Yes, after much happiness with Blogger I am moving to Wordpress and adrianmonck.com. Georgia Warren kindly hacked me a template and set me up. I have already screwed around with it (and f$%^ed it up).
Sorry for the inconvenience.
For RSS readers the Subscribe button is set up on the page, but the Feedburner url is here.
Hope to see you at the new place - and yes it will look a bit cranky whilst I mess about with it!
Andrew Exum has an interesting account of how the U.S. Army did hearts and minds in Iraq five years ago...In the fall of 2003, I was an officer in the U.S. Army, leading a special operations unit in Iraq.
When I inquired as to what psychological operations resources I had at my disposal, I was given two well-meaning soldiers armed with bullhorns.
They spoke, they admitted, no Arabic, but they had an Arabic-language recording they could play on their Cold War-era speaker system.
The enemy, meanwhile, had a keen understanding of how to use the internet and the pan-Arab satellite stations to shape the narrative of the war.
Please forgive the shameless self-promotion but Can You Trust The Media? picked up a review at the Guardian.Phone-in voting scams, dodgy trailer editing, silly-season reports of great white sharks cruising off English beaches - the media apparently has a problem with trust. How to win it back?
Wrong question, says Adrian Monck: trust is something that obtains between individuals, and no one should be so silly as to “trust” a large newstertainment organisation, which is mainly in the business of gathering people in one place to be advertised at. Consumers ought to be sceptical.
“The media is not in the information supply business,” writes Monck, himself a TV and newspaper journalist. “It’s in the distraction business.”
In his amusingly blunt style, he scores a lot of hits against naivety and wishful thinking on both sides of the argument, with colourful topical and historical anecdotes (there was no golden age of media reliability).
He nicely skewers the idea that bloggers can replace reporters; and notes the surprising truth, discovered during the second world war, that bad news from the front is better for citizens’ morale than good news.
We expect too much from the media, he argues in an expansive conclusion, because it has replaced religion for so many people.
Instead, we should be demanding greater freedom of official information, for instance the online provision of court transcripts. An excellent idea.
Channel 4’s Grand Designs Live, is built around asking viewers to vote on three properties. Here is the problem: the first property featured has a massive advantage over the last property in terms of motivating people to vote.
[Updated] Two three four nights out of three four five, the first property featured has won...
Can Channel 4 not come up with a less obviously flawed method?
The future of investigative journalism? Books, according to ex-WSJ Managing Editor Norman Pearlstine.Pearlstine doesn’t believe the newspaper business model will support the kind of long-form, investigative journalism that many of the top reporters and editors have spent their careers pursuing.
Case in point: the Washington Post’s recent 17,000-word, four-part series on IED’s in Iraq. Great story, Norm said, but probably better positioned as a book, or a premium download for Amazon’s Kindle.
“There might be 50,000 people in the world who want to read that story, but not the ones advertisers want to reach,” he said.
There is an exceptional and very poignant post from a sacked Chinese journalist translated and reproduced at the China Digital Times.I am afraid of other people praising me as a brave newspaperman, because I know I am full of fear in my heart. I did write some commentaries on current affairs, and edited some articles that exposed the truth.
And now the guy needs a job...
I lost my job and was threatened for speaking the truth.
However, to be honest, these were exceptional cases. They were my miscalculations. In my various media positions in the past decade, what I’ve practised most is avoiding risk.
Self-censorship has become part of my life. It makes me disgusted with myself.
Some of my peers are proud of their censorship skills, and like to show it off to employers. I have similar skills, and I am using them everyday.
But I am deeply uncomfortable with it. I feel ashamed about it, just like an executioner knows that he is good at killing.
I could console myself by saying that I am not alone in avoiding risks. There are risks in all professions, and everybody has to know how to control it…
However, the media industry is different. I participate in telling lies to the public whenever I cancel a good news story, whenever I delete a sentence of truth, if we regard the media as a public good.
I could also excuse my cowardice by saying that tens of thousands of jobs are at stake if I speak the truth. I should take responsibility for others who rely on the publication for a living…
However, I have to admit that I wouldn’t have the courage to speak out, if there were not so many colleagues associated with me, or if I was required to make sacrifices to secure their jobs. How can I use others as my fig leaf and pretend to be noble?
…Compared to the importance of the media to the society, what I’ve done is very limited. I should be ashamed of taking such an important position in this industry and not doing more. I should be more ashamed when I get honors for my work.
Even if I don’t have the courage and capacity to do more than I can do now, I should at least live honestly and conscientiously, and be aware of my cowardice and impotence.
Jon Friedman has a walk down ethics lane today, prompting Ken Auletta to come out with this distinctly non-counter-intuitive take on why ethical lapses occur. (And in the words of the song - “Stop me if you think you’ve heard this one before.”)“Declining circulation, falling advertising revenues, and the swooning stock value of traditional news organizations, coupled with expanding consumer choices, prompts slashed newsroom budgets.
But is there any evidence for a relationship between adverse business conditions and deliberate misreporting? If there is I’d like to see it.
“This leaves fewer editors and fact checkers to police newsrooms. Worse, with business declining, the folks who sign our checks push for more sensational stories, more conflict, more sharp opinion - anything - to lift their news stories from the clutter. The business culture imposes itself on the journalistic culture. In the contest between the two cultures, business usually triumphs.”
A public service announcement follows: online booking is now open for the 2008 Investigative Journalism Summer School.
Where: City University London,
Northampton Square,
London EC1V 0HB
When: 18-20 July, 2008
What: advanced internet research, using Freedom of Information legislation, computer assisted reporting, statistics, understanding company accounts, libel and privacy law, the environment and protecting sources.
Speakers will include:Nick Davies, author of Flat Earth News, John Pilger, documentary film maker, and Robert Wardle, recently retired head of the Serious Fraud Office.
Cost for the three days: full price £450; discounted to £300 for members of the NUJ, BECTU; and £200 for students. More details here.
David Donald and Tommy Kaas on computer-assisted reporting.
Heather Brooke and David Gordon, editor of the Belfast Telegraph, on MPs, their expenses and the Freedom of Information Act.
Jim Nichol and Raphael Rowe on investigating miscarriages of justice.
Hogarth’s Gin Lane, from the middle of the eighteenth century, has to be one of the great pieces of visual campaigning journalism.
The estimable Clay Shirky uses gin to introduce a discussion of the problem of leisure, Gin, Television and Social Surplus. You can see where he’s going (although read Peter Borsay’s neat summary here if you really want to know more about the gin craze) - the ascent of humanity from alcoholic stupor, to couch potato, to virtuous and virtual participant.
Labelling gin a technology (although cute), then skipping forward and doing the same for the sitcom doesn’t really take us anywhere, however. The result of this pick and mix history? Shirky tells us that:Desperate Housewives essentially functioned as a kind of cognitive heat sink, dissipating thinking that might otherwise have built up and caused society to overheat.
Really? Boy, I would love to see some (old-fashioned word alert) ‘evidence’ for this.
Recall Neil Postman kicking off Amusing Ourselves To Death: As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny “failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions.”
Is Shirky heading there with his essay?
Nope. Although he brackets alcoholism with mass entertainment, he then (without bothering to throw in time-use surveys) labels the time spent watching TV as - ‘a cognitive surplus!’ And then he really takes flight!The early phase for taking advantage of this cognitive surplus, the phase I think we're still in, is all special cases. The physics of participation is much more like the physics of weather than it is like the physics of gravity.
I would call this the metaphysics of b$%^&*ks. Shirky lands his argument with a banal bump: Let’s say that everything stays 99 percent the same, that people watch 99 percent as much television as they used to, but 1 percent of that is carved out for producing and for sharing.
Or it sure is a lot of Flickr albums.
The Internet-connected population watches roughly a trillion hours of TV a year. That’s about five times the size of the annual U.S. consumption. One per cent of that is 100 Wikipedia projects per year worth of participation.
Is online activity any more worthwhile than watching half an hour of the Phil Silvers Show? Or any more worthwhile than sitting in an audience whilst Shirky is speaking?
Is Shirky saying there is a problem with spectating and entertainment?
Well say it then! And give us some evidence - not just some flashy but superficial historical analogies, some geek-speak and a little Nike philosophy of the Just Do It school.
(Did I say I didn’t like this essay, by the way?)
Good reporting, the old-fashioned way. Thanks to Mike Hills for the heads up on this video.
The Chicago Tribune Guide to Newspaper Reporting (circa 1955) [KevinP1468].
Just been hearing the results of the Thomson Reuters/World Editors Forum Newsroom barometer polls presented by John Zogby. At the end, Zogby was asked for his take on the US Presidential elections.
For “entertainment value only” he offered us McCain vs Obama, with Obama by a wafer thin margin.
I pass it on in the spirit in which it was offered!
Pew has a piece looking at the impact of David Barstow’s epic NYT piece on the Pentagon’s tummy tickling of retired generals. The conclusion? No one really picked it up.
Well, there was an issue for TV to address. But really, I remain pretty much of the view expressed here.
Barstow’s work was impressive, but are we supposed to see military pensioners - paid smallish sums for TV appearances - as impartial analysts?
Want neutrality and impartiality? You have to pay a lot more...or look a lot harder.
PS And you have to pay more to get things right. I originally put Carr for Barstow in this post...
Nick Davies has a nice telling of the saga of the Haut de Garenne “body” hunt. But he can’t resist using it to bang the drum for his claim that PR now shapes journalism, falling into the trap of - in his words - “fitting facts into fictional templates.”
“Like so many false and distorted stories,” he says, “this one was driven by PR, here from the police.”
This is just plain wrong.
Police statements on the investigation weren’t PR - except by the most tortured and misleading of definitions.
What the media did at Haut de Garenne was take actual police statements and package them up in the most attention-grabbing manner possible. They were marketing the information, in a manner that would have been familiar to the 19C penny press.
When the facts and the statements ceased to be attention-grabbing, the media dropped the story from front pages. Nothing to do with public relations or PR, everything to do with journalism’s modus operandi, which is being rapidly superseded by search.
Nick isn’t really helping his argument or our understanding of the case by flattening the story to fit his own PR argument - unless he thinks the police should remain silent during investigations (and if so let’s hear that argument...).
So, for anyone who wanted to follow the police statements on the skull at the centre of Nick’s story directly, let me introduce internet novelty - the link.
Anyone can do journalism. Here, for example, is Bill Clinton’s former Labour Secretary turned Obama fan, Robert Reich, on Hillary.When asked this morning by ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos if she could name a single economist who backs her call for a gas tax holiday this summer, HRC said “I’m not going to put my lot in with economists.”
Nice. You can’t imagine Jed Bartlet Matt Santos Barack Obama spinning that old line.
I know several of the economists who have been advising Senator Clinton, so I phoned them right after I heard this. I reached two of them. One hadn’t heard her remark and said he couldn’t believe she’d say it. The other had heard it and shrugged it off as “politics as usual.”
Someone help Robert out with his blogger template though. It’s a dog.
