27
Sep 11   

Small Google News blogpost: big development

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This post on the Google News blog has not had the attention I think it deserves. It’s a small item with large implications.

At first sight the note simply sets down an announcement that a Google team made at the recent Online News Association conference. News publishers can now “tag” (or flag) journalism which they think is particularly special or “standout”. There’s limit to the number of times they can do this with their own content (seven times in a week) but no limit to the frequency with they can bestow the accolade on someone else’s content.

Google News has been wrestling for years with a dilemma which gets worse as the mountain of unsorted online information grows higher and higher. How do you find the information which is of the highest value to you? Google’s most basic algorithm, the foundation of the firm’s fortune, ranks links by the number of connections any given item has. The more links, the higher the place in the list Google returns. But that is a crude sorting mechanism which has long been open to gaming and manipulation.

Google News is plainly very keen to avoid any suggestion that they are choosing between news outlets, despite the fact that its engineers have been tinkering for years with ideas about ranking and sorting journalism for “quality”. It’s a minefield, for obvious reasons. But news is increasingly swapped in social networks. Can Google get involved (especially to help their own new Google+) while staying out of the judgement business? This commentator from TechCrunch thinks not (but note the disagreements in the comments).

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22
Sep 11   

The future of international journalism is…female

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I haven’t looked back to see if this is a growing trend or a one-off. But the gender ratio of students enrolled for Masters courses at City University London’s Graduate School of Journalism is striking.

Our largest course, the MA in International Journalism, has registered 89 students (from 32 countries). Sixty-eight of them – 76% – are women; there are just 21 men on that course. In our other nine MA courses, the ratio is 66:34 in favour of women. The overall balance for all our postgraduates is 69:31.

One of our students, Rizwan Syed, thinks that journalism’s bosses haven’t yet woken up to this shift.

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16
Sep 11   

Hari: act of contrition for the weekend

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A couple of months ago, I wrote a post here about the Independent writer Johann Hari which made a mistake. Time to rectify that.

Two days ago, Hari handed back his Orwell Prize and published a long and somewhat weaselly mea culpa in The Independent. (Readers new to this saga start here). Hari’s confession included confirmation that he had gone to considerable lengths to boost his friends and smear his enemies on Wikipedia under an assumed identity. The full extent of his lifting material to embroider his interviews is also now clear (see the critical comments at the foot here).

I didn’t condone Hari’s actions in my premature post. But I did argue that George Orwell would have taken the view that ridicule and revelation were enough, and that Hari needn’t have been stripped of the prize. That judgement looks particularly foolish in the light of what we now know; it was silly as it was. As Bagehot of The Economist pithily says, this isn’t a matter of training and teaching but a more basic one of character and integrity.

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15
Sep 11   

State subsidies for journalism? (part 2)

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Two footnote links to yesterday’s post about the slowly rising tide of opinion – particularly in America – that government should be intervening to support journalism, given that the business model which has kept private-sector journalism has broken down in many places.

I’ve made clear my doubts about this, but the point here is that the climate of thinking may be shifting. Two straws in the wind.

1) There’s an American-oriented survey of these arguments from Victor Pickard of New York University (see second item in the publications list here). Pickard is co-editor with Robert McChesney of a new collection of essays arguing that there may be a “fleeting opportunity” in the US to re-open the debate about whether the public authorities should come to the rescue of ailing news media. I suspect he’s whistling in the wind, but we’ll see.

2) One of Africa’s leading investigative journalists, Anas Aremayaw Anas, devotes an essay on africanews.com to the issues raised by the support he has had from the authorities in Ghana, where he works. I don’t know his work (and his piece is empty of links to his work) and it’s not clear how much of the support he enjoyed was financial. (Can any reader help me here?) But the kernel of his argument is that private-sector media have diluted and weakened the ability of journalists in Africa to reveal corruption and misgovernment in African societies which sorely need such information.

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14
Sep 11   

Should states subsidise news media?

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I listened a few days ago to a lecture devoted to arguing that the economic crisis of news media in America is so bad that the government should be giving journalism direct financial support. I’m very wary of these arguments. But because I think this is a subject which is going to keep cropping up, it’s worth pausing to look at this case in full.

The speaker was Robert McChesney, an American journalism professor (and much more unusual in the US, a socialist) who argues that journalism is a public good and that as such it needs and deserves public support. McChesney has recently edited a collection of essays arguing variations on this theme.

McChesney’s key points were:

  • The frequent, instant dismissal of subsidy is wrong because assuming that journalism can be a business is the wrong starting point. Journalism is essential for democracy and as a public good deserves to be sustained by public funds. The idea that journalism can be solvent is an illusion. Just because for one period in recent history advertising cross-subsidised news, doesn’t mean that solvency is attainable. Journalism is too important to depend on the accidents of business.
  • When anyone raises the idea of subsidy, scare tactics suggest that this is the start of something which will end in media control as practised by Stalin or Pol Pot. This is absurd, considering that many European states subsidise news. In fact the top five or six countries in The Economist’s annual quality-of-democracy league are the top media subsidisers. The same overlap occurs in the Freedom House democracy table.
  • The crisis of the press is part of a wider democratic decline. The three worst political sleaze scandals in recent years in Washington were Abramoff, Cunningham (both lobbyists) and Tom DeLay (congressman). The three reporters who broke those stories are now all unemployed. A business-dependent press has failed in its duty of making politicians and policymakers accountable, especially when covering (or failing to cover properly) the making of war and the steering of the economy.
  • An American BBC is not the answer: the BBC’s monolithic structure and entrenched monopoly itself causes a problem. Independent, multiple public-service broadcasters would be better.

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15
Aug 11   

PageOne: a good news story about news in New York

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Somewhere around the middle of this past decade, the New York Times suffered a near-death experience.

The paper’s finances were shaky in the usual ways: print income was falling, digital revenue failing to compensate. A Mexican telephone tycoon lent a lot of money in exchange for an uncomfortably large stake in the company. Magazine profiles openly disrespectful of publisher Arthur Sulzberger’s abilities began appearing. Rupert Murdoch took over the Wall Street Journal and declared war on the Times’ hold on New York.

One media guru put the previously unsayable into print: that the Times might soon fold or be sold. (Even this blog has occasionally been a little snarky about the Grey Lady.)

And what happened? No newspaper dependent on those dropping print revenues is out of the wood yet, but things have looked up. The Journal has not broken through in New York and Murdoch and the News Corp hierarchy have phone-hacking lawsuits, trials and revelations to worry about. Reporters from the New York Times made a significant mark on the phone-hacking disclosures.

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10
Aug 11   

UK riots: 4 fragments of wisdom

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The leafy part of south-west London where this blog is often written has not yet been touched by rioting. But of course I’ve been watching the news, the tweets and reading the commentary.

What emerges most plainly from the coverage so far is bafflement. Journalists and wintnesses with memories long enough to recall past rioting in the UK (it’s not completely unprecedented) can see that this isn’t like riots of the past. But they still can’t quite grasp or label it.

Here are four pieces from different angles, all published in the last 24 hours which seem to me to get closest to doing so and to capture some of the sense, cause and effect of what’s happening on (some of) the streets of the capital.
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26
Jul 11   

Phone-hacking, politics and Pharisees

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I’ll return to the debate about press regulation after phone-hacking later this week. In the meantime three nuggets worth passing on.

In a media feeding frenzy such as the phone-hacking affair, instant reaction overrules reflection. Just when you think you can read no more, along comes a piece so detached and so sharp that it feels like a cool drink.

This is such a piece, written by a writer who mostly works as a film critic: Anthony Lane of the New Yorker. He skillfully shows that the roots of the corruption in tabloid newsrooms are long and deep; competition and economic pressure have made things worse, but are not the only cause. Lane also places phone-hacking in the wider frame of British media and culture, deftly suggesting that some current media analysis smells faintly of hypocrisy. Of all the descriptions of this affair and the attempts to understand its significance, this one deserves to last.

Among both journalists and politicians, self-criticism is in short supply in these days. Which is what makes this article by Jonathan Powell so notable. Powell worked at Tony Blair’s side for more than a decade and was in an excellent position to see the ex-Prime Minister’s dealings with the media tycoons in general and with Rupert Murdoch in particular. Powell could easily have written a piece without directing any fire at himself or his boss. But he passed up that easy option. And whether or not one might agree with his prescriptions, his diagnosis is accurate: “The root cause of the problem is press unaccountability.”

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