Lots of excitement about today’s report that using plain water in your car’s windscreen washing system could expose you to deadly Legionnaires’ Disease.
Key reminder:
Correlation is not causality
This has been a public service announcement…
In association with the Martin Cloake blog
Following last Friday’s Value of Journalism event by the BBC College of Journalism and Polis, media blogger Martin Cloake and I have kicked off our own debate on that very question.
In the first of our exchange, Martin asks “is there still such a thing as journalism, and if so, what do we mean by it?”. He argues that, although journalism has never been a profession, the fact that it is now so open to new entrants means we need to define the difference between “journalism” and simply being able to publish information.
These differences include
Ultimately, he argues, “there is a set of values, techniques, whatever, that define a thing called journalism.”
Never mind the quality
My big worry for journalism is actually that its intended audience is not up to judging its quality, because our education system doesn’t equip school-leavers with core literacy and communication skills.
This is a big problem for the production of journalism – the new intake of practitioners is simply not up to meeting your skills agenda. But it’s also a problem for its consumption – those reading journalistic output haven’t got the critical ability to appreciate its worth.
This sounds terribly elitist (and in a way it is). But my criticism is aimed at the education system rather than the young people who have to suffer it. And it is based on the pervasive poor literacy I and other journalism academics encounter, day in and day out at university.
It’s an uphill struggle. It’s not that my students are not able to understand the difference between accurate and inaccurate – or incomplete – reportage. In fact, when I talked them through the slightly rubbish BBC story on child communication anxiety from January this year, they were quite quick to pick up on its flaws.
But they don’t seem to go out of their way to question what they read or watch. And they don’t seem to discriminate much in terms of quality of content. It seems they are much happier reading Perez Hilton than Vogue, or Facebook and YouTube rather than the Times. That wouldn’t be so bad, if it weren’t for the fact that these are the future practitioners of the craft, not just its consumers.
So what does this mean for journalism? Even if trained journalists do tell stories better than ordinary folks, our problem is that the consumers of journalistic output seem not to care very much.
If the number of newspaper readers is in decline, and people (especially young people) are flocking to social networking sites and vapid video content for their entertainment, what does that say?
Is it that, given a lower-brow alternative, people will choose it (because they are essentially not up to consuming the better alternative)? Or is it that journalistic output isn’t of as high a quality as it thinks it is?
(Continued on the Martin Cloake blog tomorrow morning)
To celebrate today’s Value of Journalism event and my upcoming debate with Martin Cloake on that very topic, via Soilman comes a grab from the Google News reader with a feed of headlines from UK national newspapers.
How many of these stories are really “news”? Not that many it would seem…
To mark the Value of Journalism event at the London School of Economics today (Friday 11 June 2010), media blogger Martin Cloake and I are debating that very question on our respective blogs.
It’s a kind of two-venue affair – he’ll be holding forth on his fine blog, and I’ll be replying on mine. For the very best reader experience, we recommend you travel from one to the other through the magic of web interlinkage – but I’ll be giving enough context here so you don’t have to bother if it’s really too much trouble.
We’re kicking off (for real, in case anyone has seen my previous attempt at scheduling this) on Monday 14 June at 9am sharp. We’d both love you to drop by and take aim at our argument – all vaguely on-topic comments are more than welcome.
Do you want to make the Daily Mail more Daily Mail than it already is? This fantastic tool from the absurdly named qwghlm.co.uk site (motto: “Because all the other domain names were taken”) will answer all your needs.
Assuming you have Firefox on your system (and you really should), just install the Greasemonkey browser add-on and then visit the Daily Mail headline generator. Make sure you do it in Firefox after you’ve installed Greasemonkey, and follow the installation instructions.
Voila – every time you visit the Daily Mail web site, the add-on will show you randomly generated more-Daily-Mail-than-Daily-Mail headlines that will entirely enhance your browsing experience. I think it will do wonders for its traffic…
As a – fairly – regular blogger, I have to deal with my share of comment spam.
The WordPress-owned spam filter Akismet does a pretty good job of filtering out spam comments – despite some reservations by others in the blogging fraternity. So, generally I’m not that bothered by it.
But when I was emptying the spam queue for my stop-motion animation blog I came across a couple of comments that seemed totally unspammy. So much so that I was surprised to see them there.
Having duly designated them as ‘not spam’, I trashed the rest and went onto the site to check they were OK. I confess I was even a little worried that the eager authors might have been disappointed with the delay in publication and given up on the blog in disgust. (It’s not a heavily-trafficked site – this would hurt).
Not so. Because when I saw the comments in place, I realised they were simply copies of existing comments. Someone had clearly just harvested existing comments, added them to their spam details and reposted them to the site.
Frankly, I’m surprised it took me so long to recognise them – given the relatively small number of commenters I have, and how much I treasure and pore over their submissions to me (go on – become part of the family). I’ve just found the same here on Freelance Unbound, too – which I’d never seen before.
Is this actually new? I’ve certainly never come across it before. I did worry that it would be a game changer in the battle between publishers and spammers.
The vast majority of spam is easy to spot, even to the untrained reader, as it is either [a] garbled and/or filled with references to pornography or drugs; or [b] completely anodyne and unrelated to the post it’s attached to (“Great post! I will read your blog forever!”). But stealing real comments and using them as a spammer’s Trojan Horse is another matter.
Luckily, Akismet can easily spot repeated comments from Freelance Unbound. After all, it’s easy to search the site’s existing database for repeated content.
But what if spammers harvest real, meaningful comments from other people’s sites and submit them here? Can a spam filter monitor the whole of the web for repeated content? And what about software that can subtly rework content so it passes a plagiarism test?
If any bloggers have more experience with this kind of thing, I’d be more than eager to hear about it…
Well – sort of, if this “staff discussion draft” of “Potential Policy Recommendations to Support the Reinvention of Journalism” from the US Federal Trade Commission is anything to go by.
Among the bullet points:
“Hot news” Protection of Facts
ie: if you report on something first, you have copyright over the event!
That’s just fantastic, and will really save journalism from Google.
Here’s a thought, though. What if – just what if – a blogger, say, gets first dibs on a story, for whatever reason. That means major news media won’t be able to report it without breaching copyright.
At which point we’ll have to rethink the whole thing – because the whole point of this is to define “news” in such a way that only mainstream news organisations get to report it.
Licensing the News
“Some suggest that some sort of industry-wide licensing arrangement be adopted, perhaps with the government’s help and support.”
So, the media will have to get permission to publish from the politicians they hound every week over one inevitable scandal or another. Yes, that’ll work. No conflict of interest there, guys.
Seriously, does anybody in the media really believe we would have ended up with the media as we have it today if it had been licensed by the government back in the 18th century?
[HT: Coyote]
It seems Twitter users can’t actually spell “Israel” – as the top six trending topic worldwide right now demonstrates.
Perhaps the mainstream media has nothing to fear after all…
[UPDATE: Oh, all right – it’s one way of spelling it. But not the US or UK English way, which is interesting in itself…]
Via Bristol Editor, here’s an interesting post from Advancing the Story on the divergence of mainstream media content from the blogosphere and social media.
A survey by The Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism has found that:
The stories and issues that gain traction in social media differ substantially from those that lead in the mainstream press.
And, unlike the norm in mainstream media, blogs, YouTube and Twitter also had a wide differentiation in their lead story – only sharing the top story once, with coverage of the Iranian election protests in June 2009.
As evinced by social media coverage of Michael Jackson’s death, blogs and social media don’t focus for that long on any one story (Iranian elections aside, which had more longevity).
This tends to be in contrast with mainstream media, which tends to milk stories until the public is sick of them, and beyond. Jeff Jarvis has an interesting post here about how the TV news agenda lingered on Michael Jackson long after online news consumers had moved on, and Recovering Journalist is good on why this might have been so.
It seems the common perception of bloggers and social networking as parasitic on mainstream media may be less true. It’ll be interesting to see if the fact that they don’t share the same news agenda as established media will also be used as a stick to beat them with.
An excellent question – and one that’s going to be debated on Friday June 11 at the London School of Economics by Channel 4’s Jon Snow and the Huffington Post’s Ariana Huffington, among others.
The event is, fairly obviously, The Value of Journalism, and it’s being put on by the BBC College of Journalism and media think-tanky things Polis and Not On The Wires.
To celebrate, media blogger Martin Cloake and I will enjoy a week of cut-and-thrust debate on the value of journalism between our respective blogs. It’ll start on Monday 31 May 7 June 14 June (oh, for goodness sake, let’s get organised), student marking permitting, and it’s open to anyone with a more-or-less coherent viewpoint to chip in their ha’pennyworth. Go on – what else are you going to do while you wait for Wimbledon to start?