It seems:
What have I got against Julie Moult?
Well, looking into some of the hateful and (ahem) inventive crap she’s produced for The Sun and The Daily Mail over the years, quite a lot… but really, I’m here today to deliver to Julie a well-earned lesson on the mysterious inner workings of Google…
It has been many years since I last did any court reporting and I remember the scramble to get out of court and either get to the court press room or recover your mobile from security. Recording devices like cameras and microphones are banned in UK courts.
Have things changed at all? Would it be OK for a reporter to follow this American example and (from the brilliant Spokesman Review – the paper which practically invented the open newsroom) tweet progress – presumably using a mobile phone?
Update. the short answer to the question above (Thanks Jon) is that mobile phones are still not allowed. Also found this interesting post on the problems of the web and court reporting:
But in a 24/7 media age, what is contemporaneous? Increasingly, newspapers feel the need to file to only one deadline: now, online.
In fairness to MacNae’s expert editors, this is from the 18th edition published in 2005 and the newer book is better with online matters and the forthcoming edition even better. But the advice it gives on being contemporaneous is from another age: hardly any evening papers publish more than one edition, and most of them are essentially morning papers now anyway, printed over night to save money and time.
So surely “at the earliest opportunity” is now. It’s as soon as the reporter has gathered his or her thoughts, deciphered the notebook scribblings, wrote the story and emailed it or phoned it in to the newsdesk.
Judges are not the most web-savvy people (see here), so for time being the next day’s edition will be enough. But how long before the senior judges and the Ministry of Justice wake up to the fact that the whole issue of “earliest opportunity” has changed?
The Society of Editors is already warning that the Contempt of Court laws need to be shaken up to cope with multi-media realities. So how long before the powers that be take court reporting law into the 21st century?
Thanks to Alison at the Liverpool Daily Post for kicking off the debate on Twitter today. She asked whether newspapers whould break exclusive court reports online, to which I ask another question: why not?
Tom Watson , William Perrin and the Power of Information taskforce shows off some mock ups for crime mapping by neighbourhood and the whole social media story makes it onto the Telegraph’s front page with a couple of subsidiary articles – including one mentioning West Midlands Police mapping site. Practical and political! Crime mapping has been useful tool in the US for a few years now, some of it inspired by tracking gun crime and is seeing growing use in the UK.
If you modestly define journalism as telling people what they need to know when they need to know it I think the various British Government twitter streams are getting into the swing of that.
This on David Davis and his resignation as an MP from UKParliament (which uses its biog to describes itself as “Keeping an eye on government, debating laws, raising taxes”) is a good example of what might have once happened in a newspaper – journo rings press office and asks: “so what exactly is the procedure for resigning from parliament?”, press officers checks details and piece is written and appears in paper. This is a modest example of journalism but it does show how much collective efforts press officers and journalists have wasted by duplicating bits of each others jobs. We don’t need the journo to do that anymore. They can do something more useful.
By the way here’s the link to the info on the Chiltern Hundreds.
Update:
Dave Briggs and Ewan McIntosh alerted me to Stratford on Avon District Council starting to use twitter. As Dave says “sometime you just have to give things a go. And it’s great that someone in local government is doing just that.” What I like is that the council uses the description of the feed as “Short, simple news” which is a more honest description of how man bodies use twitter – subverting the orignial use of “what are you doing now”.
According to the FT the Culture Secretary, Andy Burnham, thinks he may be able to not just control product placement in TV programmes but also on the web!. To quote from Neville Hobson’s blog post (nice spot Neville)
Andy Burnham, culture secretary, said the government had an economic interest in protecting standards in UK broadcasting because they were “part of Britain’s brand when it comes to world markets”.
No worries, you might think, there’s always the internet. But they’ve got that covered, too:
[...] And in comments that may alarm the digital media industry, he suggested that the government should have a role in ensuring the same standards were met on the internet as on television and radio.
“If a clip on YouTube gets a million hits, it is akin to broadcasting and it doesn’t seem to me to be too difficult to have an alert on that clip, an alert for violence or for sex,” Mr Burnham said.
Oh dear. Someone somewhere is confused.
So what are they gonna do? Count every time every online video is watched? Which ones – the ones made in the UK, uploaded to the UK, available in the UK? Just the ones on Youtube?
Then what? When a video reaches a certain popularity a crack team of digital nano cleaners (perhaps we could call them Civil Surf) will swoop into the interwebs and pixelate out any potentially placed product – or maybe re-arrange the ones and noughts so they look like Andy Burnham?
Or they could ban British production companies from putting products in video which may appear on the web – and in the process kill one of this countries fastest growing wealth creating industries.
Overall a sad, sad, idea.
Perhaps it does reveal how government is already thinking about ways in which it should/could control the internet when it no longer is able to regulate the media through the current mechanism of owning the bandwidth.
Update: Sunday 15th. Here’s a link to the speech itself: Some quotes:
With so much of the online world untrusted, I feel we should preserve standards of accuracy, impartiality and trustworthiness, rather than dismantle them. People still use the internet and TV for different reasons and with different expectations and we mustn’t forget that.
and:
But the penetration of the internet to all of our lives, means that I think that people don’t want it to feel like the wild west. Things some people accept as inevitable in terms of governance, I believe we should question.
Why? Because as, for example, Tanya Byron finds in her report there is a climate of anxiety, as well as opportunity that surrounds new technology.
You do have to stop and think when you read a quote from a nine-year old boy in Tanya’s report about whether we are sufficiently controlling this online world in which our children are roaming. It’s funny but it does make a very important point. He said: “I’m worried I’ll get lost on the internet and find I’ve suddenly got a job in the army or something.”
It made me laugh and I’m glad it made you laugh too but I think it makes an important point.
I think it’s well worth a read. He’s thinking through some important problems – yet the instinct to control rather than educate is the wrong one. It goes back to the simple reality that we should teach our children to cross the road – not prevent them going anywhere near a road.
[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c8_TSXassg8]
A cracking video made to promote a Birmingham blogging venture – Environmental News Online. The site has been run by a group of journalism students working with Paul Bradshaw and the Online Journalism Blog at Birmingham City University. A month or so ago I helped in a session with the students to encourage them to think of ways of using the network effect to reach a wider audience with the blog. Nobody at the time thought of writing a song and putting it on youtube, but it’s a classic example of media as a social object. The video has given me the desire and the excuse to write about what they are doing – to join their conversation.
Nice one. Now would you like to mention this film Podnosh made about cutting co2 in Birmingham on ENO?
Anyone who reads this blog regularly will know that I have a periodic rant about integrity. That’s always a risky game, cos we’re all flawed when it comes to truth telling. If we were not then we’d struggle to get by in our complex social world. However here’s my latest, which first appeared on this blog from Caret, where I do some work on the overlap between communications and leadership. At the bottom are some additional thoughts for you lot:
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Dave Snowden has written this good blog post about coherence, leadership and communications:
Not all great leaders are good communicators, fewer still are, or will ever be gifted story tellers. Ironically some of the worst leaders are only too good at telling stories and excel at communication. What really matters is the degree of coherence and integrity that is evident in the lived life of the leader as perceived by their employees and colleagues.
As a staff journalist I would sometimes have the argument with colleagues about the line between truth and honesty. A fact may be strictly true and can be set alongside other strictly true facts, but, as we know, the whole can still be totally dishonest.
Naturally enough whenever we strayed near that trap the package was all brilliantly communicated, regardless of how much integrity it had. After all that’s what we were trained to do. The end result though was never satisfying because it lacked integrity.
Often it was also really hard work. Why?
Because creating a semblance of coherence from something that is fundamentally flawed is devilishly difficult to do. But doing just that has become a staple technique for half hearted journalism and probably for a similar style of management. Disguising the lie has become a professional skill – acquired over years of experience. So how do you build in checks and balances to ensure you’re spending time on the stuff that really makes sense?
As Dave goes on to argue: “If nothing else leaders generally come as teams, the good ones take people with them over the years who compliment their skills. Training leadership crews rather than leaders may be one way to build more resilience into organisations”. In my mind one of the core strengths of a great team is to know what is honest and have a reflex action to communicate that. The pleasure of nailing something when you’ve also worked hard to do the right thing is enormous. Of course from time to time managers feel they can’t do that – but the wisest will never buy their own deceit. Make a habit of doing that and you’re most likely to end up being dismissed as, at best, incoherent.
Hat Tip Johnnie Moore. Image thanks to Unhindered by Talent.
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So that’s what I wrote on the Caret blog – for an audience mostly interested in leadership. Here though I’m curious about how well you think online social media networks can function as that leadership team?
How easy is it to call each other to account when we sense a drift in the wrong direction? With people I know and trust I have sent a couple of private messages saying I though something was out of order – and been grateful to receive the same on a couple of occasions. Is this enough?
Simon tweeted that the BBC is interested in his idea and this is what the iPM blog makes of what he is doing:
Simon Berry and others on the blog have been keen for iPM to to hear more about his big idea.
For more than ten years, Simon worked all over the world as part of the
British aid effort. He thinks there is a simple way to help the one in five children in Africa who die from simple causes – usually diarrhoea. And the answer is Coca-Cola.
Not the product – but its distribution network. We’ve asked Coca-Cola
to debate, but in the meantime Eddie has been speaking to Simon about
him and his idea.
Listen to Simon’s interview here.
I love a blog post which asks a good question. This lunchtime the editor of the Birmingham Post, Marc Reeves, popped up five corkers as he wrote about how one of his guest (corrected thanks to Jon) bloggers had attracted a good chunk of derision from readers for this post and this one.
So those questions…
I also suggest you read the comments section on the post, many of my answers are echoed there.
(Marc – you just got 4 links with one post!)
To read more twitter responses to the very enjoyable and very local live streaming of the election results in Birmingham please look here. I enjoyed the streaming (hosted by Adrian Goldberg) but the text service (link here) was clumsy and the media pack only available as a pdf – which is bonkers ‘cos it should also have been full web pages (a culture that thinks in print/document terms?).
Election Bloggers Elsewhere:
Getting on the telly does help bloggers get comments – have a gander at Alix from the Lib Dems, Luke for Labour and Iain Dale for the Tories who were the BBC’s election bloggers. Even Ewan Spence managed a bit of the action. The BBC’s Emily Maitlis kept updating reports but no comments function and no trackback means that wasn’t my idea of blogging.
Other Links:
Birmingham 2008 Election results here.
At 3 am May 2nd Wikipedia was not updated.
Yahoo Pipe bashed together by Paul Bradshaw.
and a Journalist asks for sympathy!
Major thanks to Jon Bounds for starting and encouraging the shared election twitter. Update The morning after, this is he how he summed up the experience:
The actual conversation bounced between pub-style debate, willful surrealism, and the kind of listening and reacting to the actual words that microblogging really helps — collating the “did he really just say that?” factor between other viewers rather than waiting for the host to pick the politician up.
Four hours of it made us all flag, but it really was a worthwhile experience and in two years (when the local elections come around again) I really hope the council harness the conversation in some way too. It doesn’t have to be twitter (which, considering the UK local elections borked it, may not be around) but it was really powerful – and if publicised widely could be really useful.
Whilst Pete Ashton describes the evening here on the Birmingham Post blogs
See more photos of our work on flickr
See more photos of our work on flickr
See more photos of our work on flickr
See more photos of our work on flickr
See more photos of our work on flickr
See more photos of our work on flickr
See more photos of our work on flickr
See more photos of our work on flickr
