DavePress

John Naughton links to an event taking place in Cambridge on 19th May:

Nick Davies, a well-known and award-winning investigative journalist, has recently published Flat Earth News, a controversial and highly-critical analysis of the British news media in which he argues that the business of truth has been “slowly subverted by the mass production of ignorance”. The book examines national news stories which, Davies argues, “turn out to be pseudo events manufactured by the PR industry and the global news stories which prove to be fiction generated by a new machinery of international propaganda.” With the help of researchers from Cardiff University, who ran a detailed analysis of the contents and sources for our daily news, Davies found that “most reporters most of the time are not allowed to dig up stories or check their facts”, leading him to describe UK journalism as “a profession corrupted at the core”. In the book, he also presents a new model for understanding news.

I’ll be there - anyone else?

Having an iPhone has really liberated me in term of the way that I use Flickr. This would be true of any phone with decent internet connectivity, and indeed there are plenty of handsets out there with better camera functionality than the iPhone. But the ability to easily take a picture and upload it to Flickr via email in a matter of seconds is fantastic - like this, which I took in Chipping Norton yesterday:

This has led me to have a bit of a wonder about Flickr and where the value of it lies. One thing Flickr does brilliantly is to create a community of photographers, from amateurs through to seasoned professionals, who discuss one another’s photos and chat about lenses, resolutions and whatnot.

But Flickr has another community too - people out on the streets with cameraphones, who don’t really care about the angles of the shots they are taking, wh just want to capture the moment and share it online. Such users can easily find themselves at the forefront of important events, thrust into the role of citizen journalist.

These two communities exist side-by-side rather well, despite the fact that they are using the same service for quite different purposes. Which is more important to Flickr, I wonder - and which to society?

I am currently reading Flat Earth News by Nick Davies, which focuses on journalism and news and how the profession is failing in its duty to protect and disseminate the truth. This isn’t, Davies claims, because of a some moral failing on the part of journalists, nor out of commercial pressure, or indeed interference from proprietors. Instead, Davies points the finger at the way in which stories are promulgated across the media as a result of a lack of fact checking and a desire to cover breaking news regardless of whether or not it is actually verifiable.

The first example Davies provides is that of the millennium bug. Before the turn of the century, significant numbers of column inches were dedicated to describing the disasters and calamities that would befall society if nothing were done about it. But in truth, the actual number of systems affected by the bug were minimal:

…the problem would only occur in computers which had internal clocks (most desktop computers do, but most ‘embedded’ systems, on which big organisations rely, don’t), but only if those clocks calculated time by using a calendar rather than by simply measuring the gap between two dates, and only if those calendars used only two digits to register the years, rather than four, and only if the computer was being used for programs which had to calculate time across the boundary between 1999 and 2000.

Needless to say, there weren’t many such systems around, and at the dawn of the new millennium, there were no planes falling from the sky, nor riots destroying our streets. The story had spread because the actual likely dangers were exaggerated by the various sources that the journalists were relying on, and those sources were not necessarily acting in a malicious way. Firstly, the IT security experts exaggerated the risk so that people would listen to them and take the issue seriously. From this, parties with an interest in the issue added to the noise: office managers seeking upgrades to their systems used the millennium bug as an excuse; governments overreacted so a not to appear as taking the nation’s security lightly. Then the third wave of opinion started to be voiced: those who had no clue what they were talking about at all.

This cacophony is self perpetuating, until some point where the truth becomes self-evident, and in this case that point was 1 January 2000, when nothing happened. Davies gives other examples too: the rumours around Bill Clinton in the 1990s, and the furore surrounding the prescription of heroin by British doctors. In the latter case, this can be seen to have had some serious consequences for society.

I’m interested in seeing what Davies comes up with in terms of explanations as to why journalists appear to be so compliant with this. Reviews of the book mentioned issues such as the demands of time and resources leading to a over-reliance on wire copy and a reluctance to fact-check. The rolling 24/7 news agenda must have some bearing on this with news TV channels demanding constant big stories and breaking updates and this is also true now of print journalists who provide content for news websites as well as for the print editions.

Does the use of social media tools by citizen journalists help or hinder the journalist profession in it’s pursuit of the truth? In many ways the influence is a negative one - bloggers have no requirement to meet any kind of professional standards and can publish more or less what they like - there is no Blogging Complaints Commission for example. This means that stories can get some air before they reach the traditional news media, giving them a life that they might not otherwise have got.

But that’s just one side of the coin. Citizen journalists can also get the truth out quicker, even when the mainstream media is pushing a different line. And while the authors of blogs might not necessarily always write the truth, it’s far harder for the majority of folk to falsify photographic or video social reporting (ok, so there is always Photoshop, and the equivalents for video editing, but the numbers of people who can produce convincing falsification are few and far between).

I mentioned in a previous post that perhaps a role for the professional journalist in the networked society might be in turning the fragments produced by the social reporters, the citizen journalists, into cohesive wholes, by taking a perspective a bit wider than the folk in the street with their camera phones who are providing the building blocks of the truth that in turn provide the journalists with the authenticity their stories need.

There is a Flat Earth News site with further information, extracts etc. It runs on Drupal!

Update: Just found this Guardian podcast featuring an interview with Davies. Well worth a listen.

Interesting re-post of an article that appeared in the BBC’s in-house magazine Ariel by Rory Cellan-Jones on the issues around the launch of the various blogs written by BBC journalists:

It strikes me the initial concerns were twofold - that nobody would be interested in our blogs so they would be a waste of a correspondent’s effort, and that they would threaten our impartiality. But the blogs have attracted plenty of readers - Robert Peston’s Peston’s Picks gets a million page views a month - and they’ve done that without descending to the opinionated, loudmouthed knockabout which was previously seen as the prerequisite for success in this arena.

What blogging does allow a broadcaster to do is to cover stories that would never make it onto the airwaves, and, in my case, to engage with a different and very knowledgeable audience. Mind you, that’s bound to be a minority audience and the danger is they become a distraction from the job of reaching the mass of licence-fee payers. Alf Hermida suggests that the BBC bloggers need to do even more to have a conversation with these people - I think there are risks in getting too involved.

Are these issues peculiar to the BBC, I wonder, or indeed peculiar to journalism?

John Naughton’s Observer column is required reading. Today he casts his eye on the Asus Eee PC:

Besides, the limitations of Mark I ought not to blind us to its significance - which is the cruel way it highlights the baroque complexity of conventional computing machines with their bloated operating systems, security problems, flaky hard drives, overheating processors and overweight chassis. Some day, our great-grandchildren will marvel that the industry once standardised on software that required its users to press the ‘Start’ button when they wished to stop their machine. Especially when all we really needed was a life-support system for a browser.

John Naughton turns his eye to the latest attempts by the music industry to stop people sending each other stuff on the interweb:

Through a staggering combination of ignorance, inertia, incompetence and paranoia, the record industry missed the significance of the internet for its business. It continued to distribute its product on plastic disks long after the net became widespread, and insisted on selling albums rather than tracks. In other words, it persisted with a comfortable business model long after it became obsolete. This couldn’t last - and it didn’t. Eventually Shawn Fanning came up with the idea of sharing tracks over the internet and Napster was born. The industry refused to offer a legal alternative, and in doing so embossed its own death certificate. The last convulsive jerk of the corpse is the BPI’s attempt to intimidate ISPs and to lobby the government for legislation which would compel ISPs to become data policemen.

David Wilcox has taken his new Nokia to the Social Innovation Camp this weekend and is putting up some great video - social reporting in action!

Incidentally, David tweeted earlier asking how Qik video can be embedded into a WordPress.com blog. I’ve quickly googled it but came up with a blank. Anyone have any ideas?

David Wilcox has taken the bull by the horns and created an open thread on the OpenRSA blog calling for a more collaborative approach to the discussion on jounalism being carried out on the RSA networks platform. This debate is one which takes into account trust in news media, and could also pull in issues around the role of the BBC in civic life.

I’m personally most interested in breaking out of the old media professional boundaries because I think greatest innovation - and citizen empowerment - is likely to take place as old cultures are challenged, openly. It’s time the newspeople stopped seeing those that they write for as “news users”, now we are producing a lot of our own content online.

The issue at the RSA is not one of platform - the Drupal based system used by the Networks is superb - but of worldview. David and I were the most consistent contributors to the discussion, but I felt my time there was up when a message was posted by a project leader confirming that the desire was to keep the debate ‘on topic’ and ‘informed’. As neither a journalist nor a fellow of the RSA, I guess this counted me, and anything I had to add, out.

I’ll be following the debate through the comments to David’s post, and anything else tagged with civicjournalismuk. I have my platform here, which I am happy to use to contribute with - or when the time is right for a dedicated platform to be created, I can use that - as long as it is open!

There is an interesting project underway at RSA Networks, the social network for Royal Society fellows, and, for the moment at least, anyone else who fancies joining in (that’s the category I belong to, by the way). It has been proposed by Stephen Coleman, Professor of Political Communication at the University of Leeds, and goes by the name of the “RSA Journalism Network”:

The public’s declining trust in the news media is a worrying trend. The RSA and the Reuters Institute of Journalism are looking at how we can support the civic function of news. We’re particularly interested in how professional journalists and Fellows relate to the public’s ideas about news and what it is for.

This is a great idea, and an important and interesting area for discussion. The web is a perfect place for the coversation to be held in, of course, because online developments are a part of both the problem and the cure for the relevance of news to people’s lives.

David Wilcox has commented on his blog about this project - again supportive of it but questioning the closed nature of the discussion on the RSA Networks platform. As anyone not a member of the network will find out, when clicking my link above, you can’t see anything without first logging in.

I can’t see how it is possible to have a useful discussion about media and citizenship in an old-style walled garden. You can link out - but people outside are then forced to come to “your place” to join in. This seems particularly inappropriate on this topic, where issues are so interesting precisely because the Internet has created a public commons.

David has started a similar thread within the project space on the RSA Network too. I’m fully supportive of his stance, having been happily involved in open online collaborative projects such as the Open Innovation Exchange, RuralNetOnline, the Membership Project and the etoolkit.

It’s far better to have these conversations out in the open, where people can read and find out more before they decide to dive in, and where people can add their thoughts whether they are a member of a specific network or not. The civic role of news is something that matters to everyone, not just RSA members, or whatever.

One of the ways that the web can help us to bring conversations together is through the use of tagging. By using tags effectively, people can write about a subject on their own blogs without needing to join another platform. All you need is  way of bringing them together, easily achieved by mixing up Technorati or Google Blog Search with RSS. Services like Pageflakes or Planetaki can then be used to publish the results.

Another way is to create the new platform, but make it open, rather as David does with his Drupal-based group blogs. Anyone can join and have an input, even if it is just to point to what they have written elsewhere. Indeed, David has taken this further by incorporating a Grazr-based widget displaying relevant content from various external blogs within the Membership Project group blog. In this way, those that have a blog can write there, and those that don’t can contribute directly to the group blog.

David is actively facilitating the Membership Project by posting regular updates and transferring the points that are made in the blog posts into a project timeline and associated work packages, thereby creating outputs from the organic content created through the group blogging process. This will be vital to keep the project moving forward, and is a great example of online community facilitation.

Taking this approach would therefore create a far more useful project, or network, than the current arrangements for the  RSA Journalism Network. I think this is too important a topic for discussion to be held behind closed doors, and for the moment I would like to suggest the use of the common tag civicjournalismuk to hold the conversation together for anyone who would like to have a say. We can figure out what to do with it all later. Let’s see how our open approach can feed into and add to what’s happening within the walled garden…

William Shaw is a great writer, and a great guy. He’s written a number of non-fiction titles, mainly on counter-cultural issues and is now doing some exciting stuff with social media, looking into stuff like uses the blog format to publish short non-fiction stories on UnMadeUp, posting stories around different parts of Brighton, and the almost uncategorisable 217 Babel. I’m hoping to do an interruption chat with him soon. He’s also a regular on Palimpsest, so he must have something about him.

Anyway, William has written a great piece for the Sunday Telegraph on Scientology:

It can never be said that Tom Cruise lives a normal life, but you don’t get to be Forbes magazine’s ‘world’s most powerful celebrity’ by being a lunatic. The list of fellow celebrity Scientologists is a long one: Kirstie Alley, Chick Corea, Beck, Jenna Elfman, Juliette Lewis, Lisa Marie Presley, Jason Lee, Giovanni Ribisi, John Travolta and his wife, Kelly Preston, are, or have been in recent times. Will Smith almost was. Jerry Seinfeld toyed with it. Celebrities or not, these are not weak-minded people. They are all successful at what they do. So, we wonder, what on earth are they doing in Scientology?

One answer is simple enough. To put it bluntly, Scientology really, really likes famous people. Cynics point out that there is a reason for this. From the early days of Scientology, L. Ron Hubbard set out to attract the famous to his new religion. Tom Wolfe once defined a cult as ‘a religion with no political power’; L. Ron Hubbard appears to have believed that Scientology needed something a lot more potent than political power. In 1955 he launched something he called Project Celebrity, listing 63 famous people he wanted to interest in his ’science of the mind’. It was a catholic selection that included Ernest Hemingway, Danny Kaye, Orson Welles, Liberace, Bing Crosby, Pablo Picasso and Walt Disney.

‘These celebrities are well-guarded, well-barricaded, over-worked, aloof quarry. If you bring one of them home you will get a small plaque as your reward,’ Hubbard wrote to his followers.

Great stuff.