Stilgherrian » journalism

Episode 25 online!

Stilgherrian — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 21:11:27 +0000

Yes, Stilgherrian Live has returned, and last night’s episode of Stilgherrian Live Delta, episode 25, is online for your (re)viewing pleasure.

I was grumpy because we started 40 minutes late. A technical fault at Ustream prevented people hearing the audio, so we just had to wait. I’m not good at waiting. I was rude. Sorry.

Still, when we finally got on air I introduced “Stilgherrian’s Street View” and pondered the ideal 8-person orgy. People chose the striking Fairfax journalists as Cnut of the Week, the clearest winners ever, beating Glenn Milne and the strange cheer squad at The Australia who want Peter Costello to lead the Liberal Party, and US Republican presidential candidate John McCain.

There was also Sheena Easton. Twice.

Have a squizz and let me know what you think!

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Links for 05 August 2008 through 08 August 2008

del.icio.us — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 08:37:42 +0000

Stilgherrian’s links for 05 August 2008 through 08 August 2008, covering all topics from Ma to Me:

NLA Australian Newspapers beta | National Library of Australia: The NLA is digitising its collection of out-of-copyright newspapers, some going back to 1803. Over 90,000 pages online so far. Searchable. OCR has been done, and you can correct any mistakes you find.
GroceryChoice site dismissed as “no help” to consumers | The Australian: The Australian government’s new GroceryChoice website is useless. Data only collected once a month, so it can’t take weekly specials into account.
The Z Curve and IT Investment | Digital Renderings: When should a business invest in new information technology? Move aggressively, assuming high costs and risks in the hope of gaining an outsized reward? Or hold back, waiting for technology to become better established, with lower costs and risks?
Twitter As News-wire | Twitter Blog: Twitter is increasingly being described as a personal news-wire. Here’s a couple of graphs showing how word of the LA an SF earthquakes spread in under 5 minutes.
Jay Rosen of NYU on the Ethic of the Link | YouTube: An excerpt from a Carnegie Council panel on 3 April 2008. Nice contextualisation of the newspaper business’ fear of the web. 4 min 21 sec.
Twitter on the front page of Liberation today | Holy Chic’s Weblog: Twitter makes the cover of French newspaper Liberation. Here’s an analysis in English.
Journalism is Dead: A new blog which purports to be the true diary of someone working at a newspaper. Looks real enough. Let’s hope he or she can continue being this funny.
Fake L.A. Times: Exactly what it says. Yes, yet another satirical news site.
The Ethics of Taking Vacations: “You owe it to yourself to recuperate, and you’ll do your job better if you take time off. Both are ethical issues.”

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Links for 04 August 2008 through 05 August 2008

del.icio.us — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 12:01:40 +0000

Here are the web links I’ve found for 04 August 2008 through 05 August 2008, posted automatically using a coat hanger, three melons and a small well-brushed poodle.

Scoble, Brainstorm & Braided Journalism | Global Neighbourhoods: Shel Israel adds an extremely sensible contribution to the eternal journalists vs bloggers whingefest. If you know any journalists, tie them to a chair and force them to watch this twice before they’re allowed any more beer.
Blade Runner sweded | YouTube: Forget the Director’s Cut, this 4-minute version of Blade Runner is superb. I love the release of the white dove.
Sweded Films (and Movies): Films: An A-Z listing of Sweded films.
Be Kind Rewind | Wikipedia: Just in case you don’t know what the term “Sweded” means, here’s the explanation from the Wikipedia entry for the movie Be Kind Rewind.
Tron, a video from freres-hueon | Dailymotion: A Sweded version of the lightcycles scene from the movie TRON. Using live stop-frame animation to recreate a CGI movie? Priceless!
Digital futures report: the internet in Australia | CCI: Findings from the first survey by the Australian component of the World Internet Project. This survey is a major piece of research undertaken by the ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Innovation at Swinburne University’s Institute for Social Research.
Large Hadron Collider nearly ready | The Big Picture: Beautiful photography of The Large Hadron Collider (LHC), a 27km long particle accelerator straddling the border of Switzerland and France, nearly set to begin its first particle beam tests.
Atomic Weapons Tests: TRINITY through BUSTER-JANGLE | Internet Archive: A 1952 film providing an overview for security-cleared members of US Congress committees and military. Declassified 1997, but some technical details still redacted. 22 minutes.
Kosovo Parody Song | YouTube: A Seattle radio DJ created a parody song to criticise US involvement in Kosovo. Norwegian peacekeepers then shot a video clip parodying the original. Fun.
Tabloid remarks | 12seconds.tv: Sitting sideways in the video, I rant about the Daily Telegraph for 12 seconds.
Foveaux: We haven’t tried this fine restaurant in Surry Hills, Sydney, but the cocktail bar downstairs is excellent. The website still shows the summer menu drinks list, fools.

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Links for 28 July 2008 through 01 August 2008

del.icio.us — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 22:11:37 +0000

Stilgherrian’s links for 28 July 2008 through 01 August 2008, which fell from the sky and painted in various attractive pastel colours:

Empirical Analysis of Internet Filtering in China | Harvard Law School: An analysis of China's Great Firewall which concludes that the blocking systems are becoming more refined even as they are likely more labor- and technology-intensive to maintain than cruder predecessors.
Handbook for bloggers and cyber-dissidents | Reporters sans frontières: Tips and technical advice on how to to remain anonymous and to get round censorship, by choosing the most suitable method for each situation.
Journalism.me - The journalism blogosphere: An aggregation of journalists who blog (mostly) about journalism.

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Links for 21 July 2008 through 25 July 2008

del.icio.us — Sun, 27 Jul 2008 00:49:30 +0000

Stilgherrian’s links for 21 July 2008 through 25 July 2008, gathered by a small, well-trained pig, washed by hand and exposed to cool, dry air:

The Changing Newsroom | Project for Excellence in Journalism (PEJ): A detailed analysis of the American daily newspaper of 2008, incuding the role of citizen journalist and a look to the future.
Google Maps (Part I of "The Googling") | YouTube: The first of 5 short films about a Google-run world gone scary.
How to Think | Ed Boyden's blog:: "I composed 10 rules, which I sometimes share with students. I've listed them here, followed by some practical advice on implementation."
2055: Voyage to Mars | YouTube: 9 minutes of animation by David Ross, with no CGI whatsoever. A fine tribute to an almost-lost craft.
Font Conference | CollegeHumor video: It's not often I can tag a video both "typography" and "humour", but here it is…
Manned spaceship design unveiled | BBC News: The first official image of a Russian-European manned spacecraft has been released. It is designed to replace the Soyuz vehicle currently in use by Russia.
Afghanistan. 1986-1987. It is photographed by the pilot of the helicopter. | Military Photos: My crusty Cold War correspondent writes: "Militaryphotos.net is frequented by Walter Mittyish paintball types, but they occasionally post material of real interest." Like a Soviet helicopter pilot's personal photos from his 1986-87 tour of Afghanistan.
Privacy | Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: After Mark Pesce's offhand remark that privacy was a construct of the Enlightenment, I decided to do some reading. This is where I started.

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(Si Si) Je Suis Un Blog Star!

Stilgherrian — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 01:28:16 +0000

It’s a lame excuse to link to Bill Wyman’s old song, but I am actually very happy to have been translated into French and quoted in Le Monde.

In his column Transnets, Francis Pisani’s article Blogalaxie/4: “futur des médias” et “rumeurs” quotes my rant about journalism from last week.

Ils ont parlé de la “tension artificielle” blogueurs-journalistes qui, selon Stephen Collins occupe trop de place (voir ce qu’en ont écrit Narvic et Éliane Fiolet sur Transnets).

J’ai bien aimé cette phrase du blogueur australien Stilgherrian: “Ce qui est fatiguant dans cette fausse dichotomie c’est qu’elle compare les idéaux les plus élevés du journalisme et le degré le plus bas du blogging personnel.”

Et ce petit avis aux journalistes traditionnels: “La forme de votre métier et la forme de vos articles était déterminée par la technologie pour les distribuer.” Aujourd’hui “nous avons tous des claviers, nous avons tous des téléphones mobiles avec des caméras ou nous les aurons bientôt. Nous avons tous des outils de publication et de distribution” comme WordPress ou YouTube entre autres.

I sound much more intelligent in French… and I do like the word “blogalaxie” rather than “blogosphere”. Still, I reckon “blogueur” and “blogueuse” sound more like something you’d pump out of an asthmatic duck.

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Defining “citizen journalism”

Stilgherrian — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 22:07:45 +0000

I’m not a big fan of the term “citizen journalism”. As I’ve said, adopting the label “journalist” will inevitably annoy those who think they are the “real journalists”. And we’re all citizens anyway, even curmudgeonly journalists.

But I haven’t though of anything better. Neither has anyone else yet, so we’re stuck with it. We might as well agree on what it means.

As usual, Wikipedia provides some good background. But Jay Rosen recently repeated his Most Useful Definition of Citizen Journalism:

It’s mine, but it should be yours. Can we take the quote marks off now? Can we remove the “so-called” from in front?

When the people formerly known as the audience employ the press tools they have in their possession to inform one another, that’s citizen journalism.

There are other definitions, but they will have to be discussed in the comments.

I used quote-marks in my headline and first paragraph because I believe that’s how you denote the item of language you’re discussing. But from now on, I’ll use the term “citizen journalism” without quotes — except just then, because I was denoting again.

Does this definition work for you? Got a better name for it?

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Which are the best Australian political blogs?

Stilgherrian — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 21:46:59 +0000

Since skeptical asked in the comments, where are the good Australian political blogs?

During Australia’s federal election in 2007, for me Possum’s Pollytics was invaluable for its analysis of opinion polls, as was Peter Brent’s Mumble. Larvatus Prodeo provided interesting commentary from a centre-left perspective. I didn’t get into any of the right-wing commentators, because Howard’s End became inevitable they became more shrill, less rational.

However the election overloaded me. I prefer to read essays and analysis with a longer timeframe, not the daily news focus on political mud-throwing.

What, for you, are the best Australian political blogs, and why?

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Anna Warwick: liar, or just unethical?

Stilgherrian — Sun, 20 Jul 2008 01:45:31 +0000

Given the recent rants about journalism and journalistic standards [mine and Jonathan Este's], Anna Warwick’s current blog entry at news.com.au is particularly apropos.

In her post Lost my designer sunnies, Ms Warwick (pictured) relates how she acted when she had to pay $14 for a glass of wine at an up-market city bar.

“I’m a journalist, I can’t afford this!” I said, hoping they might become afraid of bad publicity and offer me a freebie. Obviously I wasn’t at all scary. Joe ushered me out as soon as we’d finished our round.

As commenter Nikky of Sydney pointed out:

And they wonder why journalists in traditional media think blogging isn’t journalism… Saying that you’re a “journalist” and hoping to get a freebie at a bar is just disgraceful. Check the code of ethics, Anna. If you can’t afford a $14 glass of wine, then you might need to drink where all the other journos drink on their own dime, or invite yourself shamelessly along to a publicity event, instead of trying to pressure poor bar staff into giving you free hospitality.

Now there are only two alternatives here. Either Ms Warwick is a journalist — and her butterfly-infested personal website mentions roles such as “managing editor” — so using that status to scam a freebie is unethical. Or she’s not a journalist, which means she was lying.

Actually, there’s a third possibility: that the incident never actually happened. But that puts us back at “liar”.

What also intrigues me are the two commenters who responded the Nikki, telling her to “lighten up” and “take a chill pill”. In my opinion, there’s no such thing as “a little bit corrupt”, same as you can’t be “a little bit pregnant”.

[Thanks for the tip, @Mediamum!]

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Broader coverage of the Future of Media Summit 2008

Stilgherrian — Sat, 19 Jul 2008 05:21:21 +0000

My rant Note to “old media” journalists: adapt, or stfu! was merely my observation of one part of the Future of Media Summit 2008. Organiser Ross Dawson has posted a quick review of the social media coverage, plus links to some of the more interesting blog posts. Reading some of those will give you a more balanced view.

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Bloggers: the biggest whingers since journalists

Stilgherrian — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 03:09:00 +0000

I’m well pleased that my rant for Crikey about journalists elicited a witty response from Jonathan Este, the journos’ “union thug”. He’s kindly allowed me to republish it in full below. My comments afterwards.

He’d also like me to draw your attention to the MEAA’s own project, The Future of Journalism, done in conjunction with The Walkley Foundation.

Bloggers: the biggest whingers since journalists

Jonathan Este writes:

Your blogging correspondent, Stilgherrian, seemed like such a nice bloke at the Future of Media Summit in Sydney on Tuesday. On the way from the venue to the pub afterwards we shared a few yarns and war stories and I bought him a beer.

He could have been a real journalist.

But his piece in yesterday’s Crikey [local copy] betrayed his outsider status in his very first par:

What is the future of journalism? To judge by the discussion at this week’s Future of Media Summit… it’s endless bl–dy whingeing.

Whingeing, old son, is the past, the present and the future of journalism, as you’d know if you’d spent much time in the newsroom. It’s what we do. Journalists love whingeing and we’re pretty damn good at it.

But to judge by the wrangling during the Future of Journalism panel, on which I sat alongside Jane Shultze of The Australian, APN’s Hugh Martin and Professor Stephen Quinn of Curtin University, bloggers are certainly catching journalists up when it comes to the culture of complaint.

Their complaint appears to be this: “Journalists don’t take us seriously enough. They won’t let us play in their sand pit.”

Much debate raged about how to define journalism and journalists. Shultze copped a barracking for insisting that, as far as she was concerned, being a journalist had involved getting to know a beat (in her case, media business) extremely thoroughly, building a list of contacts around that beat and using it to break stories in the newspaper and — lately — online.

(With the greatest respect to a former colleague, I take exception with this, as it appears limited to reporters. To me a journalist is engaged in any or all aspects of journalism, there is just as much of the craft — yes, craft — of journalism in finessing a story for publication and the other roles involved in the production of a newspaper or bulletin as there is in reporting, but that’s another issue.)

Shultze’s definition was greeted by a howl of protest from the bloggers’ brigade: What do you think bloggers do? We break stories as well! What we do is just as valid as what you do, etc, etc.

And they are absolutely right. The best in the blogosphere are right up there with the best journalists, while there can be no doubt that some journalists practise the craft with more talent and diligence than others (you know who you are).

One of my favourite media stories this week is the Pounds 30 million purchase of ContentNext, the tech blog group, by Guardian News & Media. I’m a big fan of GNM and their online strategy as it is optimistic and aggressive. They are forging ahead into new markets in the belief that “reach will equal revenue” down the track.

And ContentNext has a high net worth readership in India of which the Grauniad wants a piece. GNM is not falling into the trap some other media organisations are in of circling their wagons, putting their fingers in their ears, singing “la-la-la” and hoping it’ll all go away if they cut staff savagely enough.

Perhaps Rafat Ali, the brain behind ContentNext, is technically a blogger, but what he and his people are engaged in is high-quality journalism. It is finding things out and keeping their market informed. So, can bloggers do journalism? Absolutely.

Stilgherrian reminds us of our faults and, yes: you do read barely altered press releases, there are sloppy errors and bias has been known to creep in, from time to time. One of the most recent comments you read about falling newspaper readership is: “If they gave us something worth reading, we’d buy their newspapers.”

So, less people are buying newspapers and more people are reading blogs and getting their news through informal social networks. As long as they still want the news, then there will be work for those of us whose job it is to find things out, whether it be by old-fashioned door-knocking, by monitoring Twitter feeds or by crowd sourcing. And we all get to share in the wonderful new online tools being developed.

So, yes, Stilgherrian, you can play in our sandpit. And we’ll be duly impressed when you come up with something better than the castles in the air you built yesterday.

Jonathan Este is the director of communications with the Media, Entertainment & Arts Alliance. His views are not necessarily those of the Alliance.

Stilgherrian’s Reaction

I think this is a superb response. But Jonathan, I think you’re slightly wrong about the nature of the bloggers’ complaint.

The complaint is, I believe, that bloggers are sick of being lumped together as an undifferentiated mass of amateur irrelevance while (some) journalists spout about the superiority of their craft — when both crafts cover the full spectrum from excellence to shite.

Jane Schultze was the worst offender on the panel in this regard — but she didn’t help things with her overly-narrow definition of journalism.

The bloggers feel, I believe, that if journalists don’t know about this spectrum then they’re only showing their ignorance, and that it’s a bit precious to gloss over the obvious failings of many members of their own profession.

Maybe the very term “blog” is the problem, because we’re using it for both the tool and the role. The tools for blogging did indeed emerge to serve the keepers of diaries full of trivia, but were soon co-opted by news organisations and others for more serious purposes.

To lump all users of blogging tools together as “bloggers” is like lumping journalists with historians, novelists and scientists and calling them “typists”.

Other Reactions

Duncan Riley, editor of The Inquisitr, emailed me:

What delicious irony from Jonathan Este in his contribution to the bloggers vs journalism debate (Crikey June 17), when as a journalist he has failed to use the correct name of the blog network acquired by the Guardian last week three times in as many paragraphs. The company acquired was ContentNext, not FirstContent, and its main blog is paidContent (they publish no title by the name of FirstContent). Bonus points to Jonathan on the acquisition price, which was $30m US not 30m pounds.

Would it be churlish for me to also mention that, um, Jonathan, we met on Tuesday, not Wednesday? Ah, fact-checking…

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Episode 6 online

Stilgherrian — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 22:24:47 +0000

If you missed last night’s episode of Stilgherrian Live Alpha you’ll find it online at Ustream.

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How about we do episode 6 tonight?

Stilgherrian — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 01:55:10 +0000

I’ve decided that I’ll resume doing Stilgherrian Live Alpha and will record episode 6 live on the Internet tonight at 9.30pm Sydney time. See you then.

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Links for 13 July 2008 through 17 July 2008

del.icio.us — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 01:50:34 +0000

Stilgherrian’s links for 13 July 2008 through 17 July 2008, gathered with moss like a rolling stone doesn’t:

Flat Earth News: The official website for Nick Davies' book, which various people have suggested I read.
Straw man | Wikipedia: "A straw man argument is an informal fallacy based on misrepresentation of an opponent's position." Tagged as a reminder to certain blog commenters.
Zappos.com: Who'd have thought that people would buy shoes online? Who'd have thought that a company would use Twitter and other social media to do great customer service (or so I'm told)?
Journalism: A Toxic Culture? (Or: Why Aren’t We Having More Fun?) | contentious.com: Amy Gahran helps explain why journalists are so defensive about their craft these days, and posits that they have "Priesthood Syndrome".
The plastic buttons we push | Amit Gupta likes you!: How do you make a living? Is it by pushing plastic buttons all day?
Is Social Media The Ultimate Buzz Kill? | Awake At The Wheel: Are we becoming so addicted to telling people about what we're experencing that we actually forget to experience it?
Principia Discordia Hardback | Synaptyclypse Generator: The central Discordian text, "Principia Discordia", is once more available in hardback. I am well pleased.
DIY carbon change | Unleashed: "Sometime in the last two weeks I stopped believing in government," says Mark Pesce. If governments are failing to respond to this vital issue, then we can ignore them and handle this ourselves.

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Note to “old media” journalists: adapt, or stfu!

Stilgherrian — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 03:37:26 +0000

[I promised Crikey that I'd write something about the Future of Media Summit 2008. This rant is what emerged. You can also read it over at Crikey, where there's a different stream of comments.]

What is the future of journalism? To judge by the discussion at this week’s Future of Media Summit held simultaneously in Sydney and Silicon Valley (and every other “new media” conference I’ve been to lately) it’s endless bloody whingeing. Whingeing about how journalism has standards and bloggers are all “just” writing whatever they think.

The panels in both cities covered the same, tired old ground. The new “participatory media” and “citizen journalism” would never be Real Journalism, because Real Journalism is an Art/Craft/Profession. Real Journalism involves research and fact-checking and sub-editing. There’s a Code of Ethics. But “these people”, as bloggers get labelled, these people just sit around in their pyjamas and write whatever comes into their heads.

Bollocks.

What’s tiring about this false dichotomy is that it compares the highest ideal of journalism with the lowest grade of personal blogging about what the cat did yesterday and — lo and behold! — they’re not the same. Gosh.

How much everyday journalism actually conforms to the high ideal? Not much. For every Walkley-nominated episode of Four Corners there’s a hundred tawdry yarns about miracle fat cures or shonky builders with a camera shoved in their face. For every investigative scoop there’s a thousand mundane little 5-paragraph yarns that merely quote what someone said at a press conference, and then quote their opponent. Or recycle a media release, putting the journo’s byline where the PR firm’s logo used to be. Or misappropriate statistics to beat up some shock-horror non-existent “crime wave”. Or either fawn or tut-tut over some “celebrity” and their antics — more often than not because that same celebrity is appearing in a TV show or movie that’s completely coincidentally owned by the journalist’s employer.

And you know, some “bloggers” actually know what they’re talking about, interview people, and link to their references to boot.

Dear Journalists, how can you spout all that stuff about “standards” and then go back to your mucky business?

Oh, that’s right. You’re a proper journalist. It’s all the others…

Actually, I know why you’re so bitter about “those bloggers”. You worked hard on that student newspaper or street rag while living in uni-student poverty, put up with the abuse of grumpy old chain-smoking subs who bawled you out over trivial spelling mistakes, put up with the unpredictable patronage of editors who promoted everyone else to A Grade but you — you endured all of that hoping that one day you’d get the plum posting. But no! The newsrooms are now being decimated, and the masthead’s adorned with photos of celebrity chefs. And bloggers — bloggers! People with no professional training are leaping into the limelight. Some of them are even being paid! How dare they!

Dear Journalists, in case you hadn’t noticed, the internet and pervasive mobile digital communications change everything.

The shape of your craft and the form of your stories was determined by the technology used to deliver those stories. Newspapers, for instance, worked to their daily cycles, and stories had the length and structure they did, because of the physical and operational constraints of putting ink onto paper. Some bloke called McLuhan said something about this, ages back — but I wouldn’t know for sure, because I’m not a proper journalist. Still, it strikes me that the very industrial scale of printing a metropolitan daily or producing a 6pm TV bulletin also shapes the way you go about making your stories: all that mechanism between you the journalist and your audience.

Well, that’s all changed.

We all have keyboards now. We all have mobile phones with cameras, or soon will. We all have publishing and distribution tools like WordPress and YouTube and Ustream.tv and Qik, or soon will.

We don’t need a third party in The Mainstream Media to bring us mass-produced stories for mass-produced audiences when we can tell each other our own stories. Stories that are directly meaningful to us — like how niece Sarah did so well at the school concert (and here’s a video), or how the factory’s closing down (and here’s the lousy memo the bastards sent us). We’re only just learning how to connect myriad storytellers to myriad audiences, but we’re learning fast.

There’s still a role for Real Journalism, of course, with your research and storytelling skills and, yes, with your Code of Ethics too. No-one’s saying there won’t be. And you know what? You too can use all these wonderful new tools to create wonderful new forms of Journalism — if only you’d stop whingeing about how your world’s falling apart and actually learn to use them. A hint: You don’t have to wait for your grumpy old chain-smoking editor to show you, either, because he’s a dinosaur and will soon be dead.

But nearly every time I hear journalists talking about, say, real-time messaging services like Twitter, it’s about how they can mine it for data, not how they might adapt their craft to this new participatory delivery mechanism. Or they’re waiting for someone else to show them how to do it.

The people already exploring these new media forms will be the leaders. They may not call themselves “journalists” — and they probably don’t want to, since you’re held in such poor esteem these days — but they’ll be fluent in the new media. And you… well, you’ll be stuffed.