A century of blogging

At the risk of navel-gazing, it seemed wrong to let my 100th post pass without some comment. I first posted on 1oth February 2009, so I was not exactly a pioneer blogger. I started because, as my first sentence said: “Like a tailor in a bad suit or a fitness instructor who runs out of puff, a writer without a decent blog sends a negative signal.”

I’d had an online presence through my website for about a year before, something I set up as I prepared to leave my staff job and go freelance. I’d blogged a little on that site, but really just for marketing purposes. I knew I needed something more conversational and, good as I found RapidWeaver in helping me get to grips with site-building, the blogging offer just wasn’t robust enough for what I wanted. So I moved to WordPress.com.

Playing the numbers

The figures aren’t spectacular, but probably pretty fair for a new blog which occassionally gets neglected due to pressure of work. A total of 4,000 views, with a good day currently notching up 50-70 views. The most popular post, on the anniversary of Hillsborough, drew 158 readers, and there are signs of a, small, regular audience who check in even when there are no new posts and appear regularly in the comments. Nothing spectacular, but it’s a presence and there is ongoing conversation.

Reading my first post again, the themes are still familiar and I’m happy I’ve achieved what I set out to do – or at least made a start. I’ve managed to update pretty regularly without getting too stressed when doing stuff, rather than writing about it, has to come first. I’ve found Twitter far more useful than I imagined I would, even though I still don’t use it voraciously.

What it’s meant

I said back then that “the journey would be a large part of the fun” and it has been. I learned a lot about how media can work in new ways and about how people communicate. I’ve found some fascinating blogs, sites and resources, and met some great people who challenge, stimulate and make me laugh. All in all, it’s been a very positive experience. The only really negative note I’d mention is the fact that the net seems to encourage some people seem to conduct themselves in an abrasive manner that I really hope they don’t employ when interacting face-to-face. It takes all sorts, I guess, but maybe that’s something to work on.

So, onwards. I’m contemplating the move to wordpress.org for greater flexibility and control, but I’m apprehensive about the technical knowledge required, especially as I am trying to get to grips with Joomla too. I really need to get more audio and video up on here, especially as I should set a good multimedia example to my students – I’m very conscious this is still largely print online, despite the interactivity.

But for now, there’s at least one more debate I want to contribute to, and I’ve already spent too long on the blog today. Lesson preparation, some marking, and a new business pitch await – and they are not going to do themselves. Thanks to everyone who has contributed to the first century in whatever way. There is a world of opportunity still to explore.

Noam Chomsky at SOAS

An unprecedentedly large crowd flocked to see Noam Chomsky speak at London’s School of Oriental and African Studies last week, and I’m happy to draw even more attention to a fascinating and important event. There’s a video of the full 135 minutes at the link, so give yourself time to enjoy what should be a fascinating session – my Tuesday night is now set up.

As Judith Townend observed on journalism.co.uk yesterday, “The interest surrounding his appearance, makes the media’s lack of coverage (just check Google News) all the more baffling – or perhaps not, after listening to the detail of Chomsky’s argument.” For all the discussion we are having about the development of the media, it seems much of it still has difficulty understanding and reporting all but the most basic issues.

In a wide-ranging address, Chomsky apparently asks questions such as why the banking crisis is portrayed as more alarming than global poverty, and spends some time discussing the media. the internet and the prospects for independent journalism. I quite liked his observation about the tendency to set up straw men when debating the benefits or  otherwise of the internet.

More to come once I’ve watched the full discussion tonight, no doubt. For now, share the link, digest, enjoy and then create your own media.

The vicious circle of football reporting

Much as it pains me to bring this up, I want to discuss the aftermath of Saturday’s North London derby. As enjoyable experiences go, I had more fun the following morning when I stood in the driving rain for two hours until soaked through to the underwear acting as stand-in coach for my son’s under-9s mini-soccer team. And the kids, cold and soaked as they were, showed more guile and gumption than the bunch of 5ok-a-week professionals I’d had the misfortune to observe impersonating a top-flight team at the atmosphere-free zone that is Arsenal’s Emirates stadium.

Although I should correct that last remark. So bad were Spurs in every department, from formation to tactics to application, and so great was the humiliation heaped upon our sorry heads, that even the Emirates was rocking – this time without the aid of the cringe-inducing Elvis karaoke they use to try and gee the home support up with at the start of the game. With the start of the working week comes the traditional derby dessert of dealing with the smugness, and let’s be honest, ridicule of the other lot’s supporters – and this time it’s all been given extra spice by the Robbie Keane affair.

Big mouth strikes again?

Before the game, the Spurs captain was widely reported as saying Spurs had a better squad than Arsenal, so in the aftermath of Saturday’s shocking showing the word on the street is that the big-timers of Tottenham have proved to be Charlies once again after shooting their mouths off. Or as The Guardian put it, “Talent trumps ego”. But let’s take a look at that story.

As the derby approached, Robbie Keane was one of the players put up for interview by the club. What he said translated into headlines such as “Tottenham’s squad is stronger than Arsenal’s, says Keane” and “Tottenham ready to overtake Arsenal, says Keane”. But if you look at what Keane actually did say, it’s not quite so sexy. “If you look at the two squads, you look at us and think, ‘We’re definitely on a par,’ but that will only be judged at the end of the season.” And “We have to believe now that we are as good as the teams that are up there.”

All of which seems perfectly reasonable, and far from the “baseless boast” Keane was accused of making during a weekend of widespread ridicule. But what was Keane supposed to say? “I think they’re better than us, we haven’t got the same quality in our squad”? Imagine the reaction – he would’ve been slaughtered.

Angling for pearls

The truth of it is, the papers looked for an angle and played it up – that’s what journalists do. The headlines weren’t exactly wrong, but it could reasonably be said that they weren’t entirely accurate either. Of course the headline was never going to be “We might match them but let’s see when the season’s over” – but having cranked up the angle it hardly seems fair for the press to be hammering Keane so hard for the angle it came up with. Although Robbie’s manager Harry Redknapp didn’t exactly help matters by saying “I couldn’t really agree with him” after the game. Not before, you’ll note, but after.

You can bet there won’t be any “Spurs manager says Arsenal are better” headlines worked up from Harry’s quote, and that’s because Harry, very much like Terry Venables before him, knows how to play the media. And here lies the point [cue relieved sighs from readers]. Many footballers and managers complain that the press manufactures stories and stokes controversy by pumping up innocuous statements into big issues. That accusation is not without foundation, as I hope I’ve shown above. I’d also offer the recent spattete between Wigan’s Roberto Martinez and Manchester United’s Alex Ferguson, and the ongoing attempts to inflate the bad patch being experienced by United and England defender Rio Ferdinand into a career-crushing crisis. But in an age when football’s top names either demonstrate a disdain for the press or attempt to micro-manage every mention of their beloved ‘brand’, thereby reducing most coverage to bland PR, the press needs to get its headlines somehow.

Spin city

What we’re left with is a vicious circle. The clubs’ attempts to control the way they are portrayed means most of what is approved or allowed is dull, so the press is forced to spin hard, which in turn aggravates the clubs. And yet it needn’t be like this. Most sports reporters don’t want to stitch anyone up, they just want a decent story. The reason the likes of Redknapp and Venables are so popular is that they provide original insight, for example when Redknapp spoke recently about watching a young Frank Lampard at West Ham out pounding the streets on a Friday night when his mates were out pubbing. At that stage, said Redknapp, he wasn’t the most promising prospect, but he was prepared to work hard on his game and the commitment he showed made his coaches sit up and take notice.

It wasn’t the Watergate tapes, but this was a routine football press conference, not a rendezvous with Deep Throat [not the movie ]. It gave a nice little insight, challenged a few preconceptions about ‘modern footballers’ and gave the press a good angle without giving anything away. No need for hype, no one gets hurt.

So would it be too much to expect that, in a leading club press office somewhere right now, the assembled communications geniuses may be thinking about a revolutionary new strategy? One where, instead of flaunting the strength of the ‘brand’, monetising every mention and sucking the soul out of any conversation, the media strategy focusses on providing genuine insight and access, and trusting that this improves the quality of the conversation? I’ll probably be dismissed as naive, but wily operators such as Redknapp and Venables, to name but two, have proved the value of such an approach.

Raising the paywall

The push by media companies to introduce paid-for content is gathering pace. While I still have my doubts about Rupert Murdoch’s ability to get punters to pay for news, I think people may be prepared to pay for more specialist information, especially if it’s searchable. I’d certainly think about paying to subscribe to a searchable archive of World Soccer magazine rather than keeping boxes of back issues on my shelves at home.

Of course, the best thing about all this is that, once the paywalls are introduced, media companies will use that income to invest in staff, create jobs, improve the working experience of journalists and generally reverse the cuts in investment that they say the growth of free content has forced them into. (Remember folks, in cyberspace, no one can hear your hollow laughter).

Time to move the debate about journalism’s future on

I was teaching on the day of the recent Is there a crisis in world journalism? event so I was unable to participate and I’ve been trying to catch up since. There’s plenty of audio and video at the link above, set up by Coventry University which hosted the event, and on journalism.co.uk. But I had a few doubts about the event, and what I’ve seen and heard so far hasn’t assuaged them.

Form and content

I should say at this point that I’m not knocking the very great effort that went into staging or contributing to this event. I just think we need to move things on a little. Coventry University’s John Mair, who produced the event, described it as as: “Distinguished speakers from across five continents, an audience of students, academics and real people, three and a half hours of exciting intellectual debate and more, breaking new frontiers with videoconferencing and webcasting and Twitter and more: this has put Coventry and Coventry journalism on the world stage.” All of which is fine, but the measure of the event’s value is surely in what was actually said, as well as the methods used to say it.

From what I’ve seen so far, there was much general discussion about the exciting and challenging media times we live in. Jeremy Paxman made an interesting contribution about the kind of journalism that can be produced, and Adrian Monck also focussed on a practical angle, observing pertinently that “journalists are obsessed with the notion of crisis” and saying that we need to “seize the opportunity” to put new ideas and new ways of producing news into practice. And on one of the podcasts on Coventry Uni’s iTunes U site, jco’s own Judith Townend mentions the problems caused by management’s inability (or unwillingness?) to communicate properly in this era of change, therefore fuelling staff suspicion rather than ambition.

Navigation skills

But there was also more of the same stuff I’ve been reading and hearing for over a year. At the risk of over-simplifying in summary, this seems to consist of the massive generalisation that print is “dead”; some vague assertions about the need for journalists to be entrepreneurs (as if this is something new); and a few references to how social media means we are all media barons now. OK, I know I’ve really over-simplified that, but bear with me on this.

One of my teaching colleges spoke of a frustration that “so much of the debate is consumed in negativity without giving any of the new young journos any interim navigating skills”, and I think some of that is driven by the tendency of so many journalists to re-invent themselves as expert commentators – something I refer to in the comments following a very good post by Adrian Monck in which he debunks some of the commentary.

I’m aware that by writing about all this I’m opening myself up to the same charge of posing as an expert commentator, but what I hope I can do is help to move the debate on so that we are looking at the very practical ways we can deal with the new media landscape rather than simply pushing general theories. It’s not quite so easy to get a punchy headline or a simple set of soundbites, but it may prove more useful.

Bottom up

This stage of the debate can’t be driven by talking heads, by ‘experts’ who are often removed from the day-to-day issues faced by ordinary journalists. It has to come from the trade itself. So I’ll be looking for reports of the Campaign for Press and Broadcasting Freedom’s ‘Media for all, The Challenge of Convergence’ event, and pushing the value of the NUJ’s New Ways To Make Journalism Pay event on 16 January 2010. And I’ll also be continuing the discussion with the students I teach at the London College of Communication and Goldsmiths College, who seem to have little doubt that the quality of the content, not simply the method of delivery, is key.

It’s at this level, and at the level of the – let’s call it the shop floor – that the most interesting debate is going on, whether it be Reed Business Information’s more formal discussion sessions about how to work in new ways, or simply on-the-hoof decision-making about how best to find, present and extend a story using whatever tools we have at our disposal. It’s why I’ve always believed in the value of labour that is organised – not for some theoretical political reason but because of its practical value. Understanding and valuing a trade leads to the development and practical application of skill.

That’s not to say the participants at events like ‘Is there a crisis in world journalism?’ do not understand or value the trade. They clearly do, although I would agree with Adrian Monck when he observes that any crisis may well be one of confidence in what we can do.

Don’t forget variety

It’s also worth observing that 99% of the discussion about “journalism” is actually about news reporting. There are other forms of journalism, which may not be as socially and politically significant – although there’s room for debate there – but which are embracing new opportunities with far less gnashing of the teeth than the news end of the operation.

Too much of the debate in the last 12 months has been about talking journalism down, about predication rather than application. We talk about what might happen rather than what could happen. In the choppy waters we find ourselves in, we need more navigation and less forecast.

Rapid response online: After the euphoria, the worries remain

I’m worried. It’s been quite an eventful few days for the media, with much talk of changing rules, the exercise of reader power, and democratisation of opinion. If you’re reading this, it’s safe to assume you’ll be aware of the Trafigura case, the uproar over Jan Moir’s Daily Mail article on Stephen Gately’s death and the conversations around both.

Let’s just take a step back from the specifics of whether we agree or disagree with the individuals or organisations in each case and try and think about some general principles. I’m trying to, and it’s why I’m getting worried.

Remember NightJack?

Back in June, I posted in the aftermath of the NightJack case in which a blogger lost a legal battle to remain anonymous. In the post, I wrote: “You can’t base a principle on whether or not you agree with something – a principle has to apply across the board. You can’t agree with one person’s ‘right’ to run an anonymous blog criticising something you are critical of while simultaneously disagreeing with another person’s ‘right’ to hide behind anonymity in order to push views you don’t agree with.” After the NightJack ruling, the [desperately tries to avoid using 'blogosphere'] online community was  up in arms about this loss of anonymity, yet last week that same community was celebrating using the fluid structure of online and social media to unmask a company that tried to stay anonymous.

Now, I know there is a big difference between the two cases. To reduce it to a simple equation, in one case a whistleblower was exposed and others perhaps warned off blowing the whistle, while in the other it was the attempt to silence the whistle that was wrecked. And yet I can’t quite get comfortable about whether there is a solid underlying principle, other than that it’s OK to unmask a nasty oil company behaving badly, but not someone who is criticising something we may also be critical of. I would genuinely welcome some guidance here.

Attack of the 50ft bloggers

In fact the Trafigura case, it transpires, may not have been as much of a harbinger of a new era as some, including me, at first speculated. As the dust settles, quite a few commentators are asking if it really was Twitter wot won it. Nyder O’Leary posts in a punchy fashion on his realreview.ie blog, pointing out that “By far the most important part of the whole affair was a pretty old standard – if you can’t publish, get an MP to ask about it under Parliamentary Privilege and then report on that.” The question that began to be asked increasingly frequently after Trafigura was “How long before an individual is maliciously targetted in this way?”

Which leads us to Jan Moir’s now notorious article. I’m not going to link to it because it’s had more than enough publicity already, and it’s easy enough to find without my help. Personally, I found it pretty distasteful, this is my blog, so I don’t feel any responsibility to give space to something that’s badly informed and offensive. We’ve got Question Time for that.

I disagree too with FleetStreetBlue’s In Defence of Jan Moir and the Daily Mail post (I’m hoping my comment gets approved) which, while making some good points, essentially seems to be ignoring the fact that expressing an opinion means the writer should be prepared to have opinion expressed about their views. But FSB does touch on something with the sentence “The Twitterati vigilantes have got their tails up.” Because there is much self-congratulation being expressed over the fact that a vigorous online and social media campaign has got the advertising pulled from Moir’s column.

A small step to commercial censorship

I’m not against boycott campaigns in principle, and I’ve often advocated and participated in campaigns to apply commercial pressure to influence policy, but I get worried when the tactic is used in this way. It doesn’t seem so very different to the US networks cancelling Barry Levinson’s excellent series Homicide: Life on the Streets a few years back because it was deemed too political.

The more I think about all this, the more the phrase “mob rule” crops up. For all that increased access to the means of producing media, the online shrinking of the world and greater response and participation are good things – and facts which cannot now be made unfacts – there is plenty of cause for worry about just where all this will lead. John Mair has raised the issue in a well-timed piece on The rise of smart or not-so-smart mobs, concluding with the vital question “Is this healthy for democracy and media accountability or not?”.

As things stand, I think I am right to be worried.

The flaw in the Evening Standard’s plan

I finished work tonight on Ludgate Hill, and walked my usual route back to London Bridge, over the wobbly bridge and along the south bank and into the mainline station. At not one point did I see a free Evening Standard being given out. The Standard’s sales points were locked and lonely. At London Bridge station itself, there was not a single copy to be seen on the approach from Borough Market and Southwark Cathedral, on the station forecourt, or the station concourse.

My wife had a different experience at Camden Town, where evidently a blunt instrument was needed to bludgeon through the massed ranks of Standard giver-outers.

I know it’s early days, but I’ll offer some advice freely – and if Alexander and Geordie want to show their appreciation once things pan out, that’ll be very nice.

• Increasing circulation to 600,000 is not much use if the punters can’t get hold of a copy.

• It is a good idea not to concentrate many sellers on one place while leaving many places unattended.

• At mainline train stations in rush hour, there’s a good chance that there will be a large number of people passing through. It would be worth covering each one, if possible at more than one approach point.

That’s all.

How journalism works now

A very interesting set-piece in how the rules are changing for journalists and the media today has been unfolding over the last 24 hours. The Guardian has just fought off attempts to gag its attempts to report a parliamentary question asked about oil traders Trafigura. As commentator Jon Slattery pointed out on his blog hours before the injunction was lifted, the attempts to gag the press were farcical. Now, what was an obscure question in parliament has become a major news story, and a current trending topic on Twitter. 

The affair provides a whole lesson’s-worth of material for the journalism students I teach, and should provide food for thought for journalists and press officers everywhere. At the heart of all the techie detail is the foundation of proper, traditional storygathering.

13.1 miles, 02:08:24

I completed my first-ever half-marathon today, an inspiring and beautiful route through London’s Royal Parks. I notched a time of 02:08:24 which I am really pleased with. It’s the first big race I’ve run since last summer’s Great British 10k, and I really felt the step up, struggling a little between miles 8 and 9 before finding the gas to push on to the finish. I also got a much needed energy boost near the finish as I saw my family waving me on.

At the finish, as I collected bottles of water, Lucozade Sport and much-needed bananas, my oldest son, with typical honesty, grinned at me and said: “Well done Dad, but I’ve got to tell you the carrot finished in front of you”. It reminded me of a friend who told me the lowest point on her London Marathon was being passed three miles from home by a man dressed as a rhino! It actually gave me a much-needed laugh.

It’s the good humour and friendliness I love about these events. The sense of sharing an achievement breaks down barriers, with people exchanging stories and experiences while waiting to start, and many acts of kindness witnessed en route as runners pull back to help those they see in trouble, encouraging and pacing so that everyone gets to the finish. This, and the fact that so many people turn up just to cheer on the runners, does restore a tremendous amount of faith in human nature, and underlines my firm belief that there certainly is such a thing as society.

It was also another great London occasion, the route taking us through Hyde, Green and St James’s Parks and Kensington Gardens, and also taking in The Mall, Constitution Hill, Westminster Bridge and the Victoria Embankment. Much of that route brought back memories of many a marching weekend in the 1980s. A great moment too on the tube on the way there, as the sheer variety and randomness of London life delivered another surprise. There were a few bewildered faces as people boarded tube carriages at 8am packed with passengers clad in running gear!

I’m hoping the aching limbs ease off by the time I tackle the many staircases of the LCC tomorrow, and I shall be having my first beer for a while this evening to ensure they do. Despite my late decision to go the sponsorship route, I raised £323 online and further £30 off it for the Multiple Sclerosis Society. If anyone reading this feels the need to lump on, my sponsorship page is still up.

A bad case of unreasonable optimism

Earlier this week, publisher Condé Nast announced the closure of Gourmet magazine. Also this week, it was announced that England’s World Cup qualifier against Ukraine will be shown only on the internet.

Although the latter announcement has caused a storm, no one has suggested that the news means the end of television. But the former announcement has been seized upon with wearisome predictability by the ‘print is dead’ brigade. The closure of Gourmet, it seems, is conclusive proof that all magazines, indeed all print, is doomed. On his Buzz Machine blog, Jeff Jarvis says that while once he believed that it was not yet the time to announce the death of magazines, “that ‘yet’ has now arrived”.

It ain’t necessarily so

Jeff has emerged as one of the high priests of the ‘print is doomed’ movement, although after announcing the death of print magazines he then goes on to say that, actually, he believes only that “most” print magazines will die. Some will survive. Although they are “an instant anachronism”. (I hope you’re following this). But it’s the headline claim that gets the attention, and he comments have certainly been flowing in as other members of the PID brigade have piled in with their tuppence-worth (or should that be ‘token electronic transfer amount’? Actual currency is sooo last century).

Among my favourite comments are “how is a cooking magazine ever going to compete with a good cooking Web site?” (try using your laptop on the same work surface as you’re boning a side of beef on and you’ll find out); “There is no reason a website cannot create the same brand value for an advertiser as print does” (the reverse is equally true) and – my favourite, in response to comment I posted suggesting special interest magazines were just one area in which print could thrive “I suspect your (sic) being unreasonably rosy about these special interests mags”.

Reasons to be cheerful

Well, we wouldn’t anyone to be “unreasonably rosy” I guess, we do like a bit of doom and gloom. I replied on the comments thread again, and I’ve abridged what I said there below.

Some magazines will close. Others won’t. One poster asked “How can Runner’s World the magazine possibly compete with the website?”. The answer is that Runner’s World the magazine doesn’t have to compete with its website. They operate together, offering different things. I use the website a lot. I also like to read the magazine – it’s very handy for when I haven’t got anything to plug into or my iPhone battery is low. (I also prefer reading a print page to an iPhone screen.)

Mags like RW and World Soccer have strong subscriptions bases, which enables a certain amount of forward planning and knowledge of readers’ wants. It’s why I specifically mentioned special interest mags. I also mentioned London-based RBI, a business publisher. Titles such as Flight International, Farmers’ Weekly and Community Care operate successful websites and print editions which complement each other. Staff on Computer Weekly say that the print edition drives people to the web, and the web drives print subs. See, complementary use of multiplatform media.

Take a magazine like the UK’s Take a Break. It still sells over a million copies a week. Its readers identify with what they see in its pages, they like to sit down with the mag and a cuppa and read it and do the puzzles. They could read the stories and do puzzles online. But they prefer the print version – not everyone is as tied to their computers as us media types. Personally, I think there is room for developing an online community around TaB – but publisher Bauer was never interested in doing this. But selling a million a week does make you think you’re doing something right.

Satisfaction

Mags such as Grazia and Heat succeeded partly because people liked to be seen with them in their handbags – a status symbol, a badge of honour and style and attitude that sitting in front of a computer surfing on your own can never give. Or as Word editor Mark Ellen says in the latest issue of the magazine: “The internet is perfect for exploring tangents. But magazines can carry the most intricate thoughts and images, the ones you can only fully appreciate if you look at them more than once.”

Too many people are generalising about the future of print. One mag has closed. Others may. General news in print is in trouble – that’s where instant delivery and update and multiplatform approaches really put the classic model of journalism on paper under threat. There are many other kinds of journalism and many other kinds of publication that can thrive, will thrive, and which are not throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

(s)he bangs the drum

Why, you may ask, do I keep banging on about this so much? A few reasons, since you’re asking. Most importantly I believe we need to face down this tide of pessimism about what we do and what we can do. At a time when we have the technology to expand media brands as never before, to make connections and produce content that we spent years dreaming about, we are instead encouraged to rubbish the worth of much of what we do, and in so doing we are selling ourselves and our readers short.

A former colleague told me the other day of his profound frustration with “The obsession with the delivery mechanism. There is absolutely no respect for real skills that create this content: researching, writing, taking pictures and making things look nice via design.” He saw many media executives as “nothing more than haulage contractors, making promises to deliver whatever you want to wherever you want it. They don’t give a toss about what’s in the back of their trucks, planes and cargo ships. If good journalists didn’t exist, there would be nothing to fill these multi-platforms with, yet journalists are the least respected of all the professions in the supply chain.”

No doubt such strong views will be seen as the wailing of a dying breed, but I was encouraged by the passion for quality, for the worth of something creative. Far better than the passion all too often displayed for pressing the point of why so much of what we do is in fact worthless and obsolete.

Here’s to an outbreak of unreasonable optimism.