publish first, edit later

Radio 4 blogs and the London freesheets

By the way, Saturday Live, like seemingly everything else on Radio 4, now has a blog. But it seems kind of pointless, though I did nick the Muriel Gray pic from there.  The R4 show blogs I've looked at seem mostly like places for comment from readers, or places for linking that comment to the occasional post from the presenter. For example on the PM blog, Eddie Mair posts once a day, sometimes just a sentence, and that post becomes the seed for various threads of comments. Am planning, when I get time, to look at the way traditional news media institutions have stressed the discussion forum side of blogs over the other elements.

Incidentally, I went on the PM blog to see if there was any discussion about a really interesting item I heard, I think last Tuesday, about Westminster Council threatening to charge Associated and NewsCorp for the extra work they're having to do cleaning up the mess left by all those free copies of The London Paper and London Lite. But there wasn't anything there - unless it was buried somewhere in the day's comments - but I don't think it was - just a lot of Oscar chat.

But apparently, because they get the LP and LL for free - or rather they're forcibly stuffed into your hand by underpaid workers who clearly have quotas to shift before they get paid, people just chuck the papers on the floor after they're done. And once they're dirty, the old papers can't be recycled, so they have to be incinerated etc. Lots of extra cost for Westminster Council (and other councils and the rest of us) for a product that is supposedly 'free'...

January marking and journalists and 'Capote'

So, thanks to my January marking moutain, amongst other things, the blogging new year resolution went south and I've been so busy that I didn't realise I'd started to get a few comments - a couple admittedly from a mate. Still don't really have time to do anything here - I won't until the Year 3s hand in their dissertations on Thursday.

But I wanted to remind myself of something from yesterday morning. Radio 4 was on in the background while I was clearing up breakfast  - Saturday Live, Fi Glover's show. I heard her chatting to Muriel Gray, the main guest that morning, about how she dislikes being referred to as a journalist.   

In part it was because she does a lot more than write for the papers. In part, it was because she "couldn't bear the idea of only being thought of as a journalist. Journalists are either two things - either people who steal photographs off people's mantelpieces when their child has been murdered or very brave people who go out to fantatic places and do something or other." (The stream gets a bit inaudible at this point - and obviously it will be gone by next week, if you're thinking of clicking.)

She concluded jokily with Fi Glover that no, they were not journalists. "We're better than that." Hmmm. I guess that the bulk of what people who think of themselves as journalists do sits somewhere between the two poles Gray outlines.

But the public image of the journalist, the myth, is all about those two extremes. As per Capote, which I watched last night and really enjoyed, although Philip Seymour Hoffman's Droopylicious imitation of Truman C made it hard to actually catch all the dialogue. Gray's two poles are there in one person, it struck me. Capote's the guy stealing pictures of mantelpieces (metaphorically), treating people as material, but than being incredibly brave in some ways, looking for the truth, going to a fantastic place (again, metaphorically - not sure if 'fantastic' is quite the right word, but anyway...)

And he's torn apart by that contradiction, amongst other things - I'm not mentioning the character study and the autobiography/identification/abandonment/looking and the power of the defining gaze sub-themes, which, given that it's a Sunday morning and my synapses are yet to clock on for the day, I won't get into for fear of making myself looking even more stupid than usual.

I wonder if I can get away with showing the students 'Capote' - it's quite long, but I think they'd stay with it. I could link it up with Janet Malcolm's 'The Journalist and the Murderer'...

The blogosphere on Celebrity Big Brother

Hey - my first post about 'Celebrity Big Brother'. Well, actually, my first post about 'Big Brother' full stop. Haven't really seen this year's show. I've mainly watched the odd 'Big Mouth'. But obviously I know what's going on. You just sort of soak it up - it pervades the rest of the media while it's running - and that includes the blogosphere now, here and in India. Global Voices has a useful round-up of what bloggers are saying about the whole Shilpa/Jade thing. 

The Guardian's Comment is Free has a good piece by Sunny Hundal which gets it right - it points out why many Indians and British Asians find the racist bullying of Shilpa so upsetting but it also points out where people are going over the top, it skewers the hypocrisy on all sides and looks at the complexities of race and class with an informed eye.

Hundal's the editor of Pickled Politics, a blog which explores progressive politics from a British Asian politics - that makes it sound terribly dull, but it isn't. It's funny and informed - and Hundal's posts on CBB on his own site are even better than the stuff he does for The Guardian.

(BTW, the pic is of Shilpa not looking like 'Shilpa' from C4s CBB site)

The new, shorter prime-time Panorama

Some reaction in the Media Guardian to Panorama's new length (half an hour) and location (8.30pm on Mondays, BBC1) - Owen Gibson talks to the people involved - presenter Jeremy Vine and series editor Sandy Smith. Some interesting quotes re influences on the show:

Its tone will resemble Radio 5 Live, of which Smith is a fan. The radio network's informal, yet informed, take on events, together with its mandate for audience interaction, has infected every area of the BBC's televised output.

"It has to be serious but it also has to be entertaining and relevant to people's lives. We've got to connect to what they're interested in, as opposed to following our own pet agendas," concludes Vine.

And Smith says another test will be whether the show excites debate on phone-ins, on the news and among politicians. "It's lazy to say that by shortening the length you're just telling more simple stories. Newsnight tells impactful stories in 12 to 15 minutes," he says.

This shows the way Web 2.0 approaches have now been incorporated as standard by would-be pop media. You can't switch on FiveLive these days without being exorted to contribute your news reports, have your say, text vote on this or that, blog about something blah blah blah... Smith suggests that this approach is now influential across the BBC. Interaction, debate (e.g. buzz across different networks), celeb presenter and always some sort of direct personal connection to the audience's lives - this is now the way current affairs is done on mainstream TV.

I think this could be useful for one of the Year 3 students who's writing a dissertation about the way current affairs TV has changed in response to the expansion of media choice. As could the response from Dorothy Byrne (formerly of 'World in Action' and now head of news and current affairs at C4). She attacks Panorama's new time slot (up against C4's 'Dispatches'), worries about its shortened length and bigs up Dispatches and its hour long committment to serious hard news.

Most interesting are her reflections on past current affairs TV and the narrow consumerist agenda of modern equivalents:

There was a period in British current affairs television - some people think of it as the golden age - when three quite similar programmes, Panorama, World in Action and This Week, provided viewers with three heavyweight options. Of course, because I worked on it, I thought World in Action was by far the best. World in Action was there by Steve Biko's grave, but it also invented the contemporary drama doc and the current affairs stunt like getting a village to quit smoking.

And Dispatches has continued that tradition - creating the spin-off series Can You Live Without and demonstrating cures for kids' asthma. But World in Action always knew what it was there for - serious current affairs. We liked good ratings, we liked to make entertaining films - but the serious journalism was the driving force. It was probably inevitable that current affairs like that would become unsustainable on ITV. I admire Tonight with Trevor McDonald. And I especially admire the young journalists who constantly re-invent what is, taken in total, a very narrow consumer agenda. Supermarkets, cars, sick kids, sick kids going to the supermarket in cars, supermarkets which make kids sick, kids' car sickness. They certainly deserve an award for that.

But I have to question whether what the public needs is another half-hour programme with a populist consumerist agenda.

What should journalism education be about?

I think I need to think about this a bit. Blogging about it is a start, I guess. In the US, things seem clearer. The ideas of a journalism education, of a university-based journalism school, of journalism degrees in general - all are well established over there. People know what they're talking about - the acquistion of certain skills and certain professional codes of conduct (double sourcing, impartiality, fact checking, objectivity etc) aiming to legitimate/guarantee a particular form of public writing/knowledge (and to establish the status of the journalist too).

Over here, we're less clear cut about journalism and its social/political mission. We're more inclined, as a society, to see journalists as people who write stuff for money - hacks. The closest thing to US journalism education over here are the training courses run by the National Council for the Training of Journalists.

These are news focused, and are often aimed at training the next generation of local newspaper journalists. They're more like old-style trade apprenticeships. You need an NCTJ qualification to get work on some local papers... But you don't need it to earn a good living as a magazine journalist, for example. I'd imagine that most of the people working on newspapers - in the expaning sports/culture sections, don't have NCTJ qualifications.

Journalism degrees in the UK have tended to follow the approach of the NCTJ courses but have fleshed things out with bits and pieces of media studies (amongst other things). Our old course used to do the NCTJ basics and then a lot of critical theory. I have a feeling other places did the same. Our new course is more open and teaches a wider range of practical skills, across different media pathways.

The thing is, the more you talk to students who want to do Journalism degrees, the more you realise that they have a much more expanded idea of what journalism is, compared to the kind of thing validated/taught by the NCTJ. Many don't want to learn how to be local news journalists. Most want to work in areas dismissed as 'not journalism' by trad journalists - i.e. they want to write about music, fashion, sport, celebrity, culture in general. They want to be critics or columnists as much as they want to be 'news journalists'.

Is that a problem for a journalism degree? Not sure - if you want to hang on to the sense of a moral/political mission that clings to journalism education, perhaps it is. But maybe what we should do is think of the journalism course as an education for content creators of all types (sorry for the clunky jargon), for people who create/circulate different forms of public knowledge across a variety of different media.

It should still teach the codes of conduct, explore the ethical issues and instill a general critical/analytical approach to creative work, but it doesn't have to be prescriptive about what journalism should be - it doesn't need to be focused purely on the news and journalism's role in a democracy. It should still teach that but not make it the sole focus.

I think that's what we're trying to do with our new Journalism degree. But do people get that from the name? Or do a lot of students think that we're doing old style news and think we're not the course for them as a result. Should we come up with another name - creative media maybe? I don't know. Like I said, I need to think about all this a bit.

But I started via something on Henry Jenkins' blog about, amongst other things, a recent Time story, 'How to Build a Student for the 21st Century' and his own work on how education needs to change to keep pace with society and its needs. Responding to the story (and the US report it's based on, 'Tough Choices for Tough Times', put together by the New Commission on Skills in the American Workplace), Jenkins argues that 'American schools have not kept pace with the times and are not preparing young people to be competitive in a global economy where creativity, innovation, media literacy, and social networking skills represent the edge needed to succeed.'

Creativity, innovation, media literacy, social networking skills - they all sound like the things we're starting to teach on the new Journalism course. Jenkins hightlights a few things from the Time story:

Thinking outside the box. Jobs in the new economy--the ones that won't get outsourced or automated--"put an enormous premium on creative and innovative skills, seeing patterns where other people see only chaos," says Marc Tucker, an author of the skills-commission report and president of the National Center on Education and the Economy. Traditionally that's been an American strength, but schools have become less daring in the back-to-basics climate of NCLB. Kids also must learn to think across disciplines, since that's where most new breakthroughs are made. It's interdisciplinary combinations--design and technology, mathematics and art--"that produce YouTube and Google," says Thomas Friedman, the best-selling author of The World Is Flat.

Becoming smarter about new sources of information. In an age of overflowing information and proliferating media, kids need to rapidly process what's coming at them and distinguish between what's reliable and what isn't. "It's important that students know how to manage it, interpret it, validate it, and how to act on it," says Dell executive Karen Bruett, who serves on the board of the Partnership for 21st Century Skills, a group of corporate and education leaders focused on upgrading American education.

Developing good people skills. EQ, or emotional intelligence, is as important as IQ for success in today's workplace. "Most innovations today involve large teams of people," says former Lockheed Martin CEO Norman Augustine. "We have to emphasize communication skills, the ability to work in teams and with people from different cultures."

Now I could do without some of the Time Mag biz guru jargon, but Jenkins is right when he talks about placing a new value on 'being able to access and meaningfully process new sources of information, being able to participate in social networks and knowledge communities, and being able to think creatively and act globally.' That sounds like a suitable skill set (sorry, I'm getting jargonistic here too) for would be modern journalists.

Going off on a complete tangent, perhaps another key focus for journalism education needs to be reporting - actually getting out there and gathering knowledge. This doesn't have to be focused on 'news' in the traditional sense. But it's clearly something that all journalists - NCTJ-trained or not - do less of today...

BTW - the pic comes from Time.

Newspapers and blogs

A predictably useful 'predictive' piece by Neil McIntosh for the revived Press Gazette, a kind of New Year State of the Newspaper Blogosphere riff, with stats on Comment is Free's traffic and inbound links (which are pretty good). The overall argument is that, online, newspapers are moving away from what we might think of journalism, and instead starting/hosting conversations. Here's a lengthy quote:

But let’s not get too smug. For all the success we’ve enjoyed, the fact is blogs are the horseless carriages of social media, when fleet-footed rivals are already cranking out Model Ts. Social news sites such as Digg and Newsvine show how users don’t just want to talk about the news – they’d quite like to decide what it is, or add to it because they happen to be experts in the subject at hand.

Myspace and Islandoo, to name but two, prove that vast communities of interest can spring up around mainstream media content. The conversations, properly nurtured, can end up being bigger – in scope and popularity - than the material that sparked them off. These sites might not be true to the blog boosters' utopian visions of freeing users from the shackles of MSM's narrow focus, but they are hugely popular. People do still want to talk about quite old-fashioned, mass-market entertainment, turns out.

But what of what we do? All this presents a huge challenge, and opportunity, for journalists. It’s difficult for us to accept we might create sites that are only tangentially about our journalism. It’s even harder to admit that, fanned by the viral winds that sweep the net, those conversations might be much more popular than the other things we produce, and start replacing them. We can mutter about the importance of what we do; of trust, and impartiality, and double sourcing and accountability. But the audience's attention is already drifting. Our readers' conversations don't - op-ed columnists beware - even need our initial spark to set the chat off, although if we do well we can still provide it.

Post-ironic cinema

I have  an account with one of those DVD rental companies and when you sign up you have to put together a long list of films you want to rent - twenty or so. It's so they have some options when it comes to sending out your DVDs - though they inevitably have the first one on the list. So the long list is surplus to requirements.

However, trying to fill it out made me realise how disconnected I've become from contemporary film... I had no trouble putting together a list of films for my kids. I came up with a list of family favourites too (Carry On films figure heavily - they're weirdly popular with the kids, especially the early ones).

But when I had to come up with grown up stuff that's come out in the last few years that I actually want to see... I was struggling. I need to find a dependable film critic whose taste I trust. Have to say I don't bother with Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian - not sure why, but I never read his reviews. I've stopped buying The Observer... I don't really buy magazines any more - so the only film crit I'm exposed to is random stuff of the radio...

So I need a critic I can trust, the way I used to rely on people like Penman at The Face in years gone by. In the meantime, I found a few leads via Thomas de Zengotita on the HuffPo. He talks about a new wave of post-ironic films made with sincerity and scope, with a broad but not self-consciously global perspective. The films he nominates are 'Pan's Labyrinth' (source of the pic above), 'Babel', 'Children of Men', ' The Curse of the Golden Flower' and most recent Almodovar. They're all going on the list.

Multimedia reporting

I'm beginning to find my way out of the marking mountain that is January - but I still don't really have the time to blog, what with interviewing prospective students and doing last minute dissertation tutorials. There are things I want to write about here but I just don't have the time at the mo. So for the moment, I'll just link.

There's some useful advice appearing online about multimedia reporting. Bobbie Johnson (Guardian tech reporter and someone who has been kind enough to radically improve my rabbity copy in the past) posted video reports from CES this year and has some useful advice and links on his blog. Andy Dickinson has a good initial overview of UK newspapers' attempts to post video reports. Ryan Sholin has something similar from a US perspective. Found all this via Neil McIntosh.

Gladwell on Enron

It may take me a while to ge round to Macolm Gladwell's New Yorker piece on Enron, but I will, I promise. In the meantime, I'm contenting myself with his blog posts on it - one about trying to explain, according to accounting rules, what the Enron execs did wrong exactly, and one about the role of journalism in the affair. The latter  is worth quoting:

"We’ve spent a lot of time, post-Enron, criticizing the flaws in the investment community’s gatekeeping activities. But I think we should also recognize what the Enron case tells us about the value of newspaper journalism. Maybe, in other words, we have underestimated the value of impartial, professionally-motivated, under-paid and overworked generalists in tackling the kind of information-rich, analysis-dependent “mysteries” that the modern world throws at us.

All of which, of course, points out the irony of what’s happening in the newspaper business right now. We are dismantling the institution of newspaper journalism precisely at the moment when it seems to be of greatest social value."

Some links from Roy Greenslade's blog

I need to start reading Roy Greenslade's Media Guardian blog on a regular basis. If nothing else, it's a very useful source of links. There's some good local news there and lots of pointers to hype/philosophising about journalism and new media.

For example, Greenslade opines on the whole videophone footage of Saddam's execution and points to lots and lots of media pontificating on it. He also notes the appearance of the VickyWatch blog, which tracks Victoria Newton's Bizarre column and shows where she nicks her stories from. I think I need to add Greenslade to my blogroll, if I ever get round to updating it.