Archives

Media Economics / Predictions / UK Press — 1 Comment
25
Sep 12

Funding journalism: not before a sharp, painful squeeze

Nick Clegg, the Liberal Democrat leader, sinking in the polls and suffering the media persecution which goes with that, thinks that newspapers won’t be around when his children are grown up. He implies that because printed papers might vanish, journalists of the future won’t pick apart the performance of politicians. Or at least they’ll be nicer when doing it.

Less naive, but nevertheless mistaken is the idea floated by David Leigh of The Guardian (declaration: he’s also a colleague at City University) that the financial problems of newspapers could be solved by a £2 a month levy taken from internet service providers (ISPs). Journalism has always been cross-subsidised, so it’s the right question. But the wrong answer.

Taken together these fragments of the debate about what’s happening to journalism show that a stark idea, long discussed by those who study this stuff, has now gone mainstream. Change in newspapers will be transformative and not just adaptive. And it’s coming very soon.

Take a quick look at the recent print circulation figures of the five serious national dailies (FT, Times, Guardian, Telegraph, Independent). Taking the figures from June 2011 to June 2012 (i.e. excluding Olympic effects) year-on-year falls range between 8.52% (Telegraph) and 44.62% (Independent). Take the Independent out of the equation on the assumption that the figure is distorted by some statistical manoevre and the bracket is from 8.52% to 17.75% (Guardian). Now imagine the effect of those numbers on print advertisers (still probably at least two thirds of the income of these papers) and speculate about the tone and type of discussions that are going on inside the offices.

Continue reading →

ADD YOUR COMMENT
Share
Law / UK Press — Comments Off on Britain’s privacy debate digs deeper
17
May 11

Britain’s privacy debate digs deeper

I appealed recently for Britain’s editors to take the trouble better to define and defend their positions over privacy because I think that, eventually, the law will change. Only one editor did so (and that was coincidental), but the argument about privacy has dug a bit deeper than before. A quick roundup.

  • Kenan Malik, after a radio debate on the subject, posted this trenchant and radical position.
  • The director of the Press Complaints Commission gave his first interview at length.
  • It turns out that Britain is not the only country where this is a live topic: privacy is changing in China and India as well.
  • Very few writers can be both smart and funny about a subject like privacy. This one can.
  • A useful tour of current arguments from John Kampfner of Index.

Two more footnote replies to queries raised by my earlier assertion that if the law is going to change, editors had better help define it. Charlie Beckett of Polis commented that he couldn’t see how a new law might work. “I just can’t see how,” he said, “in practice, a privacy law works in the Internet age.” With internet sites out of reach of domestic jurisdictions, won’t we just have to settle for less law in this area?

Law in this area won’t work the same way. In the digital era, no national law which regulates communication is going to be as watertight as in the days of print and mainstream broadcasting. But I don’t think that invalidates the idea of updating and improving law. Laws are often porous and, in the short run, be made to look ineffectual, as the current privacy “superinjunctions” do to those who go looking on the internet for the names they are supposed to shield. But nevertheless law can always bite on established channels and outlets inside its jurisdiction and that will still be able to affect what the majority of people know or don’t.

Continue reading →

ADD YOUR COMMENT
Share
Investigative / Media Freedom — Comments Off on What next for Wikileaks?
24
Mar 11

What next for Wikileaks?

Did you think that Wikileaks was last year’s drama? Think again. In the next few weeks, there’s going to be a lot of Wikileaks about. Julian Assange’s own book is due for publication at the end of the first week in April. Whatever else may be said of Assange, his ability to detonate high explosive in public life is beyond dispute.

For those reading this blog in Britain or the US, it’s worth remembering that the gradual disclosure of the US diplomatic cables continues piece by piece around the world. I was in India last week, where Wikileaks’ editing-and-publication deal is with The Hindu and the open disclosures from a set of just over 5000 cables set off a storm. Among other things a member of the staff of the American embassy in Delhi reported being shown cash which he was told was to be used to bribe members of parliament to support the government in a close vote in 2008.

Fascination with the spectacle or with the implications of Wikileaks runs as strongly as ever. Is this what journalism is going to be like in the future? Does Wikileaks signal that in the digital era relations between government and the governed will be changed? These were the kind of questions kicked around at a seminar convened by Polis director Charlie Beckett at the LSE last night, when I lectured on Wikileaks at the Xavier Institute of Communication in Mumbai (slides here) and in a draft paper by Yochai Benkler of Harvard’s Berkman Centre. A few points to watch:

  • Wikileaks holds a quarter of a million US diplomatic cables. With only a few (but significant) exceptions, a relatively small number have been published under the supervision of established media, who staff have redacted sensitive names. One person with good knowledge of Wikileaks estimates that something above 5000 have now been released. Perhaps, he speculated, the total published via major media outlets might be 15,000 in all. There’s only a certain number of newspapers and magazines in the world with the staff and the interest to go through and “redact” such bulky material.
  • All of which begs the question about what happens to the remaining 235,000 cables, many of which may contain sensitive names and details (of US informants, for example). This is apparently under discussion inside Wikileaks, with voices in favour of complete, unredacted release and voices against.
  • Quite apart from very likely getting people killed, the unedited release of such a cache would provoke a completely new kind of reaction. That assumption is based on the US reaction to the limited and relatively careful release so far: a wide array of government opinions (Benkler is very good on the dissenting opinions of Defence Secretary Robert Gates, who quietly insisted that the damage to the US was being hyped; Gates has of course announced his retirement and has nothing to lose), private-sector attempts to harm Wikileaks and political figures calling for Assange to be either prosecuted or killed. Would the American government unplug the internet? Could it? The consensus on the second is a resounding “Yes”.
  • Wikileaks has now spawned many imitators, local and global. Will they go commercial and become more like exsting media operations? Or will such sites, whose key asset is their digital indestructibility and ability to hide a source, act as a leaking route of last resort, a compliment and accompaniement to more conventional media?
  • There seemed to be general agreement that governments would now bolt the stable door. Documents of the kind that Wikileaks has surfaced would be harder to extract and seen by fewer people on the inside in the first place. The ship of state may have sprung a leak, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be patched.
  • That’s all fine in liberal societies to the west of here, said one Indian student in Mumbai. But is it right for Wikileaks to be tolerated by open societies when those societies are up against aggressive, ruthless closed societies? I began on a pompous answer about how liberal societies have to take risks that closed societies don’t, stopped and asked him if he had any particular closed society in mind. China, he said firmly.

Continue reading →

ADD YOUR COMMENT
Share
Ideas — Comments Off on How ideas travel
31
Oct 10

How ideas travel

There’s a lot of discussion about how inventive new ideas move, mate and multiply. Journalists should be interested in this topic because so much (particularly local) journalism is going to need to be re-engineered to work in a world in which digital dominates print. The best lab conditions for growing new schemes will matter a lot in the next few years.

The subject came up today at the Battle of Ideas conference panel on “journalism in jeopardy”. You can get a taste of the discussion from this post by my fellow panellist Charlie Beckett.

All of which is why this piece from Saturday’s Financial Times is a must-read. Steven Johnson is both a science writer and entrepreneur; he manages to make a sometimes elusive subject enjoyable. Best piece of ideas journalism I read this weekend.

(Johnson speaks at the LSE in London on Tuesday November 2nd at 6.30pm. Details here).

ADD YOUR COMMENT
Share