”

And, as it all goes to hell, this is why we should continue to pay attention.

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