Story Curve

What's the question?

2011-07-07T06:57:00.000Z

"This time, it's palpably nasty." That's Quentin Letts, the Mail's theatre critic. West End and Westminster.

It captures what everyone now feels about the long-running so-called 'phone hacking' scandal. For half a decade it has interested and outraged people like me - the sort of people Nick Robinson dismissed on Today as "professors of journalism ethics".

But now it's on everyone's mind. And lips: 'how could they sink so low?'

But reaching the tipping point is one thing. Where it falls is another.

On 6 July at the House of Lords, a campaign was launched to press for a public inquiry. (I should declare an interest: I was asked to lend my name to the campaign, partly because of earlier blogs I'd written on this website.)

Now is the chance for the public to tell journalists about the kind of press they want - a press they would trust.

It goes way beyond News International's serial offending - though that's the priority for now: discovering the number and nature of News of the World journalists' crimes, and those of the 'investigators' they hired.

But it's important that the investigation of this scandal doesn't end there.

We, the public, need to know how the culture of contempt - a culture of which phone-hacking is just the nastiest tip of a nasty iceberg - came to be the norm in all tabloid newsrooms. We need to know more about the routine of bribing bank and DVLA clerks, doctors' receptionists, nurses... anyone standing guard over private information. And bribing policemen - something News International's Chief Executive, Rebekah Brooks, boasted to MPs about.

We need to know, too, where the police were when this story broke five years ago. Why were those bin bags full of incriminating evidence stuffed away in a cupboard for half a decade? Did they think it was enough to catch the two crooks who'd hacked royal phones? Did they think phone-hacking as a matter of routine wasn't really very criminal at all? Or was there something more sinister at work? The symbiosis of the Met and News International?

We need to know more about the links, formal and informal, between political leaders and the Murdoch empire.

We need full disclosure about and proper, informed scrutiny of the kind of people who aspire to be at the helm of News International and BSkyB. Are they the kind of people the public want in charge of so much of the media?

And we need the Press Complaints Commission to tell us why it has spent the greater part of its two decades of life failing miserably to hold the press to account - even for the most disgusting breaches; not just of the risible Editors' Code but of any understanding of human decency.

We, the public, need to decide whether to call time on the running joke that has been press self-regulation. And whether we need something else in its place.

This matters. It matters because news isn't just a business like any other. And because the one thing that distinguishes journalism from rumour and gossip - trust - is in such short supply.

Tabloid publishers and editors may be content that eight out of ten readers don't believe a thing their newspaper tells them - but still buy them.

They may once have been persuaded that more intrusion, more bribery, more phone-hacking was the way to secure their future.

They can't any more. And the public doesn't have to accept it.

Standing up for journalism, standing out from the mob

2011-06-09T17:24:00.000Z

This is the text of the keynote lecture given at Westminster University, June 8 2011 at the conference entitled: 'What makes good journalism'

This conference is part sponsored by the British Journalism Review. The Review is, of course, a very British paradox. A very necessary British paradox.

And very different from the journalism journals in, say, the United States.
Journalism is still a trade here in the UK. Unlike America, journalists have no special status, no special protection. Though even there, as John Carroll, the former LA Times editor once put it:

“It is the constitutional right of every person, no matter how depraved, to call themselves a journalist.”

Here in the UK, we’re quite rightly ambivalent about the study of journalism and the academic style of journalism that’s prevalent in the States. We tend to shuffle nervously or change the subject when people try to talk about journalism in academic terms. We see journalism as a doing thing. Something you do by instinct.

Talking to people. Having a persuasive and personable manner when you’re trying to get your hands on that key fact. Listening to, following hunches. Knowing something doesn’t smell right. Weaving compelling narratives.
The American journalism reviews are wonderful things in their way.
But they have little ink on their fingers. Never feel to me like they know much about staring at a camera with the clock running down and the story breaking round you.
And that’s the great achievement of this thing called the British Journalism Review. The paradox. That it’s a thoughtful place. A place working journalists think over what they’ve done; think over the big questions they’ve had to answer. But a place that absolutely does not lose contact with our trade.
And that’s a tribute to Bill Hagerty and his team.
If I had one observation I’d like to make about this excellent conference. One question I’d like to ask, it’s this. Where is the audience? Where are those our trade touches? Our victims, if you like.
I ask that question partly because they are almost always the missing element when we come together to talk about ourselves. And partly because the people formerly known as the audience – as Jay Rosen calls them – are now, it’s often argued, our partners in our trade.

How many of you know this man?
He’s Sohaib Athar. The IT consultant who moved to Abbottabad in Pakistan for a quiet life.
And found himself live-tweeting the kill or capture operation that killed rather than captured Osama bin Laden.
He tweeted what he heard and what he saw.
But hadn’t the faintest idea what it was that he was hearing and seeing.
Journalist? Or the kind of faithful, eyewitness we journalists have always sought out at great events.?
How many of you know this photograph?

Probably one of the most famous photographs in the world.
The Twitpic image of US Airways flight 1549.
Captured not by a journalist. But by an eyewitness.
And already around the world before “journalism” had got its boots on.
Journalism?
Or again, the kind of faithful eyewitness journalists need to do their job?
And even if you aggregate thousands, millions of examples of accidental witness, does that make it journalism?
How does this stack as journalism against the work of, say, Brian Hanrahan, Kate Adie, Jeremy Bowen, Martin Bell and John Simpsone. Or of course the great Martha Gelhorn. All celebrated at the Imperial War Museum North’s exhibition on war reporting.
Now, I’m pretty clear – and I suspect many in this room are pretty clear – about the difference between them and accidental witnesses like Janis Krums the guy who shot the Hudson plane picture. Or Sohaib Ahtar?
But you know, I’m starting to lose count of the number of conferences and think-ins and seminars and panels where there’s one question on the agenda. How is new media changing journalism? Not, how do new media and journalism overlap. But how the fundamentals of our trade are changed and changing.
You know the questions as well as I do.
Do we still need reporters and correspondents in the age of You Tube and Twitter?
Do we still need investigative reporters in the age of Wikileaks and crowd-sourcing?
Do we still need columnists and leader writers in the age of the blogger?
There’s an underlying assumption at all levels in our business that paid-for, deliberate, mainstream journalism has to make itself more like amateur, happenstance, random social media. That we have to embrace new media and social media and change our assumptions about journalism. There’s even a strong thread in the current privacy debate that goes: if Twitter can spread rumour around the globe at the speed of light, we must be allowed to do that too.
I usually find myself in a minority when I argue that journalism is different from, distinct from the new forms of communication that the web and social media enable.
That it’s a very narrowly, closely defined region of the information universe. That it isn’t, can’t be, mustn’t ever be the same as or part of the white noise of the global mob.
I find myself in a minority for a very good reason.
Journalism is very hard to stand up for.

I suggest you try it. Not here, among friends. Outside. In the real world. But be prepared for hollow laughter. Derision.
When was the last time you saw a journalist as hero in a film or TV drama? It was probably Bill Nighy in State of Play back in 2003. Though the fellow played by Ben Miles in Peter Kosminsky’s The Government Inspector was a pretty good chap, too.
One of the recent TV cults was The Killing. Remember the role of the press in that? Correct – the mercurial, anonymous mob who magnified every rumour. Took every misunderstood half-truth and made it a scandal. Decided who was guilty and made the story fit. Oh – apart from the guy who wanted to suck the Birk Laarsen’s story dry for his own career.
How very different from the home life of the great British journalist.
Well, we know that’s not true.
In early June 2011, BBC Radio produced one of the most riveting programmes about journalism I’ve heard for some time. It was the story of Kim Cotton – Britain’s first surrogate mother. You’ll remember, she was paid £6,500 to have a childless couple’s baby. And more than twice that to tell her story to the Daily Star.
You could say she was foolish. You could say she was greedy. But she was also trashed by the press. Routinely. Cruelly. Almost casually.
“Kim Loses Her Money Box” – was how the News of the World headlined her hysterectomy.
Asides by her brother were turned into major family rows – rows that never actually happened. Inaccuracies. Distortions. Manufactured stories. Black and white judgments. Cruelty. Verbal abuse.
But as Kim confronted each of the journalists who’d written about her, one thing stood out. They really didn’t get it. Really didn’t get how they looked to the public. People who weren’t journalists.
And it wasn't just the tabloids. Polly Toynbee expressed mild regret for what she called her ‘waspish’ comments. But they were comments that misrepresented her subject and her motives. A tad more than 'waspish', I think.
While the other, tabloid, editors and journalists said, more or less. What did you expect? Not me, guv. It’s the system.
Perhaps Kim Cotton was a victim. Perhaps she just lost control of her own publicity. Either way, it makes uncomfortable listening - especially if you put yourself in the position of an ‘ordinary member of the public’. Wondering – ‘how on earth could these people think what they were doing was right?’

We have to accept that most of the public we claim to serve don't like us. Our brand is toxic.
The IPSOS/Mori monthly poll asking ‘who do you trust’ should be on every journalist’s desktop. Our low standing is consistent.
It doesn't matter that most of us have never hacked a phone. That most of us have never set-up a victim; egging them on to commit the very offence we're purporting to expose. That most of us have never bribed a policeman, a DVLA clerk, a doctor's receptionist to break the law. That most of us don't make up interviews and quotes. That most of us check our facts. Most of us go into a story looking for the facts that will overturn our prejudices as well as those that might confirm them.
But our brand is poisoned by those who do. And sneer at those who don't. And by editors and executives who deny or forget that they happen on their watch.
We know that there's a culture of contempt in too many newsrooms. Not just the necessary contempt for wealth, power and celebrity. But for the public that we journalists claim to serve.
Nick Davies described his book Flat Earth News:

"a snapshot of a cancer … I fear the illness is terminal."

John Lanchester went further in the London Review of Books.
Journalists are, he wrote:

"... indifferent to their own best traditions of independence, recklessly indifferent to the central functions of reporting and checking facts ... and in far too many respects, simply indifferent to the truth. There is a growing, industry-wide failure to be sufficiently interested in reality."

These are tough words. But if we’re going to stand up for journalism. And make it stand out from the digital mob, we have to accept they might be true.
The public isn’t stupid, you know. They know that what is true of MPs, the police, the bankers, financial services is true of us journalists. That without some kind of independent scrutiny, inward looking groups and professions do things not because they’re right. But because they can.
MPs expenses scandal. The bungling at Soham. The banking collapse. Payment protection mis-selling. It’s because the public should know what’s happening in the dark that we legitimise journalists’ nosiness. That’s what we mean when we insist that institutions are accountable. That’s what we mean when we say sunlight that is the best disinfectant.
While boarding up our own windows so tightly Miss Havisham would be reaching for the torch.
We try to argue that what makes us different is freedom of speech. We are the institutionalisation of free speech. Its bastion.
And we argue that freedom of speech is indivisible. That freedom for Panorama to expose Winterbourne View can’t be differentiated from the New of the World’s freedom to expose Ryan Giggs or Max Moseley.
We use arguments we need to protect the best in journalism to excuse the worst.
But the public knows that free speech isn’t the same as a free-for-all.
Freedom, protection, to report on the repressive organs of power and privilege is not the same as the licence to ogle the reproductive organs of premiership footballers and their Z list flings.
They hear us when we assert journalists’ right to report in and from Syria and Zimbabwe and China. That without journalists, without men and women to bear witness, challenge authority, tell it how it is. Where there are no journalists, all we have is rumour. Gossip.
Now, some of you may not be able to see the irony in that. But readers, viewers and listeners do. The public aren’t stupid.
At some point, we will have to face up to the fact that if we’re to stand up for journalism. If we’re going to persuade our various publics that journalism has a real and distinct value. Better than. Additional to social media, the mob on the web.
Then we have to be able to say. Look. This is important. And you can trust us to do it. And we will only convince our publics of that if we prove it by what we do and what we say. And we have the opportunity to do that in some of the current, big debates about our trade.

The continuing debate about contempt, for example. The Sun and the Mirror face contempt proceedings – and we shouldn’t pre-judge the outcome. But at last, the public will say, an Attorney General has finally had the courage to stop spluttering on the sidelines.
No-one wants to see newspapers prosecuted. But if that’s what it takes to get the message across that press lynchings are an offence to justice and to good journalism, then it’s overdue. And if you think this is overstating things. Ask the McCanns. Ask Robert Murat. Ask Tom Stephens. Ask Chris Jeffries.

Something similar is true of libel reform.
We all know that British libel laws are broken and need reform. We all know that they can present a real constraint on serious investigative journalism. And we’ve seen how proper, responsible scientific debate can be stifled. But you’re living in a fantasy world if we think that that’s what worries most of the public about our libel laws.
I’ve taken part in any number of debates about libel reform over the past few months. And the story from the public – from non-journalists – has been consistent.
Yeah ok … we get the bit about free speech and investigative journalism. But why did that newspaper print lies about me? Why did they make up quotes and put them in my mouth? Or take what I did say and make it mean something totally different?
Why did they portray me as a tart? Why couldn’t I get them to print the truth? A retraction? An apology? Even just tell me why they did it?
So far, the debate in the media about the media has focused almost entirely on reform to suit the media. Well, that’s standing up for journalism in a sense. But doesn’t it also mean showing our publics that we understand their anxieties too?

And then there’s privacy.
There’s little doubt, the public would be with us if we were going to court to defend our right to expose – and their right to know about – crime, wrongdoing, hypocrisy. The abuse of power.
They’d be with us if we were defending the right to intrude where intrusion is the only way to hold power to account. They’d be with us if judges – Mr Justice Eady in particular – really were making up the law on to protect wealth and power.
But we know that’s not how it’s been. And the public know it too. News Group’s lawyers didn’t even bother to argue in the Giggs case that it was in the public interest to reveal the details of an affair no-one except Mr and Mrs Giggs cared two-hoots about.
We congratulate ourselves that Max Moseley lost his ‘prior notification’ action. We nod sagely that THIS time it’s about orgies and Nazis – but we need to protect the principle so that serious journalism isn’t chilled. But the public aren’t fools. They know it’s not really about that.
So how we defend these principles is at least as important as that we defend them.
Get that wrong and the hollow laughter will still meet you when you try to stand up for journalism.

Now, to some of you, all of this will sound like heresy. Restraining a free press? Am I mad?
You’d be entitled to remind me that I’ve spent my entire career in the regulated sector. Broadcasting. And most of that in the cosseted protected, publicly funded sector. And that’s true.
For me, independent scrutiny from the Trust and OfCom were standard. Strict Editorial Guidelines that, constrained all of the practices I’ve talked about in a way that the PCC’s Editors Code simply does not.
Yet … Panorama remains one of the few truly investigative units in British journalism. And at Today, we uncovered Shirley Porter’s secret bank accounts. Exposed African exorcists here in London who were guilty of child abuse. And the local authorities who bungled keeping watch on them.
But if that disqualifies me, here are some other people to listen to. Evgeny Lebedev. One of the new breed of owners and publishers. If you didn’t catch his speech at Oxford University last month, I suggest you do so.
Evgeny excites conflicting opinions. But what is unarguable is that he is in the front line of making the news business work.
He also knows at first hand what a truly shackled press is like. What it means to have “armed raids at night by rogue elements of the state” to make the press behave. But here’s what he says about the British press:

“There is too much trivialisation … what passes as an urgent story is nothing more than tittle-tattle. And when that meaningless trivia is procured via illegal means, we are on a slippery slope as this becomes the accepted standard or norm. We must be wary of abusing our freedom, which could result in losing that very same freedom.”

And, he says:

“What has never been more under the spotlight are the role and responsibilities of the press. We must take them seriously. We must uphold them, cherish them, and nurture them. Because if we don't, we threaten press freedom and therefore we damage our society.”

Responsibilities. Evgeny is warning that if we carry on as we are, we will force statutory press regulation.
Perhaps. But the bigger danger is that we do nothing to regain our public’s trust. Do nothing to stand up for journalism and make it stand out from the mob.
Some editors get this too. Back in January, the FT Lionel Barber gave the annual Cudlipp lecture. And he talked about the importance of public trust if we were to stand up for journalism. If we were to argue that it was still valuable in the age of the web. Trust that the facts are accurate. Trust that appropriate weight has been given to context.

“Journalism is not perfect, nor was it ever meant to be. But we have allowed our standards to lapse. Let us hope we have not left it too late.”

It’s time for journalism to enter into a bit of self-examination, Barber argues.
So perhaps some owners and publishers. Perhaps some editors understand the kind of self-examination, self-criticism we need now to be able to stand up for journalism. But there’s a third player in this who is very important. And that’s the Press Complaints Commission.
Now, I’ve never had much time for the PCC. It was, you’ll remember, the wheeze that the drinkers in the last chance saloon came up with to avoid having their collective collars felt back in the early 1990s.
Though the then Culture Secretary, David Mellor, didn’t help things much by cavorting around with a lady that wasn’t Mrs Mellor. And by taking his summer break with PLO holidays
But for the first 20 years of its life, the PCC proved itself to be exactly what its critics predicted. A trade association. A toothless watchdog that slept through every raid on journalism’s reputational locker.
You’ll remember what the DCMS select committee said about its abject failure to face its responsibilities when the McCanns were being libelled over and over again.

"In any other industry suffering such a collective breakdown ... any regulator worth its salt would have instigated an enquiry. The press, indeed, would have been clamouring for it to do so. It is an indictment on the PCC's record, that it signally failed to do so."

And the PCC’s weakness was further underlined when the newspaper group responsible for those libels – Richard Desmond’s Daily and Sunday Express and Star – simply walked away from the PCC in January this year. Their message: we don’t need anyone else to tell us what we can and can’t do.
The PCC had also failed to show any leadership when it took a cursory look at the phone-hacking scandal, preferring to censure those who were insisting this criminal activity wasn’t just the work of a rogue reporter and private investigator.
But maybe – just maybe – the PCC is starting to stir. And maybe it has to if we’re to stand up for journalism as a unique, valued, skilled trade.
We probably all smiled wryly when the PCC chair Peta Buscombe told BBC 2’s Newsnight that Ryan Giggs should have come to her, rather than the courts, to maintain his privacy. And it would have been interesting to see whether News Group would have paid any attention to a body without any real sanction.
But the important thing here isn’t whether we believe the PCC could have guaranteed Giggs the privacy he wanted. It’s the fact that the PCC said it at all. The fact that it wants to be a player in what will probably be the most important debate for journalism over the coming years. What might well be the defining debate.
The balance between privacy and the freedom to report.
When I read the PCC Director Stephen Abell’s interview with Roy Greenslade last month, I was struck by the way in which he recognises he need to get onto the front foot. Not just standing up for the press. Standing up for a responsible press. He talks about reinforcing:

"… a sense of responsibility and self-restraint.”

But, more importantly, of the way in which responsibility and restraint is a defining feature of a press that stands out from social media and the free-for-all on the web.

"We've been in the position of seeing stories on Twitter that we know about and that haven't been run in the press following guidance from us … In the end, what newspapers find most marketable is credibility. You may ignore a story on Twitter. It only really matters when it is published on a trusted site."

Well, if this is an indication that we can’t let social media set the standards for journalism, amen to that.
Especially if the PCC goes one step further and devises a tougher Editors Code which places at its heart a notion of ‘public interest’ that really means in the interest of the public. Not just in the interest of publication.

Now, there are some in journalism who’ll think this is pie in the sky. Who’ll insist – you can’t place any restraint on free speech. And if you try, you’re out of touch with what’s happening on the web. In social media.
At the same time, at our most neurotic, we look across at Twitter and You Tube and Facebook and Google. And we look at yesterday’s depressing readership figures. And wonder what it is now that distinguishes paid-for, deliberate acts of journalism from the eternal murmur out there. Why anyone should bother. Let’s just get our slice of the mob’s free-for-all. If they can say it on Twitter, we can say it in our paper. We need to be part of the world where gossip and rumour rule.
That’s precisely the wrong conclusion.
We need to take a long, hard look at what it is that gives journalism its value. Not what we, inward-looking journalists value in what we do. But at what it is that our publics value.
If we act in a way that shows our contempt for our publics – and we have to accept that too many of us have too often. If we sound when we’re arguing over the contempt laws, libel reform or privacy that our only interest is in preserving our revenue streams.
And if we think that free speech means having not restraint on what we say, what we do. Then we can’t be surprised to find our publics value us not at all.
And that we will have failed to stand up for journalism. And made it stand out from the mob.

For students of history everywhere

2011-05-24T10:16:00.001Z

I thought this might be a good moment to think a bit about some of the important landmarks in press freedom here in the UK … or, more accurately, England.
1641: The abolition of the Star Chamber
This had been the monarchy’s most potent tool of repression for centuries. A court that held secret sessions, without juries and produced arbitrary judgments … all to please the King.
The abolition marked the end of the blanket censorship in England.
1694: The lapse of the 1643 Licensing Order
This was the fifty year old order that required pamphlets and proto-newspapers to be licensed before they could be published. John Milton’s tract Areopagitica was a blast against this order.
The lapse was the consequence of legislation following the Glorious Revolution of 1688, which among other things, established the sovereignty of parliament.
1727: Edmund Curll convicted for obscenity
Curll’s knee-trembler Venus in the Cloister or The Nun in her Smock was the first book to be banned for its sexually explicit content. He was charged with disturbing the King's peace – though since George I’s grasp of English was less than perfect it’s unlikely his peace was too disturbed by the book’s rampant prose.
Obscenity laws became a permanent fixture until 1960 when the Lady Chatterley trail began to chip them away.
1738: Parliament bans reports of its proceedings
Unseccessfully, it turned out. And the number of reporters recording speeches and debates grew steadily until …
1771: Parliament lifts ban on reporting
Several reporters, publishers and printers were arrested for breaching the reporting ban – but it proved no deterrent. The radical MP and journalist John Wilkes mounted a legal challenge to the ban, which MPs then lifted.
1803: Reporters allocated seats in the House of Commons
Two hundred years ago, newspapers vied with each other over the quality and accuracy of their parliamentary reporting and the gallery was one of the most important assignments a reporter could land.
1811: Hansard begins publication
The record of parliamentary proceedings wasn’t called Hansard until the end of the century, but it was in 1811 that Thomas Curson Hansard, the printer to the House of Commons, took over its production.
1840: Parliamentary Papers Act
This was the act that established qualified privilege for the reporting and publication of parliamentary proceedings. It followed proceedings for defamation against Hansard.
During those proceedings, it became apparent that while MPs were protected by privilege, reporting them was not.
1926: The BBC and the General Strike
During the strike, the BBC’s first DG Sir John Reith instructed news bulletins to report all sides in the dispute and to do so without comment.
This brought him into conflict with Labour leaders and with the Archbishop of Canterbury. But Reith feared that by deviating from his strict ‘no comment’ policy he would give the government the opportunity it sought to take over the national broadcaster, turning it into the state broadcaster ending its independence for good.
1977: The Gay News Trial
The success of Mary Whitehouse’s private prosecution for blasphemous libel over the poem The love that dare not speak its name resulted in the Gay News publisher Denis Lemon being sentenced to nine months in prison – a sentence quashed on appeal.
1988: Spycatcher cleared for publication in England
Peter Wright’s account of life in MI5 – a life that included bugging prime minister Harold Wilson’s phone – was written in 1985 and banned in England. But it was published – and imported from – almost everywhere else, including Scotland.
2000: Human Rights Act comes into force
The act, passed in 1998, established some sixteen human rights – including the rights to free expression and to the respect for private and family life.
Oh dear.
2006: Wall Street Journal v Jameel
The House of Lords judgment that consolidated the defence of ‘responsible journalism’.
2008: Offence of Blasphemy abolished
Though it seemed to many that the Racial and Religious Hatred Act of 2006 had simply reinvented it by other means.
2009: Trafigura gag revealed
The Labour MP Paul Farrelly asked a parliamentary question revealing an injunction obtained by Trafigura to prevent the publication of a report on the alleged dumping of toxic waste in west Africa.
The terms of this ‘super injunction’ meant that the existence of the injunction, let alone its content, could not be reported.
2011: Ryan Giggs named in parliament
All press freedom’s roads lead to this moment.

The historic conflicts – from the abolition of the Star Chamber, the arrest of political reporters, the struggle to resist government interference and the power of big business.
And in a world where over a hundred journalists and bloggers are in prison in places like Iran and Syria and China and Burma.
Or risking their lives to confront authority in places like Ukraine and Kyrgystan.
Is it anything short of a freedom’s magnificent miracle that here, now, in England we have, apparently for all time, established the unqualified right to know which premiership footballer has slept with which Big Brother contestant?

Memories of the BBC

2011-04-06T10:46:00.002Z

This is the text of a piece I wrote in the April edition of the BBC News Magazine.

In the end, only memory is left. What Jane Austen called:

“so retentive, so serviceable, so obedient so bewildered and so weak so tyrannic, so beyond control”

Why we remember what we remember and forget what we forget we cannot ever know. Nor whether forgetting is any different from never knowing.

It is the ‘retentive, serviceable’ memory that creates a collage from a sharp autumn day in 1978. The day I joined the BBC.

I wanted to be Controller Radio 4 that day and every day since but never was and rightly so. I am too lazy, too unintelligent and hadn’t the temperament ever to sit at the top table.

I never burned to be a journalist. It was one option. Also policeman, politician and priest.

But I did burn to be BBC. I’ve never been able to imagine any other life not even when, briefly, I worked at ITN.

The BBC co-owns my memory and that is probably quite sad but there you have it.

The memory, in Belfast, of the corpse. A prison officer murdered by the IRA. He could have been asleep at the wheel of his car but for the crimson slashes across his shirt. And the smashed glass and bloodied pockmarks in the seat.

The memory, in Blackburn, of the wet cobbled street where I cried. Deceiving myself that it was frustration that I was lost once again but knowing it was because I had finally understood what it meant to knock on the door of the parents of a murderer’s raped victim.

It is ‘obedient’ memory that tells me I always knew The World at One would be my home and so it became in 1980. Under Julian Holland it was a magical place where, in a tiny office, we would argue the whole morning over the big issues of the day, clothes and skin suffused by the nicotine of Robin Day’s cigars.

Nature mocked Julian’s journalistic and intellectual vision, giving him darkening physical blindness. He once told me it was a privilege to work at WATO but I already knew it was so.

‘Bewildered’ memory clouds my year at ITN.

I’d left the BBC in a fit of pique - not the first, not the last - at something someone in the boss class had done. But with no real idea about the outside nor much enthusiasm for it.

By chance, I think, it was the year I felt something approaching shame at the inhumanity of our trade. That we - I - could calmly compose careful, precise graphics clerking 193 deaths in the cold North Sea on the Herald of Free Enterprise.

Or of 31 tube travellers who choked out their lives on a burning escalator under Kings Cross station.

People said they made great TV.

When I came back to WATO and the BBC in 1988, one executive wrote ‘welcome home’ in a note to me.

Yeah. It was still home. For fourteen more years and in spite of the heart infection that tried to kill me, something my consultant said was “worse than cancer”.

I didn’t die and lived instead to see the most extraordinary experiment in political media management this country has ever seen. New Labour. The age of Alastair Campbell and Peter Mandelson, who told the Guardian in 1997 - apparently without irony - that it was his job to “create the truth”.

Those years, that team, the incomparable Nick Clarke at the microphone, seems now like some paused journalistic summer. With a self-possession nudging arrogance, we chased down truth in an exhilarating, thrilling but ultimately futile mission.

Futile because there seemed to grow in that decade of new Labour an indifference to truth. Some journalists took dictation from Downing Street while others gave up even trying to hold power to account, preferring instead to sulk on the sidelines, getting up peoples noses.

We tried to challenge power with fact and argument, eschewing the grandstanding and bare-knuckle brawling that seemed the norm elsewhere.

And then there was Broadcasting House, its title a genteel scream protesting TV’s 1998 coup d’etat and Radio News’ forced exile to a place called Television Centre, a 1970s industrial estate on the outskirts of Slough.

James Boyle, then the Controller of Radio 4, became a good friend though I don’t think he ever knew how much I coveted his job. He was vilified for ripping up the old R4 schedule and creating a new one that was so flawed it remains almost entirely intact thirteen years later.

His brief for BH ran to a single phrase.

“Not the Today programme”. I knew exactly what he meant but it took time to get it right.

Listeners hated it. It was over-planned, over-rigid and strained to be different. Half a year on, we chilled. Dropped the rigid formats and gave Eddie Mair the room to become what he always was – the sharpest interviewer and coolest presenter the BBC has.

Time passes and so do people and it’s the pity of time that so many of those we value, so many of our heroes, become no more than ‘tyrannic’ memory making inexplicable choices.

Why one of Gordon Cloughs interviews and not them all ? Why one of Bob Williams PMs of the hundreds we did together ? And why is the first - though thankfully not the only - memory of Nick the blazing row over an empty chair?

And Hutton?

Memory here truly is ‘beyond control’. It could be no other.

At it’s centre, an overwhelming sadness and incredulity that flawed journalism and even more flawed politics could lead to a good man’s death. Perhaps through a shame Dr Kelly felt but could never have deserved.

That’s all that matters. The reality skulking behind the game journalists and politicians play. Who knows if it could ever have been different.

“Footfalls echo in the memory

Down the passage which we did not take

Towards the door we never opened”

So that's it, then

2011-03-02T10:46:00.005Z

After 33 years minus a year and a half at ITN in the 1980s I leave the BBC at the end of the month.

Hard enough to think about, let alone actually do it.

When I first walked into Broadcasting House in October 1978, Jim Callaghan was Prime Minister and Jimmy Carter President of the US. The Shah was still in power in Iran, the Berlin Wall was intact and the IRA had yet to murder Lord Mountbatten.

I've worked with amazing presenters Sir Robin Day, Nick Clarke, Eddie Mair and editors Julian Holland, Jenny Abramsky, Roger Mosey. And hundreds more.

My first assignment on the road was the Iranian embassy siege - a very minor role that included keeping the phone box free on the corner by the Royal Geographical Society.

The first programme I edited was an edition of The World This Weekend the Sunday after a recalled parliament had voted for the task force to go to recover the Falklands. Our interview with Foreign Office Minister Richard Luce ran out of time before we could ask 'will you resign?' Within 24 hours, he had resigned.

All of these things happened, of course, before some of the people I work with were even born. My own children studied as GCSE history events I had covered as a journalist.

Time to go.

I've done all of the jobs I want except one, and I'm pretty clear that I was always temperamentally unsuited for it. And one that I didn't want - ditto.

I'm resigned to a lifelong association the Hutton inquiry, report and fall out. Maybe one of the first things I'll be able to do outside the BBC is something I was unable to do inside it - finally give my own account.

So there'll be books ... more teaching ... columns .... coaching.

And life on the cold outside. Scary.

Libel reform

2011-01-14T19:22:00.001Z

In case there's anyone out there who's anxious about libel reform - you will be, you will be - here's the video of my contribution to the Media Standards Trust debate at Gray's Inn on 11 January.

Enjoy.

Cold weather, cold reason

2010-12-21T14:38:00.002Z

'THEY must do something' ... 'THEY can't do their jobs' ... 'THEY should be fired'.

I know for a fact that if I'd been forced to sleep rough at Heathrow or shuffle forward in a seven-hour queue at St Pancras I'd be one of those shouting loudest, calling for 'THEM' to do something and snarling at the 'incompetence' of it all.

I might even have agreed with Labour's Denis McShane that the Prime Minister should be out there with a shovel, or with the Conservative Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, that:

"It can't be beyond the wit of man surely to find the shovels, the diggers, the snowploughs or whatever it takes to clear the snow out from under the planes, to get the planes moving and to have more than one runway going."

I did enough of that kind of thing when the Eyjafjallajökull ash cloud threatened to hold me under casino arrest in Las Vegas in April or while repatriating son #1 from the Netherlands this time last year.
That doesn't make it rational.
And it's the lack of rationality in so much "Arctic Britain" coverage that is a genuine weakness in our adversarial media and politics. That makes it very hard to lift our eyes from 'somebody must resign' or 'bungling bosses' and take a hard look at what's really happening - and what we should do about it.

Assumptions

Breaking away from the conventional wisdoms and assumptions might be one place to start.
It's pretty astonishing to still be reading or hearing 'Europe or America can cope, why can't we?' - though the chaos in Switzerland, Germany and France, let alone the US, was pretty lightly reported at first, we all know about it now, surely?
Even the most efficient operations in the most efficient countries don't expect life to go on uninterrupted when two feet of snow falls. They talk instead of resilience, which means reasonable recovery time - 'reasonable' in this context meaning 24 to 36 hours. Not even the Finns have found a way of preventing the snow from falling.
But yes, Helsinki airport does keep going - because it has three runways (third runway for Heathrow anyone?), using only one at a time while clearing the other two when the snow is heavy. Comparisons with Heathrow should, but rarely do, take into account that it also has half the traffic and a fifth of the number of passengers.
It's not just about de-icing fluid and grit and snowploughs - and the wages of the people required to drive them or stand-by when it's not snowing - it's about big, expensive, controversial decisions on infrastructure. Or reducing our passion for cheap flights, always available.
Does our media coverage encourage or discourage that kind of debate?
Then there's the expectation that it's 'THEY' who must do something to ensure that life goes on without missing a step - and they don't because they're stupid or 'bungling' (again) and should resign.
Now, as it happens, there probably is something in Ferrovial's management of the British airports it bought back in 2006 that needs proper journalistic inquiry - the answer to the question of whether it's invested properly in resilience is almost certainly hidden away there in its balance sheets and annual reports.
Anyone looking? Or is that just too complicated? Simpler to call for the minister's head - though, of course, he has no power over BAA whatsoever.

'THEM' and 'US'

Then, of course, there's 'US'. In those European countries which do recover relatively quickly from big snowfalls, people themselves play a large part. The communes, 'THEY', are responsible for some things; you, the motorist or house owner, for the rest. And part of resilience is accepting the inevitable.
In my part of France - where, incidentally, it doesn't snow much more often than the UK - when the snow starts, the main roads up and down the valleys are ploughed, salted and gritted pretty well straight away; farmers pitching in to help. Whether nagged, pressed or as volunteers, I don't know.
Valley-side roads and those over the hills aren't even touched. Signs go up telling you the limit of snow treatment. No-one expects anything different.
Down in the Vosges and Alps, some roads and passes just stay closed 'til the spring. You go a different way. No-one expects anything different.
In some departments, car owners have to own winter tyres and/or snow chains - and use them when they're told to. No-one expects any different.
Want the track to your house cleared? Clear it then. One of the biggest selling items in the hypermarkets and garden centres is 50kg sacks of coarse salt. Everyone seems to buy it; everyone seems to use it. No-one expects any different.

Hibernation

It's some way, of course, from the hibernation that used to grip France in the Middle Ages and which, as Graham Robb explains in his excellent book The Discovery of France, persisted right up to the start of the 20th century.

"Human hibernation was a physical and economic necessity."

Robb writes:

"The tradition of seasonal sloth was ancient and pervasive. Mountain regions closed down in the late autumn ... Other populations in the Alps and Pyrenees simply entombed themselves until March or April ... According to a geographer writing in 1909, 'the inhabitants re-emerge in spring, disheveled and anaemic'."

Perhaps the most macabre acceptance of hivernal necessity was dealing with the dead. For obvious reasons, it was impossible to bury those who couldn't make it through the long winter night - so granny's corpse would be unceremoniously lobbed up onto the roof, where the snow would keep it preserved until March or April and when the proper obsequies could take place.
That's probably taking acceptance a bit too far - for the 21st century anyway. But it does illustrate the central point.
Our insistence that our world continue uninterrupted whatever the conditions of flood, storm or snow - and that 'THEY' have to ensure it for us - is such a corrosive idea it makes it almost impossible for us to think what we really should do.
How much extra - both privately and publicly - are we prepared to pay to ensure a better resilience, knowing that it will never be 100%?
Which are the private and what are the public responsibilities? What are reasonable expectations?
How much are we prepared to change or modify our lifestyles, either to mitigate the effects of a crisis or to try to avoid it?
How much do we just have to accept?
And so on. Importantly, though, do we have a mature enough, rational enough media to feed a mature and rational public discourse where we can expect our politicians to make mature and rational decisions?
Or should we just carry on shouting a lot?

Wikileaks - the salient point?

2010-12-06T10:41:00.002Z

Pretty well everything that could be said about the Wikileaks diplodocudump has been said. Everyone's made up their mind about whether it's good or bad for the world/diplomatic communication/good government etc etc.

But here's something else to think about: what does it do to journalism?

It's an important question because, as I wrote earlier, we really do have to take care we don't lose investigative journalism and all it entails because we believe ersatz, hollowed out versions are the real thing.

We have to keep in focus, too, Wikileaks' agenda as set out by its oddly self-regarding founder Julian Assange. It and he are not friendly to journalism as we know it - and it wouldn't take too much conspiratorial insanity to construct a theory that this is all about busting traditional journalism.

Here's what Assange told an audience in London back in the summer, as reported by City University's Journalism Professor, George Brock.

Wikileaks, George Brock reports, started with a focus on places where government was least transparent:

"Then they moved on to places where 'the power structure is so sewn up that the press doesn't matter much' ... 'It's all bankrupt' he said ... 'All current political theory is bankrupt, all political thought, because we don't know what the hell is going on'.

You might have guessed by now that the established media are part of the problem. Journalists, he argues, are creating unreasonable public expectations. Their 'original sin' is to enjoy the imbalance of power. Why does someone want to read what a journalist has written? 'They're ignorant and you're not. You know more ... You can't lie but the opportunity to distort is large and prevalent.'

The reader can't see the whole picture so Wikileaks has to fill the gap. Once 'primary source material' is up on the web, the 'lying opportunities' shrink."

In essence, it's the journalism bypass theory, as popular with new media gurus as it was with Alastair Campbell and Peter Mandelson in the decade 1994-2004.

The diplodocudump was underwhelming - but that doesn't mean it was a Bad Thing; no journalist should argue that revelation itself doesn't serve the public interest. At the very least, it's about a partial correction of the information asymmetry between power and people.

But it wasn't and couldn't ever be an end in itself. Without the attentions and mediation of the very journalism he's declared broken, Assange may as well have fed the leaked diplomatic telegrams straight into the shredder (and, yes, I know they weren't actually on paper - cut me some figurative slack here) or indeed re-recorded Lady Gaga back onto the CD.

Journalism - especially investigative journalism - has many shortcomings. There's no science about what gets investigated and what doesn't; no guarantee that it's the biggest scandals - for want of a better word - that get nailed, nor that some lesser 'scandals' don't get a place in the public sphere they don't quite deserve.

No guarantee, either, that the evidence stacks up or that the 'truth' revealed is incontestable.

But because of the way most investigative journalism comes about - through a whistleblower who rightly or wrongly senses some kind of moral violation - it has that magic thing we call salience.

And it's salience that leaking on an industrial scale lacks. Leaking for the sake of leaking or in the hope of overwhelming both power and journalism as we know it.

Whistleblowing that lacks salience does nothing to serve the public interest - if we mean capturing the public's attention to nurture its discourse in a way that has the potential to change something material.

And the risk is this: that we persuade ourselves that Wikileaks-style transparency is a substitute for investigative journalism rather than the precursor of journalistic possibilities.

Let's talk investigations

2010-11-25T13:40:00.000Z

There's a lot of chatter about 'new' ways of doing investigative journalism - those 'new' ways being, inevitably, online, connected, networked, two-way, global and local etc etc.

The problem is, very few of the acts of journalism that the 'new' ways enable are actually investigative. Sure, they're ways of getting below the surface of data and issues and public policy - but 'investigative journalism' they just ain't.

This matters. Because there's any number of external pressures squeezing genuine investigation out of mainstream journalism. And it would be journalism's and the public's loss if we journalists stood by and allowed the name 'investigative journalism' to become hollowed out - but that's what's happening.

Examples. This from Vadim Lavrusik - who teaches social media at the Columbia School of Journalism in the US and for that reason alone is unlikely to be lukewarm about the journalistic possibilities of networking.

His is a beguiling account of "a society more connected than ever" in which "investigative journalists ... are now taking advantage of their online community relationships to help ... uncover potential wrongs".

He goes on to argue that 'tomorrow's reporters' will be able to:

"create contextualized social story streams that reference not only interviewed sources, but embedded tweets, Facebook postings and more."

And already, journalists are:

"leveraging the vast reach of social networks in unprecedented ways ... social media is enabling watchdog journalism to prosper."

Fine. As far as it goes. No-one could possibly argue with the benefits of networks that enable journalists to dig into any story. Or to tap into the experience and expertise that's out there. Or to commission communities and audiences to wear out some of the real or figurative shoe-leather that has to be sacrificed in the interests of reporting.

But this is, rightly, called Distributed Reporting. And it's a long way from investigative journalism, though it might well throw up leads that generate an investigation. But in essence, it's no more than .. well, basic journalism. All journalism has inquiry at its heart - anything else is PR or advertising. But inquiry is not the same as investigation.

Crowd sourcing, or community sourced mapping, is often cited as another 'new' form of investigation - but again, it's anything but and often falls some way short of even being journalism's raw material.

While it's possible to point to examples of mapping that have been robust, timely, accurate and of public use, there are - as I wrote here - those that haven't been and which, in spite of good intentions, ended up lacking rigour, being quickly out of date, misleading and inciting community behaviour that was anything but beneficial.

The third main category of 'new investigative journalism' is more properly a form of watchdog journalism' - the best UK example is Paul Bradshaw's beta site Help Me Investigate. It's a hugely successful site, of immense value which delivers a new form of networked journalism and has seeded a number of successful investigations.

But in itself, it's not investigative journalism - actually, Paul doesn't claim that it is. At its best, it's an exciting, broadly based watchdog journalism - helping keep the community's attention on the things power does in its name. And seeking answers.

All in the name?

Perhaps all we have here is a difference in terminology - but it's one that matters and matters a lot.

Investigative journalism is much more than sifting data or collecting data that would otherwise be uncollected. It's much more than asking the pointed, significant questions that take journalism beneath the surface facts. More than ensuring power is challenged.

In truth, all journalism is about one or more of those.

At some point, all investigative journalism is about uncovering something that's being deliberately hidden. Something that's it's in someone's interest to keep out of the light.

And it's about assessing the veracity, motives and context of sources that help you uncover what's hidden ... often without anything other than strong, circumstantial evidence to rely on.

It's about persistence - getting the key player to speak. Getting sight of the key document. Joining the dots hidden in confusing and often contradictory testimony.

And the relentless, self-critical checking and counter checking, testing hypotheses, testing alternative interpretations of the limited facts you have ... making the call on what you can and can't say. What's true not just in the detail but in the overall account.

The obvious point. It takes time, it takes money and it takes commitment - both of the individual reporter and of the news organisation.

Of course, inviting audiences and communities in, to use those networks to grind through what can be ground through or to add the expertise that's out there. But does anyone really think that we could have networked our way to the truth about Thalidomide or uncovered the 'third man' or identified the Omagh bombers. Or crowdsourced or community watchdogged our way to those hidden truths?

No. Thought not.

And the danger is, if we allow the term 'investigative journalism' to be applied to something that can be made to look and feel a bit like it's 'investigative' but really isn't. And which, into the bargain requires nothing of the same time, money and commitment - is a hollowed out shell - we'll lose the real thing.

Can you hear me?

2010-11-04T17:54:00.001Z

Whatever you think of Jon Stewart, his 'Rally to Restore Sanity' sticks an interesting question across the press coverage here of Al Qaeda's latest murderous plot.

Sure, that wasn't its purpose; that was more about creating a counter-voice to the vehement certainties that dominate US mid-term politics. Hence those banners:

"We could be wrong" or "If your idea can fit on a sign, you need a bigger idea."

Ho, ho. But deep inside is something that's more than just a parochial American, left/right, Tea Party/East Coast Liberal, Republican/Democrat thing. Take a look at this; it's part of Jon Stewart's closing homily:

"The press could hold its magnifying glass up to our problems, bringing them into focus, illuminating issues heretofore unseen.

Or they can use that magnifying glass to light ants on fire. And then perhaps host a week of shows on the sudden, unexpected, dangerous flaming ant epidemic.

If we amplify everything, we hear nothing."

Ring any bells? Probably.

But what's it got to do with us. And Al Qaeda. And coverage of the printer ink bomb plot?

Well, this was what Clark Kent Ervin (honestly), interviewed on BBC Radio 4's The World This Weekend, had to say; he was Inspector General when the US Department for Homeland Security was first set up. He resigned and is now a member of the Department's advisory council:

"We always tend to fight the last war.

Al Qaeda finds one vulnerability in our system, exploits it and then we close that vulnerability without anticipating what the next vulnerability they might exploit is."

Which brings us to the obvious question. Is the way that the British press tends to cover stories like this calculated to help us - citizens, voters, politicians - focus on anticipating future vulnerabilities?

Or is it - by raising alarm and fear and hunting for 'bunglers' - better calculated to ensure our political discourse and decision-making is backward looking and aimed principally at career preservation?

Take the Daily Mirror: its paper edition had the headline:

More Air Bombs Head for UK

Frightening headline suffering only from a complete lack of supporting evidence. It's almost as if truth doesn't matter. The Mirror website has the more restrained:

"Al-Qaeda may be plotting new Lockerbie-style bombing, experts warn"

adding it

"may herald the beginning of a new wave of al-Qaeda terror attacks"

and

"Britain could be among the frontline targets"

It could, of course. Or not. Without evidence, take your pick.

But what does this feel most like? "Holding a magnifying glass up to a problem" or "lighting ants on fire"?

And while it's vital, of course, that any security loopholes are closed, is this kind of fact-free, fear-focused journalism more likely to produce sound judgments about the true threat or decision-making that's more anxious to show it's across the last terror threat than that it's trying to anticipate the next?

The Attention Deficit of Crowds

2010-11-04T17:49:00.003Z

Few of us haven't read James Surowiecki's The Wisdom of Crowds. Its positive slant on wise crowd behaviour is striking, compelling and - if you don't think too hard about it - persuasive. Striking, too, is the total absence of counter evidence; the testimonies of individuals crushed under the heels of history's self-harming rabbles.

If you haven't come across TWOC, the notion is this, concisely expressed in its subtitle: 'The many are smarter than the few.' Obviously, it's not quite that simple. There are conditions, but, once met, crowds - the argument goes - are wiser than you would predict or expect; often wiser than the experts.

They can guess the weight of an ox, for example, without much knowledge of bovine density. While so-called experts, on the other hand, locked in groupthink, will do daft things like invade the Bay of Pigs or precipitate the Wall Street Crash.

It's an idea that matters to us journalists. A lot. One of the transformations we've undergone in the past decade is to realise that 'the people formerly known as the audience' (the crowd) may be wiser, usually, than the few experts (we journalists). They might be closer to, or in, the story.

So we tell ourselves that our jobs now are a conversation with those wiser than us. We work with our former audiences, devise new ways of networking them and the information they have.

One approach to networked journalism that caught on fast was crowdsourcing ... and please don't pretend you don't know what it is.

In theory, crowd-sourced news and investigations are networked journalism perfection. In the same way that in classical economic theory markets are perfect and consumers perfectly rational. That's to say, not at all. Not a bit. Substitute 'herd' for 'crowd' and you start to get the drift.

Here's an example.

Penurie

During the October, anti-Sarkozy strikes, my local paper in France - Le Journal de Montreuil - launched what was, on the face of it, a fantastic piece of crowd-sourced journalism. But it turned into a journalistic travesty.

Now, Le Journal is a fantastic local paper - it's tragic that more British papers aren't as assiduous, public-minded and community-focused. It's not very 21st C - it's only been online for a year and its photographers still turn their lenses to the audience rather than players at any event.

When petrol deliveries began to be interrupted - on 18 October - Le Journal had a brainwave and set up a simple Google Map to log 'penuries d'essence' - the petrol stations that had run out. The idea was that readers emailed the paper when they found a station that was voided of fuel.

Great idea. Over the next four days, the map sprouted blue flags marking empty stations. It was exactly what real people in real communities wanted to know. Real networked news.

Except two Bad Things happened. Or rather, one Bad Thing happened and another thing didn't. Which was a Bad Thing.

After the first few days, the rush of info slowed - so the map never became complete. Worse than that, as the blue flags sprung up over the map, car owners started to panic. For most of the region, there are only three or four petrol stations within 10km. Once the nearest one was flagged, people got in their cars - with tanks 7/8 full - and headed off to the next nearest without a flag. Just in case.

Of course, the absence of a flag didn't mean the presence of petrol - just that no-one had flagged it. So when the slightly panicking driver turned up at an unflagged station to find it had no petrol ... slight turned into total turned into queues, forecourt fistfights etc, etc.

Wise crowd?

After four days, deliveries restarted. Again, at first the newly replenished stations were flagged ... until there was enough petrol in the system for no-one to care enough about the map to email the paper - though not enough to ensure there was petrol everywhere.

Le Journal's experiment highlighted the problems with crowds and crowd-sourced journalism. First - crowds aren't always as wise in practice as the theory predicts they ought to be or could be. Self-interest is a powerful driver, even within the context of an exercise in public good.

Second - networked journalism needs a much higher level of journalistic 'curation' than its advocates will usually concede. Le Journal's flagging was haphazard and failed to reflect the true situation on the ground, especially when deliveries began once again and the crowd's enthusiasm for the exercise waned.

In the end, because it promised more than 'traditional' journalism but delivered less, it was worse than useless. Worse than a reporter's daily ring-round. And you don't get much more old-media than that.

In one of the villages on the way to one of my local petrol stations, there's an old church. In the 1790s, a 'crowd' of revolutionaries took over the building and renamed it a 'temple to reason and sanity' - words they scratched into the chalk brickwork of the exterior.

'Crowds', 'reason', 'sanity'. I'm not convinced.

Did we do well?

2010-10-01T13:18:00.001Z

So, are we happy with the way the Miliband business turned out? As journalists, I mean.

Job well done? Our politics better as a result of the way we, as a whole, scrutinised the Labour leadership contest, the vote and David Miliband's self-exile to the back benches?

I don't mean, of course, are we happy with the outcome of the contest itself. Nor whether David rather than Ed should have won or "really" won. Nor whether one would be better at leading HM Opposition than the other.

No, it's more about the strength of adversarial politics which tend to work best when there's talented, eloquent advocacy emanating from the opposition benches, irrespective of which party's sitting on them. And the belief that, whichever party you support, politics is better conducted with the opposition's strongest and most experienced performers sitting at the front rather than the back.

So it's about whether we're happy that it was the failings, the limited framing of much of our journalism rather than any reality that made it inevitable that David would not be able to join Ed's shadow cabinet.

Genuine differences

It's true that there were and are genuine differences between the new Labour leader and his brother. Ed's unequivocal disowning of the Iraq war. The pace of deficit reduction.Tuition fees.

And it's true - as the BBC Political Editor Nick Robinson reported - that David thought that, to some extent, Ed's overall victory was compromised by his defeat in two of the three sections of the electoral college. (Nick Robinson's work, incidentally, was an egregious exception to this broad winge.)

We will never know whether any of these genuine differences were in and of themselves insurmountable. Genuine, ideological barriers to David serving in Ed's shadow cabinet - especially as Labour renews and repairs itself after one of its worst election defeats ever and its leadership passs from one generation to the next.

What we do know, however, is that the insistent framing of the David/Ed story made any difference between them, perceived or real, potentially crippling to effective opposition - not because there was no possible resolution to any difference of view or approach but because it was inevitable that any difference (and not all of them real) would be the sole focus of journalists in search of an easy headline.

And if it wasn't clear before the press and TV coverage of Ed's leadership address to the Labour conference that David couldn't join the shadow cabinet, it was pellucid after it.

"I think that raising a wry eyebrow with Harriet yesterday shows the dangers that can come,"

David wrote.

As Iain Watson puts it in his excellent analysis, the coverage:

" ...all but convinced him that every nuance between him and his brother would be pored over by the media at the expense of scrutinising potentially far more divisive differences at the heart of the coalition government."

Or as David Miliband himself described it:

"perpetual, distracting and destructive attempts to find division where there is none and splits where they don't exist"

Now, you can, of course dismiss this as the pseudo-rationalisation of a disappointed sibling. A way out of a tricky corner, of avoiding a fight for which he has no stomach. Perhaps, even, an admission that Labour is by nature fissiparous.

Or you can stop a moment and ask whether there might be a grain of truth here. And that whether you happen to respect the former Foreign Secretary or not, whether you agree or not with any of his views ... the loss of any talented individual of any party, however temporarily, to front line politics is not necessarily calculated to improve our self-government.

And when that loss is not about genuine, real, ideological differences beyond resolution but rather about the way in which lazy journalism's narrow, habitual and infantile framing would cast any mature debate, any mature attempt to resolve differences ... well, you have to wonder whether that's scrutiny deserving of the name.

Did we do well?

The best job in Britain ...

2010-09-22T13:10:00.003Z

... is, without doubt, Controller Radio 4, in spite of the conventional wisdom that the R4 audience excels all others in cantankerous 'nein sehen'.

All the ones I've known - controllers, that is, rather than audiences, including Mark Damazer who's currently handing over to his successor, Gwyneth Williams - found themselves eventually on the receiving end of some very pointed tut-tutting, whispered 'well I nevers' or even 'I says'.

Or worse. There were the Long Wave riots; the Woman's Hour uprising; the UK Theme intifada. Etc.

But it was James Boyle who attracted the most withering looks and sottissmo voce susurrations when he tore up the pre-1998 schedule and replaced it with ... well, with the schedule that remains largely intact to this day.

There are those who think that the best thing a CR4 can do is as little as possible. Manage to do nothing at all - no Anderson's Country, no Go 4 It - and you might be spared the chorus of suppressed sighs that a decision of any kind inevitably triggers.

This is not true. CR4s can do lots if they want - as Mark Damazer quite rightly insists. And he should know, because he did a lot. All of it improving.

At the handing over of the torch, then, here are my three suggestions for Gwyneth Williams; suggestions I am confident will not be embraced. Which explains, of course, why I would never be invited to have a crack at the best job in Britain ... however long I might sit by the 'phone.

Restore Yesterday in Parliament (YIP) to its 0830 half-hour FM slot:

This was the one big thing I think James Boyle got wrong back in 1998.

Before then, Today ran from 0630 to 0830 most of the year - with YIP on both FM and LW from 0830 to 0900 during the parliamentary terms.

But James wanted to do two things: open the network earlier, at 0600, and try to carry as many of Today's 6 million across to the rest of the schedule. YIP on both FM and LW was seen as a barrier - which it was, though not as great a barrier as it seemed to some.

It was a balanced judgment. On the one hand, the possibility of adding a percentage point or two to the 0900 (and beyond) audience. On the other, losing a prime time outlet (morning is prime time in Radioland) for that most basic function of journalism: reporting to us citizens/voters what our representatives are doing in parliament in our name.

If we're serious about restoring the status of parliament - and, as voters in a representative democracy, can we be other than serious about that? - surely there is no better first step than to restore a daily, comprehensive, mainstream report on its business in addition to the late-night Today in Parliament.

Extend The World at One and The World This Weekend to an hour:

OK ... so this might look like special pleading. Perhaps I never quite came to terms with the cut from 40 to 30 minutes ... but listening to WATO and TW2 over the election period should have been enough to persuade anyone that an hour of serious, sober, public affairs journalism in the middle of the day is little short of essential.

Martha Kearney and Shaun Ley have continued the fine forensic interviewing tradition of Hardcastle, Day and Clarke ... but in 30 minutes the opportunities for reporter investigations are fewer than they could be.

Commission a new multimedia, multiplatform World News strand:

The Radio 4 audience is clear on this - they want more world news. It was, perhaps, the most persistent theme of the letters and emails they used to send me.

There's an opportunity here - the BBC has the most extensive global newsgathering operation of any news organisation. Increasingly, its reporters are recruited locally and can offer the kind of insights that British journalists posted from London - however brilliant - never quite achieve.

Plus, audio is finding a new life on the web. Either as deeper, more involving podcasts or in combination with still images or video in those multimedia slideshows I keep ranting on about. Like this; or this; or this multimedia show on the 2010 Iraqi elections.

So what about a new WN title ... created from the ground up as part radio programme, part podcast, part interactive web product?

Like I say, I won't be waiting by the 'phone.

News of the World and the scalp hunt

2010-09-04T11:00:00.000Z

It would be a pity if the News of the World phone hacking scandal reduced itself to a hunt for Andy Coulson's scalp.

That's not to say Mr Coulson doesn't have many questions to answer - he does. But so do NewsCorp's management, the Metropolitan Police and the Press Complaints Commission. And arguably, their (selective) inaction in the face of criminal activity is at least as reprehensible as anything Mr Coulson is alleged to have done.

The NotW scandal brings into crisp focus all of the questions about the British press that make it one of the least trusted in the world. Not least the fact that it took an American paper, the New York Times, to mount and publish a proper investigation that finally got people to sit up and take notice.

The British press - with the egregious exception of Nick Davies et al at the Guardian - has been criminally silent. It is impossible to imagine that they would have held their tongue so tightly if this scandal had been about a government department or the nuclear industry.

Andy Coulson is, for all sorts of obvious but unsatisfactory reasons, the chief target. Some of the NotW's victims would relish the prospect of landing a blow on David Cameron - whose press chief Mr Coulson is. The danger is that such an outcome - which would then move the story on to the PM's "judgment" - would leave unexamined stuff that is very, very whiffy indeed.

And we should remember that when Andy Coulson's defenders tell us these new, damning allegations are coming from an unreliable source, they are from a journalist Mr Coulson was, for a time at least, perfectly happy to have working on his staff. And when they tell us that last year's Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee could find no evidence that Mr Coulson knew about routine phone hacking ... they're only telling us part of the story.

A story that's worth reminding ourselves of - or, if your main news source is a NewsCorp title, reading for the first time since those titles virtually ignored the select committee's report when it was published, and wholly ignored any criticisms in it of NewsCorp's obstructive management.

"No evidence"

Let's start with that 'no evidence that Andy Coulson knew' illegal phone hacking was a routine newsgathering technique on his paper - which it was - and that Clive Goodman, who went to jail, was a "rogue".

Here's what the committee says:

439. We have seen no evidence that Andy Coulson knew that phone-hacking was taking place.

Ok ... that seems clear enough. Except;

... that such hacking took place reveals a serious management failure for which as editor he bore ultimate responsibility, and we believe that he was correct to accept this and resign.

And as if to help us judge the veracity of Mr Coulson's assurance that he knew nothing, the committee reminds us:

431. Mr Coulson also said he had "never read a Gordon Taylor story, to the best of my recollection" although, as we have been told, it was Mr Coulson who spiked the story.

Hmmm ... Anyhow, the committee goes on.

440. Evidence we have seen makes it inconceivable that no-one else at the News of the World, bar Clive Goodman, knew about the phone-hacking. It is unlikely, for instance, that Ross Hindley (later Hall) did not know the source of the material he was transcribing and was not acting on instruction from superiors. We cannot believe that the newspaper's newsroom was so out of control for this to be the case.

441. The idea that Clive Goodman was a "rogue reporter" acting alone is also directly contradicted by the Judge who presided at the Goodman and Mulcaire trial. In his summing up, Mr Justice Gross, the presiding judge, said of Glenn Mulcaire: "As to Counts 16 to 20 [relating to the phone-hacking of Max Clifford, Simon Hughes MP, Andrew Skylett, Elle Macpherson and Gordon Taylor], you had not dealt with Goodman but with others at News International."

All of which makes the testimony of Sean Hoare, to both the New York Times and the BBC R4 PM programme, feel a bit like one piece of the jigsaw the select committee couldn't put its finger on.

The big question, though, always was about the apparent failure of NewsCorp, the Met or the PCC to take NotW's routine illegal phone hacking as seriously as it warranted. Yes, there were the prosecutions over the royal phones ... but as we know, those weren't the only victims of this criminal activity.

Here's what the committee says about this - there's a lot of it, but it's worth reading in full:

442. Despite this, there was no further investigation of who those "others" might be and we are concerned at the readiness of all of those involved: News International, the police and the PCC to leave Mr Goodman as the sole scapegoat without carrying out a full investigation at the time. The newspaper's enquiries were far from 'full' or 'rigorous', as we - and the PCC - had been assured. Throughout our inquiry, too, we have been struck by the collective amnesia afflicting witnesses from the News of the World.

449. The News of the World and its parent companies did not initially volunteer the existence of pay-offs to Clive Goodman and Glenn Mulcaire ...

the private investigator who worked with Clive Goodman and others

... and their evidence has been contradictory. We do not know the amounts, or terms, but we are left with a strong impression that silence has been bought.

455. Gordon Taylor was cited in one of the charges over which Glenn Mulcaire was convicted in 2007. In the civil action, however, the News of the World nonetheless initially resisted the claim, and on a false basis. We consider there was nothing to prevent the newspaper group drafting its confidentiality agreement to allow the PCC and this Committee to be informed of these events, so as to avoid, at the very least, the appearance of having misled us both. We also believe that confidentiality in the Taylor case, and the size of the settlement and sealing of the files, reflected a desire to avoid further embarrassing publicity to the News of the World.

467. In 2006 the Metropolitan Police made a considered choice, based on available resources, not to investigate either the holding contract between Greg Miskiw and Glenn Mulcaire, or the 'for Neville' email. We have been told that choice was endorsed by the CPS. Nevertheless it is our view that the decision was a wrong one. The email was a strong indication both of additional lawbreaking and of the possible involvement of others. These matters merited thorough police investigation, and the first steps to be taken seem to us to have been obvious. The Metropolitan Police's reasons for not doing so seem to us to be inadequate.

472. We accept that in 2007 the PCC acted in good faith to follow up the implications of the convictions of Clive Goodman and Glenn Mulcaire. The Guardian's fresh revelations in July 2009, however, provided good reason for the PCC to be more assertive in its enquiries, rather than accepting submissions from the News of the World one again at face value. This Committee has not done so and we find the conclusions in the PCC's November report simplistic and surprising. It has certainly not fully, or forensically, considered all the evidence to this inquiry.

It's hard to fault the select committee's reasoning and conclusions - hard, too, not to feel their frustration at being blocked at every turn in trying to get at the truth.

And that's why this scandal shouldn't be allowed to slide into obscure memory the moment someone is able to hang Andy Coulson's bloodied scalp from their belt.

Stained or Sullied

2010-09-02T19:33:00.003Z

"I am afraid that all of us who blog have been sullied by this experience" writes Conservative blogger Iain Dale today on his friend and, one supposes, rival Paul Staines - who writes pseudonymously as Guido Fawkes.

For it was Paul Staines who led the way in circulating rumours and innuendo about William Hague. If you were to read his latest (1200 Thursday 2 Sept) post, though, you'd have no idea of the nature of the 'story' as he originally developed it.

After the Foreign Secretary's unequivocal statement, the 'story' is, according to Staines, about Mr Hague's failure to employ an efficient press handler. That, and the Foreign Secretary's mistake in releasing the statements he did responding to the innuendos on Staines' blog. Oh, and judgment:

"All in all, he has only himself to blame for being ill-advised and has shown a staggering lack of judgment."

Do journalists care?

2010-06-08T19:19:00.000Z

This article in the online Scottish Review is a must read - especially for any journalist involved in covering the Cumbria shootings. It's by Lorn Macintyre - a writer - and it echoes many of the things I've heard from listeners over the decades, usually after (or during) coverage of traumatic events.

Make what you will of its direct criticisms of the organisation I work for, the BBC, and two of the programmes I've edited over the years, The World at One and PM - that's not the point of this blog post. The article raises much more profound questions about the assumptions we journalists take into covering events like this.

And it shines a light through the gap between those assumptions and the sensibilities of our audiences. By all means, read the article in full and reflect on it as you will - but these are, for me, the most striking questions:

Were the media engaged in "an obsessive and unsavoury inquisition into the circumstances of the deaths"?

Any journalist worth his or her salt takes it as an absolute given that the job is to act as the eyes (and ears) of the wider public. Even when the facts and details are grim. Especially when they're grim.

Could there have been anything to be gained from suppressing - or not reporting - known facts and details about the circumstances of the victims' deaths? Few journalists would answer 'yes'.

And yet ... there are limits. Over the years, there have been many images of death that - rightly - neither the BBC nor any other Western broadcaster has shown. We draw the line at the gruesome details of sexual abuse.

If we accept the need for limits, then, why are they here rather than there? And in whose interests are they drawn?

The media has an "obsession with interrogating witness after witness, those who escaped death, and those who witnessed it".

I don't know a single journalist who would describe interviewing witnesses and those who'd escaped death as an "obsession with interrogating" them. It's gathering the facts, surely; assiduous rather than obsessive.

And yet ... do we journalists stop (should we stop) to think about the effect of what, to us, is an unquestionable necessity of the job? Are we right to argue that our job ends with the disclosure of 'facts'?

How does a family member, a friend, feel when they hear these details repeated over and over in bulletin after bulletin?

I've never found this one easy to deal with - though I've been told often enough that, as a journalist, you have to harden your heart. Many news stories upset someone - but, the conventional wisdom goes, that's no concern of yours; your job is to get the facts out there.

I'm sure that's right as far as it goes. And I'm not sure what the alternative is. But this is a concern you hear over and over from audiences - and are we totally certain their expectation of us is an unreasonable one?

Is it really therapeutic for the wounded, and those who escaped the pointed barrels, to keep repeating their terrifying experiences on air?

Is it?

It's something you will often hear journalists say to those who've had an awful experience and it's advice that's often given to young reporters nervous about approaching people in distress.

'Tell them they'll feel better talking about it.'

That might be true for some; it might make them feel better or start the grieving process. But we also know that it isn't true for everyone. Do we - should we - care? So long as we get our story.

"Surely it is the duty of the police and not the media to amass evidence on each killing ... (they) should be allowed to proceed with their harrowing duties, rather than being harassed by one of the many reporters dispatched to the crime scene?"

Again, seeking to find the 'why' is a duty that every journalist would say is beyond question. After disclosing the 'who, what, where, when', it's the job of the journalist to give context; to bring expertise to bear on the known facts. To keep adding to those facts. It's what the job IS.

And yet ... when you look at the sum total of the media's job on the 'why' of Derrick Bird's killings, are we confident that they've done or are doing an unequivocally brilliant job?

Depending on the paper(s) you've read over the past few days ... the cause is a family feud; a will; a tax bill; teasing over trips to Thailand; an 'unhealthy' obsession with a Thai girl etc, etc. Or that Derrick Bird was a quiet man ... or he had a history of violence. He'd planned the killings months ago ... or suddenly snapped. His targets were chosen ... and they were random.

We know that journalism's search for the 'why' can be a messy, sometimes rambling, often chaotic job. We accept that ... but what if our audiences don't?

Is "the motive for the media's insensitive and intrusive behaviour in such cases ... not sympathy for the murdered or the bereaved, but ruthless competition"?

Very few journalists want to be second with the facts; journalism is about the new, making known something that previously wasn't known. Competition is essential to the job and, while it may not seem "ruthless", "insensitive" and "intrusive" to us ... what if that's the way it looks to our audiences?

And if we seem to have removed ourselves from 'normal' human sympathy ... does that matter? More: should we allow our motivation, either to report or not to report, to be "sympathy for the murdered"?

Which brings us to Lorn Macintyre's summary accusation ...

The microphone and the lens intrude into personal grief, exploiting the fragile psyche.

... and to the blunt question all journalists should ask themselves. What if this is true?

We might know it's not. Or feel it's not - or at least not our intention. But what if it's true?

Do we care? Should we care? And if we do/should ... what do we do?

Laws law

2010-05-31T15:51:00.000Z

Journalism has its first scalp of the new government. Inside 17 days. A new personal best. Should we be proud?

Have we, once again, brought power to heel with our watchdoggery? Stood firm in defence of the honest man and woman?

Or has journalism, true to type, proven its inability to understand its civic purpose? That the point of journalists' scrutiny is to improve the way we govern ourselves? Without that, it is just self-regarding noise.

There's a real dilemma at the heart of this and we journalists should, at the very least, recognize that. Perhaps even, whisper it quietly, be prepared to try to resolve it. As things are, we excuse in ourselves behaviour we would accept in no other institution - a behaviour that is at best arrogant, at worst delinquent.

You don't have to take sides or be soft on politicians to have been dismayed by the assertions of some in the press that, in spite of David Laws' explanation of his actions in the light of the Telegraph's disclosures, they knew what it was really all about. What was really going on in the former minister's mind.

'Sobvious innit. MP = greedy. Snouts, Trough, Boots. Fill. Nothing's changed, they're all as bad as each other. Bad as the last lot. Chuck 'em all out.

Thus the Sun: Mr Laws "channeled more than £40,000 of taxpayers' money to his long term partner" - the verb, intriguingly upgraded at the subbing stage; the original story had the more bland 'paid' ... as you can see from the url.

Thus the Mirror: a simple expenses scandal - his apology groveling (oh, come on ... you can do better than that: surely it was at the very least 'sniveling' ....)

And thus Barbara Ellen in the Observer ... who you might have thought should have known better.

Don't we - in the interests of both scrutiny and accuracy - have to begin with David Law's own explanation of why he did what he did? If we can disprove it through proper scrutiny .. fine. But if we simply dismiss it - because we really know - we also have to explain why one of the cleverest and most economically astute men in the country, let alone Parliament, didn't arrange his affairs to cash in to the max. Something he could have done entirely within the rules both as they were then and as they are now.

And this matters. Matters way beyond the detail of this one story.

It's likely - most sensible commentators seem to agree - that that the Laws affair is about judgment distorted not greed. That what we've learned about a (former) cabinet minister is that people - even those in positions of leadership - do daft things for complex reasons. Usually because they understand themselves less than they understand anything else.

Yet that lazy default - "we know they're all on the make" - is doubly dangerous; it looks like scrutiny without being anything of the kind. And it damages our politics, if for no other reason than that it reduces our various publics' understandings to yet another pointless, misleading binary; venal or honest ... with the centre of gravity very definitely on the venal side.

There is a genuine dilemma around disclosure and its effects.

As Roy Greenslade writes:

"The press exists to reveal what those in power seek to keep secret. The raison d'être of journalists is disclosure."

And it's impossible to argue that having bought the information - part of that CD whose contents it began publishing just over a year ago - the Telegraph should not have revealed what they had. And the measured language of its first report can't be faulted.

But is it enough to say that "disclosure" is all? That our responsibilities as journalists end once the revelation has been made? Don't we also - as people with pride in our craft - have the responsibility to make sure that disclosure is scrutinised in ways that are both rigorous and accurate. That we don't hunt scalps just for the sake of it or as means of validating our own purpose in life?

The Guardan's Michael White goes further:

"I do not think the public interest has been well served
by the Telegraph exposé. Laws is a clever, serious fellow who could have
opted for a life of idle self-amusement but plunged in public life
where dreadful things can happen.

So I regret his going and hope
the Telegraph's more thoughtful readers are as unimpressed as I am.
Perhaps the newspapers really are losing the plot in their - our -
battle to retain sales share."

Whether it's about the business of sales share alone, I'm not so sure. There's something so deeply ingrained in the culture of British journalism that the alternative, thinking whether the way in which we treat disclosures like the Telegraph's is proportionate, is just not an option.

So we've got our £40,000 back ... at what cost we will only know when or if the £160bn debt mountain is finally climbed.

More 'oxy' than 'moron'

2010-05-18T20:45:00.003Z

Frederic Filloux is a blogger and teacher, based in Paris. He edits a blog/newsletter called Monday Note - worth sticking on your GoogleReader (other readers are available).

His latest post - The Oxymoronic Citizen Journalism - has generated ... well, mostly yawns, except amongst the ubercitjguruklasse - e.g. NYU's Jay Rosen who Tweeted in response to it that - "from Paris, the worldwide professional freak out over the term 'citizen journalist' continues ...".

"Freak out" there is a noun, by the way. Verb or noun, though, no freak out.

Like I say, mostly yawns at that old 'would you trust a citizen neurosurgeon to remove your kid's neuroblastoma?' gambit. Answer: 'No'. Answer continues: 'Nor would I trust one of those journos who made up over 100 totally false stories about the McCanns to tell me how many legs I had. Let alone offer me something with "more professionalism than mere crowd-powered demagoguery".'

Let's be honest, too much of our journalism is exactly that - 'crowd-powered demagoguery' ... except the crowd is populated by journalists in what Tony Blair once called a hunting pack of 'feral beasts'.

Too much journalism is too bad to make the claims that Frederic, and others, make in defence of it. Differentiating it from random rumour and the "utterly superficial" by virtue of its "painstaking" professionalism - a differentiation that Frederic himself concedes is all too rare.

There are differences and distinctions between those of us paid to do journalism and those of us not - but 'professionalism' isn't it. Especially since more of us would trust a total stranger than a journalist to tell us the truth.

To be fair to Frederic, he acknowledges that 'citizens' have a role in telling their own story about themselves to themselves - but the mask slips when he talks about "newsrooms" having "a challenge on their hands"; that what non-journalists have to say about their world is an "input" that needs "handling".

Frederic seems to think 'citizen' and 'journalism' are contradictions - he probably didn't mean to but, put like that, you see it for the nonsense that it is. And you have to be careful, you know, with 'oxymoron' - it doesn't quite mean what you think it means. If you want to sound really clever, do the Greek: oξύς (sharp) and μωρός (dull) ... which kinda reads across to citizen=sharp, journalism=dull ... though, of course, in French that would be the other way round.

Journalists forget at their peril that the facts they deal in - assuming they are dealing in facts - don't actually belong to them. And they have no right to manipulate them on the other side of some 'professional' membrane, separated from the citizens whose lives they're both describing and - potentially - changing.

And if you don't get that, you kinda don't get very much.

Anyhows, all of this will be on the agenda at what we hope will be the biggest ever Citizen Journalism conference in the UK - it's at the LSE on 11 June.

The Value of Journalism (#voj10 on Twitter) will look at CitJ from every angle - especially, what it means to the so-called 'professional tribe' and how it nurtures and supports our civic lives.

My hunch is that 'oxymoronic' is not a word we'll be using much.

Crystal ball or book?

2010-05-07T10:45:00.001Z

Nick Clegg's short intervention this morning - that the party with most votes and seats, the Conservatives, should seek to form a government - could be a hint that things are moving faster than they might seem.

The assumption has been that the Lib Dems key demand - an agreement to, at the very least, a referendum on PR - is anathema to the Tories and effectively rules out any coalition between them. Certainly, that was the assumption of this morning's 0810 interviews on BBC Radio 4's Today - and with good reason.

Need that be so? And need we spend too much time looking at the crystal ball?

The 2008 election in New Zealand provides a good example of a 'confidence and supply' agreement; an agreement between parties - none of whom has an overall majority - in order to form a stable government but which does not tie the partners together as tightly as a formal coalition with a single, agreed, full legislative programme.

The basis of 'confidence and supply' is, very crudely, that the smaller partner agrees not to vote against the incoming government's Queen's Speech or a confidence motion nor to vote against supply measures, enabling the government to pay its bills and raise credit.

In the case of New Zealand, the centre-right National Party - which was the biggest party, three seats short of an outright majority - drew up a 'confidence and supply' agreement with the (broadly) Liberal ACT.

Its preamble is interesting:

"Recognising that National and ACT have a duty to give effect to the will of the people as expressed at the general election, in particular the strong mandate for a change in New Zealand’s economic and social directions ..."

Remind you of anything?

And here's something else to think about. What if part of a 'confidence and supply' deal between David Cameron and Nick Clegg is that the Tory leader agrees that a vote in parliament for a referendum on PR isn't a confidence measure ....?

We'll know, I guess, at 2.30.

Vegas to London: the final leg

2010-04-20T13:39:00.004Z

**This was written on Eurostar on Monday 18 April - posted later**

Why am I not surprised?
Of course, the Eurostar part of Brussels Midi is swamped. Mostly with people trying to buy tickets which they will not be able to do. Long, long queues. Crying, crying children and the depressing, rattling ostinato of those bloody bags on wheels that, apparently, even able-bodied grown men drag around behind them without the slightest embarrassment.
There are two ticket collection machines. Both are en panne - of course - but there is a mending man grovelling in the innards of one of them. I ask him if it will be working in a moment and he says it will.
He is sort of right. He presses some buttons and sucks through his teeth and pulls and pushes paper into slots and the screen comes alive and pretends to work. He moves onto the next machine.
We are so, so close now. I key in my code. My reservation comes up on the screen. It asks me to confirm my identity with the card I used to buy the ticket. A tense moment - let's hope RBS haven't been as dozy as Egg or that at least they have read the papers and know something is up.
It is fine.
'We are printing your ticket' the screen says. For a long time. A very long time. Until it changes to say: 'There has been an error in printing your ticket. Refer to information desk' - or something like that - and then shuts down.
That scream is mine. The mending man looks up from the bowels of the other machine. Perhaps it is the hyperventilation that alarms him enough to come and have another go at the machine in front of me. Again, buttons, lights, paper, slots. And the screen comes on.
I key in my code again but of course the machine now thinks it's issued the ticket and tells me it can't issue another, before shutting down again.
It is own-a-Eurostar-employee time. There is one to hand. She tries to brush me off and tells me I have to join the long queue of crying people in the ticket office but this will not do and I tell her she must find someone to print the ticket for me. There is a stand off so I do something that surprises even me. I say: 'OK' and begin to walk through check-in towards passports and security. This causes a kerfuffle but fortunately they do not shoot me and instead another woman breaks off from whatever she was doing on her computer and prints me a boarding pass.
As it happens, the long queue of people who were standing behind me waiting to use the en panne ticket printing machines have followed me and now stand queueing at her desk demanding she print their boarding passes which she really cannot refuse.
It is a small triumph and it appeals to my vindictive side.

It is almost time to be relieved but I will not be until we actually leave Brussels. For the first time in days, I have lunch. In the sunny square by Midi station and go back to Eurostar at two - as instructed.
They have managed to manufacture a small riot.
There are no tickets now until Wednesday - they say ... but then, they said in Milan there were no tickets north from there until Tuesday - and so all the supplicants have been thrown out.
So, bizarrely, have all the passengers who have tickets and were waiting to check in for the 1429 or 1459 trains. Perhaps it was for the sake of neatness.
There are two burly but unfrightening bouncers on the door and a non-burly but extremely frightening woman barking instructions in three languages to anyone who tries to get into the office or passenger lounge.
Only 1429ers are let through and they have to join a long queue since both passport and security controls have been stepped up. It is half past two before we 1459ers are allowed in and there are still over a hundred 1429ers being critically examined for bombs and surly expressions.
It is a shambles and impossible to guess why the 1429ers weren't checked in hours ago. Don't they know there's a crisis???
Odd how irritating half an hour delay has become when, in Rome I was happy that a delay was only five hours and in Milan I was prepared to hang around for 30 hours.

We leave half an hour late. And there are empty seats. Lots of them.

Vegas to London: the Brussels leg

2010-04-20T12:09:00.005Z

**This was written on Eurostar on Monday 18 April - posted later**

It is an unremarkable morning in Koln.
The hotel is on the raw side of the station. All station's have a raw side, the side you're not supposed to see. The side where the prostitutes work; where something is always being built or demolished and the roads are always coned and dug.
Some have four raw sides.
From the room's balcony, you can see this mucky, bleak, platz. A place to scuttle through and hundreds of schoolchildren and office workers and labourers are scuttling.
I have a headache. Dehydration. I seem to have forgotten the basics of day to day.
My shoulders and back hurt beyond what is simply annoying. My bag isn't very heavy but it is heavy enough to pull my spine to one side - 'unstable vertebrae' was how the osteo once described what I have. And to bruise my shoulders. And to pull on my sternum which is held together by metal bands after Bashir - the sawsman on Mr Pugsley's cardiothoracic team - unzipped me sixteen years ago.
The gammy leg and its filigree of op scars is more swollen than ever and one of the scars is starting to show the signs of an infection. I hope there's not another bout of cellulitis in waiting but at least I have some emergency antibiotics with me.
It is good to know that I have tickets through to London but I am now regretting that I did not book a seat to Brussels. Still there is little sign of of stranded types but who knows.

Down to breakfast and the hotel lobby is piled high with suitcases. I am now worrying about the Brussels train.
The breakfast restaurant is piled high with British pensioners. I am now worrying even more about the Brussels train but it turns out that, incredibly, they are going the other way. On a 'no-flight' tour of Europe.
Perhaps they feel vindicated in their decision never to travel by air.
They talk about Knutsford and travel insurance and peace of mind and one of them is telling her table about a new breed of foreign pickpocket who work in twos; the first picks your pocket and the second replaces your wallet or cash with a wad of papers so you don't notice 'til it's too late. You can never be too careful.
I do hope they have a lovely holiday and I'm sure they will but I also wish they would hover a little less over the buffet. Especially the fruit. I need fruit.
For a very long time, one of the senior travellers seems to think he needs some too. But he hesitates. And then hesitates some more. And then some more still. And then he decides fruit is a bit too foreign for breakfast and moves on to the speck and gruyere but I do not imagine he will find what he wants there either.

Now I really wish I'd booked a seat. The platform is crowded and it turns out only half of the train from Frankfurt goes on to Brussels, the rest to Amsterdam. And it is late.
There is nothing else for it. It is down to luck or guesswork or fate or whatever but since luck has been good to me so far - and the harder my family and friends in London have worked on my behalf, the luckier I've been - I am not too despondent.
I pick a place. If the door stops opposite me, I will be fine. If not, well ... There is no chance of moving up or down the platform to chase the door, so this is it.
And what about that. The door stops at the exact spot I am standing. I am first on and find one of the few unreserved seats.
The train fills. And fills. And fills with standing passengers. There is a loud bilingual row at the end of the carriage because someone is sitting in someone else's reserved seat. The line of passengers trying to get on spills out of the door and the guard/conductor makes a long and complicated announcement in German which is the first or second language of about 1% of the train passengers.
It amounts to 'if you don't have a reservation you must get off the train'. This is insane. Everyone thinks so and no one moves. The standing passengers reason that since they are standing two abreast along the entire length of the train, the guard will not be able to check any tickets but they are wrong.
He forces his way into the train and starts checking tickets and throwing people off. Perhaps he really will throw all the standing passengers off.
In the event, he sees sense and leaves the train without having made a huge impact on the number of standing passengers. We depart half an hour late but I am on the train, with a seat and will arrive in Brussels with three hours in which to make sure I can get the ticket I've bought.

Vegas to London: German Homecomings

2010-04-20T10:13:00.008Z

**This was written in Koln on Sunday 18 April - posted later**

Zurich station is not chaos. It is instead a model of Swiss order.
I know the station well from many trips to Davos both for the WEF and for family skiing holidays.
I am swayed by the guard's advice about Basel ... on the other hand, there are other routes through Germany and perhaps I should be thinking about those too.
Or perhaps Paris.
It is the total ignorance of what lies ahead that is the problem. Even with the SMS lifeline to Mrs Marsh, it is possible only to know so much. Railway routes are no more than serving suggestions, timetables no more than aspirations.
It is three o'clock and walking down the platform to the main concourse, I devise a plan. Well, it is not so much a plan as a decision to let fate decide.
There is a huge board over the main concourse at Zurich station and it lists all the departures for hours ahead. If there is a train to Basel soon, I will take it. If not ... well, I'll look for the first one that seems promising.
There is a train to Basel in an hour and I can buy a ticket from the machine. You can only buy tickets to Swiss destinations from the machines. So that kinda clinches it. Basel.
Decision made and I have an hour to kill. I wander into the Reiseburo. It is packed but they have a ticket system - you take a numbered ticket and when it's your turn, your number flashes over one of the dozen or so windows. The highest number flashing is 413. I take a ticket. It is number 491. I leave.
But by the Reiseburo are the ordinary 'international' windows. This is one of the infuriating things about European trains. There is a fantastic network of wonderful fast trains ... but the ticketing is 19th century.
I have nothing else to do with my fifty minutes before the Basel train so I join one of the, relatively, short queues. They go very slowly but even at ten minutes per customer in front of me, I will be able to reach the window.
At the front of the queue, the Utrecht quartet are negotiating passage to Amsterdam. One of them comes to me at the back of the queue and asks if I want to travel with them. They have a train and it leaves at six in the morning - they will buy a fifth ticket if I want them to.
It is a temptation. It would mean a night in Zurich and then ... then what from Amsterdam? A ferry from the Netherlands, I guess.
But I have the ticket to Basel and perhaps if I have to spend an overnight that would be better and there is still something pulling me more towards Calais rather than Ostende or Rotterdam.
I thank them but stick with the Basel plan.
The young couple in front of me want tickets to Paris. There is nothing until Wednesday they are told; 'you have to have a reservation to travel on the TGVs'. She adds that, of course, the French trains will be affected by strikes.
Again, I wonder whether the true nature of what's happening is fully understood in the chancelleries of Europe ... and the boardrooms of the transport operators.
The young couple are crestfallen; 'My mum is coming over to pick me up in Calais' the young man says, his voice cracking just slightly.
He asks about a coach station but the clerk does not know. They walk slowly away and I do not know what they will do.
It is my turn and I ask for a ticket from Basel to Koln. The clerk is a little shruggy and tells me she can sell me a ticket but doesn't know whether I can get on the train. It is a risk I will take because it means I can at least travel to Basel knowing I have a plan of sorts.
And Koln is within the pick-up zone - a place from which, if all else fails, someone can pick me up in a car.
The train to Basel is about half full and hardly any passengers are stranded types such as me. I have just seven minutes to change trains in Basel but this is Switzerland and I am confident and indeed we pull into the station not early, not late, but exactly on time.
The Mannheim train is busy but a long way from full. There are seats and rouged old ladies with lapdogs who have perhaps been visiting reluctant children and grandchildren. And sad faced young men going home perhaps after a weekend with a girlfriend. And students cramming for the week ahead. People making their way home. But homes in Germany. Again, there are no stranded types.
There is WiFi, though, and I buy an hour's worth hoping that the laptop battery will hold out. The intention is to post a blog or two ... but first I look at trains from Koln to anywhere north, intending to go to Lille which is even more into the pick-up zone.
The Lille trains go through Brussels ... so, with the laptop battery on a shouty shade of red, I take a look at the Eurostar website. Just in case.
And there are trains. From Brussels to London. Tomorrow afternoon. At a ridiculous price, but they are there.
Yesterday, the Eurostar website was teasing with the promise of trains but they could not be booked. The site timed out or refused to accept payment.
I choose the 1459. It lets me. I put in my payment details. It likes them. It tells me I have a seat. It gives me a confirmation code. It thanks me for my purchase. The laptop battery dies.
We speed north up the Rhine valley and it is difficult not to think of it as a tour of WW2 bombing targets, the place names characters in every black and white war movie featuring young men with white scarves and pipes and bouncy dogs with names it would be wrong to use these days.

Vegas to London: Koln and another beggar

2010-04-20T10:08:00.004Z

**This was written in Koln on Sunday 18 April - posted later**

The train pulls into Koln at half past nine. For the first time, I am something close to optimistic though I will not allow myself to feel good until I am in my seat on the Eurostar and the train is moving.
Again, I have no idea what it will be like at Koln station. Perhaps the relative quiet and normality of the Rhine journey was an illusion and thousands of stranded types are already recreating the bung that was Milan.
They are not. Again, the station is busy but it is German people getting home in time for bed and work in the morning.
I will feel better if I get a ticket to Brussels tonight. There are no queues at the ticket machines but you can only buy some types of ticket through the machines. Again.
My ideal train is a Thalys at 1044 but you cannot buy Thalys tickets through the machine - only Deutsche Bahn. And I cannot find the right button.
From my left, a smartly dressed Asian man asks me if I want to buy a day pass 'for all trains'. I say no but he appears not to understand and begins to tell me that it will take me anywhere I want to go. I say no but he appears not to understand.
From my right a small man in a red jacket asks me where I'm going. His breath smells lightly of beer but he is not at all drunk and speaks perfect English with no more than a hint of an accent.
I am annoyed and tell him I'm going to the ticket office because I need a train to Brussels.
'You can buy that here. Look ...' His fingers are already playing the buttons on the touch screen like some silent musical instrument.
'Here. You can buy this ticket. The 0843.'
It is earlier than I want. I am tired. Very, very tired and the thought of waking up early dismays me. But it is a train. And I will feel happy to be on something. I say OK.
'Here. First or second class?' Second.
'You wanna book a seat.' For some reason I say no.
'OK. Here. Put your card in. You won't need your PIN.' He is right. I don't. He has done this before. Clearly. Often.
I pick up the ticket.
'So maybe you could give me some change?'
I give him five euros and he is content. It is not begging. He is running a small service industry which is better value than most.

My son has booked a hotel for me. It is right opposite the station and the Dom; the stark and slightly scary Koln cathedral. It is perfect. Two minutes from the station.
In the hotel room, there is a strange, alien smell. It is me.
During the night, there is a small riot in the platz outside the station and policemen smashing batons into people but I hear nothing. It happens in the couple of hours that I'm asleep. Not a long sleep but a very deep one.
I hear about it in the morning.

Vegas to London: To Zurich and the Utrecht Quartet

2010-04-20T09:09:00.004Z

**This was written on the train from Milan to Zurich on Sunday 18 April - posted later**
A time to reflect. On the conflicting emotions, apart from anything else. The high that I'm on the move and the anxiety at what will happen in Zurich when I will have to decide what to do next.
I have left Milan ... feel that it is a kind of escape.
It's idiotic, of course. But Milan felt like the Athens Olivia Manning described in her cloying but oddly compelling Balkan Trilogy.
It's idiotic. We were not forced to eat lung and rodent and Prince Yaki did not have to sell his overcoat at the last and we were not fleeing before a lethal enemy. But there was a sense of desperation, magnified no doubt by our ludicrous early 21st century assumptions about the way the world should work. Comfortably. Conveniently. Without setbacks.
And people from all over Europe milled and mixed, queued and quarreled. There was no obvious way out of the city. At least, that was the official version and it turned out not to be true.
We are four days into this and I can see no sign that anyone has got a grip. It is not the EU's finest moment.
As a BBC man through and through, I understand the arguments both in favour of and against the 'ever closer union'. (Though I do wonder what happened to that phrase - haven't heard it for a long time.) But whether you are a phile or a phobe, the EU is there ... and surely this is the sort of EU wide crisis that a suprantional institution is meant to manage. After all, it was a Europe wide body that pressed the alarm button in the first place.
But there are no additional trains; no fleets of coaches; no advice on the best route to take; no relaxation of ticketing rules; no emergency accommodation ... though the piazza in front of Milan station is already filled with tents which house the market there.
I see no sign of a EURO-COBRA. But perhaps they are videoconferencing in secret.

My seat is in the middle of a group of four elderly - they are probably not much older than me - Dutch people. From Utrecht, or close by.
They speak perfect English, of course. One, the oldest of the men I think, speaks perfect Pall Mall Club. He also coughs relentlessly and I cannot understand how he has not had an aneurysm. Or perhaps he has. It is impolite to ask about these things.
We talk about our journeys and about Utrecht which is a beautiful city. Like me, they are travelling stage by stage. They have no Big Plan and at one point they say they will try to hire a minibus in Zurich and offer me a ride to Amsterdam. It is very kind of them but I do not think this will happen. But they take my mobile phone number just in case.
The train pushes through low cloud and up the St Gotthard pass through Como and Lugano which are dripping and gloomy. But the mountains and lakes are beautiful even if it is impossible to enjoy them.
The road over the pass runs to our right and it is a long, long, traffic jam. Had I taken the taxi to Paris, I guess I would be in that queue and it is not moving.
We are and we are soon over the pass and into Switzerland where the angled pastures are sprinkled with yellow flowers and the train's air conditioning fills with pollen. This I know because my eyes begin to itch and swell and I sneeze and the hayfever makes the approach to Zurich miserable as well as anxious.
The guard on the train predicts chaos in Zurich and advises we head to Basel. I text Mrs Marsh who works out for me the route from Basel to Koln. It seems an option and the anxiety if not the misery lifts for a moment.

Vegas to London: Part 1

2010-04-19T21:25:00.012Z

** When the Iceland volcano blew, I was in Las Vegas selling a website to the Americans. Here is the first instalment of delayed posts describing the journey back to London. More follow.
For the genuine blog experience, read from the bottom up. Or the top down if you can't take the suspense.**

The ticket to Zurich: 18 April

I get more money from more cash machines until I have the €750 in cash that I’m prepared to pay.
But there are none of the long distance taxis outside the station now. At least, not so far as I can see.
So. Tweak the plan. One more try to get a train ticket but it doesn’t look good. The lines are longer and the signs and announcements are saying no trains north … well, ever really.
But the queues at the machines are short so what to lose by trying them again.
Miraculously, the machines are refreshed and I am able to by a ticket to Zurich for Monday. How? Maybe the announcements about no tickets north means all the way north. To the channel. But if we go bit by bit … ?
And I feel suddenly calm since that is a new plan. I have a cheaper hotel for Sunday evening.
I walk towards the new, cheaper hotel and pass a small travel agent with, astonishingly, no queues. Two or three people – most, as it happens, trying to get refunds on tickets they now don’t want to use. I go in to see if I can book anything on from Zurich.
No, I cannot.
But behind me is a man offering a taxi share to Paris for €300. And since that is three times as far as Geneva at half the price I was prepared to pay to go there, I am tempted.
Then another man asks ‘Did I hear you say you want a ticket to Zurich ??’
He has a ticket for the train about to leave for Zurich. He is Milanese and says he doesn’t want to go any more.
I take it. €100 for a first class ticket in a reserve seat. I pay and immediately think – ‘fool … it must be a forgery’ and regret not taking the offer of the taxi to Paris.
I take my seat on the train, convinced that the real owner will show and I do not help things by misreading the ticket and sitting in the wrong seat – 81 – instead of mine – 86.
But it is not a forgery.
And in seat 86 I meet the Utrecht Quartet.

The First Beggar: 18 April

It’s Sunday morning in Milan and it is raining.
The walk to the station is gloomy, dreary and even though I have a plan everything feels very low.
I stop at the first cash machine I see and where there are cash machines in Milan, just as in any tourist town, there are also beggars.
This one was clever. Perhaps I would find them all clever. No, I know that I find anyone who lives on their wits clever.
He was a tall, middle-aged man who came from Africa in one sense and nowhere in another. In that I didn’t see him there.
He appeared by the cash machine and asked what nationality I was.
‘French, English, Spanish’ he asked with a word or two of each language.
I said Greek – in the expectation that he knew none and that if he did, I might know more. Being Greek for the time being, I now had to commit to gestures – indicating that I needed to focus on getting my cash.
He paused until I’d got the money and then said goodbye, stretching out his hand. I shook it and he pressed into it a small, cheap figurine of the Buddha.
‘It is a gift’.
I said thank you. He asked how many there were in my family. I indicated four with four fingers. I was still ‘Greek’.
He stretched out his hand again, saying, ‘you’re so lucky to have a lovely family’.
I took his hand again and he pressed four more tiny buddhas into it.
‘For your family. Now you could give me ten euros.’
I gave him ten euros.

Desperate in Milan: 17/18 April

Is that what I look like?
In the hotel, I see myself for the first time in a while and it is a mess. Creased, dirty, greasy. My right leg – the one with the operation scars – is very swollen. The sternum staples feel stretched from carrying my bag.
I have something to eat. A bath. Wash some clothes – well, the more noisome portions at least. It’s never a great idea to wash entire shirts and so on – hotel rooms don’t have radiators any more and they would never dry and if they did they would be so creased you couldn't wear them.
I try to sleep but it is not going to happen. I have no plan. I have never felt more powerless.
This is the lowest point so far.
I do not know what it is like to have no idea what to do next. The one thing I have is resource. I have no other usable or useful qualification except that I can always see a way through anything. Always see an answer. Sometimes, even the right one.
Except tonight.
I can’t settle to the idea of just waiting it out in Milan. If I were going to do that, I’d still want to know when and how I was going to get out of here. I can't just see what happens.
So I make a plan. However improbable, I make a plan.
There are taxis outside Milan station that go long distances – I know this because they wouldn’t take me the mile or so to my hotel in the city.
I start to work out how much would be too much to pay one of them to drive me to Geneva. €500? €1,000? It’s about 200 miles. About a three hour drive.
I settle on €750. That’s how high I’d go. Then maybe a train. Or maybe a friend in Geneva who works at the UN might know someone going north.
So that’s what I’ll do. Get the cash out in the morning – it’ll need cash, I guess – and do that.
A plan.
Sleep.

The Milan train: 17 April

Everyone is going to Milan.
The train is chaos. There are more passengers than seats but nothing to say which seats are reserved and there is constant commerce in places to sit.
I guess lucky and sit all the way to Milan. We go through Firenze and Bologna but they have no charm. Not today.
Mrs Marsh has booked me a hotel in Milan. At a ridiculous price but it is the only option. A room that would normally be €160 is €360.
Milan station a little before ten in the evening boils with despondency.
The ticket machines have become moody and the queues into the ticket office are long and long and long. Younger people seem to have decided they must sleep in the station, resting like upturned turtles on their rucksacks.
Boards and announcements say there are no tickets north until Monday – that’s in two days time. There will be no ticket tonight and I need sleep more than I need another plan. So I go to the hotel, resigned to the idea of an enforced holiday in Milan where it is raining.

More in Rome: 17 April

That’s the second time today I’ve had this collision of emotions. The high of a barrier overcome with, almost simultaneously, the anxiety and uncertainty about what the next move can be.
I need to get to Milan. Unlike most capital cities, Rome is nowhereland when it comes to railways. It is like Bristol or Coventry but with older and generally more impressive ruins.
If you want an Italian train to somewhere, Milan is where you have to be.
I find a machine to sell me a ticket. At first try, it rejects my Egg card. That’s Egg.
Apparently, I have made ‘a number of atypical transactions’ and they suspect fraud. I know this because they leave a voicemail message on my mobile. One of the ‘atypical transactions’ is a $3 charge for WiFi on the NY flight.
I am glad that they are protecting my card security but wondering why they do not realise that ‘atypical’ conditions – like most of Europe’s airspace closed – might lead to one or two ‘atypical transactions’.
That’s Egg, by the way. Useless in a crisis.
I get a ticket for a train in five hours time and my mindset is now so changed that this seems good news. It is a train. Out of here. And only five hours to wait.
Batteries are now a problem too. The mobile especially. Without it, I am blind. I persuade the woman in a cafe opposite the station to let me charge my phone while spinning out two cappuccini over an hour or so.

In Rome: 17 April

It is clearly very bad.
Countries are falling like falling things. North Italian airspace is closed soon after we arrive. Hungary. Slovenia submit as we go through customs.
There is no news on Kuwait airways but Paris has reclosed and Rome is frantic and vile. It is not the place to stay and though I had protectively booked a room at a Rome airport hotel, it would be insane to wait here so the room is canceled.
I am now committed to getting home overland and so it is into Rome and head for the station.
I am not the only one who has had this idea.
I do some more sums. There’s no way of knowing how long this will take and I went to Vegas as light as possible.
Only just enough shirts socks etc for three days.
It is now day four.
Importantly, only just enough of a vital medication for three days. Pills I have to take daily to prevent me having that stroke I considered feigning in Vegas.
It is now day four and I need a plan within a plan.
The drug I need is warfarin – it’s very strictly controlled in the UK and everywhere else as far as I know. I imagine I will have to find a doctor to write a prescription. On a Saturday. And there will be no pharmacies open on Sunday. We are in the sphere of the social chapter.
Evoke pity is a good plan within a plan within a plan.
I find a pharmacy and in Italian owing more to Vergil than Dante explain what I need. I am prepared to weep, collapse, clutch my chest or anything if need be.
‘Certo’ he says. And hands me a box with enough blood thinner in it to eradicate all the rodents in a small underground station. For €2.50.

The Rome flight: 16-17 April

JFK seethes with lost and abandoned Europeans. A sort of latter day Ellis Island except that the Europeans are trying to get out and they are mostly really rather rich. And shouty. In a 4x4 sort of way.
Ticketing is starting to collapse and the only way through it is to ‘own’ a Delta employee. Make your problem their problem. So I do this and in spite of all machines rejecting my passport I manage to get a boarding card for Rome but only just.
If it had not been ‘the last flight to Europe’ – it probably wasn’t but that’s what they said – it would have been the plane to avoid. Two or three parties of teenage schoolchildren, each one a testimony to American orthodontics. The hormones crackled.
My seat buddy is a living wheezing incarnation of American obesity. I’m sure the dismay shows on my face as I approach and I am a lesser person for that.
Doubtless she is a very sweet and kind and gentle woman. But just right now and for the next eight and a half hours it is about practicalities. One third of her spills over the armrest and occupies one third of my allotted space.
Worse, she fits so tightly into her seat that every movement – like breathing or blinking for example – telegraphs itself through our miserable settle and, for all I know, the entire plane.
I have unkind thoughts. Especially when we hit heavy turbulence over Newfoundland. The sweet, large lady cannot hold her arms near her body and when we drop a few hundred feet or so, her tumbler of red wine is levered sharply up then down … and …and … and …
I do not know how long I will have to wear these trousers, newly freckled. But it was all right because she was screaming ‘Oh my God … Oh my Lord’ as the plane bucked and dived. And the teenagers, confident in their own immortality, whooped.
No-one slept.

To New York: Friday 16 April

It is early Friday morning at the airport and everyone seems to be leaving Las Vegas. That would make such a good film title.
The plan is now extended with a Kuwaiti airways flight to Paris from Rome but I do not believe this will happen.
I check in to NY. But the machine will not let me check in for the flight to Rome. I do not like the feel of this.

The plan: Thursday 15 April

We are at the Vegas convention centre. A depressing carpeted hangar somewhere … somewhere. This ash thing is looking serious and I have begun to do the sums.
There are 400 odd people on each direct UK/Vegas flight. Pretty much full, especially at the end of the Easter holiday.
So one canceled flight means 400 to slot in on later pretty much full flights. Two means 800. Three 1,200 … and so on.
Time for a plan.
Fly. Fly anywhere. Antarctica. Somalia. Anywhere but NY is nearer London so I think there.
My mobile becomes a lifeline. That and wonderful people in London to do stuff for me.
I get a seat on a flight to New York at seven in the morning. And then to anywhere in Europe still open. Turns out, only Rome.
Hurrah. Got seat on that. Looks on the website like it was the last one.
We now start to think about ‘the event’ – the thing I’ve actually come here to do.
It is just half an hour before my presentation and a very long time since I slept properly. Fatigue erupts and I lose the power of speech and of rational thought.
This is a pity since all I need right now is the power of speech and of rational thought. To my ears I am slurring my words so I rehearse and begin with the easy stuff at the beginning.
‘Good’ and ‘evening’ each sort of works on its own . Running them together is asking for trouble.
I consider feigning a stroke.

The News: Thursday 15 April

Wake up in Las Vegas to a text from Mrs Marsh apologising for the cloud of volcanic ash that has closed British airspace.
It is not her fault I think. But it seems Iceland has not finished with us. Dodgy banks and Bjork were only the beginning.
The news seems incredible but then I am surrounded by the incredible. Las Vegas. So it must be true.
It’s easy to be snobbish at Vegas’ vulgarity. But then, there is nowhere more vulgar on the planet. There are queues for everything except the gambling tables and the wedding chapels.
It is what the late-Roman empire or that of Justinian and his part gymnast part whore empress Theodora would have become had it got the hang of petrol and pre-stressed concrete.
Whatever else happens, I cannot stay here. If my flight is canceled tomorrow, I’m out of here.

Paying for quality

2010-03-30T12:54:00.003Z

Of all the arguments in favour of newspaper paywalls, one is utter tosh. It is that we - the readers - must pay to preserve "the best newspapers in the world".

Now, as a general rule it's always a good idea to reach for your revolver when you hear anyone say any country has the best TV/Health Service/Newspapers/Football teams ... anything "in the world".

Not because we/they don't, necessarily. But because life's more complicated than that.
But one thing we absolutely, certainly, assuredly don't have here in the UK is the best newspapers in the world. Full stop.

If we did, a quarter of those who used to buy them wouldn't have stopped doing so over the past twenty years - a desertion that long predates the web, incidentally. If we did, our press wouldn't be one of the least trusted institutions in the land and our newspaper journalists the least trusted in the world.

We wouldn't have journalists sent to prison for hacking into mobile-phone mailboxes. Nor editors fired for printing fake photographs or "setting the agenda" while, by their own admission, still drunk from the night before or admitting that they pay policemen to breach their public trust and give information to journalists.

A newspaper group wouldn't have had to pay the McCanns hundreds of thousands of pounds for quite literally making up over 100 separate defamatory articles.

Websites such as Tabloid Watch would have nothing to watch: they'd not be able to point to astonishing examples of poor journalism, like this or this or this or this We might have less of a warped obsession with celebrity.

And sites such as 'The Sun - tabloid lies' wouldn't have such a rich source of raw material.

Now, it's true that our democracy needs journalists who aren't intimidated by power. Who aren't browbeaten. Who need to be, on occasion, rude, offensive, disrespectful and bloody-minded - but, you'd have thought, as a means to and end not an end in itself.

NewsCorp argues that good journalism has to be paid for - which is true. Of course, it might help their argument if more newspaper journalism were better than it is. Worth paying for.

But beware the chopped logic here. Well-funded journalism doesn't unavoidably entail its readers paying to be let in through a turnstile to read it. Apart from anything else, readers have never been the major source of newspaper revenue. And as Alexander Lebedev has shown at the Evening Standard - and may well show with the Independent - you can give newspapers away free and still make a profit. Still fund good quality, original, investigative journalism.

Nor is paying at the door somehow morally superior to - or really very different from - other ways of paying. Like, errrr, the BBC licence fee, for example. News isn't free just because it's been paid for in advance.

The clock should have struck thirteen when News Corp's James Murdoch told his Edinburgh audience last autumn that

"Dumping free, state-sponsored news on the market makes it incredibly difficult for journalism to flourish on the internet."

A broad attack on anyone making news by following a business model different from NewsCorp's. But flawed. The idea that news - in all its novel, invigorating, refreshing, chaotic, demotic forms - is not 'flourishing' on the web flies in the face of reality. It's news, Jim, but not as you know it. And it's flourishing.

What isn't flourishing is journalism built to fit the old model and the old mindset. Bundles of readers buying bundles of news printed on bundles of ads.

And this is the thing to watch. The terms of the debate have changed and continue to change. If we want to understand that debate, the changed world and how journalism fits in, we should take care not to allow those whose interests paywalls serve - as well as outdated understandings of what journalism is - define its terms.

The leadership fetish

2010-03-24T19:57:00.002Z

***This is a cross post from the BBC College of Journalism***

Ian Watmore's departure as the Football Association's Chief Executive has "torn the FA apart", according to at least one headline.

It 'may affect England's football World Cup bid', according to another. And is unsettling for the squad preparing for the FIFA World Cup in South Africa later this year. Apparently.

But hang on. Here's what BBC Radio 4 Today's Garry Richardson had to say about Mr Watmore's sudden departure. It happened because he was:

"Able to have such little impact on key decisions".

And as for that other stuff about World Cups:

"He obviously doesn't pick the team or coach the team ... the 2018 bid team is totally separate so it won't matter at all."

So ... the departure of this particular leader doesn't actually amount to anything.

Apart from a pile of overexcited news stories telling us more than we probably want to know, and more than we could possibly care about, the office politics of a body that's marginal to most of our lives.

It highlights once more, though, journalism's obsession with 'the leader'. An obsession that is close to a fetish and isn't confined to political leadership. The leader is the organisation, this addled thinking goes: so their departure must matter. Even when it doesn't.

It's worse when there's a problem in an organisation. Then, sacking the leader is the obvious and only remedy.

It's lazy thinking. Worse, it presents the illusion of accountability journalism without any of the inquiry or understanding that lies behind the real thing.

Years ago, in our World at One morning meetings, some wag would usually break a stumped silence with: "Maybe we can get someone to call for John Prescott's resignation." It was code for: 'We haven't got a clue how to develop this story.' And finding someone to call for John Prescott's resignation was never very difficult.

Now, of course leaders should be held to account and journalists should hold them to account. Of course leaders are responsible for those they lead and should take the rap. And that might - might - mean a leader has to go for the good of the organisation. But of course it might also mean staying to put things right. Or firing those who've got it wrong. Accountability journalism is as complex as the problems those we hold to account have to deal with.

Last week, six Birmingham social workers were sacked: the sackings followed the deaths of eight children in the city, though were not directly related.

And then, the inevitable question: Why were no managers sacked?

The reasoning, all too familiar: if those sacked weren't doing their jobs properly, then it follows they weren't being managed properly or that there weren't people keeping an eye on them - so they must be sacked, too. All the way to the top - after all, the bigger the scalp, the bigger the journalistic kudos.

The problem is that once the dogs have barked and the caravan has moved on, interest in how - or even whether - faults are put right is far from the minds of those journalists of simple remedy.

Birmingham's new social services director, Colin Tucker, put his finger on it in one of his interviews. He'd been brought in to sort out what was clearly a dysfunctional child-protection service. And what he was leading, he said, was "a learning process, not a blame process".

And that's something journalists as scalp-hunters just don't get. Public services - like our police or our hospitals or child protection - don't automatically improve in proportion to the bloodiness of journalists' belts. It may need work rather than symbolic, top-level resignations.

'Heads must roll' journalism does us citizens no favours. As Colin Tucker reminded us, "for ten years, social work has been on its knees". It is "failing to attract the brightest and the best".

And that's a surprise?

In praise of the audio slideshow

2010-03-19T19:20:00.002Z

***This is a cross post from the BBC College of Journalism***

Of all the sessions at Digital Storytelling 10 - an event in London on March 19th (co-organised by the College) that is/was about ... well, digital storytelling - the one presented by Benjamin Chesterton of duckrabbit in praise of the audio slideshow was a stand out.

Duckrabbit is a production team that focuses on journalism and advocacy touching, mostly, development and human rights issues ... it also does stuff that is just, well, beautiful. And one of their most effective tools is the audio documentary illustrated by - usually very high quality - still images. The audio slideshow.

As Benjamin Chesterton said, it's both a new language and a very old one - and it's one that's much better developed in the US and amongst non-broadcasters than it is here in the UK and in (former) broadcasting organisations. Take a look at Interactive Narratives for some recent good, and bad, examples.

The audio slideshow suffers from a default perception that it's neither one thing nor the other; something less than video while tainting the purity of audio. One questioner at the conference put it succinctly: 'why would you choose a slideshow when you could use video?'

Benjamin Chesterton's response: with moving video the viewers eye is centred - broadly, locked to the framing of the video camera. With still images, the eye roams. It stops and moves and stops and moves. Frozen gestures and expressions kick off a cognitive process - thinking - that moving images simply never do.

Something similar is true of good audio. The best audio blends reportage ('being me, being here') with the kind of aural cues that make audiences think and wander off down their own pathways while still engaging with the sound.

Put the two together - great audio documentary and great still images - and you have something that is potentially MORE than great storytelling.

"Most storytellers want to get people to think" was a striking line from this session. Would that it were true ... true about journalism, at least. You'd need to add the phrase "... like them" to apply it to much modern journalism.

The point about audio slideshows is that they're not storytelling - at least, not in the conventional journalistic sense. You can, of course, build a traditional story in audio and images ... but why waste what you have?

Take one of duckrabbit's pieces of work with Medecins sans Frontieres, Condition Critical - a suite of shows beginning with Francoise's Story. This, and the other stories in the suite, don't so much include excluded voices (actually, traditional journalism is much better at that than its critics allege) as lift those voices out of the constraints of formal storytelling, the straitjacket of a single beginning, middle and end; an external, journalist imposed conclusion.

You, the viewer/listener bring your own narrative arc - or none at all - to the audio in the same way as, and at the same time as, your eyes roam the images. It is engaging and involving - and very, very personal. We will all see and hear something in the shows that no-one else will.

The antithesis of the story - and all the better for that.

Checking facts

2010-03-11T20:10:00.003Z

***This is a cross post from the BBC College of Journalism***

Back in 1988 - yes, it really was that long ago - the former BBC Director General, John Birt (he was DDG and Head of News at the time), told the Royal Television Society that it would be a good idea to introduce 'fact checkers' into BBC newsrooms.

Brows creased on wise old heads and there was tittering throughout newsland.

This was a horrid US idea. And, anyway, wasn't that the point of BBC News? That it checked the facts?

But JB was serious.

I know this because shortly before his speech he and I were in Atlanta for the Democrats' Convention. I ran into him just after I'd interviewed a Native American 'chief' who wanted Michael Dukakis (he was the, now forgotten, Democrats' choice to confront George Bush MkI) to pledge the return of a mountain range to his tribe.

JB asked if I'd checked whether the chief's claims were valid in law. I hadn't ... but mid-admission he dropped the filling of his Taco Bell on his shoe and our focus was diverted.

In the event, fact-checkers were not bussed in and BBC journalists got on with checking their facts themselves.

But some journalists were chippy for tribal reasons. One, a more youthful (back in 1988) Christopher Hitchins, wrote in the Miami News (no, me neither) that fact-checking:

" ... sounds innocuous, even scrupulous, but it is a snare and a delusion. It usurps the idea of authorship, with its concomitant responsibilities, and indicates a vague, mediocre neutrality."

Getting the facts right a "snare and delusion"? Hmmm. Does "authorship" trump verification and veracity?

It's much the row that's blown up around the celebrated (and brilliant) Polish foreign correspondent and author, Ryszard Kapuscinski.

A new book - 'Kapuscinski Non-Fiction' by Artur Domoslawski - has stirred up a row over the journalist's 'non-fiction' by suggesting rather a lot of it (his books rather than news dispatches) stepped over the line into fiction.

Kapuscinski was without doubt a great storyteller - Travels With Herodotus an excellent example. But should it matter that in his books, 'literary' truth may have tainted his account of facts?

Journalist and author Neal Ascherson argues perhaps not - there is such a thing as "literary reportage" where:

"You're meant to believe what you are being told, but not in every literal detail.

In the end, there is no floodlit wire frontier between literature and reporting. All we can insist on is that a literary text is not presented as a verbatim transcript."

Tim Garton Ash, another admirer of Kapuscinski, takes a harder line:

"There are, it seems to me, few more responsible callings for a human being armed with a pen than that of being a veracious witness to great and grave events.

But if I say I saw that, then I saw that. It was not in a different street, at a different time, or told me by someone else over a drink at the hotel bar."

But here's the thing: we can debate this as journalists and - perhaps - cut ourselves the slack that allows us to persuade ourselves that usually verification trumps all ... but come on!? Every time?

And, anyway, what is truth? Etc. Etc.

But what do you think happens when you ask non-journalists? Aka, the audience?

Correct. They expect "witness" to be just that. And even though they don't expect all viewpoints to be the same - no two witnesses ever agree - they do expect facts to be ... well, facts.

And that expectation extends to political argument. When I was at Today, I'd often get emails from members of the audience asking, in the middle of some complex row, 'who's right?'

That's why Today's new partnership with More or Less presenter Tim Harford is so welcome.

Its first task - trying to sort out the Michael Gove and Ed Balls spat over how many pupils who receive free school lunches get into Oxbridge, an important indicator of social mobility. While Channel 4's Cathy Newman ran the rule over the same debate on the C4 'FactCheck' pages.

It's important that both Today and C4 are following in the footsteps of the daddy-of-them-all fact-checking site, Annenberg's FactCheck - especially during an election campaign, when our audiences probably have less time than normal for "literary" truth. And, as FactCheck found, once you begin you have an endless supply of claims to check and arguments to calibrate.

And an audience grateful that at last someone is answering their question - or at least trying to - 'who's right?'

Fact checking, John, but not as you knew it.

Strong words - press on

2010-02-24T15:53:00.001Z

The Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee's report on press standards, privacy and libel is a remarkable document - all journalists should read it. It makes serious efforts to find some sort of way through the tangled issues in its title with important recommendations that you may or may not agree with ... but which at the very least push the debates forwards.

Most striking is the strength of its language in describing and condemning the attitudes and techniques of some in the press and the failings of the press 'regulator', the Press Complaints Commission - less regulator, more mediator, according to the committee.

It's worth pulling together some of these strong words - if only to understand something of how others (in this case, MPs) see the media in general and the press in particular.

The committee's conclusion is a good place to start:

"The freedom of the press is vital to a healthy democracy; however, with such freedom come responsibilities."

Which leads to the obvious question - how does the committee see the press exercising those responsibilities?

Here's a taster - it's what the committee says about an approach a News of the World journalist made to two of the women involved in the Max Mosley story - an approach that, bluntly, said 'give us an interview or we'll publish photos that identify you'.

The committee's thoughts?

"A culture in which the threats ... could be seen as defensible is to be deplored. The fact that News of the World executives still do not fully accept the inappropriateness of what took place is extremely worrying."

And what about the News of the World's defence that the Max Mosley story was in the public interest?

"The News of the World editor's attempts to justify the Max Mosley story on 'public interest' grounds (was) wholly unpersuasive."

OK, so ... standards in the industry generally?

"The picture painted for us of corners being cut and of fewer journalists struggling to do more work is cause for concern. If the press is to command the trust and respect of the public, the public needs to know that the press is committed to high standards even in difficult times."

Some of the committee's strongest criticisms of the press are aimed at its coverage of the McCann case:

"The press acted as a pack, ceaselessly hunting out fresh angles where new information was scarce ... competitive and commercial factors contributed to abysmal standards in the gathering and publishing of news."

Where, the committee wonders, was the PCC in the McCann case?

"It was obvious as early as May 2007 that a number of newspapers were ignoring (the PCC code's requirements on accuracy) yet the PCC remained silent. That silence continued even though the coverage remained a matter of public concern through the summer and autumn of that year.

"This was an important test of the industry's ability to regulate itself, and it failed that test."

And:

"The newspaper industry's assertion that the McCann case is a one-off event shows that it is in denial about the scale and gravity of what went wrong ... In any other industry suffering such a collective breakdown ... any regulator worth its salt would have instigated an enquiry. The press, indeed, would have been clamouring for it to do so. It is an indictment on the PCC's record, that it signally failed to do so."

It is, the committee declares:

"A kind of avoidance which newspapers would criticise mercilessly, and rightly, if it occurred in any other part of society."

On the phone hacking scandal at the News of the World, the committee's conclusions have been widely reported, but its strong words on the standards on display have a resonance for all of journalism:

"We strongly condemn this behaviour which reinforces the widely held impression that the press generally regard themselves as unaccountable."

But back to the PCC. The future of self-regulation is important - but the PCC, the committee seems to think, just isn't in the game.

"The failure of the PCC to prevent or at least limit the irresponsible reporting that surrounded the McCann and Bridgend cases has undermined the credibility of press self-regulation."

And:

"For confidence to be maintained, the industry regulator must actually effectively regulate, not just mediate. The powers of the PCC must be enhanced, as it is toothless compared to other regulators."

Dismiss all of this as "innuendo, unwarranted inference and exaggeration" - no, satire is not dead - or politically motivated if you wish.

But doesn't everyone have to face up to the possibility that this report is from the same box as those depressing regular polls that show only one in five Britons trust the press?

Sources close ...

2010-02-23T22:28:00.002Z

**Cross post from BBC College of Journalism**

When Jeremy Paxman grilled the Observer's chief political commentator Andrew Rawnsley on BBC 2's Newsnight, he got down to one of the Big Questions that a largely untrusted trade - journalism - has to answer.

Why should anyone trust a journalist? Especially a journalist quoting or reporting an anonymous source.

Opinions about Gordon Brown's temperament and alleged behaviour are many and various. My hunch is, most people already know what they think about him and that few will change their minds as a result of Andrew Rawnsley's book ... or the second hand reporting of it (which, incidentally, makes allegations that do not appear in the book itself).

But why we should trust the allegations in the first place? In the past 72 hours or so, I've come across any number of people who'd LIKE the allegations and the very worst interpretation of them to be true - not natural GB supporters, then - but who still feel inclined to disbelieve a journalist, however honest and well respected, who can't/won't name his sources. Especially in the face of an on-the-record (non-denial) denial.

As Jeremy Paxman knew, there was no chance of Andrew Rawnsley naming any of those who'd spoken to him in confidence - protecting a source is a fundamental of journalism. Though to his credit, JP continued to challenge knowing that he was articulating the sceptical thoughts - mistrust - that many in the audience were doubtless entertaining.

Why are audiences so sceptical, so mistrusting? Especially since it's an undeniable fact that almost any story worth telling started life with a source anonymously briefing a journalist - the first ray of sunlight that is, according to US Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, "the best disinfectant". And without whistleblowers and their like, journalism would have few means if any to challenge, even in small measure, the information asymmetry that pertains between people and power.

The problem is that for every example of outstanding investigative, accountability journalism that leans on anonymous sources, there are dozens if not hundreds of examples of unutterably lousy fiction purporting to be a journalistic account of 'sources'.

Good journalists are alive to the risks and for the need to be scrupulously honest and straight ... even when, as with an anonymous source, there's little chance of contradiction; the BBC Editorial Guidelines offer a fairly strict straitjacket. The constraints in the Reuters Handbook of Journalism are even tighter:

"You must source every statement in every story unless it is an established fact or is information clearly in the public domain ... Good sources and well-defined sourcing help to protect the integrity of the file from overt outside pressures and manipulation and such hazards as hoaxes."

And on single - usually anonymous - sources:

"For a single source story, the informant must be an actual policymaker or participant involved in the action or negotiation with first-hand knowledge, or an official representative or spokesperson speaking on background. Such information should be subject to particular scrutiny to ensure we are not being manipulated."

Both organisations' reputations rely on them being trusted, even when they're using anonymous sources.

But here's the thing. The language of responsible journalism like Andrew Rawnsley's or that which scrupulously follows guidelines like the Reuters Handbook - based on genuine sources and done in the public interest - is indistinguishable from that used to defend fabrication, intrusion and distortion, based on rather less genuine 'sources' and a different understanding of the public interest.

It is the problem of 'assessability' that Professor Onora O'Neill explored in her 2002 Reith Lectures: on the page, there is nothing to distinguish the best from the worst, the trustworthy from the disgraceful.

Journalists who take easy options - inventing a 'source'; turning a half remembered paraphrase into a hard "quote"; attributing their views to a source - then the role of journalism as a check on power is reduced for the simple reason that they erode trust in ALL journalism and not just in the newspapers or news organisations they work for.

Can I come in there ...?

2010-01-30T14:04:00.003Z

*Cross post from BBC College of Journalism, 'Discussion on CoJo'*

I shouted at the wireless three times this week. I've never done that before - I've shouted often enough at people on the wireless: that's an Editor's prerogative. But never at the innocent box before.

Interruptions. Interviewers interrupting. That's what the shouting was about.

And maybe it's because I listen to the wireless now just like any other member of the audience and not as someone in charge of (part of) what's coming out of the loudspeaker.

Contentious

Interruptions have always been a contentious area; presenters hate being told they do it too much, but it's one of the top two or three things that regularly gets the letters and emails coming in.

I won't name this week's culprits - suffice it to say, they've got form.

What was surprising, however, was that two of the three weren't challenging interviews at all. One was a two-way with BBC political editor Nick Robinson (purpose - to get facts across); another, an appreciation/obit where 'names' had been invited on (purpose - to hear the 'names' appreciate the figure in question).

The third was potentially confrontational, but made no sense unless the interviewee was able to set out his alternative argument - which happened not to be the 'conventional wisdom' that was obsessing that day's papers and, apparently, the interviewer. To set out that argument required several clauses to be heard in sequence - they were not.

We never got to understand or even hear his argument ... though we did get to know exactly what the interviewer thought.

Challenge

Why, when, and how to interrupt an interviewee has been an issue for broadcasters since Sir Robin Day and his ITN colleagues invented the challenging TV interview back in the 1950s.

Sir Robin is a great role model - but many interviewers and their producers mis-remember him and are unaware of the interviewing code he drew up for himself 1961.

Sir Robin was a challenging, even aggressive interviewer - Mrs Thatcher said as much, as if we didn't know, back in 1987. But his aggression came from the forceful, direct and challenging wording of his questions - not from interruptions.

I was one of Sir Robin's producers back in the early 1980s on The World at One and it was striking how rarely he interrupted or talked over his interviewee. Sir Robin had an ear finely tuned to the punctuation of the spoken word and he could slice into a sentence at the briefest caesura.

One of Sir Robin's successors at The World at One, the late Nick Clarke, was renowned for the forensic sharpness of his interviewing ... but also for his politeness; criteria, incidentally, in the annual Nick Clarke award for interviewing.

Rules of thumb?

Clearly, every interview has a life and dynamic of its own. And part of the point of an interview is the on-air personality of the interviewer - otherwise, we may as well have interview robots.

(Actually, the old BBC political unit did use to have an interview glove puppet, kept on a peg by the door. It had been, allegedly, trained to ask, "what's the problem? what's the answer? how much does it cost? and where do we go from here?")

But there are some rules of thumb - and many of the BBC's top interviewers have their own.

As an Editor rather than a presenter, I'd say the following are important.

First, there are very few reasons why you should interrupt - and by 'interrupt' I mean deliberately talking over the interviewee:
* to correct a factual inaccuracy - especially a potential defamation
* to curtail (politely) an over-long answer or ...
* to bring the interview (politely) back to the main subject ...
* to insist (politely) that the interviewee answer the question ...
* to end the interview when you've run out of time

Ideally, you should never have to end an interview abruptly - it's usually a failure of planning and pacing.

The astute amongst you will note that I haven't included 'to challenge an assertion or an argument'. There's a reason for that.

A strong, effective, telling challenge is one that is cool, precise, short - and delivered at the right moment.If the audience can't hear the challenge because it's delivered over the interviewee's words, then it's the interviewer who sounds weak and ineffectual.

What's more, the struggle to be heard often takes up so much time out of the interview that the interviewer runs out of time to make an effective challenge - senior politicians use this tactic routinely to deflect any challenge.

It's worth thinking, too, about the reasons why you shouldn't interrupt:

* to show you're tough and challenging and won't back down
* to show how much you know (more than the interviewee)
* to be a participant in a discussion - unless it's the format
* to express your view or judgment - tho' as above

And interruptions that are designed to bring the interview back on track are especially irritating (and counter-productive) when the interview is going down a road far more interesting than the one originally planned.

Your urge to interrupt shouldn't overtake your ability to listen to the answers.

Role model

So who's the best around right now? Who'd be a good role model? Who's the 21st century's successor to Sir Robin and Nick Clarke?

Well, he'll hate me for saying this - but there's no question in my mind who's the sharpest, most challenging, toughest interviewer around right now ... and by some distance. Has been for some time.

He's also someone who rarely interrupts, is unfailingly polite yet never lets anyone off the hook.

You can find him here.

Guilty of Wikipedia

2010-01-16T14:58:00.006Z

It is – according to the Mail on Sunday – a Bad Thing to correct, edit or add to articles on Wikipedia. It is not the sort of thing that ‘normal’ people do. It’s a bit weird. Raises all sorts of questions, don’t you know … (shakes head and wonders what the world’s coming to.)

How do I know this? Because that’s the tenor of an article about me that I expect to run in the MoS tomorrow, 16 January. And I know this thanks to a phone call from a MoS journalist on Friday afternoon, 14 January. When the call came, my mobile was on voicemail – it almost always is – so that was where the journalist left a message asking me to call back.

Now, calls from the Mail and the Mail on Sunday come in two flavours. If they’re after something from you on someone else, they generally include some idea of what – or who – their story is about. When you’re the victim, they just ask you to call back.

This one just asked me to call back.

I always return journalists’ calls – partly because it’s difficult to argue, as I do, that everyone should have an automatic right of reply and that journalism should be fair, honest and open if you’re nor prepared to answer a journalist’s questions.

The journalist gabbled nervously but got straight to the point. “We have a story about you that we’re running on Sunday and we wanted to give you a chance to comment.” Note the wording there; “we have a story … that we’re running …” So - oh dear, oh dear. What said journalist was saying, in effect, was “No counter evidence, no matter how compelling, can make us look again at this story; we’ve made up our minds. All we want from you is a comment”.

The journalist went on: “you changed the Wikipedia entries for …” and gave me a couple of names here … “we have evidence that you did it.” No offer to put the evidence to me nor any hint that such a thing could ever be on the agenda. The message was: “you’re banged to rights sonny, now do yourself a favour and come quietly”.

I pause. Partly because it’s obvious I’m not talking to a journalist who's in fact-gathering mode. I know that the more I say, the higher the risk of a single word or phrase being ripped out of context in order to ‘prove’ that … well, I’m a bit weird ‘cos I’ve participated in the most amazing knowledge experiment the world has ever known. Perhaps I should ask for dozens of other offences to be taken into consideration – changes to articles on Greek vase painting, psychology, oral poetry, epistemology, etc etc etc. But somehow I don’t think the journalist will be interested.

I pause too because I can’t quite work out where to start. Do I try to explain to this journalist what Wikipedia is? How it works? That Wikipedia isn’t a combination of Wicca and paedophilia? That it’s still legal in this country?

Do I try to explain that Wikipedia is a Good Thing (though I’d never advise a journalist to lift anything from it without checking the sources)? That it’s most good when people have collaborated, edited and corrected in large numbers? Or when people with specific knowledge and expertise have participated in authoring or fact checking an article?

Not a good idea, I think.

Do I try to explain, instead, that it’s a journalist’s duty to correct inaccuracies? And that inaccuracies come in many forms?

Perhaps not. Something tells me we’re not in that region of the universe.

Or do I reveal that this ‘story’ is no big secret? It’s not even new. I blethered on about it at the time – this was 2007, incidentally – and think I rather bored people. I’ve a vague recollection that it appeared at the time in some gossipy diary … but I can’t remember where. We even thought about doing an item about the etiquette of correcting Wikipedia articles – remember, these were Wikipedia’s relatively early days – but it never made it to air.

Do I try to explain that Wikipedia doesn’t let you correct inaccuracies or deflate puffed-up biographies or do anything ‘secretly’? That if you add or edit or correct an entry, you do it knowing that everything you do is fully public? That your changes are tracked? That anyone can see what you’ve added or edited? And can add to or correct any changes you’ve made?

No. Less is more. So I say instead: “yes I corrected those entries for the sake of accuracy”.

Said journalist is nonplussed. Drops the ‘phone or recording equipment – by the way, it’s common courtesy when you record phone calls to let the person at the other end know – and I hear distantly what sounds like a radio pantomime approaching a comic climax. When composure has been recovered, the question again. And again I say ‘yes I’ve corrected Wikipedia entries for the sake of accuracy.

Then this: “Don’t you think this undermines your position?” said in the tone of voice you might use when speaking to an MP with a very clean moat.

How can I explain that the opposite is true? Where do I start?

Is there any point in explaining that Wikipedia was still pretty young at the time. The entries in question were short, mostly ‘stubs’ … and full of inaccuracies. Silly things like audience figures, roles, names, descriptions, sequences of events. Some were mistaken, unchecked ‘common knowledge’. Others had been written by … well, by people who appeared to have an interest in portraying some events and some individual’s roles in a particular light.

No, this question is based on an assumption that is 100% wrong. It would have undermined my position to know about these inaccuracies and do nothing about them. I even opened a second Wikipedia account with a username that was then the same as my BBC login name so that it would be clear to anyone who cared where I’d corrected an entry and how.

Again, no point, I’m thinking, in explaining any of this. So I stick to the formula: “I edited the entries for the sake of accuracy”.

Now, I’ve no idea what the eventual story will be. Or whether it will run at all. If it does, I wouldn’t be surprised to see some ‘oddities’ and embellishments in the ‘evidence’ – like I say, I was never offered the opportunity to know what it was or is - not even for accuracy's sake. But we will see.

On the substantive point though; yes, I am guilty of Wikipedia. In my youth – well, ok a few years ago, in my early fifties – I added, edited, corrected, supplemented dozens of articles about a whole range of things and on a whole range of people. As accurately and impartially as I was able. All openly, publicly – as indeed participating in Wikipedia has to be.

And of course this episode reminds me that I haven’t been involved in Wikipedia for a while. I became lazy as Wikipedia became better, fuller, richer – though still not, to repeat, a source journalists should use without further checking.

So, thanks Mail on Sunday for reminding me that I should get involved once again. And here’s how I’ll start – I’ll take time out to look at the articles this journalist and ‘source’ (funny how Wikipedia insists on naming sources but … well, never mind ) are frothing about and if there’s anything there that’s inaccurate and needs correction, I’ll get stuck in.

There. You heard it here first.

The challenges of learning new multimedia and social media skills

2010-01-14T13:15:00.003Z

News:rewired, January 2010
***Notes from opening remarks at the 2010 news:rewired event, City University***
This is a very special event – the kind of event, frankly, we don’t have enough of here in the UK.
I feel very privileged to be here this morning to talk about one of the tough questions that faces all of us in different ways.
How do we meet the challenges of learning – and teaching – some of the key skills of our new media environment. Multimedia and social media skills.
One thing I would say – the coward in me is relieved I’m at this end of my career and not the beginning … though I’m not escaping what is a very complex world.
After 25 years as a BBC frontline editor – the first programme I edited was the weekend that the task force was sent to the Falklands – I'm now one of the team - the BBC College of Journalism - responsible for teaching journalism in the biggest news organisation in the world. The BBC.
What I do want to talk about are the principles and assumptions we’ve used to build our responsive, informal and online learning.
And to do it in a way that lays down some challenges. Just in case you hoped today was going to be cosy.

Three quick stories
Story 1:
In April last year, the BBC opened the biggest multimedia newsroom in the world here in London. Eleven hundred journalists working on multimedia, multiplatform news content.
It was intended to be – and was – a transformation. Both for the organisation and for individual journalists.
Expectations about roles were changed. As were the combinations of skills required. Journalists who’d worked for years monomedially were encouraged to take on new skills. Or totally new roles.
Live and continuous and the web were put at the heart of the BBC News offer.
News 24 became the BBC News channel; News online became the BBC News website. TV became video; radio became audio.
A multimedia internal news agency was the flywheel of the operation; the blogging and podcasting networks became less constrained.
The then head of the newsroom, Peter Horrocks, wrote thoughtfully about UGC and the role of audiences in Big Journalism’s newsgathering and fact checking.
In short, it was an example of Big Journalism making a rapid movement in the direction it saw journalism moving.
With multimedia, multiplatform journalism at its heart … though, at that stage, not social media.
We were asked to put together some online learning to help the project along.
And it seemed important to try to capture both the big picture – what was happening at the organisational level – and the many individual perspectives.
So one of the things I did was to task a multimedia producer and a Flash developer with making an interactive movie did both those things – in particular, mapped the changing skills any individual would need.
It was, and still is, a beautiful 3-D map/graphic. You click on graphic of TV centre to open a 3-D map that gave you an overview and what was going on in each part of the production chain.
And you could drill deeper and deeper right down to the individuals in any part of the production chain to watch a video of each of them describing their role and the skills they needed to carry them out.
We launched it when the newsroom opened – it was amazingly popular. Pretty well every journalist explored his or her future.
But we had to re-author the map during that week – because the newsroom itself and the roles within it had been tweaked.
Within a week of the newsroom opening, we had to redraw the map, rewrite text and re-shoot some videos – it had changed again.
It wasn’t long before organic changes to the newsroom and the roles within it were being made faster than we could reflect them in the Flash movie.
So we gave up. But it’s still a beautiful movie. A historic document – a snapshot.
What’s the moral of this story?
Several.
The obvious one is that our landscape is changing faster than we can describe it, let alone understand it.
Or work out what we need to know – the skills we need to have to deal with it.
The less obvious one is that even big news organisations like the BBC are changing rapidly, organically, dynamically – sometimes in ways that seem chaotic. But only in the way that any complex organism seems chaotic.
One example.
The BBC newsroom has begun organising itself into what it calls ‘story communities’ around Big Stories. They began using MSM to communicate and keep the community together - now, there's a dedicated application that does this.
The ‘community' grows and shrinks according to the needs of the story - drawing in new skills as they're needed and sharing content.
Less obviously, for all the Big Journalism’s skills at resembling a rabbit caught in the headlights of multimedia and latterly social media … it’s probably doing better than you think at adapting and capitalising on new media.
I think I detect a hint of ‘return to the cottage industry’ in a lot of what is written about new media’s potential for journalists.
Don’t make the mistake, for example, of thinking that journalism’s future will be populated mainly by ‘news entrepreneurs’ – it won’t, as even that particular idea’s uberzealots will tell you.
Don’t make the mistake, either, of thinking that in future journalism will be entirely or even mainly about the kind of skills we’re talking about today.
Like it or not, much journalism is about process and organisation – and seems likely to remain that way.
Demand for people who can organise an outside broadcast or coverage of a court case for live and continuous news remains and will remain high.
Demand for people who can elbow their way to the front of a scrum – ditto. Or for people who can field produce, problem solve or persuade players to appear on screen or on the web.
And so one of the challenges of learning multimedia and social media skills is to understand them not just for what they are and what they can do, but how they fit with the other essential - arguably more endurable - skills of journalism.

Story 2.
In a different universe, 2002 to 2006, I was editor of Today.
In one of our more turbulent periods, I wrote in an email that described a particular journalist’s report as “a good piece of investigative journalism, marred by flawed reporting.”
In that different universe – five years ago – that email became part of the evidence to the Hutton inquiry. It was about Andrew Gilligan’s infamous 0607 two-way. That was the two-way in which he attributed to his single anonymous source the judgment that the Government included a particular claim in its pre-Iraq war dossier although it “probably knew it was wrong”.
My wording “a good piece of investigative journalism, marred by flawed reporting” attracted a lot of comment.
One BBC veteran insisted there was no difference between ‘journalism’ and ‘reporting’ - and that I didn't know what I was talking about. Another of journalism's Big Beasts said it was yet more evidence that the BBC didn’t know what words meant so how could you expect them to tell the truth.
Of course, the point I was making was, and is, that there are at least - at least - two distinct and discrete sets of journalism skills. But that neither of these sets can exist independent of each other - not for a journalist anyway.
First: finding, checking, assessing the facts.
Then: telling those facts – accurately, impartially, independently. And engagingly.
Andrew had succeeded in the first part of that. But failed in the second.
The moral of this story?
Well again, the obvious one – you can’t separate the getting skills of journalism from the telling skills. Good, multimedia storytelling doesn't somehow get you out of the responsibility of finding out in the first place.
Nor do good 'getting' skills make up for an inability to articulate accurately what you have found out.
Less obviously, however good your 'telling' skills and however good your innovative 'getting' skills ... they don't supplant more fundamental, enduring journalistic skills.
Making contacts who know; persuading them to speak; noting accurately what they say; verifying their claims, testing them; thinking through who you have to approach next before you have a story; pursuing a long investigation; finding stories in opaque documents; filling in the gaps without speculation or sensation when authority holds its information tightly to itself; finding ways through the democratic deficit.
Multimedia and social media skills work when they supplement or facilitate these and other of journalism’s fundamentals.
They don’t supplant them.

Story 3.
Spool forward a few more years – to around 2005, the early days of serious newspaper multimedia.
I was interviewing Ben Hammersley at the Frontline Club – mostly about being Ben who, as you know, is one of the UK’s earliest genuine multimedia/multiplatform journalist.
He is a man to respect – who practices what he preaches.
Among other things, he really got the wired, networked idea. He helped develop some of the Guardian’s early blogging platforms.
Sensibly doing the whole thing from a café in a piazza in Italy.
But when we spoke at the Frontline, he was pushing the multimedia storytelling frontiers with some energy.
They were exciting times – and Ben’s vision of the future journalist was based on what he knew was possible. He knew it was possible because it was what he was doing.
That you could, as a journalist, spot your story. Develop it. Check it … and then decide the best way to tell your story.
Text. Text and stills. Audio and stills. Video.
The fact is – some people can work this way. But they’re the minority.
As I meet journalism students around the country, I keep coming across a mindset that every journalist has to have every available skill developed to the same level. An anxiety at the skills they don’t have or aren’t taught or aren’t taught well or in the right combination
Ben’s dream journalistic ecology is fine for him and fine for some – but it’s not for everyone.
A news organisation that produces multimedia journalism does not have to be peopled exclusively by pan-media journalists.
Quite the opposite – large news organisations need people with higher than average levels of graphics skills; video editing skills; writing skills. And higher than average social media skills.

Conclusions
So, what are my conclusions. My final thoughts.
1. That you learn and keep on learning is at least as important as what you learn.
You will not get very far in journalism any more unless you have the mindset that accepts and understands you will need to learn something new, changing the way you do things several times in your career.
2. Cruise and surf
Be a journalist when you're thinking about new skills.
Be aware of what exists and what’s changing - just like you do with news stories; what other people say about them; what they could do for you.
But don't think you have to have hoover up every skill.
3. What do you well? Which of the skills around would help you do that better? How do new skills fit with your old ones
There is nothing worse than watching someone who has no audio sense edit a news package or podcast.
At the same time, there’s nothing worse than watching someone who writes great headlines or lead paragraphs think that writing great tweets is somehow different.
4. Extract the real value from each skill you try
What are you really getting from this new skill? What’s it giving you? What’s it giving your work?
5. … and be ruthless
If it is isn't delivering – drop it.
6. When you find the set of skills that works for you, keep thinking, keep innovating
Example – blogging has done an awful lot more than simply increase the number of people who can 'do' journalism.
Robert Peston and Nick Robinson (and thousands of others) have found that it changes the nature of ‘the story’ – no-one has to wait for the next bulletin and the opportunity to fashion the perfect package in order to get a story or a development out.
And it advances trust and expertise as good blogging criteria - show you can't be trusted or that you have no expertise and the info fog will close around your blog.
7. Don't ever deceive yourself that 'big journalism' is over – it isn't and never will be ...
It will change and it will adapt to and incorporate the kind of skills and techniques we're talking about today.
But they're not the only ones that have value to journalism– though they can enhance the value of those other skills.
8. … on the other hand, organisations are not cleverer than you
Change, even in Big Journalism, can come from the bottom up - from the realities in the ways people are using new skills and new applications.
9. Don't lose the bigger picture
The sets of skills we're talking about today are important.
But they’re not necessarily the ones that are doing most to change journalism.
The personal web, granular searching and more clever metadata and augmented reality are doing and will do more to change journalism than multimedia or social networking
10. Skills are a means to an end
In journalism as in everything.
And no matter how exciting multimedia and social media are – the way in which new, easier ways of doing things come on stream - they're not an end in themselves.
Don't become a Twitterhead - like a petrolhead who knows everything about cars but forgets the point of them is to go from one place to another.
Make sure you stay outside the bubble.

Is it really all about ink and woodpulp?

2009-11-26T12:54:00.003Z

**This is a cross post from the BBC College of Journalism**

The Italian newspaper magnate, Carlo De Benedetti is undoubtedly a man to listen to - an opportunity afforded by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism who invited Ing. de Benedetti (in Italy, the qualification 'Engineer' - 'Ingegnere' - is used respectfully as a title) to deliver its 2009 memorial lecture. You can read it here.

Carlo de Benedetti is Chairman of Gruppo Editoriale L’Espresso and La Repubblica - the media group that owns those eponymous weekly and daily titles as well as handful of regional papers, radio stations and internet content.

He's a hugely respected leader of liberal opinion in Italy where his opposition to Prime Minister Berlusconi, both politically and as a rival businessman, has made him something of a hero to centre and centre-left alike.

His theme was the importance of newspapers to democracy and citizenship. Newspapers, note - not journalism. Here's his reasoning:

"Starting from a fact, which flashes naked and unembellished across internet screens – unmatched in terms of speed and immediacy – or across TV screens or radio waves, a newspaper organizes this fact, giving the reader an overview which aids understanding and puts it into context. It thus creates an authentic information system that enables citizen-readers to map out the issue and by reading about it form their own independent and complete final judgement. This passage is the difference between knowing and understanding, between looking and seeing, between being informed and being aware, to the point of ultimately being able to take responsibility for a reasoned personal opinion."

It'd be odd if Ing. De Benedetti didn't defend newspapers and their role in our democracies but what was striking here was his insistence that ink on woodpulp - and all the rigmarole that surrounds it - was somehow different from other ways of delivering journalism. His line that newspapers and newspapers alone can support citizen-readers' democratic decision making feels a bit of an oddity in 2009 .

Both in his lecture and in response to direct questions, Ing. De Benedetti characterised broadcasting and the web as transitory and ephemeral, good for the 'what' but lacking the 'why' - "the difference between knowing and understanding".

Perhaps the media landscape in Italy is very different from that in the UK where examples of genuine understanding derived only from broadcasters or genuine depth derived only from the web are too many to enumerate - indeed, they're routine. Perhaps it's Snr. Berlusconi's dominance of Italian TV that conditions Ing. De Benedetti's view of broadcasting's democratic potential.

Perhaps, too, newspaper culture in Italy is very different from that in the Anglo-Saxon world where, according to Ipsos/MORI's routine 'Trust' polls more than twice as many of us (54%)trust a total stranger to tell us the truth than trust a journalist (22%) to do the same. When 78% of your citizenry can't believe what they read in the papers, it's a bit hard to describe those papers as "an authentic information system".

A new ethical universe

2009-11-18T19:54:00.007Z

This is a re-post from the BBC College of Journalism 'Discussion on CoJo' pages.
*** UPDATE: Kurt Greenbaum's response here. ***
Kurt Greenbaum is the director of social media for the St Louis Post-Dispatch. He blogs on his own account as well as running a sector of the newspaper's website - stltoday.com.
On Monday, 16 November, Kurt posted this article both to his blog and to 'The Editor's Desk' - one of the parts of the website for which he's editorially responsible.
It told the story of a reader who'd posted a one-word response to an earlier blog which asked the question "what's the craziest thing you've ever eaten?" That word was obscene and would certainly have been removed by any moderator of any responsible blog - which is precisely what happened.
But it didn't stop there. Kurt takes up the story himself:

"A few minutes later, the same guy posted the same single-word comment again. I deleted it, but noticed ... that his comment had come from an IP address at a local school. So I called the school. They were happy to have me forward the email, though I wasn't sure what they'd be able to do with the meagre information it included.
About six hours later, I heard from the school's headmaster. The school's IT director took a shine to the challenge. Long story short: using the time-frame of the comments, our website location and the IP addresses ... he tracked it back to a specific computer. The headmaster confronted the employee, who resigned on the spot."

Kurt's actions have not gone down too well with his blog's readers. At the last count, there were 152 entries, most of them condemning what he did - some in strong terms, including phrases such as "thought nazi".
Sentiments such as this from 'Andrew' are more reasoned and catch the tenor of the responses:

"That was a really low move. The Post-Dispatch opens up their message boards to all users and takes it upon themselves to self-police them. Retaliatory attacks against users is not something that any person should expect from using these boards, save for threats of bodily harm or death."

What seems to have got up the noses of most of his readers is Kurt's tone in both telling this story in the first place and subsequently defending it where, in message board posts, he urges reader/writers to "follow the rules" and then they'll be OK.
So here's an ethical question journalists have never had to confront before. Is removing obscene or offensive comments in moderation enough? Is banning users from future posts enough? This offensive comment was posted from what appeared to be a school computer - does that change the ethical issues involved?
Should a message board poster risk losing his or her job for a comment which, though offensive and obscene, is neither illegal nor threatening?
I've emailed Kurt to ask if he's had a chance to reflect on all of this yet - I'll let you know what he says.

Emerging into the light

2009-11-16T15:27:00.006Z

It now looks pretty certain that December 14th will be the day the BBC College of Journalism goes truly global with the launch of its new website on bbc.co.uk - free to UK users, under subscription overseas.
It's been a pretty frustrating couple of months - not with the build of the site; that's been going rather well thanks to the patience and expertise of Web Manager Jon Jacob. There's one niggly little techie thing to finish and then we're there.
No, the frustration has been around the prep work - writing, editing, blogging - to build the content, knowing that no-one outside the BBC can see it yet.
Vital though that constituency is for us - our mantra is 'BBC learning for BBC journalists by BBC journalists' - it has meant that a lot of our discussions on the site have had a dimension missing; journalists and audiences outside the BBC.
Anyhow, here's another sneak preview of the homepage:
A large part of that front page is, as you can see, feeds of various kinds.
We're using del.icio.us, for example, to share blogs and articles that have some learning for journalists in them.
Some of you will be familiar with the College on Twitter - once we're fully public, we'll be able to link from our tweets to our content and blogs ... not being able to do that, for fear of annoying the hell out of non-BBC followers, has felt very restrictive for the last few months.
But there are also links to the content - liking the carousel top centre? And there's a lot of content inside.
About 2,500 pages at the last count. And something like a couple of hundred videos. And dozens of 'virtual newsroom' scenarios ... and quizzes ... and tests. And. And. And.
It's all arranged into four main categories: Ethics and Values, Law, Skills and Briefing. There's also a cross-category bit of the site - the Glossaries.
We've tried to keep the structure as flat as possible - the idea is that you should be able to go exactly where you want with no more than a couple of clicks ... something that's helped by the site's 'intelligent learning environment' - each page's metadata should ensure that you're offered on that page something else similar or related to the learning you're reading or watching.
We'll be adding new content regularly - there's already more stuff in the pipeline on court reporting, numbers, field production and political reporting - and building what we hope will be one of the most important networks around journalism and journalism education in the world.
We'll see.

Getting nearer day by day

2009-10-07T19:10:00.002Z

One of the most frustrating things about the stage we're at with the new BBC College of Journalism website is that we're so close to publishing ... and yet can't really show anyone what's going on.
I guess it must always be like this. But to bring up to speed those of you who haven't been able to follow ... here's a quick summary of the game so far.
We launched a BBC College of Journalism intranet site back in January 2007 ... aimed at the 7,500 journalists in the BBC (not all of them in News, incidentally).
It wasn't lavishly resourced and some of us - me - who were probably supposed to be thinking strategy and direction learned instead about coding and HTML and Flash and and and ...
A handful of us put together about 1200 pages of learning - guides, tips, advice - and about 250 bits of video; a blog, podcasts, interactive tests and quizzes and built the tools to deliver them. A lot of late nights and a lot of really satisfying work.
Satisfying, too, because we put into effect some really cool ideas about informal learning and were able to find out how early and mid career journalists learn best. (Clue - it's not in the classroom and not from people the journalists don't respect or even admire).
Something went right - about half of our client group visited the site at least once a month (many more than that) and stayed for about 25 minutes using about 14 pages per visit.
The plan always was to share this content with the people who'd paid for it - UK licence fee payers. And to make it available for BBC journalists to work on at home or in parts of the world where a www connection was more reliable than an intranet link.
Which is where we more or less are now.
We've taken all the intranet content; re-shot some of it, re-authored most of it; added to it to create an initial offer of about 1800 pages of learning, 200+ films, audio and interactive tests and quizzes ... and put it all on a bbc.co.uk site.
You can peek at the front page here.
Anyhows ... the wraps come of for BBC users on 13 October; it being gently launched as a beta site with the inention that our colleagues will help us improve it.
Then - mirabile dictu - sometime just before or around Christmas it'll be available free to UK users and, probably, to global users under subscription.
And though we're sharing BBC learning, the website will remain a site for BBC journalists by BBC journalists - anyone going there will be able to experience exactly the same learning material that BBC journalists use.
Coming soon ... promise.

A long silence ...

2009-09-10T20:55:00.006Z

... though why should anyone care.
It's been all about this:

The new BBC College of Journalism site - on bbc.co.uk and, I hope, soon to be launched to the UK public.
More news soon.

The uses of literacy

2009-02-07T11:19:00.003Z

Been meaning to post this one for a while.
I imagine it's mere chance - both ads have been appearing for sometime in the New Yorker but always on different pages and never, as here, one above the other. Of course, these ads are one of the many reasons for still having a subscription to the paper and ink version. Someone who does maths should be able to work out the next time these two are likely to come into conjunction.
'Course, it might not be chance. Maybe a temp in the small ads department or setting the page has a wicked sense of humour.
And the New Yorker has visitied similar territory before - the June 9/16 front cover.

Cross fertilisation

2009-01-13T21:19:00.001Z

By the way, should you want to keep up with how the thinking is evolving in developing the publicly facing College of Journalism website ... take a look here. A working knowledge of Latin is helpful.

Discovering another America

2009-01-03T11:12:00.006Z

My daughter, Ellen, gave me a splendid Xmas present ... something she came across in one of the second-hand bookshop world's best kept secrets - the Oxfam shop in Turl Street in Oxford. It is a bound collection of The Century Magazine covering May to October 1895.
For those of you who haven't come across The Century Magazine, there's a brief Wikipedia entry here ... which hides as much as it reveals.
The first real thrill came when I opened the volume - it was presented to the writer, architect and gardener Walter Hindes Godfrey in February 1896 - when the young Godfrey was just 15 years old - for 'the best map of ancient Italy'. Godfrey is perhaps best known for his restoration of Herstmonceux. I am no great fan of Godfrey ... but there is something both thrilling and intriguing about knowing who owned a book before you.
The Century is described as a 'popular magazine' - which on the strength of its sales alone, it certainly was. And the style of much of its fiction certainly deserves that description. But in no other sense can the other meanings of 'popular' be ascribed to it. It is a dense read; its pages - 60 lines in two columns - are forbidding to modern eyes and as thickly textured as its illustrations, mostly drawings and engravings with the odd photograph, exemplifying the horror vacui of the time.
The Century was truly global in its subject matter - Napoleon Bonaparte coming high on the list with half a dozen articles during the six months or so of this collection ... presumably marking the centenary of his appointment as CiC of the French army, the event that began his rise to supreme power. There are articles on travels to the orient, the Balkans and England; on personalities; obituaries. And there is fiction. Oh yes, there is fiction - mostly written by apparently formidable women authors, much of it serialised, some of which, "An Errant Wooing" by Mrs Burton Harrison for example, yields nothing in emotional intensity to modern soaps.
But what is most wonderful about The Century Magazine from these latter years of the 19th century is that it clerks and logs the self-discovery of an America that was still bemused by its own existence. For many of the educated middle classes of New York and Boston, America was an un- or partially known presence. For those in late middle-age, the Civil War was a living memory and much of the West, though by the 1890s well-established states of the Union, remained more of an idea than a reality to many Americans on the Atlantic coast.
Unsurprisingly, then, there is much in the pages of The Century Magazine that feels like an exploration of the notion of 'homeland' ... in both fact and fiction. Stories are set on the transcontinental railroad, opened a generation earlier; folk festivals of rural America are studied and described. There is polemic against the tenement landlords of Manhattan who have to be forced to mend the foul drains that condemn their tenants to disease; and a consideration on the marriage prospects of college educated women.
If you want a flavour of The Century Magazine you can dip in here.

What I learned in 2008

2008-12-16T18:31:00.006Z

... is the question over at The Learning Circuits blog. The big question.
Background first; I do many things these days but first and foremost I earn my corn at the BBC College of Journalism. Somebody thought that after thirty years in the front line - I edited the BBC's biggest domestic radio news programmes, including Today with some 6 million listeners - I might have something worth passing on to the rest of the organisation.
Not an unreasonable assumption ... except that I did my learning in a world very different from now. So different that the past couple of years have been more about discovering how journalists learn today than they have been about systematising my own learning from the past.
Example: everything I know about journalism I learnt from other journalists - ones I admired, feared, resented. It happened in pubs; in cutting rooms; in cutting corners; in salving wounds and pride; from that one piece of intelligence that transfigures understanding and from the revelation that came from riding the Story Curve (hence the title of this blog). Oh, and from that feeling you get after putting down the phone, bested by a politician or spin-doctor.
The common factor in all of this? Time.
Time to talk, reflect, experiment, understand what's just happened to you and to construct a principle for the future; time to go to the pub; time to talk about the edit; time to use short Anglo-Saxon words outwardly while embedding a piece of learning inwardly.
And what is it that our young journalists don't have now? Quite.
So part of my learning about learning in 2008 has been trying to find ways to use our website - sadly, still internal to the BBC but going global in 2009 - to recreate something of the power of that way of learning.
Some has been easy; journalists still want to learn from admired experts; they want critique - inwardly, at least ... outwardly they put on a good show of shrugging off anything that looks like criticism or learning. They want 'just in time' advice; intelligencing and a sniff of the Story Curve. Some simulacrum of this we can fashion online - but it only goes so far.
So here's the other thing I learned; organisations like mine can put social networking tools in place and we must and we should and we have ... but even if they're used (more on that in a moment) on their own they're not enough. The way journalists have learned traditionally captures a truth that we all now theorise - the piece of learning comes initally wrapped in garish emotional wrapping; the crashing, heart-stopping moment when you realise just how wrong you were ... how easily you could have got it right; but then moves - sometimes at dead of night or in an unguarded moment - to realisation, rationalisation and resolve. Deep learning self-generating away from the learning stimulus in other words.
On this, here's the thing I have still to learn; how to use online content to 'create' time or its illusion; 'create' the crashes of the learning moment; 'create' the opportunities for that deep learning.
Here's something else I learned; try to understand the learning networks that already exist - don't try to reinvent them. We did a lot of work in the middle of the year around how organisations use networking to support learning. It was good work, but it overlooked one thing; BBC journalists were already sharing learning, links and intelligence like crazy - millions of transactions a day amongst the 8,000 or so journalists. They were writing stuff that was in every respect blogging ... it's just that no-one called it that.
Like most newsrooms, the BBC uses a computerised real-time news production system to read news agency wires and write scripts; that news production system has an informal instant messaging system as part of the package. It's used routinely for every conceivable purpose from conducting questionable social lives to passing the most profound intelligence and thinking around breaking or moribund stories.
We - those of us delivering online learning to our journalists - shouldn't try to create an alternative to this. But here's the challenge; one very senior executive is reported - almost certainly unfairly and out of context, for it is ever so - to have said, "I go to blogs and read stuff ... but that's not learning".
Getting that particular executive to acknowledge formal/informal learning - that's to say, the informal learning contained within an enterprise like the College of Journalism website and blogs - is a bit of an ask. Getting him/her to acknowledge the rich learning contained in the instant messaging around programme production ... oh dear.
Here's the final thing I learned in 2008. Everything we journalists work with changes each time we use it - not just the technology to gather, produce and distribute our content but journalism itself. The story is dying ... but we're still not entirely sure what to put in its place. Our former audiences are talking back to us ... but we're still not entirely sure what to do with what they say. We stumble on fantastically successful formats ... but lack the confidence to read across from them to other content.
That's the big learning challenge/opportunity for 2009 - how to teach the 'meta-skills' of journalism ... or raise awareness of them and find some resource to wheel in behind. Not 'here's how you do this' or more accurately 'here's how we've always done this in the past' ... but 'here's an idea about how you could think and be to be able to deal with whatever it is that journalism becomes'.
Coo.

The end

2008-12-01T20:32:00.002Z

The Times' George Brock, one of journalism's old boys (sorry) writes in the TLS that journalism is approaching its end - at least, the 'professional' sort is. Excerpt:

"Journalism is in trouble as an idea. Does this matter? The fourth estate cannot, thank goodness, be managed, reformed or even considered as a coherently organized profession. But journalists could think more clearly than they do about how to improve the level of trust in their work. The case for the professionals needs making all over again. With humility."

He writes in review of Bob Fox's new anthology of reportage 'Eyewitness to History' - a 2,000 page lintel. And paradox to boot.
'The case for the professionals' can't be made without accepting that their/our base currency - the story - is dead. And that we 'professionals' need the people we used to think of as our audiences to keep us honest or 'improve the level of trust' in our work.

Quote wars

2008-11-30T21:06:00.006Z

My friend Adrian Monck seems pleased by my aside in a recent book Beyond Trust that his thoughtful and entertaining book Can You Trust the Media is - as far as the values of journalism goes - nihilistic.

Adrian is reminded of a book (that's three books so far; one more to come) he read some thirty plus (I'm guessing here) years ago; Turgenev's Fathers and Sons in which the odious Yevgeny Vassilievitch Bazarov delivers himself of this juvenilium:

"A nihilist is a man who does not bow to any authorities, who does not take any principle on trust, no matter with what respect that principle is surrounded."

Apparently, there's a bit of him in every journalist. Well, kinda; and that's the problem. Bazarov's human weaknesses are multiple (irony) in that as well as being utterly ignorant of the consequences of the philosophy he claims to live by (more irony), he's a hypocrite, liar and cheat; he's also incompetent, snuffing himself out before the end of the novel because he couldn't meet the most basic requirement of his job.

For better or worse, I prefer Victor Hugo - and there's a lot of him to prefer. In my part of France, the whole population (apparently) of Montreuil sur Mer joins every year in an appropriately lengthy son et lumiere, scenes from Hugo's Les Miserables - this bears no relationship, incidentally to the London musical.

Now as every French schoolchild knows, Hugo has something to say about everything and one of the things he has to say about nihilism is this:

"All roads are blocked to a philosophy which reduces everything to the word “no.” To “no” there is only one answer and that is “yes.” Nihilism has no substance. There is no such thing as nothingness, and zero does not exist. Everything is something. Nothing is nothing. Man lives more by affirmation than by bread."

Relevance ? Well it's this. We can reduce journalism to zero - to something that has no meaning beyond story and cares nothing about a meaning that outlives the sound of its last story's last word; the question is, should we ... or even, do we want to ?

I suppose I have this daft belief that it's a good idea if the accounts of the world we give each other are true (inasmuch as they can be - and, yes, I get that problem) honest (inasmuch as we can judge them - ditto) and trusted (inasmuch as we can audit them - ditissimo). And that if journalism purports to make a living from scribbling these accounts on the back of adverts and flogging them to us, then it'd better make sure its accounts are at least fractionally more trustworthy than those we can get from the village gossip, for free and without the ads.

I suppose I mind the hollowing out of journalism that this nihilism supports. But I suppose I mind more that line about 'siding with Andrew Gilligan'. Now that is nasty. AM knows how to wound.

But I don't bear grudges - so here's a challenge; let's debate this. A showdown. You ... me ... with or without seconds. I don't even mind an away fixture down your end of town. Before Christmas ?

Will Big Media gobble-up the citizens?

2008-11-14T18:32:00.002Z

I was struck by this exchange between BBC News chief Helen Boaden and Tobias Escher at the Oxford Internet Institute.
It touches on two things I've written and spoken about before - one, the attitude of Big Media towards its authoring audiences (partners or occasional amateur helpers) the other, a lecture back in June 2006 predicting Big Media's inevitable assimilation of UGC and citizen journalism ... certainly in the strict news context.
For anyone with enough time and curiosity, here's that period piece of almost two and a half years ago.

The Revolution Will Be Televised after all
Bournemouth, 8 June 2006

If we’d been having this discussion three or even two years ago, we’d have been full of certainties.

We’d have been certain that news had become just one source in the thickening fog of information about the world. For many, not even the main or an important source.

That news consumers had long since stopped turning to newspapers first as a source of news. And were beginning to stop turning to TV and Radio too.

That this thing called the internet was giving away free what we’d been selling. Selling directly in the commercial sector, indirectly in the public sector.

We’d have been certain that the traditional business models of news producers were unsustainable and wondered what next.

We’d have been certain that the young just weren’t consuming our news any more. And that if they never got the habit in the first place, they certainly wouldn’t develop it later on.

We’d have looked at the nervous breakdown in American journalism. Caused by the bloggers’ relentless pursuit of dodgy journalistic practices and Wall Street’s loss of patience in big newspaper chains.

Certain it was only a matter of time before something like that came here.

We’d have looked at all the data – and become even more certain.

UK newspaper sales continued in long-term decline. At least one national editor wondered whether printed papers had a future at all.

Audiences for the big news bulletins on BBC1 were falling steadily as they fragmented and spread themselves around all the digital options.

ITN had suffered from being the Flying Dutchman of the ITV schedules.

Serious current affairs were firmly located on the margins.

And we’d have looked at the trends on the net – certain that we saw signs there that journalism itself was unravelling.

Those bloggers in the US who’d become the scourge of the New York Times, Time Magazine and CBS were raising the obvious question.

If bloggers – ie we ourselves – could do what journalists did … why did we need journalists, their arrogant lectures and questionable practices ?

The war between bloggers and journalists was definitely on.

And we’d have been certain about the crisis of trust; only one in six UK citizens trusts a newspaper journalist to tell the truth. Fewer than trust a complete stranger. Fewer than trust bloggers.

That at the very time trust was emerging as the most important commodity in the wired world.

Tom Curley, the CEO of Associated Press, was certain. What was happening marked "a huge shift in the 'balance of power' in our world, from the content providers to the content consumers."

We’d have been certain about this huge shift because of what we were reading, too. And what was happening in other worlds linked to ours.

One of those books was Joe Trippi’s. It described Howard Dean’s campaign for the Democratic nomination in 2004.

It’s a great story. About how the Dean campaign never really took off when it followed the traditional candidate’s route.

And how Trippi persuaded Dean to take a leap into the unknown.

To turn his back on traditional campaigning and funding and publicity. And rely instead on new internet based social and political networks for debate, money and coverage.

Democrats for Dean blogged. Trippi blogged, Dean blogged – they tested policies over what was an exceptionally well organised network of networks.

It was the story of grassroots power. A story about people sharing peer to peer, building into networks that didn’t need that politico/journalistic complex that was American politics and American political reporting.

Trippi called his book; “The revolution will not be televised.” And just in case you missed the point, he subtitled it; “Democracy, the Internet, and the Overthrow of Everything.”

The Dean story wasn’t quite that. At the Iowa Caucus. Dean – by then the front runner – came third and went out on a scream.

Kerry won the nomination. Bush won the election.

Trippi’s was a surfer’s book. Not internet surfer – though it was that too. It was written by someone carried along on the top of a huge, exhilarating, exciting wave.

A wave that – Trippi was sure, we all were sure – was sweeping through politics and the media. That really did threaten the overthrow of everything – including what was, by then, being called Big Journalism.

That term, Big Journalism, was coined by one of the most significant and persuasive voices riding the wave. Dan Gilmor – a former Californian journalist who gave up the press to work with the internet.

In the summer of 2004, Gilmor produced another book that we all read; We the Media; Grassroots journalism by the people for the people”.

It’s theme was this;
Grassroots journalists are dismantling Big Media's monopoly on the news, transforming it from a lecture to a conversation. Not content to accept the news as reported, these readers-turned-reporters are publishing in real time to a worldwide audience via the Internet

The previous year, Hypergene’s Shayne Bowman and Chris Willis had produced the most read - and if you were in the traditional news media, most unnerving – account of a possible future for news.

Through the autumn and winter of 2003, traditional journalists and editors emailed each other links to that account – called “We Media”. There they read;
“We are at the beginning of a Golden Age of journalism — but it is not journalism as we have known it. Media futurists have predicted that by 2021, "citizens will produce 50 percent of the news peer-to-peer." However, mainstream news media have yet to meaningfully adopt or experiment with these new forms. Historically, journalists have been charged with informing the democracy. But their future will depend not on only how well they inform but how well they encourage and enable conversations with citizens. That is the challenge.”

And they were right. There was little sign back in 2003 that traditional news producers knew where to start in adapting to the new news ecology.

We were all certain that the revolution would not be televised … because all the signs were that Big Media, traditional news producers, wouldn’t be there to do it.

Then came Web 2.0.

An internet concept that seemed to make life impossible for Big Journalism – certainly for Big Journalism that had to make money.

Web 2.0 is an elusive term.

It was coined in Silicon Valley – by Tim O’Reilly, who happened also to be Dan Gilmor’s publisher - at about the time Joe Trippi was predicting the overthrow of everything

Initially, it referred to the kind of web being created around 2003 and 2004 by the companies that had survived the dotcom crash of 2001.

Borderless and continuous. Where the platform was king – giving users all the tools they needed to assemble their own content, making their own and mixing it with yours and mine.

All at no or very, very low cost.

Google is the paradigm Web 2.0 company with a paradigm Web 2.0 business model.

It collects rent on something it doesn’t own – your eyeballs. From people who don’t own them. – advertisers. In return for directions to something it doesn’t own – your and my content.

The strength of its brand resides in its ability to take you somewhere useful, reliably. Billions of times a day – raising revenue – a tenth of a cent at a time - from a percentage of those billions.

The contrast with the business models of Big Journalism couldn’t be more marked. Those models depend on the loyalty of a few hundred thousand or millions, in a close relationship, paying money up front for some things they want and a lot they don’t.

It was grim. And just a couple of years ago, the only question was. How grim exactly ?

The revolution would not be televised – at least, not by Big Journalism.

But 2005 was a remarkable year.

It began with one of the most perceptive commentators on the media – Jay Rosen at New York University – declaring the war between journalists and bloggers over.

Rosen reasoned that neither side had won; they do different things. There was room in the new world for both.

But their future relationship – which in essence was the relationship between news producers and consumers – would have important consequences for some of the most cherished – and most abused – notions in journalism.

But the lecture was over. Welcome to the conversation.

Some – but by no means all – of Big Journalism took Willis and Bowman’s advice and started to ask how they could adopt or experiment with these new forms.

Hesitantly and uncertainly at first – and it’s still work in progress.

But broadly successfully.

It was a process hastened by the major news events of that year. Events that tested Big Journalism’s engagement with the new forms.

The Asian Tsunami, the London bombings, the Buncefield explosion – and in a different way Hurricane Katrina.

In the world we all feared, the vast amount of vivid, eye-witness material gathered by news consumers themselves would have sat somewhere out there, aggregated by users themselves by-passing journalism using the platforms of Web 2.0.

But it didn’t happen like that. With each of these, Big Journalism showed it could handle this kind of news gathering.

Absorb it. Test it. Use it. Give shape to it. Crucially, give it the meaning the algorithmic platforms couldn’t.

American journalism – which had suffered more than the UK – seemed to be making its way back upstream.

In its 2006 review of the State of the American news media, journalism.org reported that traditional news producers were finally getting to grips with new platforms and establishing their brands amongst the young.

Here, some newspapers continued to lose circulation. But some didn’t.

And there seemed to be a direct relationship between brand strength and adaptation to the new media.

Amongst the newspapers, The Guardian, The Observer, The FT, The Independent and Independent on Sunday along with the Economist all had good years in 2005 – both online and on the news-stands.

In the BBC, 2005 was the year of Creative Future – the year the BBC became serious in its thinking about how to deal with the new realities.

We weren’t alone. Guardian newspapers’ developments online – one of the most used and trusted sites on the web; its podcasts; blogging columnists and user-generated travel reports.

In the US, the American Press Institute’s “Newspaper Next” initiative – all evidence that traditional news providers were getting to grips with their own survival.

Tamar Kasriel – the head of Knowledge Venturing at the Henley Centre – said at the Guardian’s “Changing Media” conference in London earlier this year.
“The single most important thing to understand about the future is that it’s not about being right, it’s about being ready.”

Her advice was to look closely at trends. Push them to extremes – and be ready for anything.

Anything means exactly that. Some challenges are predictable. Others not.

One clear trend that you saw in that film and which others have also identified is the durability of content. AP’s Tom Curley put it like this;
“we want to have ownership of the story for longer than the first few hours.”

The job used to be to produce news stories for your primary platform; a wire service, a newspaper, a radio or TV programme.

Now that’s just the start.

Just the first step in driving a much broader portfolio. More ways of getting those stories to consumers.

Headlines on the move; to mobiles and in public spaces. Online and into the home via radio and TV.

For AP – which the American Journalism Review’s Rachel Smolkin called the “meat and potatoes” of news – it means the AP blogs and podcasts; the online video network; and A-S-A-P, a syndicated online news provision aimed at the under 35s.

It’s what the BBC’s Director General Mark Thompson calls “the long tail.” Working every story through every platform. Connecting with both general and targeted audiences.

The other part of that is the journey stories make from news to context.

As stories develop, today’s news becomes tomorrow’s background or context.

We know the traditional model well. The editor’s choice of story is placed alongside the editor’s choice of picture, choice of background, choice of analysis, editorial comment and op-ed page opinion.

But in Web 2.0, everyone can and does make their own context - usually by searching on Google.

If you want your news to have a really long tail – and most business models require news producers to make money from that long tail – your stories have to survive in the new market place as context.

That means being a highly trusted source of news in the first place, doing something other news providers can’t.

And one source of that trust comes from the conversation with the audience.

News consumers know what they know. And know what you don’t. As Dan Gilmor point out, someone – perhaps a lot of someones - out there knows more than you do.

Integrating that knowledge is a critical part of Big Journalism’s survival.

Richard Sambrook – the BBC’s Head of Global division – sees it happening in four ways. Some of them, we saw in that film.

Eyewitness accounts, pictures and video; the integration of blogs into news coverage; news broken on the web; and using the public to develop and inform our journalism.

In the BBC, we’re setting up specialist units to handle user generated content and all the editorial challenges it poses.

Blogs and message-boards are emerging as important sources of news and context – the best insights into the Lozell’s disturbances was on the BBC’s “Where I Live” site.

And even the most traditional programmes like R4’s Today now trawl the 70 or 80 thousand emails it gets every year for tips for new stories and truth checks on running stories.

But I think Web 2.0 – and Webs 3.0, 4.0 and 5.0 when they come along – will challenge journalism in a very much more fundamental way.

Big Journalism will be around to televise – and report – the revolution.

But the ability that those platforms give news consumers to slice across their news and information in any plane will changes our ideas of news at a very basic level.

Trust drives the web.

Often, we don’t know who we’re dealing with. So we develop ways of finding out whether we can trust them.

Google, eBay, Amazon, iTunes, Expedia … the list goes on. They work because we trust them. And we trust them because they do exactly what they say they will do.

But we have different kinds of trust. The kind of trust that wants to know it’ll get straight dealing. The kind of trust that – in our world, the world of information – knows it’ll get as factual answer as possible to the question; what happened; where did it happen; who did it happen to; why did it happen.

And then the other kind of trust. In platforms, sites and bloggers who appeal to us in particular ways. They confirm our view of the world. Or they tell me stuff that’s really whacky. Or they’re just cool.

Those two big strands in the new media world mirror the two great traditions of journalism.

The journalism of verification and of record. And the pluralist, argumentative, gadfly tradition. John Stuart Mill’s clash of ideas.

In pre-web journalism, these two traditions have been consistently woven together.

Sometimes loosely – the stinging editorial inside the paper with the straight report from Iraq on the front page. Sometimes tightly – the screaming headline that tells you exactly what the editor thinks and doesn’t give the facts even one clear run.

But I wonder whether that weave can survive the web ? Especially since we know the interleaving of fact and opinion is one of the principal sources of mistrust in journalists.

The new news consumer will still want both fact and comment – but no-one will need to tolerate them woven together sometimes so tightly that the paper’s voice drives the facts and not the other way around.

Google News filters one kind of content for you; Technorati another.

And as far as comment and argument goes, the distinction between columnist and blogger becomes daily harder to make. Newspapers experimenting with columnist/bloggers are identifying the one with the other.

If I like – trust - Simon Jenkins, David Aaronovitch and Matthew Parris, am I going to buy three papers or go to the web ? And while I’m reading them on the web … why not Romanesko or Gaping Void or Kick AAS ?

And won’t I think that what I want to tell the world is at least as valid as what they have to say.

So how will the other tradition go ? Well, Wikinews and OhMynews show there’ll be a conversational role there too.

But it seems clear that there’ll still be huge demand for people who “do journalism”. The hard stuff that the average citizen can’t do, doesn’t want to do or hasn’t the time to do.

Journalists – the people who collect news from places most of us can’t or don’t go. Not routinely, anyway. And from the people the ordinary citizen has no access to.

Investigations and watchdog journalism that most citizens don’t have the time or skills to do.

Verification, explanation, judgement and analysis. Platforms don’t make judgements.

But to generate trust in that kind of content, journalism will have to show its workings.

Some Web 2.0 gurus doubt that traditional news providers can ever become the kind of organisations that generate trust.

Most British newspapers are notoriously opaque. Refusing the openness and transparency they demand of others. Most still have no means for the reader to question their decision-making; most don’t publish a code of practice.

Most refuse to correct all but the most glaring errors and some turn every which way to defend the most grotesque misquotations.

Maybe I’m imagining it, but it does seem that the news organisations most prepared to be open with their audiences are better placed to win trust.

American journalism – brutalised by the Blair, Miller, Jordan and Rather scandals … or more accurately, the news organisations’ initial opacity in dealing with them – is responding with a flurry of openness; codes of conduct and promises to their readers; publishing on the web interviews and source material in full.

I’m confident the revolution will be televised after all.

Some of the certainties that made us doubt that have turned out to be less certain than we thought.

One certainty – that news producers as a breed couldn’t handle the changes Web 2.0 was throwing at them – has turned out to be just another opportunity. There will be winners and losers.

It wasn’t and won’t be the overthrow of everything after all.

But one thing will, I think, be overthrown. The barrier to trust that some of the opaque rites and rituals of journalism truly are.

And if, as I believe, that leads to journalism becoming one of the most trusted trades rather than one of the least, then that would be a revolution we could all cheer.

Welcome, Jeff

2008-09-30T19:30:00.001Z

Jeff Jarvis is a zealot when it comes to new media. He makes you think and in a way that means you don't have to agree with him. But when he writes ...

"The building block of journalism is no longer the article
The old building block of journalism — the article — is proving to be inadequate in the current onslaught of news. I’ll argue here that the new building block is the topic."

... he should be welcomed to the fold.

Crisis, what crisis ?

2008-09-28T19:26:00.002Z

A cracking 'Moral Maze' style debate in Oxford this weekend just past, marking the 25th anniversary of the Reuters Foundation – now Thomson Reuters Foundation - and examining the proposition that ‘Quality Journalism is in Crisis’.
One of the participants, Charlie Beckett of the LSE/Polis who opposed the motion, blogs that its outcome – overturning an initial near 2:1 supportive majority to a near 2:1 vote the other way – is resonant of the (in)famous King and Country debate at the Oxford Union. Up to a point etc …
I was fortunate enough to be one of the investigating panel – along with Jean Seaton of Westminster University and the Mayor of Woodstock and 'missionary to explain', Peter Jay – and began the enterprise needing to be convinced by the motion’s supporters.
Little united those supporters other than an uneasiness that a familiar past was slipping away; in the cases of the Guardian’s 'Flat Earther' Nick Davies or the BBC’s John Ware it was a past (largely imagined, I think) in which the journalist was hunter-gatherer hero, bringing stalked enlightenment back from the forest; in the case of former Reuters’ strategy director David Ure it was a past of brand-dominant information brokerage. Oddly, the fourth supporter of the proposition, former LA Times editor Michael Parks, had told us the previous evening ‘every minute spent lamenting is minute lost to inventing’ … so little surprise he ended up switching sides and opposing his own motion.
And that was probably justified by the debate, too: Charlie Beckett and the Oxford Internet Institute’s Bill Dutton presented a distinctly non-scary future vision of what is already the dominant news platform, the internet: while Zoe Smith of ITN online and Mehdi Hassan of C4 News – whose combined age was probably less than the average of the other speakers and of us on the panel – proved utterly unperturbed by a future in which platforms mutate before their eyes and passionately committed to finding ways of producing quality journalism.
What swung the vote ? Probably the realisation that the ‘crisis’ of the proposition is in large part an ever present feature of quality journalism: that it always has been and always will be under threat from something – whether the foibles of press barons, the profit drive of corporate ownership, the fickleness of audiences and their attention, the gutter morals of the lowest in the trade. There wasn’t isn’t and won’t be a golden age.
Probably, too, the understanding that journalism’s emerging future is one in which the divide between ‘news’ and ‘information’ is gone; that quality, revelatory journalism of the now and future is more about intelligencing information – which in all likelihood is already out there in some form - than it is about hunting it down. Oh … and that it’s inevitable someone out there in the audience is better at intelligencing it than a jobbing journalist.
That, in order to sustain quality journalism, what will be required are new analytical, intellectual and visualising skills more than technical skills (which, anyway, young journalists increasingly have as a matter of course); that the journalistic convention of ‘the story’ is dead; and that quality is unlikely to look like it did twenty years ago.
Yup. No crisis at all.

The shoe-horn cracked.

2008-05-05T10:40:00.002Z

Nick Davies' excellent deconstruction of what must be one of the worst reported stories this year - the Haut de Garenne investigation - is a great Bank Holiday read. (Oh, how sad is that?). Until this:

"Like so many false and distorted stories, this one was driven by PR, here from the police. That PR material was used by media outlets without sufficient checks and then recycled secondhand by masses of others, all of them falling foul of the commercialised media's in-built preference for certainty over doubt; for fitting facts into fictional templates; for taking the safe road of running the same angle as the rest of the media; and, most of all, for running stories which sell."

You really could hear the shoe-horn crack. Somewhere deep, deep in the background of the Haut de Garenne insanities may perhaps be aspects of the far from unarguable journalistic universe that Nick articulates in Flat Earth News. But even if they are, they're well hidden by the figures in the foreground - the 'reporters' locked into a ritualised reverence for 'the story'.

By Nick's own account, the information shared with journalists was a million miles from PR - and it's worth trying to imagine the alternative for a moment. What if deputy chief officer of police, Lenny Harper had revealed nothing of the inquiry in press notices and conferences?

Inevitably, details would have leaked and the headlines would have been similar, the coverage similarly mendacious and chaotic ... with the added implied verification "it must be true because they didn't want us to know it."

Coverage like that of Haut de Garenne is much more the result of the internal rites and rituals of reporters obsessed with the outdated idea of 'the story' - and their preparedness to bend or omit any set of facts to make 'the story' - than it is newsrooms' surrender to commerical pressure or slave-labour news production quotas.

Bloody internet

2008-05-03T09:28:00.005Z

Seems I'm the only person I know who isn't publishing a book right now. That's OK - I can live with it. What I am doing, though, is trying to get my head around an idea I sold to BBC R4's Analysis: and, yes, it did seem like a good idea at the time etc. The programme Editor and producer, Hugh and Ingrid, have that irritating tendency proper to clever people of insisting that people like me who aren't very clever get a grip of their facts and what it is they want to say before opening their mouths.
The idea is, on the face of it, a straightforward one: 'Can the British press survive its crisis by taking lessons from the American public journalism movement?' And yes, if I'd had the courage of my convictions, I'd have opened it up as a web conversation and taken it from there.
But I'd written a short(ish) pamphlet on public journalism for my BBC bosses back in 2005 ... so at the time I floated the idea, it didn't seem too big an ask.
Which is where the 'bloody internet' comes in. The great thing about the internet is the serendipity of the research you do there, arriving in places you could never had predicted when you clicked on that first link: I remember Theodore Zeldin telling a symposium at the World Economic Forum in Davos back in 2004 that the ideal internet search engine would be one that delivered random results, his way through the information fog.
The bloody thing about the internet is what happens when it crashes into traditional research for a traditional, linear piece of work. A piece of work with a deadline.
First, the depression when you find that every 'original' thought you think you've had has already been had: second, your subject's refusal to be constrained by any single, or even complex, line of thought: and by extension, third, the distance you travel from those post-its you sprayed around your computer screen with the chapter or section titles on them.
'Course, Dr Zeldin is right - it's much more fun this way and you do end up with both the conscious and unconscious bits of your brain better employed. But it doesn't make it any easier to arrive at five thousand particular words which, when joined end to end, work both grammatically and intellectually.
Take this: I thought I'd got the bit worked out about the 'BIG CHOICE' for the press - whether it re-establishes itself as a meaningful agent in the public sphere or finally abandons its threadbare 'public interest' loincloth and just gets on with flogging eyeballs to advertisers.
Then Googlereader gives me a link to this post on Steve Boriss' 'Future of News' - reviewing James Bowman's new book. Steve summarises James Bowman's arguments like this:

"... a key motivator for consumer newspaper purchases is the vanity of knowing more than others do. Since we tend to assume that the privileged rich, powerful and famous have access to knowledge the rest of us don’t, much of modern journalism has devolved into the questionable and narrow practice of digging out the “hidden truths” allegedly known only to elites."

Now, the problem with this is that it gives a second chance to a line of thinking I'd abandoned on space grounds: linear means you can't get everything in and have to decide priorities ... thank heavens 'the story' is dead. The post-it had already been crunched into the recycling.
When I was Editor of The World at One, in 1997, I commissioned some research to try to find out how the audience actually used what we broadcast. What it told us was that a huge chunk of our 3 million or so listeners used what they learned in conversations with others - in the pub, at the golf club or even in the 'bus queue: in the words of the academics, we were both a location and agents in the public discourse.
Of that huge chunk, a significant slice liked to feel - and here's the link - that what they heard on WATO enabled them to feel they knew more than others. Now, I wouldn't call that vanity ... though clearly the motivation has some sense of social hierarchy hidden in it.
But here's the thing: I had never linked that motivation - to know more than others within the context of their engagement with the public sphere - with the second half of Steve Boriss' summary: that it leads to the "questionable and narrow practice of digging out the “hidden truths” allegedly known only to elites" aka "punk journalism".
So what to do? Now that I know this is an argument out there ... do I have to include it? Do I have to un-crunch the post-it? I'm not sure that the link between the two propositions is a necessary one, by the way.
Or do I stick to the nice straight line my surviving post-its make across my desk and pretend either I never came across this or - haughtily - imply I've considered and rejected it?
Like I say, bloody internet.

Remembrance of things past

2008-04-20T11:04:00.001Z

Was it really ten years ago? Was it really that bad? Was I rude to Croydon?

The 'story' is dead

2008-04-17T20:59:00.005Z

I don't think I meant to do this ... but you know how it is.

Two talks this month: the first to the University of North Texas (via a 128bit ISDN videophone - how retro is that?), the second to a group of early to mid career BBC journalists at a thing called the SON&R Centre in Bristol, a learning enterprise dedicated to sharing best practice.

At both, we were talking about multimedia news ... and both came soon after the launch of the new BBC News website and soon before the launch of the new BBC multimedia newsroom (I wrote about that here in the UKPG).
Maybe it was all the fault of that piece in which I wrote:

"... the idea of “the story” becomes meaningless ... “the story” is defined by an output deadline: “What can we find out and illustrate in the time we’ve got left?” There never was anything special about that particular iteration of those facts and that illustration, though we became very good at creating the illusion that there was.
And with “the story” goes the idea of an account being “complete enough” to put to air (why stop there?), of the fine balance of voices (there’ll always be another nuance, another voice) and the 24-hour-news cycle (whose 24 hours?)."

Anyhow, the idea that 'the story' is dead seemed to have wormed its way in there ... mostly because the concentration of thinking around UGC/citizen media, mobility and personalisation didn't seem to me to be getting at the essence of the transformation we linear journalists need to make to get to multimedia-/multiplatform-land.

Partly too, though, because this piece on Paul Bradshaw's blog back in September 2007 had taken root, followed up by Ed Roussel's talk at DNA 2008 - both, all, seemed to be pointing in the same direction. And so did the ideas underpinning the new, sleek, clean BBC News website.
The death of 'the story' - or at least we journalists' construct of 'the story'.

Which was how and why I came to two talks about 'Storyfinding and Storytelling' with the same opening line. 'The story is dead. Get over it.'

Since then, this in the New York Times echoing this from Loic Le Meur both articulate a truth we're all starting to see in action. News finds people - sometimes from Big Journalism, sometimes not (if you're under 25, usually not). And when it finds them - whether through BJ's alerts like Paul Bradshaw and Ed Roussel describe or by that weird wired osmosis that finds our teenage children without them apparently turning anything on - they don't quite respond to the carefully polished 'stories' we linearites cherish so much.

So far so obvious. But think about it for a mo. If you're one of those formerly known as the audience it's no big deal. But what does it mean for the stuff we journalists produce?

Thing about 'the story' is that it was the glorious evasion that enabled journalism. No-one can ever know 'the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth' still less convey it to anyone else. But 'the story' absolved us journalists of the need even to try. 'The story' never was anything more than one subset of facts that we could bind into a coherent narrative to get us around the information asymmetry. 'I just tell stories.'

'Stories' are great for excusing irrational agendas and teamed with deadlines they create the need for false balance while creating the illusion of completeness. And 'storytelling' is wonderfully teachable, what with four w's and inverted pyramids and all that.

'Stories' have been good to journalism - all the greater truths (Watergate,Thalidomide, the Iraq deception) have been accessed, initially at least, by 'stories'. But they've done it a lot of damage too - mostly springing from the assumption that if the storytelling is good, you can get the attention of an audience not intrinsically interested. Fine - but for every Seymour Hersh story that gets through the mesh of indifference many thousand sensational half-truths swim through too.

But here's the thing: journalists have always been far more entranced by 'the story' than audiences. Less than a quarter of newspaper readers claim to read to the end of a story, even one they're interested in ... and of those, over two thirds don't read every word.

And a pattern's emerging on the web that audiences are tending to use a 'story' as a prompt to find their own background and context and history and consequences and discussion. They'll all pot out at different stages in 'the story' ... but pot out they will, rendering redundant the careful polish we journalists have put on our storytelling. But think about it. Why should they suffer our choice of background and context?

I used a phrase that caught some of this which my audiences seemed to like: 'navigable narration.' I don't think it does the whole job ... but it does start to get across the problem we have.

At one level - we journalists can't escape the story as the unit of currency if for no other reason than one thing follows another and the conscious bit of the brain works in a linear fashion. At the same time, it's also got to be our job - surely - to understand our audience's need to navigate around our narratives and, crucially, to navigate back to our narratives when they themselves become the context, history and background for the next story.

Alastair's denial

2008-01-28T20:53:00.000Z

I was struck by a couple of passages in Alastair Campbell's Hugh Cudlipp Lecture and subsequent comments blogged by Charlie Beckett of POLIS.
First this: that, apparently, one of the reasons Alastair left No10 was:

"relations between media and politics had become so bad, I had become something of a symbol within that, and part of me thought maybe things would improve."

An act of selfless self-sacrifice, then, on behalf of the greater good ... though, he asserts, a sacrifice made in vain.

"I am not sure things have improved at all.”

May as well have stayed on, then ... though the diaries (and cheques) etc would have had to wait.

Alastair's list of what didn't improve at his going is long and familiar: quantity of journalism up, standards down ... and there's much with which most would agree. The media - the press in particular - should

"understand (that) its responsibilities in a modern democracy go beyond making money and filling space"

for example. Amen to that.

But while Alastair seems on one level to recognise that his controlling urges changed both politics and political journalism, he seems on another to be in denial about the scale and corrosive effect of that urge for control ... and what needs to be done to make good that corrosion.

The truth is that some very important things did change the moment Alastair left No10. It became possible, for example, to have rational, calm conversations both with Downing Street and other Government departments. My dealings - I was then Editor of Today - with Government and Ministers was no longer a perpetual combat, a zero-sum game in which reason was a sign of weakness and the resolution of every negotiation or complaint had to have a winner and a loser.

Second, this: I sometimes wonder whether Alastair's obsession with the quantity of news (“In an era of more pages, more space, more access, more talk, there is less said and done that is truly memorable”) is any more than the realisation that he could never really control the supply of news ... that no-one could. That news and journalism is cantankerous and messy. And I wonder whether what he calls "the media's obsession with itself" isn't just a cry of frustration at those pesky journalists he felt he should have controlled but who insisted in going off-grid - like Nick Clarke's The World at One, which always took as its starting point stories and angles that weren't on the Downing Street spreadsheet.

But Charlie Beckett is right - the question to both journalists and politicians is ... what are you going to do about it? Things may have improved since Alastair left Downing Street ... but not by enough to make repair all the damage done while he was there.

There are plenty of shortcoming in the British press; the obsession with failure or with doing down public figures ... rather in the way Alastair describes the Leader of Her Majesty's Loyal Opposition as:

"a PR man by trade whose single most important achievement prior to becoming leader was making a speech without notes"

and the Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg as:

"a good looking 40 year old about whom next to nothing is known"

But then, old habits die hard. Which is the point Alastair has never seemed able to grasp - that if you want a higher level of serious political debate then some old habits need to go ... on both the political and the journalistic side. And that those habits will never go while the default nature of politics and political journalism is blood sport and neither politician nor journalist really, really wants that to change.

A UK first?

2008-01-24T19:39:00.000Z

Roy Greenslade asks the question:

"Is Guido Fawkes responsible for Britain's first genuine
blogging scalp with Peter Hain's ministerial resignation?"

And points out that Guido Fawkes/Paul Staines makes a passing mention of his possible involvement in the tonsuring while asking:

"Is this the first example of a blogger supplanting Fleet Street?

A good question given the realities of politics and journalism ... but one that for some reason hacks me off.

And not just because I've been reminding myself of the glory days of Ian MacIntyre and John Birt in David Hendy's excellent history of Radio 4. I was a rebel, honest.

Of course, bloggers have been supplanting Fleet Street (columnists) for a couple of years now - sorry Simon - you really don't get the best venom on paper any more nor do you have to pay for it.

Question is, have bloggers usurped Fleet Street's right to fuel palace coups or court culls - aka make the kitchen so hot the only sensible way is out? Answer is, no. Fawkes/Staines may have known (roughly) where the petrol cans were ... but it was only when the mainstream started waving them over their heads that it got dangerous for Mr Hain.

Test is this: who'd have cared if Fawkes/Staines was wrong? Or ... alongside the Hain 'scalp' how many missed crania are there? Possibleymore than one and perhaps up to many.

But back to the coups/culls. I really do understand the thrill of it - I've had my share and there's something undoubtedly satisfying about tucking the bloodied follicles under your belt. It's exciting, fulfilling, endorsing, validating. I really do understand it.

Except.

It can't be right, can it? Being a watchdog is one thing - waking voters up to those things the elected have done in their name. Reminding the people that they own the power, not those they lend it to.

But ... do watchdogs scalp those they watch? Isn't that up to voters? Is this kind of pressure exerted by a handful of journos on a single individual, an uncertain and increasingly insecure Prime Minister, really what democracy is about? Or what voters want it to be about?

Actually, the thing that really hacks me off is that it never seems to me that many political journalists - and now bloggers - see this side of their trade as anything more than or other than a game.

They use the language of democratic accountability to describe something that looks to those on the outside (ie voters, citizens - sorry, subjects - people, you, me) like a round of British bulldog in which they're not asked to play.

I said something like this here back in April:

"From what I see of the successful political blogs - let's take Iain Dale and Guido Fawkes for instance - they replicate the inward looking, metropolitan chumminess of the Westminster village that many in the audience find repellent in both politics and political journalism."

Fawkes/Staines pinged back:

"it is only a blog, and it is intended to entertain not save the world."

Or change it. But that was then. This is now.

Future(ish) News(ish)

2008-01-11T19:39:00.000Z

Recently, my good friend and Head of BBC Newsroom Peter Horrocks spoke to Leeds University and posted these comments to the BBC Editors' blog on user generated content.
The speech and blog are an early glimpse of the direction he intends for the newly merged 'News' department of the world's most important broadcaster and it’s a pretty clear statement of the relationship he sees between traditional, 'big' journalism and the participating audience ... as both journalism and information sharing on the web evolve.
He has the responsibility for that News - I have the luxury of being able to comment with no responsibilities, now, of a similar order. Peter was clear that he wanted a debate on his thoughts ... so I helped with these thoughts from the yellowing ivory tower and posted them this week on the internal BBC College of Journalism website.
One thing no-one could argue with; the nature and scale of the challenges to the BBC from new(ish) journalism are unique. The risks to it dwarf those confronting any other news organisation. It would be wrong to underestimate that. In this as in most things, the BBC is different.
For that reason if no other, a careful and cautious approach is probably essential; but, some would argue, Peter's journocentric approach might not be so essential. It’s worth discussing - his vision of journalism yields very little of the trade’s role as the principal agent in the information business. Interacting with audiences isn’t much more than a help and assistance in that.
Not everyone would agree.
Take this. Peter describes how the BBC considered closing down the online debate following Benazir Bhutto’s death, ostensibly because that debate, in conventional journalistic terms, went off message - discussing Islam (rarely in flattering terms) rather than the political future of Pakistan (though there are perfectly respectable arguments here, here and here, to pick a few at random) to be had about the nature of Islam and its effects on Pakistan’s social and political development.
In the end, he/they didn’t close the debate down … not because it was felt that the debate was in and of itself worthwhile but with two ex post facto, journocentric justifications.
One, this.
“Buried amongst the comments … were insights from those who had met Benazir or knew her. And there were valuable eye witness comments from people who were at the scene in Rawalpindi. Our team that deals with user content sifted through the chaff to find some excellent wheat.”
The other, this:
“In one sense it is very useful to understand the strength of feeling on this issue (the nature of Islam) amongst our audiences.”
In other words, the value of hosting the debate (and remember, it’s the comment and debate side of audience participation not its role as occasional, accidental reporter) lies in the “wheat” we journalists can sift from the chaff (a wheat/chaff distinction determined by us journalists) and in the steer it gives us journalists about what audiences are thinking, though a steer we journalists interpret and are at liberty to ignore.
“We cannot just take the views that we receive via e-mails and texts and let them drive our agenda. Nor should they in any way give us a slant around which we should orient our take on a story. At their best they are an invaluable information resource and an important corrective to group-think.”
True. But who’s saying that it should?
Put the other way around, is it right still to place traditional journalism (with all its failings) at the heart of the “public participation journalism” model? It’s understandable that we journalists want to - but is it really just “messianic and starry eyed” to consider the possibility it doesn’t have to be that way? Or even that it shouldn’t be that way.
Peter gives a straw man a good shake with this rhetorical interrogative:
“Should we (in the case of the BBC’s Bhutto coverage) have given over a significant part of our website and our analysis programmes on Radio 4 to consideration of whether Islam is a religion that is inherently skewed towards violence? Or were we right to concentrate our journalism on reporting and analysing the life on Benazir, how she came to die and the political consequences?”
Some will see this as a journocentric elision that assumes the web and what happens there and on Radio 4 (or in any other traditional context) are both parts of a single editorial continuum … with traditional journalism at the ‘good’ end and peer-to-peer web action at the other.
But are they all on the same continuum, the ‘low’ end validated by the ‘high’? Or if they are in journalists' minds, do they have to be?
Only if you assume that the web is no more than a source (of stories and audience insights) for traditional journalism does the argument hold. It may just be that (some of) what’s done on the web – in particular peer-to-peer information sharing and debate - really is a different species from traditional journalism … and that it should be. And that by the same token, what happens there – even on a BBC site – should have no inevitable consequence for the choices made in traditional journalism contexts.
So why not either let the web crowd do what it does or – if traditional journalism must intervene - inject into that web debate (in this case, over Islam) content touching on the question the audience is itself discussing? Why does that have any necessary consequence for the choices Panorama, Newsnight or News 24 makes?
Here’s one of Peter’s answers why not – but some will wonder whether it really flies.
“The general conversation on the web is freely available to all. The BBC does not have to host that.”
Rework that with the word “News …” instead of “The general conversation …” and see where it goes.
And for the BBC to host a web conversation, here’s the essential criterion ...
“We will want the information generated to be editorially valuable ... we need to be able to extract real editorial value from such contributions more easily … (we must get) real journalistic value out of this material.”
Hmm. Is there really no intrinsic worth in civic debate - whether on the web or in a village hall? Is that debate and conversation only to be judged by the editorial content it supplies to traditional journalism? Is there truly no public purpose and civic value in hosting that conversation?
It’s a question of choice. The argument that moderating web debates is costly and time consuming and brings editorial risk is true of all BBC journalism. Cost and risk alone and in themselves can’t invalidate any journalistic activity – they’re parameters to help a broadcaster work out priorities.
There’s no doubt that audience participation on the web does and should support traditional journalism done by traditional journalists. Anything and everything is a source. There’s no doubt, too, that peer-to-peer debate and information sharing offers big journalism important audience insights – including an aid to calibrating what impartiality seems to mean to audiences on any story.
But is that what it’s for?
Few will argue with Peter's stress on the idea of “radical impartiality” and the pointers the web conversation gives traditional journalism to achieve it – though I think “radical impartiality” was something both Peter and I were already pursuing in the pre-web age … he at Newsnight, me at World at One ... both ever looking out for the “thoughtful or surprising views and opinions” in any source.
But some eyebrows might be raised at the characterisation of web debate as, occasionally, “digital bullying”. And at the assertion that it’s:
“actually about getting the so-called mainstream media to adopt specific policy agendas, or lean in certain directions.”
It may once have been true that contributing to online debates was a minority activity and that, therefore, marginal views became amplified. But even if that’s a valid metric – and most would argue that on the web, it isn’t – it’s becoming less and less true. A piece of academic research due to be published later this year suggests that 42% of audiences now participate in online interactivity.
But even if the web debate does shift the centre of gravity on an issue? So what? Off-line conversation as well as speeches, books, magazines, newspapers … even press releases and spin meisters … have always done that. Have journalists feared “hot-air” or “paper” bullying?
So, the question is worth asking in the light of Peter’s clear statement of purpose for the BBC in journalism’s latest burst of evolution.
Is audience interactivity on the web – or more precisely, interactivity on BBC websites – only validated by its usefulness to traditional journalism? Or, conversely, does the BBC (and some other parts of big journalism) need to shift from an understandably journocentric view of audience participation and consider the fact of the online civic debate as a public good in itself?
Discuss.

Istanbul.

2007-09-29T14:37:00.001Z

It is not the image I had of Turkey. More Barcelona with minarets. Perhaps it isn’t Turkey at all.

The problem is this. Since I started pontificating on this whole Corporate Social Responsibility lark - in particular (my bit, this) the social responsibilities of the media - I’ve been getting interesting and puzzling invitations from all kinds of places.

Kyiv in July. Tbilisi in November. Istanbul in September. I suppose I have an attraction that someone who knows what he’s talking doesn't have. I’m free.

They work you hard and so in less than 24 hours in Istanbul, it’s one lecture, one televised panel, five press interviews and a TV appearance.

I’m asked, among other things, about the portrayal of Turkey in the European press … that was what the lecture was about. I’m not very kind about it. The press, that is. And though I’m no expert on Turkey, I do try to understand the British media for a living and think I can spot a bizarre portrayal when I come across one.

This account by Yasemin Sim Esmen captures some of it.

I exonerate the BBC (as well as the FT and Economist and even some of the quality inside pages … though they are exactly that: inside pages. Often a long way inside). As far as the press is concerned, it’s hard to find coverage that isn’t refracted through the EU/Islam/culture clash prism – even the quality press isn’t always as careful as it could be.

Criticising the UK press portrayal, incidentally, doesn’t mean supporting the Erdogan view of the world … nor even the longer term Turkish take on history. Intriguingly missing from that Turkish Daily News account is a chunky discussion we had about Article 301.

That’s the article of the Turkish legal code that was used to prosecute Orhan Pamuk and a clutch of journalists. One of the (must-be-reformed) weaknesses of the Turkish judicial system is that more or less anyone can prosecute more or less anyone under 301. And they do just that – usually hard-line secularist/nationalists trying to imprison liberal journalists and intellectuals.

“So what’s the responsibility of the Turkish press as far as 301 is concerned?” was the question.

“Well, it’s got to go” was my answer. “And it’s a test of the Turkish press and broadcasters whether they can be the agents of the debate that gets rid of it … a debate they’ll have to reflect in an open, transparent fashion.”

Etc. I see it’s not in the TDN article.

It was pretty clear from my 48 hours in Istanbul – most of it stuck in traffic – that it and probably the Mediterranean seaboard could walk into the EU tomorrow. But as everyone I met made clear, it’s the vast eastern part of the country stretching down to Iraq and Syria that’s the problem.

And that was my message about the western press coverage of Turkey. For the moment, more Brits favour Turkish EU entry than oppose it. But my hunch is that if or when it ever became a close prospect, the western European press would kick and gouge and bite like crazy to make sure it was as difficult as could be.

In France

2007-07-30T09:15:00.000Z

I am in France for three weeks and it is very different here.
The local weekly (paid-for) paper has gone through traumas over the past few years. Resolutely off-line, it’s tried every possible way of re-configuring its local offices to offer, first, a single paper for the whole region; then, a complex web of micro-papers which were flops because they were too micro; then a micro with a macro fold-in; and now, back to a single paper for the whole region.
The problem they had with the micro-papers was that there just isn’t enough news. No, really.
It’s even a bit of a problem with the single, regional edition.
Top headline this week? A picture lead on “the dead wife of the Lord of Crequy, who died in the war (crusades, that is), Dame Brunhilde haunts the chateau by night (that’s a pun, incidentally, on a dramatic production coming up at Fressin castle called ‘Nuits de Chateau”) whenever danger menaces the fortress.”
Inside. Barn fires – one of them deliberate. Car crashes – no-one hurt. One obituary.
And this, under the headline “Dog beaten up”:
“After passers-by raised the alarm, a 22 year old man was arrested on Saturday morning for beating up his dog and throwing it from the four-metre high sea wall. The dog – an American Staffordshire - did not seem to have been injured.
The man is being charged with cruelty and also for failing to muzzle the dog – the dog was not wearing a muzzle even though it is considered as belonging to a dangerous breed, category two.”
It’s about as bad as it gets in the summer. In the winter, he might have shot it.
Elsewise, all the news is good. A couple who have welcomed a child from Darfur into their home gets an inside page to itself. Painters and artists are inspired by or hang their work in trees. Artois medievality is celebrated on all sides, Victor Hugo here and there.
There are births marriages and deaths; theatrical and musical productions where the audience rather than the performers is the picture feature.
Mayors, departmental, regional and national government are invisible; the CRS a welcome buffer between the seaside town rowdies (many of them British stag and hen parties) and ‘us’; the courts seem never to over or under sentence.
And in spite of the pictographic weather forecast predicting brilliant sunshine, the sun has not returned and it is raining, raining, raining.

In the mirror

2007-07-26T18:23:00.000Z

Something bugs me about this - but I'm not sure what.
It's the Mirror's account of its reporters' bungled attempt to 'test security' at a rail depot. I first heard the story in a late night news bulletin on the BBC on Tuesday evening ... and was, uncharitably, puzzled not to see the cock-up reported in the Mirror the following day.
Roy Greenslade has this account of the Mirror's reasons for not reporting on its own reporters ham-fisted debacle.
When they did get their backsides in gear, the account was a cross between pusilanimous and whining.

"The Government wants us to trust them over 56-days' detention. The disquieting experience of these two Mirror journalists raises hugely worrying questions
..."

bleats the intro.
Hang on - the Mirror incompetents were in the jug for a few hours. Fifty six days? What's that got to do with it?
Plus; "worrying questions" would have been raised in my mind if they hadn't been shaken down pretty thoroughly - in fact, I wonder if 12 hours was enough.
I suppose the thing that both worries and bugs me is the unquestioned assertion that planting something dicky with wires on a train is, in fact, a "legitimate assignment" for a journalist.
On the one hand, it has to be right that the media tests the assertions of authority, that they're doing all they can to make us safe. On the other, it's - frankly - not that oozing in enterprise to skulk around a train yard with a box of tricks ... or, for that matter, to smuggle something nasty onto a plane knowing that, except in the most knuckle-headed foul up, you'll get away with it.
And I suppose the thing that bugs me is when it does end in a knuckle-headed foul-up ... isn't the only legitimate response to say - 'yup, this time we lost'. If you're testing security and the security works, then - I would have thought - you say so.
To flick it round as the Mirror did to argue that holding a couple of buffoons for a few hours to check out their story, that going to their houses to check that story stacks up is somehow oppressive is, at the very least, perverse.
Yes - of course checking those assurances about our security is legit; but, please, when you've shown that guys who plant stuff on trains get caught ... say so. End.
What's that line about 'if you can't take a joke you shouldn't sign up ...'?

Not chicken in Kiev

2007-07-17T17:47:00.000Z

Apologies. Crap half-pun. With a trace of meaning.
Just spent half a week in the Ukraine capital with the UN there trying to explain Corporate Social Responsibility ... with a bit of journalism ethics on the side.
CSR is one of those things that you either get or you don't - and, no, it's not a typically lefty, BBC type thing aimed, at best, at taking the edge off raw capitalism, at worst, returning the globe to a tankie-style planned economy. It's rooted in business and profit; why are energy companies amongst the biggest CSR fans? Because they want to be still making profits in fifty years' time.
In Ukraine, as in most other places - including this sceptical blast from the Economist (login required, but you can get it free) - CSR is confused with philanthropy; supporting the arts or buying a local orphanage. It isn't - as the fons et origo of global CSR the UN Global Compact makes clear; at root, it's about respecting the law, fellow humans and the environment. Which lets the sceptics in from both sides; either it's chucking profit away on the feckless or the aesthetic or it's no more than the law prescribes.
The Global Compact is far from ideal; its 'precautionary approach' to the environment is bonkers, effectively legitimising as it does even the daftest allegedly (untested) eco-plan ... so long as it's done in the name of environmental protection.
But the worst thing about it by far is its failure to pay even lip service to the role of the press, the media, journalism as either watchdog or platform to debate the merits of the whole idea.
Which was my theme ... so I witter on about that; and press freedom; and media ethics. And I point out that Ukraine has only one choice about CSR; fast or slow. Access to western capital, markets etc depend on it.
There's a forest of hands. 'What do you do in the UK when a businessman pays your editor to spike your story?' Or 'What do you do about TV owners who tell their newsrooms not to report certain stories?' Or 'What's the point in signing up to the CSR agenda if media companies refuse to report it even exists?'
Ok. Slow dawning. Wrong starting point. Like other dilettantes, I assume the Orange Revolution has licked the land of the Cossacks into some sort of recognisable shape ... decent by EU standards, that is.
On the face of it, Ukraine's media and journalists are free ... constrained by the constitution, the legal code (which is extensive) but most of all the raw power of the oligarchs. There is something brutal in the air, which you kinda catch from the muscle bound, smoke-fugged, shaved-heads driving the cabs and dooring the pubs, or the ads for prostitutes and 'try before you buy' brides on the tourist office givewayws. But here in a five star hotel in central Kyiv a couple of hundred journalists spend a day and a half railing against it, asking for help with a way through. A way through that doesn't go the Georgiy Gongadze way. And then the journos from Moscow, Tbilisi and Almaty pitch in. Judged by their tales, Ukraine is not that badly off.
I've never had the thugs come round so I don't know what I'd do if they did. Nothing heroic, I'm sure.
So I lecture them on accuracy, the journalism of verification, independence and impartiality. And then go to the airport to catch up on Queengate.

Out of the Lobby?

2007-05-31T11:48:00.000Z

SKY Political Editor Adam Boulton has kept a diary of his week for the UKPG online
In it, an intriguing defence of the Lobby. He would, obviously, defend it since he’s been a member for 25 years and is this year’s chairman.

He writes:

“In spite of its sinister reputation, the Lobby is not an old boys’ network in
which politicians and hacks conspire to “keep it under their hats”. We rarely
hear secrets and, if we do, the public is informed pretty soon afterwards.”

But that misses the point. The real concern non-journalists have about the Lobby isn’t that it’s an ‘old boys’ network’ – though that’s exactly what it is (with the 21st century substitution of ‘boys and girls’ for just ‘boys’).

Nor that its members conspire with politicians to keep things “under their hats” – journalistic competition, the proliferation of news sources, the pressures of a 24 hour news cycle and politicians’ annoying tendency to speak to journalists outside the Lobby mean that that particular cosiness is no longer sustainable. Though cosy the relationship certainly remains.

There are two main reasons ordinary voters – or at least those who take any interest at all in national politics – find the Lobby system wanting.

First, that even with developments such as the PM’s monthly on-camera newsconferences and attributions to PMOS, the Lobby remains an interpretive animal. We were not there, we cannot tell how well the Lobby journalist has done his/her job.

To use Onora O’Neill’s Reith Lecture formula, Lobby reporting is a form of non-assessable communication … and the drift is very definitely in the direction of preferring the assessable. Joe and Jane Voter want to see/hear for themselves.

Second, the Lobby is the embodiment of Westminster’s inaccessiblity to the ordinary voter. Six hundred years ago, when they used to burn heretics and witches, the clergy opposed the translation of the Bible from Latin (which priests had to gloss and interpret) into English (which the laity could read and understand for itself). The Lobby is as reluctant now to let go of its role as the – metaphorical – denouncer of heretics and burner of witches.

The formula: “the minster said this … but what he really meant was this …” is such a familiar formula in political coverage, we journalists don’t even question it. Nor have we questioned sufficiently often and self-critically what it’s done to the concept of political truth-telling.

The sense that national politics is another world conducting its business in an alien tongue with a mendacious vocabulary is one of the (many) reasons why potential voters remain just that. Potential and not actual.

Adam’s defence continues:

“In practice, it is the main interface between political journalists, the
Government and parliamentary institutions.”

Really? I have no numbers on this but I suspect the average voter’s knowledge of what politicians are doing in his/her name derives more from interviews (press as well as broadcasting), speeches, appearances, articles written by politicians themselves and non-Lobby journalists than it does from the Lobby.

Direct, unmediated and assessable communication ought to be a good thing … except that it’s routinely glossed by Lobby journalists with the confident nose-tap of one-who-really-knows.

The reality is, the clarity of an interview on Andrew Marr’s show or The World at One is subsequently fuzzed by the Lobby journalist’s translation – a translation as often as not ‘tweaked’ after a quiet word with a special advisor.

Adam notes that political bloggers Iain Dale (**update - Iain Dale denies he wants admission to the Lobby; see his comment **) and Guido Fawkes, among others, now want admission to the Lobby. But, he asks:

“Do they want to operate as journalists or gossip columnists?”

Good question – I wonder whether Lobby journalists ever ask it of themselves.

Charity

2007-05-19T20:40:00.000Z

At the Charity Communications conference - the second such devised by AskCharity, Media Trust, and the Institute of Fundraising. Once again, I am sweeping up after Alistair Campbell.
The conference is an important venture. The place where charities and the media meet is rarely straightforward and full of misunderstandings. Journalists see many charities and their (unpaid) media volunteers as little more than providers of case studies to illustrate the stories they've already decided to tell. The charities see the media as an occasional ally but more frequent obstacle in getting the purity of their messages across to the public ... from whom, of course, they need cash.
I'm sad not to have heard Alistair ... but he needs no intermediary.

Three things: case studies, expectations of the media, the impact of social networking.

I'm a heretic on case studies. The conventional wisdom is that case studies are essential. The unquestioned assumption has it that most people only engage with a big idea through a personal narrative. Compelling character and narrative = engagement = impact.
And that's the problem. Compelling characters and narratives tend to be atypical. News is the atypical - 'plane crashes' is news, 'plane lands' isn't. But it's the landing not the crashing plane that tells the story of planes.
The best case studies tell only their own story. Just like good pictures .... which is fine if the case or the picture is the story. It usually isn't.
Journalist Victoria Wright told how it usually is. She contributed to a BBC documentary 'What are you staring at'. The programme needed someone with facial disfigurement to criticse plastic surgery; Victoria didn't do that ... at least, not in the bits of the interview that never made the cut. In the edit, she said enough that seemed critical for that to 'become' her view. She was a case study cut to fit the frame.
Katie Weitz of First Features - 'Earn BIG BUCKS by telling YOUR story' - thought the answer was copy approval ... and claimed editors were usually amenable to the idea. Um ... no editor I've ever met, but then I've led a sheltered life.

Expectations are difficult. By definition, everyone working for a charity believes in what they're doing ... and not all can always see that their beliefs and priorities aren't universal. The only realistic advice - have no expectation of the media. Journalism is about explaining the world as it is - or at least, as journalists see it.
Peter Gilheany of Geronimo Communications put it uncomfortably - charities are businesses. They're in the business of selling and marketing. One questioner believed the answer was to appeal to journalists as human beings. Another that journalism should 'help'.

Then the obvious question; 'will blogging and social networking be the end of journalism'. I guess something of Alistair in the question - the dream of unmediated communication. Aka, control.
Of course not, is the right answer. It's the one everyone gives.

Mirror cracked

2007-05-18T17:57:00.001Z

The scientologists have done us a service. Their rebuttal campaign aimed at John Sweeney’s Panorama investigation is a foretaste – a particularly well-funded and well-produced foretaste – of the feedback firestorm beginning to engulf all of Big Journalism.
Good.
Journalists and audiences should get used to the new world.
The story so far. The latest Panorama (which you can click here to watch) began life as a John Sweeney investigation into Scientology. It’s not the first time Panorama have been here; they looked at the religion in 1987. Many of John Sweeney’s allegations were familiar, though his evidence was more up to date and more compelling.
But the film turned into a report on a report on a report. Panorama put a reporter, producer and crew into the field; the scientologists did the same… Panorama looking at Scientology’s methods and mores, Scientology looking at John Sweeney’s methods and mores.The result; a Panorama film that told the story of a Panorama reporter’s reaction to the scientologists’ mirror. And a little bit about the scientologists too.
In the end, (depending on your point of view) either John Sweeney cracked or, as he explained it in the programme, he asserted his authority, leaning heavily on a prior thespian persona in “Oh What a Lovely War” (Joan Littlewood, you have much to answer for). Either way, he shouted a lot and links to the clip of 'the moment', posted to YouTube by a scientologist blogger, spread through e-mail networks faster than Staph A on a lukewarm Petri dish.
And the scientologist onslaught was multimedia; they handed out copies of their counter-film to BBC staff on Monday morning and posted it on an elegant and well-designed website which broadened the attack onto the BBC in general.Good.This is how it is now and will be more so in days to come. And it's not a bad thing for Big Journalism. OK, so not everyone in journalism's many audiences has the resources, time, commitment and Tom Cruise/John Travolta on the books. But almost everyone has a mobile phone, a digital camera, the ability to record audio, blog, join networks... do much more to just tell the editor what they think of the journalism they use or experience.
And if you doubt the power of the audience... look what happened to Eason Jordan, Dan Rather and Judith Miller. It's uncomfortable... IF you're used to the old one-to-many lecture that journalism used to be. But the reason it's to be welcomed is that it will improve journalism; perhaps even raise our trust in what journalists tell us.After all, if the argument for investigative journalism is that things done in the light are done with more integrity and accountability than things done in the dark... then the argument for investigating journalism - for audiences and those journalism puts in the news to investigate journalism - is unanswerable. Journalism that has integrity and honesty in the first place has nothing to fear.
Postscript: as we know, 'nothing is ever finished, it's just the latest version'. Within hours of the 'Sweeney moment' being posted to YouTube this 'tweaked' version joined it.

After spin

2007-05-12T17:12:00.000Z

So far, Gordon Brown and his new website have been remarkably successful in shaping the way his campaign has been reported. Today, his top line is:

NHS an immediate priority
Gordon Brown today announces that the NHS will be an immediate priority, saying “we will do better”.

And sure enough, that's the line most journalists seem to be focusing on - a result, especially since that was the focus of 'interesting' Gordon on Today this morning. The focus of 'dour' Gordon was much more significant, though, and promises interesting, if not immediately amusing, times.

This;

"I think we're going to have to have a better constitution. In other words, we're going to have to look at how the executive and all those who hold power should be held properly accountable to the people of this country. And I do want to conduct a debate in the country about how we can go forward with a better constitution for the future ..."

He cited - not for the first time - things like a new ministerial code and the right of Parliament to vote on peace or war ... both of which he's edged towards in previous briefings ... here, or here last September. It's linked to the notion that his time in office could be distinguished by a new approach both to government accountability and to the media. Perhaps even restoring the latter to a player in the former.

OK ... so Arctic Monkeys this isn't. One difference - it matters.

Charlie Beckett at POLIS has this extended post, his line that:

"It is one of the most majestic ironies of the New Labour years that the administration credited with the invention of spin is now threatened by a tidal wave of media hostility. Can Gordon Brown get his head back above water?"

Part of Gordon's problem, he diagnoses, is that he can't rely on everyone having a short memory:

"Brownites such as media consultant Scarlett McGwire claim he is man of integrity who will sweep the corridors of Whitehall clean of spin. Er… hang on a minute.
Brown’s original press man Charlie Whelan was one of the most ebullient exponents of the craft. He was often cavalier with veracity in the face of political danger ...
Our foremost chronicler of spin, Nick Jones, has described Brown as the greatest leaker of them all. Why should Brown change the habits of the last decade when he gets the top job?"

He concludes:

"The potential is there for a revived political culture. Can Gordon contribute?"

One former practitioner, John Williams who for half a dozen years was press secretary at the Foreign Office and before that a political correspondent on the Evening Standard, thinks at the very least he has a chance.

In a blog for the BBC College of Journalism - sadly, I can't link; it's still on an intranet site - John Williams writes;

"One of the first changes Gordon Brown should make is to end the culture of spin.
This is easily said. It is less easily defined. And it’s harder still to draft a programme for improvement."

In spite of the difficulty of a definition that separates presentation from spin, John Williams proposes these two criteria;

"over-statement that gives a false impression; uncheckable sources using anonymity in an underhand way. "

But that might not be all. he goes on;

"It would be good to have a debate on what else spin consists of, or if this definition is far too gentle."

His remedies?

"One: restore parliament as the place where government policy is first announced.
No more trailing in the Sundays or – sorry, BBC – in broadcast interviews. It would make an enormous difference to our political-media culture if we started tuning in to Commons statements and debates expecting to hear something important for the first time.
Two: reform political sourcing. Make clear to the media who are the two or three people genuinely close to each minister, authorised to speak on their behalf: say the press secretary, special advisor and perhaps parliamentary private secretary. Ministerial sources should be named. This could work only with media co-operation, but the media has an interest in more soundly-based news that the public can trust because it knows where it’s coming from. ‘A source authorised to speak on behalf of…’ is a formula I once used to tighten up Robin Cook’s media relations and it worked. It would be wonderful to see a newspaper report based on ‘a source not authorised, nor very close to, but freelancing for his/her own purposes.’
Three: Establish a respected, independent statistical service whose figures would have to be referred to, with footnotes, whenever a politician wants to give figures to back up an argument."

But there are problems. As Martin Moore posted a few days ago;

"it's not obvious there are many journalists out there still interested in the 'serious business of politics'. And those that are need to be convinced not just that Brown is telling the truth, but that he is willing to put up with people not liking his policies - i.e. engaging in a genuine debate, rather than trying to squash or square dissent."

I.e. there's no evidence that the the political press will drop the habits of spin ... because it's not in their interest to do it, culturally or competitively. Plus, it's difficult to envisage a day that the written press would adopt the 'on the record' default of the broadcasters - the stories are better with unnamed sources ... they're also less trusted, but hey ... memories are short and tomorrow's another day. The weird calculus that places the unnamed, interested source way ahead of the named, interested source is hard to shift.

But at the risk of seeming like a one string fiddle player, we either have to learn to live without a press that explains people to power and power to people - and the democratic deficit that inevitably accompanies it - or we have to change it. The demoticisation of publishing helps (if only by embarrassing the political press by contrasting with its villagey chumminess) ... but only so far.

What would take it much further would be a serious politician of any party who applied himself or herself to the task of remaking the links between the conversations people have and the politics they determine. And sure, that means kicking spin - as John Williams defines it - into touch; but it also means finding a way of weighing those conversations and producing politics and ideologies steered by that weight.

Parties and their annoying, troublesome constitutions used to do that. What's the new thing?

Frontline postscript

2007-05-04T10:36:00.000Z

Thursday's World Press Freedom Day discussion at the frontline club was humbling for anyone - like me - who's spent their professional lives in the relative comfort of the UK media. You could say that fretting about how the anglo-saxon world's politicians and political journalists are trying to grab the blogosphere for themselves is kinda missing the point. Ethan Zuckermann and Egyptian blogger Alaa Abd El-Fattah brought to the discussion accounts of bloggers (and journalists) intimidated, imprisoned, closed down, unplugged.
The simple truth that the web enables more people to speak more freely to a bigger audience than ever before has got to be A Good Thing and I can't think of a single argument against it - not even when blogging is at its most uncivil or social networking at its most irreverent.
But the web's value as a medium through which the (potentially amplified) civic conversation takes place doesn't automatically make it the answer to our broken politics' prayers. Worse, the danger is that both politicians and political journalists - in the anglo-saxon world at any rate - are tending to make the parts of the web they occupy resemble all that was wrong about politics and political journalism in the first place.
Suw Charman argued - and I don't disagree with her at all - that many bloggers here in the UK post about real-world political experiences and issues, the ambulance service, the NHS and so on; that blogging constitutes an alert, engaged, bothered conversation. Kevin Anderson adds the thought that this is a reflection of the way in which most people "relate to governance and policy differently than politician and journalists."
Exactly - that's the precise point of the disconnect; the exact place the wires have been cut. Martin Moore takes this one step further and asks whether these conversations - including those involving councillors and candidates and activists - shouldn't "feed directly into politics at a local level"?
But that's the point - they don't. Neither locally nor nationally. And one of the reasons they don't is the way in which our politics and political press have co-evolved over the past quarter century; that co-evolution has neutered ideology, stunted political debate and replaced it with a hand-book of standard scenes that have litle to do with the connection of conversation with action and everything to do with tomorrow's headline.
Soooo ... blogging, good; social networking, good; civic conversation, good. But is the web the the tool that will mend what's broken? No.

Political blogging

2007-04-26T18:23:00.000Z

It seemed a good idea at the time. Now I'm not so sure. Next Thursday, I'm at the frontline club with Ben Hammersley - one of my favourite gurus and blogger - and Richard Gizbert - of the al Jazeera 'Listening Post'. Blogger Ethan Zuckermann - co-founder of Global Voices and blogger Alaa Abd El-Fattah will join by phone.

We'll be talking about political blogging. An uneven contest, especially since I'm the - alleged - sceptic in the line-up. And even more especially since I'm not in the least sceptical about blogging ... whatever that would mean.

What I am sceptical about is that blogging or any other form of social networking can fix what's bust about our politics and our political journalism. In fact, it's more likely to make them both worse.

Each new alliance of social media and politics has one or more of these claims made about it;

it's an attempt to bridge the gap between politicians and the public
it brings a voice to the conversation that's been marginalised by conventional politics and political journalism
it enables direct communication between politician and elector without the mediation of broken political journalism

Each of which is fine in itself. But while all of these contribute to the civic conversation, they aren't the problem. I can see little evidence that blogging or any other form of social networking increases the trust - still at floor level - that voters have in politicians or in those who report their doings to them. I can't see how a blogging politician is any closer to his/her constituency than one who holds surgeries, makes speeches at prize-givings and knocks on the occasional door.

From what I see of the successful political blogs - let's take Iain Dale and Guido Fawkes for instance - they replicate the inward looking, metropolitan chumminess of the Westminster village that many in the audience find repellent in both politics and political journalism. Similarly, I'm left wondering what it is or might be that Benedict Brogan, say, or Daniel Hannan (political journalists both, politician the latter) might say in their blogs that they might not say in their columns, leaders or - in Daniel Hannan's case - addresses to the European Parliament.
It's inevitable, too, that - as Joe Trippi told Jeff Jarvis - politics on social networking sites will become dominated by 'makaka moment' videos ... accentuating rather than countering a similar trend in political reporting.

Crucially, though, no form of social networking bridges the gap that has to be bridged. And that's the one that used to be filled by party organisation that joined the civic conversation to political action - formally in the case of Labour and the Liberal Democrats, informally in the case of the Conservatives. It's fine to have a robust and energetic civic conversation ... but a conversation is exactly what it says it is; talk.

I can see how blogging enables that conversation; I can't see how ideologies are derived from it nor how political judgement and action are derived except in a nervy, fractured obedience to some assessment of 'the public mood'. Which is precisely the problem in the three way relationship between people, politicians and political journalism.

Let's see how Thursday goes.

Is the British press the worst in the west?

2007-04-16T15:48:00.000Z

As almost everyone predicted, the stories of the 15 marines - or at least those who sold/were allowed to sell their stories - morphed instantly into a commentary on the British press.

Unseasonally, Martin Moore at the Media Standards Trust, likened the whole affair to a pantomime before pondering just what it was that the Press Complaints Commission were up to in their reported offer of help. As Martin points out:

"The PCC, as it repeatedly states, reacts to complaints – it does not pre-empt them. This was one of the reasons it gave last year for not taking action against the 305 journalists exposed by the Information Commission for illegally gathering personal private information (and breaking clause 10 of the code)."

Charlie Beckett, over at the LSE's POLIS, wants us to "lighten up and save (our) moral outrage for something truly horrible." While Professor Adrian Monck at City University found himself "thinking about the moral problems of military service".

Melanie Phillips - who writes for the Daily Mail, one of the losers in the bidding war - thought the whole affair was a debacle of the first order – "a grim parable of the degraded state to which Britain has now descended and an alarming portent for the free world in its fight to survive." So, no sign of sour grapes there then ... though you are left wondering what she might have written if the Mail had got one or more of the marines to talk.

Andrew Grant Adamson at Wordblog is bemused at the world in which military personnel are allowed - enabled - to break their code of omerta .... but not parents, desperate to tell the story of their "nightmare" at the hands of a family court.

But it was Polly Toynbee's column - and blog at the Guardian's comment is free - that really piled the ordure on the head of the British press.

"Our press, the worst in the west, demoralises us all"

... ran the headline. And after trotting through the various tabloid hypocrisies, her column/blog concludes:

"What is so squalid about these newspapers is their use of figleaf sermons to cover their real business, done with corrupting chequebook, threat, intimidation, invasion of privacy, paparazzi aggression and vicious cruelty.
Labour should use this disgrace to reign in chequebook tell-all by public servants, from those at the top such as Christopher Meyer to those at the bottom such as these sailors. It's time to look again at privacy legislation, a quid pro quo for the Freedom of Information Act the press abuses with petty assaults on government.
The media is in danger of making government by any party impossible."

The real meat, though, is in the comments - long, but worth spending some time on ... if only for the way in which the debate ("if X agrees with Y that Polly's motivations are Z ... then though I agree with her I have to disagree ...") slides though meta-debate into a form of rhetorical calculus that's, possibly, beyond mathematical expression.

In defence of the "citizen journalist"

2007-03-08T19:58:00.000Z

Martin Moore of the Media Standards Trust has posted a plea – “please stop calling us ‘citizen journalists’”

Martin’s argument is of the Holy Roman Empire variety – neither citizens (in the overtly active sense of the word) nor journalists.
“How many bloggers / vloggers etc. would even call themselves journalists let alone citizen journalists?”he asks.

“What we're really talking about is a bunch of different phenomenon lumped together as 'citizen journalism'. There's the virtual stringers - people who happen to be somewhere that news is happening and record it (like at the 7/7 bombings). People who just reflect on or react to the news (like this blog). And people who write / photograph / video things which they don't consider 'news' but publish online and then gets picked up by others who consider it newsworthy. Maybe we should call them 'virtual stringers', 'demablogs', and plain old 'bloggers' until we develop a new vocabulary.”

Whether bloggers can ever call themselves journalists – in the sense of going out there and getting stories, standing them up, checking them etc … as opposed to happening to be there when stories happen or having ripe and robust views on something happening somewhere else – is a question Robert Niles takes on over at the Online Journalism Review.

“Are blogs a parasitic medium” bluntly. And Robert Niles goes on:
“I hear the frustration behind the comment. You bust your rear to get stories in the paper, then watch bloggers grab traffic talking about your work. All the while your bosses are laying off other reporters, citing circulation declines, as analysts talk about newspapers losing audience to the Web. It's not hard to understand why many newspaper journalists would come to view blogs as parasites, sucking the life from their newsrooms.
Still, the charge riles me every time I hear it.”

Robert Niles’ posting – written while “riled” – nonetheless seems aimed at whittling out a consensus … though some of the bloggers he consults use words like “baloney” while also pointing out that there are blogs that address topics the mainstream media ignore; that even derivative blogs “animate” the stories they reference; and anyway, there’s nothing new about journalists referencing each others’ work so why shouldn’t bloggers.

Oh and Lisa Stone, co-founder of BlogHer.org makes the obvious observation that:
"An opinion editorialist doesn't have to break news herself to provide amazing, fresh perspective on world events -- whether she's published on the New York Times Op-Ed page or on her own blog.”

Robert Niles’ consensual tendencies can be read here; The silliest, and most destructive, debate in journalism in which he pleads:
“Let's quit arguing the merits of "mainstream" versus "citizen" journalism and instead work together on "better" journalism.”

And there’s something of that in buzzmachine’s Jeff Jarvis who posted this unremittingly optimistic account – most of which, for what it’s worth, I happen to agree with – of a term teaching journalists (first filed for Guardian Media on Monday.)

On the key question, the BBC has more or less dumped the term “citizen journalism”, preferring however reluctantly “user generated content.”

But the phrase “citizen journalism” seems to contain something really rather subtle that Martin Moore’s – and others’ – rejection of it misses ... though it’s certainly the case that “citizen journalism” means/meant something different depending on where you used it from.

For Big Journalism, it had a patronising tang that almost equated to “less than a … journalist”. For citizen journalists, though, it emphasised the truth of both citizenship and journalism (ok, I know we’re all subjects and not citizens in the UK … but rest-up for a moment); that you needed to be qualified for neither and that journalists were citizens, citizens journalists.

Oh… and that the rights and responsibilities of both were identical. Try the phrase “non-citizen journalist”. Doesn’t quite work, does it?

OK – vloggers/bloggers/networkers/shares are a pretty diverse group; they’re also – the few studies that there are suggest – a pretty parasitic lot. But Lisa Stone is right – so are journalists.

Whatever we call them/us, the people formerly known as citizen journalists have never just dumped a load of raw newsgathering into the news stream. They’ve also established a pretty high level of media critique that means any and every form of journalism is now forced to look over its shoulder at the strident cries of foul from those who formerly fumed (quietly) in the audience.

Which is where Robert Niles’ ‘destructive debate’ posting comes in. Whatever you call them, “citizen journalists” are an essential component of better journalism.

And hurrah for that. I still like the term “citizen journalist” – not that it describes what anyone does. But for the simple existential reason that it describes what they are.