George Brock - 21st Century Journalism

In his masterfully choreographed world book tour selling his autobiography, Tony Blair has been reaping another round of credit for settling more than three decades of violent “troubles” in Northern Ireland.

Without doubt Blair deserves praise for the energy and patience he devoted to the negotiating end-game. But the fact that the long and bloody IRA campaign got to that point of closure at all was very largely down to other people. And they are a great deal less likely to end up on the international book publicity circuit. As I explain here.

Hat-tip to Richard Sambrook for pointing me to this superb analysis of the Chinese media, its layers, ambitions and limits by a professor at one of the Hong Kong universities. I may not be alone in finding the Chinese media’s growth hard to see clearly; this piece makes sense of the combination of (huge) state power and outlets that belong to a more loosely controlled zone.

While on the theme of China’s soft power ambitions across the globe, here’s a background piece from a couple of years ago by Mark Leonard in Prospect magazine. He went to China to talk to its policy wonks, assuming that they were a handful of dried-out party functionaries in back rooms. What he found suprised him.

At the very moment that a promising experiment in hyperlocal journalism in the Czech Republic seemed set to spread all over the country, the original investors have sold the company and the small town papers and websites are to be shut.

Best version of the story is at Editorsweblog. Some background from this blog here.

What was unusual about the Nase Adresa (literally “our address”) network was not that it did hyperlocal startups. There are, happily, thousands of those all over the world – although they remain relatively rare in central Europe. The x-factor in Nase Adresa’s recipe was the unusual  balance between local and national.

The little news rooms, located in coffee shops, generated most of the material for printed weeklies and websites in communities of usually between 10,000 and 30,000 people. But they were not on their own. The company, PPF, had invested in and raised sponsorship for a “Futuroom” in Prague to which the local reporters could turn for help.

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Illuminating and characteristically trenchant piece in Standpoint magazine from the very knowledgeable R W Johnson about the background to the proposed new media laws in South Africa (first posted about here). Johnson, who lives in South Africa, is precisely the kind of politically incorrect writer at whom these new laws are aimed.

Johnson, an academic-turned-journalist who is incapable of turning a sentence which doesn’t make somebody somewhere indignant, refers to rows that have been going on about his writing about South Africa in the London Review of Books. Coverage here.

In my earlier post about South Africa, I said that South Africa’s president Jacob Zuma was once of a very small number of politicians who had been idiotic enough to sue a cartoonist. I did not know at the time that this select band also includes the Turkish prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan. It may not be a coincidence that Turkey’s political class has authoritarian instincts not unlike those of South Africa’s ANC.

While I was away, the argument about whether or not the web is dead, killed by the rise of apps (as argued by Chris Anderson and Michael Wolff – see here), boomed back and forth. Mostly wrong as it was, the original piece nevertheless dislodged some illuminating ripostes. Some of the better pieces:

• A good new-readers-start-here summary from The Observer.
• Some expert debunking here from John Naughton.
• A different angle from Frederic Filloux of the excellently quirky Monday Note.
• Lastly, an upbeat lateral route outwards from this debate and towards the cheering idea that portable, wireless devices – be they called smartphones, tablets, e-books or whatever – are now getting so neat that and useful that long-form journalism may be better and better read. From Bobbie Johnson of The Guardian and with links to new sites specialising in promoting long-form.

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